Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 126: HyperCard and Myst

Episode Date: November 20, 2017

Jeremy Parish and Ben Elgin take a deep dive into the history and concept behind Apple's HyperCard technology and how it became a surprising platform for game development -including the best-selling PC game of the 20th century, Cyan's Myst.

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Hi, guy. Yeah. Yeah, the team. Love line, man. You guys remember us from back in the day? We're doing a pod and we're doing it every day. And we've been doing it for a while. And if I hear one more time, people say, God, I loved you and Adam together on

love line. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, we're doing a podcast. Will you please just join us at the Adam and Dr. Drew Show. Please. At Adam and Dr. Drew Show. Come on now. Only on podcast one. That's us. Adam and Dr. Drew Show. Just like the old days. Doctors orders. Oh, man, you're funny. Yep. All right. Let's go save some babies. Let's do it. Hi, everyone. Welcome to yet another fine episode of Retronauts here on the East Coast. Yes, it's Retronauts East. I am Jeremy Parrish. And this week, it's just me. And Ben Elgin. And, yeah, it's the two of us because why is that?

I guess because we're talking about something fairly obscure, and none of our other East Coast regulars were really on board with it and really knew much about it. Not that I know that much about it either. I'm kind of out of my depth. Fortunately, I was an enormous Hypercard nerd back in the day. Oh, you spoiled it. Yeah, that's what our topic is this week.

We are talking about HyperCard, which we have mentioned, a previous episode. And we're also talking about sort of as the B-side to this episode, the Mist series, which we've also mentioned in a previous episode. We've touched on these things, but we've never gone really in depth with them. And it's, you know, this is not, like I would say necessarily an essential, crucial, pivotal part of video games and video game history. But it's interesting. And it's one of those little like ecosystems that kind of cropped up. You know, you see things like, I don't know, like dating sims in Japan or like games that came with tape cassettes of music, you know, just kind of one of these like niche topics. And

this is one of those. And it just happens that Ben was someone who was pretty heavily invested in this. Yeah. And there were definitely a lot of things that grew out of it. So even though, even though it didn't necessarily directly hit a whole lot of the gaming public, I think definitely had an effect. Yeah. I mean, like, like I said, we're talking about MIST, and MIST emerged from HyperCard, and until the Sims came along, that was the single best-selling PC game of all time. Yeah, so for like a decade. Yeah, for nearly a decade, it basically ruled the sales charts.

So to say, you know, HyperCard is of no consequence would be completely incorrect. It definitely touched into the mainstream, even if, you know, people didn't realize that it was there. They didn't, no one picked up MIST and were like, oh, this is just a HyperCard stack. because, you know, it was heavily modified and so on and so forth. And we'll talk about that. But definitely HyperCard had an impact and touched on many, many people's lives, even if they didn't realize it, even if they weren't necessarily Macintosh users.

And as with many things related to Macintosh, it was sort of something generally restricted to that small cult audience of Mac. But as with many things to do with Macintosh, it eventually rippled outward and became part of the mainstream. And also within that, the Mac cults at the time, it was actually pretty ubiquitous in it was a big part of like the shareware scene just because it was so easy to dive into and make your own stuff that a lot of the things that were being distributed on an amateur basis came out of HyperCard. And, yeah, I guess that's maybe where we should start, is that it was kind of like this simple do-it-yourself approach. It was kind of like the unity of its day, I would almost say. It was meant to be, you know, a very easy to pick up programming application, not really a language. It did use a language of its own.

Yeah, it had a language, but that was kind of the second. step. Right. So on the surface, it had a lot of easily manipulable elements that you could just kind of plug and play in what you needed for a particular app. And then if you needed to go further, there's this whole extremely robust scripting language behind it to let you do other stuff. But it was not specifically a video game application.

Not at all. The idea was not, oh, yes, people are going to make their own video games with this. It was people will create their own sort of applications, their own project. Your own custom Rolodex was sort of the top level cell on this, which is why it's, you know, cards and stacks. But it's so, you know, if you need to keep track of something and there's not a program out there to do it for you, roll your own, you know, make whatever you need to keep track of your information and link it together, basically. Yeah, the custom Rolodex, that's a good metaphor, because back when computers, microcomputers, were new and the computing industry was trying to sell America on the idea that, yes,

yes, you should own a computer. It is good to spend $6,000 on this box that's going to sit in your home. You know, that was a tough sell because computers back then were relatively very expensive and very limited. And one of the big sales pitches

was the sort of ubiquitous use cases that was always given was, oh, well, you can have, you know, your recipes all filed away digitally. And that's kind of funny to think about now because, you know, my grand mother's old recipe card box, you know, these like index cards. My mother still has those. She still uses them. And my grandmother, I'm sure, did put stuff on computer, but it was like

an old K-Pro, and I have no idea what happened to those files. Like, yeah, but the idea was that you would, you know, all the things you needed to do in the home, like file recipes, you know, it wasn't just for men, women who had to cook could also use computers. They were, they were these valuable tools that everyone could use and they would make everyone lives, everyone's lives better. Well, HyperCard was the next iteration of that, like, you know, recipe card box, a concept with everything being cross-linked and connected and, you know, a real sort of database being created in a transparent and intuitive way. So you didn't really think about the fact that you were, you know, organizing all these systems underneath. It was just cards, video visual cards.

Yeah, it was sort of an extension of, excuse me, Apple's whole desktop metaphor that you had and they're pushed into desktop publishing, you know, you could have pages that were what you would do on a typewriter or a publishing setup. And this was kind of the everything else of the desktop, you know, something that wasn't just a text document or just an image. This is where you can bring things together and put them together in whatever way you wanted. And so, so yeah, And that was actually some of the first things I did with it was go with that top-level Rolodex metaphor. And I made, like, my own custom database for Nintendo Power issues.

So I could remember look up, like, what articles were wearing my huge stack of Nintendo powers. Do you still have that around? Because that would be actually really as I'm doing retrospectives. Probably bring it back up in emulation. Is that one of your things on Archive.org? It's not on Archive.org. But it is on my disk at home.

I know I have that. I could, you know, and it'll cover, like, early 90s. for a few years, probably. That would be awesome. I could try to bring it up. Hypercard still saving lives, 25, 30 years later. Yeah, so I had that.

I had some EGM. I had a different stack for some EGM stuff. And then I had a stack for Magic the Gathering cards because I had a whole huge database of those. And I made one to keep track of the BBS users in my local area code because I was in a weirdly active bullet and board system dial-up area code back in the early 90s.

So, yeah, that was the top level. stuff is just, you know, use it to organize your things and link your information together. And that was really easy to do because it came with this metaphor where you have, you know, anytime you open up a new one, you have this stack of cards and you can put shared fields for text that go all through your stack. So, you know, you can have a title field and a content field and then you can search these fields and you can have buttons that will link from one place to another or do, you know, pre-saved custom searches and all kinds of things like that. And that's really easy to do without really getting into any code at all.

So that was sort of the top level set. You know, I think we're talking here and people who aren't familiar with HyperCard may be thinking, this sounds a lot just like the internet. And that's not a coincidence. Like the modern day internet, especially, well, you know, even more so the internet of the 90s and early 2000s was very similar in structure and concept to HyperCard. And in fact, you know, the basics, the basics. of the worldwide web is hypertext markup language. And it's not a coincidence that these two things are called hyper. They both relate to sort of a metaphor of interlinking data through links and through an interface where you can easily jump from one object to another, and they're

all sort of organized within a hierarchy. And as with many things that Apple did that were innovative and interesting. They didn't invent this concept. They didn't invent the desktop graphical user interface. They swiped that from Xerox Park. And HyperCard was actually created by the guy who did the graphics programming for like the graphics engine programming for Macintosh, Bill Atkinson. He was one of the guys who went to Xerox Park and was like, Steve Jobs, you need to steal this. It is such a good thing. It is so great. We need to make a computer around this. And this was his next phase. Like, after they created the Macintosh system, Bill went on to say, well, this is really great.

But what we really need is, like, a miniature computer that you could hold in your hand and use a touchscreen to, you know, make use of this visual metaphor. Well, that wouldn't come along for another 25 years. He was a little ahead of his time. I mean, you know, even Star Trek didn't have, like wasn't around with a pad back then. And, you know, the, what was it, John Scully and his virtual valet or whatever, this was all around the same time. Like, you know, the thought was there. The ideas were out there, yeah. Yeah.

But it didn't yet, like the tech just wasn't there. I mean, you wouldn't even get the Newton for another 10 years. So sort of stymied with this, Atkinson was like, well, I can't basically create this entire new space of computing because the tech is. isn't there. But what if we, you know, what if we sort of applied that concept back into the Macintosh and sort of took the visual interface and the idea of interlinking concepts together? And so HyperCard was basically like a worldwide that wasn't worldwide. It was just a web on your computer. It was contained. Or a tablet that wasn't on a tablet. Right. And it really was contained to your computer. Like the way, the way it came out of the box, you have this

a home stack, which is basically which it comes up, and it has a bunch of links to other utilities access. And it honestly, it looks like a smartphone screen. It's, you know, you have this main page and you have just a few rows of little icons that are single click links to small applications that do other stuff. And so really, yeah, I mean, if the tech had been there, he would have built an iPad at that time. And this was sort of what he could do instead. But again, Apple didn't create this concept. Bill Atkinson didn't create this concept. I don't know if he took the concept from somewhere else if he actually knew what was out there floating around. I have to guess he did. I think so, yeah. But just as the Mac user interface was

inspired by Xerox Park's work, the Palo Alto Research Center, the concept of hypercard, hypertext, like that term was actually coined in the 1960s by a Harvard graduate named Ted Nelson. And he came up with a you know the concept of hypertext where you know words linked to other words and you navigate information turning turning the concept of reading and uh information organization into an active process um and he came up with a concept called zanadu which never quite came to fruition and and apparently he's very very sort of like this very embittered person about the worldwide web and feels like, you know, Tim Berners-Lee and everyone totally ripped him off. Yeah. And maybe they did. I mean, it really is. His whole concept is everything we take for

granted today. But back then, it was really pie in the sky. I think, you know, I mean, it was the concept of basically linking all the world's information together. And that was ridiculously out there at the time. And now it's just, well, that's the web. Okay. Yeah, he just didn't have the resources available to him, just like Bill Atkinson had to abandon his tablet project and create hypercard instead. Tim Nelson, or Ted Nelson, sorry. He never had the resources and the tech available in the time he needed it to be. But instead of saying, okay, let's step back and do something different, he kept working at it.

And his idea for Zanadu is still out there. I think Xanadu.org or something, if you go there, it's still, like he's still, yeah, he's still blogging the idea. lot of people sort of see him as a crackpot, which is unfortunate because he was so far ahead of his time with this concept. Again, 1960s, that's crazy that this idea goes that far back. But, you know, again, so much of kind of what comes to fruition in terms of tech is, it's not so much of like who comes up with the idea first, but who can turn it into something usable, who can distill it into a product that, you know, the public can make use of. Yeah, what is the right thing at the right time? for what you can actually accomplish. And HyperCard wasn't quite the right thing at the right time, but it was closer. It definitely had its loyal users.

It made it to the world as a product. Not one that made Apple rich, but that wasn't the point. The point was more, it was kind of one of the company's final sort of like, this is for the good of everyone. Yeah, I mean, then they actually, so the, so Atkinson actually managed to sell it to Scully, who was, I mean, sell in a metaphorical sense, who was the CEO at the time.

A lot of people thought that he wouldn't go for this, but he actually saw that this was a really cool thing that could get people into solving their own problems. And so they ended up bundling it for free for several years with MacOS. That's kind of a, you know, I don't want to get too aggressive here. But John Scully, I feel like he is sort of disliked by Apple fanatics. he was the guy who stepped in after Steve Jobs was ousted and it was partially his fault that Steve Jobs was ousted back in the early, you know, the mid-80s around after the launch of the

Macintosh. And, you know, he came from Pepsi, I think, PepsiCo. And so he was like a soda marketing guy. Yeah. And so people like see him as, you know, the death of Apple. But, you know, despite the fact that he did come from that background, I still feel like a lot of the things that you know you look back at and read some of the stuff he wrote and you know his project about the navigator or whatever it was called the the digital valet like

he was open to to innovation and to good product ideas beyond just like will this make us a lot of money there was still a little bit of idealism in him or at least that's that's i definitely i definitely think in hindsight you know he was not without any vision uh it's just you know yeah i mean compared next to steve jobs it's hard to look like Not stodgy. But Apple would have much less visionary leaders over time, like Gil-Armelio. Yeah, I mean, the really boring periods came even later. Yeah, like once Scully left, then it really went downhill.

But, but yeah, this was one point where Scully was like, you know what, this is actually pretty cool. And so he greenlit hypercard, and it launched for free. It was going to be included on new Macintoshes. for free. And if you already owned a Macintosh, you could buy the discs for like 50 bucks, which is pretty reasonable. And I think he also remembered at that point still like everything, you know, Atkinson had had done. Like we were saying earlier, Atkinson had done the original drawing code for the entire Macintas platform. And he also came up with MacPaint, which was really revolutionary. And quick draw was the routines underneath. But MacPaint was the actual

painting program. And at the time, that was also revolutionary. You know, it did, it was to desktop publishing, or sorry, it was for drawing what the other Mac apps were to desktop publishing, and that it was one of the first things that really let people go to town in this new all pixel world, basically. Yeah, those are my memories, my earliest memories of the

Macintosh are using Mac Paint to create dumb little, you know, like black and white images. Yeah, and it's one bit color, but if you go back and look, like, its interface is pretty clearly the progenitor of, you know, everything they came after, Photoshop, Illustrator, all those thanks. Yep. So, yeah, he was a guy who was very like forward thinking and did a great job of distilling big ideas into something that was extremely usable. He had a gift for accessibility.

Yeah, there was, that's pretty rare. Like engineering savvy and, uh, the ability to think like what will people find intuitive? Uh, I mean, it's hard to find people who understand intuitive design, period. Certainly, people who are leading the way for World Wide Web Interface, websites these days, I'm just like, unless you've spent a lot of time working with websites, like a lot of nested menus and things like that, those are intuitive. Yeah, I mean, and his, his palettes and everything. Honestly, to this day, you know, I do, I end up doing UI design sometimes for other jobs, and I feel like a whole lot of the good things I actually know about UI design can all trace back to you.

Yeah. So I don't want to spend too much time. Yeah. So I don't want to spend too much time dwelling on the prehistory. of HyperCard and the history. As with all of our computer-based retronauts discussions, the best place to find reading information on this, reading material about this, is the digital antiquarian. He's written some really great pieces

on the history and priestry of hypertext, or hypertext and HyperCard. So please check out that site, support that guy on Patreon. He does great work. Every Friday, he publishes a new article about the history and evolution of classic computers.

and so he's done some great research and some really good job of distilling all that research into useful articles that people like me can pilfer for their podcasts. Indeed. So that's where HyperCard comes from. And it debuted in 1987. It was distributed, like I said, for free on new Macintoshes.

I think it made its debut at like Worldwide Developer Conference or Macworld or whatever. Yeah, it was one of the big conferences. And immediately set the world on fire. like not the entire world, but the world of tech savvy, media savvy, computer savvy people pretty universally recognized like this is a big, big deal. And of course, like I said before, HyperCard was extremely limited by the fact that it was bound, you know, the stacks you created, this was before common networking, before the

World Wide Web became universal. So it was very sort of limited in that sense. But, you know, even at the very beginning, the idea of getting it onto a network existed, one of the first groups of people who were sort of inducted into HyperCard, you know, given sort of an early run at it by Apple were the users of the well, the whole Earth Electric Link, I think is what it's called, which is something that kind of predates my time on the Internet, but I was using the Internet early enough, you know, in the early to mid-90s that, I remember seeing, you know, Well mentioned with sort of like this gushing reverence by publications like Wired. They were just like, yeah, like everything comes from Well. Yeah, I wasn't really on it, but I definitely, you know, it was in my consciousness. So, so yeah, Well was an online group that shared information and they had their own sort of online database that sort of predates Wikipedia and Apple was like, well, why don't you turn this into a hypercard stack? So

they did. And of course, you know, that wasn't networked. You couldn't just like log on and check it out anywhere in the world. But, but it was just like, it just needed that one little connection. The idea was there. The germ was there. And so, yeah, HyperCard was definitely very progressive, very innovative, had enormous potential. Yeah. And we had, you know, we still had distribution networks then. It just wasn't, you know, the web didn't exist yet, but you could still transfer things through, you know, FTP or Gopher and all that good stuff. You could definitely download. You could still get your stuff out there. You could download or upload stacks and run them on your local system. It just didn't work with the sort of distributed system of the worldwide

web. Direct links from in your text, because in your stacks, because that just really wasn't a thing yet where that would be an interface that would be available. Although actually the other way think they were distributed a lot is just on discets because you had, we touched on this in another micro that may or may not have gone out yet, but that you had companies that would basically just be a all

warehouse for redistribution of shareware and freeware and things people had made that they would put out these catalogs of everything people had submitted to them and then they just put together floppies and send them to you. And so you get stuff that way as well from other people. That was actually a pretty big distribution network for HyperCard at the time in the early 90s.

sending out your software in a little plastic baggy, that kind of thing. Yeah, well, or even, or you send it once, yeah, you send it once to these distribution centers and have them, like, copy it because people would pay them a nominal fee for the copying and the disks, and they would just copy whatever you wanted onto disks and ship it out to you. So before we start talking about what we're really here to discuss, which is the gaming applications for HyperCard, can you explain a little bit about how it actually worked? I tried using HyperCard after it was sort of obsolete, and I didn't have. have anyone to explain it to me. I sat down and was like, what am I doing? Like, there was no,

I didn't have any documentation or anything. So I was just kind of, at a loss. There was no hypercard for dummies. I didn't bring those with me. I have like several thousand pages of documentation. There were some big books that came on. I thought this was supposed to be simple. Thousands? I mean, it will. It depends how far you dig into it. So, so there's multiple levels. So again, at the top level, as we already mentioned, you have in your basic hypercard, you have a stack that's made up of cards. And so you have a stack. And so you have, have kind of a concept of foreground and background. So you can have a background that's shared between a whole bunch of cards and then stuff that's in the foreground on each card. So like for a

simple database, you know, you'd put in, so there's a tool that's just like make text fields. So, you know, you put in text fields for whatever data you're going to enter and you put those on the background. So they're shared between all the cards. And then in the foreground, you would enter different data on each card. So that's your basic roll of text. And then you could have, say, you know, a button that's going to search a particular text field or whatever. And so there's easy tools for creating these fields, for creating these buttons, for making them do simple things. And you can, again, because this is, you know, from the same guy that did MacPaint, it's all very easy tools for moving things around the screen and positioning how you wanted

and you can add graphics and that sort of thing. So this actually sounds more sophisticated than pure hypertext. It sounds like there are application, not full application, but like mathematical functions that can be assigned to beyond just like click link and go to other car. So that's the next level is sitting behind this, there's a complete full feature scripting language. And it's a complete programming language under the hood. So you can basically write whatever you want in this. And it has a lot of cool features to it. So like I said, it's a complete language. It can do anything. But it's sort of engineered to look friendly from the outside. So it's very natural language. There's not a lot of weird punctuation in syntax. A lot of the

things can be written almost as if you're writing English. And it has, it actually has a lot of cute shortcuts that help ease people into it. So there's like this global variable that's always there that is just the default variable and it's just named it. And so you can do things like you can type in a script. You can say get five, add eight to it, put the results in the answer field. And that's almost literally what you would type. get 5 add 8 to it put in answer put it into answer because it is this global variable so when you say

get 5 it's just putting that number 5 into this global variable that's the default variable and you said add 8 to it and it's adding 8 into that variable and so then you would get 13 in your answer field and so there's cute things like that where you can almost type English and once you're once you're into it as a programmer you know the fact that there's this thing named it doesn't really matter you're going to be using your own variables but for getting people into the idea of what you can do I think some of those little tricks are super useful. But so then, yeah, once you do get into it, you can do almost anything. So you can, you know, you can script, you can obviously create buttons and fields ahead of time,

but you can also script anything you can do. So you can say, you know, move this button from here to here in a script. And so this is where we get into the ability to do game-like things. Because if you take a button and you can make the board as invisible and you can put a graphic on and now it suddenly looks an awful lot like a sprite. And you can tell in a script that sprite where to move or to change its graphic or to do, you know, all kinds of things. And suddenly there's a whole lot of opportunities to do whatever you want here. So depending on how far you get into it, you can make it do increasingly ridiculous things.

So like if you're thinking about developing games with the hypercard, like the obvious top level thing, which a lot of people did, is to make a point and click adventure. And obviously this is going to take us to Manhole and Mist when we get there. because, you know, a point and click adventure is basically just moving through a series of scenes with some interactive elements, right? So, you know, you have this series of cards and each of them has a scene on it and you click a place on one of them and it's an invisible button that takes you to a different scene. Or you click on a button and it picks up something and you have something keeping track of your inventory. And that's all really quite easy to do in HyperCard. So there was a lot of like point and click adventures that came out of this. But then, like I said, using buttons to make sprites and things, you can get increasingly ridiculous.

So I made like an overhead, overhead isometric or overhead perspective engine where you could move around a button like it was a character moving around. And I had a system where I had maps where I would just draw stuff on the screen for a map. But then I had an invisible field in the background, a series of ones and zeros that said collision detection for that map. So where you could go and where you couldn't go. and then you basically have an overhead like Final Fantasy Map engine, and then I used that and actually made a game out of that one. And then I did increasingly, increasingly completely ridiculous things, like actually make an action 2D side-scroller engine,

which is really not what this sort of thing is designed for. And it's kind of slow, but it actually kind of worked. Because you can do fun things like everything is a container in this language, so you can put scripts into any button can have its own script inside. side it. A field can have its own script inside it. So like I had a button that represented an enemy that had basically its own BAA behaviors, sorry, in a script in that button. And then just a global thing that would call each button that was on the screen and tell it to do its thing in an idle loop.

So would you say that being able to do things like that in HyperCard speaks to HyperCard's flexibility? Or does it speak to the determination of creative types to turn anything into a video game to like brute force entertainment out of out of something no matter how inappropriate I think I think all of the above um it was designed it was clearly designed to be very flexible um because you know you could you could make something much more small scale that could still do the like rolodex kind of things that was the top level application um but they decided to put this completely full featured language behind it um I think knowing that people would find weird things to do with it because they wanted people to solve their own

problems. Now, did they think someone was going to try to make an action game out of it? I really don't think so. The action. The action, the rolydex. Yeah, the action rolydex. No, like I said, I have like, I have like 3,000 pages. So I just pulled all these out last night of like documentation books and hypercard. And the word game is not actually mentioned in any index of any of those books. That's kind of Apple's M.O. from that point from the period. The, you know, Steve Jobs, especially was like determined that people not see the Macintosh as a toy. And that, that, that, went away over time. Yeah, that was sort of a backlash.

Yeah, but there was a, it definitely stunted the evolution of video games on Macintosh. But HyperCard was pretty cool because once that application came out and people had it on their system, stacks kind of functioned like standalone applications. Yeah, actually, as of HyperCard 2.2, I think it was, there was actually a function in it to export your stack as a standalone. So you did not anymore. Yeah, so you didn't need the base program anymore to run. I mean, we'd just bundle it onto your stack and run. That's crazy.

Yeah. I didn't realize that. Like I said, I didn't really use that part that much as a programmer. And one of the, I mean, one of the things they did encourage people to do that it was built around was interesting presentations at well. It was also sort of, you know, in addition to being a Rolodex, it was also kind of the PowerPoint of the day. But an even more flexible PowerPoint in that, you know, same as, same as weird I was talking about with adventure games, you can have all these screens with just different information on them and interesting branching ways to navigate between them. good for presentations, too. But it's also very close to being an adventure game. So, you know, you could take, there was all this documentation on how to make interesting multimedia

presentations, you know, with branching hierarchies and searchability and all that stuff. And a ton of that you can take and just apply to an adventure game. So how come HyperCard never evolved? That's, I mean, it did to a degree, but like technologically, it never managed to get its way out of, you know, like system three. It was always black and white. Yeah, that was one of the big, I feel kind of like drawbacks is that it didn't, it didn't expand to embrace the march of technology. You know, once max went 32 bit, like, the hypercard would have come along, but it didn't. It had a few versions where it gained a few things, like we were just saying the ability to export your stacks and that sort of thing.

it relied really heavily on expandability on like third party stuff so um i actually had a ton of basically plugins um and we'll talk about this more with miss that would let you do things like add movies or adds different sounds that weren't supported by the basic program or different kinds of graphics that weren't supported by the basic program and just kind of have those as overlays um that you know these external commands would let you put them on cards or let you put them on buttons and and do things with them. And so for a lot of that, I think it just relied on extensibility. And for a while, there was a lot of support.

The first few years, there was a lot of support for that. One of the big problems, I was reading this in one of the articles the other night, that sort of took the wins out of the sales is after a few years, Apple spun off. That was the point when Apple spun off all its software to Claris. So none of Apple software was being developed in house for a while. They put it to a separate company that was trying to make its own profits. And that was when suddenly HyperGarp wasn't free anymore. Like the base version, if you didn't have it before, suddenly cost like $200.

And that took a huge amount of Windows sales because suddenly, you know, not every new hobbyist had this thing anymore. Right. And not only that, but I mean, one, $200 was a lot at that point. But also, like, they were asking money for this thing that used to be free, but they hadn't, you know, substantially improved it. It wasn't like you released HyperCard next where everything was color and had. you know, a system 7 interface and so on. And it was actually even worse than that because restricting the quantity of new users like that also made it hard for these third parties that were enhancing it to make any money selling their enhancements because there just weren't as many new users. And so a lot of them folders who were buying the software were like, I don't want to pay money on a plugin too.

Yeah, yeah. And so a lot of them folded up and sort of the enhancements kind of ground to a halt at that point too. and Claris was eventually folded back into Apple, but I think at that point it was just, it had just lost momentum. And, you know, there wasn't new stuff going on because of this period when nobody knew had it. And so, yeah, it just kind of fell by the wayside.

You know, I don't know, behind the scenes, I think the teams were working on other things at that point. Yeah, I mean, it kind of soldiered along on life support until after Steve Jobs came back. Yeah, it was supported for a while. It was like 10 years after more than 10 years. No, it was like, or 11 years after its debut.

Yeah. But, yeah, at that point, you know, he kind of pulled the plug on a lot of things. Yeah, I mean, I was still... I was still... I was still using it for ridiculous things for class projects up into 2000 or something. I tried doing a Hypercard project in, like, 1997, and my professor was like, really? Hypercard? So by that point, it was already, you know, kind of considered obsolete.

I wrote a machine language interpreter in Hypercard, which was... How does that even work? Ridiculous. I mean, it's just, it actually was pretty straightforward because it's just, you know, machine language is just you have a bunch of registers that are little, little tiny memory chunks, and you're doing very basic operations on them. So I just had a stack that had a whole bunch of fields that were memory registers and buttons that did basic operations on them and scripted machine language operations. And it worked perfectly fine. It was just a very weird thing to do. I kind of, I feel like, I don't, I don't know if hypercarcars.

was necessarily one of the inspirations there. But I feel like it was one of the reasons Apple needed to come up with the iTunes app store style model where, you know, you have a platform and then the things you put on that platform are what you charge for. Like iTunes, you go free. Yeah. You know, you buy your phone and the app store is on it, but it gives you like it's extensibility for your device or for your application or in the case of iTunes, your media.

and you, you know, kind of do the micro-transaction approach. Yeah, I mean, Hypercard was... If that had existed, Hypercard might have been, you know, a good pioneer for that model. It was very much an early platform, you know, on which people built other little useful and fun things. That was very much the model for when it was around. So, yeah, I mean, there's only so much we can say with the gaming stuff on here. Like I, like I said, I didn't do any programming and I only played a few hypercard games. I did go back to try some out before this episode.

And if you go to archive.org, as with many things, there is all kinds of hypercard stuff on archive.org. Well, this is actually quite recent and very cool that you can actually emulate hypercard in the browser on archive.org now. So you can actually play these archives they have. It is a little clunky. It's pretty clunky. You have a, yeah, like I used it and it's kind of.

Yeah, so you have to wait for it. you're like, oh, I can't control the computer anymore. Yeah, yeah. So you have to wait for it to boot up this whole emulated, like, Mac OS System 7, I think, or 6 or 7, it's running. So it boots up this entire little desktop in the browser. And then, yeah, it tries to map your mouse to the virtual mouse and let your keyboard through, and so it is a little clunky.

But it works. It runs, which is impressive because it's hard enough running these an emulation on your own computer these days. So getting it running in a browser is a pretty amazing feat. Yeah, it's seamless to just go to Archive.org and run as opposed to getting basilisk or something. Yeah, yeah. It's a lot of work to make it work on now.

The operating system and the BIOS and everything. Yeah. It's really fiddly. So it's very nice having something that's not fiddly where you can just just running. And if you know where to look, try BMUG. That's what Boston Mac user group, HyperCard stacks on Archive.org. Yeah. Just look for HyperCard on Archive.org.

Yeah, it'll find all kinds of stuff. And there are dozens and dozens of applications, including games. and I tried out a few of these. It was kind of frustrating because, you know, you are doing, like, the emulation in a browser thing, and it's still not fully baked, but it's cool that you can It seems to mostly work, yeah. Yeah, like, it works. It's just not a great experience yet.

Yeah, I was going to, so it turns out, it turns out one of my games is actually up there. Which one is that? So it's Mr. Lane's adventure, which was my top-down adventure engine, and it was a project I did for a chemistry class in high school. Mr. Lane was my chem teacher. But it's actually kind of cool. I booted it up enough to see that it basically runs. I haven't played through the whole thing, so no promises.

And the sound doesn't work, unfortunately, which is because it had some cool sounds in there, but oh, well. But yeah, if you're at the Archiveorg, BMU-G, HyperCard stacks, I think if you just search it for Mr. Lane, L-A-N-E, it will come up. And yeah, it's got some instructions in there. It's a basic, you know, use your arrow keys to move around, top-down adventure game, you're basically collecting mystery elements, and then you have

to take them back to the lab where you can do experiments on them and try to guess what they are, and that's the educational part. Wow, it's like the chemistry rote-like. It kind of is. I mean, it's not road-like, because it's not actually random. It's not actually randomized. But then once you've identified some elements, you actually have to use these elements to get past

like monsters that are on the map blocking your way. So you find some element that, like, reacts with the monster or that you can use against it in some way, and then you move on to another screen and so on. So it's... The periodic table, Oregon Trail. Periodic Table, Zelda. Yeah, I don't know.

Grumble, grumble. I need beryllium. But, yeah, I was actually pretty proud of it because it's kind of, kind of impressive in that it, you know, it looks like a top-down adventure game rather than a hypercard stack. Yeah, I just, I poked around and found some weird stuff. Like, I found a reasonably well-working space invaders clone. I can't remember what it's called, but you can move a cursor back and forth at the bottom of the screen, and it doesn't, it's not like a full game. Is it real time?

It is real time, but there are like invaders that move around at the top of the screen, and you fire a bullet, and it moves up really slowly. And basically, you can set how many times the invaders will go back and forth across the screen. It recommends doing no more than three. So it's kind of like a test to see how many invaders you can shoot down within three left, right, side. cycles. Yeah. It's not, you know, it's not exactly the real space invaders. No one's, no one's going to be like, well, you know, I was thinking about picking up, you know, space invaders extreme, space invaders versus arcenoid, but I think I'm just going to go to BMUG's archives on archive.org and play this hyperstack simulation of space. Yeah. And so I'm sure,

I haven't seen that one, but I'm sure behind the scenes that's someone doing what I was just talking about where, you know, your bullet is a button that's being told to take up the screen. Actually, I think it was, um, it was the, it's the letter E. Oh, they're doing it in a text field then. Oh, that's interesting. That's another way to do it. Okay. Yeah.

And again, these are things that really wasn't designed for. And at some point, you get to where it's just, it's really slow and clunky and not what you want to be doing. It wasn't on archive.org, but the most impressive thing I saw by far is a video. I linked to it. I don't know if you check this out. I just wrote, this is nuts, which doesn't really, doesn't explain anything. But it's a video someone recorded of, I guess, like a class project they created where they turned Metal Gear Solid into a HyperCard stack.

And it's not, you know, full, it's, I mean, they made it a point in click. It's not the full Metal Gear Solid, but it's kind of like, I would say it's almost like a fancier version of a Tiger handheld. Well, they made it into a point and click adventure, basically. Sort of. So you're moving around picking stuff up, using it on the guards, yada, yada. But they, they apparently scanned, uh, yeah, Jiji Shinkawa's character artwork. Yeah, they created it to, you know, one bit black and white.

And it sounds like they recorded audio off the game. and you know have sound effects so there's like voiceover when you receive transmissions and text yep um i mean it's it's kind of a mess sure but it's it's really interesting that you know you have this very simplistic simulation of shadow moses island you can like move left or right you come up against a guard and you can either like choke the guard or throw a smoke grenade at them if you found a smoke grenade um yeah i i didn't check to see just how how far that went because after, you know, two or three minutes, I was like, okay, I've seen this pony's trick, but it's still kind of amazing that someone could create so complex and so ambitious,

a hypercard stack. Like, I would not have guessed, if it weren't black and white, I probably wouldn't have guessed that that was made with hypercure. Yeah, I mean, I did, I don't think this one's made it up on Archive.org, but I did a full adventure game, full point and click adventure also. So I called the quest for the golden orb. It was the most generic name for an Avenger game ever. The whole thing was pretty tropey.

But it was a whole, you know, I drew out Zork style maps for it, and then made the whole graphical adventure. It probably had like 100 locations or something. And that was one, yeah, like I said, that was one of the things that was actually pretty straightforward to do with the tools available and actually worked really well, you know, as opposed to trying to do space invaders. A point-and-click adventure is a thing that really works in this environment.

And there's some other things, too. if you want actual, like, good playable games in a hypercard, I mean, a lot of people did card games, gambling games. So, you know, you can get, you can get perfectly serviceable, you know, hearts or roulette or blackjack and all that sort of things. People did in a hypercard. And, you know, there's no reason those don't work as well as in any other system. Because, you know, you're not trying to do graphics zipping around the screen or anything. I feel like hypercard gaming and kind of is impressive on the same level as, you know, like super early microcomputer gaming like you know x80 or something you're just like wow that

this isn't really that fun but it's amazing that they could do this much with so little um i'm actually kind of interested in some of the uh the projects you listed that a c s demo okay uh an AI that learned to play puyo puyo tell me about that that's oh this this hypercard stack might actually be smarter than me this was This was a neural networks project in college. And so, yeah, we simulated Puyo Puyo. I actually had actually, a guy I was doing the groupwork with simulated Puyo Puyo, and he actually did that in a different language.

But I had this neural network learning to play, and it would basically just, so, okay, crash course in neural nets, you basically have a set of rules that are just kind of doing random things as inputs to something, and you see what the results are, and you basically score the results. on whether they're good or bad, and then you basically mutate the rules so it tries different things. And you go through a bunch of generations. Actually, this is also genetic algorithms. A bunch of AI keywords in here. So basically, it was just playing Puyo Puyo by randomly

moving blobs around the screen and seeing whether it won. And over a bunch of generations, this thing actually learned how to do combos. And I think because it was playing against itself. It ended up in this state where the way it would win was by causing a combo so huge, it instantly caused the other side to lose. So I'm not sure it would have actually been great against a human that was throwing stuff at it constantly, but playing itself where all it was doing was trying to make combos, it got incredibly good at making a really big combos, which was impressive. I didn't really expect it to do as well as it did. That's really interesting. And you did that with a hypercard stack.

I did the actual, yeah. Just because I mean, I ended up doing a lot of things in a hypercard just because it was so, I mean, at that point, I already knew it. But, You know, it's just super easy to get into. You don't have to worry about things like how do I draw a thing on the screen or how do I get my main loop up and running or whatever that you do in a lot of other languages. Like, the framework is all there and incredibly easy. Well, I knew we were going to talk about HyperCard gaming,

but I didn't realize it was going to be also HyperCard playing games. I didn't realize that it was so versatile. Outside the norm. Well, again, you know, it's a full-featured language, so you can basically do anything with it. you can do in, you know, any other language, like, C or whatever, so. So is there anything else you want to say about HyperCard itself, or should we move along to HyperCard's Magnum Opus?

Ah, pretty much hovered most of it at this point. Yeah. I mean, there's also, you know, it's also good for messing with graphics. I had a bunch of little things that would just, like, draw their own, like, graphics routines doing fractals or doing random graphics, just because it also had, you know, all the tools you had in MacPaint were also in HyperCard, mostly. And you could script them with the scripting language. So I had things that would just like stacks that would like draw their own things on the screen, like script generated content. So that was kind of something else that didn't take off for a long time. Now you have, you know, things that will like populate a world with its own trees or stuff, but which is not a thing back then.

But you could sort of see the beginnings of that sort of thing in script in terms of scriptable content. Well, I'm sure that the the folks at Sion would have appreciated having a hypercarriage. to create trees. I remember that was one of the big... I wasn't doing 3D trees at that point, yeah. In the game, MIST, but we'll take a quick break and then come back and talk about MIST because that is sort of where HyperCard ultimately led to. And call her number nine for one million dollars.

Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck.

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Some features not available in all states. Hey, buddy. Hey, buddy. What's going on, man? Hi, Guy. Yeah, yeah, the team. Loveline, man. You guys remember us from back in the day?

Well, we're doing a pod and we're doing it every day. And we've been doing it for a while. And if I hear one more time, people say, God, I loved you and Adam together on Loveline. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, we're doing a podcast. Will you please just join us at the Adam and Dr. Drew Show. Please. All right. Adam.com.

It's a great show. Come on now. Only on podcast one. That's us. Adam and Dr. Drew's show. Just like the old days. Doctors, orders. Oh, man, you're funny.

Yep. All right. Let's go save some babies. Let's do it. All right, so that was HyperCard. Now to talk about HyperCard's proudest baby. Yes. Greatest, greatest child.

Before we do that, though, some people did write in this episode to talk about their memories of both HyperCard and Mist. So you're not the only one up there who made video. video games in HyperCard. There's a few of us. Yeah. Here's a letter from Brad Halverson. I was around 11 or 12 when I first started fumbling around with HyperCard of my Macintosh 2SI, but it wasn't until my family embraced the wild frontier of America Online that I really saw its potential.

There were plenty of freeware Mac games available to. download, but their quality was too inconsistent to justify spending too much time squeezing them through a 2,400 bod modem while getting charged by the minute for the privilege. However, the hypercard section of early AOL was a treasure trove of homemade creations that were comparatively small, and as a fan of anything that resembled an adventure game, their lo-fi choose-your-own-adventure-style approach really appealed to me. And while the quality was all over the place, there was an uncurated public-access TV quality to these things that I found fascinating. I tried making my own creations, but adolescent me lacked the skill and patience to craft anything

terribly compelling. I took some vague stabs at making simple adventure games, and even once tried to make a graphical version of Zork. But the limitations of the software and my own talent meant this project was short-lived. My greatest hypercard achievement was making a brief choose-your-own adventure game starring one of my friends, in which you clicked his disrespectfully rendered avatar through a day at school, where regardless of your choices, he continually failed at everything and was a huge disappointment.

Nice. I then saved the slanderous hypercard stack onto a floppy and installed it onto the Mac classic he was assigned to in computer class so that he'd see it when he went to open the typing tutor program. If this sounds like I used HyperCard to invent cyberbullying, rest assured that it was all safely within the realm of jitly antagonistic camaraderie of schumms. We're still friends to this day despite our mutually inflicted childhood cruelty. That is fantastic.

It is amazing. I love it. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, adventure games were definitely one of the biggest genres you got out of Hypercard just because it was so geared towards that sort of point and click kind of thing. We didn't have Hypercard back then because my dad had prodigies. There wasn't quite as much that I got online.

I got most of mine on discs. All right. To avoid this being just like half an hour of my voice, why don't you read the next letter? Oh, geez. We can just pass it back and forth. Okay, my first time, go easy on me. Okay, so we have a letter from Rory Starks. And he says, my introduction to Hypercard was the full version of the software that was included with Scyon's Spelunks in the Caves of Mr. Sudo for the Macintosh.

Yes, so this is what we're about to get into. It was treated almost like a plugin that you needed to install before running the game. I understood that it was used to make Spelunks, and I wanted to make my own games, if possible. I found several books at my local library that contained documentation and tutorials on authoring stacks. The most memorable one was the complete HyperCard 2.2 handbook by Danny Goodman. Yes, that was a good one. I borrowed that book so many times that the library eventually let me keep it. I also spent a lot of time dissecting HyperCard games that were distributed on IOL.

One of the best parts of HyperCard was how easy it was to see how other people made their own stacks. It was a really fun way to learn about software development. I made a slew of poorly drawn point-and-click adventure games and arcade games with all that I had learned. HyperCard had a huge impact on my life as I eventually worked in the game industry as a user interface, designer and developer. So yeah, definitely, I have that book. It's a good book. And that's actually a good point.

He brings up using HyperCard as a programming learning tool was a really good thing. Because like I said, you know, you just had these relatively readable scripts that was the language. And it was actually possible to lock a stack before distributing it. So you couldn't get into the scripts. But a lot of people didn't bother doing that. And even if it was locked, there were some ways you could get around it usually. And so, yeah, it was a really good. tool you saw someone doing a neat thing. A lot of the time, you could just go into the script

and see what they were doing. Here's a long one from Ravi Canodia. I don't know if I have any special insight into HyperCard, but I do have a lot of fond memories of it, both as a user of HyperCard stacks and as a creator. In the late 80s and early 90s, I was part of a cadre of friends at an affluent elementary school that spent a great deal of time developing little games using HyperCard, both at our school and at home on our personal computers, which in hindsight was a lot bigger deal than I understood at the time. The work was slow going because none of us had any real knowledge of programming and

computer science. We did have a Hypercard reference manual, a thick book containing a list of every functional built, every function built into Hypercard, with brief descriptions of what they did. But no books which taught anything about the fundamentals of programming or the specifics of Hypercard semantics. It was sort of like trying to learn Japanese with just a Japanese English dictionary, and nothing to teach the sentence structure or verb conjugation. Because of that, all of our programs were riddled with bugs and design choices that would make a junior developer's eyes pop out of his skull. Because we had no idea what source control was, let alone a way to use it, we could only collaborate by passing around copies of

our stacks on 3.5 inch floppies. If two of us have been working on the same stack, unbeknownst to each other, the only way to resolve the discrepancy was to open one of the versions in an editor and type the changes from the other version in manually. Almost all of the changes we made were shamelessly crib from popular titles. Approximated as closely as we could manage with what little knowledge we had. For instance, one of my projects was a top-down RPG with grid-based over-world movement, which largely worked, and a Dragon Quest, excuse me, I mean Dragon Warrior, inspired battle screen, which largely didn't.

My most complete project was the unimaginatively titled Wizard Tale, a simple, two-dimensional first-person labyrinth, again all drawn in MacPaint, that the player had to escape by navigating with the arrow keys and collecting a set of items by clicking on them. Some of the items were keys and others were weapons, allowing the player to defeat monsters, which were effectively obstacles blocking the player's progress. One of my friends started our most ambitious game, a street fighter knockoff starring ourselves, as the playable characters, all drawn in MacPaint, by the way.

We used HyperCard's text console as the input buffer. Every half second or so, the stack would look at whatever had been typed into the console and compare it to a long list of move commands. Nice. If we found a match, a simple animation would play, and one character would take damage. For example, for instance, typing 214P would make the right character throw a fireball. It didn't work very well because both players were typing on the same keyboard into the same input field, and we didn't know enough to be able to parse out the characters from each player separately.

If the other player typed anything while you were doing a move, it wouldn't happen. In order to play it at all, the two players effectively had to agree to take turns. Another friend didn't use hypercard to make games, but rather animations, in a process which we would now consider to be roughly analogous to flash cartoons. The content of these animations was usually bizarre and disturbing, and he got sent to the principal's office more than once for presenting such brilliant works as Happy Family Barbecue, wherein a suburban family, accidentally cooks themselves alive on a Weber grill. In retrospect, it's kind of a miracle no one ever called child protective services on his family. After elementary school, our weird little band of nerds fragmented for various reasons, and Hypercard quickly faded into our past without ever really being replaced. with the exception of one member of the group that I've since lost contact with,

none of us ended up following a career in game development. But all of us grew up to be well-adjusted and productive members of society in some way or another, even the guy who made Happy Family Barbecue. Many of us work in tech, including one friend whose early background in programming, largely gleaned from those hypercard years, has occasionally allowed him to outshine his peers in advance his career in an otherwise non-development-related role. As for myself, I bounced around Silicon Valley as a developer of various stripes for more than a

decade. None of that time was in the games industry until just recently when my career path led me to an engineering role on Sony's PlayStation team. So who knows, maybe someday Wizard Till will be coming to a PlayStation near you. Nice. It's always good to hear people doing things as weird as I was. Actually, at one point, I was pretty convinced I could recreate most of Final Fantasy One in HyperCard. And I think I probably could have done it, but I kind of lost interest, although the map code that I made for that is what ended up being in the top-down adventure that I actually did make. I mean, Final Fantasy One was a pretty big game.

Oh, yeah, I don't mean, I don't mean in terms of all the content. I mean, like, I'm not going to draw all those monsters myself, but in terms of the engine and the mechanics, I think it's pretty doable. You might even have come up with some spells that, like, temper that work. That actually work, yeah, maybe. This one is from Brian Rude, who says, I originally learned some basic hypercard techniques on my school's black and white max, just enough to make some simple animations.

When the school got a whopping two color max a couple of years later, I taught what I knew to a couple of my friends who were in the same class, and we would use our free time to create adventure games. Mine was essentially a choose-your-own-adventure game with the occasional hidden secret that focused on humor. My friends teamed up to make a game that ended up being more like 1988's The Manhole, which we're also about to talk about, in that there were no particular goals and a secret in nearly every object

in the relatively small environment. Both of our games came to an unceremonious end when they reached the limits of our respective max memory. I wanted to save them, but they were far too big for a single floppy, and the teacher wouldn't let me install a program to split files onto multiple disks. Ah, so sad. That's pretty harsh. That's kind of tragic.

That is a weird facet of video games from a long time ago. Yeah, splitting over discs. And you did have to find something that would do that because you couldn't just, you know, take a single file and drag it onto multiple floppies. Yep. Let's see, from Matt Lichtenberg. I didn't have a lot of experience with HyperCard when it was new other than exploring the manhole and cosmic osmo whenever I came across them,

but I've been having some fun exploring the, Internet Archives, recent edition of more than 3,000 HyperCard stacks all playable in browser. Okay. I didn't realize it was that many stacks. So, yeah, go to Archive.org and look up HyperCard, and you will never lack for

primitive database driven video games ever again. Thad Boyd writes, there's a straight line between HyperCard and what I do for a living and for a hobby today. HyperCard was my first development environment. I was seven or eight years old, and I wanted to make games.

Today, we've got Kodoo and Super Mario Maker. In 1990, we had HyperCard. HyperCard's interface bore a certain resemblance to PowerPoint with drawing tools that looked a lot like MacPaint. You could show slides or cards in order, as in PowerPoint, but you can also use buttons to link out to cards out of order. So it was a useful language for making your own Choose Your Adventure Games. If you wanted to examine the sound coming from the next room, turn to page 38. If you want to see what's going on outside, turn to page 44.

That kind of thing, but with buttons to click. My game, Seeker's Awesome Adventures, was mostly that sort of thing. There were a few roundabout ways to get where you were going, some of which would result in your in-kindly death. The most complex sequence involves selecting two tools from a list that you'd be allowed to use later on, and keeping track of your selection required just a bit of actual programming. I mostly built Seeker through the simple point-and-click front-end, but HyperCard also came with its own programming language, HyperTalk. I used HyperTalk to track what weapons and tools the user selected,

and the end game would adjust accordingly. You're in a pit? Did you bring the grappling hook? It's pitch black as you bring the night vision goggles. Store a variable and test it conditional. This is absolutely as simple as programming gets. It was a pretty good place to start. And that's more or less how the web works.

Fundamentally, it's a set of pages and users navigate between them using hyperlinks. For more complicated stuff than just moving between pages, your browser has built-in support for scripting languages. The similarities aren't coincidental. The HyperCard Wikipedia entry says that, through its influence on Robert Collaloo, HyperCard influenced the development of the web in late 1990. JavaScript was inspired by HyperTalk. HyperCard is where I started programming, and while I never did make a career of game development, I'm still programming,

and there's a more than passing resemblance between developing for HyperCard and developing for the web. My grandmother's been clearing old stuff out of her house, and a few weeks ago she gave me a bunch of old 3.5-inch floppies. Seekers' awesome adventures is probably in there somewhere, the original graphical HyperCard version, the text-only remake I put together in QBASIC a few years later, and maybe even the unfinished Turbo Pascal port

with PC speaker music. I really should buy a USB floppy drive and see if I can get any data off those disks. All right. And finally from Superboy Allen, one last letter on hypercard. Boy Alan says, when my parents upgraded from our old Apple 2GS

to a compact Presario 717 with its blazing 90 mega, hertz processor and massive 840 megabyte hard drive. I had some of my first experiences with CD-ROM technology. Sierra's Lolo-esque edutainment puzzle or spelling jungle, sorry, spelling jungle, adventure titles like Kings Quest 7 and Patrick Stewart's inimitable voicework in Computron Interactive's Encyclopedia 1995. Yes, the last one is totally a real thing. Sounds good. Anyway, Kings Quest 7 was my inroads into the adventure genre and Mist followed relatively soon after. I didn't have a bunch of baggage with the genre. I wasn't. savvy to the Walking Dead scenarios and obtuse puzzle solving of earlier titles, and the departure

from an inventory-based system, while noticeable, didn't turn me off to the genre. I know I had to look some things up, but I had a good time. I lost touch with the series after buying Riven, though. Maybe it was the inclusion of all those other characters you interact with in person, or maybe it was that I got sick of having to constantly switch between five CDs as I travel between areas. Maybe now that I have it on GOG, I'll give it another try without that technological burden being in my way. I get the sense that the experience of the first game could never be fully recaptured by the original developers, though.

Sure, other games have done the you're in a world and you have to figure everything out thing. But like John Cage's famous or infamous music composition 433, in which the performers remained silent throughout the entire work, maybe it was the sort of thing you could only really create once. The magic of the game was in its immersion. It was an experience where the developers left the players to their own devices telling you, in Patrick Stewart's words,

go explore and enjoy. The adventure is yours. Yeah. I definitely share. Alan's frustration with Riven. And that seems like a great transition, a great, what do you call it? Yes, transition. Segway.

To segue, that's what they're called. Yes. One of those things you ride around on. A great segue into talking about Mist, the crowning achievement of HyperCard, although kind of not really. Well, but to get to, to get some mist, we start with the manhole, maybe. Okay. So I guess we start with Sion.

Sion, yes. Which is now called Sion World. a company established by two brothers, Rand and Robin Miller. And they were kind of focused on using HyperCard for creating educational game-like application. Yeah, so they, like a lot of us, didn't really have a programming background. They hadn't done games before. But this was something they wanted to get into. And HyperCard made it really easy.

So the manhole is exactly the kind of thing we've been talking about that is the sort of genre of game that HyperCard is best suited to. It's a point-and-click adventure where you're going between various scenes and interacting with things. And unlike Miss that came later, HyperCard, I mean, or sorry, Manhole really looks like a HyperCard thing, and that it's all detailed black and white pixel graphics of the kind that early Mac made famous. Yeah, I never actually saw that version. By the time, if I'm thinking correctly, maybe I'm thinking of Cosmic-O-O- Like, what did-COSO was a similar? Did they remake one of these games in color? Oh, they've both been, they've all been remade since then, yeah.

I remember seeing it on CD-ROM. Okay, yeah, that was a later version. But so the original of both Manhole and Cosmic-Cosmo was this detailed one-bit art. And, yeah, a very distinctive look to it like a lot of other early Mac games. And it was very much just, so Manhole was really just kind of a toy box. It wasn't even particularly educational other than, you know, teaching kids to explore and use the computer and click around on things. but it was just sort of this fairy tale inspired world that you could just explore. And there was really no goal and there was really no end game.

It's just click on things and cool stuff happens and you can navigate around. And it had a few characters that you would run into multiple times and they would maybe go somewhere else after you interact with them. So there were a few little through stories, but nothing really overall coherent is just look at these cool things. And a lot of early Hypercard stuff was like that. look at these cool things I made. And so, and it did have, but it did have a sound and some voice work, you know, anyone who's played the original version, would be like, oh my, my, there's a tiny boat

in my teacup. And it had some very, like, quotable little lines. But it was just kind of a fun place to spend time, a toy box to kind of poke around at. But not really a game so much, as you say. Yeah, it was, it was, yeah, it was just sort of an experience. And honestly, I feel like both, I mean, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here. But both this and missed were sort of, in some ways, precursors to the sort of reinvented genre that we now call a walking simulator, which was not really a thing so much of the time.

You know, you had your adventure games that were very goal-focused and had inventories and were all about the puzzles. But both the manhole and later missed were much more about putting you in an environment and letting you just explore. And it's something that I think has had a resurgence recently. we have this whole subgenre of walking simulator that's going around and just kind of figuring stuff out on your own with as little interface as possible between you and the environment. And that was very much their ethos here is strip away everything. So it's just you and an interesting environment. And then, as now, hardcore gamers were adamant that these aren't really Like, where's the actual game system? Yeah.

And, you know, as kind of like to fly in the face of that, again, MIST was the single most successful PC game ever until the Sims came along. The Sims is also sort of like that little fart around in a toy box. What's the actual game here kind of experience? So it's almost like a lot of people really enjoy that. And gatekeeping video games is stupid and you shouldn't do it. It's sort of the ultimate and accessibility. Like there barely are any systems.

There's nothing you have to know. You just drop in and go. Right. So Mist, you know, we've been talking about HyperCard. and Mist is very much limited by sort of what you can do with HyperCard. I know the Millers wanted to create a fully immersive 3D world, but the technology wasn't really there. I mean, this was, the game launched in 1993.

Yeah. So, you know, 3D games at the time, there were some. But I mean, this was the same time Doom was launching. Right. That wasn't even really 3D. That was just, you know, it was fake 3D. Yeah, like projections on a 2D space. So this was a time when there were rendering engines there,

where you could make really convincing-looking environments, but it would take an hour to render that frame. So you could make something really cool on complex that looked almost, I mean, okay, today it doesn't look like a real space. But for the time, you were like, oh, my God, this was so real. For this for this, you know, messed around and missed for a little while. And I'm like, this does not look as amazing as it's not like as impressive anymore. But for the time, and again, compared to things like Doom,

which were these little pixely things in flat planes, and that was it because that was what you could do if you were trying to render something in real time. If you went into a rendering engine and gave it an hour to render something, you could make this really impressive looking 3D scene. But again, you know, hours to render a frame. So you're not going to be doing that on someone's personal computer, letting them walk around. So like Final Fantasy 7 did, you pre-render these cool scenes and then you present them. Or Donkey Kong Country, which was more contemporary with Miss. That came out less than a year later. And, you know, it was a different kind of game. But the idea was there of

of using 3D objects and pre-rendering them in advance and then taking those images and turning them into video game, you know, like more traditional game structure. So where Donkey Kong country was about taking pre-rendered graphics and making them backgrounds and, you know, animated sprites, MIST was about taking those pre-rendered images, those scenes, and turning them into, you know,

different perspectives in a first person, adventure image. I mean, it was like taking Shadowgate, which also started on Macintosh. And making it much more realistic, much more immersive. The thing about these 3D spaces that they created

is that once they had created the spaces, once they had built the environments, then they could just place a camera in different directions to their angles. And yeah, give you lots of different viewpoints. of the island. So all of a sudden, instead of having like, you know, 30 different scenes as you would in a game like Monkey Island, you had all these different spaces with dozens and dozens of

perspectives. Yeah, going forward and backward through various paths. Yeah. So, you know, it wasn't as immersive as real-time 3D where you'd, you know, turn and rotate and everything would spin around you. But they approached that by using this node system where if you clicked on the side of the screen, your perspective would change. Sometimes you turn all the way around, but sometimes you turn like five degrees and look at, you know, something a little more specifically, a little more

particularly, and change your focus. And so this fit very well with the default hypercard paradigm in that you've just got, you've got a bunch of scenes, which are equivalent to a bunch of cards, and you're just replacing the built-in one-bit graphics with these gorgeously rendered scenes. So structurally, It's very much like the manhole where you're just clicking from place to place. It's just that now it looks like you're in this amazing 3D environment instead of looking at this black and white 2D storybook. Mist also greatly simplified how the game work. You know, the adventure genre to this point, you had LucasArts games and you had Sierra games,

and those were kind of the big dogs. There were lots of other people making adventure games, but they were kind of fading out around this time and sort of taking, you know, fading into the background. LucasArts hit it big with Maniac Mansion. But, you know, that and Monkey Island were sort of their big hits and everything after that was sort of diminishing returns. And Sierra was, you know, they were having trouble with King's Quest and Space Quest and Police Quest, I think, did pretty well for them around this time. It was an established subgenre at that point. And it had its core of fans.

So there was still new stuff coming out that the fans were lapping up. Right. But I guess it wasn't really drawing in a lot of new people at that point. And at the same time, again, you know, Mist came out at the same time as Doom. And that was just, you know, it was like the nirvana. of, like, as Nirvana was to rock music, doom was to video games. It made everyone stop and say, whoa, this is different and new, and the 90s are here. Yeah.

And Mist took a different approach to the adventure game, the adventure genre, than LucasArts or Sierra had. I mean, it kind of fell in line with the LucasArts style of the ethos of you can't die. It was possible to have a bad outcome and get a bad ending, but that, that, literally came down to the final choice you made in the game. There was no point of no return at which you were like, oh, I should have picked up this thing, you know, 30 minutes into the game, but I forgot. So now I'm 25 hours into this adventure and I'm totally boned. Yeah, you can't get permanently stuck.

There's none of that. There's nothing they can stay permanently. There's no enemies. There's no systems. Like, I think the primary driving thing here for them was to be as immersive as possible. And to that end, they wanted to, as I mentioned, they basically wanted to, strip away all of and they want they want to no interface it's just between you and not nothing between you in the world so you're just here there's no menus there's not even an inventory

yeah a big part of that is taking away the inventory to me that's that is the biggest like this is different approach to games you didn't have you know the lucas arts like click on the text and you know you have sort of the smart sentences that create and you didn't have a menu full of items you can hold one item at a time i think one of the reasons they went to that is because at the time, there wasn't really an immersive way to do that that didn't involve cutting away to a menu or having a menu take up a part of the screen. Like, you're right, because we weren't rendering this in real-time 3D, so you couldn't just have like a satchel that you look into that's still immersive in the world. You would have to have it in a menu,

and they didn't want that. They wanted it to just be the screen of you in the world. And so that was the result is that you had, you know, you had your hands and you had your perspective, and that was it. Well, you didn't even see your hands. It wasn't like trespasser. Yeah, no, no. It was, I mean, you would have a cursor. Right. Yeah. Like a hand. And icon, basically. And if you were holding something, then you would see the icon would follow you around and it would change. But that was it.

And you saw the same philosophy a decade later almost with Halo, where you didn't have the ability to carry 10 or 20 weapons where you'd like hit the function key to change your weapons. You had what you could hold in one hand and what you could hold in the other hand and your grenades. And that was it. And I think that's a big part of those games appeal. like they simplify things and you know it creates interesting gameplay dynamics like it's not just oh this is you know a simplified game and there's less to do it's a matter of like you have to make choices like which item do i want to carry around the island i have the ability to carry one item but there's two in this space so what do i need right now just like in halo you're like well i could

carry you know like a covenant weapon and the pistol but i might need to shoot someone at a distance. So do I want to keep the sniper rifle, even though it's extremely limited in use, and I can only, you know, fire three rounds from it? You know, it creates these, these sort of dilemmas that you have to choose and, and make decisions around. I think Mist is a little more forgiving in that regard. Yeah, there's not really a lot of items even in the game. So there's not usually too much dilemma as to what to do. Like most of the, most of the puzzles are relatively self-contained where they are. Occasionally you have to, when you, occasionally you get something that you want to bring back with you to the hub to use.

I seem to remember there were a couple of times, it's been a while, but I seem to remember there were a couple of times where I would have, you know, like different items to pick between, there's a few, there's a few. But yeah, most of the stuff is fairly self-contained in its own areas until you get what you're going for and then sometimes you will get one of the pages that you're collecting, you'll need to bring that back with you. But, you know, you usually don't have, it's usually not, you don't find yourself in a case where you're like, oh, I need this thing and I left it, you know, two worlds away.

Okay, no. No, yeah, like, this is a game that is really about just clearing off the bullshit threshold. I mean, honestly, I think if it had existed at the time, this game would have been in VR. Because it was all about just the, just the immersiveness about you being there and not having, not having other stuff in the way and just doing things directly. Of course, that wasn't something that existed. Yeah, and I, again, like you said, I feel like I agree with you that this genre has made a comeback. like Mist was very controversial at the time because it did simplify so much and people were like oh well it's just like a vacation simulator it's all about the pretty graphics and it was

I mean these graphics like no one had ever seen graphics like this on a computer before as a home product and this was I think the first game that was CD-ROM only because you could not have put all these visuals. It was the first big one for sure. Yeah you couldn't have put all these I mean it wasn't the first CD-ROM game but it might it might have been the only one like the the first one that you could only buy on CD because it would have been hundreds and hundreds of poppy disks. Yeah. And it was, and you hear, you read about this as being actually a driver of CD-ROM sales. Because, you know, not a way. It wasn't CD-ROMs weren't built into things back then. You had to actually go out and buy one. And people would buy one to play games like this with, you know, these amazing graphics.

I bought a 2X CD-ROM and speaker set in 1994 for my computer. And the first game I bought was missed. and I didn't regret it like the sound effects you know the sort of atmospheric sound there's a little bit of music and there are some puzzles that are based around sound but it was you know just the the atmospheres

the water rippling and lapping as you move closer to the shore like there was a lot of spatial thought put into these locations and the sounds that were associated with them even though this was not a you know free moving

immersive 3D game. Yeah, they did. They did their best to give you a sense of where you were. They did the best to give you the best to. Yeah, they did the best to give you a sense of where you were in this space through both the graphics and the sounds. But, but yeah, I mean, unlike Manhole, it's not like there weren't actually game elements in here as well. So a lot of it was exploring, but then there's also a ton of puzzle content. And they did.

And again, this is... I mean, that's pretty much. what mist was. Yeah, it's a little on the nose. Like when you first arrive at the island, you're on like the hub island, which I guess is mist itself. And it has like an observatory and a pool and, you know, there's a forest, but it's all very small and kind of self-contained. And you can go into some buildings, but eventually you have to go kind of like up the stairs and across the island. And as you do that, there's a note just laying on the ground that the sort of invisible presence whose personality

exists throughout the game, Atris, has left a note for his wife saying, like, input the number of things on the island, like, I think switches on the island into the imager, and I have a message for you. So it's like, so there's an interesting, it's a little, it's a little obvious. I read an interesting thing about, though, that is apparently that note was not originally there, but they were playtesting people with this game, and they found that people who were expecting kind of a linear adventure game, they were expecting like some kind of inciting incident

to tell them what they're supposed to be doing. And they were just kind of flailing around lost without anything like that. And so they actually added that note. It has that feel about it. I didn't know that, but I'm not surprised to see that. Because when I went back and replayed, I was like, this feels really out of keeping with the rest of the game.

I mean, you have notes and stuff around. Like the whole, the whole game is based around the concept, the power of words. Like literally the power of words. You're using a book, use books to get around to these worlds. And the idea is that the worlds exist within the books because Atris, the author of the books, has used like his magical powers to create these worlds by writing about them. So it is a very word-centric concept in universe, which is what makes this note so like really but it was a concession to give people someplace to start before they got into the whole idea of you know they're just supposed to be exploring and piecing this together i guess

not every game can be super mario brothers world one one yeah teach you on the fly so so aside from that one little like bump i mean it is very much just about finding these gears and switches and machines and gizmos and devices and mysteries and figuring out what the hell is happening here. Yeah, well, so, okay, so maybe we should give some context to what actually goes on in this game for people who haven't played it. So, so you find in this, in the hub world, there's these two, two books that appear to have people trapped in them, but they're like, you just start on, on the shore.

Like, yeah, you start on the shore. There's no, there's nothing, aside from this note that was added in. Well, and there's the very preamble, like I touched the miss book and fell into the world. Yeah, so you fall into this world through a book. So you know that that's a thing. The books contain things. But eventually, you know, you go to the center of this island, you find these two books that seem to have people trapped in them, but the books have pages missing, and that makes the transmissions coming from these people very scratchy, so you can hardly tell anything they're saying. So it becomes pretty obvious that what you want to do is try to get pages to fix these books and figure out what's going on, you know, why people are trapped, what's happened here.

And so you find then on the Hub Island through solving some puzzles, you find other books that take you to other worlds, or that. there and then in turn have their own puzzles to keep you from getting around and you solve those and you can eventually find pages and bring them back. Right, because of course it's a video game and rather than just like taking the pages out of the book, the person putting these people in prison in the books, didn't say, okay, I'm just going to burn these pages. They put them very carefully behind in other worlds. Yes, behind puzzles. Because, I mean, because it is, you know, it is a game. It's not just an exploration simulator. There is stuff to do. And there's a lot of stuff to do. There's a ton of puzzles that are all very clever. But they do make a point of not just

saying, you know, you walk up and, oh, here's, you know, a crossword puzzle written on the wall or whatever. The puzzles are sort of integrated into the environment. So there's like, you know, there's an age that has lots of mechanical things in it and way to get around. And there's like this monorail system that's kind of broken and you have to figure out how to navigate in it. And it turns out that it makes different sounds for different directions and you have to piece together. That was the one that caused me the most trouble. That's a tricky one. You've got to write down a lot of stuff to figure that out.

But everything else I figured out my own. I had to get a handbook for that one. I think I got that one eventually. But yeah, so it's all these puzzles that are very integrated into just the things that make up the environment. And a lot of, I think for all the other worlds, they've said that actually basically they started with coming up with interesting, environmentally based puzzles and then sort of built these worlds around them to make them work naturally. And the worlds themselves are pretty interesting. They're pretty distinct.

the stone ship era where you have, I guess, like, a world that wasn't written well. So it consists of like a rocky island. And then there's a giant boat that's like... Embedded in it. Yeah, it's like a teleporter accident in Star Trek. Yeah. Like the boat is actually protruding from the rock. So you're like, oh, something bad happened here.

But yeah, these worlds are all barren and empty. And there's actually a lot of fiction built up around this game. There's a ton of backstory over the years. I think Robin Miller wrote three books, like three full-size novels, that largely fill in the backstory about Atris, his wife, Catherine, the Deney people who, or Dunny, who basically created this ability to use language. And Atris' father turns out to be a jackass and his sons are a jackass. A lot of people are jackass. Yeah, basically, Atrice is a pretty cool dude and his wife's pretty cool. And then everyone around them is horrible.

Yeah, it's one of those families that has family issues. Like in every big adventure, you know, like the Skywalker's or the Mishimas or whatever, everyone's jackass. Because that's how you get plots. Right. And then there were five core games in MIST as well as Uru, which is kind of where the main creators of MIST went after MIST two. Two, yeah, they did one and two and then split off. And I didn't play Uru. but apparently there's as much content in that one game because it was like online and they

kept adding expansions. There's as much material in that one game as the quintology. Yeah. So I never actually played it myself, but it's certainly an interesting development story. So they like, they split off and let Ubisoft actually for a while was publishing the core missed games. While random Robin working, they wanted to do this online collaborative version, which unfortunately, again kind of was ahead of its time in some ways and didn't work out so well. So they had this sort of frame story where in order to have a lot of people doing this,

it was like a modern day archaeology expedition uncovering the ancient dene civilization and figuring out its secrets. So you could design your own avatar instead of being part of this plot and you're all just, you know, archaeologist working on this. And it was supposed to be this grand

multiplayer online thing where you could collaborate with people with puzzles and stuff. But there were a lot of issues and the multiplayer stuff didn't work very well. And so eventually it got released as a single player game, which was supposed to have a multiplayer component coming, but it got delayed, and then it got canceled. And then like years later, who was it, Game Tap resurrected it? And so that's when it actually existed as a commercial product briefly for like a year, but it didn't have enough subscribers. So it got shut down again. And then they got the rights back. And eventually

they open sourced it. So it's still out there. It has like a fan community, I think, that keeps it running um but yeah it didn't get a lot of chance to exist as a real product yeah and um so mist three and four were developed three was by presto studios the creators of the journeyman project guys yep and then four was developed internally by ubysoft once ubisoft bought their rights to mist from yeah broader bund that was actually ubysoft montreal i didn't know that until i had looked it up recently that they they actually did miscore it's weird yeah and then missed five in Ages was developed by Sion. That was back to Sion, yeah.

And about a week before it came out, they laid off, like, every one of the studio. Yeah, but then they hired the back. They pretty much, yeah. Because they got some funding from someone. Yeah, and so, so Sion World is still around. And I interviewed Robin Miller a few years back at GDC. And, like, he's definitely a writer. Like, you can tell.

Like, he's very, very thoughtful. But So Rand, meanwhile, came back and did a Kickstarter game just a few years ago. Obduction. Abduction, yeah. So this, I actually sort of lost track of this. I remember when it came out being pretty excited about it. But he decided, you know, he wanted to do another sort of missed like exploration and puzzles game. And he did a Kickstarter in 2013, which did not amazingly but well enough to proceed.

Or in 2013, yeah, it was the Kickstarter. And then it came out just last year. And I've heard good things about it. Actually, I haven't played it, but I probably sure. I haven't either. Yeah. But it's on PS4 now, too, because because they did a PSVR version and it came out on PS4 also. I think it kind of got overshadowed by The Witness, which was very much the same sort of thing,

except everyone I know who's played The Witness says it's really smug, whereas abduction, I feel, is more just like a have your own, have your own adventure, do your own thing. Yeah, so it's not in the miscontinuity. It's just sort of a similar feel. Like the gimmick in abduction is that bits of Earth have basically been teleported to this alien world, so you have this mixture of human and alien architecture together.

And yeah, it sounds like a fun, a fun environment for puzzles and things. I should probably check it out sometime. Yeah, I want to talk more about sort of the evolution of mist. But honestly, there's not that much to say. It stayed very similar through the first three or four titles. Like, there were a few things added. They added at some point the ability to take notes and screenshots in games. So you could see the first games.

And we talked about this in the micro episode, which I don't know if it's aired at the time. This one airs. But, okay. the microvesa where we talked about gaming early at home in the 90s and how you, you know, didn't have game facts, so you had to take your own notes to figure stuff out. And the first few myths were very much, very much required that. Yeah, it came with an empty notebook for you to take notes in. Eventually, as technology progressed, they decided maybe people would want to do this

in the game itself. And so the later ones have a journal that you can take your notes within the game and you can take screenshots and bring them with you so you can refer back to them. and that was really about the only aside from having a little bit more video a little more character interaction Yeah, I mean, Riven, the sequel to Mist took like three years to produce

or maybe longer, I think it was more like four or five and that came out on five CD-ROMs And that killed it for me because you're constantly switching back and forth It was very inelegant Like they needed DVD ROM at that point DVDs didn't exist until like 1998 So it was a little too late

That even came out on PlayStation So it was like, I think it was six discs on PS1. But it was just too many. Like, anytime you switched worlds or whatever, then you had to switch disks. And this was a much more complex game than missed in terms of traveling between spaces. So you were switching discs a lot. And it just, I don't know, like that was really irritated.

It was a problem for this kind of context. It wasn't like Final Fantasy 7 where you get to, you know, the end of disc one. And that's it. You're done with disc one. This game, you would keep putting. Yeah, because one of the things about this, about these games is you can go wherever you want so that you can't kind of linearize linearize it like that.

And yeah, it wasn't until MIST 4, I think was the first one that actually came out on DVD and then finally had the space to do what you needed. I didn't even play MIST 3, but then I played missed 4 and reviewed it from OneUp.com. I didn't. I haven't actually played a lot of that. Like I thought, oh, you know, I got the assignment. It was like,

I don't really want to do this, but then I played it and really enjoyed it. I thought it was really good. And then MIST 5 actually did give you finally real time. That was the first 3D1. They used the Uru engine for it. Yeah. Or no, not Uru. Was it RURu real time?

They did Real Mist. Okay, they did Real Mist. Both Real Mist and Uru in 3D. Uru was definitely because Uru had your own avatar. So Uru was actually third person, unlike all the others, which are first person. Eru was third person so you could see your multiplayer avatar. So yeah, so they had the engine at that point and then Mist 5 was done completely in 3D. Although interestingly, they had this like option where you could navigate around it in real time,

like a 3D, just walk wherever you want. Or you could switch to back to node-based and have it be like the old games where you click from point to point if that's what you want to do. So, yeah, I mean, that's pretty much all there is to say about Mist. It seems like the story kind of wrapped itself up. Miss Bird was a, yeah. Yeah, the third game introduced Atrice's daughter. Yeah. And she played a bigger role in four, which kind of brought an end to the brother's stories, Cirrus and Akinaar, who were the two kids, the two kids.

the two dudes in the trapped in the prison books in the first game. Like their stories wrap up. One of them turns out to be an okay guy in the end and the other is a monster. Which is kind of a weird recon really,

but I think he makes, you know, penance. Yeah, yeah. It's all very Christian. And then five involves the daughter and I actually don't remember what happened in the story in any of them beyond the first one. Yeah.

I enjoyed it at the time. It got a little melodramatic about halfway through the five game arc because you started has the same thing any ongoing saga where you have to keep kind of one-uping yourself in terms of dramatic developments. But they did, but they did pretty much wrap it up and had had a full saga of this family. Yeah, as with a lot of properties that find their way to companies like Ubisoft, I'm pretty sure it's done. They bought the rights to it. They published a few games

and said, all right, that's it. The end. So we'll probably never see another missed game. It's pretty wrapped up. So I think it's at a good place to. Cyan is onto its own projects now. But I didn't want... I'm sorry. I don't know if Rand's working on something else now that abduction is pretty much out on all the platforms it was aiming for.

That'd be interesting to know, but I don't know what he's doing. Are we working on the switch port now? Possibly, yeah. Originally, it was just like PC and Oculus, and then it came out on PlayStation and a few other things. So before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you for your perspective on missed

as a hypercard game. We touched on that just a little bit, but I want to kind of round this up. As someone who used HyperCard and programmed for HyperCard a lot, can you talk about, like, what this game does with HyperCard and where it kind of fudges things? I mean, it's actually, so in a lot of ways, it's pretty prototypical as a HyperCard adventure game

and that you're just, you know, you're clicking between scenes. So you're going from card to card, even though it's kind of obscured you don't think of them as cards at that point. Of course, you think of it as moving through this 3D, area, but behind the scenes, you're going from one node to the next in this stack. And so it's very typical in that way. And there's a few things that have interactivity, but it's pretty minimal.

You know, you click on this invisible button and then it causes some change in the world or you get an object or whatever. And that's all pretty straightforward. So really the main thing it did was just make huge leverage of these external add-ons that allowed them to do full-color, full-screen graphics, and, add in little movie clips that they integrate. And it was actually, I mean, a lot of the innovation there was they did some very clever things to enable the presentation that they had. So they had like little tiny, and again, to get this to all fit on a few CDs, they would have

these little tiny super compressed quick time movies of something being animated, like birds flying or butterflies or reshaking something that they would have created, or in fact, real characters that were films, but that they created green screened and then perfectly integrated into the pre-rendered 3D background. So you had this illusion that you had this beautiful world that had living elements in it when it was, you know, this one big static picture with, with a very clever movie overlaid onto one little tiny part of it. I had forgotten all about that until I got to replay it, you know, went to replay it and was looking around the island and there's like a seagull in the sky. Yeah. They're like pinwheels around and then banishes.

Yeah. So that was a lot of the innovation there was just in the presentation in, making it look like you have this extremely high resolution, high-color living world made out of a few little elements. Yeah, it's like the opposite, the inverse of what Square did with some of its Final Fantasy movie integration in the PS1 era, where you would have, you know, like the background, the static background image would transition into a movie,

but then they would overlay a sprite on time of that. So you had like a real-time, real-time sprite. They really did that a lot with Final Fantasy 8 and 9. So, you know, the background would become a movie, and then you would have like a very limited amount of control over your character. So you had like the real time object over the animated background, whereas this is like the real time, like the main background with like a fake movie playing over it that you had no control over. I don't know. Like it makes sense in my head. But, you know, games of this era were very much about fudging it to create that cinematic immersive sensation, despite the fact.

that they were using the same limited technology as everyone else. Yeah, you don't have the data to actually do full screen video forever, and you don't have the processing power to just render stuff where you want it. So you have to fudge it. And they did a really good job. Yeah, I mean, I've always been a believer that technological limitations can lead to some great ideas because, you know, you tell someone they can't do something. They're like, you know what?

I'm going to figure out a way to do that. And, I mean, Mist is a great example of that. people people can hate on it all they want but it's a solid adventure game with some really interesting puzzles and it fakes so much of like the idea of technology i mean yeah the environments like the rendered environments they look pretty dated now lots of you know wet tile floors you know black and white grid tile okay that's that's so like you know splinter the mind's eye i mean at this point it's nice i loved this yeah at this point it's nostalgic because it is the 3D graphics are very much of that early 3D error, but not the like simplified early

real time 3D, but the kind of 3D you get when you had all day to render it and people would do interesting things, but it's still a very early point in the medium. So there's certain like signs that you can see that like, yeah, this is, this is 90s, early 90s 3D rendering. Yeah, there's like 500 individual viewpoints in the game. Oh, at least. Something like that. So that's like a year's worth of rendering.

if these images takes all day. And they probably did because they had like raycasting and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. So they were really kind of pushing the back end technology and then making use of a very simple front end technology. Again, very much like Donkey Kong country. And it created a very convincing illusion. And the fact that it was such a low stress game.

So, you know, like you could get pretty stressed when you were stuck on a puzzle for a week. But, you know, it wasn't a challenging game in the finger dexterity sense, but rather mentally challenging. It made a game that, you know, had a very low barrier to entry and looked very inviting. So, yeah, people were curious about it. It was a great demo game because even though it's super slow-paced, it looked really great when you just, like, you could pick up a mouse at a computer store and click around and be like, oh, this is very interesting. saying, oh, I see things that I was supposed to do, like switches, you know? I mean, the switches and machines and stuff, those were just hypercard buttons, but they looked like machines and they drew you in and made you say, what am I supposed to do here?

And there wasn't much to the game once you figured out of the puzzles. Like, you could literally complete the game in about 12 minutes once you knew everything you were supposed to do. I could take longer than that. Oh, oh, oh, if you know the solution to the final puzzle, you can shortcut it all share. Yeah, once you've done everything and solved all the puzzles, so you're just like, oh, you need to go good to the... You can go straight to the end, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, that wasn't the point. The point was very much the journey, not the destination. And it was a very, at the time, large, sprawling, challenging game. And I think... Obscure puzzles. Yeah.

And I think the theme of figuring out how to do interesting things with limited resources is a good wrap up to this whole session, because that was very much the entire hypercard gaming scene. is like, you know, it's this easy to get into environment that draws people in, but then there's all these capabilities under the surface. So you get into it and then you're like, oh, well, I want to do this. And you're like, you're going to do that in this environment? Well, okay.

Yeah, if you can figure out a way to do it. Sure. And a lot of times you can. You know, you can do something clever with the tools that are available and make a lot of really weird, interesting stuff. So let's wrap this with a few letters specifically pretending to mist. People wrote about Hypercard and missed. Some of them were just about music. So this is one from Adam Middleton. My brother and I were a bit late to the party with Miss, not having played it until

1996, but it was still gorgeous enough to blow my mind. Even FMV felt futuristic to my nine-year-old self, but there were real people in my video game. Of course, I'd seen Toy Story when it came out, but this was different. This was happening in my computer. I mostly watched my brother play it because I didn't really have the patience to solve all those puzzles, and I kind of just wanted to see that wonderfully rendered 3D world. I lost interest when I found out you could basically beat the game from the beginning. I suppose I didn't yet understand that the journey was more important to the destination.

Wow, I just said that. Super Mario 64 went on to set a new bar for exploration and immersion in 3D games later that year, but MIST still had a profound effect of my young gaming mind. To my recollection, it was my first PC adventure game, and I'm grateful that it sent me on a path to playing mini-Lucas, Arts, and Sierra hits since. From some dude named Benj Edwards.

What a weird name. Sorry I couldn't make it there with you guys today, but I wanted to chip in some thoughts about one of the most often overlooked parts of the MIST franchise, Uru Live Online. Uru Live is an online an online immem-like puzzle adventure game that launched in 2007. I think it started as an

online component of the 2003 game Uru, Ages Beyond Mist, that never came out in its original form. I first played Uru Live in 2007 as part of a subscription I had to Game Tap, and it felt awe-inspiring and wondrous to explore. The graphics were great at the time. The game wasn't very popular, but its mostly deserted nature actually made it a lot more fun. It felt almost shocking and world-breaking to run into someone when you found them, considering the context of the You're Usually

All Alone Mist Universe. The puzzles and atmospherics were amazing, but I only played Uru for a few months before I felt I had squeezed all I could get out of it. I probably only made one friend on there, and we tried to play a few puzzles together, one. once, but it mostly felt like a single-player experience that just happened to have an online component. It did feel like it could have been a lot more, if enough people had played it. You had your own personal house that people could visit if I recall correctly, but I don't think anyone ever saw mine. From what I know, Uru Live continued later on. I think I tried it briefly again once around 2010 when Cyan set up its own server for it, and when open source about a year

later. Anyone curious about exploring the full depth of the MIS franchise should try it out at least once. Let's see. From Dylan G. My parents were never really into gaming except for a period of a few years in the early 90s when my family first got a computer with a CD-ROM drive. As such, I have a lot of memories of being a kid and watching my parents play CD-ROM games of the era, like the seventh guest under a killing moon and of course missed. I was only a little kid in the 90s, so despite being intrigued by its mysterious world, the puzzles were too opaque for me to wrap my head around, even though our copy came with a hint book. A couple of years later, my family picked up a copy of Riven. I played around in it and never really made any progress, but I was impressed anyway

with its sheer visual splendor. A few months later, my dad gave up trying to solve it and printed out page by page the walkthrough on GameSpot's website, just so he could see the ending. It wasn't until a number of years back when Mist and Riven were re-released on Steam and Gog that I went back and tried to solve them legitimately with an adult brain. I found MIST to be pretty doable with a relatively minor amount of note-taking. I only really struggled trying to parse with what the game was trying to communicate to me in the underground train puzzle. a puzzle Robin Miller called their worst puzzle. It has post-mortem at GDC 2013. All in all, it's not a groundbreaking game by today's standards, but it revolutionized the genre in its time

and holds up perfectly as a serviceable adventure game. Riven, on the other hand, now stands among my favorite video games of all time. Everything about the art direction holds up incredibly well for a game from 1997, from its stellar visual design to its chilling ambient soundtrack, even the bits of FMV acting holdup, which is more that can be said of 99% of having to be acting. It's a tough game with only a vague stated goal at the outset. Find Catherine, capture Genn, I'm Atris's father, and send a signal back to Atris. The game trusts the player to suss out how to go about those objectives. While there are a couple of annoying pixel hunts, they're relatively few and far between. It's a game that makes me envious of people who get

to experience it for the first time, and there's never been a better time to play it than now that it can be obtained digitally without the need for constantly swapping the five CDs is originally shipped on. Yep. And there's a photo of the GameSpot Guide printed out in black and white and stapled together. Nice. That's impressive. I think that's another good point, though, but like where a lot of games with full motion video

shoehorned in just end up being kind of annoying and overacted that they did a really good job with a restrained use of a video of these. And again, partly that was because of necessity that, you know, they have very little space to work with. But, you know, they have these green screened actors. superimposed and just little snippets and they did a really good job in most of these games of just believably fitting them into the world

and not having them overstay their welcome. Yeah, I agree. So I don't know. I feel like I feel like the Mist series is due for reconsideration by people. It's been written off so unfairly, I think, by people who are like, oh, it's too simple, it's too stupid, there's nothing there, there's no substance.

You know, the Wikipedia page has a quote from you on it about mistruining the adventure genre? I did not say that it is... No, not in those words. I said that people have complained that it ruined the adventure genre. Okay, okay. That's fair. That's fair. I was citing other people. I do not hold with that perspective. I think Wikipedia is misrepresenting you on that page.

Those bastards. That's what happens when you let anyone edit. Yeah. Democracy is art death. No, I have never said that missed ruined video. games. I have said that people complained about that and that there is a lot to be said for MIST. Yeah. And I think, I think from our perspective today, it's easier to see that MIST was really the beginning of a diversion genre from the Lucre's art style of adventure games than that there's a place for both. You know, you have these adventure games with complicated inventories and systems

and puzzles that are solved, including, you know, lots of objects and menus and stuff. And there's a perfectly good place for that. And then there's this other genre that's very stripped down. and very much about just the player in the world with as little interface as possible. And, you know, these can both coexist just fine. The great thing about video games is there's so many different ways to interpret the idea of video game. It doesn't all have to be the same.

And Mist, I think, has a lot going for it. And I have all three novels. I haven't read them since they first came out. I read one or two of them. It was a long time ago, yeah. They were pretty interesting, not the greatest prose I've ever read. But enjoyable, like the... I like that there's so much thought put into the world of the games.

And, you know, as a writer, I can definitely appreciate a game created by a writer about writers, about the power of words. I'm like, yeah, that speaks to me. It's kind of like Stephen King always making his protagonist a novelist. Yep. So anyway, that I think wraps it up for Mist and Hypercard. I feel like we've kind of covered the gamut of this topic. Yeah, I think so. And especially thanks to everyone who wrote in.

there were some great letters, some very interesting insights and anecdotes. So thanks everyone who took the time to write in. Be sure to check Retronauts.com on a regular basis and check my Twitter feed, Twitter.com slash GameSpite, because I put out calls for letters from time to time. And I appreciate the fact that so many people wrote in this time. Sometimes we get like two or three, but we got a ton this time. So that's awesome. Anyway, so yes, Retronauts, another episode down.

Thanks, Ben, for coming in to chat about. mist and HyperCard and share your experiences and bring in all this stuff and we'll have you on again sometime again soon. I don't know when. It's always a mystery. Things aren't planned up that well. Anyway, Retronauts, the podcast

can be found at Retronauts.com on iTunes on Podcast One and on the podcast one app. We're supported through Patreon, patreon.com slash Retronauts. If you support us for three bucks a month, you'll get to download podcasts a week early in higher bandwidth. Band, no, bit rate. Yes, that's it. And without advertisements. So that's pretty cool. And of course, you can keep reading Retronauts.com because we publish stuff there every day about video games, mostly old video games. I'm on Twitter, I said, as GameSpite. And Retronauts is on Twitter as Retronauts. We're on Facebook. YouTube. Oh my God.

just, just, just, all the places. If you look for retronauts, you're going to find us. It's pretty easy. But what about you? Uh, so you can find me on Twitter at Kieran, K-I-R-I-N-N, with an extra N, because the original one was taken. Um, and you can also find a retro focused blog of mine at Kieran's retrocloset.tumbler.com. That's Kieran with one end there. Um, I'll try to post up some of the, some of the visual aids relevant to this episode near when it goes up, but you can always also just search the Retronauts tag on Kieran's Retro Closet to find relevant things. And yeah, if you want to try out some of the CyberGard stuff, do check. I think we're going to try to put this in the show now.

It's the Archive.org archives. There's a bunch of stuff you can play there. If you want to actually try it out writing stuff yourself, you're probably going to have to go to Old Macintosh OS emulation, which is a bigger topic than we're going to cover in the outro. But the resources are out there. It can be done. All right.

Thanks, Ben. Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks everyone for writing. As always, we'll be back again in one week with another full episode and on alternating Fridays with a bonus micro episode. When I say bonus micro, I mean probably nearly a full episode because we've lost the plot. It's terrible. Anyway, bear with us. We'll keep talking. Thanks. Bye, Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah,

ah, oh. So, Mario, So, Mario. Oh, Oh.

So, Mario, so Mario, You normally have three opportunities per year to see Retronauts live. This year, we've been to Midwest Gaming Classic, Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, and Portland Retro Gaming Expo. But it's almost Thanksgiving, so we're going to give you one last reason to be thankful in 2017. Chris Sims and I, which is to say

Retronauts East, we'll be putting in some appearances at Super Famicon in Greensboro, North Carolina, just down the road from where we live, as a bonus 2017 live appearance. Look for us on the floor and on panels on November 18th and 19th. We'll be talking to Luke Edwards, Star of The Wizard,

looking at the history and impact of Night Trap with the guys from Limited Run Games, and more. That's Super Famicon in Greensboro, North Carolina, November 18th and 19th. Be there, or wait for the live recordings, I guess. And caller number nine for $1 million. Rita, complete this quote.

Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck.

Switch to boost mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House

if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week.

Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say, acted as his lookout, have been charged. with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.