Definitely one of my very favorite Infocom games. It's a shame Ms. Briggs never made another game, as she definitely had a feel for how to create true interactive fiction, especially how to handle plot. I wonder if she knows about modern authoring systems like Inform and the like? Maybe she could be convinced to try her hand again...
Being 12 at the time, I didn't want to play a pirate game where I didn't get to play the pirate (and had to play a girl at that). Was very much in Fred Savage "Is there kissing?" mode (appropriate as The Princess Bride came out the same year). That said, a year or so later, I recall playing through Moonmist as both male and female, so apparently like Fred, I grew to not mind it as much.
Honestly, reading the end brings back the bad memories of watching Infocom fall apart in real time. They, Epyx, and Atari - the games companies of my youth - all seemed to blow up right around the time that Commodore ultimately did, and it was sad times.
Wouldn't that be 128K? That would be the upper size limit of the Z-code file, at least. Plundered Hearts is about 126K, which seems to be about the normal size for a late-era "small" game.
There was an article in the Winter/Spring 1988 edition of The Status Line ("What about Atari 8-bits and the Commodore 64?") that talks about the size limitations of different platforms. It doesn't go into a whole lot of detail, but it does have a chart of the sizes of the games, in release order, and lines showing the approximate size limits for TI99, Atari and C-64.
I believe you're right, and thanks for the catch; I've tweaked the wording in the article so as not to be misleading. I think I misremembered because .z4 (marketed as "Interactive Fiction Plus") required 128K of *memory*: the story file could be up to 256K because it wasn't all loaded into memory at once. .z3 maxed out at 128K of data, so I think I just halved the wrong number when comparing PH to AMFV.
I just checked MobyGames, and you're right that at least on the PC version of the Trinity box there's a sticker saying "REQUIRES 128K OF MEMORY". For whatever reason, the sticker on the Mac version says "REQUIRES 512K OF MEMORY". I guess the Mac GUI imposed some extra overhead, or something like that?
I thought it interesting that some of the smaller version 4 and 5 games (Nord and Bert, Border Zone and Sherlock) were still released for the C-64. I guess it remained a relevant market well past what I would have expected. (I never owned one myself, so I had little reason to follow its rise and decline at the time.)
Yeah, 64k direct addressable, 128K for read-only memory, with functions and strings. When I was working on my decompiler, and especially writing config files, I got to spend a lot of time looking at the compiled zcode, and in the later z3 games, authors pulled a lot of tricks with strings to pack as much as possible in there, things like constantly using print_obj [obj], which would just take 2 bytes, to prevent repetition of a lot of strings. Moonmist, LGOP & Lurking Horror were the ones that really pushed it right to the edge.
this was an excellent read - a bit of everything in this story!
regarding the clothing simulation: was the "first" for infocom that the clothing simulation was a separate source file? or were its contents (dresses, broaches) the "first"? or maybe something else?
Specifically the notion that there were enough clothing items to warrant splitting them out into their own source file (or an author who thought of organizing content that way). Certainly previous Infocom games had featured clothing items, but weren't in genres where what the heroes are wearing was quite as important.
To my knowledge, it isn't. As a private demo piece, it may never have left Briggs' hard drive and thus not gotten slurped up along with some of the other company material that would eventually get archived and preserved.
I have not played through all the Infocom games yet and this is one I should certainly do soon. Here's a question though - does playing as a woman in Leather Goddesses of Phobos (I did both as a kid) count in terms of female protagonist? You can certainly make the argument that not much really changes either way and so it's just a slight variation on AFGNCAAP but it should sort of half count. :)
Good point! You can also play as Trillian for a while in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so there were earlier precedents. But I think it's accurate to call PH Infocom's first with a female protagonist, implying the character is inherently female and you play her throughout the story.
(I've also seen some lists of women characters in early games leave Plundered Hearts off because the protagonist doesn't have a name. This feels unfair to me: it's true her first name is never mentioned, but she's canonically "Lady Dimsford" and is addressed this way a couple times within the game itself.)
Infocom games were mostly not deeply into gender roles, with Plundered Hearts as of course a notable anomaly. Most games sketched their protagonists so widely that gender, to the extent it could be discerned, was from very minor responses. Only a few could be said to clearly assign a gender to the protagonist in the eyes of the reader. Specifically, of course, the adaptations (Arthur, Hitchhiker's Guide, Sherlock, and Shogun) all have male player-characters (except for the short Trillian section of HHGTTG). AMFV has a fairly specifically described PC with a male persona. All three PCs in Border Zone are male, though only incidentally mentioned as so. And Witness never explicitly establishes the PC as male, but it doesn't make much sense otherwise, as a period piece set in a period where the PC's role was vanishingly infrequently female, subjected to old-boy chumminess by Lindner. Five games give an explicit choice, but only as window-dressing (Ballyhoo, Beyond Zork, Bureaucracy, LGOP, and Moonmist).
Definitely one of my very favorite Infocom games. It's a shame Ms. Briggs never made another game, as she definitely had a feel for how to create true interactive fiction, especially how to handle plot. I wonder if she knows about modern authoring systems like Inform and the like? Maybe she could be convinced to try her hand again...
Being 12 at the time, I didn't want to play a pirate game where I didn't get to play the pirate (and had to play a girl at that). Was very much in Fred Savage "Is there kissing?" mode (appropriate as The Princess Bride came out the same year). That said, a year or so later, I recall playing through Moonmist as both male and female, so apparently like Fred, I grew to not mind it as much.
Honestly, reading the end brings back the bad memories of watching Infocom fall apart in real time. They, Epyx, and Atari - the games companies of my youth - all seemed to blow up right around the time that Commodore ultimately did, and it was sad times.
> every corner of the 64K allotted
Wouldn't that be 128K? That would be the upper size limit of the Z-code file, at least. Plundered Hearts is about 126K, which seems to be about the normal size for a late-era "small" game.
There was an article in the Winter/Spring 1988 edition of The Status Line ("What about Atari 8-bits and the Commodore 64?") that talks about the size limitations of different platforms. It doesn't go into a whole lot of detail, but it does have a chart of the sizes of the games, in release order, and lines showing the approximate size limits for TI99, Atari and C-64.
I believe you're right, and thanks for the catch; I've tweaked the wording in the article so as not to be misleading. I think I misremembered because .z4 (marketed as "Interactive Fiction Plus") required 128K of *memory*: the story file could be up to 256K because it wasn't all loaded into memory at once. .z3 maxed out at 128K of data, so I think I just halved the wrong number when comparing PH to AMFV.
I just checked MobyGames, and you're right that at least on the PC version of the Trinity box there's a sticker saying "REQUIRES 128K OF MEMORY". For whatever reason, the sticker on the Mac version says "REQUIRES 512K OF MEMORY". I guess the Mac GUI imposed some extra overhead, or something like that?
I thought it interesting that some of the smaller version 4 and 5 games (Nord and Bert, Border Zone and Sherlock) were still released for the C-64. I guess it remained a relevant market well past what I would have expected. (I never owned one myself, so I had little reason to follow its rise and decline at the time.)
Yeah, 64k direct addressable, 128K for read-only memory, with functions and strings. When I was working on my decompiler, and especially writing config files, I got to spend a lot of time looking at the compiled zcode, and in the later z3 games, authors pulled a lot of tricks with strings to pack as much as possible in there, things like constantly using print_obj [obj], which would just take 2 bytes, to prevent repetition of a lot of strings. Moonmist, LGOP & Lurking Horror were the ones that really pushed it right to the edge.
this was an excellent read - a bit of everything in this story!
regarding the clothing simulation: was the "first" for infocom that the clothing simulation was a separate source file? or were its contents (dresses, broaches) the "first"? or maybe something else?
Specifically the notion that there were enough clothing items to warrant splitting them out into their own source file (or an author who thought of organizing content that way). Certainly previous Infocom games had featured clothing items, but weren't in genres where what the heroes are wearing was quite as important.
Do you know if the sample game ("a game tester assigned increasingly surreal tasks") is available please?
To my knowledge, it isn't. As a private demo piece, it may never have left Briggs' hard drive and thus not gotten slurped up along with some of the other company material that would eventually get archived and preserved.
I have not played through all the Infocom games yet and this is one I should certainly do soon. Here's a question though - does playing as a woman in Leather Goddesses of Phobos (I did both as a kid) count in terms of female protagonist? You can certainly make the argument that not much really changes either way and so it's just a slight variation on AFGNCAAP but it should sort of half count. :)
Good point! You can also play as Trillian for a while in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so there were earlier precedents. But I think it's accurate to call PH Infocom's first with a female protagonist, implying the character is inherently female and you play her throughout the story.
(I've also seen some lists of women characters in early games leave Plundered Hearts off because the protagonist doesn't have a name. This feels unfair to me: it's true her first name is never mentioned, but she's canonically "Lady Dimsford" and is addressed this way a couple times within the game itself.)
Infocom games were mostly not deeply into gender roles, with Plundered Hearts as of course a notable anomaly. Most games sketched their protagonists so widely that gender, to the extent it could be discerned, was from very minor responses. Only a few could be said to clearly assign a gender to the protagonist in the eyes of the reader. Specifically, of course, the adaptations (Arthur, Hitchhiker's Guide, Sherlock, and Shogun) all have male player-characters (except for the short Trillian section of HHGTTG). AMFV has a fairly specifically described PC with a male persona. All three PCs in Border Zone are male, though only incidentally mentioned as so. And Witness never explicitly establishes the PC as male, but it doesn't make much sense otherwise, as a period piece set in a period where the PC's role was vanishingly infrequently female, subjected to old-boy chumminess by Lindner. Five games give an explicit choice, but only as window-dressing (Ballyhoo, Beyond Zork, Bureaucracy, LGOP, and Moonmist).
> But it’s worth nothing that Briggs certainly did this deliberately,
Unfortunate typo!
Oops, good catch! Fixed.