#040: Fur Trader - The Ontario Trail

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre(s): Management Simulation

Developer(s): Dan G. Bachor

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

This week's game is quite a fascinating one. Fur Trader is a historical-educational game of several firsts: the first Canadian-made video game, the first business simulation game... there's also some adventure game characteristics, and aspects reminiscent of The Oregon Trail, which Fur Trader also happens to have an interesting connection to... come join the fur trading expedition!

History

Authorship here is attributed to Dan G. Bachor (via Ann Brebner), of the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. This also happens to be his only game credit, which is curious to me, as fur trading seems an odd topic for a psychology professor to make a game on. A brief scan of his available academic works also reveal that they have very little, if anything to do with the content of his game, so there's no help there in determining why he chose to make a game about fur trading. Currently, Dan Bachor is on staff at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

As far as my list is concerned, this is only the second game from Canada - the first being Bertie the Brain, all the way back in 1950. Arguably, it's not technically a video game, meaning that Fur Trader is potentially the first ever Canadian-made video game. And fitting too, considering the game's content is distinctly Canadian.

I'm not really sure what's going on in the cartoon...

After this game was included in Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games, it was ported both to the Sol-20 and Commodore PET computers, the latter by Ahl's Creative Computing, and the former, interestingly, by MECC. For those who aren't clued in, MECC is the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium - the company responsible for developing the commercial version of The Oregon Trail. Fitting, as Fur Trader bears some slight similarities to The Oregon Trail. Outside of that info, crickets, though real-life fur trading role-playing games (furs not included) still appear to be rather popular in Canada as a means of teaching Canadian history to youngsters.

The Game

Fur Trader stands out initially as a type of game we haven't really seen much of up to this point in history: management simulation. There are some lost games that could potentially fall under the umbrella of business/management sims, but the closest games I've played to this would be Civil War and Hamurabi. Fur Trader still remains distinct from those two in that this is a game strictly about running a business and turning a profit. Those other two games certainly involve management, but as a means for a different purpose, rather than the management itself be the purpose of the game.

We ain't buying your clanker junk!

As I've been mentioning throughout the article, this game is also primarily concerned with Canadian history, also serving as something of an educational title. Fur Trader is set in the year 1776, and you play as the leader of a French Fur Trading expedition in the region surrounding Lake Ontario. This year's expedition has been declared a great success, and you are now returning to sell your wares at a select destination. There are three destination forts to choose from, each varying in several ways:

1. The first fort is Fort Hochelaga, in Montreal, and is the "easy" route of the game. The journey is a safe one, with the fort under the French Army's protection. On account of the ease of the return trip here, your furs sell for the least amount of the three forts, and the supply cost is the highest - no doubt to pay for the hungry soldiers.
2. The second fort is Fort Stadacona, in Quebec. This is the "medium" route. The fort here is also under the Army's protection, however the road there is more perilous, requiring your troop to make a portage and cross the Lachine Rapids. The value of your furs here is a middle ground between the other two forts, as is the cost of supplies. The soldiers must be more well-disciplined and less prone to gorging themselves on the available rations here.
3. The third and final fort is Fort New York. This is the game's "hard" route, with the Dutch controlling the fort, and the route necessitating traversing the lands of the Iroquois. One the flipside, this route gives the highest payout for furs, and has the cheapest supplies.

At these forts, your expedition has 190 furs to sell. You get to select how these 190 are distributed between the four different pelts: mink, beaver, ermine and fox. Each appears to have a different value, but the exactness of their value is something that the player can only figure out through doing some external calculations. My initial assumption was that mink would likely be the most valuable, which is generally in line with my playing experience - beaver also tends to sell quite well, while ermine was generally the poorest performing fur during my playtime. Fox pelts tended to have the most variance in value - sometimes as valuable as mink and beaver, and sometimes performing as poorly as ermine.

The starting situation.

On this, I also noticed that there seemed to be a vague formula the game uses to determine how much you get for your furs at each fort. This is purely anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt, but it appeared to rely on the total amount of each fur selected, and (like the game suggests) the route chosen. At the easiest route (Fort Hochelaga), I tended to get paid around 66 - 75% of the total of each pelt I had, while at the hardest (New York), it tended to be 90 - 110% of the number of each pelt (again, with ermine typically being the worst performing). The middle route (Fort Stadacona) tended to have the most variance, with each fur netting between 75 - 110% of its total number - mink and beaver being the best performing.

No! My precious beaver pelts!

All this discussing furs a their value is well and good, but it doesn't mean much if you can't actually get them to their destination. Fur Trader makes the difficulty distinction between routes evident by having random events that can occur on each separate route that can cause harm to the year's expedition. Events can affect your overall expedition, or can be specific to one type of fur. For instance, at Fort Stadacona, there is a chance your beaver pelts may be too heavy to make the rapid crossing. Alternatively, your canoe might flip during the crossing, causing you to lose all your furs. At the most extreme point, your game can end early if, on the Fort New York route, your party is ambushed and killed by an Iroquois raiding party. Game over. Yikes. That certainly raises the stakes a bit, eh?

I'll admit, I didn't come across that event on my first playthrough, and it came through experimenting with the different routes, seeing what could potentially happen on each. From my testing, it seems that nothing bad ever happens on the easy route (Hochelaga), and the risk increases from there. The other two routes seem to have two, maybe three bad events that can occur - I'm not sure if I saw them all. One thing I did see was a random game crash, though, and that's also a bad event, but an unintended one.

RIP. Game over.

It's an intriguing game, is Fur Trader. As mentioned earlier, there's definitely some similarities to The Oregon Trail. Perilous river crossings, the threat of native raiding parties... although, Fur Trader is far more simplistic in its gameplay, by obvious comparison. I also detect within some nascent adventure game elements, with the game being more narrative driven than gameplay driven, in some sense. There isn't really a story here, though. It's more a historical setting in which your own story can develop - or, at least, that's what the idea seems to be. That's a gameplay-narrative integration concept that will be more fully explored later down the road, but we can see the seeds of the concept being sown here in Fur Trader.

Anyway, that's a lot of chat for what I've been regularly describing as a "simple" game. There just so happens to be a lot to talk about with Fur Trader, which is a nice change of pace. We still have the scores to talk about, too, so let's do that.

Scores

Time Played: 30 minutes

Difficulty: N/A (Variable)

More or less determined by the player and what fort they choose to go to, although the result of the choice of fort is random to some degree.

Gameplay: 2/20
I can only give Fur Trader a 2, unfortunately, as there's very, very little proper gameplay here, and much is reliant on the semi-random outcomes of your fort choice. The most "gameplay" aspect I can see is figuring out which of the furs has the best value and using that to determine how many of each you take each year. There's also no endgame to speak of, and no real point or objective to the game other than "make money". Unless you die, that is. You can also figure out fairly quickly which of the furs make the most money, and capitalise on them, which trivialises almost the entire point of the game.

I'm being slightly more generous with the score here, because I can give props to the game for its simple attempt at trying to immerse the player in a historical setting. I argued with myself as to whether the immersion constituted a story, and whether I should include the story metric for Fur Trader, but ultimately decided against it. Fur Trader seems more in-line with Civil War or Hamurabi in the sense that it's not exactly trying to tell a narrative, but has narrative elements built into the gameplay. If Fur Trader didn't have this narrative/immersion aspect, I'd probably have given it a 1, to be perfectly frank.

Controls: 5/10
Nothing unusual or out of the ordinary here.

Visual: 1/10
It's not formatted very well at all. There's large chunks of unformatted text that are cluttered and hard to read, like the descriptions of the different forts; the numbered list isn't formatted correctly. The code was ported over to the '78 edition of BASIC Computer Games, so the poor formatting suggests the author wasn't overly familiar with programming BASIC, as we've seen far more well-formatted games predating Fur Trader.

Functionality: 4/5
The game can randomly crash at certain points, but seems to be a rare occurrence.

Accessibility: 3/5
While a lot of reading is required, it's not overly wordy, and the game is intended somewhat for educational purposes. No actual knowledge of Canadian history is required to understand what's going on, either, so I'm comfortable with giving this a standard text-based game score.

Fun Factor: 3/20
I think there's some merit to exploring the possible outcomes the game provides for each fort, and for experimenting with how much of each pelt to take, so it has some replay value and interest beyond its incredibly basic gameplay. The historical setting also intrigues me, but I'm biased as a history nerd.

Overall, Fur Trader only ends up with a score of 18 - just enough to keep it out of the F-tier, and put it at the bottom of E-tier. I do feel kind of bad for the score, as a solid amount of effort has been put in to make something rather interesting. However, it just doesn't fare well from a game design perspective. There's little player agency, and there's just not really much point to the game outside of teaching some Canadian history. Feels like a lot of words for what I'd objectively call a "bad" game. At least it's an interesting kind of bad.

Next week is back to the simple, pen-and-paper type games - a common childhood game that, surprisingly, hadn't gotten the digital treatment as of 1973.

Where Did Video Games REALLY Start?

So, way back when I started the blog, I made the assertion that I believed that Christopher Strachey's Draughts was the first video game ever. My stance on that solidified as a result of watching Stuart Brown's (Ahoy) video essay on the subject of the definition of a "video game", and what, based on that definition, ought to be classified as the first "true" video game. Incidentally, I don't think you should really read those early posts - my writing and research was quite lazy. Putting multiple games in a single post was a mistake - a mistake I may potentially look to rectify in the near future.

I still agree with Ahoy's assessment that Draughts is the first true video game ever made. However, that's not a consensus opinion. Plenty of people would disagree with me. There's plenty of other takes on the "first video game", and games that predate Draughts that could be argued as the first. Some say it's OXO, others Tennis for Two, and some would even say Spacewar! or Pong is the first. Ralph Baer, of course, argued that his "Brown Box" that would become the Magnavox Odyssey was the first. Here in this article, I'm going to discuss those other contenders (except Pong and the Odyssey, because ignoring 25 years of prior history to them is absurd), and attempt to settle on a definite date for when the concept of the "video game" was born.

As I'm sure we're all aware of, especially if you've been around this blog for any length of time, the video game spawned out of the world of computer science. Computing technology had been slowly developing over about a century, starting with the mechanical computing devices invented in the 19th century - Charles Babbage being the chief instigator of that with his "Difference Engine," and later the "Analytical Engine." Calculators and other similar, mechanical and non-electronic devices continued development (we can't forget that the arcade existed, either) up until just prior to the outbreak of World War Two. 

The war seriously accelerated the progress of computer development, in the West especially to counter the advances of the Germans in their Enigma encryption technology. The Germans also had access to one of the world's first digital computers: Konrad Zuse's Z3. The Brits countered first with their "British Bombe" electro-mechanical codebreaker, and then with the Colossus computer in 1944 - the ultimate code breaking machine.

After the war, however, there was naturally less of a push for state-of-the-art defense technology, allowing for peacetime efforts in computing to be directed elsewhere, particularly games. For instance, Turing, in 1948, began experimenting with creating a Chess program, which he called "Turbochamp." He worked out the algorithms by hand and tested them against his colleagues, before getting to work programming it on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer - a task he would never finish. Despite him not finishing the program, it shows that there was interest in using computers for gaming purposes very early on in the minds of the great coding wizards.

Several other computer scientists experimented with games programming, though not initially for the sake of leisure, but more for the purposes of developing machine learning and artificial intelligence. Particular interest was given to what are called "solved" games - games that had a "perfect" way to play them, discoverable through use of computers calculating the algorithms. Chess and Checkers are such games, hence why there was much interest in them early on, but also Tic-Tac-Toe and Nim were also of interest as much simpler "solved" games. Some games were designed purely for recreational purposes, but those were much rarer across the early decades of video games (1940s - 1960s.)

Now that I've given more of a surface-level overview, we're going to zoom into a few examples of early computer games. Timing wise, I'm going to end off in 1952 with a revisit of Draughts and OXO. I'm only interested in the origins of the computer game here, so going beyond that point is unnecessary in such an introductory article. Each game will only be getting a brief summary, both to prevent this article from becoming a master's thesis, and to leave room for expanding this article into a "revisit" of my prehistory series. If I'm honest, I'm not totally satisfied with my early articles and the lacking research I did, so revisiting the series is something I'm strongly considering, both to fix my mistakes and refine my research methodology further.

Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device (1947)

Patent schematic.

An electronic game designed by Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. This is usually cited as the earliest example of a video game by most historians I've read. Personally, I don't think it really counts, as it was only ever a patent. Never was this device constructed, and I think that's important when discussing the "first video game." It's one thing to have the idea and the blueprint for it, but it's another thing to actually build the device to see if it works. 

However, the description of it may sound vaguely familiar. The player would sit in front of the CRT, presented with a game in which you fire artillery shells at designated targets painted on the CRT's screen. The shells, represented by a dot on the screen, were able to be manipulated by the player with a control knob. The player was to move the dots over targets painted on the CRT screen that represented aeroplanes, pushing a button to then fire the shell. If successful, the screen would simulate an explosion.

That does sound very much like an early arcade or second-generation console video game to me - part artillery game, part flight combat simulator. Considering what was to come after this patent was filed, this electronic game concept was quite ambitious and forward-thinking. Certainly not a "solved" game, like most of the other early examples of computer games. It does make one wonder what might have been if the thing was built, though...

Bertie the Brain (1950)

Comedian Danny Kaye was a fan.

Electronic game development goes quite for a couple of years after the CRT Amusement Device was patented. 1948 and 1949 don't see much progress in electronic game development, outside Alan Turing's previously mentioned Turbochamp Chess program, and some other computer scientists doing similar experiments that were strictly not intended for recreational purposes.

That leads us to a new decade - the 1950s - and the next milestone game: Bertie the Brain. Like the computer scientists' experiments, this machine wasn't entirely intended to just be a for-fun amusement. Its creator, Dr. Josef Kates, created it as a marketing ploy for his newest invention: Additron tubes. Kates intended for these tubes to replace the earlier, more fragile Thermionic valves. One Additron tube was equivalent to ten Thermionic valves!

With support from his former employer, radio and electronics company Rogers Majestic, Kates' went about constructing a machine to display the potential of his new invention. What he decided on was to make a device that was able to play Tic-Tac-Toe against a human opponent. The result was Bertie the Brain, a four-metre tall electronic box that offered passersby at the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition (where Bertie the Brain was put on display) a novel game of *Noughts & Crosses.

The display consisted of incandescent tubes that lit up with an X or O - not really a true "video" display if we're working with Ahoy's definition of a video game. The control panel was quite intuitive - nine buttons, one for each box of the game grid. What I find most interesting about Bertie the Brain from a game-design standpoint is that it had adjustable difficulty. Kates was able to adjust the level of challenge to suit whoever was playing at any given moment. Accommodating for a child, merciless and unbeatable for a skilled adult player. It's a clear forerunner to the varied DIP switches found on just about every single arcade video game from Pong onward.

Nimrod (1951)

Looks like the lair of an evil genius.

Across the Atlantic, something curiously similar to Bertie the Brain was being developed. British computer manufacturer Ferranti were gearing up for the 1951 Festival of Britain. However, their promise of preparing a new computer for the festival was seeming less and less likely to be fulfilled. That's when John M. Bennett, an Australian (hype!) computer scientist and employee of Ferranti suggested the idea of making a computer that played a single game: Nim. Bennett was inspired by a similar, electro-mechanical Nim-playing machine that had appeared a decade prior called the Nimatron.

Once again, however, the purpose of this "game" was not to simply be a game. Bennett wanted Nimrod to be a display on the basics of computer programming. Most onlookers were, according to Bennett himself, "quite happy to gawk at the flashing lights and be impressed." Some were more determined to try beat the artificial intelligence. Like Bertie the Brain, Nimrod used incandescent lamps to indicate game progress, and used a push-button panel as the control scheme. With the lack of video display, Nimrod also fails to perfectly meet the definition of a video game.

Nimrod also went on a small world tour, heading to Germany after the Festival of Britain exhibition concluded, and then after Germany to Canada. Also like Bertie the Brain, once Nimrod had fulfilled its purpose, it was sadly dismantled. This wouldn't end Ferranti's contributions to early video games, however.

Draughts (1952)

Recreation of what the game would've look like.

Now for my first true revisit on the blog. Christopher Strachey's Draughts was one of the very first games I covered on the blog. There wasn't a whole lot of depth to the research in that article, as I paired the game with A. S. Douglas' OXO. At the time, I thought it made more sense, since Draughts is a game lost to time, to pair it with another game to make the article more substantial. In retrospect, I think that was a mistake.

The story of Strachey's Draughts goes back into 1951, parallel with the time Nimrod was in active development. Strachey has just joined the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, England. Just prior, the NPL had completed the Pilot ACE - one of the country's first computers, based on an Alan Turing design. Strachey, wanting to familiarise himself with programming on the Pilot ACE, chose to create a Draughts (or Checkers, if you prefer) program.

However, his program was too much for the Pilot ACE, and totally consumed the system memory. This led him to look elsewhere for a more capable computer to run his game. Ferranti re-enters the scene, as they happened to have just the computer Strachey needed - the Manchester Mark 1. Incidentally, Stracey and Alan Turing were colleagues, and so Strachey was able to request that Turing send him the manuals for the Mark 1. By October of 1951, Strachey had transcribed the program, but it took until July 1952 to get the game fully functional.

By all definitions, Draughts is certainly a video game, and the first one that is purely software. It uses two CRT displays to show game progress, and the player inputs are through buttons. Strachey also programmed in various reactions the computer would give depending on player actions, such as telling them to hurry up or berating them for not playing properly. It's apparent to me now that this is where the trend I've seen of text-based games berating the player started. Also noteworthy is that Strachey included one of the earliest instances of computer-generated music in Draughts, where, upon the conclusion of a game, the computer would play a short piece of "God Save the King."

One final distinction earned by Draughts is that it's the first video game to directly inspire a future game. Back across the Atlantic, Arthur Lee Samuel created his own Checkers game for the IBM 701 computer, which became a pioneering work in machine learning, as the game's computer opponent could learn to improve its play.

OXO (1952)

A draw - again.

The final game in this overview of the beginnings of video games sees us staying in the United Kingdom. OXO is another software game developed for the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator - try saying that five times quickly), stationed at Cambridge University. Alexander Shafto Douglas was its creator, a computer scientist with particular interest in the relationship between humans and computers. Once again, this is a game that was not created just to be a game.

Like Draughts, OXO is one of the first games to use a graphical CRT display, making it, by my definition, a full video game. The control scheme is of particular interest, though, as it uses a rotary phone dial as the input. I bet some of you younger readers have no idea what a rotary phone dial is. Google it. Since Douglas' purpose for OXO was to be a part of a thesis on human-computer interactions, any sort of difficulty or gameplay wasn't considered; the computer plays a perfect game of Tic-Tac-Toe, meaning that the player can never win. The player was never intended to win.

Final Thoughts

If we want to answer the question posed by the article, there's two possible, more definite ways to answer it, in my opinion. The first is to just start at the very very start, saying that the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device is first, simply because it was the first video game concept ever created, despite the fact that it was never built.

Video games were invented: 25th of January, 1947.

The second, and this is where I land, is to find or develop a working definition of "video game," and determine what's first from there. As said at the start, I use Ahoy's definition, which sees Draughts and OXO as the first true video games. Although, it could be argued that these two games don't perfectly fit his definition, as his fourth point, "Be principally intended for entertainment", is not directly met by either. They weren't intended exclusively as entertainment, but as training (Draughts) or academic (OXO) exercises. Still, there's enough recreational merit in both to meet the definition of a video game, in my mind.

Video games were invented: 30th of July, 1952. 

There were some other games floating around at the same time, like Sheep & Gates, also on the EDSAC, which Ahoy also briefly mentions, but none of those caught much attention and continue to live in obscurity (perhaps something I will seek to remedy?)

That being said, answering the question is not really that simple. History is rarely ever simple. You could look at the pinball industry, or electro-mechanical arcades and say that the seeds of video games are present there, particularly when a computer game like Nimrod was directly influenced by a similar, electro-mechanical arcade game developed a decade prior. When electronics and technology advance, the effects eventually filter down into other industries, and that's what we see with the origins of video games. Computers become more advanced, then get incorporated into arcade games, etc., etc.

Personally, I always find the origins of things fascinating. There's always an opportunity to see the seeds of what was to come being planted. The curious thing with the origins of video games, is that just about every game is an island. They all exist in their own spaces, not influenced by each other, nor do they influence any future games. While Bertie the Brain and Nimrod were publicly displayed, they had no sequels, nor was anyone inspired to do something similar by them. Draughts and OXO were purely academic works, inaccessible to the public and created as part of personal projects - although Draughts did inspire one other Checkers game. The influence of these games lives far more in the realm of computer science than video games. We don't actually see any substantial video game "family trees" begin, per se, until Spacewar! and The Sumerian Game appear in the early 1960s.

What are your thoughts on the first video game? Do you agree with me? Or do you prefer a different game be labelled the "first"? Did I miss a game? I'd greatly appreciate it if you shared your thoughts in the comments. This is potentially the start of a "prehistory revisited" series that would feature more robust and well-researched articles. Let me know if that's something you would be interested in seeing from me.

What's In a Game?

The recent article on Boomerang Puzzle got me to thinking about something. I remarked (rather strongly, at that) that I didn't think Boomerang Puzzle was a video game. Afterwards - and even during the writing process for that article - I got to thinking about what exactly is a video game? How do we define what qualifies as a video game, and what does not? So I decided that it was worth writing about, and here we are.

I'll propose a working definition of both a game and a "video" game in this article. Not only will it be helpful for me going forward, but I also want to present it for discussion. I'm sure I'll miss something, or you, reader, will come at it from a different perspective, which I wholly welcome. Discussion and debate are good and healthy things, provided they don't become hostile.

A Brief History of Games

It's a history blog - you know I'm going to delve into some historical data. The concept of games as a recreational activity is most likely as old as the human race itself (regardless of whether you hold to a creationist or evolutionary worldview.)

One of the oldest known games to us is the Royal Game of Ur, named after the great Sumerian city of Ur (in modern day Iraq) - the same city the Biblical character Abraham likely originated from. It was played all across ancient Mesopotamia as far back as 2,600 B.C., according to archaeologists - old enough for Abraham himself to have played it! It also made its way to Egypt, where a variant arose called the Game of Twenty Squares. Game boards were discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun, and even as far away as Crete and Sri Lanka.

Royal Game of Ur game board, dating back to 2,600 B.C.

The objective of the Royal Game is quite simple: get your pieces from one end of the game board to the other. It's pretty much the same core game objective as Backgammon. Two players play on the same board, consisting of 3 rows of squares, with both players sharing the middle space and owning one of the edge rows. Each player has 7 pieces that they must get from one end of the board to the other. Movement is done by using four-sided triangular dice. Two of the points on these triangular dice are coloured, giving a 50-50 chance of getting a coloured point facing directly up. On a player's turn, they would roll four of these dice, and however many coloured points they get is how many places they move on along the board.

There are some extra rules to make things more interesting, however. The basic form of the game has five special spaces on it - four on the edge rows, and one in the centre square. The edge squares give the player an extra dice roll, and the middle one is a "safe" square. This means that a piece that lands on it cannot be removed. That's where the other main rule comes in - the centre row. Since both players move their pieces along the centre, what happens if a piece lands on the square their opponent's piece is on? Like Backgammon, that piece is kicked off the board, and has to start its course all over again. With all the similarities to Backgammon, it's likely, according to historians, that this game was an ancestor of the family of games which includes Backgammon.

Another ancient game that's possibly even older is Senet. Senet originated in Egypt, possibly as far back as 3,100 B.C.! The rules of this game are more obscured to us today, but it's believed that the game itself had religious significance for the Egyptians. The objective of Senet is, like The Royal Game of Ur, to get all your pieces off the game board. Also like The Royal Game, Senet's game board is comprised of a board of 3 rows, but with 10 tiles in each row. Players would use "throw-sticks," sticks with one coloured side, to determine moves, and avoid hazards on the game board.

Senet game board for Pharoah Amenhotep III, circa 1,390 B.C.

We've already seen another ancient game in action on the blog, Mancala, in my Awari article from last year. Almost unbelievably, there's potential archaeological evidence of Mancala boards dating back to 6,000 B.C.!! This is a mathematical game played across almost the entire world, with variants in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Players take turns sowing "seeds" (stones) into their houses on the game board, with the aim being to capture more "seeds" than your opponent by the end of the game. Rules vary wildly by region, with Kalah, the Western variant Awari was based on, being one of the simpler ones.

Modern Mancala.

All of these games have several common factors, which are the defining characteristics of what a "game" is as its core.

Core Components

All the games I've mentioned above all have several shared components that make them a game. These components are fairly consistent across games historically, and so work as a suitable base from which to define a "game" and, extension, a "video game."

1. Objectives

A game is an objective-based activity. This is fairly self-explanatory. There's always some sort of end goal to be achieved in order to win a game. The Royal Game of Ur and Backgammon's common objective is to get all your pieces on, across and off the board before your opponent does. Chess and Checkers require you to capture all of your opponent's pieces to win. Every kind of sport has an objective, usually scoring more points than your opposition.

Video games are the same in this regard. In an RPG, the chief objective is often to defeat some sort of big-bad to restore peace to the land, such as defeating the Dragonlord in the original Dragon Quest (or Dragon Warrior, if you prefer,) or saving the world from being destroyed by Lavos in Chrono Trigger. Racing games mostly have the same simple objective - win the race. Strategy games, whether real-time or turn-based, ask you to acquire and spend resources to defeat your opponents before they defeat you. Puzzle games - solve the puzzle. The list goes on. Failure to achieve an objective usually results in some form of punishment, like losing a life or losing hard-earned progress, although less so today; there tends to be less harsh consequences for failure in more modern games, but failing objectives is still possible, in most cases.

Even a game like Minecraft, which started life as an open-ended sandbox that doesn't necessarily fit neatly into this category still has objectives - survive, gather resources to create better means of survival, and explore the world. Later on it was given a technical "End" goal (*wink*), but the game doesn't truly end, even after completing this objective.

2. Game "Board"

Every game has a "game board" in some fashion or another. Physical board games are obvious, but even digital and card games have a form of "board" that the game is played on that defines the setting of the game. A real-time strategy game like Age of Empires, or even an RPG like Skyrim has a game map - the digital "board" that the game takes place on. Platformers have their level maps, and so too first/third-person shooters. Puzzle games have more obvious boards in a lot of instances - just look at the grids Match-3 puzzlers like Bejeweled or Jewel Quest are played on. Some of them look like Chess or Royal Game of Ur boards.

Card games mostly have pre-determined layouts of where the main deck goes, where the discard pile is (if applicable,) and where players place certain cards on the table in relation to other cards. Something like Solitaire has a fairly obvious game board. TGCs like Yu-Gi-Oh or the Pokémon Trading Card Game straight-up have mats to use like game boards.

3. Rules & Mechanics

Without rules, there is no order. Just pure anarchy. Some people might revel in that, but not I. Games certainly don't revel in the idea, either. For a game to be a game, it must have both gameplay mechanics, and rules governing the use of those mechanics. The mechanics are kind of like the physical pieces of the game, while the rules put limitations on their usage.

It's a fairly simple area to deal with in board games, and sports as well. The mechanics of Tennis are simply hitting the ball with the racket, with the objective of getting it past your opponent, or forcing them into an error. The rules are what points you get for forcing your opponent's error, how many points you need to win, how many times the ball is allowed to bounce, that the ball must stay in the court, etc, etc... Monopoly has money as a mechanic, and there are rules governing how money can and cannot be used. Of course, we always like to break the rules and cheat, or just come up with our own rules.

Video games, on the other hand, aren't so simple. Depending on the size and complexity of the game, there can be hundreds of mechanics, and thousands upon thousands of rules governing how they can be used. Often the rules and mechanics are far more tightly interwoven, which can result in the lines becoming blurred. Super Mario can jump, but how high? What happens if you tap the jump button instead of holding it down? That piece of equipment can only be equipped by x class in y slot, and has this much protection and that much weight - oh, and it has elemental resistances, too, and a +2 bonus to strength. You can gather food and wood in Age of Empires, but it specifically costs 50 food for a villager, and 30 wood to build a house. Plus, if you don't have houses, you can't get more villagers or other units. Cavalry units are a +2 to population instead of foot units being +1. That AoE example factors in the mechanics and rules surrounding resource gathering, unit production and population - all interconnected and working together. The rabbit hole keeps going deeper and deeper here, so I'll refrain from any more examples, otherwise I'll have to make this into a book.

4. Interactivity

I thought about this one later into the piece while driving home one night recently. One of the big differences between games and other forms of entertainment, like film, art and TV, is the interactivity factor. Don't just watch that sport on television - play it! 

With video games, interactivity is what makes them especially unique. It immerses the player in a world more than any film or show can. You're not watching Frodo Baggins' quest to take the one ring to Mt. Doom - you're playing it, like you're Frodo himself. You aren't watching a sport on TV, you're participating in a simulated match yourself, controlling the players and making strategic decisions. Video games allow the player to be directly involved in making choices that have consequences, either immediate or later down the line, depending on the type of game. If the media being viewed doesn't let you make interactive choices, it can't be a game.

5. It's Just Fun

Finally, games are meant to be fun. If it's not fun, it's work. Games are at heart a recreational activity, meant to bring pleasure, relief and rest after a hard working day. Unless, of course, your work is games, in which case I envy you, or if the game in question is a sport. Recreation and pleasure are certainly present with sports, rest... not so much.

There's certainly other benefits to different forms of games. Sports help with fitness, hand-eye coordination and (sometimes) teamwork. Board games and video games can build critical thinking and problem solving skills, as well as teamwork and social connections in multiplayer settings.

But, ultimately, games are meant for enjoyment. Fun, laughter, getting a good fright, showing off the newest cool thing you built in Minecraft - it's all meant to bring some form of entertainment.

But What About x Game?

Naturally, some exceptions crop up from time to time in today's gaming climate. With such a massively wide scope of programs calling themselves "games" these days, some are going to not neatly fit into the categories I've just described. So, what do we do with these? Are they still games, or something else?

First, let's talk about a game I've mentioned a few times - Minecraft. 

Minecraft doesn't exactly fit into category 1 of objectives. It doesn't exactly have a winning objective (The End notwithstanding,) and is functionally an endless sandbox. However, I think it's still a game. It has objectives, and the player also has freedom to create their own goals, or even their own minigames within it.

Plenty of other games are out there that buck the objective category also. Any kind of sandbox game would suit, SimCity, The Sims - anything without a precise, winning objective. One could even make an argument that many arcade games, like Galaxian or Pac-Man, are endless and without winning objective. However, these all still have some kind of objective. Whether that be to survive as long as you can, beat the high score, or save your city from an alien invasion... what, what? 

Another sort of game that might come up as a "what if" is "walking simulators." You know, games like Journey, Dear Esther or The Stanley Parable. There's not a whole lot to do, but just... walk around. There's still objectives, and these games do have an ending, so I think it's fairly cut-and-dry that they're games.

When it comes to interactivity, I've mentioned several times on the blog the phrase "illusion of choice." This is a term I use to refer to games where player choice is present, but doesn't actually affect the outcome of said choice - by it either being predetermined or completely random. The go-to examples here are Dartmouth Championship Football and PDP-10 Timesharing Basketball. These games have choices the player can make, but the outcome is entirely random - your choice is effectively irrelevant. Are we to still consider these games? I think so, because they still have all the other components of a game, and interactivity is still technically present; the player still has to make strategic choices, even if the outcome is random.

Where I would say the line gets crossed is with a program like The PDP 10 Timesharing World Series. That's a program I looked at way way back at the start of the blog. It's not a game, because you don't actually play anything in it. The only "choice" you make is choosing a seed number at the start of the program, which then simulates a preset game of baseball based on that seed. You don't pitch, don't bat, don't field - no interactivity at all, so not a game.

Even the aforementioned walking simulators win in this category - as they're all about interactivity. You walk through the world, interact with it, maybe solve puzzles if there are any present in the game, but you still get to choose where you go and how you explore the game world.

I don't think there's much in the way of exceptions to the "game board" category, so let's move on to some possible exceptions to the "fun" category.

Starting with that dreaded word... edutainment. Some games are intended for a purpose other than entertainment, which is learning. Education and computers have a long standing relationship that goes back into the 1950s and the formation of computing as a whole, so I think it was a natural inevitability that, once computer games started being made, creating games meant for educational purposes would occur.

Based on their intent, I'd still classify "edutainment" games as games. The purpose of educational games is to inject an element of fun into learning. How fun these games are is up to user discretion. I played educational games like Word Rescue and Math Rescue growing up like they were normal games, not even thinking about the educational aspect. Plenty of us, I'm sure, played Number Munchers while at school. We also had Math Circus, which was great fun.

What's determined as "fun" is more subjective than the other factors. I don't exactly find horror games to be much fun, but many others do. This component is more about authorial intent than the others. If the developer intended for it to be fun entertainment, then I'd still call it a game. Spreadsheets are not a game, however, as fun as I might find them. They are intended for non-recreational purposes - though we can still find recreational purposes for them... that is not what they were designed for.

I think that just about covers it for exceptions and objections I can think of. Please, if you can think of others, leave a comment.

Quick Recap

That does it for now. I just had the idea on a whim and thought, "why not?" These will be good bonus articles that I can put out every so often when I have an idea I want to air out. I have a few more drafted, so if this one works out well, I might consider posting more. There's also a new page on the sidebar where all my thinkpieces and special articles will be housed.

So, to recap, the defining components of a game I outlined were:

1. Objective-based.
2. Set on a "game board," with pieces, physical or digital.
3. All games have rule and mechanics.
4. Games are interactive - you have choice, and it matters!
5. They're meant to be fun!

What are your thoughts on these categories? Did I miss anything? This is open for debate - I'm not saying I'm an authority on this at all, just someone who has ideas wanting to put them out there. I did briefly look at what some other people had said about the topic, but all of these categories are formed from my own thoughts and experiences on the subject, in combination with the research I did on historical games. I'd be interested to know if my thoughts are similar to anyone else's.

If you made it this far, I'm impressed. Know that I appreciate you. Also... if you check back here on a Tuesday, there might be an extra surprise every-so-often. Keep your eyes peeled.

#031: Boomerang Puzzle - I Know the Greeks Invented Everything, but Boomerangs?

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC Type-In)

Genre: Puzzle, Non-Game

Developer(s): David H. Ahl, Nicomachus [ed. or maybe not...]

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

It seems like a bizarre place to go, but I'm about to go on a short diatribe about Greek philosophers on a video game blog. The Greeks invented everything, don't ya know?

Anyway... we owe a lot to the Ancient Greek philosophers. Much of what we know and understand about the world was originally discovered by them, as well as methods of understanding. Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Pythagoras - we could go on listing them. Another of these names, certainly not as well known as those I just listed, is Nicomachus of Gerasa. The distinction needs to be made, for there are several notable individuals named Nicomachus. Technically, Nicomachus of Gerasa isn't a Greek, but a Roman, for Gerasa was in Roman Syria - which is today in modern Jordan. Greco-Roman culture had a lot of overlapping though, so you could excuse thinking Nicomachus was a Greek. He was, after all, inspired by one of the great Greeks - Pythagoras. Nicomachus was a Neopythagorean philosopher, which was a movement concerned with the revival of Pythagoras' teachings. For reference, Pythagoras lived in the 6th century BC, whereas Nicomachus lived in the 1st century AD - about 600 years after Pythagoras. Nicomachus was primarily interested in the study of arithmetic and music, and produced his most notable work on the former of these - his Introduction to Arithmetic.

Artist's rendition of Nicomachus. This picture looks funny.

All of this is relevant, I promise...

Nicomachus' Introduction to Arithmetic became the standard mathematics textbook for over 1000 years. Supposedly, an arithmetic puzzle was derived from this book which was given the nickname "boomerang." Unless the Greeks invented those, too, this is a rather anachronistic nickname. This puzzle involves being able to guess a number between 1 and 100 based on the result of dividing it by either 3, 5, or 7 and the remainder.

That's David Ahl's explanation of it, anyway. He took this puzzle and digitized it for today's Boomerang Puzzle, including it in 101 BASIC Computer Games. The trouble is, I scanned through the entire Introduction to Arithmetic to find Ahl's source for the puzzle, and couldn't find what he was referring to. There wasn't really anything close to what he described, in fact. There's a "sieve" method referenced, but that doesn't even belong to Nicomachus.

Artist's rendition of... something. This picture looks terrifying.

Maybe there's a writing of Nicomachus' I've missed - Ahl cites his source as the "Arithmetica," which I assume is Introduction to Arithmetic under a different name, as no results appear when searching for "Arithmetica" online. Ahl was very insistent on the puzzle originating from Nicomachus - so much so that he titled the game after him - NICOMA in the original book, Nicomachus in the microcomputer edition. If anyone does know what Ahl's source is, please let me know in the comments.

So, maybe Nicomachus actually isn't that relevant after all...

[Ed. A helpful commentor cleared up this confusion. Ahl, or whoever he was referencing, had more than likely been mistaken or misremembered the source of the Boomerang Puzzle. In fact, the earliest example of it comes from Sunzi Suanjing, a mathematical writing from Chinese mathematician Sunzi (or Sun Zi - not to be confused with Sun Tzu) at least 200 years after Nicomachus. This formula is commonly known as the Chinese remainder theorem. If the Greeks didn't invent it... the Chinese probably did!]

Regardless, there's still a game to be played.

Or is there? 

To be perfectly frank, after playing Boomerang Puzzle, I don't actually think it's a game. This is more of a novelty program than anything. It's a "pick a number between 1 and 100" guessing game, along the lines of earlier games Trap and Stars. However, it's not you guessing the number this time - the computer is doing the "guessing." Role reversal! You think of a number and, based on the remainder of the number after being divided by 3, then 5, and finally 7, the computer knows exactly what number you chose.

At least Ahl got the date right.

I messed up my sums with my first number choice - 97. Second time around I got it right and the computer - as expected - guessed my number. One who is more obsessed than I may consider running through every number just to see if there's any chink in the computer's armour. I got up to about 14 before I got bored.

My arithmetic was indeed in error.

I must admit, I'm rather disappointed. This has ended on quite an anticlimax. All that talk of history and Greco-Roman philosophers, which is of great interest to me, built Boomerang Puzzle up to be something quite interesting. Alas, it was not. All we've ended up with is something of a novelty educational program.

In case it wasn't already obvious, I'm not giving this a score - I can't classify Boomerang Puzzle as a game; there isn't really any "gameplay" to speak of. Boomerang Puzzle is merely a novelty showcase of what you can do with coding algorithms. The only sense in which there's "gameplay" is doing your sums properly so as to not confuse the computer. It tells you when you're wrong anyway, and you just try again. No penalty for getting it wrong. In that sense, it has some use in teaching basic division with remainders, so I could argue that it's something of an educational program at least. Maybe "winning" is getting the computer to guess your number correctly? I'm clutching at straws at this point. I stand by my decision. Can't help but be disappointed, though.

Hopefully, next time, we have something more interesting.

#030: Bomber

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC Type-In)

Genre: Simulation

Developer(s): David Sherman

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

World War II has long been a favourite topic of game devs. It's easy pickings, when you think about it, with clearly distinct villains that most feel no remorse for slaughtering, and the opportunity to experience and be a hero in the largest scale military conflict the world has ever seen.

Naturally then, the interest in war and particularly World War II started early in the medium's lifespan. Today's game, Bomber, is not the first game based on the war - that would be the 1972 game Graf - Spee, named after the German battlecruiser of the same name. Bomber is, however, the first World War II game available to play. (Graf - Spee has a later re-release on the Sol-20 microcomputer, so we'll get to see it much later.)

Spoiler alert: this illustration is better than the game.

Once again we have David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games book to thank for this game. It was included in the original July 1973 release of the book, and returned in the 1978 microcomputer edition, although there it was given the name Bombs Away. Can't say I understand the name change; there's no other game named Bomber in the 1978 edition. There were a few other games named Bomber floating around at the time, including an Apple II title, so perhaps the name change occurred to avoid confusion.

They couldn't even be bothered doing up a new picture for it here.

Unfortunately I can't avoid confusion when trying to find information about the game's author, David Sherman. There are several men who share the same name, including a relatively well-known author (who is definitely not this David Sherman.) Of the ones I found I highly doubt any of them were the high school student that developed Bomber while a student at Curtis Jr. High School in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Sherman has no other game credits, according to MobyGames, so there really aren't any solid leads to follow on this one.

Sherman had a rather... odd approach to creating Bomber. The game touts of allowing you to pilot a bomber plane for one of four nations involved in World War II, with several missions available for each nation, differing in country or choice of plane. Sounds rather interesting and expansive for a 1973 game, right? Initially, I had quite a bit of excitement for Bomber.

The opening screen. Not even a title.

For my playthrough, I simply went through all the nations one by one, doing each of their missions sequentially. By doing this, I realised something very quickly about this "game," and my excitement was quickly dashed.

In reality, all of the "missions" blend into a short series of questions that you must answer well enough to have a chance of success, or escape at least. Actually, it's not even a series of questions, it's usually just one - "How many missions have you flown?" Put in a high enough number, and you'll usually have a successful mission (though you'll get told off if you go too high.) If it's not quite there, you'll "miss" your target, and how to escape retaliatory fire. At this point you get to choose what weapons the enemy has, as well as how accurate their gunners are. I was asking what the point of the game was at this point, as I can just make them suck at shooting their guns, and I should escape, as long as I don't give them both guns and missiles.

This is as exciting as a mission can get. Why do I get to choose how dangerous the enemies are?

Three of the four nations fall into the above pattern: Italy, Allies, and Germany. You even get told off by the game for picking the Germans (there are several little quips made by the game depending on your choices.) Japan is the one exception to the pattern, as there's only one mission, and it's kamikaze. The game simply asks if you've flown kamikaze before (hint: nobody flies kamikaze twice.) If you say no, you die, and if you say yes, you die but can sometimes escape. How that works, I can't say.

In the case of the Japanese, death is the only outcome.

There's some flavour text referencing historical battles and events across the European, North African and Pacific theatres of the war, but that's really all the game has going for it. I think Sherman was "Fresh out of training" when making this one...

Time Played: 7 minutes

That's for two full-playthroughs, which was more than enough.

Difficulty: N/A

There's not really a game here - you're just answering questions which you're allowed to rig in your favour.

Gameplay: 0

Practically no game here, to be blunt. In terms of game design, it fails on every front - there's no challenge, no payoff, the fact that you have total freedom to rig the game in your favour defeats the entire purpose of it being a game in the first place.

Controls: 5

Here, it's fairly rudimentary and of-the-time.

Visual: 1

Yeah, not willing to be generous with this one. It doesn't do a whole lot to elevate the formatting above what's necessary.

Functionality: 5

No technical problems.

Accessibility: 3

Standard fare for text games.

Fun Factor: 0

Bomber is one of those games where you just ask "what's the point?"

Bomber does just barely enough to save it from the dishonour of being the absolute worst game on the Tier List, with a still-pathetic score of 14. It's currently the fourth-worst game I've played so far, but it somehow managed to feel worse than that, which is an impressive feat.

Well, that's a fun way to start of the new year - with an absolutely terrible game. Sometimes they're more fun than the good ones, because I get to rag on them and crack jokes at the game's expense.

Things are going to get more interesting, as next week we're taking a trip back to Ancient Greece. Hope you've brushed up on your Pythagorean theory. 

Prehistory XXIII: High Noon

Release Date: 9 December, 1970

Platform: "Call-a-Computer" timeshared system

Genre: Strategy

Developer(s): Chris Gaylo

Publisher(s): Call-a-Computer

Apologies on taking a while to get this post out - at the time of writing I just bought a new laptop and have been in the process of getting it set up properly as a dedicated gaming laptop, which will also be what I use for the blog from now on. Hopefully, it should streamline a few processes to help get these out quicker.

There are three more games (at the time of writing this) to go in the Prehistory of Video Games series, and High Noon is the first of them. Bridge is not on the Pterm PLATO emulator, and Moo is technically playable, but runs on Multics, which I looked into and found exceedingly complicated to get up and running, so I'm skipping that. In case you're curious, Moo is just the pen-and-paper / board game Bulls and Cows (otherwise known as Mastermind).

High Noon is quite the outlier in the 1970 list. It's not in David Ahl's book, 101 BASIC Computer Games, where most games have come from thus far, nor is it a simulation / adaptation of a pre-existing physical game (pen-and-paper, card, board or casino.) Instead, it takes a more similar approach to a game like Civil War, or Hamurabi, in that it creates an original game out of a historic setting. In this case, it's the Wild West, which marks the first time this setting has been used in a video game.

It's development is also odd. It wasn't developed, modified or published by anyone related to DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) or its user's society (DECUS), nor was it developed on a PDP system. High Noon was developed by a high school student, Chris Gaylo, from Syosset High School in Long Island, New York. Gaylo programmed the game on the school's timeshared system from a company known as Call-a-computer (later renamed to Advanced System Labs). That's all the information we have - we don't know exactly what computer system it is. Elsewhere online the computer is simply called "Call-a-computer." 

I couldn't find any other information on Chris Gaylo. This is the only game he's credited on, and there isn't any definitive information online about what he did afterwards. He did share some information on the game with myBitBox.com, explaining a bit more about the game's development, with photos and scans of the source code, and a scan of a piece of correspondence he had with a Call-a-computer employee named Mike Lowery. Lowery liked the game so much that he asked Gaylo if he could add it to their system library (so that every system on the timeshared network could access it), and offered to add a line of code to the game crediting Gaylo with its creation. Interesting little insight into how early computer games were distributed. 

While there is a lack of information on High Noon's author, there is certainly no lack in ways to play the game. I have two main options for playing High Noon for this blog:

1. The creator of myBitBox, who goes by the online handle "s1axter", produced a browser-based recreation of the game that mimics a teletype to give a more authentic-to-the-original experience.
2. MyAbandonWare contributor Benedict (who's been mentioned here before) made up a DOS-based version of the game that plays more like the BASIC Computer Games book games I've been playing through Vintage BASIC.

Seeing as I prefer trying to be as close to the original game as possible, I'm going to go with myBitBox's version for this blog. Both versions come directly from the source code, so there aren't any differences in gameplay between the two - it's purely aesthetical differences.

Do you dare take on this deadly duel?

Upon opening the game, you're asked (as with so many of other games I've covered already) if you'd like instructions. These instructions are a bit different, however, as they also provide you with a bit of story! The premise is that you have challenged to a duel by the notorious outlaw, Black Bart. He appears from a saloon 100 paces away from you, and that's where the duel begins.

The core gameplay is cleverly integrated into this little section of story als0:

• You and Black Bart have 4 bullets each.
• Your marksmanship is equal.
• The closer you get, the better your chances of hitting are.

This is the first time anyone's produced anything close to resembling a story, and I must say I'm rather impressed by it. It's only a few sentences, but it sets the stage, provides a bit of immersion, sets the imagination off, and integrates the gameplay effectively. Completing this introduction, the game asks if you "still want to continue." Very nice touch - first setting the stage and then asking "are you sure?"

Well, to answer that question: I'm still here, writing this blog, so I think I want to continue. The game then provides you with the choices you have in the game:

1. Advance
2. Stand still
3. Fire
4. Jump behind watering trough
5. Give up
6. Turn tail and run

You can give up, or give up in a more embarrassing way.

So there are two different ways to give up... interesting. Afterwards the game asks you for a lucky number. I'm not sure what this does, perhaps something to do with generating the game seed? The game might be too old for that sort of thing, mind you. I selected 7 as my lucky number for my first game.

I decided that it made sense to advance a bit first, so my first move was to advance 10 paces. Bart responds by moving forward 7 paces. 83 paces between us now. Maybe it's best to wait and see what he does next. I opt to stand still. The game calls this out as a bad move, and Bart fires and misses. Probably not the best idea to do that again, then.

The game's not shy of letting you know when you messed up.

I think I'll advance a bit more. Perhaps only 5 paces this time. Bart chooses to fire again! He misses, but only just. The bullet catches my left jaw, however. I'm very much appreciating the game going out of its way to give extra details.

Considering that Bart is going gung-ho trying to get me, I think finding some cover would be a good idea. Jumping behind the trough, Bart's third bullet hits it, and I'm commended by the game. Bart only has one bullet left, and I have all 4 of mine. I'm in a good position, so long as I make the right move. I'd like to try and make him waste his last bullet, so maybe I'll stick behind cover.

Always get behind cover. Have you never played Gears of War?

It works, Bart's final bullet is lodged in the trough, and he's out of ammo. Time for me to strike. I miss, and Bart turns tail and runs. I win the duel! Though I'm disappointed that I didn't manage to get him, but the game assures me that he won't be seen again. Still, this is not the most satisfying conclusion to the game, so of course I need to play it again.

I meant to do that... Black Bart won't be so lucky if he sees me again.

The Browser version of High Noon was a pain to record right, and the game also had some issues when inputting moves, so I opted to switch to the DOS port to see if that gave better results when recording. The results were mixed. 

The DOS port. Looks a tad dull in comparison, doesn't it?

To start with how my playthroughs went. The second one, I chose lucky number 3, advanced 10 paces twice and immediately got shot and died. Can't just charge straight at him, he's too smart for that. 

Shot through the heart... you know the rest.

So I went back to lucky number 7, and found success there. I first advanced 8 paces, then fired at Bart after he fired at me. Misses all around (but Bart got me in the shin). I then accidentally hit Enter before inputting a command and the game scolded me for that, 

"You sure aren't going to live very long if you can't even follow directions." 

I think that's a bit harsh, don't you? 

Hey! It was an accident!

Anyway, after that I jumped for cover, Bart got me in the side of the jaw, and I fired and grazed his right arm. I still felt like I was too far away, so I crept forward 2 paces, and Bart missed his final shot and moved forward 9 paces. The game says that this is the moment to strike. So I do, and I get him right between the eyes, and Black Bart falls down dead (the screen scrolled far to quickly to see this text in the moment - I had to look back at my recording to see what happened).

Having defeated the menace that was Black Bart, the mayor of "Dodge City" approaches you to thank and congratulate you for killing him, and he presents you with a check for $20,000. The game then draws up a graphic of the check, dated to the 18th of August, 1889. You're advised not to spend it all in one place, but I don't think it would be possible to do that with 20k in 1889. That's a massive amount of cash for 1889.

Got him!

My well-earned reward.

I had another go at the game after this to try and get a good recording in DOSbox. One thing I discovered is that the "lucky number" does indeed appear to be a seed selection, as I chose the same moves as the previous game, and the same result ensued. As mentioned above, however, the screen scrolls too fast in DOSbox, and text is missed as a result, and DOSbox won't allow me to scroll the screen up to catch what was missed. So I went back to the Browser version for the final recording, which is what you see at the top of the article and on the YouTube channel.

We have ourselves a second impressive game in a row. Let's see how it scores.

Time Played: 20 minutes

Difficulty: 1/10 (Very Easy)

It wasn't too hard to win, only took 3 attempts for me to get the Black Bart kill.

Gameplay: 5/20

The gameplay is surprisingly the weakest element of the game. There's nothing necessarily wrong with it, it's just extremely simple. There aren't a lot of options to work with, and half of the presented options you shouldn't pick anyway. Distance isn't utilised as well as it could be in my experience of playing the game; you get to around 80 paces and Bart'll snipe you pretty quickly.

Controls: 10/10

It's great - simple inputs that work.

Visual: 8/10

First off, the formatting is excellent. There's never too much text on one line (excepting the introductory paragraph), the move list is clear and spaced out, and the game even draws the check for you at the end of the game. It's clear a solid amount of time and consideration was put into the formatting, and it shows.

Story: 6/10

The first game to have a story! I'm glad to say it's one that's been executed quite well. It's incredibly simple, but the limited dialogue is written well and integrates with the gameplay. My imagination has always been quite vivid when it comes to reading, and High Noon does get the imagination going and I can visualise the events thanks to how descriptive Chris Gaylo managed to make everything with such a small game.

Functionality: 5/5

Works great, no issues.

Accessibility: 4/5

This is the highest score I've given for a text-based game for accessibility. The story elements I think give this an extra level of appeal - it's perspicuous and very simple to play. Could be a recommendation for someone just getting into text-based games.

Fun Factor: 5/20

The story elements really carry the game and shore up how enjoyable it is. I had to drag myself through successive playthroughs since I wasn't compelled to keep coming back.

High Noon has managed to knock Battle out of second spot (barely) with a score of 43/80 (53.75%) to claim the top spot in the D-tier. It's interesting - High Noon is unarguably a more complete game, but I'd go back to Battle before it. Just my tastes, I suppose. The re-score I'm planning after the next two games might shuffle things around a bit to reflect my thoughts better.

[Add.] Upon completing the rescore project, High Noon lost 1 point, down to 42/80 (52.50%), but is now the highest rated game on the tier list to date.

Two more games to go in 1970, and both of them are based on Lunar Lander. The first one honestly looks quite scary.

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