Thomas M. Disch, author of the 1986 text adventure Amnesia (published by Electronic Arts) passed away on July 4th. He took his own life.
Every May my friend Greg returns to Colorado, and we go out and have a drink or play some Xenophobe or something, and funnily enough, this game came up in our conversation. Amnesia, the game, was the first thing I had ever tried to buy over the Internet.
Back around 1998 someone offered it for sale on one of the newsgroups. I wrote them saying that I would buy it. Everything was agreed upon and I just forgot to, ah, actually send the check. I was “that guy.” I ended up being a more responsible Internet buyer, and got the copy depicted above. You know the big box of computer manuals that every PC gamer has? Yeah, the manual to Amnesia was on top and one of our cats decided to sleep in said box and then scratch it all to make itself cozy. Whoops.
I know that in 2008, having a game that says AMNESIA on the cover is like making a game called MAZES or MY COLLEGE DORMROOM. I don’t quite think it was this terrible cliche, but Amnesia gave you plenty to do – my main gripe with interactive fiction that features amnesia on the part of the protagonist is that it requires an enormous leap of faith to keep playing. Amnesia – Disch’s game – wasn’t like that.
But why it will always be special to me is because it was the first game that I played that seemed “infinite.” Elite did that for people, and Starflight and a few sandbox-style games as well. Amnesia said it had much of Manhattan available. You were wandering around New York City (!!!) in a video game! Sure, it was all text, but we didn’t care!
Of course, later you learn that while much of the city may have been represented, it was not in a meaningful way. You learn about the limitations of computers and further games can’t trick you like that. But for me, Disch’s Amnesia was the one that gave me pause as a kid and wonder about what kind of universes could be created in a floppy disk.
Amnesia had one direct influence on my own IF work. My original plan for Pantomime was to have the entire Phobos colony represented. I wanted the player to be able to go to any door and maybe break it down and explore inside and get sub quests from there. With only a few people left behind on the colony, it would be doable. I ultimately had to scrap it. I left a little bit into it, however – all the hallways and doors are there for the apartment that Raif, the protagonist, lives in. Someday I’ll try to revisit that. Given enough time, I think the dreams that Thomas Disch had for his text game could be a reality.
One last thing. Jason Scott, who is working on a text game documentary, wrote Mr. Disch a while ago to see if he would be available for an interview. The exchange is here. Disch says, “[M]y memory of the particulars of Amnesia are foggy after all this time–and the genre I worked in never took off: interactive fiction, text only. “
And this is sad, to me. I have made so many friends through interactive fiction and had so many good times. I have created things that I am truly proud of, and received the kind of useful criticism that has helped me grow and mature as a writer. But yeah, mostly the friends thing. It’s very sad to me that he didn’t remotely get the same pleasures out of it. I can accept IF being irrelevant to the wide majority of the population, I mean, you have to come to grips with that or you are not living in reality, but to see a very talented individual create the fiction of what was a very playable game and end up with that take on it…Â that’s depressing.
I hope he found the peace he was looking for. If I can figure out how to play Amnesia in DOSbox or something, I’ll pass this info on. As a PC Booter game, I think those are somewhat difficult to emulate.
UPDATE: I have since learned that Disch was worried about losing his rent-controlled apartment in NYC, as it was in his partner’s name. Speculation is that he ended his own life at least in part due to these circumstances. Whoever the landlord is, whose greed in squeezing some extra money out of a place lived in by a 68-year old man came to light: way to fucking live up to the cliche, slugger.
I just heard this news earlier today through an email. It seems Disch didn’t even rate a newspaper obituary. During the late 70’s and 80’s he was quite well-respected as an up-and-coming serious science fiction author, but then he sort of lost the plot and faded into obscurity. Sadly, it seems his problems were not just professional but also personal.
Re: Amnesia: I believe the game was something of a bitter experience for Disch. He had had high hopes for it, but was jolted by the poor sales and rather negative reviews it garnered. His response was to — much as I hate to speak ill of the dead — rather petulently blame the failure on his audience: “trying to impose over this structure a dramatic conception other than puzzle was apparently too much for the audience,” he said in an interview in 1990. There may have been some audience disconnect there, of course, and it certainly didn’t help that Amnesia was released in 1986 when all-text games outside of Infocom had virtually disappeared, but the big problem was that Amnesia was just not a very good game. It was huge and ambitious and fascinating, but virtually unplayable, featuring just about every annoying aspect of old-school IF to the nth degree. Too bad, as the prose was quite good and there were some really neat ideas lurking in there.
Amnesia is available on Home of the Underdogs in a version you can run right from the Windows command prompt. http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?id=53. All the docs (which you NEED) are also up there.
Very nicely done memorial. I’ll miss his cantankerous blog a lot. And some of the bleak little poems he wrote in the last couple years are excellent. I hope someone archived his LJ site (hint): tomsdisch@livejournal.com.
Bruce
uh, tomsdisch.livejournal.com.
I must be smoking crack today.
Bruce
FAG!
The sample transcript (not of part of the game, an imaginary one like Infocom’s) in Amnesia is on my personal list of Best Transcripts Ever.
Oh man. I didn’t even know of Disch’s suicide until I learned of the wonderful world of abandonware and immediately tried searching for Amnesia yesterday.
I first played this game when it came out in 1986; I was twelve. My mother was a little annoyed with me for picking out an all-text game for our whiz-bang new Apple IIc, with its (her words) “amazing graphics capability.” She’ll never know how influential that game was on me, or how many Disch books I read and re-read from the library during my young English major days. The game’s text was the first prose I ever NOTICED; it was careful, mysterious, beautiful. There’s a passage I wrote down then and still have . . . you go to meet someone at Grand Central Station but end up wandering off in a haze of memories and end up standing near a bridge at dusk. “In the other direction from the bridge,” Disch wrote, “the sunset has tinted wisps of high cirrus clouds to a delicate shrimp-pink.” Something in that moved me, as did the descriptions of other incidents, like playing at a piano bar all night, finding a long-lost girlfriend while sketching portraits for money at a park, or even getting killed by thugs when you open the wrong door in the abandoned tenement apartment you sometimes call home.
Jimmy Maher is right about the playability of the game, though. My IIc still works (!) and I last fired it up for Amnesia 3-4 years ago. “[F]eaturing just about every annoying aspect of old-school IF to the nth degree” indeed! Jeez, every time you use the subway, you have to wait as your character makes his way down the stairs, dot by dot . . . . The scoring system never made sense, either, and I still have unresolved questions about aspects of the plot that maybe I missed because I didn’t know how to find a certain character or ask a particular question.
To this day, however, I cannot think about Manhattan without remembering my “visit” there via Amnesia; I’m probably the only person who watches “Sex and the City” and mentally goes back to that grey-and-white folding map, trying to picture where the locations fit there. If I ever go, I’m taking it with me.
I have just got this game on ebay for the Apple IIe, paid $30 for it. Haven’t got an Apple IIe, but do still have my Commodore 64 and floppy and four 20 year old C64 disks that still work(!) Somewhere in time, I lost the documentation and box, and I know the game is so detailed, you cannot complete it without said documentation, so bought the Apple IIe version just for all the paperwork!
I didn’t know what happened to the author, and way back when I thought it very brave to go against Infocom, so at sometime in the past he had steel in his belly! I don’t know if Infocom would have accepted it for their label, but if they had I cannot believe the game wouldn’t have been a huge hit! As it was, any publisher with one title was not going to get far, even in the 80’s.
At the weekend I will start playing Amnesia again, for the first time in 20 odd years. That, in it’s way, is the best thing I can do to honour this man, a man who should have been given more respect back in the 80’s and again just a few months ago….