Total Amnesia

By Thomas M. Disch and Sarah Smith

The world's most famous lost computer game, by one of the world's most famous science fiction authors, disappeared when the publisher lost the uncompiled version. Now, due to the efforts of people all across the United States, the game has been restored (it's available, free, by Googling Amnesia Restored) and the complete text and programming notes are available here. Included are appreciations and essays by John Crowley, Jimmy Maher (the Digital Antiquarian), Gregory Feeley, prizewinning game designer Aaron Reed, hypertext guru Mark Bernstein, Sarah Smith, and Dene Grigar of the Electronic Literature Lab. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Max Light Books
• Release date: Dec 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781951636159

Book preview

This edition © 2021 Sarah Smith DBA Max Light Books

Tom Disch and I: An Introduction © 2021 John Crowley

"Amnesia: A History" © 2021 Jimmy Maher; a slightly longer version originally appeared in his Digital Archeologist in 2014. https://www.filfre.net/2014/09/amnesia/

"Disch’s Career and Amnesia" © 2021 Gregory Feeley

"Amnesia as Text and Game" © 2021 Aaron Reed

"Eastgate Systems and Amnesia" © 2021 Mark Bernstein

"How Amnesia Was Restored" © 2021 Sarah Smith

The Electronic Literature Lab and the Creative Media and Digital Culture Program © 2021 Dene Grigar

All other text © the Estate of Thomas M. Disch

The cover art incorporates art from the original 1986 publication of Amnesia by Electronic Arts and material created by the Design Team of Amnesia: Restored: Ariel Wallace, lead designer; Yimin Que, Wes Anglin, Richelle Sabado, Charlotte Borden, and Jacob Cook, designers

photograph by Jaime Spracher

This edition is dedicated to Thomas M. Disch

The Histories of Amnesia

Tom Disch and I: A Memory

John Crowley

I met Tom Disch and at the same time Thomas M. Disch (Tom Disch, I would learn, was the poet; Thomas M. was the novelist and story writer) at a con in New York City, the first I had ever attended – Nycon3, in 1967 (I had to look it up). I didn’t pay for an entry; it was the last day of the con and many were wandering around unpaid, like me. The strangeness of SF and fantasy and the writers and readers of it was at once overwhelming and also encouraging. Tom was surrounded by fans in the corridors, and I joined them and listened. He’d just published The Genocides, a slim paperback. I hadn’t published anything anywhere. The fact that he was enormous and loud and I was neither somehow brought us together. He lived on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, and invited me to come visit. When in the course of time I wrote a short novel, and then another (Beasts, 1976) which he was sent and read. I have only fingered the fine silver of the epigraph, he wrote to me (we lived twenty blocks apart, but still wrote letters or cards back and forth.)

In 1980, the National Book Awards were canceled and replaced by The American Book Awards replicating Hollywood’s awards, and with the same sort of lineup: not only novels but also 30 award winners in 27 categories including 14 categories of literary achievement from cookbooks to children’s books. Science fiction was a category, which caused hearts to leap at least for that one night. The competition included Tom’s great novel On Wings of Song and my novel Engine Summer. Tom and I went to the event in our tuxedos and had a fine time. Neither of us won (Frederick Pohl did).

Tom’s science fiction, large in numbers, never seemed to me to resemble the generality of the field insofar as I knew it (not much). The science fiction label was one that Disch neither accepted entirely nor ever tried to leave behind. He was a very considerable figure in the genre, a representative of a new style (new content too — SF is necessarily about the content) that arose in the late 1960s. The New Wave transformed SF — as rock music and comic books were also at that time being transformed — into a realm of innovative personal art, and attracted not merely good tale-spinners and good projectors, as it always had, but good writers tout court. His 1998 dissection of SF, The Dreams our Stuff is Made of, was a general demolishment of the ancients and the moderns from Poe to Ursula Le Guin, and at the same time showed how the standard elements of older SF, the people-shaped robots and intergalactic spaceships, the telepathy and the alien visitations, had extended their reach throughout our culture — without having come any closer to actuality. When the 1986 PEN conference of that year in New York, Tom was dubbed by Susan Sontag (one of the organizers) to make up a panel of science fiction writers. Tom tried to bring in Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and, yes, Ray Bradbury, among other major figures, all of whom turned him down. So he elected me, and John Calvin Batchelor (The Birth of the People’s Republic of Antarctica), and the critic Leslie Fiedler. The theme of the conference in that year was The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State. Many of the attendees denied that the state had an imagination, but Tom held that the imagination of the state lay in the plans and projects of the mid-level engineers and scientists not only of NASA but of the RAND corporation an ARPA. And what writers had shaped their imagination? Why, science fiction: writing that posits worlds different from our own.

What I consider Tom’s greatest achievement in a single book is 334, a future New York City story set in 2025 and encompassing the lives and doings of several beautifully rendered characters, more strange and beautiful now than when it first came out in 1972, and though this may be a response personal to me, I think there is a larger reason, one that has to do with SF in general, and the powers and pleasures of fiction, and the writing life. 334 is among other things a heightened portrait of New York as it was in 1972, where pay phones take dimes and Negroes are scary to whites, where violence and an ugly stupidity are pervasive and everything is a lot worse than it was before. And of course, most such predictive fictions simply evaporate at this juncture into fantasy or alternative reality. But if the author is both good and lucky, a futurist novel can later regain status, revealing itself to be not a book about our shared future nor about the present it was written in but a vivid personal vision, no more (and no less) a rendering of this world than is Zamyatin’s We and the book derived from it, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, both of which gained power as fiction while losing it as prediction.

I have never known anyone, not among the writers I know, who were as delighted by the thousand forms of fiction and art as Tom Disch. He loved opera, had been a spear carrier at the Met once, but he loved the wacky pseudo-soap Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. He loved poetry and loved poets too (not all readers do). He painted, badly but eagerly. He loved history and he loved the movies (see the astonishing list of movies he created for 334, half actual, half invented). He loved Minneapolis, his home town, and loved destroying its prejudices and narrowness in a trio of horror novels that are by turns grotesque and funny, dark and despairing, and blasphemous in laughter.

Amnesia can be allied with the text-only games of the period, involving choices made one after another to advance or stop the adventure. Tom’s was written to be played, but the almost infinite possibilities of complexity and retronymic (is that a word) entanglement delighted and defeated him, though he was sure it would enrich him. He was deep into it when I visited him once, and he tried to explain how it worked, and admitted that the workings of it were beyond him. They were certainly beyond me.

But now the world can play.

Amnesia: A History

Jimmy Maher

First appeared in The Digital Antiquarian, 29 September 2014. Appears here in edited form

https://www.filfre.net/2014/09/amnesia/

I feel fairly confident in stating that Thomas M. Disch trails only Robert Pinsky as the second most respected literary figure to turn his hand to the humble text adventure — speaking in terms of his literary prestige at the time of his game’s release, that is. The need for that last qualifier says much about his troubled and ultimately tragic life and career.

Disch burst to prominence alongside Roger Zelazny and the rest of science fiction’s New Wave in the mid-1960s. Yet Disch’s art was always even more uncompromising — and usually more uncompromisingly bleak — than that of his peers. His first novel bears the cheery name of The Genocides, and tells the story of the annihilation of humanity by an alien race who remake the Earth into a hyper-efficient nutrient farm, apparently without ever even recognizing humans as sentient. In its final scenes the remnants of the human race crawl naked through the innards of the aliens’ giant plants, stripped of even a veneer of civilization, reduced to feeding and fucking and waiting to be eradicated like the unwanted animal infestations they are. Camp Concentration — sensing a theme? — another early novel that is perhaps his most read and most acclaimed today, tells of another ignominious end to the human race, this time due to an intelligence-boosting super-drug that slowly drives its experimental recipients insane and then gets loose to spread through the general population as a contagion….

[Disch was] a classic difficult artist; his reputation as a notable pain in the ass for agents, editors, and even fellow writers was soon well-established throughout the world of publishing…. Yet just when you might be tempted to dismiss him as an angry crank, Disch could write something extraordinary, like 334, an interwoven collection of vignettes and stories set in a rundown New York tenement of the near future that owes as much to James Joyce as it does to H.G. Wells; or On Wings of Song, both a sustained character study of a failed artist and a brutal work of satire in precise opposition to the rarefied promise of its title — these Wings of Song, it turns out, are a euphemism for a high-tech drug high. Disch wrote and wrote and wrote: high-brow criticism of theater and opera for periodicals like The New York Times and The Nation; reams of science-fiction commentary and criticism; copious amounts of poetry (always under the name Tom Disch), enough to fill several books; mainstream horror novels more accessible than most of his other efforts, which in 1991 yielded at last some of the commercial rewards that had eluded his science fiction and poetry when he published The M.D., his only bestseller; introductions and commentaries to the number of science-fiction anthologies he curated; two plays and an opera libretto; and, just to prove that the soul of this noted pessimist did house at least a modicum of sweetness and light, the children’s novel The Brave Little Toaster, later adapted into the cult classic animated film.

The dawn of the brief bookware boom found Disch at a crossroads. On Wings of Song, published in 1979, would turn out to be his last major science-fiction novel, its poor commercial performance the final rejection that convinced him, the occasional short story or work of criticism aside, to write in other genres for the remaining quarter century of his life. He was just finishing his first horror novel, The Businessman, when its publisher Harper & Row came to him to ask if he might be interested in making his next novel interactive, in the form of the script for a computer game. Like just about every other book publisher in the United States, Harper & Row were in equal measure intrigued by the potential for interactive literature and terrified lest they be left out of a whole new field of literary endeavor. They were also, naturally, eager to leverage their existing stable of authors. Disch must have seemed an ideal choice; they’d get the cachet of his name without forgoing a bunch of guaranteed sales of a next traditional novel. For his part, Disch was intrigued, and jumped aboard with enthusiasm to write Amnesia.

… The script evinces by its length and detail alone a major commitment to the project on Disch’s part. He later claimed to find it something of a philosophical revelation.

When you’re working on this kind of text, you’re operating in an entirely different mode from when you’re writing other forms of literature. You’re not writing in that trance state of entering a daydream and describing what’s to the left or right, marching forward, which is how most novels get written. Rather, you have to be always conscious of the ways the text can be deconstructed. In a very literal sense, any computer-interactive text deconstructs itself as you write because it’s always stopping and starting and branching off this way and that. You are constantly and overtly manifesting those decisions usually hidden in fiction because, of course, you don’t normally show choices that are ruled out — though in every novel the choices that are not made are really half the work, an invisible presence. With Amnesia, I found myself working with a form that allowed me to display these erasures, these unfollowed paths. It’s like a Diebenkorn painting, where you can see the lines that haven’t quite been covered over by a new layer of paint. There are elements of this same kind of structural candor in a good Youdunit.

Disch came to see the player’s need to figure out what to type next as a way to force her to engage more seriously with the text, to engage in deep reading and thereby come to better appreciate the nuances of language and style that were so important to him as a writer.

Readers who ordinarily skim past such graces wouldn’t be allowed to do that because they’d have to examine the text for clues as to how to respond; they’d have to read slowly and carefully. I thought that was theoretically appealing: a text whose form allowed me a measure of control over the readerly response in a way unavailable to a novelist or short-story writer. I’ve always been frustrated that genre readers are often addictive readers who will go through a novel in one night. I can’t read at that speed — and I don’t like to be read at that speed, either.

Philosophical flights aside, Disch didn’t shirk the nitty-gritty work that goes into crafting an interactive narrative. For instance, he painstakingly worked through how the protagonist should be described in the many possible states of dress he might assume. He even went so far as to author error messages to display if the player, say, tries to take off his pants without first removing his shoes. He also thought about ways to believably keep the story on track in the face of many possible player choices. One section of the story, for example, requires that the player be wearing a certain white tuxedo. Disch ensures this is the case by making sure the pair of jeans the player might otherwise choose to wear have a broken zipper which makes them untenable (this also offers an opportunity for some sly humor, part of Disch’s arsenal of writing talents). Even Douglas Adams, a much more technically aware writer who was very familiar with Infocom’s games before collaborating with Steve Meretzky on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, couldn’t be bothered with this kind of detail work; he essentially authored just the main path through his game and left all the side details up to Meretzky.

Amnesia‘s story is not science fiction, outside the presence of a drug capable of inducing sustained and ever-encroaching amnesia. It’s rather a noirish mystery in which no character, including the amnesiac protagonist, is pure; everyone has multiple layers of secrets and motivations; and nothing is quite what it initially seems. Disch almost seems to have challenged himself to make use of every hoary old cliché he can think of from classic detective fiction, including not only the device of amnesia itself but also hayseed Texans who shoot first and ask questions later, multiple femmes fatales, and even two men who look so alike they can pass as identical twins. It takes a very good writer to get away with such a rogues’ gallery of stereotypes. Luckily, Disch was a very good writer when he wanted to be. Amnesia is not, mind you, deserving of mention alongside Disch’s most important literary works. Nor, one senses, is it trying to be. But it is a cracker of a knotty detective story, far better constructed and written than the norm in adventure games then or now. Among its most striking features are frank and even moving depictions of physical love that are neither pornographic nor comedic, arguably the first such to appear in a major commercial game.

Cognetics -- Pat Reilly, Kevin Bentley, Lis Romanov, and Charlie Kreitzberg -- trying to be EA rock stars and, with the notable exception of Benley, failing miserably at it.

Cognetics — Pat Reilly, Kevin Bentley, Lis Romanov, and Charlie Kreitzberg — trying to be EA rock stars and, with the notable exception of Bentley, failing miserably at it.

To implement his script, Harper & Row chose a tiny New Jersey company called Cognetics who were engaged in two completely different lines of endeavor: developing the user interface for Citibank ATMs and developing edutainment software for Harper & Row, specifically a line of titles based on Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock television series. The owner of Cognetics, Charlie Kreitzberg, already had quite a long background in computing for both business and academia, having amongst other accomplishments authored a standard programming text called The Elements of FORTRAN Style a decade before. Working with Kreitzberg and others, a Cognetics coder named James Terry had developed an extendible version of the Forth programming language with a kernel of just 6 K or so to facilitate game development on the Apple II. He dubbed this micro-Forth King Edward for reasons known only to him. [He was looking at a cigar box when someone asked him the name of the language.—Ed.] The actual programming of Amnesia he turned over to a local kid named Kevin Bentley; they had met through Kreitzberg’s wife, who shopped at the grocery store owned by Bentley’s family. And so it was poor young Kevin Bentley who had Disch’s doorstop of a script dropped on his desk — no one had apparently bothered to tell the untechnical Disch about the need to limit his text to fit into the computers of the time — with instructions to turn it into a working game….

It was of course a hopeless endeavor. Not only had Disch provided far, far too much text, but he’d provided it in a format that wasn’t very easy to work with. Disch, for understandable reasons, thought like a storyteller rather than a world builder. Therefore, and in the absence of other guidance, he’d written his story from the top down as essentially a hypertext narrative, a series of branching nodes, rather than from the bottom up, as a set of objects and rooms and people with descriptions of how they acted and reacted and how they could be manipulated by the player. Each part of his script begins with some text, followed by additional text passages to display if the player types this, that, or the other. Given the scope of possibility open to the player of a parser-driven game, that way lies madness.… Amnesia is perhaps the most painful victim of this fundamental confusion, born of an era when hypertext fiction didn’t yet exist outside of Choose Your Own Adventure books and any text- and story-driven game was assumed to necessarily be a parser-driven text adventure.

Harper & Row's original Amnesia box art

Harper & Row’s original Amnesia box art (courtesy Stéphane Racle)

In mid-1984, just as it was dawning on Cognetics what a mouthful of a project they’d bitten off, Harper & Row, the instigators of the whole thing, suddenly became the first of the big book publishers to realize that this software business was going to be more complicated than anticipated…. They abruptly pulled out, telling Kreitzberg he was welcome to do what he liked with Fraggle Rock and Amnesia. He found a home for the former with CBS, another old-media titan still making a go of software for the time being, and for the latter with Electronic Arts, eager to join many of their peers on the bookware bandwagon. EA producer Don Daglow was given the unenviable task of trying to mediate between Disch and Cognetics and come up with some sort of realizable design. He would have his hands full, to such an extent that EA must soon have started wondering why they’d signed the project at all.

In addition to being a noir mystery, Disch had conceived Amnesia as a sort of extended love letter to his adopted home of Manhattan. Telarium’s Fahrenheit 451, when released in late 1984, would also include a reasonably correct piece of Manhattan. Disch, however, wanted to go far beyond that game’s inclusion of twenty blocks or so of Fifth Avenue. He wanted to include almost all of the island, from Battery Park to the Upper West and East Side, with a functioning subway system to get around it. The resulting grid of cross-streets … was problematic on multiple levels; not only could Disch not possibly write enough text to properly describe this many locations, but the game couldn’t possibly contain it. Yet Disch, entranced by the idea of roaming free through a virtual Manhattan, refused to be disabused of the notion. No, EA and Cognetics had to admit, such a thing wasn’t technically impossible. It was just that this incarnation of Manhattan would have to be 99 percent empty, a grid of locations described only by their cross-streets, with only the occasional famous landmark or plot-relevant area poking out of the sea of nothingness….

Disch never developed with Cognetics and EA the mutual respect and understanding that led to more successful bookware collaborations like Amazon, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Mindwheel.… I described Disch as difficult earlier in this article, and, indeed, that’s exactly the word that Kevin Bentley used to describe him to me. His frustration with the collaboration was still palpable when I recently corresponded with him.

The conclusion I reached was that Tom wanted to write a book and have it turned into a game by creating a sort of screenplay adapted from a book. The trouble was that a screenplay to my mind was the wrong metaphor for an adventure game. The missing piece of the puzzle seemed to be that Tom didn’t grasp that an adventure game was a matrix of possibilities and it was up to the user to discover the route, and the point was not to cram the user toward the conclusion. Tom was very unhappy with the notion that the player might not experience the conclusion of the story the way that he intended in the script, so he insisted that the user be directed toward the conclusion.

Bentley and Kreitzberg met with Disch just a handful of times at his apartment near Union Square to try to iron out difficulties. The former remembers lots of herbal tea being offered, and being enlisted to fix problems with Disch’s computer and printer from time to time, but it’s safe to say that the sort of warm camaraderie that makes, say, the Mindwheel story such a pleasure never developed….

This did allow EA and Cognetics a freer hand, but that wouldn’t necessarily turn out for the better. Feeling that the game was lacking in the standard sorts of gaming experience (like a score, sleep, food, etc.) and looking for some purpose for that huge empty map of Manhattan, EA requested that Bentley shoehorn all that and more into the game; the player would now have to eat and sleep and earn money by taking odd jobs whilst trying to come to grips with the central mystery. The result was a shotgun marriage of the comparatively richly implemented plot-focused sections from Disch’s original script — albeit with more than half of the text and design excised for reasons of capacity — with a boring pseudo-CRPG that forces you to spend most of your time on logistics — earning money by begging or washing windows or doing other odd jobs, buying food and eating it, avoiding certain sections of the city after dark, finding a place to sleep and returning there regularly, dealing with the vagaries of the subway system — all implemented in little better than a Scott Adams level of detail. Daglow came up with an incomprehensible scoring system that tries to unify all this cognitive dissonance by giving you separate scores as a detective, a character, and a survivor. And as the cherry on top of this tedious sundae, EA added pedestrians who come up to you every handful of moves to ask you to look up numbers on a code wheel, one of the most irritating copy-protection measures ever implemented (and that, of course, is saying something). [There is no copy protection in the reconstruction, which is available at https://amnesia-restored.com —SS]

All of this confusion fell to poor Kevin Bentley to program. He did a fine job, all things considered, even managing a parser that was, if not up to Infocom’s standards, also not worse than its other peers. Nevertheless, growing frustrated and impatient with the game’s progress, EA put him up in an artist apartment near their San Mateo, California, headquarters in February of 1985 so that he could work on-site on a game that was now being haphazardly designed by whoever happened to shout the loudest. He spent some nine months there dutifully implementing — and often de-implementing — idea after idea to somehow make the game playable and fun. Bentley turned in the final set of code in November of 1985, by which time everyone was over it, enthusiasm long since having given way to a desire just to get something up to some minimal standard out there and be done with it. Certainly Bentley himself was under no illusions: as a game I thought it sorta bombed. Impressed with his dogged persistence, EA offered him a job on staff: But I was 20 and far from home. I knew if I left immediately and drove back to New Jersey I could be home for Thanksgiving. Unsurprisingly given the nature of the experience, Amnesia would mark the beginning and the end of his career as a game developer. He would go on to a successful and still ongoing career in other forms of programming and computer engineering. Charlie Kreitzberg and Cognetics similarly put games behind them, but are still in business today as a consulting firm, their brief time in games just a footnote on their website.

EA's released Amnesia package

EA’s released Amnesia package. Note that it’s simply called a text adventure, a sure sign that the bookware boom with its living literature and electronic novels has come and gone.

Amnesia, a deeply flawed effort released at last only during the sunset of the bookware boom, surprised absolutely no one at EA by failing to sell very well. It marks the only game EA would ever release to contain not a single graphic. Contemporary reviews were notably lukewarm, an anomaly for a trade press that usually saw very little wrong with much of anything.…

Disch… took such reviews predictably personally. Amnesia, he pronounced, had been one of the quickest disillusionments of my life. He went on to blame the audience.

The real problem is that there’s simply no audience for this material, no one who would respond enthusiastically to what I do well. Those who buy it, who are aficionados of the form, are basically those who want trivial pursuits; and to offer them something, however entertaining, that involved reading and imaginative skills they did not care to exercise while playing with their computers was foolish. I felt like de Soto, who journeyed to Tennessee looking for the Fountain of Youth — an interesting enough trip, but neither of us found what we were looking for.

People who want to play this sort of game are looking, I suppose, for something like Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker, where they can have their familiar experiences replayed. The computer-interactive games that have done well — like the Hitchhiker’s or Star Trek series — have been tied in with copyrighted materials that have already had success with the target audience in prior literary forms. I don’t think the quality of those scripts compares to what I did in Amnesia — Adams’s scripts, for example, are actually very good of a kind, but it’s a matter of one little joke after another. The notion of trying to superimpose over this structure a dramatic conception other than a puzzle was apparently too much for the audience. In the end, I just produced another literary curiosity.…

One of the writers with whom Disch seemed to feel the greatest connection was another brilliant, difficult man, Edgar Allan Poe. Disch once wrote a lovely article about Poe’s appalling life, the last year of which seems a headlong, hell-bent rush to suicide.  Like Disch, Poe also died largely forgotten and unappreciated. Perhaps someday Disch will enjoy a revival akin to that of Poe.

In the meantime, that Amnesia script sits there tantalizingly, ripe as ever to become a modern work of interactive fiction that need not leave out a single word, that could give us Disch’s original vision undiluted by scores and copy protection and money problems and hunger and sleep timers. Maybe he’d forgive us for trimming some of that ridiculous Manhattan.

And maybe, just maybe, his estate would be willing to give its blessing.…

(First and foremost, huge thanks to Kevin Bentley for sharing with me much of the history of Cognetics and Amnesia. Disch himself talked about Amnesia at greatest length in an interview published in Larry McCaffery’s Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers. Disch’s writings on science fiction are best collected in the Hugo-winning The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of and On SF.)

Disch’s Career and Amnesia

Gregory Feeley (literary executor of the Estate of Thomas M. Disch)

Amnesia is, God help us, a new art form, although an embryonic specimen. – Thomas Disch

The interactive novel was an art form made possible by the rapid development of a new technology, but the technology would soon leave it behind. It could not compete in the market with games that, even by the primitive graphics available in the mid-eighties, offered players a visually exciting experience.

Its publication in text form, however, allows us to see Amnesia more interestingly, as a work of Thomas M. Disch.

Disch’s early novels and stories seemed to obey the unities of place— throughout their stories, the protagonists of The Genocides and Camp Concentration are bound in a nutshell (to quote Disch’s favorite play, which he cites repeatedly in his work) and those of 334 or The Squirrel Cage or Descending were never going anywhere. The pronounced intensity of Disch’s early work may owe something to its sense of constraint.

By the time he came to write On Wings of Song, however, Disch was willing to send his protagonists out into the world: even, in a sense, to dispatch them upon quests. This sees its apotheosis in Amnesia, where the protagonist—penniless and bereft of memory—must venture out into a Manhattan he no longer knows.

More than any of his SF peers, Disch was an author of urban life, and Amnesia was his third novel (if that’s what it is) to be set primarily in Manhattan. Science fiction tends to be set on frontiers and undiscovered worlds, vistas not yet explored, while genre fantasy remains largely set in romanticized rural landscapes and pre-industrial eras. Disch had little patience with either; his comédie humaine was an urban one. His quartet of horror novels are set in Minneapolis, and to the degree that his very last, The Word of God or, Holy Writ Rewritten, can be said to have a setting, it modulates between Minneapolis and Manhattan. We know from the notes to Amnesia that Disch thought of setting part of the story outside Manhattan; he thought better. That his interactive novel never leaves the island was utterly in keeping with his art.

Also in keeping was Disch’s nameless protagonist as an Everyman rather than a heroic figure. While Disch’s contemporaries such as Gordon R. Dickson and David Drake gave us protagonists who proceeded from strength to greater strength, showing confidence and proficiency at their tales’ beginnings and gaining more as they proceed, Disch declined to engage in such wish-fulfillment. Daniel Weinreb, protagonist of On Wings of Song, is pleasant but unremarkable (the novel drives this truth home with merciless clarity), while the Anker family, the main characters in The Businessman, are philistine underachievers, more recognizably human than readers find comfortable with. Will the you of Amnesia, casting about for clues to his identity, discover that he is a CIA agent with astonishing skills, like Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity, or even an outright superman as in an A.E. van Vogt novel? The game’s original players may have wondered, but those who knew Disch’s work would have been in no doubt as to the answer.

Is Amnesia, finally, a novel or a game? Disch’s script specifies that All texts should lead to Epilogue node, which he warns will be only minimally interactive, and indeed some reviewers complained of being driven towards a specified ending rather than being able to find their own paths through the story’s challenges. The manuscript of Amnesia contains the beginning of a novel version. If Amnesia the game had never been published, we might have had the novel. If it had been successful, Disch might have written further interactive fiction, which presumably would have benefitted from his work with Amnesia’s programmers.

As it stands, Amnesia remains the great curiosity of Disch’s oeuvre. Long lost, the game is now available again in a modernized version, thanks to the students of the Creative Media and Digital Culture Program at Washington State University, Vancouver. You can play it at https://amnesia-restored.com.

The complete text and programming notes here are the materials Disch sent to Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems when Mark proposed a reconstruction of the game in the 1990s. Thanks to Sarah Smith for editing and publishing it.

Amnesia as Text and Game

Aaron Reed

You wake up feeling wonderful.

But also, in some indefinable way, strange…

Kevin Bentley woke up feeling awful, pulling back the curtains of his new apartment in San Mateo, California. Only a year out of high school, the New Jersey native had been hired by local software company Cognetics and turned loose on the project of simply implementing a script by well-known science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch: turning it into a fully playable interactive fiction game. No one at Cognetics or at Harper & Row, Disch's publisher, seemed to think this ought to be too big a problem: the publisher had already prepared box art and marketing material before Bentley was even assigned to the project.

But a static script is not a playable game. There was far too much of Disch's prose to fit in the two-disk budget the game had been allocated; the programming language he'd been asked to work in was a cut-down version of Forth, not well-suited for text adventures; … and now he'd been shipped to the other side of the country so the game's new publisher, Electronic Arts, could keep an eye on him and make sure their game got finished.

EA had never published a text adventure, and they never would again. Despite this, they had opinions, concerned that Disch's theatrical structure wasn't gamey enough and what it needed was a bunch of hunger and exhaustion timers, more aggressive copy protection (but worked into the fictional world, please), and points. Maybe three separate kinds of points. Oh, and the game needed to include an explorable version of Manhattan with four thousand rooms and a working subway system. And also, why wasn't it finished yet?

After Amnesia was finally released, more than a full year later, no one involved in the project—not Bentley, not Disch, not Cognetics—would ever make another game again.

The game opens with a series of set pieces, which Cognetics president Charles Kreitzberg likened to a series of stage sets, much as you might have for a play. Your character wakes up naked in a hotel room with no memory of who he is or how he got there. The game cheekily prompts you to describe what you think you look like, but as soon as you look at yourself in a mirror all your guesses are revealed to be wrong: a sort of anti-character creation. You suffer a series of largely pre-scripted misadventures attempting first to find clothes and then to escape the shotgun wedding awaiting you in the hotel's lobby, eventually emerging broke and confused on the streets of Manhattan in a white tuxedo.

The prose is not Disch's best, but the author's famous dry wit and bleak sensibilities shine through:

> change channel

Channel 4 has a news program. The President of El Salvador wants more money for his country's defense. The President and the Soviet Union have unkind things to say about each other. Two people died in a fire in the Bronx. The weather will remain sunny.

> change channel

Channel 5 has ads for soap and toothpaste and floor wax. A talk show host then resumes his interview with an actress starring in a new prime-time soap opera, who feels that her role is helping her to grow in unexpected directions.

The story is most memorable for the way it contrasts a series of grimly pedestrian challenges (panhandling to find enough money to eat; finding a safe place on the streets of Manhattan to sleep) with a screwball plot involving mistaken identity, jilted lovers, Australian sheep ranches, and copious flashbacks. The game aggressively wants you to remain confused and disoriented: there are opportunities to settle for a particular identity where your character is described as going on to live a happy life but the narrator clearly disapproves that you took the easy way out, while if you try to dial one of the numbers from an address book before you've found it in the game (perhaps because you've restored from an earlier save), the response is equally dismissive:

Now how did you happen to think of just that number? Has your memory been restored?

[If answer is YES:]

Well, that was a quick recovery. Now that you can remember exactly how you got into this situation, it's clear what you've got to do. Do it. And congratulations!

[End of Game]

The point of Amnesia is clearly to be confused—to suffer—and yet the game ended up becoming perhaps a more brutal instantiation of that concept than its creator intended. From interviews about the game during its development, it's clear that while Disch was genuinely excited about the concept of an interactive story, he was not particularly interested in changing his writing style to accommodate one: the user’s freedom is, as in life, largely an illusion.... I control what is actually said. That’s the chief thing, he said in an interview with Scott Edelman.

To his credit, the script is remarkably comprehensive, thinking seriously about possible states the game might get into and including responses for hundreds of alternative things players might try typing, down to the level of pedestrian error messages.

And yet a script is an awkward starting point for a digital game. Most existing interactive fiction had been designed from the ground up, as it were: encoded chiefly as a simulation of space, objects, movement, and properties, a platform upon which a story driven by the player's exploration could be told. Amnesia's design fundamentally assumes a different model: nodes (as Disch calls them in his script) which can be transitioned between by typing the correct reply, with the text serving mostly to funnel the player through the correct sequence of nodes. This conceptual mismatch makes for an