The Secret Visual Novels of the 1980s

The proto-visual novels of the 80s are fascinating. Of all the early attempts to use software as a form of storytelling--hypertext fiction, "bookware", litpacks, whatever Deus Ex Machina was--visual novels are the medium which seems to have resonated the most with people over the years. Most histories focus on Japanese productions as virtually all of the medium's iconic and canonical works originate from there, but I think it's also worth remembering the attempts from elsewhere. They may not have had the same impact as their Japanese cousins, but they remain important to our understanding of global gaming history regardless.

Le Declic, 1987, Amiga. An untranslated Italian erotic visual novel.

Infocom's Zorkquest is likely the most famous of the early "Western" visual novels. It's a series of pulp fantasy stories, made distinct from the main Zork series by its extremely limited interaction. You can swap between the perspectives of the different characters at pre-determined points in the story but that's all you get. You are a passive observer, not the driving force behind the narrative as you are in most of Infocom's more famous adventure games. In many ways, the infocomics are even less "gamey" than some early hypertext works were. Such hypertexts are the technical predecessors of modern Twine games and the primary thing which separates them from early narrative video games is the cultural place from which they emerged. The Infocomics are unpretentious genre works by an acclaimed game developer, where the most famous hypertexts were literary fiction coming from established authors and academics. But, as we'll see, plenty of "adventure games" had "literary merit". Had Micheal Joyce been published by Electronic Arts instead of Eastgate, I'm confident we'd be discussing his work as a part of gaming history.

Hypertext fiction is often distinguished from the "interactive fiction" made by game developers, but the two are often broadly similar in form.

Portal is a prime example of this. It was written by Rob Swigart, an author and former professor working at San Jose University. Released by Activision in 1986 for the Amiga, PC, Commodore 64, Apple II, and Macintosh it is, unlike Swigart's later digital fiction, widely considered to be a video game. It has an entry on Backloggd and everything! Swigart himself disagrees, stating it is "in no way a game", but being published by Activision for "gaming computers" like the Commodore 64 has cemented its legacy. Some reviewers at the time, however, did not consider it a game and criticised its lack of interactivity even as they praised the quality of its writing, but you would be hard-pressed to find a modern 'player' aware of it today who doesn't consider it to be a game. Even hypertext curators use that terminology now. It's fascinating how definitions shift over time.

Computer Gaming World June, 1987. Perhaps Charles Ardai would have had a better time if he'd played the mouse-driven Amiga version. The DOS, Apple II, and C64 versions' joystick controls are a fucking nightmare.

If we do consider Portal to be a game, it's of the sort best exemplified by Christine Love's Digital: A Love Story. The interface is modelled on pre-web dial-up services such as Quantum Link or Compunet. The player takes the role of an astronaut returning to Earth from a failed voyage to the stars only to find that humanity has disappeared entirely. They eventually find a working terminal connected to the "WorldNet", an imagined global computer network that loosely resembles the modern internet. WorldNet is constructed out of a number of AI database systems that have long entered hibernation in humanity's absence, slowly coming to wakefulness when they realise that a human is interacting with them for the first time in many years. Homer, a "storytelling AI", acts as your go-between, allowing you to gain access to these networks and search through data that would ordinarily be restricted. As you do so, Homer collates the data and constructs a prose narrative speculating on the events that most likely led to humanity's disappearance, while at the same time questioning its ability to understand the human soul and doubting whether there can be any literal truth to its stories. Reminds me of this quote:

"I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor."
Ursula K. Le Guin, from the introduction to Left Hand of Darkness.

Portal touches on themes of digital age social alienation, the contradictions of utopian idealism, the nature of art, gender identity, dreams, and Carl Jung's collective unconscious. It draws from the Chinese folk tale of the cowherd and the weaver girl and occasionally leaves its New Wave-tinged sci-fi behind for hypnagogic fantasy reminiscent of Lord Dunsany's best. The protagonists, Peter and Wander, communicate telepathically with one another through their dreams, united across the stars by their shared loneliness. Wanda is cryogenically frozen but aware, unable to survive the Earth due to a rare illness and sent hurtling through space to an alien star while Peter struggles with the ennui of life in an ambiguous and collapsing utopia. Their conversations take place in an expressionistic fantasy world, a Jungian tower in which Wanda is imprisoned, as the straightforward prose we've become accustomed to melts into poetry to reflect the unreality of their meeting. The formal characteristics of the work are integral to its narrative; Swigart seamlessly blends a number of disparate styles to convey the experiential difference between the digital, the physical, and the ethereal.

The dream sequences are a little looser with their formal grammar than the rest of the story, heightening the sense of unreality.

There were "visual novels" made outside America, too, of course. There's an excellent book by Jaroslav Svelch called Gaming the Iron Curtain which discusses the game development scene in communist Czechoslovakia against the backdrop of the failing Soviet bloc of the late 1980s. ZX Spectrum clones were relatively commonplace in the region and many of the games produced for them were translated and made available by the Slovak Game Developer's Association a few years ago. I'd highly recommend reading their history and trying some of them out, it's a fascinating and criminally under-discussed part of gaming history. While many of them have some resemblance to mainstream Western titles (particularly from Spain and Britain given their computer of choice), many of the games feature highly idiosyncratic gameplay and narratives. Naturally, due to the young age of their creators, some of the social commentary in these games may come off as sardonic, crude, or nihilistic but another word for that might be "honest." It's unfiltered and raw, the product of young minds that simply wanted to unburden themselves, unconcerned with finding the perfect turn of phrase to express their discontent towards a repressive and socially conservative government that could no longer even offer the illusion of stability.

"Fuksoft" from 1987.

Many games in the 80s were much more socially conscious than the popular histories would have you believe, and this is especially true for games whose cultural origins lie outside the global north. Coktel Vision's Mewilo (1987) is somewhat more of a traditional adventure game than anything else in this post, but it warrants a mention regardless due to its extreme focus on narrative and its incredible thematic ambition. Though published in France by a French software house, it is primarily the brainchild of two Martinicians: director Muriel Tramis and writer Patrick Chamoiseau, a celebrated Creolite novelist and essayist. Mewilo is a magical-realist mystery game in which you play as a parapsychologist investigating a zombie haunting in St. Pierre the day before it is destroyed by the eruption of Mount Pelée. It draws from the Carribbean Jars of Gold myth in which white slaveowners were said to bury treasure alongside their most loyal slave so that they might protect it and acts as a portrait into the life and culture of the people of Martinique. The game is written in a simplified form of Antillean Creole (with a translation cipher included in the manual for people who only speak European French) and comes with a recipe for calalou and a cassette of Martinician music. One of the first puzzles in the game involves a quiz about Martinique's culture and history, a veritable honkey filter, and includes several questions which directly critique the European (and especially British!) imperialists who have colonised them. It is most likely the earliest example of a postcolonial story in the history of video games; a defiant expression of self-determination from the perspective of the colonised. And it came out in 1987, a whole year before Super Mario Bros. 2 was released. It is a beautiful homage to Martinique and its people and would be followed up a year later by the furious cinematic strategy/RPG Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness. While only debatably within the purview of this article, I simply couldn't leave it out.

Honestly if we can consider Yu-No a visual novel despite its inventory and puzzles, then Mewilo, with its narrative focus and first-person perspective, surely counts too.

Thematically similar, but somewhat less successful and authentic is Passengers of the Wind, released in 1986 by Infogrammes for the Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, MSX, Amiga, Commodore 64, and PC. It's based on a popular French comic by Francois Bourgeon and is an adventure-romance story (or, if you prefer, a romance in both its modern and antiquated senses) which takes place just before the French revolution. Like many modern kinetic visual novels, it's only truly interactive during its occasional decision points which lead you to bad ends and force a reload should you choose incorrectly. The narrative doesn't meaningfully branch nor are there really any puzzles, it is utterly divorced from the conventional adventure game style of the time period. The interface is incredibly frustrating, though, and it's not always clear when you've run into a bad end as a result. The translation also leaves a lot to be desired, with its awkward, stilted dialogue that seems, at times, to be lacking vital context. As a result, the original comic is much better way to experience this story. Still, it's an interesting early look at a 'game' for which traditional gameplay was a tertiary concern, a true forerunner of the modern visual novel from a country that few associate with the form and an example of a fascinating period of French gaming history.

But, if I were going to recommend you a politically charged French adventure game that isn't Mewilo, I'm much more likely to point you towards Froggy Software's La femme qui ne supportait pas les ordinateurs (lit. "The woman who couldn't stand computers"), a 1986 game which takes place on the Calvados network and casts you in the role of a woman facing sexual harrassment from an online community. It's not graphical enough to be a visual novel, but it's worth a look all the same, provided you can read French.

Possibly the greatest box art of all time.

While I've barely played it, I would like to give a brief shout out to Le Crime du Parking (lit. The Crime in the Car Park) as well. It's a graphical parser-based adventure game, not quite a visual novel in the same sense as the rest of this post, but it's fairly similar in some ways to the original 1983 version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, widely considered to be the forerunner to the modern visual novel. Like Portopia, Parking is a pulpy detective story which focuses on narrative and NPC interaction over inventory puzzles, offering an experience that isn't exactly like the modern visual novel, but certainly gestures towards it.

Some of the art is uh. A little racist, though.