~10 minute readMike Berlyn: Programming His Way to a Pulitzer
Sitting down to his new adventure game, the player finds himself on his way back to Earth with an antiplague serum among his other cargo. But his ship is overtaken by an alien race, forced dowm onto their planet, stripped down to the hull, the pieces are scattered over the alien planet, and he's imprisoned. Can he find the keys to reversing that process?
If that sounds more like the plot of a science fiction novel than an adventure game, that's probably because it's a description of Oo-Topos, an adventure game written by Michael Berlyn, a programmer who was a science fiction novelist before discovering micros.
Berlyn's story reverses many of the trends shown by other writers who use small computers for word processors. Always an independent spirit, the thirty-two-year-old novelist, whose credits include Crystal Phoenix and The Integrated Man with Bantam Books, and Blight under the name "Mark Bonders" with Ace Books, actually became a writer because, as he puts it, "I hate working. I don't work well for other people. I need to be doing something creative. I paint, and I'm a musician -— I played electric violin and guitar for a rock group called Taylor Mills Road in New York for a while."
But more was involved than creative laziness. Always an avid science fiction reader, Berlyn took a course in science fiction as literature while an undergraduate at Florida Atlantic University. "My professor said that for our final exam we could write a short story," Berlyn recalls. "So I figured, 'Okay, what's so hard about that?' Little did I know."
But when the professor told Berlyn that his story was worth publishing, it gave the young rebel something to ponder. "I thought, if it's possible for me, I'd much rather make my living doing something by myself for myself in which I'm my own boss than work for someone else."
An Apple II proved the catalyst that transformed Berlyn the writer into Berlyn the programmer. "I was going full blast as a science fiction writer when I decided to purchase an Apple to use as a word processor. I figured that it would save me a lot of time and work in not having to retype anything.
"My first word processor was Dr. Memory, which was really all that was around then," he recalls. "I struggled along with it as best I could —- or as best as it could -— and while I was doing that, I was playing games for my own amusement. I found myself enjoying the games more and more and trying to figure out whether or not I could write them myself."
Soon Berlyn found himself splitting his time "about fifty-fifty" between writing on his Apple and writing for it.
"That's how I got started in it in the summer of 1978. I was getting more and more involved in the Apple. Writing a program is very similar to writing a book in that there are problems that must be overcome, and you can see when it's working and when it's not working, and there are levels and layers of complexity," Berlyn says.
"The amount of satisfaction that I can achieve from writing a good program is —- I will not say the equal of writing a good book, but it is similar. The more I got involved with programming, the more I wanted to learn about assembly and Forth and the different languages that were out there."
A "laser learner," Berlyn set his sights on what he wanted to know, and went straight for it. He started absorbing computerese at an incredible rate and, within six months, was an adequate programmer. "Having an Apple at home full time and having nothing else to do was a help," he admits.
But as he eased into programming, Berlyn stayed close to familiar ground —- he wrote a science fiction adventure game. "Oo-Topos was my first program, and I think I bit off more than I could chew at the time," he says. "I liked the original Adventure so much that I wanted to do something like it, a lot larger, a lot more intelligent, a lot larger vocabulary, but basically in the same format.
"I started on it just about the time I got Dr. Memory, and worked on it for a year and a half, until I got it into the shape that it is now. It turned out to be 150 rooms and about four hundred-some-odd vocabulary words —- it really grew into something huge."
Oo-Topos is still doing very well, Berlyn says. "People seem to like it. It was the first real science fiction adventure with any kind of a plot, any kind of tone, with any kind of science fiction consistency in it."
In 1980 Berlyn and his new wife, Muffy, left West Palm Beach, Florida, and relocated to Aspen, Colorado. "I sold my Apple," he says. "I had no real plans to stay with computers, but when we got here, I just happened to walk into a computer store in town and ask if they needed any programs written."
The store's owners almost leapt upon him, he says. "They really needed a programmer in the area. It's a pretty isolated little town, although very sophisticated, and there wasn't a programmer here, especially for Apples. It was a tailor-made situation."
He began working at the store and within a short time decided to found a software company with some other people in the area. "When we started, we set our sights on outdoing Visi-Corp, which was then Personal Software. We're dedicated to high-quality programs and national distribution—that whole trip. We've been working really hard at doing that."
For Berlyn, the key to high-quality programming is interactivity. "Actually, the name of our company is Sentient, and sentient means 'aware,' " he says. "In a science fiction sense, when you call an alien creature sentient, you mean that it's an intelligent, feeling, aware creature, almost as if it had human qualities. And that is what our goal is for all of our programs. To make the user feel as if he's interacting with a partner rather than a machine."
Berlyn is in charge of games development at Sentient and still writes games himself. Other games projects are presently jobbed out to freelance programmers, and Sentient boasts a business line coming out with a general ledger, accounts receivable, and accounts payable. "We've also spent a long time developing a job-cost and accounting package for hard disk," Berlyn says.
Today he programs almost entirely in assembly, he says. "Oo-Topos is an all-Applesoft program. "Cyborg, my second adventure game, is about 75 percent Applesoft and 25 percent assembly, and two graphics games I just finished, Congo and Gold Rush, are all assembly. The differences between the languages is really incredible in getting results, and I find assembly easier to work in now than Basic. Besides, I enjoy it a lot more. I'm starting to look at Forth as a real viable language, especially for the kind of interactive adventures I want to write."
Interactive? Yes, Berlyn says, with both his artist's and his businessman's natures showing. "Pure adventure games as extended puzzles have probably had their day—they just can't compete with graphics games," he says. "But the adventure games are evolving into interactive novels, the first all-computer aesthetic development.
"Oo-Topos is the start of an interactive novel, but Cyborg is an interactive novel. Cyborg isn't even an adventure, although we bill it as one, and it's being reviewed and played as an adventure. The program itself is about the same size as Oo-Topos is, but there's an excuse, a reason for the computer being there.
"It really creates another persona, a character in the computer, and that is your cyborgan half. As a player, you are only half the player. You have a partner that is the computer, and you can ask opinions of it on locations, on objects, on situations; you can have it scan objects for you using its cyborg powers."
What makes a program an interactive novel? The same thing that makes a book interactive, Berlyn says: total absorption into the characters, the situation, and the plot.
"What takes people away from being absorbed in games is the lack of sophistication of the user interface," he says. "So a program becomes an interactive novel when playing. It's no longer simply a question of walking through situations and solving puzzles. Instead, there's something that unfolds, that illuminates the player.
"So instead of identifying with a hero you read about, you become the hero as you play. And the role that the hero plays is different in an interactive novel than in an adventure game. Both the player and the plot evolve as the game is played."
In that respect, Berlyn has managed to achieve a unique synthesis of the programmer and writer into a new breed of artist. "I'm involved in two projects that are cutting new ground," he says. "I really can't discuss one of them, but the other is going to bring the adventure another step closer to the interactive novel."
So Michael Berlyn is back over the keyboard of one of the two Apple IIs or the Apple III at Sentient, but whether he's a programmer doing writing or a writer doing programming is hard to tell. Yet despite his achievements, he doesn't consider himself particularly unique.
"The science fiction market was easier to break into than any other," he says, "in that it is one of the only short story markets that is still actively searching out material, and they had absolutely no objections to buying a story from an unpublished writer. Well, that kind of free and easy attitude exists In programming, too. It's getting less and less like that, but It sure was like that last year, and it was even more like that the year before.
"The level of sophistication in the programs that are coming out precludes the home hobbyist from knocking something out over his weekends, and then expecting it to make it in the big time. But opportunity is still wide open. Good programmers can still find a place even if they're self-taught."
At Sentient, he says, they're actively seeking out people who write programs. "There are people out there in college or in high school who don't do anything when they go home but write programs. Every software company is looking for those people, and there's a lot of money there to be made by freelancers, too. It's still wide open in that respect," Berlyn says.
Software companies need new programmers because of the high level of competition, he says. "I just know If you're doing a space graphics game, you really have to compete with people like On-Line and Sirius, because their work is out there and available. Someone would have to be crazy to buy your game if it weren't as good as theirs. The level of sophistication Is going up as far as the quality of progprams that are available now."
Nor does he find the dominance of arcade games unhealthy —- with some exceptions. "They're fine as long as what they're offering Is not destructive. Pac-Man Is what I consider a nonviolent arcade game. Something like Defender, where you're shooting down things and the object of the game Is to destroy as many things as possible creates a whole different feeling while you're playing it. Implied violence is a negative aspect of arcade games that really isn't being dealt with. I'd like to see it addressed somehow.
"My least favorite game is Missile Command. It's really a sick game. And my second least favorite is Shark Attack. In that one, the player is the shark, and the goal is to rip up and destroy divers who are shooting spears at you, with pools of red blood in color graphics. It doesn't make It for me at all.
"Games like Pac-Man I don't see anything wrong with at all, or the amount of quarters being pumped into them. It's a phase, but we lived through the hula hoop. It's going to level out, I'm sure —- especially since I'm in the business now."
And for Michael Berlyn's future? "I still love science fiction. I still like working for myself. So underneath It all, I'm still a writer," he says.
"I'm using SuperText II now. It's my own personal preference after my experience with all the capitalizing functions In Dr. Memory. I find WordStar a bit of overkill for what I need, so I never bothered with it. And I've used Paymar's upper/lower case adapter since it came out —- of course, his was the only one then, so I don't have anything to compare it to.
"But I can hardly wait for the day I can buy a word processor all my own and sit at home doing nothing but writing. I'm being a programmer now, and I'm doing it with a passion, but I'm still a writer. I'm 100 percent committed to programming, and, when that phase of my life Is over, I'll commit myself to whatever's next.
"I was a musician for seven years, and I was totally committed to that. And when that phase of my life was over, I was completely committed to writing. And now it's programming. "So I don't know what lies ahead, but I sure hope I'll go back to writing. I look forward to it, but I don't begrudge the time I'm spending programming now at all. It's very exciting."
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