Video games are many things, but in the main they consist of three primary elements: art, play, and story. Of course, these elements may not be distributed equally in every game. In Tetris (1985), for example, the play element predominates; there is no story and the art is mere adornment (as evident by the fact that Alexey Pajitnov created it originally on a Soviet minicomputer, the Electronika 60, using only basic characters for graphics). Flower (2009) offers minimal play and story—the art carries the day as the visuals and music waft the user along a landscape, scattering petals. In a text-based adventure such as Zork (1977), art is absent—instead the writing creates a story in the user’s mind during the play.
Discrete collections here at The Strong will often document the history of these three pillars of video games differently. Will Wright’s notebooks record his work on titles such as The Sims (2000) and Spore (2008), offering tremendous insights into how play powers the mechanics of these games. Innovations in animation art appear in the papers of Jordan Mechner, who created masterpieces such as Karataka (1985) and Prince of Persia (1989). And the Michael and Muffy Berlyn Papers offer tremendous insights into the ways that storytelling and good game design can drive careers and push the medium in new directions.
Mike and Muffy donated this collection in 2020, and their dedication to story was immediately evident to me when I had time to go through the materials systematically after processing. The primacy of narrative in their work was evident from the beginning, starting with some of Mike’s handwritten stories in spiral bound notebooks from the late 1970s and early 1980s and continuing throughout their writing and design and production notes for a variety of games, including their hit console titles featuring the loveable bobcat Bubsy, who first debuted in 1993. But their interest in story in games began early in their careers when they tried to innovate on the story element of text-based adventures.
For those not familiar with them, text-based adventures were a style of game popular in the 1970s and 1980s in which players traversed fictional worlds by typing short written commands like “Go west” or “Get lamp.” Given that they are literary creations, it would be easy to assume that narrative plays an important role, but in the early years of text-based adventures it was the play that predominated, not the story. There was no story to Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), only a somewhat random world for players to explore and, to some extent, solve. Zork (1980), from the company Infocom, took a step forward by offering a more cohesive world that players were discovering—the Great Underground Empire—but there was no story in any meaningful sense. Mike and Muffy Berlyn by contrast were storytellers, so their first work, Oo-topos (1981), emphasized story. When Mike began working at Infocom, he brought that narratological instinct to his craft, exploring new ways that story could be wedded to games.
It’s evident in his pitch for the game Suspended (1983) created for Infocom. In it, a player assumes the role of “Talent,” a character cryogenically suspended aboard a colonized planet and dependent on a malfunctioning computer that he must fix even as he acts through it. What is particularly interesting about Mike’s work on Suspended is that he conveys not merely a novelistic approach but the “think different” approach of a science-fiction (and somewhat post-modernist) writer.
The pitch document to his bosses at Infocom makes this clear. In the game, the character is in a “limited cryonic suspension,” meaning that he can use his mind to control activities on a colonized planet but cannot physically move from the cube in which he is suspended. He interacts with the environment through robots, each of which have different capabilities (that primarily correspond to human senses). Unfortunately, not everything in the system is functioning correctly, so the player needs to use the robots with their varying abilities to solve a variety of problems and complete a multitude of tasks to return things to proper working order.
Mike Berlyn’s writer-first approach to game design is evident in the last paragraph of the pitch, where he wrote, “These are some basic ideas, none of which are fully developed. I feel the specific situations and goals are not in what I have presented, but will become readily apparent as the writing of this progresses.” Writing would dictate game design. His literary tendencies also appeared in the inclusion of a sixth robot, Poet, who communicated through verse.
Interactive fiction like Suspended charmed players with its ability to conjure up imaginative worlds. For a while it was the hottest thing in the computer games market, but for several reasons, including the capacity of increasingly powerful computers to render better graphics, the boom in text adventures collapsed in the late 1980s. The Michael and Muffy Berlyn Papers bear tangible records of this. Mike and Muffy had gone out on their own and formed a company called Brainwave Creations, but they faced struggles getting their games published. As I turned through a two-inch thick folder of concepts, scripts, level designs, and other materials for a proposed game “Rager,” I came across a single-page letter from Robert Garriott, president of Origin System, letting Mike and Muffy know that “we have decided to cancel our Rager contract due to our belief that current market conditions will not allow us to profitably market text adventures.” For this game, the story was over.
And yet writerly elements like story and character persisted, even as graphics became a larger and larger part of the formula for successful video games. For their game Tass Times in Tonetown (1986), Mike and Muffy described how they developed the game after falling in love with a swaggering little dog Ennio. Their graphic adventure game Altered Destiny (1990) may have used illustrations, but the story was still central and, as sketches in the archive show, story potential was a paramount factor in driving game design.
This ability to blend story, art, and play coalesced best in the Berlyns’ most well-loved game, Bubsy. The collection contains a wealth of Bubsy materials ranging from level maps to concept sketches, but even as the Berlyns were designing this sidescrolling graphical game, they didn’t abandon their ear for key literary elements. The initial proposal sketches out the main environments, describes the general tone of the game (“light-hearted, with a strong, likeable main character”), and lays out the story:
“Bubsy is a bobcat who has been abducted by a Snorkle. He’s been taken via flying saucer out of his normal environment, the woods, and dropped off at the other end of a village. Bubsy’s goal is to get home to the woods.”
It’s a simple story—get back home—that is used in many contexts, but the fact that the Berlyns prioritized it in the initial description speaks to the extent to which narrative sat at the center of their approach to game design; it’s a leitmotif that goes through their long tenure in the games industry.
One of the most valuable things about the collection is how the Berlyns’ career spanned so many of the industry’s different epochs of gaming. Beginning in text-based gaming for microcomputers, they created graphic adventures for personal computers, platformers and 3D games for consoles, and even downloadable, internet-based games like the match-three downloadable PC game Triblettes. The collection’s vast scope documents their work on these titles and also contains a rich lode of material for unpublished games. One folder entitled “Adventure game as a book” explores the idea of an interactive text adventure that is an actual, physical book, complete with little pockets for cards that represent the inventory. Yet another way of telling a story!
Over the years, there has been considerable academic interest in the role of story in video games. Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997) and Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages (2003) were among the first academic works in game study to focus on the unique aspects of narratives in games, and in recent years there has been a host of titles such as Amy Green’s Storytelling in Video Games: The Art of the Digital Narrative (2018) and Johansen Quijano, The Composition of Video Games: Narrative, Aesthetics, Rhetoric and Play (2019). Given that story, along with art and play, is one of the three pillars of most video games, there seems little doubt that researchers will continue to be interested in this topic, and the rich resources of the Michael and Muffy Berlyn Papers will be a boon to scholars interested in these subjects for years to come.
Of course, collections have inherent worth aside from the uses to which scholars put them. To me, much of their value is the way they document people’s lived experiences. In this case, the story of Mike and Muffy Berlyn is not just a story about lives in game design, but a love story, one of two people bonded in life as well as work. That is why one of the most charming pieces in the collection was a simple doodle I came across entitled “Muffy and Me.”
Anyone who has been in love will recognize it instantly—replete with the infatuation and probably a little insecurity that comes with being in love—and after all, what better story can there be than a good, old-fashioned love story.