Once and Future

I experienced this game in an environment far different from its original release in 1998. More than two and a half decades have stripped it of the mystique that it held after years of pseudo-existence as presumed vaporware, and months of hopeful speculation about the return of commercial IF in the form of Cascade Mountain Publishing, a short-lived endeavor by none other than Michael Berlyn of Infocom fame.

This is a work of truly epic scale in terms of play time, and I admire author G. Kevin Wilson simply for the massive size of the effort put into it. Once and Future is easily two or three times the length of a typical long-form work, requiring substantial time at the keyboard even if one makes frequent use of a walkthrough. It's not just a matter of puzzle solving and navigation across the extensive map, it's also a matter of just plain reading; in SPAG #16 Gunther Schmidl notes that a printout of his transcript was 128 pages of 10 point Times New Roman. This is perhaps the only work of IF I've ever gone through that truly felt like reading a novel, and I'm not alone in that impression; in that same issue of SPAG -- which was dedicated in its entirety to this work -- Magnus Olsson compares Once and Future to the Great American Novel in IF form.

Olsson also notes that Once and Future is "a very American game." Its central preoccupations are with matters that had significant impact on American culture in the latter half of the 20th century. From its opening set in the Viet Nam war to its conclusion at (Spoiler - click to show)the site of the Kennedy assassination, American sensibilities dominate. Good guys are good guys, bad guys are bad guys, and where they meet violence is a foregone conclusion. This Manichean worldview translates easily to the world of Arthurian legend, where the majority of the action takes place, but other aspects of this mix of tropes only go together about as well as oil and water. The mishmash of tropes seems to originate in something personal for Wilson; to me the connections between the various categories seemed tenuous at best. (Spoiler - click to show)It was hard enough to try to reconcile the fairy tale atmosphere invoked by King Arthur with the gritty mood of the game's opening scene in a post-propaganda portrayal of the Viet Nam war, but adding (Spoiler - click to show)a literal demon to tempt Lee Harvey Oswald into being an assassin was ultimately stretching things too far for me.

They say that a cynic is just an idealist minus the hope. Wilson's magnum opus blends idealism and cynicism, leading to jarring tonal shifts in many places. The plot is undeniably escapist from the outset, but the protagonist's happy ending (Spoiler - click to show)(achieved when he escapes from our world into one in which JFK was not assassinated) is muted and not in keeping with a typical Hollywood ending; Wilson does not let idealism win at the end, at least on the individual level. (Spoiler - click to show)It seems that even the good endings are linked to a horrible future in which the protagonist is possibly the last person alive in a ruined world, waiting for the arrival of his past self in a scene that you must play through earlier in the game. The treatment of Snookums, an NPC that was much celebrated in contemporary reviews, is ambivalent in this context. It seems to be very vaguely hinted that her simplemindedness is the result of (Spoiler - click to show)brain damage received when she was drowned for being a witch in the real world, but similar logic does not seem to apply to the harm that the PC received in the process of dying, which leaves the portrayal of her interaction with the PC a little disconcerting.

The work's writing has both highs and lows. There are definitely memorable parts, and portions of the writing and craft on display show skilled shaping of the player's experience at the local level. It's at the macro level that it breaks down; although the work holds together well enough in terms of prose style, the story unfolds itself irregularly in a manner that isn't very satisfying.

As is relatively common in "old school" works, there are various distinct areas, each with its own feel to it. In an interview found in SPAG's dedicated issue, Wilson estimated the work to have 300 rooms, 1300 objects, and 35,000 lines of code (in TADS 2). (By comparison, Scavenger has about 15,000 lines of code, and Uncle Zebulon's Will has about 5500.) When you do the arithmetic, you might be surprised that this averages to about 115 lines of code per room, those lines also being spread across the objects within them. This leads to a rather sparse world, with a mostly empty map of rooms containing only limited description. Similarly, the estimate of 600 topics and 40 NPCs implies an average of around 15 distinct topics each, leading to largely uninteresting ASK/TELL interaction with them.

The attention to programmatic detail and game design is sometimes lacking. For example, the protagonist has a (Spoiler - click to show)suit of armor that, when carried, reasonably prevents entering a lake due to its weight and the possibility of damage. However, it is possible for the the PC to be magically transported into the lake while in possession of that object without negative consequences. To get the maximum score, the player must do some mind-reading, such as somehow deducing that all of the wrong pieces for a certain puzzle (Spoiler - click to show)(the planks in the mole tunnel sequence) must be broken instead of just determining which is best to use. Certain puzzles are just arbitrarily-included logic games that do nothing to support the central theme; this was still relatively common at the time when coding for the work began.

This game is historically notable, but I'm not sure how much the average modern player will appreciate it. Overall, Once and Future seems too late for its own time, and much too late for today. I would advise anyone trying it to keep a walkthrough handy and not to hesitate to make liberal use of it.