Machines for Getting Lost on Purpose: Kentucky Route Zero and the Future(s) of Adventure [Part 1]
This post is a lightly-edited transcript of a talk I gave of the same title at NarraScope 2020. It is adapted from a chapter in Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider.
Kentucky Route Zero is a game deeply concerned with both the past and future of adventure games. Across its five acts it tells a mysterious, wistful, and entrancing story about hard times, friendships and found families, and living with the past. Finally completed this past January with the release of Act V, almost a decade after a modest Kickstarter asked for six thousand dollars to fund a “magic realist adventure game,” it’s only now that we can take a step back to look at the game as a whole, and what it has to say about the genre of adventure games and interactive narrative writ large.
A note: this talk has been designed to hopefully be interesting regardless of whether you’re a die-hard KRZ fan, or someone who’s never played but is curious to learn more. We’ll be doing a deep dive into elements of its plot and mechanics, so there will be spoilers if you haven’t played, but I think they’re mostly the kind that would enhance, not ruin, your experience of playing the game for yourself. We’ll start by reviewing the game’s overall structure, and then consider what it has to say about the past of adventure games (in this part) and then what it has to say about their present and future (in part two).
As I mentioned, the game began with a 2011 Kickstarter for a simple adventure game (with a very different art style than the final version), planned at first to be released later that year. As the developers began to work on it, they realized the story they wanted to tell was spilling out of the boundaries of its original frame. KRZ was ultimately released in five acts with interstitial pieces in between, across a period of 7 years:
- Act I (January 2013)
- Limits & Demonstrations
- Act II (May 2013)
- The Entertainment
- Act III (May 2014)
- Here and There Along the Echo
- Act IV (July 2016)
- Un Pueblo de Nada
- Act V & TV Edition (January 2020)
The game is primarily the work of three creators: Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy, who between them did the design, coding, writing, and art, and Ben Babbitt who did the sound and music. They released the game under the label Cardboard Computer.
The story of KRZ unfolds mostly across the course of a single long night, juggling dozens of characters, locations, and ideas: but two main through lines emerge.
The first is the present-day struggle of a driver named Conway, whom the player most often controls, to make one last delivery for a closing antique store, along with of a ragtag band of companions he meets along the road, all similarly struggling with past traumas and uncertain futures. Conway’s search for his delivery address leads him underground to the titular highway, the Kentucky Route Zero, and the subterranean Echo River, which both meander through a dreamlike underworld Appalachia whose residents face the same struggles as folks on the surface.
The second story, seen mostly through distancing reminiscences, recreations, or retellings, centers around the artist Lula Chamberlain, part of a fictional band of computer pioneers who retreated to underground caverns in the 1970s to complete a revolutionary computer simulation system called Xanadu. The project failed, leaving its survivors in eternal limbo, always wondering how things might had been had they succeeded.
As with everything in the game, these threads are closely twined together, sometimes in space- and time-bending ways: the address of Conway’s delivery, for instance, 5 Dogwood Drive, is the apartment where Lula was living decades earlier when the dream of Xanadu was born, suggesting the game’s journey is a quest, possibly fruitless, to return to a long-vanished place of inspiration. Given the strong parallels KRZ makes between Xanadu and the classic game Adventure (and we’ll dive more into that soon), it’s not unreasonable to see one layer of the game as a study in how, whether, and why one might try to recapture the magic of the adventure games of old. So let’s start there, with the ways both obvious and subtle that KRZ connects to the adventure genre’s rich history and distinct traditions.
The game’s visual design is an obvious place to jump in. Its stylized characters evoke, while not directly copying in the sense of 8-bit aesthetics, the limited graphical capabilities of early home computer systems, and the way it frames its scenes in mostly long establishing shots mirrors the technical limitations that led pre-3D adventure games to divide space up this way as well.
But KRZ turns this artistic limitation into an deliberate device, connecting this kind of perspective view to theatrical traditions of stage sets and scenery. With an elegant, choreographed artistry, the game’s sets function like backdrops in an enormous theater, gliding smoothly on and off stage, the camera tightly controlled to shift the framing of each scene’s beats as a single unbroken moment. The designers have spoken of being inspired by theatrical traditions around space, blocking, and set design in contrast to techniques from cinema that most modern games emulate like the cut, the close-up, or the tracking shot.
The game also moves at a slower and more contemplative pace than most modern games. Its designers mention taking inspiration from filmmakers like Tarkovsky and Kurosawa, who are “bold in their use of slowness and stillness.” But this also echoes the pace of classic adventure games. One of the things I notice most when I go back and play these games now is how slow it feels to have to wait for your character to walk across the screen. In some games, like Loom, the view would sometimes pull back even farther to reveal the immensity of a space, and your character, lost within it. That kind of slowness has been designed out of most modern games, but it’s present, even drawn attention to, in KRZ. Conway injures his leg early in the game and moves with a limp through its cavernous underground spaces, often leaving you no choice but to wait for him to arrive where he’s going, and think about what you’re looking at.
Another way KRZ connects to its adventure game ancestors is through its use of multiple channels of storytelling. Infocom’s text adventures famously came with “feelies,” from fliers to comic books to in-world props, in an effort to make their worlds feel more expansive than what a single disk could contain. Loom came with a cassette tape containing a thirty minute audio prequel, and a physical notebook to record magic spells in. Games from this era often had hint lines you could call, navigating phone trees to get the right nudge to unblock your progress.
KRZ likewise yearns to reach beyond its boundaries, and the interstitial releases between acts often included weird experiments and real-life components. “Limits & Demonstrations” is a playable museum exhibit of Lula Chamberlain’s work, which was also staged in partial form at a real life gallery in Philadelphia. “Here and There along the Echo” was originally released as a phone number you could dial to navigate a surreal phone tree. At least one extension invites you to share a memory after the beep: in the game’s next act, released many months later, a character can check his answering machine messages to listen to a seemingly endless stream of these recordings. The creators also sold real phones on eBay and in live streaming auctions modified to only be able to call the Echo River number. “The Entertainment” is a full one-act play which could be bought as a printed book, experienced in virtual reality as an on-stage but silent cast member or reenacted with friends via a series of detailed instructions. And “Un Pueblo De Nada” takes place behind the scenes of a public access television station during a live broadcast, which was also actually filmed with human actors and released online.
Until its final “compilation release” this January that brought some of these pieces together in a single download, the experience of playing KRZ, like those early games, spilled out of its notional boundaries as a single piece of software bound within a box, a screen, or a fixed duration of play. Those of us who were fans all along lived with KRZ’s unfinished state for years, much like as kids playing adventure games, it would sometimes be months before the solution to a puzzle would unlock the next bit of story.
The game’s primary interaction mechanic, other than movement, is the dialogue tree, a convention popularized by LucasArts adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island. While in classic games this mechanic was generally used simply to pick what to say in conversation, KRZ uses the mechanic in a much broader way: to establish how your character feels about what’s happening, to help define parts of the story world, to interact with devices, to direct pacing and flow. We’ll delve more later into the game’s take on the meaning of choice and agency in an interactive story, but the dialogue trees are another part of classic adventure game design vocabulary that KRZ reworks and repurposes to serve its own more modern ends.
KRZ is built on these general adventure game tropes, but is also rich with references to specific adventure games, particularly the earliest. The strongest thread is its connection to Will Crowther and Don Woods’ original Adventure, which history remembers (with some typical fuzziness) as the first adventure game. Laine Nooney has done some great work recently challenging this narrative, by the way, that’s well worth checking out. But it’s absolutely true that Crowther & Woods’ Adventure had a big impact on the generation that would build the first adventure games. In the early ‘80s these games were often called just “Adventures,” and multiple companies were named after it. And KRZ has references aplenty to Crowther & Woods’ original game. To name just some:
- Adventure was inspired by the real-world Mammoth Cave, based in Kentucky: hence the game’s name, and Act IV’s mechanical mammoth;
- In its first scene you’re given a lamp as you head underground, just like in Adventure;
- The game’s geography makes frequent references to locations in Adventure, like the Hall of the Mountain King or its twisty little passages, and people connected to the real Mammoth Cave, like Stephen Bishop, a slave who hoped to earn his freedom by exploring and mapping it for his master, and whose maps were still in use generations later;
- The game even has a character named Donald and a character named Will, if you still hadn’t figured it out.
In fact the game’s creators used to wear this inspiration even more on their sleeve. Before they were Cardboard Computer, they went by the moniker “The Guardians of the Tradition,” under which name they created an exhibition piece housed in an Infocom-styled box remixing text from Adventure with biographical stories about Will Crowther.
And while it’s a graphical game, KRZ also includes long sequences that play out entirely in text, sometimes fading the visuals away entirely, connecting it to the text-based games that dominated the first decade of the genre’s existence, and have continued to be a rich source of designers and ideas ever since.
So it’s clear the game’s creators want us to see KRZ as connecting to the deep history of adventure games. There’s almost a palimpsesting that happens here: the real Mammoth Cave and its many stories and legends; the game made about it that spawned the industry of digital storytelling; and this new game where going underground is both a physical act and a powerful metaphor, and where the context of what’s on the surface still matters.
There are also references to other parts of early computer history. The first character you meet in the game is a blind gas station owner named Joseph Wheattree, who vaguely alludes to having once written “poetry on the computer.” On his office desktop you can encounter a thinly veiled clone of 1960s chatbot ELIZA, which was one of the first programs to bring the idea of computers understanding and responding to language into the public consciousness. ELIZA was created by Joseph Weizenbaum — whose last name is German for “wheat tree.” The game’s Joseph Wheattree is blind, and it’s possible this is a reference to Weizenbaum’s later disavowal of ELIZA, claiming that people’s desires to project intelligence and empathy onto his simple program did more harm than good, despite it firing the imagination of generations of creators.
Magnus Hildebrandt, in a great series of posts called “Kentucky Fried Zero” (thanks to the Internet Archive for preserving this now-dead link), catalogued dozens of other possible references in the game’s character names:
- Lula Chamberlain shares a last name with William Chamberlain, who in 1984 published the book The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed, attributing authorship to his program RACTER and calling it the first book written by a computer.
- Conway’s first companion, Shannon Márquez, may reference the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of the most famous works of magical realism: Gabriel García Márquez.
- Conway himself shares a last name with the creator of Conway’s Game of Life, the first digital cellular automaton.
There’s a theme across all these references about the edges between reality and magic, or between software and sentience, an homage to the most magical moments computers have brought us in the past half-century, moments of collaboration between people and code. And adventure games are certainly part of that tradition of wonder.
One of the spots where these references are most richly layered is in Act III, the only one to focus mainly on the Lula Chamberlain and Xanadu side of the story. In a vast chamber called (after Adventure) the Hall of the Mountain King, you find the abandoned Xanadu computer, visually styled after the groundbreaking PDP-1 mainframe that debuted in 1960, and on which was created the first interactive word processor, the first computer chess, the first major timesharing system, and some of the first examples of computer music.
On the Xanadu computer, you can start playing a game that mingles the exact opening text of Adventure with line-graphics reminiscent of Roberta Williams’ Mystery House, one of the first graphical adventure games. The Xanadu game quickly turns into a playable version of its own origin story, as if it can only tell you its history in the language of the transporting games it was designed to enable. Soon you find yourself playing a resource management game reminiscent of Hamurabi, another of the earliest text-based computer games, to convey the way Xanadu’s creators had to fight against time and the elements in the hopes of completing their masterpiece.
The leader of the doomed Xanadu project was a man named Donald, and interestingly there have been several influential Donalds in computer history associated with grandiose projects and doomed ambitions. There’s Don Woods, of course, who extended Will Crowther’s Adventure and brought it to the masses. There’s software architect Donald Knuth, whose fifty-year mission to define The Art of Computer Programming remains unfinished; or A.I. pioneer Donald Michie, who created one of the first self-learning computer programs.
But there’s an even more obvious analogue for the game’s Donald: early computer visionary Ted Nelson, whose real-world 1970s Xanadu hypertext project envisioned a radically new, never-fully-realized way of interacting with interconnected text. Nelson was one of the earliest advocates for the transformative power of computers. A decade before most Americans would start getting the chance to interact with one, his Computer Lib / Dream Machines manifesto foresaw the enormous revolution that access to computers would bring about, and the urgent need to find new systems of organization and thinking that would thrive in an interconnected world, rather than letting stale old models pollute this digital Eden. But as big businesses shouldered their way in and created a home computer industry, Nelson’s radical ideas were smoothed out and paved over. In the game, Donald sits around a perpetually burning bonfire of old computers, and says “Do you have any idea what it’s like to spend your life building something, and then sit powerlessly as your work declines into ruin?”
In Act III you learn how Donald, Lula and a handful of other visionaries had to go literally underground with their research into more and more elaborate computer simulations: there’s a great description of them slipping into the mouth of a cave with bulky computers, rather than expedition gear, strapped to their backs. There they devoted their lives to building this perfect system that would realize all their dreams. Donald wistfully rhapsodizes of Xanadu: “There was so much more to it… Ornate labyrinths of memory, exhaustively-simulated parallel cave ecosystems. Real artificial intelligence built on sophistical neural network algorithms! The birds in the forest could flock in three dimensions. The bats could learn to sing!” He tells you the secret of Xanadu’s potential: the digital circuitry had fused together with cave mold, making it unpredictable, chaotic, perhaps even, once, alive. Donald says: “You’ve seen it for yourself, what’s left of it. The chalky bones of a beautiful dream. But you can see what it once was, can’t you? Can’t you?”
I see in Xanadu shades of Ted Nelson and the early hacker dreams of truly open systems that could change the world. And I see a parallel story there to the history of adventure games, which also made big promises and drew players to their beautiful dreams of nearly limitless potential. Many of us fans can rightly be accused of being almost as starry-eyed as Donald.
But it’s relevant to this interpretation that KRZ’s Xanadu didn’t fail on principle: it was sabotaged. You learn the computer was continually tampered with by “the strangers,” who appear in the game as skeletons of crackling electricity, representatives of the soulless corporate power company that’s been slowly taking over the game’s Kentucky both above and below ground. Countless once-local and independent outfits have been shut down, bought out, or crippled by Consolidated Power. One of these is Hard Times Whiskey, whose product Consolidated has turned into a tool of addiction and control, and this turns out to be the source of the strangers’ interest in Xanadu.
This is kind of convoluted, but stick with me.
When whiskey ages — and this is a real thing — some of it evaporates, what’s called the “angel’s share.” We learn in the game that Consolidated Power’s owners decided Xanadu’s organic mold was feeding off that whiskey in the air — which they considered their whiskey — that the Xanadu project was stealing from them, even if that theft cost them nothing. They sent the strangers to sabotage Xanadu, crippling it: both to defend an abstract principle but also to keep everyone else under their thumb, and all the control flowing back to them.
Maybe I’m reaching, but we might read Consolidated Power as the business forces that took over gaming from its outsider creators, turning their radical experimentation and dreams of a revolution caused by the unpredictable collaboration of man and machine into a system of controlled, reproducible successes, inventing addictive game mechanics to keep players hooked, smoothing away the “rough corners” of experiences like moving too slowly, typing whatever you wanted at a prompt, or sharing software with your friends.
But there are no easy villains in KRZ: at one point you find a “degausser” that momentarily makes the skeletons less faded, giving each one a few moments to tell you their life story, and their name. It turns out they’re all just regular folks who got in too deep with the power company and were offered a job to pay off their debt. None of them want to be what they’ve become. They’re just doing their best to get by in a world that would crush them if they didn’t.
Here’s Part 2 of the talk, about what KRZ has to say about the present and future of adventure games.
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