Game 471: Mechanical Anarchy (1993)

That's a disturbing robot.

     

Mechanical Anarchy

United States

Independently developed and published as shareware

Released in 1993 for Macintosh

Date Started: 28 October 2022

Date Ended: 29 October 2022

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 11

Ranking at Time of Posting: 38/483 (8%)

    

Mechanical Anarchy is a shareware game for the Mac made by a couple of teenagers from Glendale. It does the job expected by a game of such description, which is to provide something mildly entertaining to do for a couple of hours while we're waiting to die. It is the creation of brothers Spencer (16) and Warren Lee (13). They developed it using SuperCard (a development environment for Macs.) They asked $10 for it.

  

The game claims to be set in a dystopian future in which humans, their every need catered to by robots, have devolved to a primitive state. And the robots have rebelled. Honestly, neither part is entirely clear in the sometimes-awkward text. It doesn't really matter, as the game world doesn't really reflect the story.

        

No robot shall ever competently play and write about RPGs.

      

You play a robot in the employ of a character called "the professor." The professor is worried that you'll short-circuit like the other robots, so he sends you on a quest to "contact your maker to find any viruses or flaws in your system." You start at Level 1 with no experience, no inventory, 25 hit points, 5 strength, and 5 defense.

        

The professor's house.

      

Control is entirely via the mouse except for movement, which uses the numberpad, and the "Attack" command, which uses the "5" key on the numberpad. The rest of the commands are clicked on screen; some work for the environment, some for inventory. The game was developed in black and white; some emulators show some of the buttons in color, but that seems to be an accident. Movement through the game is excruciatingly slow. Fortunately, Mini vMac supports speed scaling; I played at 16x for most of the game.

 

The professor's house is a single-screen indoor area. Once you exit, you're in a 24-screen outdoor maze, six screens across and four screens vertical. This tiny game world nonetheless wraps around on itself. Your goal is to make your way to the center of the maze, but that involves solving a variety of mini quests first. 

      

The game world except for the final screen, which I forgot to screen-capture.

     

As you explore the outdoor environment, you occasionally run into a combat. You don't see enemies in the environment; instead, the game seems to offer a small probability of combat every time you step in a new square. Combat takes you to a little arena based on the surrounding terrain. As far as I can tell, there's no way to flee combat. You fight until you win or die.

       

I'll bet that sentence has never been written before or since.

       

The bad news is, you die a lot. The game introduces new monsters every time you level up, and the highest level monsters are usually capable of tearing you apart in one or two combats. The good news is, when you die you return to the professor's house, all your inventory intact, and he heals you. Thus, you spend most of the game exiting the professor's house and hoping you make it to your intended destination before some demon destroys you. To offer some mild assistance, there are a couple of wells and at least one other NPC that fully heal you, plus some NPCs give you gas cans, which act as "full healing" potions.

    

Progress through the game is "gated" like this.

     

Yes, I mentioned demons. The game's monster list doesn't really reflect its backstory. From easiest to hardest, the list of enemies seems to go slimes, humans, murfs, elves, mutating oozes, radioactive slimes, mages, demons, wizards, droids, devils, mutants, samurais, ninjas, and armed guards. The hardest part of the game is when demons and wizards start to appear around Level 7. Around Level 11, I think, new enemies stop appearing, you find better equipment, and the endgame is a bit easier.

      

The message you get every time you die.

      

You get experience (somewhat randomized) for each successful combat. The thresholds you need to level up are also randomized. In my winning game, for instance, I had to earn 9 experience points to go from Levels 3 to 4 (27-36), but only 4 to go from Levels 4 to 5 (36-40). Generally speaking, the requirements increase as you level up, but so do the rewards, so it's rarely more than four or five combats between levels.

Acquisition of weapons and armor is another way you can get stronger, but there aren't many of them in the game, and some of them are weird. A rose bush is a weapon worth 5 points, for instance. A thimble is a defensive item worth 10 points. A cactus lets you attack for 15 points. 

       

The best weapon for a robot is clearly a sword.

        

The maze has a couple of NPCs and about half a dozen houses and other structures that you can enter, most of which have their own NPCs. The largest of the structures has maybe six screens on a couple of different floors. To get to the endgame, you must:

   

• From a house east of the professor's, get a strange coin. ("The date on it says 1996. This thing's really old.")

• Fight an NPC at a dead end in the woods and loot the skeleton key from his or her body.

       

You don't have a lot of faith in your combat abilities, do you?

      

• Kill a warlock in his house and loot the golden key from his body.

• From NPCs behind the doors unlocked by the two keys, get a needle, thimble, and thread.

• Find the tailor and give him the needle, thimble, and thread so he can make you a cloak (the strange coin serves as a cloak pin) worth 25 for your armor class.

       

'Cause what's a robot without a cloak?

     

• Return to the professor, who says he'll open the gates to the castle to the north.

      

You could have done that all along?

     

• Enter the castle. Get a sword from an NPC there, the best weapon in the game. Find and push a lever. This de-activates a force field between two pillars on a screen east of the professor's.

      

It sounds like the game is trying to trick me through flattery.

       

• Go through the pillars, find a house, talk to the NPC inside, and get the endgame texts.

In doing all of this, I never found a legitimate use for "Jump." If you jump in either of the wells, you immediately die.

     

The person in the final house has a long monologue:

    

It's you, my creation! I am very proud. [Something I missed, but the gist of it was that although he or she "created" me, he or she did not program me.] The professor, your master, is the one who did the work. He programmed robots like you that like to take charge. But he can't be blamed because of a principle called human error. The professor made robots with more human features such as conscience. This made his robots even more powerful. This is what gives you your power. The only thing left to do now is stop. Just give up. Stop the war. Oh sure, wars will keep going on, but not with the robots. Because war comes from human pride, the only thing we can't program. So now, return in peace unto the professor, your master. 

        

Where did you "create" me? On your dining room table?

     

The game automatically sends you back to the professor's house. He simply says: "So, now you know the truth. You have done well in finding it, indeed." This is followed by a "THE END" screen.

        

You could have just told me.

      

The story doesn’t make a lot of sense—the developers seemed to be going for some kind of twist ending in a game that doesn’t have the narrative complexity to support it. But this isn’t the sort of game that you play for the story. Anarchy is at least competently programmed. I didn’t run into any bugs; the sub-quests flow easily from one to the other; the commands work sensibly; and the authors took time to add some touches like an “Inspect” button that almost always produces a description of what you’re holding or what you’re facing.

        

According to Spencer Lee, you can take "brown stuff" from the toilet and equip it as armor. You would never guess this game was programmed by teenagers.

     

GIMLET? Let's say 11. It gets 1s across the board except for "Gameplay," which gets a 2 for knowing how long a game this limited content deserves.

    

I reached out to Spencer Lee a few days ago, and he responded with enthusiasm, grateful that someone had dredged up the memory of this 30-year-old endeavor. He related that he, his brother, and a mutual friend learned HyperCard in the late 1980s. The disadvantage to HyperCard was that it required the application to run any game based on it. SuperCard could create standalone programs, so they convinced their friend's parents to purchase it, then did most of their programming at their friend's house. Lee says that they started and left unfinished a large number of RPGs with titles like Prehistoric Wrath Master and Castle Quest. They also tried their hands at action games and a pinball game. Anarchy was the first they were able to finish, with Spencer writing the program and Warren designing the graphics. Their primary inspirations were console games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, reflected in the use of slimes as the weakest enemies. He also notes that they "accidentally landed on the same aesthetic disparity that many Japanese games had when they came out in the west: cute characters on screen, ugly 'tough' looking characters on the game box."

     

The brothers submitted Anarchy to a shareware collection and were accepted. Later, they offered it on eWorld, an online service run by Apple from 1994 to 1996. They created a strategy guide with maps and clues and mailed it to the few people who actually sent the shareware fee.

  

We owe our thanks to commenter Teegan for recovering Mechanical Anarchy from obscurity. He's related in a few comments how he played it as a child and spent years trying to find it before discovering it on a compilation CD from MacAddict magazine. [Ed. My apologies for assuming Teegan's gender. Teegan is a "she."] This does not seem to be the original shareware CD that Lee mentioned, but rather a later disk that used the version the Lees posted to eWorld. The ReadMe file that accompanied Teegan's version was clearly written around 1994 or 1995, and the game lacks a bug that the Lees fixed after the original release.

     

Another title from the Lee brothers.

   

Lee says that the brothers continued to develop shareware, including a version of Connect Four called Super Connecto and a compilation called the Larry Larvae Activity Set, which offered a variety of minigames. By this time, the Lees were calling their enterprise SilverWare.

   

Thanks to Teegan and Mr. Lee for the reminder that behind even the simplest games are interesting stories.

   

My coverage of BloodNet starts next; make sure you also check out the Adventurers' Guild for complementary coverage from an adventure gamer's perspective. Initial entries this Thursday!