Loveletter to Ivstalad

The world ended enough days ago that the nub of chalk you were using to mark the passage of time, has crumbled to dust. You live on dry rations, tinned peaches and bottled water. You are a lone worm wriggling in the darkness beneath the permafrost of a nuclear winter. You may be the last human being alive. Then the radio crackles to life with a voice. “Hello….hello? Is there anyone there?”

In 1986, John West and Westward games published Duck and Cover, a game of nuclear tension. What had begun as a roleplaying game of sorts in John's flat at the tail end of the 1970s had translated poorly into a video game, but through it Westward Games had attracted attention. They had made a game that could be considered art among a deluge of insipid platformers and forgettable space-themed shooters. They were daring to do something very different. Even at the time, the audience were ready for something more challenging, something meatier. This was what John West told his team as they gathered, before the sales figures for Duck and Cover had even been announced. They knew the news was not good, but they didn't know how not good it was going to be. John refused to let this slow them down. It was time, he said, to make the game that he had wanted to make all along.

The team were sceptical. Duck and Cover had gone over budget and the process had been an emotionally taxing one for many involved. Matthew Willis, John's friend and second in command was desperately trying to convince his friend to make something easy, to pump out a handful of cheap and straight forward knock-offs, to take a step back and rest. Matt Boyd, known at Westward Games as The Other Matt, had been planning to leave the company the moment that Duck and Cover was over, but for some reason he had stayed. Strangely, it was him who bid the rest of the team to hear John out. It was January of 1985, and the group were sat in a smoky crowded pub in Camden.

John presented the facts. There were action games. There were war games. Fantasy games, science fiction games, westerns, comedies. But there was one genre nobody had tackled yet.

Nobody had ever made a romance.

It was inevitable that romantic sub-plots would begin to appear in video games once character-driven RPGS arrived on the market. The popular final fantasy series is well known for its love stories, often not positively, and the ability to form romantic and sexual relationships with those you encounter has become a common feature of large-world sandbox games like Skyrim, Mass Effect and the Fallout series. Again, these relationships are not often seen as particularly well done. In fact, believable romantic relationships seems incredibly hard for video game writers to get right. Is it down to the joking cliché, that these designers and programmers, nearly universally men, nearly universally young, are romantically stunted themselves or is it a drawback of the medium that makes portraying the subtle details of love difficult?

The lack of a good love story game, as John professed it, may have been due to the media of the time. In the late 80s games were beginning to pack a little more punch, but the limitations of the hardware were still a highly restrictive factor. There simply was not the space to include something that wasn’t crucial to the game play, hence, sub plots in general were yet to make much of an appearance. Games tended to rely on doing one thing and doing it well and often, repeatedly, until the game was finished. It was not space-efficient to portray relationships in detail. There was also the role of women in video games. Though Samus Aran of Metroid fame would soon become the first female protagonist of note in 1986, there had been very few female characters. The idea of fleshing out not only one character, but two, one of whom was a woman, to create a believable love story between them seemed impossible.

But where had this idea come from? In 1985, Nintendo had released Super Mario Bros., the first game in the still wildly popular Super Mario series. In the game, Mario and his brother Luigi, ran, jumped and fire balled their way through 32 levels of turtles and goombas in order to save Princess Toadstool (who would later be renamed Peach). Though it would be another two years before Super Mario Bros landed in England, John had been keeping track of the game in computer magazines and had even played once whilst visiting family in New York. In a typical John West twist, it had been this game that had inspired his idea.

John wanted to make a game where the romance, the love, the relationship, was not the prize that hung at the end of the fighting and action. He wanted the relationship to BE the game play. In an interview with compute! Magazine, after Loveletter to Ivstalad's release, he elaborated on this slightly.

“I just kept thinking, what now? You've saved the princess but what now? What happens in all these films and television programmes and games once the credits have finished? You don't know each other, so what, now you just love each other? Where's the game that happens AFTER the end?”

John pictured Loveletter to Ivstalad as a sequel to Duck and Cover. If Duck and Cover was the mounting tension of nuclear war leading to a full blown apocalypse, then Loveletter to Ivstalad was the aftermath, the epilogue. It took the grim sense of inescapable horror presented in Duck and Cover and added a bitter-sweet sense of hope in the darkness, but that hope was extremely hard won and poorly cultivated. The main lesson John West had learnt from Duck and Cover was that nobody was going to be as invested in his game, as he was. He could not micromanage emotions and expectations subtly from behind the scenes the way he had been able to when playing the original Duck and Cover in his student flat. If he wanted the audience of a video game to feel something, it had to be blunt and heavy and thick. It could still be good, but it could not be gentle. From the get-go, Loveletter to Ivstalad was going to grab the audience by the shoulders and force them to feel.

Rumour has it, that this phrase “grab them by the shoulders and force them to feel” was one of several that John stuck to the pinboard at Westward Games studio throughout development. In a photograph of John circulating on the internet, there is a sign just barely visible in the background. Half-eclipsed by a speaker, scrawled in thick capital letters, it reads “take everything from them.”

The them in this case, being the two central characters, the only characters, of Loveletter to Ivstalad.

Two humans sealed away, locked in cells of their own design deep beneath the earth. The protagonist of Loveletter to Ivstalad is an unnamed individual locked within the confines of a nuclear bunker. They survive, according to the text at the start of a new game, on dry rations, tinned peaches and bottles of water. It's one of the very few pieces of information that we receive about the character before we inhabit their body and their life.

They speak with a cynical and somewhat bitter voice, a voice that suggests that they knew the war was coming, that apocalypse was inevitable. Their words are full of negatives 'no', 'hate', 'death', 'misery'. They presume the worst, expect things to deteriorate and have very little hope that anything will change. One dialogue path reveals that the protagonist of the game fully expects to die within the bunker, referring to it as their 'lead-lined coffin'. There is a sense of melodrama, but a realistic melodrama to their voice, bearing in mind the circumstances. They lament their situation in strangely insolent and belligerent way, like a spoiled child who has been denied something, rather than an adult facing the potential extinction of the human race.

Their situation is, of course, dire. Faced with a dwindling supply of food, a Geiger counter which ticks like a metronome whenever it is switched on, and the eternal silent static of a radio transmitter which can find nothing to connect to, it is easy to understand why the protagonist might have lost hope.

And then, a single voice makes its way through the radio silence. A voice which, due to the technological constraints of the time, is never heard, but is only rendered in text. A voice which, when asked the right questions, reveals its owner to be in an equally miserable situation on the opposite side of the world. A voice which begins its discourse with ““Hello….hello? Is there anyone there?”

One can almost imagine the panic and frenzied excitement that this lone survivor would have on hearing another human being's voice for the first time since the apocalypse. That first line of dialogue from the radio - “Hello….hello? Is there anyone there?” is as much an introduction as anyone could hope to have – a completely and utterly open invitation to speak. And once that line of dialogue is on the screen, the player can respond and that is when the game play of Loveletter to Ivstalad really comes into its own.

The first text based adventure was developed over a two year period starting in 1975 and ending in 1977. The game, which came to be known as Adventure, can be credited as the father of the modern computer RPG. Simple descriptions would be given, after which the player could input simple verb-noun commands. “Go south” “pick up knife” “read book” etc. and effect the game world. The goal of the game was to delve into a deep maze of caves and acquire as much treasure as possible before finding a safe route back to the surface. It is easy to trace the line of succession from Adventure to rogue-likes including titles like Nethack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. But beyond these titles, lie the more graphically intensive publications of anything involving exploration, combat and gathering loot. Without Adventure, there would possibly be no Elder Scrolls, no Final Fantasy. Things we take for granted as tropes of the video game genre like locating keys to progress through locked doors, and finding light to aid in the darkness are rooted in Adventure. The first text-based adventure game, Adventure inspired a run of similar titles including the dungeon and dragons themed experiments which John West produced for his friends, but never published.

Loveletter to Ivstalad however, was the first text-based adventure to break completely from the pattern established by Adventure. Rumour has it that the very first draft, before John West had decided exactly what the perimeters of the game were, had been very similar to adventure and involved one man's trek into the wilderness to locate the bunker of another local survivor. The final product was a completely different game altogether. Gone, was the enduring “Verb followed by a noun” pattern. Instead, Loveletter to Ivstalad allowed players to only input one word at at time and one word only. These words were triggers for the conversation that would follow.

From that first hello across the radio, most players would try to input the command “say hello”, only to be interrupted as soon as they hit the space key after say. It was this that presented one of the most interesting mechanics of the game – and one of the most infuriating features. There was very little precision of control. What players thought they were going to say, was not always what they ended up saying, and the Westward Games team were very clever at manipulating this. At key points in the game, the key words entered would provide a completely different response than the player generally anticipated. One of the puzzle elements of the game, and one that caused a great deal of discord among reviewers, was picking the right word in order to progress in the correct manner.

The established convention of verb/noun is a good system for a number of reasons. Firstly, its very easy to get used to. Secondly, it limits a surplus of choices down to key short instructions. Anyone who has played a text-based adventure knows the frustration of wanting to do something, but not knowing how to get the computer to understand. This feeling is made only more maddening, when one knows the instruction one is trying to give is likely the correct one, but the correct combination of words is elusive. Pick up key, get key, touch key, grab key, hold key, put key in inventory, use key. And so on.

The verb/noun system is also very good form a programming perspective. Specific verbs could be coded to have specific results, with the nouns serving as interchangeable parts. If the term get key is used, it is generally safe to assume that get is going to transfer the item labelled key from the screen the player is on, to their inventory.

Loveletter to Ivstalad is a game about talking. Sealed away, supposedly safe from the scenes of Armageddon outside, the only way the player character can interact with the voice at the end of their radio, is through talking. Save, restore, restart and quit are the only words that trigger anything other than a conversation and rumour has it, John himself had been against even those commands.

A single word was all that could be entered at a time. A single topic of conversation. Wisely, John had never intended for there to be any physical contact in his romance game. It was a game about building a relationship via discourse. As a model for his team, he located dozens of love letters from throughout history that had been written between people who had never met, often never would. He wanted them to see the way that this romance could build through the written word. With one word to choose from to trigger conversation, the exchanges between the player and the stranger on the other end of the radio, became a guessing game. Very little information was provided to the player prior to starting the game, the manual for instance, gives no concrete objective to strive towards, the only indicator of what you are even supposed to do comes in the form of the opening introduction on the first page.

“The last great war ended suddenly with missiles falling like rain.

The world became sick and poisoned but you survived.

Now, you are the only living human in an underground nuclear fallout shelter.

Before it happened, they always said that the President and other important people would get to bunkers, but you've found no evidence of any other survivors.

You have waited for a sign that there is another living creature out in the world.

And then you hear a woman's voice on the radio and it is the most beautiful sound you have ever heard.

Ironically, your companion in the end of all things, hails from the land of the enemy.

Can you overcome your mutual differences and find a type of love in this, the end of the world?”

On the very back page of the manual, something many players failed to notice, was a partial map of the USSR marked with a red circle. It is purposefully blurry and difficult to navigate, but appears to show an area in the south of the country. Beside the red circle, in neat penned writing – Ivstalad. The small home town in a sleepy part of Soviet Russia where another human being still lives.

The player character is American, living somewhere on the West Coast, but it is never revealed which city or state they inhabit. In one conversation path, the two survivors discuss the sea and fishing. The player character talks about watching surfers on the waves near their house. The Russian does not know the word surfer, cannot translate. Conversation moves on. It's possible that this eludes to The American being based in California. Surfers exist elsewhere of course, but its exactly the sort of image an English computer programmer might have had in his head regarding America, the sort of stereotypical Californian scene that filled media of the late 1980s. There is also another hint that The American is in California, but that wouldn't come for a very long time. More on that later.

With very little guidance, players generally began by exploring what they could talk about. To begin with, The Russian is wary, her replies are short and cautious. Juxtaposing this, the way the player character speaks is excited and desperate. Compare the different attitudes present in the following piece of dialogue that can be accessed in the first turn of the game.

Scared.

“I was so scared I was the only one left alive. I wondered if I'd ever get to speak to another person!”

“That's sad. I'm sorry it was me. I'm sorry you didn't find someone who could help you.”

Help.

“If there's help out there it will find me I'm sure. I don't care about being helped. It's just wonderful to hear another human voice. I think I started talking to myself within the first week and I've not really stopped since.”

“I'm so sick of speaking to myself. I can't stand my voice any more. It's so lazy and shrill.”

The American is happy, ecstatic even, desperate to maintain conversation. The Russian is self-deprecating. Compare the American's vocabulary – wondered, sure, wonderful to the Russians – sorry, sick, can't.

Now, let's take a quick step back and think about how difficult this task must have been. Conversations are inherently complex. The way we slip back and forth from topic to topic, responding to what has been said, replying to create an opening of our own. In most video games, naturalistic dialogue is far from a main concern – the dialogue serves as a way to inform the player, or move the plot from A to B. In Loveletter to Ivstalad, the dialogue WAS the game. It had to be at least passably believable. John and his team spent hours and hours making sure that the writing was tight, whilst also maintaining as much fluidity and natural flow as possible. Leaping from topic to topic was something that players were very likely to do, so the ability to switch seamlessly between those different conversational paths was also important.

And then, John decided to make Loveletter to Ivstalad even more complicated.

John had learnt to program video games through coding his own slow text-based adventures. The content had been lifted from the world of the groups Dungeons and Dragons campaign so the players got to interact with fictional characters and explore a world that they were already familiar with. John had enjoyed these early games as a learning experience and as a way of entertaining his close friend circle, however, certain elements of the genre frustrated him. Players had a tendency to hit certain points where they would become stuck. Rather than solving the puzzles as they were presented, an element of brute force came into play where they simple resorted to trying everything. This was very much against the design principles John had in mind for Loveletter to Ivstalad. If he was making the emotional punch of the game heavy and over the top, the gameplay needed to reflect a certain level of precision, of thought, of finesse. He wanted players to think before they simply hammered choices into the computer. The game was an exploration of building a human connection, and in real life, those connections build slowly and carefully. We have matrices that overlay our social situations, groups that we identify and view through a certain lens. What you would discuss with your partner or partners is very different to what you would discuss with a casual acquaintance. As relationships strengthen or weaken in intensity, the way we talk and the content of our discussions changes. The closer two people become, generally, the deeper and more intimate their conversation grows. There are of course exceptions, therapists for example, but for the most part – we reveal the most about ourselves to those we deem closest to us.

John wanted this element to the relationship in Loveletter to Ivstalad. He wanted to show the way that the relationship between The Russian and The American would develop as they got to know one another, albeit in an atypical context. He wanted the conversation trees to be different, depending on how deep into the game those trigger words were used, after all, there would eventually be a prompt that would trigger the end of the game. Did they really want players able to enter that prompt immediately on start to reach the end?

What I've given you there is really a whole lot of words about something that is shown better in context so let's take a look at an example. In this case, the command word we'll be using is Ivstalad. It's a good choice because it has several different responses throughout the game, it's one of the first things many players try to talk about due to the unusual word appearing in the title, and it is actually the final trigger for the ending to Loveletter to Ivstalad...when used correctly.

But let's say we've just started a game, we've received the opening text.

“Hello….hello? Is there anyone there?”

Ivstalad

“Ivstalad”

“I don't know who you are, or how you know I'm here, but I don't want anything to do with it” The radio clicks to silence. You have lost your chance at a connection. Do you wish to Restart, Restore or Quit?

There is a very John West symmetry in this, the same command used first thing causing the immediate shut down of the game, effectively a bad ending, whilst simultaneously triggering the good ending used later.

It is possible to get The Russian to mention Ivstalad first, though not absolutely necessary. She will mention Ivstalad if you begin conversations with a relatively wide array of command words. Family, home, house, farm, children, husband, Russia, America, where. Once she has said Ivstalad, you can ask a lot more about it. Here is her response to Ivstalad if you use the command before she mentions it.

Ivstalad

“What is Ivstalad?”

“Who mentioned anything to do with there? Who said Ivstalad?”

A short, somewhat sharp response. However, using the command a single turn later can trigger a very different response.

Farm

“I miss the farms here. We don't have many, but when I grew up there were farms all over. I used to visit my grandparents out East every summer. It was hard work, milking cows, feeding chickens, but it was great.”

“Ah, yes, in Ivstalad farms are a big part of life. I grew up on a farm, most of us did, and when the war started there was a big push for us to make enough food, even as people were starving.”

Ivstalad

“You said farms are a big part of life in Ivstalad, is that where you grew up?”

“Yes, and where I am now. It's a small place. Cold. It breaks my heart to think about it frozen and ruined up there. There's probably so much radiation in the soil now that nothing will ever grow there again. My husband spent years tending that land, its horrible to think of it wasted.”

In a similar fashion, the Russian doesn't like to talk about her husband very much early on. Using husband as the first command gets another game over. But later on, she will acknowledge that she is a widow. Later on, her husband becomes a big point of conversation – we learn he died before the bombs fell, killed in a hunting accident. We learn that she feels a great deal of guilt about it. Pushing further, we can learn that it was an arranged marriage of sorts and that initially, she had no interest in him. We learn they have children, both presumably killed when the bombs dropped. She will not discuss them. We learn that The Russian's husband built the bunker she is living in. That he became mayor of Ivstalad. Towards the very end she will reveal that the hunting accident was likely no accident, and a political move of some kind. She will briefly elude to politics, but John was well aware of the soviet mentality, of how uncomfortable and dangerous political talk was, and weaved this through Loveletter to Ivstalad. Politics is another word that she doesn't like to talk about.

Loveletter to Ivstalad was released in February of 1989 with versions compatible with the Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS. Despite the very lukewarm reaction to Duck and Cover, there was a relatively high level of interest in this new project from Westward Games. Ultimately, Loveletter to Ivstalad proved divisive among audiences.

Critics praised its storytelling and the complexity of its plot. Mark Tanis of Compute! Wrote “its the first game I've ever played to really have an emotional impact. Inside my little black crippled heart it made me feel something, and whilst I wouldn't ever admit it down the pub, this game did bring a tear to my eye.” The Games Machine gave it a score of 78% stating “this just goes to show you that you don't need flashy graphics to make a really good game.”

However, the text-based nature of Loveletter to Ivstalad was a serious problem for many reviewers. Scores sat in the low 20s/100 from several publications. Words like dated, old-fashioned, even retro were used. In an industry that was moving rapidly, Loveletter to Ivstalad was rooted in techniques from the past. The game was commonly compared to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, released by Lucasarts Entertainment the month before. Boasting a rich, detailed story lifted from the George Lucas movie, as well as expressive graphics and a variety of game mechanics including fighting sequences, it proved hard competition.

Among players, however, the game proved popular. It was, in fact, the most well received of The Nuclear Trilogy, both in terms of sales and player response. The generally poor reviews did little to lower the interest. It was never going to be a big international seller, but for a game made by a small London studio, Loveletter to Ivstalad did pretty well. The depth of the story and how it was revealed purely via conversation allowed players to use their imagination and conjure up images far more powerful than the blocky graphics of the time allowed. The framing device - two survivors on opposite sides of the world, made for a compelling narrative and for every player put off by the lack of direction or perceived openness, others were impressed. Just as he had with Duck and Cover, John West had made the world seem larger than it was. When players could not see the confines of their world, when they had no idea just how much conversation they had missed, they tended to believe that there was perhaps more behind the curtain than there was.

The path to the end of the game was complex and required a huge amount of mapping, exploration and experimentation. Key conversations had to be hit in a certain order, The Russian revealing certain details about herself carefully and cautiously, eventually leading to the final stretch of the game. Of the people who bought and played Loveletter to Ivstalad, it has hard to imagine that a great number found their way through to the end.

Once all the key information had been revealed, The Russian and The American characters fully explored, and their relationship constructed to a certain level, the following exchange was possible to access. It was possible to deviate somewhat, revisit other conversation paths and return, but the quickest and most direct route to the end was as follows:

Hope

I hope that things change. I hope that this isn't the rest of our lives.

Me too. I think I was done in lots of ways before today. I kept thinking about the future. I kept worrying and I was very depressed.

Suicide

Me too. I even considered doing something silly once or twice. It felt like there was no chance of anything ever changing. Do you know what I mean?

I do. I can't believe I'm telling you this. There's been a rope tied around a beam in the bunker here for days. I kept staring at it. Wondering if it was the right thing to do.

No

You can't. It's not what your husband would have wanted. He'd want you to be strong. I want you to be strong.

You're right. Things just felt hopeless before. I felt trapped and alone.

Alone

I know how it feels. I don't think I've ever felt so alone as I did just before your radio came in.

It certainly feels like something new, doesn't it? Like a new start. But it isn't. Not really. We'll never find each other again, you know that right? This is it. At some point whatever made the lines connect will drop out and we'll lose each other forever.

Forever

Forever is a long time. You don't know that. I promise I'll be spending a lot of time searching for your voice from now on. Maybe I'll never find it again. But it will give me something to do.

Don't say that. It's too horrible. I can't bear to think of us separated now. You in America, me here.

Meet

Well you could always come and visit.

Haha. I wish that I could. Ivstalad has always been a cold and lonely place to live. Until tonight, I thought it might be the coldest and loneliest place in the world. I wish I could show you how the trees looked on the edge of town.

Ivstalad

Well, maybe one day I will be able to leave the bunker and see the world. Maybe one day, everything will be safe and plants will grow and people will live like they used to. Maybe I'll get to see the trees. Maybe I'll get to see you.

Maybe. Maybe there's a glimmer of hope in the future. I… I'm really glad that we met. If this counts as meeting. I want you to kn...witho…...so fa...I…..che….ission….won't be able to, but perhaps the fu….ca…

The radio line goes dead, swallowed by static.

It's an extremely bitter sweet ending, but the feeling of hope, however slim, is a million worlds away from the start of the conversation.

And that was where the story of Loveletter to Ivstalad – a game by John West ended. Or, where it ended for almost 30 years.

John West has a strange sort of celebrity. He's not famous by any stretch of the imagination, but his fan base, like many fan bases of the early computer era, are fiercely loyal. On the third of March, 2015, John West published a string of Tweets in response to a tweet from a Michael Jo Johnson from British Columbia, Canada.

“Remember playing Loveletter to Ivstalad with my dad on the Atari. What was the ending?” Michael wrote.

John's tweets reveal a strange fact, a secret, that had lay dormant for close to three decades.

“Lots of people ask bout ending to Loveletter. Static swallows you is real ending of game, but not story.”

“AFIAK, nobody ever realised the secret of LLTI. Secret was in player manual. Snuck it in with @MatthewWillis.”

Matthew Willis commented forty minutes later.

“I don't remember what @JohnEWest is referring to, but I'm, excited.”

The secret of Loveletter to Ivstalad will come as no shock to most now, but looking back, it was a bold statement to make.

On the final page of the manual is an image, the map of Russia with Ivstalad circled in red pen. It is a powerful image – bold, colourful, but it has a much more powerful meaning when fully examined. There are three things to note, in the foreground of the picture, the hand of The Russian rests on a radio tuning dial. The hand is small, delicate, almost fragile looking in the dark gloom of the bunker. The second detail, a square of light falling on the image, as if lit from above. At a glance, it could just be the way the image has been drawn, or the light of fluorescent bulbs, but the shape is square and oddly angled for lighting. What if this was light coming in from a trapdoor? What if this was the light of the outside world? Thirdly, a tiny detail, so at home in the picture that is almost lost. One pin, holding the map to the wall, has a small round badge showing a bear, the bear in fact, from the flag of the state of California.

Why would The Russian have a trinket from California? Was this an oversight? A statement about the relationship, or was this image intended to be in America all along? What if the hand on the dial did not belong to the Russian at all, but rather, was the hand of the American? What if the map of the USSR was the American highlighting the location of their distant and mysterious love interest? Perhaps the secret of Ivstalad was that the two characters were not male and female as everyone assumed. What if, the whole time, they had been playing a lesbian romance? In text, there is no voice to give sex or gender to the character, but in the world of the game, this text represents a voice. It's such a powerful image to me, the opposite of dramatic irony – two characters who knew the truth, even if their players did not.