The Beribboned Door - Part Two

Once a password was entered, the computer inside the desk would whir and click.
“Please enter a name...”

Again, more clicking, more whirring.
“Please enter the date and time...”

There was no clock inside the pyramid and unless they were wearing a watch, players were likely unaware of one or even both. Any attempt to communicate with staff inside the pyramid was ignored. The Quiet Man would inevitably stare at the screen over their shoulder in silence. Regardless of what information was entered, the computer would whir and click and then the game would proceed. There would be a short burst of crackly music.

And so began the game, a game that could last anywhere between seconds and up to an hour and a half. Each game was different. Each game was strange. They did not play like the games that people were used to. They were text adventures, but often without an obvious quest. One player in Berlin described his game as being the set of a Mexican soap opera about actors behind the scenes at a Mexican soap opera. A player in Austin claimed his was some accounting simulator where he was forced to balance numbers and input data. One man played a twenty minute game as a pigeon in 18th century London. One man was a woman at a picnic with her children who eventually wandered down to a river and drowned.

“You would be there in the pyramid and there's this weird guy watching you and its hot and it stinks in there because there’d been people in it all day and you can hear the noise coming in from outside but it's all muted, and up on the screen you're playing this… thing that is unlike anything else.”

One thread ran common through all games. Things would inevitably turn dark. Characters would become violent, the plot would arc towards disaster, scenes of graphic horror would unfold. Entropy reigned. When players talked to one another afterwards, they would note that these things would happen when they did something 'wrong'. They felt that there was some near invisible path to progress a certain way, and stepping off of that path caused things to deteriorate with increasing rapidity. Eventually you would reach a point of Game Over and a crackling 8-bit rendition of the funeral march would play. There would be a click and a thin piece of paper would be printed from the desk with a sixteen digit code on it. Then you were done. The game would go black and refuse to restart until you left the pyramid.

“There were a lot of one turn games,” forum user ChinchillaKilla says “I had a one turn game and it was also my weirdest one. I was the last guy to go in our group so I said it out loud to my buddies when I got out, and we each remembered a sentence, then we raced up to my hotel room and jotted it down word for word. The game said 'Your husband is now seventeen minutes late. You suspect he is having an affair. The telephone is ringing in the kitchen. The baby is crying upstairs. You are ovulating in three days. Spring comes every year….' so I thought about it and I put in 'Answer telephone'. Clearly that wasn't what the game had in mind. Straight away the game plays the funeral song and tells me 'Spring comes every year but the baby's screams herald winter. Game Over.' And that was it.”

Other endings were less abrupt, though many were just as ambiguous. One player progressed through a game that lasted perhaps thirty minutes in which they were exploring a forest. Turn after turn, nothing of note occurred.

“I would keep getting the same screens over and over, just telling me 'you see a river', 'you see a hollow tree trunk', 'you hear birdsong to the east', stuff like that. I just kept wandering around, waiting to get Game Over really. If I tried to do anything but go north, east, south or west, the game would tell me no. Literally, like that. It'd just say no. Eventually I worked out I was supposed to follow the bird song. I ended up in this weird dark temple. At some point I must have done something wrong because it said something like “The Lord of Birds calls court in ten years.” Every turn it would lower the countdown. “The Lord of Birds calls court in nine years.” The Lord of Birds calls court in eight years” etc.' Obviously, I didn't know what it meant, so I kept exploring but each turn there would be something horrible, like I was dying of radiation sickness or something. My hair fell out and turned to dust before it hit the floor. My eyes grew dry and shrivelled in their sockets. I remember it told me that my nails clung to my fingers only due to the beds of repugnant pus that had formed around them. When the countdown hit zero I was in this room with diamonds on the wall and I was trying to steal one. I think my last turn was something like “steal wall diamond”. The game told me something along the lines of “You take the wall diamond and admire it. The Lord of Birds calls court. Courtiers flock from north, east, south and west. Your soul is torn from the sky by hawks. The choir sings. Game Over.”

Despite these strange and extremely unsettling games, players wanted more. They were limited to one game a convention via the password system. Having to provide ID meant that players attempting to return were quickly turned away and told to play again next convention. People attempted all manner of feats to get another turn in the pyramid, from forging identification to breaking in to the conference hall in the middle of the night (the pyramid and the game had been removed). Rumours began circling that nobody in the world (The Quiet Man aside) had seen games other than their own. People tried to shove their way through and throw the pyramid doors open during other player's games, only to be stopped forcibly by security.

It is easy to see why the game generated such wild speculation. The strangest point, perhaps the point which was the catalyst for the rumours, was that nobody at the The Beribboned Door booth ever seemed interested in selling anything. Month after month, in different cities all over the world, The Beribboned Door would appear, but there was never any talk of a release date, or even a product.

“People became desperate,” Frantasty_ writes on one of the The Beribboned Door forums. “One time I was in the queue and a guy from another booth comes over. He was working, he was supposed to be dealing with stuff at his own booth. He had a cheque in his hand and he was trying to give it to The Fat Man. When he wouldn't take it, he tried to give it to The Fish Tattoo Lady and she wouldn't take it either. So he marched up to try and give it to The Quiet Man inside the pyramid, and security came down on him hard.”

Likewise, no company ever took credit or ownership of The Beribboned Door. No magazine or television show was able to get an interview or additional information from the developers. The one piece of evidence ever located, came from a hotel employee who smuggled confidential documents out of his place of work for an undisclosed amount provided by someone still active on the The Beribboned Door forums. These documents listed “The Beribboned Door International” as the company attending the conference. No trace of the company was ever found.

The regulars began following the pyramid to conventions. When I ask the forums how much money they spent attending expos, how many hours they spent waiting in line at the booth, how many international flights they took, none of them will give a straight answer.

People began swapping stories and this quickly became people comparing notes. Players began recording information and statistics compulsively. It emerged that there were some elements that featured in multiple games. The Lord of Birds was one such element, a character who never appeared directly 'on screen' but whose influence was felt. There was a location known as The Infinite Green which usually led to Game Over in one way or another. There was a large company named 'Soulhaven International' that practised bad business across several games. Most important of these recurring features was a 'red spectre' named Ithbal, though I'll discuss her in more detail in the next article.

Though games could seemingly cover almost any topic, certain genres seemed to appear more often than others. There were 'wood games' which took place in forests and involved a lot of exploration. There were the so called 'castle games' which involved navigating hallways of an ancient fortress. There were 'family games' which revolved around domestic life. There were also subgenres, usually relating to how strange and surreal the game became as it progressed. A player might describe a particular game as “family veryweird” or “chased creepy”.

Players would compare notes and memories and whenever they did so, the most obsessive of the regulars would note down their findings. There is a wiki page for The Beribboned Door. Though it came far too late for the hype-period of the game and sees little traffic, it contains over 5000 articles.

Nobody could accept that the game was intended to run the way it was running. It seemed too strange that the game would have these near infinite possibilities, yet no win condition. Rumours began circulating of players who had won games, and what happened when they did. Regular players began actively trying to win the game in an organised fashion. They would meet up in hotel lobbies and bars the day before conventions, and plot out strategies. Strange clans began forming within the fanbase, each wanting to be the group which solved the game. Friendly rivalries emerged which quickly escalated to bitter feuds.

One school of thought claimed that completing a game to successful conclusion was possible, and that players simply had to get better at it. There was some evidence to support this. Generally, players did better (performed more turns) each successive game, which suggested that the seemingly random games were not inherently designed to be shorter or longer than one another.

The other claimed that such a random and unreadable game was not possible to solve through traditional play, and that some other factor must be responsible. The game was already so strange, and already worked so differently from anything anyone had ever seen, that they believed that things like the name you entered, or the date and time must be relevant. “Why else would the game ask for this information?” they argued.

“There was one guy who never really posted on the old BBS boards,” a regular remembers. “He had this theory it was to do with something before the game even started. He would try and get us to wear different colours, or to interact with the staff in different ways. He had this whole theory about the staff. He would produce these grainy photos, like photos of big-foot, showing washed out theatre posters with a Falstaff who he insisted was The Fat Man. He had this theory that the whole thing was an act, that there was a guy inside the desk typing the game out in real time, almost like that old Turkish chess robot. None of us really took his ideas seriously, but as time went by and nobody was completing it, his thought process appealed to a lot of people.”

And through it all there were constant hoaxes being thrown into the mix. Some were clearly fake, others extremely believable. Many were printed in magazines or found their way into the official canon. A lot of the rumours revolved around the strip of code that each player received at Game Over. Perhaps the most famous hoax claimed that entering previous codes as your password at the start, allowed you to 'continue' your past games from before things went wrong. This was, however, quickly disproved, yet still the hoax continued to circulate. There were always people claiming to have completed the game to a satisfactory conclusion, and each told a different story of what happened when they did. As is so often the case, one story gained more traction than others. Apparently, on completing the game, the screen turned from black to white, and the text from green to gold. A fanfare would play and the screen would display a message. “An infinity. A unit beyond time. A chasm in the finite. An hourglass without end. A cosmic yawn. You have no need for a name.”

The forum users pretty much agree that nobody ever completed the game. For a while, anybody claiming to have done so was banned.

So what happened to The Beribboned Door? Where did it go and why did it disappear?