Remembering ‘Amnesia’: Digital preservationists reboot classic video game

You wake up naked in a hotel room. You don’t recall who you are or how you got there. Your clothes are missing. Someone knocks on the door.

So begins “Amnesia,” a text-only video game released in 1986, in which players inhabit the perspective of a man experiencing memory loss while staying in midtown Manhattan at the fictional Sunderland Hotel. Players must negotiate a series of puzzles to find much-needed clothes, leave the hotel, and navigate Manhattan’s busy streets. By gathering clues and avoiding innumerable pitfalls, they gradually discover that the protagonist has a fiancée he cannot remember, is being pursued by an assassin, and is wanted for murder in Texas.

A groundbreaking digital work of interactive fiction by the sci-fi novelist Thomas M. Disch, the game anchors “Remembering Amnesia: Rebooting the first computerized novel,” an exhibit on view through March 2 in the Hanke Exhibition Gallery at Sterling Memorial Library.

Drawing on materials from Disch’s archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the exhibit explores the author’s novel attempt to move video games into the realm of literary fiction. It also describes the efforts of the Yale Library’s Digital Preservation unit to preserve the game, originally stored and played on now-obsolete hardware, and restore it to life.

The revived version of “Amnesia” is available to play on three workstations — two located just outside the exhibit space and one in Bass Library — that emulate a mid-1980s computing environment.

“The dual narratives of the game’s creation and our work to preserve it convey the creative effort needed to bring the interactive computerized novel to life and secure its place in the historical record,” said exhibit curator Claire Fox, software preservation and emulation librarian at Yale Library. “We wanted those creation and preservation narratives to culminate in the opportunity to actually play the game. We hope the exhibit inspires more people to request access to digital materials, especially digitally created materials like historical video games.”

An interactive digital novel

Disch, who died in 2008, was a speculative fiction author and a poet. His best-known novels — exemplars of the experimental “New Wave” of science fiction — include “Camp Concentration,” “On Wings of Song,” and “The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars.” He set to work on “Amnesia,” which he envisioned as a computerized novel, before he even owned a personal computer, writing the narrative by hand in notebooks and then typing up drafts on a typewriter. Those notebooks and an annotated typescript draft of the novel are displayed in the show.

“I wanted to recreate my experience of encountering the archival materials in the Thomas M. Disch papers and the excitement that I felt about them,” Fox said. “There’s so much interesting material available about how he worked on his idea through his pre-digital writing process. You can also see his process transition to digital. Suddenly you’re seeing documents typed and printed on a computer, not handwritten notes and drafts typed on a typewriter.”

Disch’s first computer, a Kaypro II purchased in 1984, is on display. It weighs 29 pounds and has 64 kilobytes of memory. By comparison, today’s smartphones typically have 8 gigabytes of memory, meaning they possess 131,072 times the memory capacity of the Kaypro II, according to the exhibit text.

“The Beauty of the Personal Computer,” an unpublished poem Disch wrote in a notebook on display, suggests what the writer perceived as the advantages of working digitally:

One is that we may begin anywhere / and should that beginning be a botch / wipe out the memory of all we’ve done / and begin again without a sense / of failure or betrayal …

For “Amnesia,” Cognetics Corporation, a game-development company, transformed Disch’s script into computer code. (A printout of the source code is displayed.) Electronic Arts released versions of the game for the Apple II and for IBM PC-compatible computers in 1986. The next year, it issued a version for the Commodore 64.

The exhibit includes two floppy disks from the game’s Commodore 64 release, marketing materials used to introduce the first-of-its-kind computerized novel to consumers, and the packaging and related ephemera for the various versions of the game.

A flowchart on view maps the game’s intricate web of locations, or “nodes,” which include accurate, detailed descriptions of Manhattan’s blocks and neighborhoods south of 110th St. (A “Streetwise Manhattan” map accompanied the Commodore 64 version to help players navigate Disch’s text descriptions of the Big Apple.) Reviews of the game — also included in the exhibit — praise its complexity and strong writing but express frustration with its seemingly interminable length and the difficulty of its puzzles.

Accessing obsolete technology

Although the game’s technology was cutting-edge in 1986, the subsequent decades rendered “Amnesia” obsolete and unplayable. Its fate highlights the challenges and complexity of preserving digitally created materials and making them accessible, Fox said.

“When a researcher requests access to the Commodore 64 version of ‘Amnesia,’ we can’t provide them with a Commodore 64 computer,” she said. “That wouldn’t be sustainable for us at scale.”

In 2019, Alice Prael, Yale Library’s born-digital specialist, decided to use “Amnesia” to test methods for emulating legacy operating systems. Prael and Fox, then an intern at the library, used Kryoflux, a forensic tool, to capture data stored on the game’s floppy disks so that they could be accessed in their original form. Then they needed to replicate the obsolete hardware using an emulator — a software application that allows one computer system to run programs designed for another.

They did so in collaboration with the Yale Library’s Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure program (EaaSI, pronounced “easy”) — an international, collaborative effort to increase equitable access to collections dependent on legacy software and to enable scholars to use digitally created materials as primary sources. The EaaSI platform provides librarians and archivists access to various emulator applications to help them establish efficient methods for accessing digital materials that require interaction in a legacy computing environment.

Prael, along with the EaaSI team, including Ethan Gates, senior software preservation and emulation technologist at Yale Library, selected and tested an emulator that allowed them to recreate the experience of playing “Amnesia” on a Commodore 64. This success came in handy in 2022, when a researcher requested access to the game.

Aside from video games, which are increasingly significant cultural artifacts, emulation also can be used to preserve and enable access to interactive content like legacy websites, searchable databases, and industry-specific software that requires the use of obsolete operating systems, Fox explained.

The three gaming kiosks demonstrate the emulation’s effectiveness in simulating an authentic interactive experience. The game proceeds much as it would on a Commodore 64. (Players likely will note that it takes a while to load.) Even the keyboards and their chunky keys recall the experience of using a desktop in the mid-1980s.

“The keyboards are the breakout stars,” Fox said.

As the game starts, Disch’s prose unfolds on the screen. It prompts players to issue commands to propel the narrative. For example, one might type “look for clothes” after the protagonist gets out of bed. (Hint: There are no clothes. Cover yourself with a bedsheet or a bathroom towel before answering the door — it’s the maid. And don’t forget to take the key with you when you leave the room.)

After a minute or two, it should be clear to any player that they’re in for a challenge.

“This is why I love that we included reviews of the game,” Fox said. “If you're playing it today and you’re feeling frustrated or unsure about how you’re supposed to know to do something, please know it’s not you. The game was hard for players in 1986, too.”