Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 21:17:10 -0800 (PST) From: --- To: David Van Brink Cc: --- Hi. Thanks for the recent reply on Ankh. > Is that the game you're thinking of? Yes! Wow! I never expected to be able to play it again. Thank goodness for emulators! I wish to impress on you that this is more than just running across some old game and getting to play it again. I mean, I also once thought Choplifer was cool, but to see it today would be nothing more than a mild curiosity. Ankh is something special. It isn't shallow like most games. Perhaps it came with printed directions, but 15-year-olds (like me) sharingdisks over modems wouldn't know. To me, this thing started up with no instructions. It looked like a game of some kind, but the goal was unclear. One quickly learned to do things and go to new rooms, so progress was being made, but was one doing the right things? Continuing to make progress became increasingly difficult, but it was never to the point of being frustrating. My friend and I soon realized that Ankh consisted of many independent automatons. Playing Ankh was similar to programming: by piecing together simple independent things, one could create a chain of events that would lead to a desired result. The next time one played, one might think up a more efficient way to achieve the same result. It was a wonderful puzzle world, richly layered, eloquently executed. Then we discovered something most curious. From one of the screens (probably the title screen), hitting a certain key combination (maybe just a control key?) put you into a strange world in which you could navigate the ship around some kind of one-dimensional world. No puzzles to solve, only movement. Parts of the world were visible but unreachable, if I recall correctly. We had to figure out what that world was! I don't remember how I did it, but somehow I found a data segment in the program that contained a bit image representation of that one-dimensional world. I must have dug through the binary program file looking for segments that the monitor disassembler couldn't make sense of. Who knows how I thought to do this in the first place. After finding it, I guessed a width and height and wrote a BASIC program to walk memory, rip each byte into bits, and put the results on the hires screen. Revealed was the mysterious one-dimensional world: it was text that said something like, "Hackers put your message here". Is this familiar to you? It must be! (Who else could have put it there?) I assume this was the ultimate treasure of the metareal world, or did you hide other things as well? We were already so impressed by Ankh itself, you achieved visionary status after we discovered and "solved" the ultimate puzzle (the mystery message). We had achieved the final victory and half expected you to materialize in the computer and congratulate us. We desperately wanted to talk to you, and half considered contacting Datamost to put us in touch with you, but we were afraid of getting in trouble for being 15-year-old pirates.