Chapter 20. Excalibur

Gossip was a pure design exercise; I never intended it to be a product. I desired only to demonstrate that a game addressing social interactions could be built. Underlying my efforts here was a much grander ambition.

I had been inspired by John Boorman's magnificent exposition of the Arthurian legends in the movie Excalibur. I wanted to create something as noble as Boorman's film. The Arthurian legends seemed to be the ideal vehicle for my efforts. These legends have played such an important role in Western literature because they have carried just about every basic dramatic theme and idea. Starting off as a defeated people's wistful legends of past glory, they were modified by the French troubadours to suit the ideals of courtly love fostered by Elizabeth of Aquitane.

Later, Thomas Mallory gathered up the many bits and pieces and forged them into a unified whole in his great classic, Le Morte D'Arthur (which, by the way, played a major role in standardizing English, because it was the first widely read book written in English). But Mallory's version had a heavy-handed style, with as much violence as a modern videogame.

In the nineteenth century, there was a grand revival of Arthurian romance, with less blood and more brooding. Then Mark Twain the Impertinent put his hand to the legends and came up with the magnificent satire A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

In the mid-twentieth century, two more Americans took the legends in two other directions. Walt Disney created a children's entertainment with The Sword in the Stone, while Lerner and Lowe produced a classic love triangle in the musical Camelot. Times changed, and Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote The Mists of Avalon, a feminist take on the Arthurian legends.

Throughout these many evolutions, the legends served their artists well. Marion Zimmer Bradley's feminist version is just as rich and robust as Mallory's masculine version. The Arthurian legends have become an entire body of literature embracing all the important dramatic themes of Western civilization; they can be molded to serve any artistic purpose. I therefore resolved to build my dream on this vehicle. In particular, I wanted to create a work about the nature of leadership: How can a leader overcome the fissiparous tendencies arising from personal ambition, jealousy, and possessiveness in any group in pursuit of a grand goal for the group as a whole? Watching the insane combination of anarchy and overbearing dominance at Atari, I couldn't help but wonder what makes a good leader. My game would explore these dilemmas.

I decided early on that the game would consist of a number of subgames. This was an ambitious idea back in 1982. Most games then had a single main screen and a single challenge. The idea of combining several smaller games into one larger game is now common. I don't know if Excalibur was the first published game to do so, but it was certainly one of the earliest.