Trinity: Live. Die. Repeat.

With my discovery of A Dark Room, reading about the genre of interactive fiction, and watching Get Lamp, I finally decided to bite the bullet and try Brian Moriarty’s famed Trinity. The 1980s were the heyday of interactive fiction marketed as computer games. I tried Adventure and Zork back in the day, but (even crappy) graphics seemed much more alluring than a text adventure game. Thus, I never looked at the many Infocom hits of the 80s. But since I watched Oppenheimer a month ago, and I just started Spring Break, I was motivated to try Trinity. (Pic from the Macintosh Repository.)

 

The 1980s were a strange time with the spectre of nuclear war looming. This was before the fall of the Berlin Wall or the breakup of the U.S.S.R. Was World War III just around the corner? That sets the stage for Trinity, released in 1986. From what I’ve learned about its history, Moriarty had been working on it for several years. (By the time the 90s rolled around, I was no longer playing computer games and also never tried Loom, which is what Moriarty is likely most famous for.) Since I had little experience with Infocom games, I read through the manual (which opens with a comic strip about the Manhattan project) to get a sense of the navigation commands I would need. Then I booted up the game.

 

The scene opens in Kensington Gardens. You’re an American tourist. It’s a crowded day but there are strange scenes suggesting that something is not quite right. I was able to visit all the spots and acquire all the necessary items, but couldn’t quite work out the combination before the air sirens rang out. Then I was killed along with all the other tourists when a nuclear missile struck, ushering a nuclear holocaust. While all this sounds bleak, I was very impressed with Moriarty’s writing. He knew how to paint a scene, provide sufficient hints to help the reader progress, and maintain the tension of the story. I had not expected the game to have a countdown timer, which explains why I started with a wristwatch that told me the time. Every action brought me closer to the appointed hour of doomsday.

 

As an old-school gamer, I knew how to draw a map and take notes. I dutifully did this in my first game, and knew I had fully explored the Kensington ‘scenario’. It was time to brush away the cobwebs and reactivate my old-school gamer-puzzling abilities. In my second run-through, I figured out how to finish the first stage – which turned out to be a prologue. At this point, the opening credits begin: Trinity, a game by Brian Moriarty! I was impressed.

 

The second stage area resembled the Neitherlands of the Magicians, except that instead of fountains that connect you to other worlds, you have ‘doors’ that connect you to other relevant timelines in Earth’s history. These timelines are related to the making of the atomic bomb and its detonation at the Trinity test site near Los Alamos in the New Mexico desert. The tricky part was figuring out where the doors were and how to open them. This required more mapping and systematically testing some hypotheses about which items I need to use in a particular way. I was thrown off for some moments when the ‘world’ seemed to reverse east-to-west but finally figured it out. I patiently worked my way through the puzzles, most of which were straightforward, but a few were quite obscure and took several attempts. (I died once or twice and learned when to strategically save the game.)

 

Now it was time to do the time-traveler thing. Most of the portal doors led to a short scenario where you needed to get an item to help complete your quest. This required the use of other items. It’s crucial to save the game before you enter a portal door, because you’re not likely to do them in the right sequence the first time. And you’ll die a few more times in scenarios where time is of the essence. I admit to a little impatience and occasionally looking up ‘hints’ on the internet to help me along. Back in the old days, I had the tenacity to keep attacking the problem and exhaust the possibilities, but there was also no access to hints. (Because I acquired free pirated versions of most games, I didn’t have manuals either.)

 

I knew that the game would culminate in Trinity 1945 so I saved this scenario for last. That was the correct move. The final scenario is much larger and the puzzle is fiendish and time-constrained. Playing it felt like being in the movie Groundhog Day, or more appropriately Edge of Tomorrow. Live. Die. Repeat. I died a lot. After at least twenty runs at it (with a few hints), and possibly more (I lose track), I gave up. I know where the necessary items are and how to get them, but I just couldn’t figure out the right sequence and not run out of time. And timing is everything in this scenario of Trinity. I succumbed to reading a walkthrough on the Internet, and it’s quite clear that I would not have had the patience to finish the game. (No, I didn’t finish the scenario with the walkthrough instructions.) I do highly recommend this site for the walkthrough, because it had an external link to The Digital Antiquarian which has some superb articles to read about Trinity.

 

Playing Trinity made me think of the value of simulations in training for difficult missions. Pilots train on simulators. Navy Seals are put through rigorous exercises and challenging scenarios before their actual mission. NASA trains its astronauts extensively. Tom Cruise had the tenacity, with Emily Blunt’s encouragement, to keep going again and again until he got the sequence right and didn’t die. Even a tourist with no special training can, with lots of trial-and-error in a simulation, do what it takes to perhaps prevent World War III? It also made me think about tenacity and perseverance. And when to quit. In this case, I quit Trinity at the right time. I spent enough time to enjoy and appreciate it but didn’t burn away many more hours so I can move on to other interesting brain-tickling activities.