I just heard this news earlier today through an email. It seems Disch didn’t even rate a newspaper obituary. During the late 70′s and 80′s he was quite well-respected as an up-and-coming serious science fiction author, but then he sort of lost the plot and faded into obscurity. Sadly, it seems his problems were not just professional but also personal.

Re: Amnesia: I believe the game was something of a bitter experience for Disch. He had had high hopes for it, but was jolted by the poor sales and rather negative reviews it garnered. His response was to — much as I hate to speak ill of the dead — rather petulently blame the failure on his audience: “trying to impose over this structure a dramatic conception other than puzzle was apparently too much for the audience,” he said in an interview in 1990. There may have been some audience disconnect there, of course, and it certainly didn’t help that Amnesia was released in 1986 when all-text games outside of Infocom had virtually disappeared, but the big problem was that Amnesia was just not a very good game. It was huge and ambitious and fascinating, but virtually unplayable, featuring just about every annoying aspect of old-school IF to the nth degree. Too bad, as the prose was quite good and there were some really neat ideas lurking in there.

Amnesia is available on Home of the Underdogs in a version you can run right from the Windows command prompt. http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?id=53. All the docs (which you NEED) are also up there.

Very nicely done memorial. I’ll miss his cantankerous blog a lot. And some of the bleak little poems he wrote in the last couple years are excellent. I hope someone archived his LJ site (hint): tomsdisch@livejournal.com.

Bruce

uh, tomsdisch.livejournal.com.

I must be smoking crack today.

Bruce

FAG!

The sample transcript (not of part of the game, an imaginary one like Infocom’s) in Amnesia is on my personal list of Best Transcripts Ever.

Oh man. I didn’t even know of Disch’s suicide until I learned of the wonderful world of abandonware and immediately tried searching for Amnesia yesterday.

I first played this game when it came out in 1986; I was twelve. My mother was a little annoyed with me for picking out an all-text game for our whiz-bang new Apple IIc, with its (her words) “amazing graphics capability.” She’ll never know how influential that game was on me, or how many Disch books I read and re-read from the library during my young English major days. The game’s text was the first prose I ever NOTICED; it was careful, mysterious, beautiful. There’s a passage I wrote down then and still have . . . you go to meet someone at Grand Central Station but end up wandering off in a haze of memories and end up standing near a bridge at dusk. “In the other direction from the bridge,” Disch wrote, “the sunset has tinted wisps of high cirrus clouds to a delicate shrimp-pink.” Something in that moved me, as did the descriptions of other incidents, like playing at a piano bar all night, finding a long-lost girlfriend while sketching portraits for money at a park, or even getting killed by thugs when you open the wrong door in the abandoned tenement apartment you sometimes call home.

Jimmy Maher is right about the playability of the game, though. My IIc still works (!) and I last fired it up for Amnesia 3-4 years ago. “[F]eaturing just about every annoying aspect of old-school IF to the nth degree” indeed! Jeez, every time you use the subway, you have to wait as your character makes his way down the stairs, dot by dot . . . . The scoring system never made sense, either, and I still have unresolved questions about aspects of the plot that maybe I missed because I didn’t know how to find a certain character or ask a particular question.

To this day, however, I cannot think about Manhattan without remembering my “visit” there via Amnesia; I’m probably the only person who watches “Sex and the City” and mentally goes back to that grey-and-white folding map, trying to picture where the locations fit there. If I ever go, I’m taking it with me.

I have just got this game on ebay for the Apple IIe, paid $30 for it. Haven’t got an Apple IIe, but do still have my Commodore 64 and floppy and four 20 year old C64 disks that still work(!) Somewhere in time, I lost the documentation and box, and I know the game is so detailed, you cannot complete it without said documentation, so bought the Apple IIe version just for all the paperwork!

I didn’t know what happened to the author, and way back when I thought it very brave to go against Infocom, so at sometime in the past he had steel in his belly! I don’t know if Infocom would have accepted it for their label, but if they had I cannot believe the game wouldn’t have been a huge hit! As it was, any publisher with one title was not going to get far, even in the 80′s.

At the weekend I will start playing Amnesia again, for the first time in 20 odd years. That, in it’s way, is the best thing I can do to honour this man, a man who should have been given more respect back in the 80′s and again just a few months ago….