Thread by @BeleG_AG

This is a story about the infamous cat hair moustache puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 that allegedly "killed" adventure games in 1999. A story with full of twists and turns, heroes and villains!

#gamedev #pointandclick #sierra #adventure #adventuregame

You all know the puzzle, it's got its own Wikipedia article (yeah). In the internet echo chamber it's almost mandatory for anyone discussing AGs to refer to it at some point in their argument, usually accompanied by a term like "moon logic" or thereabouts en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_…

I'll break down the steps in the puzzle later but if you can't wait you can see it for yourself in this video (helpfully introduced as the "worst puzzle in adventure game history")

It's not a good puzzle, we'll get to that, but why do people call it the "worst in history"? There are certainly worse puzzles out there. Like MUCH worse. Before and after GK3. More illogical, less signposted, worse implemented. In more famous games too.

When I think of bad puzzles the whole King's Quest series jumps to mind (with murderous intent) but I leave you with my personal favourite, expertly narrated by @richardcobbett. So why did the cat hair puzzle enter the collective memory as the worst?

Answering that question requires us to jump back to a year after the game's release, when in Sep 2000 the cat hair puzzle was the centrepiece of Erik @wolpaw's dramatically titled article "Death of Adventure Games". oldmanmurray.com/features/77.ht…

The article gives a detailed account of the puzzle and uses it as a premise to blame adventure games for 'killing themselves' (i.e. losing commercial relevance) as a direct result of their ridiculous gameplay.

It was published in Walpaw's Old Man Murray website. It may not sound like much today but in the late 90s every self-respecting hipster in game development read OMM religiously which made the often lambasting opinions of its authors highly influential in the industry.

Wolpaw was (is) a talented writer who later became a successful developer in his own right, working on such reputable franchises as Psychonauts, Half-Life or Portal. He clearly understood the design language of action games and the role narrative plays in them.

What Wolpaw wasn't was an adventure game player. By his own admission he had no interest in the genre and had never played games like Monkey Island, DOTT, Full Throttle or Grim Fandango (he had in fact lied about having played GF when he applied to work for @timoflegend)

Despite Wolpaw's disinterest in the genre, his opinion resonated with an industry that had already decided that AGs were toxic stock. The article shot at a dead body though. By 2000 the curtains had already closed for a genre that wasn't making as much money as it used to.

Death of Adventure Games was a response to another article published by Gamecenter, "Dead and Buried", which blamed the advent of FPS games and the rise in graphics expectations caused by Myst for the difficulties and decline in popularity of the genre. web.archive.org/web/2000101904…

Dead and Buried was a short article, competently written but with no flourish. An insightful take on the Death confirmed by those who lived through those times in AG development (see e.g. @allowe's take on the Death). But history has largely forgotten it. allowe.com/al/articles/de…

History remembers Wolpaw's take though. His article features in the required reading of many university degrees and is referenced in almost every academic paper that talks about adventure games. Even if you think you had not read it, you read it through others.

Why does history work that way? Perhaps because Wolpaw's was a controversial take. VERY controversial.

Such an influential article must be pretty insightful and well researched, right? Well... it really isn't. It's full of offensive remarks and the kind of derogatory comments about Jane Jensen's intelligence and culture (and that of AG fans) you'd expect from a school bully.

Take as an example the entire third page of the article, which does more for airing the author's complexes at the time than for setting out the shortcomings of the puzzle.

Maybe I'm failing to appreciate the sarcastic tone and humour of OMM, or Wolpaw's enfant terrible persona at the time. It's still not a nice read, and it does not make any sort of valuable contribution to the debate on adventure game design.

Nevertheless that article has played a major role in crystallising the idea that AGs are an inherently flawed genre, and the GK3 association is directly responsible for keeping many AG fans from even firing up that game.

So Wolpaw fits the bill as the adventure-killing villain pretty well, doesn't he? Well... no. The truth is that OMM was a comedy website first, and Wolpaw has no responsibility for how Death of Adventure Games has been used by scholars, press and fans after its publication.

The snarky tone of OMM helped Wolpaw gain some notoriety and eventually a job in the industry, where he made a significant contribution as a writer. Without Death of Adventure Games we may not have enjoyed Portal 1 and 2 as much as we did. I for one am ok with that.

I only bring up the article for its role in establishing the notion that this puzzle was the worst ever designed and for its comments about Jane Jensen. Because this is the first of our TWISTS, did legendary designer Jane Jensen design this puzzle at all?

In a 2007 interview, GK3 programmer Scott Bilas revealed that the team had scrapped one of Jensen's planned puzzles and replaced it with the infamous cat hair puzzle, which was designed by... the game's producer! adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site…

If Wolpaw was not our villain, maybe we just found him! Meet evil producer Steven Hill, bane of adventure games. I'll give you some time to grab a few pitchforks while I continue the story.

That's right, we mentioned that in the late 90s adventure games were in trouble. Cancellations were happening left and right, and the few games that made it to release had to face significant pressures and constraints.

GK3 was no different, the project was unpopular with management, late and overbudget. It was only kept in production because too much had already been spent on it and Sierra was slow to figure out what to replace it with in the pipeline.

So in this high-pressure environment, technical challenges and rushed last minute decisions resulted in the unfortunate inclusion of a poorly conceived puzzle which the team "hated". It was not included by design but as a patch.

In case it's not clear we should certainly not blame Hill, who was a substitute producer with some programming credits but no design experience who only helped bring a threatened project over the finish line. It's more than most could say at the time.

So we then have to conclude that the poster child for terrible adventure game puzzles was just an accident. Hey, at least this saves the honour of our hero, Jane Jensen!

...OR DOES IT?

If a puzzle was cut then a puzzle existed, so... what was that puzzle? Well, thanks to the work of GK enthusiast (and fabulous researcher) Bonny Ploeg, and with confirmation from GK3 Assistant Designer Adam D. Bormann, we have a pretty good idea. web.archive.org/web/2010122823…

The original puzzle chain was essentially the same, with the difference that the black fibres used for the moustache did not come from a cat but from a black rug, out of reach. A crow had stolen some of those fibres and kept them on its nest, up on a tree in RLC.

You had to attach a spray gun left by the Abbé to a hose that would be outside the Museum, then use the water to knock down the nest and get the black fibres. There was some problem with getting the hose to work, so the idea had to be scrapped.

The truth is that, all other elements of the puzzle chain remaining equal, this doesn't change very much (animal cruelty included). We may have today called it the rug moustache puzzle (which admittedly doesn't roll off the tongue the same way).

The whole thing would have been a bit less wacky, but it's not like putting bird-chewed rug fibres on your lip would be that much more sanitary than cat hair. And if the rest of the puzzle was the same...

...wait... so that means... Jane actually DID IT! She has been our villain all along! Even before that Gabriel Knight 20th Anniversary Remake! Her and her Pär Lagerkvist books had us fooled!

Because the puzzle IS cuckoo. There's no defence possible. Right? Well... what makes a puzzle bad?

You can certainly argue that it's tonally out of place. No argument there. It's a Sam & Max puzzle in a Gabriel Knight game. And that is plain wrong. But its reputation is that it's so cuckoo that no one in their right mind could figure it out. Is that right?

To get the bike you need a passport from someone who hasn't rented yet, i.e. Mosely or Baza. You cannot access Baza in this timeblock and 'Passport' is your only topic of conversation with Mosely, so the need to impersonate Mosely is apparent from the get go.

All you can do with Mosely is get him to leave his room. When you do, if you wait downstairs, you'll see him grab a candy, so that candy you took must have something to do with it.

Look at Mosely while he's on the corridor and Gabriel will tell you that he needs to get him to stop so he can do something. Connect the two and you got yourself Mosely's passport. Easy. You'll surely have stolen his jacket from his room too, it'll come in handy.

This part of the puzzle until you get the passport is hard to criticise. It's just a good puzzle, it's well signposted, uses the 3D space and rewards your patience and observation. It also makes you feel sneaky and mean, well on brand for Gabriel.

Things get messy now. All your clues now are that you don't look like Mosely. Grab the hat and it'll tell you it's something Mosely would wear. It's not very logical but it's a clue. Combine it with the passport and it tells you your outfit needs more work.

You'll now be working through process of elimination (not great). There's NOTHING to do in this timeblock except figuring out what's up with the cat, because Gabe REALLY wants to get some hair from it. He emphatically tells you that. Why? No idea.

How to get the hair is not difficult to figure out. The Abbé has left a squirt bottle you can use with the cat to make it squeeze through a tight hole so it won't take leaps of logic to try to use the sticky tape there. Congrats, you have cat hair now. Jerk.

Look at the hair and Gabriel outright TELLS YOU he wants to use it as a moustache but needs something to stick it to his face. It's absurd but it doesn't take a genius to figure out what he's trying to do, or to try the maple syrup.

Combine the moustache and the hat and he'll tell you he needs one more thing that'll say "Mosely" all over. If you looked at his jacket you'll have heard the exact same thing. Again, not logical but well signposted, so not hard.

With a full disguise, Gabe's feedback is that he's ready to go. At this point you're probably thinking that the disguise is hiding your face more than making you look like Mosely. And that would at least makes some sense. Moving on.

Try the disguise on the storekeeper and... Gabriel thinks he needs to do something about the face on the passport to match the disguise. This is your cue for painting the famous moustache on the passport. It's again a matter of doing what Gabriel wants to do.

What matters is that you've solved the puzzle and can continue your adventure. Did it make sense? Hell no! Was it hard to figure out? Well, Gabriel has told you what to do almost every step of the way, all you had to was follow his demented advice.

See, this puzzle was never designed to be solved in one sitting but one step at a time, following the signposting. Presenting the absurd solution and asking whether you would figure it out is simply not the right question.

Look, there's no denying that this puzzle was uninspired and out of place, but it was sufficiently well implemented to allow players to move past it. That's more than you can say for a good pile of puzzles from 80s and 90s adventures.

It is also one of dozens of puzzle chains in this game. One. Of dozens.

We AG fans have a tendency to be utterly ruthless with adventures where a single puzzle does not meet our high and mighty expectations. @grumpygamer put it neatly when reminded for the nth time about the famous monkey wrench puzzle.

https://twitter.com/grumpygamer/status/1528759734093897731?s=20&t=sb4DVrqiKE3Ei_E68c8Atw

It may be our love for storytelling, but we also tend to make heroes out of our favourite designers, and lose all objectivity when we discuss their games. You probably didn't flinch when I called Jensen a "legendary designer". We're setting them up to disappoint us.

If there is a moral to this story is that we don't need heroes or villains. We just need to understand how difficult it is to make the games we love, and to be fair with those who make them.

These are tremendously complex games, and designing the kind of puzzles we enjoy in them is really hard. A sub-par puzzle here or there shouldn't taint a whole game. Let alone a whole game genre.

I don't want to finish this thread without wholeheartedly recommending everyone who was put off by this game's reputation to give it a go. GK3 is, warts and all, one of the BEST adventure games ever designed.

Get over the cat puzzle, it's 10min of gameplay (even less now you've read this) in a long and complex detective adventure with an intricate plot, great focus on exploration and observation, rich context-sensitive UI and a cool timeblock-based narrative structure.

It's not just the famous Le Serpent Rouge puzzle chain (which is brilliant), the game contains a number of highly immersive detective mechanics that put the player on the driving seat in unravelling the plot.

You will be chasing and eavesdropping on suspects, collecting and collating physical evidence, conducting research... Few detective-themed AGs achieve this level of immersion. You should try it out!