Game #134: The Prisoner (1980)

The Prisoner is based on the TV series of the same name which ran from 1967 to 1968. It stars Patrick McGoohan as a secret agent who has chosen to resign from his job. He is then kidnapped and taken to a village which is really some sort of bizarre prison. His warders demand to know why he resigned and he is constantly trying to escape.

The game was written by David Mullich for the Apple II and published by Edu-Ware. You, like the TV series, play the role of an agent working for a mysterious corporation and you’ve decided to resign. Whether you choose to travel to London or anywhere else in the game you suddenly find yourself abducted. You awaken to find yourself on “The Island”. What ensues is one of the more bizarre games I’ve ever played. You are referred to as # rather than giving any kind of name and you travel from building to building; each hosting a quest or a test of your individuality or freedom. Will you conform or remain independent? The ultimate goal is to escape “The Island”.

In the beginning of the game you are given a resignation code of 417. You are asked to commit it to memory and under no circumstances are you to reveal it to anyone. Throughout the game the computer will constantly try and trick you into typing in this code. This was extremely amusing and at every turn you’re asked to type in that 417 sequence. Once you do, however, the game is over and you’ve lost. The game even fakes a computer crash to DOS and the error is on line 417. Ha ha! It appears you’ve dropped to a DOS prompt but if you type line 417 the game resumes and you discover you were tricked and once again you’ve lost. Pretty original there. The theme of individual identity vs. conformity runs rampant throughout the entire game. I had never seen the TV show and the more I played I began to wonder if there was even really an actual way off of the island. There are a lot of “red herrings” or false trails in this game where you think you’re going down the right path to getting off of “The Island” only to find that you have been tricked or have hit a dead end. Frustratingly so.

In one such example I finally made my way to The Wilds which I believed was the penultimate destination in order to escape “The Island”. I finally found a Train Depot which returned me to the City and to my office where I had resigned and I thought where I could tell them about “The Island”. I was given a choice to speak to a number of authority figures and then asked to submit my fingerprints (you had to hold your hands down on the keyboard – pretty cute). I am finally greeted by my old boss who says; “Well, well. Look who’s returned. We had give you up for lost. Have a seat.” This goes on for a bit and ultimately he leans forward and asks; “Tell us why you resigned. The code”

Ugh!!! If you give him the code you lose and your identity is consumed and “The Island” still wins. If you refuse to give up the code you find yourself right back on “The Island” I was almost ready to quit at that point because I honestly thought that perhaps that WAS the ending and that the point is that you’re never getting off “The Island” but are going to remain trapped in a loop which never ends. The game is bizarre that way. I was also a bit aggravated because it took me a lot of time to get to that spot and a lot of patience to make my way through The Wilds.

The other part of “The Island” where I got completely duped was in The Diner. At first blush when you walk into the building you are given choices of eating 1) Green Stuff 2) Red Stuff 3) Blue Stuff or 4) Exit When you select any of those options the response is Have a Good Meal. However; instead of hitting a numbered response, if you attempt to move around in the diner you discover a secret cloning facility! The doctor in there offers to clone you for 10,000 credits which can then act as a decoy for your escape. Having failed to escape through the Wilds, and realizing I now have to get a loan from the bank to complete this quest, and that I need other items in the game to get that loan, I figured this was the ultimate solution. Wow was I wrong. I did all that you needed to do to secure the 10,000 credits. I paid for the cloning process. The process is completed and an identical copy of myself emerges. It is at that moment that the facility is raided. The guard gives me 3 tries to prove my identity or I will be killed as a spy. No matter what I did I could not prove my identity and I was shot. I awoke back in The Castle. The cloning facility was another dead end. Pursuing that plot took FOREVER and quite literally sucked the life out of me!

Building #2 throughout the game was an odd building. It operates on a language parser and I’ve tried communicating with it throughout the game. You find a very strong and bizarre theme of conformity vs individuality and creativity throughout the entire game. Having spent hours chasing dead ends in the game I resorted to taking a peek at a walkthrough and I am very glad that I did. To ultimately win in this game, you have to go into building #2 and type in The Island is a Computer Game.

Once you do so you receive the following message shown above and finally discover the Truth, which is that you’ve simply been playing a computer game this entire time.

It is a rare occasion indeed that I throw my hands up in the air and resort to a hint. In this case I am glad that I did because I think I could have easily spent several more hours wrestling with this game. It is definitely a unique experience to anything else I’ve played so far in this era. Again, I’ve never seen the TV show but the author of the game definitely gives you a paranoid, oppressive, bizarre experience. If you’re an individual that spent hours on this game and tugged on the various myriad threads and solved this completely on your own then I tip my hat to you.

The irony here is that the ultimate solution is that you were playing a game however rather than feeling like a game it felt more like an “experience”.