Bletchley Park, 1942. A component from the Bombe machine, used to decode intercepted German messages, has gone missing. One of the cryptographers is w

New interactive story: The Intercept

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2021-06-30 06:30:07

Bletchley Park, 1942. A component from the Bombe machine, used to decode intercepted German messages, has gone missing. One of the cryptographers is waiting to be interviewed, under direst suspicion. Is he stupid enough to have attempted treason? Or is he clever enough to get away?

Available now is a new short interactive story, The Intercept. It’s a culmination of several different ideas, systems and projects that I’ve had floating around for a while. It’s playable online, and also downloadable as an ebook for Kindle devices, using the new inklewriter to ebook conversion we just announced over at inkle. (If you’ve no idea what that means, please take a look at inkle‘s own site).

The first thing about The Intercept is the setting – Bletchley Park. This is a stately home in England that was used by the military for code-breaking during WWII. They recruited a team of brilliant, awkward scientists using all manner of baroque tests and competitions (a crossword in the Daily Telegraph was used at point) and here, locked away from the War, this group cracked the “uncrackable” Enigma code and developed the world’s first computer (if you don’t count Babbage’s calculating machine).

This isn’t the first time Bletchley’s appeared in interactive fiction – there’s an Enigma breaking sequence in Graham Nelson’s epic Jigsaw – and it’s a great section, even if it does require the player to actually decode an Engima message. The Intercept is somewhat lower tech – it’s a play-by-choices, and the code-breaking is strictly a metaphor at play, rather than an actual challenge.

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