Marienbad

Marienbad was a 1962 mathematical puzzle computer game developed and published by Witold Podgórski for the Odra 1003. Inspired by the display of a variant of the game Nim, named after the 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année dernière à Marienbad), Podgórski programmed the game for the in-development 1003 mainframe, released in 1963. Elwro did not produce or advertise the game, and it was not widespread, though it was played at the Military University of Technology. The game fell into obscurity, and later became lost with no pictures or documentation surviving to recreate it in its original form. Nevertheless is considered possibly the first Polish video game, and an ancestor of the modern Polish video gaming industry.
==History==
===Conception===
Elwro was a Polish company, established in 1959, that designed and manufactured mainframe computers and microcomputers based in Wrocław, Poland. Its first release was the Odra 1001 mainframe in 1960, followed by the Odra 1002 in 1962 and the Odra 1003 in 1963. Witold Podgórski was a recent graduate of the Wrocław University of Technology, having majored in electronics and specialised in mathematical machines. Having first heard about the existence of "electronic brains" in 1955, he embarked on 5 years of study toward the automation of "digital machines"; he completed his masters thesis at Elwro, where he was employed on October 10, 1961, working with the Odra 1001. He discovered a phenomenon regarding the machine's memory that allowed content to be saved, thus paving the way for the Odra 1003. An electronics engineer by education, Podgórski, while working for Elwro in 1961, discovered the game while reading an issue in the weekly magazine Przekrój, of which he was a faithful reader. The magazine described a two-player game where players remove any number of items from one of four rows, with the player holding the last item losing. Przekrój named this variant of Nim as "Marienbad", after the 1960 French film Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année dernière à Marienbad), in which characters frequently play these mathematical duels. (This film was known within Poland). Podgórski became inspired by the use of the game Nim in the film after reading about its principles.
===Design===
While sitting through a 2-3 hour dull lecture for his obligatory Studium Wojskowym (Military Study) class, he decided to decipher the Marienbad algorithm, and save it to a binary system which could be understood by computers. Podgórski would later assert that the algorithm was extremely simple to implement into a computer and could be expressed in two words, adding that if nobody was interested in it he would take it to the grave. He program the game for the first prototype of the Odra 1003, then in development, and later to be installed in the Board of the Topographic General Staff of the Polish Army in Wroclaw. The game, intended for logical duels, was developed solely by Podgórski by creating the algorithm, writing a list of instructions, and manually setting the state of each memory cell. He taught Odra to play the game by creating a list of orders of the machine (which was located on several sheets printed to the size of a small postcard) and manually setting the status of each memory cell on the control panel keys. He designed the game to be unbeatable, if the human player made a single mistake, the computer would win. The only way in which the machine communicated with the player was via a telegraphic printing device on which Odra presented the state of the game and current layout of the cards. On its maximum settings, the game could handle eight thousand rows, which equalled almost a trillion matches in every row, and total of one thousand cubic kilometers of matches. It only required three people to lay out the paper. This was inhibitive however, due to a response time of over an hour. While employees in the Elwro factory knew that the result of the game was predetermined, many volunteered to play it. They could not beat the standard version of Marienbad (sixteen matches - one, three, five and seven - in four rows), let alone the game on higher settings.
===Aftermath===
At this time, Podgórski became a student at the Wojskową Akademię Techniczną (Military University of Technology), and set up a version of the game that was mediated by the university, with an omnipotent operator between the player and the computer. It was able to be played by any student, but only through an operator., who received the intended input from the player and using banana plugs they passed the information to the computer. The machine did what the operator ordered, and won or lost based on how well the operator knew the algorithm. The operators would win and then actively discourage the players from participating, due to the machine knowing an algorithm they could not beat. In doing this, the university authorities aimed to forcibly remove the "nasty habit of harassing computers for logic games", which they viewed should only be used for serious military purposes. Under these conditions, it became necessary to play the game only in the late evenings, and underwent secret meetings un front of the massive computer.
In later years, variants of Marienbad were the second most popular type of computer game present on Polish computers after noughts and crosses. This is due to it being a relatively simple game to program. Wojciech Pijanowski, who would be known throughout Poland as the two-decade long host of Wheel of Fortune from the 1970s, would suggest to Polish Television a game show where players verse the NPC in Nim on a Momik 8b minicomputer. Meanwhile, Podgórski continued to work for Elwro, co-creating Odra computers, though he did not stop working on games. After colleagues brought a variant of the mancala board game from Egypt, he became inspired to adapt it to the computer. This time he did not want to create an unbeatable game, but adjust the difficulty level based on the rival's ability to create a fun experience regardless of the player's expertise.
Polish Bytes asserts that as the only copy of the Odra 1003 is kept at the Museum of Technology in Warsaw in an inactive state, only memories remain of this game, and that we'll never be able to see it with our own eyes again.
==Gameplay==
In Nim, players take turns removing at least one object from a set of objects, traditionally matchsticks, with the goal of either being or not being the player who removes the last object; gameplay options can be modeled mathematically. In Marienbad, four rows of matches were generated, with either one, three, five or seven matches within each row. The side that is left with the last match loses. The computer screen showed the player the current layout of matches. The game was a 2 player human-vs.-NPC title, with the player alternating with artificial intelligence. Regardless of who started the game, the computer always won due to turning out to be invincible. The only person who could beat was the author himself.
On its maximum settings, the game consisted of 8,000 rows containing up to 1 trillion matches, requiring an hour for the computer to choose their next move. The game did not support graphics as the Odra 1003 did not have a screen. Instead, the game was played via a teletypewriter and card perforator, on which the machine printed the results.
==Legacy==
Like many games in the early history of video games, Marienbad was not spread far beyond the initial location. Elwro declined to publish or advertise the game, and the title was mostly forgotten. Tomiga asserts that this is because the game was likely made 'after hours'. The game did spread beyond the Elwro factory, however; a copy of the game was on an Odra 1003 installed at the Military University of Technology where members could take on the challenge of defeating the computer, though the game was not well received by the university heads. Despite knowing that Podgórski coded the game to always beat the player, he recalled many who spent many hours with the trying to decipher the algorithm or even win. No recreations of the game have been made for more modern computers, and there are no known photos or documentation for how the game was played or created. While the Odra was once considered the apex of Polish technology, it soon became a relic as it was replaced by newer, more advanced hardware, which also rendered the game obsolete. The paper Gry komputerowe jako dziedzictwo kulturowe notes that the game can only be written about in the past tense as the original elements have not been preserved, adding that while the Marienbad algorithm can be recreated in a new programming environment, reconstruction of the transistors on a transistor-based computer would be much more difficult. Speaking about the larger problems of gaming consoles becoming useless over time, the paper further compared the challenges of playing this title in the modern era to playing Super Mario Bros. on the originally intended equipment in 50 years. Similar to other pioneering early games such as Tennis for Two (1958) or Maze War (1973), Marienbad was created within a government institution, because at the time these extremely expensive devices would have only been seen as having military strategic importance. Empik felt "computer game" would be a somewhat exaggerated term to describe Marienbad. Polskie Gry argues that while this is the first video game, Puszka Pandory is the first to be based on an original idea rather than an adaption of a physical game.
Marienbad is considered possibly the first Polish video game, developed almost twenty years before later candidates OiX (1984), Gąsienica (1985), and Puszka Pandory (1986), and well before the first well-known Polish game Tajemnica Statuetki (1993). Lodz game historian Bartek Kluska made this assertion in his foundational book on the Polish video gaming industry Polish Bytes; his research uncovered the game that was 24 years older than the game that previously held the title. Nevertheless, Kluska acknowledges that even before then, "Kółko i krzyżyk", a version of tic-tac-toe written by Department of Mathematical Apparatus programmer Bogdan Miś in 1960 for the XYZ computer, using a chess-sized grid. The book also explains that what could be considered the first tech demo came from the XYZ computer too: when a TV crew came to film a piece aboutt he first computer, the enginneers programmed it to display a dog squirting a sapling on the oscilloscope. Gry komputerowe jako dziedzictwo kulturowe asserts that one importance of the title is due to it being easy to forget that some of the earliest video gaming artefacts did not come from the United States. Computerswait wrote that this first attempt at creating a Polish computer game went unnoticed.
Cichy Fragles noted that the game only had playability at the time due to players accepting the gameplay of enter data using perforated cards, noting that such a game would not have the game appeal in the modern era. The paper Is Every Indie Game Independent? Towards the Concept of Independent Game suggests that despite the lack of a dedicated video gaming industry at the time, the title could be referred to as "independent", however calling it "indie" would be an anachronism; the paper also referred to it as "self-published". The first computer games were created at universities and research establishments as experiments that were never intended for any distribution, and Marienbad is a prime example of this trend; this predates the home-made game creation phase by many years. Gry Online noted that despite its obscurity, it should be considered the ancestor of the modern Polish video gaming industry. The 2018 Ars Independent Festival held an exhibition entitled "From Marienbad to Novigrad", which explored the history of the Polish video gaming industry from Marienbad to The Witcher 3.
==Trivia==
*Marienbad is the first video game in history to be developed outside of the United States.
==Gallery==