The Fool's Errand

[Chris L]

Some years ago it came out that Stephen Sondheim occasionally played games on his Macintosh. He was a fan of game designer Cliff Johnson, who created puzzle games structured as quests. The best known of these, and the one to which Sondheim was apparently addicted, was The Fool's Errand, which is long out of print. Fortunately, Johnson currently makes the game available for free on his website, where he also sells the sequel, The Fool and His Money.

If you'd like to play The Fool's Errand, click on this link and look for the "Dowload Game" link in the list. Click on it and you'll see links for both Macintosh and Windows. Click on the name of the computer that you're using and you'll go to a page telling you how to install it. The instructions are fairly clear and I'm not going to attempt to explain them further, but you should eventually wind up with a tiny little Macintosh window running in the middle of your widescreen monitor. Johnson will tell you how to load the Fool's Errand "disk" (actually a file) and run games off of it. (It also has a couple of other games by Johnson on it.

The Fool's Errand is a series of often daunting puzzles that shouldn't be taken in order. As you solve each one they give you a piece of a larger puzzle. This was how Stephen Sondheim was procrastinating while writing Assassins and Passion. May you enjoy procrastinating with it yourself.

[Chris L]

Fool's Errand screenshot:

[KathyB]

I bought this game when it first came out and I believe I have the original floppies somewhere.    I played it on my Mac SE. I spent a LONG time figuring everything out. The one tip I have is to print the final story out (if that's still possible, under emulation). I found it tremendously helpful to be able to flip back and forth between pages and draw out relationships between things on the paper. Of course this was 30 years ago and nobody writes anything down any more. 

[Vera Charles]

I bought this game when it first came out and I believe I have the original floppies somewhere. 

Was that the era when floppies were actually floppy?

[Chris L]

I bought this game when it first came out and I believe I have the original floppies somewhere. 

Was that the era when floppies were actually floppy?

Mac floppies were never floppy.