“1992: Silverwolf”, 2021-06-03 (; backlinks; similar):
At the address was “a white crumbling turn-of-the-century house overlooking the tiny fishing village of Burtonport”, where women could take a paid holiday that would immerse them in the life of a proper boarding school girl of an earlier time. “There were no electric lights in the place”, one game journalist wrote upon visiting: “the maid who answered the door was surely not of this decade.” The students wore bonnets and period clothes while attending lessons on mathematics, literature, and penmanship; plastic and other modern materials were forbidden; the headmistress was a severe woman in black who enforced strict discipline—stricter, at times, than some of the students might have preferred. “Quite where computers fit into this situation is difficult to understand”, another journalist wrote; and nobody could really put their finger on what the “situation” even was. Were the group “Victorian cultists”? Were they LARPers? Were they con artists preying on emotionally immature women? Were they a game studio with a very unusual front? Or was there, as one embarrassed Irish reporter asked, “almost a gay element to the activities here?” Answers were not then forthcoming. Few are even today.
…Oxford, 1971. 2 years after Stonewall, a wave of student and activist groups are loosely uniting under the mantle of the Gay Liberation Front, accelerating queer and feminist conversations about equal rights and alternatives to hegemonic patriarchy. At women’s college Lady Margaret Hall, one student group bonds over a difference with most of their sisters-in-arms: they reject the crass, drug-fueled and sex-fueled decadence of the 1960s, even while admitting it “left openings for a new feminist consciousness”, as one member would later write: “We welcome [the rock culture of the sixties] as we would welcome typhoid in the enemy’s water supply. But we do not drink it ourselves.” Out of this group would arise several radical separatist movements with overlapping membership, including a religious one called Lux Madriana—worshiping a female god with rituals supposedly passed down from a “magical matriarchal community” in a distant past—and an elaborately fleshed-out otherworld called Aristasia. Much like the rich fantasy worlds created by Tolkien or the Brontë sisters, Aristasia became an ever-growing obsession for its creators, with its own customs, calendar, literature, and history, to the extent that some of the worldbuilders eventually dropped out of university to attend their own unofficial Aristasian school instead. In Aristasia there were 2 genders, both female (assertive brunettes and demure blondes); the decadent modern world was known as The Pit; and the word for person was not man but maid [cf. Class S/Takarazuka Revue].
Eventually some number of this group took up residence in the remote coastal house in Burtonport, which would become the stage for their next decade of inventing new realities. At first they styled themselves a community of “Rhennish” folk, the last descendants of a five-thousand-year-old matriarchal culture, and called themselves the “Silver Sisterhood.” But their plans to live off the land fell through, and after a few seasons it seemed a quite different group was occupying the house, now called St. Bride’s School. St. Bride’s billed itself as something between a real school and a holiday retreat, posting ads for week-long terms where students would “spend 24 hours a day living in a different time, living a different life.” The staff and students observed a strict hierarchy, with obedient students appointed prefects to keep the others in line, and prefects reporting in turn to teachers: “Some maids like to tell others what to do”, as a visitor summarized the philosophy during the Silver Sisterhood days, “and some maids like to be told what to do.” Both the Sisterhood and St. Bride’s attracted copious media attention—which seems likely to have been deliberately sought out—and from news clips it’s clear at least some residents of both groups were the same people, though going by different names and speaking with changed accents. It was the first of many transformations.
…One of these was a title called Silverwolf, which was to be released alongside an original comic by Langridge. It was based on a serialized fantasy story appearing in a lesbian periodical called Artemis, which the St. Bride’s crew were also distributing under yet different aliases. The stories were credited to “Laeretta Krenne-Genovene with illustrations by Michele Dennis”; one or both of these people may, or may not, have been Langridge. The stories tapped into the deep well of Aristasian mythology, and the recap at the start of one episode gives a sense of their flavor:
Modern English schoolgirl Petra Stone is a reincarnation of the matriarchal warrior princess Mayanna. The princess and the schoolgirl exist as 2 independent personalities. She has been taken back into ancient matriarchal Britain by an Amazon group: Rahiyana, the leader; Thunder, a 7-foot powerhouse; Whirlwind, the teen tornado and a shape-shifting imp called Uisce. But the evil patriarchal Lord Fear is determined to kill Petra and has sent in pursuit of the group a powerful and mysterious band known only as the Swarm.
In the text adventure based on the stories, you play as Petra’s 4 Amazon companions, switching between them on a quest to help the reincarnated princess gain the power to become Silverwolf. The game is split into 2 parts which can be played in either order: they may originally have come on 2 sides of the same cassette tape. In one part you play as Rahiyana and Whirlwind, trying to escort Petra to the Holy Mountain where she can complete the ritual to transform into Silverwolf; in the other, you play Thunder and Uisce trying to retrieve the enchanted sword that Silverwolf will wield. Each of the 4 Amazon women has their own special power, and you must switch between them using commands like BECOME WHIRLWIND to complete the game. Transformation is in fact a recurring motif: Uisce can turn into any creature she sees by typing TURN INTO, and this includes other people—in some sequences you’ll need to BECOME UISCE and then TURN INTO THUNDER to complete a puzzle. To activate Rahiyana’s archery skills, the player needs to summon the power of Diana into her body by typing the phrase HAYA DYANA. The game, like its creators, is obsessed with becoming other people, or allowing them to become you…In one puzzle sequence, you must make use of Uisce’s shape-shifting to reach a series of progressively more unlikely areas. Spotting a bullfrog in the rushes of a lake, you can transform into it to leap to a lily pad. From the lily pad you can see a dragonfly, which you can in turn become to fly to a hidden beach. On the beach is a sand-castle, and the dragonfly is small enough to see that it’s a fortress home for a band of fairies. Becoming a fairy lets you enter the castle and recover a buried key.
…The group’s former publisher suspects their primary motive was always financial: “I think, basically, St Bride’s were in business: they were doing it on a commercial basis, however un-commercial they may have looked!” But some of the school’s pupils in later years would come to characterize the group as dangerously earnest, with one describing it as a cult.
“There was something sinister at the heart of it”, she wrote: “The founder was a remarkable person but was leading a fantasy life—we were living in someone else’s fantasy.” While much about the Games Mistresses would shift across their decades of fronts and personas, disconnection from the everyday world was a constant theme. “We really, truly are not living in the same place as you”, oneonce wrote; “I don’t like the modern world, and I don’t live in it”, Scarlett has said. “We don’t concern ourselves with the present at all. We live in a little world inside our house… it’s a world apart, really, where we are.” Perhaps from this perspective, an interest in the transporting power of games, electronic or otherwise, becomes less difficult to understand.
