Trust and Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot (1987) by Chris Crawford
Status unclearYear: 1987 · Developer/Publisher: Mindscape · Designer: Chris Crawford · Platform: Macintosh · Theme: Unique, Science Fiction
Calling something “the world’s first narrative game” is the kind of claim that invites skepticism, and Siboot mostly earns it anyway. Chris Crawford, already known for the political simulation Balance of Power, built a game here that has almost nothing in common with the strategy genre it gets filed under. There’s no map to conquer and no army to build. What there is instead is a cast of alien characters, spread across several planets, each one keeping their own private opinion of you.
The actual mechanic underneath all that is a nightly round of “mental combat” that reduces, mechanically, to repeated rock/paper/scissors. That sounds almost insultingly simple written out plainly, and it would be, if the game didn’t spend the daylight hours before each round making the outcome depend entirely on information you’ve traded with other characters. An iconic language lets you offer deals, make promises, express emotion, or just make small talk, and every one of those exchanges quietly updates how much each character trusts you.
That trust mechanic is the whole game, and it’s genuinely unforgiving about it. You can’t win consistently without eventually giving up information about your allies, but overuse that tactic, or fail to apologize when someone finds out you burned them, and you’ll run out of people willing to talk to you at all. Winning Siboot means constantly weighing a short-term informational advantage against the long-term cost of being known as untrustworthy, which is a strange thing to say about a game whose combat system is nominally rock/paper/scissors.
The gameworld itself is built to support that social focus rather than distract from it. Several planets, each populated by a distinct alien race, give the trading and diplomacy layer room to actually matter, since your reputation with one group of characters doesn’t automatically transfer cleanly to another. It’s a deliberately small-scale, character-dense structure compared to the sprawling star-map strategy games that dominated the genre at the time, and that scale is precisely what lets the trust mechanic carry the entire experience instead of getting buried under territory management.
None of that comes easy. Siboot ships with a steep learning curve and, in its original freeware release, no printed manual at all; a PDF scan of the original documentation exists specifically to fill that gap. It’s also, by its own designer’s account, a first attempt at something Crawford would keep chasing for the rest of his career: realistic modeling of how people actually deal with each other, an idea that eventually grew into his long-running Erasmatazz project. Whether Siboot fully succeeds at that ambition or just points convincingly in its direction is a question the game itself never quite settles, and it’s better left open than forced into a tidy verdict.
How to run it today
The Macintosh version is the one worth tracking down; a DOS port exists but was left incomplete and buggy. Classic Mac emulation through an environment like Mini vMac or Basilisk II handles the original release without much friction once you have a working system image.
Compatibility: Macintosh (via classic Mac emulation) · Controls: Mouse-driven, icon-based command language · Setup difficulty: Medium
Legal status
Chris Crawford made Siboot downloadable as freeware directly from his own website at one point, and later released source code for several of his older titles. Whether that channel remains actively maintained today isn’t something this page can confirm with certainty, so status here is treated as unclear rather than settled either way.
If you liked this, try
Balance of Power (1990 edition), Crawford’s own earlier political simulation, shares the same designer’s fascination with realistic, character-driven systems over conventional combat. Racter and Alter Ego: Male round out a similar niche of unusual, conversation- or personality-driven software from the same general era.
Frequently asked questions
What makes Siboot different from a typical strategy game?
Its core loop is built around trading information with alien characters through an iconic language, then using what you learn to win nightly rounds of rock/paper/scissors-style combat. Success depends on managing how much other characters trust you, not on unit counts or resource stockpiles.
Is there a manual for Siboot?
A PDF manual exists, scanned from the original printed documentation after Chris Crawford made the game available for download without one. It's the recommended starting point given how steep the learning curve is.
What platform was Siboot originally built for?
Macintosh. That's still the recommended version to play, since it received the primary development attention from Chris Crawford.
Who created Trust and Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot?
Chris Crawford designed it, the same creator behind the political simulation Balance of Power, with Mindscape as the original publisher.
Is Siboot considered Chris Crawford's best game?
That's a matter of taste rather than a settled ranking, but it's widely regarded among his most distinctive work, and Crawford himself has described it as his first serious attempt at realistic human-interaction modeling in games.