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This web port of Cliff Johnson’s puzzle game needs a mouse and a screen at least 800 pixels wide. Please visit on a desktop or laptop computer.
In 2012, nearly a decade after it was announced, Cliff Johnson released The Fool and His Money — a puzzle game that followed up his late ‘80s classic The Fool’s Errand for the Macintosh.
I anticipated the release of this game for years, but at times it seemed doomed to never ship. Cliff wrote in his newsletter of myriad catastrophic events that seemed to conspire against the game’s development: snowstorms, super flu, plagues of locusts (not really).
I preordered at the earliest opportunity (achieving culty-sounding “True Believer” status) and waited another year. But finally, it was released!
The thing is: Cliff’s games can be brutally difficult— not unfairly so, there is always some underlying system that can be unraveled if you work at it for long enough — but not the kind of games that can be breezed through in a weekend, or a week, or even a month. In my extreme case: I first played the Fool’s Errand in the early ‘90s on a Mac SE and finished it in 2010 on Mini vMac. It took me decades.
So it was unfortunate that Cliff’s long-awaited game landed in 2012. I spent some weeks playing it, got stuck, got busy transitioning to a new job, got distracted with Dwarf Fortress. Time passed. I chipped away at it from time to time, but ultimately stalled. For years.
At some point, when I returned to the game I began to get the dreaded “This application needs to be updated by the developer” deprecation warnings as Apple moved to drop 32-bit support. The writing was on the wall. Eventually the game would no longer run.
In the year 2026, I still aspire to finish this damn game, so I ended up porting the original Adobe Director game content to the web.
I’ve made every effort to contact Cliff about this project, but I haven’t been able to reach him. If you know how to reach Cliff — or ARE Cliff — I’d appreciate hearing from you.
I’m sharing this web port in the spirit of software preservation for a game that is no longer commercially available or runnable on the platform that many purchased it on — but especially in appreciation of Cliff’s puzzling genius.