Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Our author circa 1962, from the Internet Archive.

We last saw Dian Gerard (or Dian Crayne, or J. D. Crayne) with The Hermit’s Secret, as published by Norell Data Systems; she followed up the same year with The Phantom’s Revenge.

Treasures, puzzles, and danger are waiting for you. Over a hundred rooms, a fascinating and challenging adventure.

For my general history see my Hermit’s Secret post, but I have two pieces of news regarding Dian to add:

1.) Monster Rally, previously a lost game, has been unearthed. (Described as: “a large text only horror/fantasy epic weighing it at circa 300 locations”.) We’ll make it there in 1983. Oddly, the rescued copy is credited to Dian’s husband, Chuck Crayne, and despite all the games of this line being credited to Dian, he may have done some uncredited collaboration on the others. They at least worked together some; the pair are credited together in 1985 with the book Serious Assembler.

2.) Exemptus has investigated the game Granny’s Place — a game that lacked a name as published by Temple Software — and concluded Dian Gerard/Crayne was responsible for that game too. He goes into the reasons why in the post, but I wanted to highlight the use of encryption to “sign” the code:

The table of messages in the game files is encrypted with a 1-byte XOR operation. This is not uncommon, but guess what the value of the encryption byte is: hexadecimal DC, the initials of her name. So basically she signed the code.

Before getting into The Phantom’s Revenge, I wanted to look backwards a little at the formation of the publisher Norrell, as it explains how at least a little how what normally seems like a “utilities company” had more connection with games than it might seem at first glance. We can trace the story back to 1975 and, weirdly enough, the Sphere computer, which only lasted from 1975 to 1977.

Byte Magazine, September 1975. Ben Zotto has a long presentation here done at the Computer History Museum if you’d like to see more.

Despite the short life span of the computer, a company formed — Programma Consultants, headed by Mel Norell — producing software for the Sphere as well as a newsletter.

Our main function is to provide reasonably priced software program products to users of 6800 based machines. Specifically, we have been providing support software for the Sphere Series/300 System since June 1976.

The above statement was written in June 1977, when Sphere was already applying for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It incidentally reports that Sphere was “in the hole” for $600,000.

While the Sphere was alive, Programma produced a replacement operating system (OS/1) and published some games, like a chess program by Chuck Crayne (that’s Dian’s husband, remember) and a “Tank War Game” by Scott Adams.

Chess from the Sphere 1 Emulator.

Simultaneous to this, the accountant Dave Gordon discovered computers in 1977, originally putting down payments on both a TRS-80 and a Commodore Pet; when saw an Apple II, he canceled both orders and went all-in with Apple. He scrounged (and pirated) software. According to a July 1983 profile in Softline:

From the first day he got his computer, Gordon seemed intent on acquiring every public-domain program written for the Apple. His enormous appetite for software drove him to user-group meetings, software stores, and the homes of fellow Apple owners. A hustler, a trader, a Brooklyn-turned-L.A.-bum, Gordon copied and traded software as if it were bubble-gum cards.

Gordon became friends with Norrell (no doubt due to Gordon meeting everyone in the computer community) and formed Programma International with him in 1978, expanding past Sphere computers to computers more generally. Programma became (in)famous for putting out a blizzard of software in the next two years of high and low quality. While they generally stayed associated with Apple, they went into PET, TRS-80, Atari, and the Exidy Sorceror as well.

The catalog I just linked includes Disk Magic, Apple II software by Dian Girard. It sold for $25.

This utility program allows the user to examine and modify diskettes created for the Apple ][ from the physical sector level and without the limitations imposed by standard DOS commands. It is possible to determine actual remaining disk, space, release system space for program use, fix damaged files of all types, and restore some files that have been deleted. A comprehensive manual included.

The company was having trouble by late 1980 and got bought by Hayden Book Company. Gordon stayed on as a vice-president, but Gordon was soon out due to personality clashes and formed the new company Datamost.

Norrell went off to form Norrell Data Systems instead. One of their earliest products was Rocket Command for Apple II, an arcade game that looked a lot like something that would come out of Programma instead, and in fact there was some confusion about this at the time; Mel Norrell wrote in to Softline to correct them on giving credit to Programma for the game.

Just a Missile Command clone.

After this, though, the catalog essentially settled on utilities for DOS. It is nice to know that Norrell as a person (albeit under a different company) had a brief moment of massive game distribution before switching gears.

Enough wandering, let’s get into the game:

So you want to challenge the Phantom!
Would you like instructions?
yes
There is a strange old prison near here, long abandoned except for a few caretakers, and some half-mad vagrants. A few people say that the prison is haunted by some sort of ghost, and that it guards some fabulous treasure. A lot of people have gone to search the old place, and have never been seen again. If you want to explore the old place, I’ll help you all I can. Direct me with one or two words, and if you’re stuck, type INFO for general information, or HELP for some basic instructions.

This program and script were developed by Temple Software, Inc.

You are in a tiny stone cell. The only light comes from a small barred window, too high for you to reach. There is a massive iron-bound door set in the west wall. It is ajar.

Impenetrable gray stones surround you on all sides. When you look cautiously around the edge of the door you see the back of a burly uniformed guard, and hastily retreat.
There is a slightly moldy piece of cheese on the floor.
There is a rather battered old spoon on the floor.

Despite there being of plenty of room for text I feel like we’re missing some context that’d be in a manual. We’re still on a Treasure Hunt (I think) but we start stuck in a prison instead, and then need to break out before we start exploring.

Trying to just leave to the west has us stopped by the burly guard.

The guard is a little out of condition, but take it from me, he’s MEAN! You can’t get past him without the proper resources.

It’s possible we’ll reckon with him later. I would have been stuck longer but I brought out my standard verb list to test and DIG happens to be quite early:

As you dig frantically at the east wall, the stones slowly loosen! Suddenly, several of them fall to the floor, along with a bright gold ring that had been embedded in the mortar! The ring rolls across the floor and vanishes under the door – leaving you with a heap of rubble and a hole in the east wall.

The map then opens up a bit, so while the bottleneck only lasted a short while, it did serve some purpose in giving some sense of atmosphere and plot that the author’s previous game lacked.

Just for the record, I did finish my verb list:

Purple items are verbs that give “blank responses”. This apparently happens with these specific verbs in other Norrell games, so it is a common codebase bug. For two of the words (FLOAT and LAUNCH) the game reacted like they were nouns instead. Notable green-marked verbs are SING, FOLLOW, and WAKE, none of which are easy to think about while in the midst of puzzle crunching.

After making the prison escape:

You force your body through a tight east-west crawl, moving along carefully on your hands and knees.
E

The tunnel you are in is dark, and you feel the floor ahead of you carefully, fearful of open pits or traps. The floor is dry, gritty, and seems to be made of great slabs of stone. There is a strong current of air coming from the southwest.
SW

You are crawling along through a dark, low ceilinged tunnel. The floor is fairly smooth here, and you can feel fine soft powder that might be dust. There is a dim light to the southwest, and an equally dim glow to the east.
SW

You are walking on a tree-lined lane, under a blue sky. West there is a busy street. As the lane curves off to the south it turns into some kind of waterfront area. There is a storm- drain opening to the north of you.

There is a strong leather leash lying here.

Knowing Girard’s last game, this is going to be a big map to tame, so I’m not going to be foolish enough to try to convey everything in one go. But a few observations based on what I’ve seen so far:

1.) This is still clearly using the “Adventure codebase” in feel, even if it isn’t literally the same code. The “dwarves” throwing axes are still in, just reskinned, in an admittedly nicely thematic way.

You have crawled into a low-ceilinged room where strange gray and green fungus covers the walls. There is a small dark opening in the northeast wall, and a slightly larger passage to the south.

A strange figure in a tattered old uniform (obviously some prison guard driven half mad by fear) lurches around a corner, throws an old fire axe at you — which misses — and then staggers off cursing into the darkness.

An old fire axe is lying nearby.

2.) Fairly early on there’s a magic word that warps you straight from some caves and prison cells over to an opera house. Using the same word in the same place wraps you back again; it gets treated as a “direction” like north or south rather than magic.

You find yourself in a vacant stone cell with doors to the north and south. Some demented soul has scratched the words “YNGVI IS A LOUSE!” on the west wall.
YNGVI

This is the Green Room of the opera house, where the performers and their friends used to gather after the show was over. There is a doorway to the south, and a passage leads upward.
S

This room seems to be the office of the opera manager. It is neatly decorated with playbills, and has a large desk and swivel chair. Doors lead out of all four walls, but the west wall is steel and has a combination lock on it.

There is an old theatre ticket here.

READ TICKET

It says “ADMIT ONE – CENTER SECTION”

3.) Exploring some abandoned cells I found a “maniac” but throwing an axe does nothing so I don’t think they’re meant as a normal hostile mob.

There is a vacant cell here, and the only exits are a doorway in the south wall, and a rather small hole in the floor.
D

There is a nasty-looking maniac here, eyeing you. This is the west end of a long east-west tunnel. A dusty passage goes south from here, and a narrow hole leads upward.

This already is more coherent than The Hermit’s Secret, and since I already know what I’m in for (big map that unites in multiple ways) I’m feeling positive about this one.