Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Originally the program was aimed at the 11 to 16 age group, but we get fans as young as five. I think they like to see people get evaporated.

— Ian Oliver, producer for the TV show The Adventure Game, from Micro Adventurer November 1983

The Adventure Game (1980-1986) was a British gameshow where contestants were tasked with escaping from the planet Arg. It’s essentially an early lo-fi version of The Crystal Maze, and if that doesn’t ring bells, just think of it as a series of escape rooms.

It wasn’t filmed “live”; the article linked above discusses 3 hours being filmed for each (half-hour) episode. Being made for children, it was intended as educational, and so a lot of time gets spent setting up real physics and math problems. The lead, Patrick Dowling, previously worked on The Great Egg Race, a competition with a series of engineering tasks, named after a vehicle powered by a rubber band that transports an egg.

The various mechanisms (at least in the 1980 season which I was sampling) get explained before the players go through them, and there’s a lot of emphasis on players talking through their thought process.

A scene from the first episode, explaining a puzzle involving clown doors.

The guests tended to be two “show business personalities” and one “guest” (that is, someone not used to TV) and the showrunners would sometimes customize puzzles based on the guest’s personal knowledge to make them more comfortable.

One of the common elements through episodes is a colored floor of shapes called Drogna that the players need to logically step through. It was later turned into a game for the BBC Micro.

Contestants from the first episode solving the Drogna puzzle.

They sometimes played an adventure game on a computer as part of the obstacles. Season 1 used a HP 9845 workstation while later seasons used a BBC Micro.

The above is from Season 1 Episode 3, with Maggie Philbin, Moira Stuart, and James Burke (of Connections fame). Yes, that’s an automap in 1980, meaning the innovation can be found by either making a game for children or making something that will make sense over television.

THERE ARE THREE EXITS E,S AND W AGAIN

THERE’S AN UGLY GREAT TROLL DEMANDING FOOD – HE WON’T LET YOU PASS
FISH
HE’S GETTING VERY, VERY ANGRY.
SPRAY
HE’S GETTING VERY, VERY ANGRY.
CUCUMBER
HE SAID ‘CUCUMBER? YUK!’ AND THREW IT AT YOU.

In the above segment, they’ve passed by some spam sandwiches and attempted to give their cucumber sandwiches instead. They go back for the spam sandwiches but don’t run across the troll again, eventually going in another direction. Going that way they encounter an ADDER, and rather than interpreting the ADDER as a snake, they are supposed to use the SUBTRACTOR they are holding.

STOP! THERE’S AN ADDER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TUNNEL.
SUBTRACTOR
OH GOOD – THE ADDER IS NOW SUBTRACTED AND HAS VANISHED.

It looks like there might be some control on the part of the showrunners of the adventure game portion as it is going on or at least creative editing. (That is, the game might not be “fully playable” in a real sense — remember this isn’t live.)

We know at least one of our authors (Brian Howarth, see Arrow of Death Part 2) was influenced by the show, but our interest today is in a program made by Kuma for the Sharp MZ-80A that places the player as a contestant.

Via Sharpworks on Twitter. The MZ-80A was the “follow-up” to the 80K and comes with a proper keyboard.

We saw Kuma once before with the game Quest / Fantasy Quest by John Wolstencroft; this game has no author given and may have been “in-house”. It gets a mention in KUMA’s August 1982 catalog but doesn’t stick around for long. Strident suggests some kind of licensing issues (maybe because of the release of Drogna in ’83) although Sharpworks suggests the game was a “rush job” and withdrawn for quality control issues.

I know, at least, the game is supposed to be cryptic and hard.

I might say “I’ll try my best to solve honestly before succumbing to the lure of the walkthrough” except the game is ridiculously hard to control, even compared to some of the legends we’ve seen on this blog so far.

That’s a truly unorthodox verb list, and even knowing the verb that seems to fit an action doesn’t necessarily help. For example, you might think, given the direction on the sign, the next step is to WATER PLANT but the game just asks “How?” and TAKE TUBE has the game respond “TUBE?” (that is, it doesn’t recognize the noun). I tried WATER PLANT WITH TUBE and variants, also with no luck.

The only thing I’ve been able to do is SAY MYNAME to go to the next area. (The game actually instructs you to “speak” your name, yet SPEAK is not a recognized verb. There should be a name for this phenomenon, maybe “disjoint instructions”?)

The introduction said we have one Drogna “peice” already, but I have been unsuccessful in using it, even with USE (USE DROGNA: “What for?”). TYPE at least gets a response…

…and PRAY gets “OK….I’ll pray for you!” (Who puts an easter egg verb in a list of only 9 of them?)

I’m hoping there’s some basic communication norm I’m missing and things will start to go more smoothly after, but I don’t have faith anything about this game will be smooth.

(Also, thanks to Ethan Johnson for helping identify the HP computer used in the first season of The Adventure Game.)