Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued directly from my last post.)

It was a number of things coming together. I’d seen the very original computer game called “Adventure” back in 1977, which was played on mainframe computers (on which my son worked). Then we got involved with a team playing Dungeons and Dragons. I needed a new imaginative idea to replace Vision On which I had been making for some 10 or more years, when I heard The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the radio and was knocked out by it! So I met up with Douglas Adams and outlined a general idea to him in the hope I could get him to write it up, but unfortunately he had just agreed to write the TV version of Hitch-hiker … and though he liked the idea didn’t have the time. So I just went at it myself, trying to combine all of the above.

— Interview with Patrick Dowling speaking about the origins of The Adventure Game, via an interview at Off the Telly

I managed to finish the game, although there were parts I didn’t fully comprehend.

Replica Drogna currency for the planet Arg, from TheZeroRoom on Etsy.

First, watering the plant in the opening room.

The screen above comes from typing WATER PLANT at the start. Of course, being able to do so requires knowing the verb WATER works (and I can assure you it is very rare compared to “POUR WATER” or the like) but even then it failed in a cryptic way, by asking “How?”. For some games — like the Scott Adams ones — this is a prompt for another parser action. That is (to compensate for it being a two-word parser), you might respond with

WITH TUBE

indicating the thing we do the action with, and that resolves the “how”. Alternately, the command itself might have needed rephrasing, like possibly WATER PLANT WITH TUBE. That wasn’t the case here either.

Here, “how” should be interpreted as “there is no way to do the action you are thinking”. This requires visualizing the game like the author does. The tube and the plant should be thought of as in separate places to the extent that you can’t just tilt the tube over or grab it (TUBE is not a recognized noun, even). Both are fixed in place.

This reflects the television show occasionally have this sort of locational puzzle, where you need to do an action (involving some science trick) which brings together distant things in a room, or at least manages what might first seem an impossibility. For example, the first episode has a ball with a clue that rises to the top of a cylinder if all the players are standing in particular places:

This is showing the aliens explaining the puzzle.

The proper resolution is to put weight down in a spot to substitute for a person.

So the right way to visualize the plant puzzle is as “here’s some water, here’s a plant it needs to be brought to, now bring them together”. I at least guessed something like this early.

In the room to the north (the one with the computer asking for 1 drogna and the closed door requiring 12 drogna) there’s also a button, and pushing the button causes an uninflated balloon to appear. This gave me the idea to fill the balloon with water and use it as a water balloon, but my attempts at FILL BALLOON and the like came to naught (they were technically off my verb list already, but with a parser this dire anything is possible).

I finally came back around to trying WATER PLANT again — even though it had already failed — and was surprised when it worked.

I was so surprised it took me some effort to realize I was doing the implicit actions of filling the balloon, bringing it over, and squeezing. Most adventure games would require the steps in between. As is, the setup is so convoluted I am only 95% certain everything I said above is correct, but at least I’m through the puzzle, and have claimed my 12 drogna “peice”! (You need to refer to it as “12 drogna”, not “piece” or “peice”.)

Now, there’s a matter of not being able to INSERT anything in the computer room (see above). The right thing to do is either PAY COMPUTER (to activate the MZ-80K) or PAY MACHINE (to activate the door opening). In neither case are the nouns described that way in the text, so another vibe I need to roll with is that the game is happy to freely modify how a noun should be referenced from how it initially gets described. That is, (as imaginary examples) you might find a BROOMSTICK that needs to be referenced as a STICK or an APPLE II that needs to be referenced as a COMPUTER.

Paying the computer first:

The computer types out the following: WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

Giving your name, and then trying to type something random has the computer give exactly what sort of prompt it needs.

I never — and this is after finishing the game — found any phrases the computer recognized. The computer was even giving messages like I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHERE which is exactly the thing it asked me to type.

Nevermind that: I could PAY MACHINE in order to open the bars to the west (“Right,the bars slide apart”), and pass through. The bars slide shut behind you but there’s a button in a random spot later you can push that will cause them to open again; this allows later access to the computer, but since I never found a use for the computer it didn’t really matter.

This is the complete map for the game. The first thing encountered past the bars is a random green button with a strange result.

This seems to serve no purpose other than if you go north in a dark section up to where the “monster” is you get “evaporated”.

A brief primer on evaporation: it was introduced in the television show during Season 2, as a new “end game” called The Vortex. Players would move from place to place on a triangle grid avoiding an invisible (to them) enemy that was made via computer generated graphics, and if they hit the enemy, they were “evaporated” and had to “walk the galactic highway” to escape as opposed to just leaving. The video below starts about 30 seconds before an evaporation:

I admit I don’t understand the “strategy” of this game, given the enemy is invisible. This seems like just a lottery? It is important past the theoretical because to escape the MZ-80A version of The Adventure Game, you also need to pass through The Vortex (with identical rules). Evaporation in the TV show doesn’t kill you (they needed to accommodate those five-year-olds), evaporation in the computer game does.

But that comes later. For now, we entirely ignore the dark section and go to the south instead.

Keeping in mind this was based on an educational show with math puzzles, I figured while there might be a code for the safe somewhere, it was equally likely the game meant for you to brute force list the different permutations of ABCD (as a math exercise) and go through each one. Brute force worked fairly quickly:

Playing the arcade game is just a matter of ignoring the computer so you can save your 1 drogna for the game instead.

OK…It isn’t a game at all,really.A camera is located nearby and you can see a dark passage,a huge,hairy monster and you can see BOX.

This was highly deceptive, as you’ll see in a moment. Heading west from the arcade gets a riddle:

Going further you meet a robot who wants to play chess. You have to beat it to pass, but there’s no trick, it’s just a matter of playing multiple times until you win.

Off a side passage from there is a storeroom with a button (that opens the bars at the start), a torch, and a “dissintergrator”.

You can only refer to it as a GUN. I was never able to use it.

Going back to that message about the monster and the BOX — I tried taking my torch over to the dark place and lighting it, but none of the verbs I came up with worked. I wasn’t able to shoot the monster with the gun either.

I eventually found that the box is not at the monster at all but a side room, but you can only see it if you are holding a torch. It’s truly the weirdest of implicit actions — I guess the torch is providing light but makes no indication of such?

This room was originally empty. There’s no indication otherwise the torch is doing something.

Pushing the red button just kills you. The box can be opened to find a 1000 drogna piece. And that is that.

Regarding the safe at the arcade game that had the key, that goes to a “grandfather clock” in another side branch back at the chess-playing robot.

And a little bit further someone is taking fares back to Earth, and the 1000 piece works. I have no idea if the 6 also gets used somehow, everything is implicit action.

Now, to escape, we have to go through what this calls the EVAPORATION GAME.

This was incredibly finicky and I suspect the emulator might have been bugged. Sometimes I picked a kosher direction and it didn’t work. In between moves the “evporators” would move, and sometimes then I would get a turn back, and sometimes the game would just lock up in an endless loop.

Eventually, by sheer luck, avoiding both the evaporators and the crash (equally deadly) I made it to the end and won everything.

Cryptic things I never worked out:

• how to use the computer
• how to use the gun
• if the safe had another intended method of opening other than brute force
• what the whole point of getting the key from the safe and finding the 6 drogna piece was
• why pressing the green button makes the monster hostile, and if there’s any way to escape when it is non-hostile

Even when I knew what verbs I should stick to, the parser felt like wading through mud, because so many of the nouns were either not recognized or were described in ways that required me to guess what their “parser equivalent” was (like the gun). The torch was especially cryptic and I only worked out what the game’s intent was after the fact.

The one thing this had going for it is atmosphere; it really did feel like I was on Arg rather than a generic planet. The game might have been stronger had it done more with the game show elements: multiple characters, science puzzles with multiple solutions, and cryptic alien hosts that would sometimes give hints to make sure shooting ended in time. (Ian Oliver, producer: “Many of the ‘hints’ from Chris the butler and company were issued in desperation – we had to be out of the studio by 10pm come hell or high water.”)

This was a little too ambitious for what was likely someone’s first adventure game. Even an advanced parser wasn’t strictly necessary — you can just subsume a lot of action under USE — but there needed to be proper feedback when and why things don’t work, implicit actions needed to be described when they happened, and nouns needed the in-game text to match the name the players use. However, the NPCs required to match the show likely would have strained even Infocom’s resources.

(One last bonus anecdote from TV production before I check out: two of the series were recorded in a studio with no air-conditioning, and because of the structure of the game allowing the players to explore anywhere at any time, it meant most of the sets needed to be lit. On a normal production only one would be lit at a time. This led to the place being more sweltering than normal during a summer shoot.)

Next up: Transylvania for the Apple II. I know some of you have been waiting for this one. It’s finally time.