Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Williamsburg is a small Colonial Town where there is hidden the Golden Horseshoe, your goal is to find and bring home the Golden Horseshoe. Beware Evil Spirits, and the Ghost of Bruton Parish, your adventures will get you shot by the Police, chased by the Butcher, and lost in the Maze, will you get the Horseshoe??? Only your Dragon computer knows!

Look, marketing copy is hard. At least the cover of Microdeal’s version of this game is one of the most memorable we’ve had all year.

From World of Dragon.

Microdeal we’ve had before with Mansion Adventure, as first published by Chromasette in January 1982. (Chromasette was a Tandy CoCo spin-off of CLOAD, the TRS-80 tapemag.) Microdeal published the game in the UK for the Dragon, a Welsh machine mostly but not entirely compatible with the CoCo. Mansion Adventure was a curious choice to kick off a series because it was extremely short and almost devoid of traditional puzzles; it was all about picking up clues to a numerical sequence and applying them.

Microdeal’s Adventure 2 we’ve also played: Adventure in Ancient Jerusalem. That game was “traditional” but had serious gameplay issues, especially with excessive death traps. The version Microdeal published was not from the July 1981 CLOAD, but from Chromasette, in the August 1981 version.

This game is given on the Microdeal cover as Copyright CLOAD 1981, but didn’t actually get published — and only in Chromasette — until September 1982. I’m going to put both 81 and 82 in my post title but still sort it with the rest of my 1982 games.

The author, given in the source code, is Mike Hughey.

1 ‘MIKE HUGHEY
2 ‘ROUTE 2, BOX 90
3 ‘KING GEORGE, VA. 22485

The address of King George is more important than usual, as it is close to the real Williamsburg, and the game’s locations are based on the real Williamsburg. He also shows up in the yearbook for the College of William and Mary in 1982, which makes a physical appearance in the game.

The best comparison I can make is with Nijmegen Avontuur. That game was similarly based on a real town and had you hunting a single treasure. I got hung up early on imagining I was in a real town and wasn’t aggressive enough, despite the presence of such items as a bazooka. In Williamsburg, the same thing happened: I started off too “peaceful”, but this game is clearly means for you to go full Grand Theft Auto and cause as much carnage as possible on your way to obtaining the Golden Horseshoe.

The note about “two-word commands” will become important later.

This is a good contrast with my last game (The Paradise Threat); that game had a high density where every room had something in it (even what seemed like an ordinary hallway room had a secret). This game has some locations like the starting one which are just room descriptions, but I think this may be because of the town-modeling idea: the action starts set on Duke of Gloucester Street, with some of the corresponding locations going off of it.

The starred locations all make an appearance, as well as the Governor’s Palace.

Even though everything is highly compressed from the real map, the author clearly felt some streets representing connective tissue were necessary; you start on Duke of Gloucester south of the Governor’s Palace and just east of the Church, but you have to pass through “Palace Green” going north to arrive at the front gate of the Palace.

Scribner’s is no longer there but it existed in the 1980s.

Without that extra room there it might have felt (to the author or anyone who knows the area) that the map was a bit too far awry, having the distance west to the church and north to the palace be “identical”.

Typing LOOK GATE mentions “a keyhole” but just typing OPEN GATE or UNLOCK GATE (even without a key, I haven’t found one yet) just states “O.K.” The gate doesn’t actually open; it seems that a “you failed” message was never properly put into the logic here.

You can scoot to the west of the gate to a wall, and try to GO WALL to climb it, but disaster results:

The rather aggressive police gives our first hint this might be Grant Theft Colonial but let’s do the two puzzles we can pull off acting like a normal tourist first.

On the east side of town (see above) there’s the King’s Arms Tavern. Our inventory starts with a fifty dollar bill so we can eat there.

I’m not sure if you’re supposed to eat the dinner yet, but you are supposed to pay for it, because the waiter gives you back a quarter and informs you the only place you can spend now is at Scribner’s. This generous (?) hint leads the player over to obtain a map.

The object name describes it as a map to the Maze.

And here I was stuck quite a while after. There’s a music shop that needs a ticket to enter, the capitol needs a ticket to enter, and there’s a student hanging out at William and Mary College. There’s a gift shop with some cheap crosses that you can’t buy…

…a church that I am unable to enter…

Parser issues, or does the game just not let you go in?

…and a graveyard that can kill you.

Yes, only STONE works even though it is described as a GRAVESTONE.

A cross might protect me from this?

Where I finally managed to nudge ahead progress was a the College of William and Mary.

You might think to SHOOT CANNON to get the student’s attention, but that does nothing. Now we come to the breaking point.

Keep in mind our author was a student, so he’s got satire on his mind here. Our author also “forgot” about the two-word instruction because we need to break that.

The student leaves behind a STUDENT ID. This ID lets you get in the “ticket” places for free, that is, the capitol building (which has nothing of interest) and the music store (which has an organ book you can just take).

I haven’t been able to get anything to happen with this at the church.

Still with the notion of violence-is-the-way, I was able to make a smidge more progress on the gift shop.

So I can bust the security camera but I need to get the lady distracted, perhaps?

No clue where to prod otherwise. I haven’t mentioned the stockade (at the real-life courthouse) but that just has some guns that are alarmed and you will die if you try to take any.

This does have walkthroughs (multiple ones!) so I have a fallback but I’ll keep at it for a while longer. Still, if someone knows this game I will take hints of any kind as long as they’re encoded in rot13. I’m especially curious to know if the church-entering is truly prohibited or it requires a serious game of guess-the-noun.