Nobody is easy. Almost nobody, that’s the tricky part.
On the night of August 7th, 1979, I set off with Bamber Gascoigne, who was chosen to witness the burial. Once at the right spot, I cut a turf about ten inches square with my knife, then dug down until I’d made a hole to the depth of my elbow. There was a moment of panic when my trowel hit rock, but it turned out to be just a small stone. In went the pot with the gold, then the earth and the turf. I watered the spot to encourage the grass to grow again. As Bamber and I shook hands over the burial ground, the moon came out from behind a cloud and, I like to think, shone down a blessing on us.
The grand “thousands (or or tens of thousands, or more) participants / only one winner” treasure hunt seems particularly daunting to manage if it is meant to go over a large chunk of time. It is unclear if Masquerade’s multi-year span was accidental or intentional. Certainly, when Williams designed the puzzles and hid his hare, he fretted over the puzzle being too simple, as explained by the witness Bamber Gascoigne:
Kit had explained to me the basis of his puzzle, but even with that privileged information I was unable to make it work out. The cause of my growing uneasiness was the thought that if it was in fact impossibly difficult, then I was the only person in the world in a position to form that opinion. Kit considered it very possible, even perhaps dangerously easy, because he had invented it.
The game had the right density of red herrings to baffle the public; more than “he had invented it”, I think the reason Williams thought the puzzle was easy is he knew exactly which elements were red herrings. The excess of extra text and riddles (including hiding a hare in every picture) made it easy to project almost any answer whatsoever.
They are far more complex than anything I had imagined, yet they fit the book. It’s a scientific principle that if you want something to work badly enough, you organize the facts so that it does. I watch people allowing themselves to be twisted round and round. In the long run, solving the book is a matter of trial and error.
— Kit Williams quoted in The New York Times, The Legend of the Golden Hare, November 15, 1981, while the hare was still buried
One issue (which applies also to Alkemstone and PRISM) is that the puzzle requires indicating an exact spot. This was long before public GPS use. Even getting somewhere in the ballpark isn’t good enough; a small field is too hard to dig without more information. Williams managed this (possibly with incorrect measurements) by using a particular day and a particular time and the exact position of a shadow. Based on what we know about Alkemstone, I’m guessing a similar idea. With PRISM, I’m not sure; PRISM’s job is made more onerous by having to give the location of three items.
People have been using clues to guess states (and I’ll get to that) but somewhere, somehow, there has to be something at a numerical level. Perhaps it is the shadow trick again (given the product’s theme of light). Is there some other way to do it?
Or it could be the puzzle is broken by unclear directions, like the stereotypical pirate map “forward 50 paces, then right 60 paces” which isn’t very exact at all. I had at least vague concern that this screen might be like that, although there’s a theory from the comments I’ll get to later that treats the puzzle as wordplay.
All this relates to another issue: how close are the keys to each other? There is no rule that says they need to be spread out across different states, and in the review I referenced last week the author asked specifically that question (with no answer received). I could see some particular landmark being marked which then gets re-used three times for three different shadow points, for instance.
I think part of the reason Pimania had a superior puzzle from what we’ve seen so far is it did not require an exact location; it was able to use fairly general symbolic language without getting into the nitty gritty of exactly how many meters forward from spot X to get.
I bring all this up not just because theorizing is part of the point of this blog, but also because it may help in forming a solution. Thinking backwards, we know three exact locations have to be clued somehow. (Maybe in a flawed way, but even the most self-deluded of puzzle-setters would know they can’t just indicate a particular park somewhere.) There’s not a lot of emphasis on time of year (like there was on Alkemstone — which is why I suspect that game was using the shadow method); if a game was not using the shadow method, is there some other compact way to represent three entirely different digging spots?
I note that the majority of the “twisted round and round” answers that I’ve seen referenced for Masquerade fail the criterion of giving an actual spot to dig. (From the NYT article: “Among the most common ‘solutions’ Williams receives are: Stonehenge, the Greenwich Observatory and the Hill of Tara in County Meath, Ireland.” I suppose you could claim you meant the “high spot” of a hill but even that would tend to be ambiguous. To be fair, some of these were sent to the author trying to go “fishing” for information with the hope they’d get feedback that they had the right area, just they needed to refine down to an exact spot.
Swerving back to looking at the actual content, we had various theories trying to interpret the different side messages. Regarding that “In at 7…” message, John Myers had a promising theory:
The word “rerouting” has “out” at position 4, “in” at 7 and means “forward” (as in to forward mail) and is slightly more than 8 letters. No idea how this fits into the puzzle if it is correct though.
That is, the word being built is _ _ _ O U T I N _ like a cryptic crossword clue. I’m not sure where to go with this information, though; it might suggest US map routes, but not what to do with them. Syracuse is incidentally at the intersection of I81 and I90:
Aula and Aspeon tried to interpret messages as US states:
Also, “TWO OF ONE” comes before “ONE OF TWO” because the only always-sensible reading order is left/top/right/bottom. This makes the text rhyme at the halfway point and end (here TWO/BLUE) with the only exception on the page with “1 THRU 3 / OF EIGHT”. There are several states with eight-letter names, but only in “Oklahoma” all of the first three letters can point to other states; O for Ohio, K for Kansas (34th state, so XXXIV) and L for Louisiana.
“IN AT 7 / OUT AT FOUR / FORWARD 8 / AND SLIGHTLY MORE” is probably cluing South Carolina in a similar way: letters 6-7 of Carolina are IN, letters 2-4 of South are OUT, letters 6-8 of the full name is CAR, and there are a few leftover letters. (S/H/OL/A)
In more expansion of the “maybe some clues indicate states” idea, Rob suggested that “Up north / Lines meet / Down south / Fates greet” was in reference to some kind of state lines (like the “four corners” area around Arizona/New Mexico/Colorado/Utah) and Matt W. though perhaps “Fates greet” could be Truth and Consequences, New Mexico.
Morpheus Kitami tried to organize the letters based on color (using, as Aula points out, the proper order of starting left and going clockwise):
Red: PIMSRNESUHRTTENAREGVIXXX
Blue: RLACENONESRNENUR
Green: GCKFKAEUASVYOLA
Purple: APOLARTFLIE
With anagrams of
Red: PRISM HUES GRANE XXXVI (NRTTE extra)
Blue: CLEAR ONE RUNNERS (N extra)
Green: YOLSVA
Purple: POLAR LIFE
(The green is excluding the “GCKFKEA” text.)
He also highlighted what he calls an “elevator”…
…although I admit I just thought of it as a door with the text over it. Intuitively, I do think there’s a fair chance this is a real clue, perhaps indicating whatever we find will have “west” amount indicated first and then “north” amount after. Or perhaps the up-arrow can be interpreted as a mountain, because there’s a few I Ching symbols scattered throughout, all of them referring to Gen (Mountain).
There’s a similar symbol at the fallen-tree picture. (It could be two versions of Li or Fire stacked on top of each other.)
There’s enough mountain references in the art I got suspicious, but other than my guesswork going nowhere, it was failing the basic question of how do you indicate three exact spots? One could imagine very expensive surveying gear somehow being placed at particular heights but it seems like you’d need to still convey a large amount of information in order to mark where X is.
Even the “mystery anagram” page which is fairly sparse has part of a mountain in the picture.
I’m definitely going to be making at least one more post — I am determined to organize the information into some sort of (likely spectacularly wrong) theory so I can at least encapsulate what the authors may have been up to. More ideas in general are of course welcome.
In the meantime, anyone with a theory on NOT A ROCK, NEVER HOT, NOT FRUIT, NEVER LOCKED? I might throw this one out to social media because it seems plausibly standalone. It doesn’t work like a “riddle” since there are plenty of things that fulfill all four categories, but is there something themed around the contents of PRISM that would work best? Or maybe a set of five things (or more), where four out of the things are excluded neatly by the “rock/hot/fruit/locked” phrases?
The colored letters have different kinds of colors. Maybe instead of one word per page, it’s one sentence from all the differently colored letters. All the purple, blue, green, etc. This could be for each key, maybe this connects to the words on-screen?
…
There are some pictures in real world locations, perhaps this is intended to be a clue? Is there a building that looks like the two pillar building in Syracuse?
Morpheus is referring specifically to this one:
From ern2150:
33 letters? 3 keys, is that enough to spell city/state abbreviations?
From Alastair:
Up north / Lines meet / Down south / Fates greet.
Is there a northern US state (or state or town) where lines of some sort (roads, railway lines, whatever) meet, and for a southern state where “fates greet” makes sense?
I think a good approach is to think of “small” mysteries, individual questions that might be answered or theorized about even if we don’t have a good approach to finding keys yet.
a.) What are the green letters KFGCEAK from the third image used for?
Most of the pages easily anagram. This one doesn’t, and another page you’ll see today doesn’t.
b.) What does 1 THRU 3 / OF EIGHT refer to?
I would guess the “standard” Venn diagram with red, green, and yellow circles overlapping. (Especially given the packaging says “each represents a primary color” in regard to the keys.) This makes seven colors, eight if you include black. The list (red, blue, yellow, green, magenta, orange, white, black) does seem to represent the full color spectrum of the game.
Perhaps something that’s colored in green (like the mystery-anagram) refers to blue and yellow keys specifically, but not red?
c) What does ONE OF TWO / TWO OF ONE / COLORS RED / WHITE AND BLUE refer to specifically?
Maybe the magenta part of the Venn diagram?
I want to do some big-picture analysis in my next post, so rather than waiting I’m giving the entire rest of the story. Get ready:
Yolvsa, Plane of Darkness. A hot, silent wind blew over the desolate landscape, and colors more hideous than the boy had ever imagined painted the cruel specter.
Rising from the bleak surroundings, Hubert discerned a reptilian tangle resembling nothing in his experience except a grotesquely upturned tree. Waving above its misshapen body, he beheld a vision of wildly twisting purple tentacles… monstrously flashing green teeth… yellow tongues flapping wordlessly in an impossible world of terror.
YOLVSA.
Now, Hubert’s only contact with his familiar, secure world was the PRISM he had so hastily thrust into his pocket. Sensing more than feeling the heat now emanating from it, he pulled it out and held it in his hand. From the mysterious crystal now came a pale, pulsating light.
Instinctively, Hubert knew that he was nearing his goal, and that the PRISM was guiding him inexorably toward it. Determined now to meet with success or accept his fate, the lad prepared to follow the all-compelling crystal wherever it led.
At that instant, the parched torrid wind arose with a roar, sweeping before it every pebble, jot of earth, and the hapless Hubert. Desperate, with no other shelter visible, he reached out to grasp a limb lashing in the tempest. He had found concealment behind the torturously twisted limbs of a mutant tree where he made himself as small as possible and inwardly quaked as he waited.
TRET? This is the other one that fails to anagram. The side text also doesn’t match the story or picture at all, suggesting a stand-alone riddle.
Huberts efforts were to no avail. A creature of unfathomable deformity, grotesque in feature and limb, materialized at his side and cast him to the ground. Grane, prince of Yolvsa, keeper of the thousand names of horror, gazed redly at the small, prone human.
With a malignant sound that the boy could only compare to laughter, the creature stared down at Hubert and, at last, spoke. ‘The Protectors send a mere child to do their bidding. O, powerless being, we of the darkness will teach you to confront the forces of Yolvsa. Away to my stronghold, where you will meet your inescapable destiny.’
The entrance to the stronghold of evil; a seething, snarling mass of unspeakable forms crying out for a share of the treat. Hubert could not mistake the fact that he was to form the basis of a savage ceremony. How they howled in the throes of unwholesome ecstacy!
(Note: “Huberts”, “gazed redly”, and “ecstacy” are transcribed correctly. Gazing redly could of course be a clue.)
GRANE, the name of the prince. Again the side text is more irregular than normal.
With monstrous majesty, Grane led the boy through a labyrinth of chambers and corridors into a vast, cold space. In it stood a twisted throne of immense magnitude upon which Grane seated himself. His red eyes stared down from his sinister face.
‘Resign yourself, whelp. Although you are an insignificant figure, you may yet furnish an interesting tidbit for my extremely large fangkat. Come, my lovely. . .
From the recesses of the darkest corner of the chamber slinked an indescribable apparition, a being of incredible hideousness and all too apparent appetite. Brave as Hubert was determined to appear, he quavered under the malicious stare of the creature.
With little hope of escape, Hubert’s glance darted wildly about the throne room, alert to any means of salvation. Transfixed with terror, he was still aware of the PRISM, now burning in his pocket. Its ancient purpose aroused at the nearness of the keys. Like a thing alive, it demanded to be set free! Hubert drew it forth, and like an extension of himself, flourished it in the faces of the Yolvsa horde.
XXXVI, that is, the number 36. (Or 34!)
As if with a will of its own, the PRISM whirred above their heads in the hands of the intrepid lad. The Keys were near, and Hubert would have them whatever! As swiftly as the thought had come, a glint of bright metal struck his eye.
‘A mere talisman — that trinket — will avail you not,’ raged Grane, ‘and we taunt you as you stand before us. Behold! The Keys are here in my hand — your first and last sight of them.’ He raised the keys in his twisted hand, daring the boy to marshall his last spark of courage and make a futile attempt to defend himself.
Hubert knew not what he did, but the PRISM guided his hand in a flashing arc. As he brandished it in Grane’s face, it glowed with a white-hot force which seemed to be drawn from the Keys the monster held. Enraged in the face of the burning crystal, Grane gave a mighty roar. . . and an eruption of color — the brilliance of the spectrum — burst upon the assemblage. Half blinded by the intensity, Hubert nonetheless heard the clatter of metal tinkling at his feet as Grane swayed on his throne of terror.
Hubert, his hands sprawled along the floor, felt desperately around him for the keys, trying to retain the direction of their ringing in his ears. After what seemed an eternity, his groping fingers felt a small metal object and, suddenly, Hubert had the magic keys of color grasped firmly in his trembling hands.
I still find interesting the notable lack of yellow.
Driven only by instinct, the boy crawled around the chamber, seeking the great iron doors which meant a passage to freedom. The PRISM, its colors shining with brutal intensity, masked his intent as he made his hurried way through the anarchy of Grane’s throne room.
Hubert reached the doors shakily, drawing great gulps of the fetid air into his aching chest. Quickly realizing he needed his sight, he pocketed the PRISM, extinguishing its blinding brilliance. As his eyes adjusted to the relative darkness, he hastily scanned the maze of corridors confronting him, struggling to recall Grane’s course when they entered. The awful sound of naked claws scraping and clattering on stone, spurred him to action.
He ran! He ran with a speed as great as his terror. First left, then right, then right again and miraculously, the great doors of the stronghold loomed up before him.
Out the door he flew, eyes wild and lungs burning from the noxious air. From within the loathsome building came the sound of a mighty bell, sounding the alarm to the minions of Yolvsa. Hubert jumped from the path and skittered down the embankment just as the pursuing creatures burst through the gates howling their terrible curses.
RUNNERS?
His forward motion carrying him, Hubert lunged–but in the same instant was pulled back sharply. Around his ankle wound a hot, purple tentacle dragging him relentlessly, remorselessly, back into the Plane of Darkness!
LIFE.
With his overtired mind and body reaching their utter limits, Hubert made the most important decision of his young life: If he could not survive, he would, at least, cheat Grane and his malignant forces of their victory.
Drawing back his arm, he hurled the Keys and the PRISM together, with all his might, through the rapidly narrowing space. The world he, himself, would never again behold would yet have its beauty restored.
Even as he swooned, a mightily sinewed arm reached through the prortal and pulled the boy across the threshold. A rush of cool, sweet air, and the darkness closed about him…
(Note: “prortal” correct.)
In the quiet of his own room, in his parent’s humble home, Hubert awoke as from a dream. There were no Keys, no sign of the glowing PRISM. Was it, then, a dream, or had he really seen and done the fantastic deeds he remembered now? And yet, as he roused himself wearily from his bed and silently pulled on his shoes — a single blade of grass, colored in a loathsome shade of purple, dropped from a shoelace. Hubert acknowledged his playful puppy’s kisses and, his face set in a mask of determination, finished dressing and headed out the door, Uanna barking and following close behind.
In a sequestered cavern, beyond mortal reckoning of time and space, a PRISM still glows quietly in the semi-dark.
Color of an uncertain brightness has returned to the world, but the rich tints and intense hues of a bygone time are only the stuff of legends, living in the memories of the very old.
Is the quest unfinished? Does the PRISM still burn to be reunited with the Keys of the spectrum, lost by Hubert’s heroic throw? You and I know, that somewhere on this terrestrial plane, the answer lies hidden. Will you follow the fearless Hubert and complete the task? To the Protectors of the PRISM falls the duty and honor of reuniting the keys with the PRISM and reaping their colorful reward.
With a little animating on the letters.
Hopefully there’s enough to chew on now! If nothing else the pages with “non-sequitur” phrases could really use some speculation. I’ll get into wild-analysis mode next time and try to sort things; one big question is “are the three keys all hidden by the same code, or are they clued in three entirely different ways?”
(OK, if you combine the two “unanagrams” you get KFGCEAKTRET which can make “keg fact trek” or “tack fret keg”. I don’t think either of those are intended.)
I was unable to wrest any hints from ISM. Are the keys more than one hundred miles apart? Five hundred? No comment. Are the clues in the pictures only, in the pictures and inscriptions, or in the text, pictures and inscriptions? No comment. The only help I got, which I pass on to you, is that the keys are in the 48 contiguous states… somewhere.
I did think it possible, given the office in England, that this might be a cross-continental game (enabled by having three keys!) Apparently not.
My commenters last time (ern2150, Voltgloss, Gus Brasil, arcanetrivia, matt w) noted that two of the graphics screens seem to involve anagrams; the letters of PRISM in the first and CLEAR in the second. The third, mystifyingly, seems to have no equivalent (I even checked the rest of the story in case of a proper name that matched).
I’ve added connections to the letters in case the idea is to make a shape that spells something out or keep an eye on what parts of the picture the “lines meet” at. In addition to this being open to interpretation, if the line idea is right, it isn’t clear what point each vertex should be touching (the center of a letter? right on the edge of the frame?) Perhaps the third non-anagram page is supposed to be more of a code?
One other major point to mention is that the three keys are given as Blue, Red, and Yellow, yet the colors of the screens are Red, Blue, and Green. Colors after are Red, Blue, Purple, Green, Red, Red, Orange, Blue, Purple, and Multicolor. While I’m not officially up to Multicolor yet, I wanted to share that screen early just because it is so notable.
The colors have their usual Apple II muddy effects going on so I can’t be certain, but I think the “A” on the page bottom is the only place a letter is colored yellow. (The anagram here, by the way, is Uanna, the name of the dog. The name is so unusual surely it is a significant clue? The review I mentioned earlier thought the dog’s name was Vanna, but cross checking a word starting with “V” later indicates the game definitely meant Uanna.)
In addition to maybe suggesting “up”, “advance”, “north”, “north”, “advance”, the presence of UAANNA here is notable in that it means this hunt is not exactly like Masquerade. (Again, no solution was published 1982, so there’s no way ISM could have copied the solution part, just the words and colored letters on the border.) The text in Masquerade was completely a red herring. (There were some riddles, but they led nowhere.) Here, the text seems to have at least a little relation to one of the images.
I’m going to pick up the story now all the way up to where Hubert enters the “other world” and the player is requested to swap disks.
Suddenly, Hubert found that he was standing in a vaulted cavern bathed in an eerie, muted light. Bewildered, Hubert glanced about for a familiar sign or friendly face. As his vision cleared, he beheld the figure who had brought him to this strange place, standing alongside a similarly dressed companion.
‘Why have I been brought here? Where am I, and who are you?’, asked Hubert of the steadfast guardians. Nothing met Hubert’s ears but the most profound silence. Then, suddenly. . .
‘You are the True Protector of the PRISM,’ pronounced a voice from the vastness. ‘You alone can retrieve the Keys and restore the powers of the PRISM to your world.
Even as the voice reverberated, the last vestiges of color were draining from sight. Boldly, the lad raised his eyes to the space above and asked again, ‘Where is this place, and why am I here?’.
From the void came the reply, ‘The location is of no matter. Only the fact that you are here, and you are the chosen Protector. Unto you has been given the task of restoring the keys to their hallowed resting place. Only then will color return to the world. Behold the PRISM, Lad, and see its despair.
As though his sight were guided, Hubert looked upon a pedestal in the center of the cavern. On it lay a translucent object of great beauty, as colorless as a tear. Above it on a shelf were three empty keyholes.
Animated rays like the sun was animated.
‘Find the keys, my boy, and return them to the Cavern of Color. Only then can the joy and beauty of color be restored.
Accepting the disembodied voice, brave Hubert asked, ‘Where have the Keys gone, and why am I chosen to search for them?’.
‘You are the chosen of the PRISM, for only the small and pure of heart can pass through the portal. Among your people, age brings wisdom of a sort, but with it a loss of the magic born into every child. No one of full growth, therefore, can slip through the walls of the world and bring back the beauty that has been taken from you. Ask no more questions, for even now the access narrows and further delay would mean all would be lost.
Red, White, and Blue are the colors mentioned here. White = yellow somehow?
‘You must summon all of your courage for this journey’, the voice continued. ‘Dark forces of great power will be arrayed against you. Grane, prince of Yolvsa, has breached the portal and stolen the keys to add color to his evil wastelands. Yet, he foolishly left the prism behind, not knowing its power of focus. Take the PRISM, Hubert. Go and be swift! For even as I speak, your moment is quickly departing. Behold, the portal!’
Piercing the darkness, Hubert beheld an aperture of odd configuration, rapidly diminishing, even as he stared. Clutching the PRISM tightly, he plunged into the darkness.
The anagrams HUES and PORTAL are there; other than that I’m going to keep any analysis for now in the comments.
PRISM is an ISM Storydisk which tells the wonderous tale of the theft of the three ancient Keys of Color, and the adventures of the young boy who must seek them in the monstrous kingdom of Yolsva, Plane of Darkness. All is chaos, and the story contains many levels of hidden meaning through which the Keys may be found and reunited with the prism. When this occurs, and only then, can the mysterious and magical ending of PRISM unfold.
— From the instructions for PRISM
Six years ago this blog tackled the game Alkemstone (1981), a contest leading to a buried treasure with clues in an Apple II game (the Alkemstone itself did not have value, but you could win money from the company for finding it). A year after Alkemstone there was another Apple II program, but this time hiding real buried treasure. As far as anyone knows this treasure is still buried.
In 1980, Stephen Brightbill founded International Software Marketing, Inc. in Syracuse, New York. They launched with the product MatheMagic in 1981, software that “harnesses the power of your Microcomputer to perform simple arithmetic to sophisticated mathematics.” It had versions for DOS, CP/M and Apple II and sold for $89.99.
Where this put them on their main product line was a 1982 extension, Graph Magic, which allowed for “figures in graphic form and full color”. From there they followed with Color Magic and essentially pivoted to graphic presentation software for the duration of their lifetime (folding in 1992, according to Brightbill, due to “competition” and the “rise of Windows”; they were DOS-only by this time).
The “International” part of the name is significant as while it might have been a little aspirational, they did list a UK office branch in their ads. This connection means they likely had strong familiarity with the book Masquerade which was still being a smash hit at the time.
I bet you can do something with books that no one has ever done before.
I’m not giving a history of Masquerade but rather deferring to Jimmy Maher; the important points are that it was a real-life treasure hunt for a buried hare designed by a real jeweler, and the hints to find it were inside the pages of a lavishly illustrated “children’s” book.
We’ve already encountered several “contest games” on this blog, including the previously mentioned Alkemstone, but also Krakit and Pimania. While it is almost certain they happened because of Masquerade-mania, none of them tried to match the form factor. Alkemstone had clues hidden in a first-person maze, Krakit just had a series of puzzles on ZX81 (and no buried treasure!), and Pimania was an adventure game where the clues suggested a particular time and place to go (but again, nothing buried).
That’s not the case for PRISM. PRISM has not just one buried treasure, but three: keys designed by the Syracuse Jewelry Manufacturing Co.
Blue: 18K gold key with 3/4 carat Blue/White Diamond
The people involved (besides presumably the CEO) are all listed. Mark Capella and Ronald Roberts are “co-designers”, Mike Sullivan did art, and Carol Keller did editing. We’ve seen Mark Capella here before; Mike Sullivan of Microstar Graphics later did the disk magazine PC Life. Relevant for today, here’s Sullivan’s “Musical Christmas Disk” called ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas disk from 1987 (if it embeds correctly, it is interactive and you can try it right in the browser):
If you’re wondering how a business-software company got involved with making a game, in some sense, it isn’t a game at all. The software is merely a “Storydisk” for Apple II which is a “slideshow” much like the ones people could make with their own software. It presents a book that bears strong similarity to Masquerade and hence PRISM represents the closest thing Masquerade had to an actual clone.
Now, a huge disclaimer: just like Alkemstone, it is quite possible the contest landed somewhere too ambiguous to solve (explaining why they never announced a winner, even though the company lasted for ten more years). On the other hand, we discovered things out of Alkemstone nobody had seen before, and there’s three locations rather than just one, so it is still faintly possible something of real money value may come from this exploration. I cannot prevent anyone searching on the basis of information here. I will state myself outright if I find anything myself personally I will be donating it to a gaming museum like The Strong. I cannot speak for anyone else. You can assume anything posted here is public.
The pages that do have art have some animations, so while I’m going to be showing pages from the “book”, there’s going to be a little more going on than with Masquerade; it’s even possible there’s “hidden keypresses” or the like which are part of the game. At least in general the only options are “left arrow” and “right arrow” to move between pages.
Not including the start and end, there’s forty pages total. I’m going to just give the first seven for now, but I’ll give out later sections in larger chunks. I expect to make at least six posts and possibly a few more; feel free to chime in with theories in the comments about what’s going on.
For the text-only pages I’m going to give text rather than screenshots, although I did want to show the first page off as an example.
Hubert stretched luxuriously in his comfortable bed, rubbed his eyes and met the brilliant colors of the morning with a smile. His first thought, as always, was of his favorite little puppy, Uanna. A whistle, a clap of his hands, and she was there on the coverlet, her playful green eyes urging him to get up and about for their morning frolic. Like any hearty lad, Hubert dressed without losing a moment… looking forward to the fun and sport he knew lay ahead. Calling the pup to his heel, he strode happily through the door.
It was a glorious day in spring, and the sun shone down on the myriad and beautiful colors of the world. The brightly clad people of Hubert’s town seemed to bloom with the splendor of the flowers around them. In the golden sunlight, the gentlefolk exchanged pleasantries and basked in the splendor of Nature.
I find the transcription much easier to read!
The rays do some color cycling.
The first graphical page; notice the words along the border as well as colored letters. These are both clones of Masquerade, although there is no implication they get used in the exact same way (the solution hadn’t been released yet of the original book!) Hence we have the curious situation of someone copying what a puzzle looks like but quite possibly doing something very different with it.
Hubert, a small but sturdy lad, smiled as he watched the congenial fellowship of his townspeople. Around them, the festively colored birds chatted as they built their nests, and the animals lazily stretched their muscles after a satisfying winter’s nap. With Uanna following close behind, the boy whistled as he strode down the road, with not a care in his mind.
And it was then that. . . A sudden hush descended upon the street. Hubert cast an anxious glance about, then started in disbelief. Around him, HIS WORLD WAS CHANGING !!!
Two more text pages (page 5 and page 6), and then I’ll give the image after, and that’ll be enough for today.
Where the warm golden sun had beamed, only a white blaze appeared. The gaily clad people looked down at themselves in disbelief as the colors slowly drained from their brilliant clothes. Before their eyes, their splendid world was turning black and white and every shade of grey in between!
Young Hubert felt a chill run through him as he witnessed this stupendous horror. ‘How can this be?’ he wondered. Even the animals seemed to sense the transformation as they scampered back into their burrows. The townsfolk silently dispersed, shaking their heads in wonderment.
Suddenly, Hubert found himself alone on the stark, black pavement, his puppy pressed up against his leg in her anxiety. The once, and so recently colorful world was rapidly beginning to resemble the pallid grey images on one of his grandmother’s old photographs. As he turned the corner in the direction of his home, he found himself confronting the gigantic figure of a strangely garbed individual. The apparition wordlessly reached for Hubert and as he lifted, they both seemed to fade into nothingness.
The above images animates with the two figures disappearing:
I’m stopping here (page 7) to give people time to comment and will continue on page 8 next time.
(Continued from a post from a year ago. You should probably read that post before this one.)
While I occasionally reach a videogame in the All the Adventures project which is famous enough to have existing interviews and memoirs to pull from (like The Hobbit and The Dark Crystal) oftentimes I have very little to start with. Even when an author gets some attention from later work they may never talk about their adventure game output (like with Stuart Marks’s biography pretending that Pillage Village didn’t exist).
Hence I was gratified when the author of The Colonel’s House (Rob Davis, 14 when he wrote the game) contacted me and not only was he willing to do an interview, he remembered this era well.
The first computer I experienced was a ZX-81 that my Maths teacher showed in the school staff room. I was immediately massively inspired by seeing it, and requested one for my birthday. I learnt to program BASIC on the ZX-81, and very quickly outgrew it and bought a VIC-20 where I continued to program BASIC and learnt Assembler.
Rob Davis first had contact with adventure games via a visit to a friend’s house; they had an Apple II and were playing Mission: Asteroid, “a really early graphic adventure that I remember involving a spaceship, and you had to work out which buttons to press on a very simple spaceship control panel, and it was a text adventure, but it was graphics, and I found that really exciting.”
He also had exposure to Mystery House (more on that in a moment) but otherwise this brief visit was his only exposure to adventure games (he played lots of games, “especially Jeff Minter ones”, but not adventures); that was enough to make him want to write his own.
I was just doing it in my own from my own inspiration it was just really that one game and really just one hour with that game that was the starting point for me.
He had no exposure to Crowther/Woods Adventure, or Scott Adams, or any of the VIC-20 adventure games coming out at this time.
I did it from scratch. I had read books about coding, but no, I had no guide to making adventure games or anything. I just started and I worked out how to build the engine for the adventure game, which was an engine that was able to kind of store room state, store player state, parse language, render rooms and react to your movements across the rooms and react to the objects changing state and all those kinds of things. So I wrote the engine for that from scratch from my own understanding of coding.
His VIC-20 had memory expansion; he wrote one game as a proof of concept (“a small map and was set on a desert island”) before writing The Colonel’s House.
More than games, I was inspired by the Omen movies on TV at that time, which had a set of seven daggers forged to kill the Antichrist.
He’s referring to The Seven Daggers of Megiddo. They are named after the seven churches from Revelation, and each one needs to be placed at a different point of the body to kill the Antichrist.
The Colonel’s House was a “private game” to just share with friends. Sometime after this, he had gone to a computer game show in London, where he found Rabbit Software, and the topic of his game came up:
I got talking to them, and they asked me to send them a tape of my game. I wasn’t going to send it, but a school friend persuaded me that I should, and Rabbit immediately offered to publish it.
They were “chaotic” and actually released the game without telling Davis; a school friend had said they’d seen it at a game store. Rob didn’t believe him but his friend offered to buy a copy.
That was also the first time I saw the cover art, which I didn’t approve at the time, though in hindsight it was OK.
I was able to discuss the content of the game a bit; he had a scene (which I didn’t hit while playing) where you can fall out a window; you’ll be alive, get picked up by an ambulance, but then the ambulance will get in a wreck on the way to the hospital and you’ll die. This comes directly from a death in Mystery House (when you leave the attic). Regarding the amount of the death the game has in general:
I mean, I’m casting myself back now to when I was 14, but I’m not sure that I would know mechanically how I wanted to treat players who had done something unwanted and kind of you know failed in one of the puzzles; like probably death was the only way to handle that. How do you cover the cases of the different failures of the puzzle? That might have been a complexity that I wasn’t sure what to do with … therefore game over seems like quite a kind of neat way to wrap up whatever kind of sequences of actions that haven’t got them (the player) to the right solution.
He did indeed have a grand plan for seven games total:
I had planned to make 7 adventure games, each to recover a different one of the 7 Knives of Eternity. The lore was that the knives were extremely powerful and when joined together, gave the holder ultimate powers. They had been hidden distributed throughout time and space for safety, but their locations had been compromised and others were seeking them. You were an agent who had to recover them and destroy them for good. I did complete the 2nd game, Escape from Detra Five, which had a knife hidden in an alien space station. Unfortunately it was never released because Rabbit went out of business.
He remembers Detra Five being at a computer show once so it is still faintly possible a copy escaped to the wild; he doesn’t have one he can find.
Rob Davis did eventually go on to be a full-time game developer, and there’s even an interview in The Guardian with him back when he was in charge of Solaris Media (“worked with Macromedia Flash for five years to build websites, online games and digital art installations”).
Again, deep thanks to Rob Davis for his time, and of course (if he is the one reading these very words) feel free to drop any additional thoughts in the comments.
I’ve finished the game; this continues directly from my previous post.
Covers of the last three issues of the magazine (ending in August 1983).
I received warning on the puzzle I was stuck on from gschmidl that: “I have no idea how you’re supposed to figure it out.” The puzzle is so baffling I am coining a new term, supermoon logic.
The term moon logic has not come up as often on this blog as you might think; as I’ve mentioned before, I think the term gets applied far too widely to any kind of puzzle difficulty without any kind of care taken to if a puzzle is illogical or just difficult. Quoting myself on the game Katakombs:
I still think the term is useful, but I tend to narrow down to circumstances were cause and effect seem to be nearly at random; perhaps you understand from the animation why the bubble gum made the goat move, but the connection is one that could almost never have been predicted. There is a disjoint between action and result. Oddly, in text adventures, this shows up less than you might think, just because the requirement of a verb adds specificity to an action; you can’t just USE BUBBLEGUM ON GOAT and have the animation happen, but rather need to specify to (for sake of example) FEED BUBBLEGUM TO GOAT. The puzzle is still perhaps a bad one, but there’s at least a suspicion that something interesting might happen.
This puzzle is worse than that. Not only do cause and effect seem to be random, but even after seeing the result the sequence makes no sense. Put another way, if a game asks me to “guess what the author is thinking”, usually afterwards I can see how the author made the decision they did (even if it went spectacularly awry). Here, even knowing the particulars and combing the source code I can’t even begin to reconstruct what was going on. Perhaps you, the reader, can help demystify this, but for now I’m slotting this as the rare supermoon logic, where moon logic doesn’t even make sense after the fact.
Last time I was stuck with water in a jar (from a pond), a key (extracted from the bottom of the pond), a gold leaf, and a staff. I had dead-ended at a castle with a pit that you could use a staff to fly over and a wizard in a room with a cryptic sign.
The pit turned out to be a complete red herring; I am unclear why the flying scene was in the game. Only the wizard room is important:
? E
YOU ARE IN THE CASTLE ENTRY.
VISIBLE ITEMS:
NOTHING
? E
YOU ARE IN THE WIZARD’S ROOM.
THE WIZARD IS IN THIS ROOM.
A SIGN IS NEARBY.
VISIBLE ITEMS:
WIZARD
SIGN
? READ SIGN
IT SAYS, ‘I AM CLUTON. THROW A PIE AND YOU WILL DIE.’
? TAKE SIGN
THE WIZARD SAYS, ”LEAVE MY SHINGLE ALONE.”’
The hint that I needed to do an action I had already done was enough to get by, but only because I looked at my previous screenshots and saw an action that could be done in any room.
? DRINK WATER
O.K.
EVERYTHING BEGINS TO SPIN AROUND AND…
YOU ARE ON THE HEATH OF ORIONE’S MANOR.
TO THE NORTH IS A HOUSE, TO THE EAST, A DUMP.
VISIBLE ITEMS:
NOTHING
Anyone with an idea? I tried doing anagrams of “I AM CLUTON”; I tried poking the word (and the “throw a pie” phrase) into search engines to see if I had missed some obscure cultural reference. I tried checking the source code to see if I had missed a way of getting a hint. Drinking the water elsewhere gets the message “BOY THAT REALLY HIT THE SPOT!!!” which suggests nothing magical.
The other lesson from this is that magic is very dangerous for a game designer; it can be done to make arbitrary effects, but if a part of the game is based on that effect, it is almost certainly going to be frustrating for the player.
Moving on, as we aren’t too far from the end:
You can go south to loop back to the forest with the oak tree if for some reason you missed something; if you go east you end up at a DUMP with a RAT. This room serves only to kill you if you try to mess about with the rat.
Heading north instead into the house, there’s a series of locations that are room-name-only (YOU ARE IN THE ENTRY HALL, YOU ARE IN THE BACK ROOM, YOU ARE IN THE BACK PORCH). One side room is a kitchen with a pie, and at the end of the sequence is a ghost.
Given the sign earlier, it was impossible not to resist trying to THROW PIE while at the ghost.
YOU HIT THE GHOST WITH A PIE.
HE GETS MAD AND PUNCHES YOU, THE FORCE OF THE BLOW
IS SO GREAT THAT IT KILLS YOU.
I know people are still sore about the pie/yeti combo from one of the King’s Quest games; finally, the ghost gets revenge.
Thinking outside the box, I looped back around to the wizard Cluton and tried throwing the pie at him instead…
…the end result being that THROW PIE still somehow throws it at the ghost, even when you are nowhere nearby. OK, yes, the source code is a bit fragile. (I checked the late issues — see top of this post — for corrections, but couldn’t find any, but maybe the magazine ended too quickly for that.)
I tried EAT PIE instead and found a diamond. Knowing GIVE was on my verb list, I tried GIVE DIAMOND while at the ghost and it worked.
This isn’t supermoon level logic since “enemy accepts something valuable” makes retrospective sense (sort of), but I certainly didn’t use regular logic to solve; it’s just the game limits so heavily what options are available I didn’t have many choices to go through.
The ending had no puzzle at all because I had already found the key (if you didn’t find it earlier, you can go back and get it; you can even refill your water and do the DRINK WATER trick again).
My apologies to the author if he’s here Googling himself. I did indeed hit a puzzle so baffling I had to coin a new word to describe it. I did at least appreciate the “pure” feel of the game even with the bugs and puzzle illogic, and even with minimal description I did get the scent of another world.
It was also useful to see what sort of game H & E Computronics printed (and the fact they likely did not test the game for bugs at all); as I mentioned in my last post, we’ll visit them again sometime at least once more (I have not skimmed the complete catalog to be sure nothing else is missing).
Coming up: an interview with an author giving a snapshot of the chaotic UK game publishing scene, followed by an Apple II “contest game” with buried treasure.
Written in 1981, not published until 1983. Take your pick. I didn’t have this one on any of my lists but El Explorador de RPG recently pointed it out; since it was not preserved otherwise, gschmidl then put the source of the game on his Github.
It was printed in the magazine H & E Computronics, which has barely had any mention here at all, so a brief history–
From the first issue of the newsletter (July 1978) that would eventually be the magazine called H & E Computronics.
Howard Y. Gosman, former math teacher out of New York, ran one of the first personal computer magazines kicking off in July of 1978; their June 1979 issue specifically bragged they were “the first TRS-80 PUBLICATION to last a year” as well as “the largest publication devoted to a single computer (over 16,000).”
This is an oddly specific claim meant to work around existing alongside things like PCC’s newspaper/magazine which launched in the early 70s and Kilobaud launching in January of 1977 (“The Small Computer Magazine”). One of their main competitors was Softside which was still TRS-80-only from 1978 through 1979 although it launched later (October 1978). Softside has been mentioned here now quite a few times; they printed, for instance, Dog Star Adventure, the first full-parser adventure game in a magazine.
Softside tended to be quite game-friendly; with the exception of the tax software from the February 1979 issue, every issue from ’78 through ’79 featured a game on its cover.
While H & E included games once in a while, they tended to be a seller of “serious” software; their catalog was heavy on the business side and they even kept this going past their own magazine’s existence, selling their own VersaBusiness software into the late 80s on a variety of platforms.
They did have one gaming landmark worth noting, possibly a side effect of their “serious” positioning: they have the first ad I can find for an adult game. Back in that June 1979 issue the company Phase-80 includes a mention of their games Strip Dice and Strip Concentration. (“Each player must follow ALL directions of the computer … The game may be played by ‘CRT’ light if desired.”) H & E Computronics later sold the infamous “activity catalog” Interlude, which you might remember from City Adventure.
The Phase-80 ad notably beats out the first commercial adult game in Japan, Yakyūken, although Yakyūken is far more significant in being a single-player erogē rather than a “party game” facilitated by the computer. (Joey Wawzonek has a terrific essay here about the game, answering the question “why are we stripping while playing rock paper scissors in the first place?”)
After their August 1983 issue, the publication (not company) of H & E merged with Basic Magazine (formerly 80-U.S. Journal, another magazine founded almost exactly the same time as H & E). Today’s game, Sword of Raschkil by Mac Vaughn, came from one of their last issues, May 1983. Comments from the code identify Vaughn as being at Henderson High School in Georgia.
Our author is standing second from the right, clearly demonstrating that Math is Cool. Via one of his school yearbooks.
True to form, the magazine the game appears in has a super-serious cover. This seems to be why their games have generally been overlooked in the various TRS-80 archives, even though this isn’t the only game in this issue (although it is the only adventure). From a different issue, Castle Adventure is another game I need to loop back to that again seemingly was never archived.
Our objective is to find the long-lost sword of a warrior from the distant past.
Several hundred years ago, the warrior Raschkil was slain in battle. It was rumored that he had had a magical sword, but when it was not found on him, many assumed that it had never existed.
Just a few months ago, you were digging in a garden near your small house when you unearthed a small, unlocked iron box. Within it was a map giving the approximate location of the sword of Raschkil! How did it get under the soil of your garden? No one will ever know.
You decided to find the sword, and had little difficulty finding the area on the map: an area surrounding a small castle. Now, using your wits, you must find the sword within the area named. Any further instructions are included in the program. Good luck you’ll need it!
We start, as is tradition, in a forest.
The game fortunately does not start with a maze; the forest is tiny, and it leads to an even tinier castle. The starting area map first, though:
Just to the south is a “hole” where ENTER HOLE puts you on a ledge of a bottomless pit, with a staff you can take. You can only get out with CLIMB LADDER so you can’t take the ladder with you.
Heading further south, there’s a meadow followed by a large oak you can climb. Along the way you can pick up a “golden leaf” and the top of the tree has a jar because … squirrels need jars?
Back to the start, heading east you can find a pool; you can FILL JAR at the pool.
I was expecting the water to be toxic and kill you. I’ve been in too many death-every-corner games lately, I suppose. You can also POUR WATER in any room where it “makes a puddle on the floor.”
The game also lets you SWIM, and I was briefly worried I had a broken-code issue for a moment afterwards.
YOU ARE SWIMMING IN A POOL OF WATER.
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POOL IS A KEY.
? GET KEY
I CAN’T DO THAT AT THIS TIME.
The reason for my concern is I had discovered by now the game has a bug: if you drop any item you can’t pick it up. DROP STAFF cheerfully gets the response of “O.K.” but then trying to GET STAFF yields the response I CAN’T DO THAT AT THIS TIME. I checked with gschmidl who assured me the game was beatable as is, before arriving at DIVE.
Just for reference, my verb list, based on typing in all my standard verbs:
This was a bit fussy to get because typing CLIMB has the response
I DON’T KNOW HOW TO CLIMB SOMETHING!!!!
which is a touch deceptive. The command doesn’t work without a noun.
With all that taken care of (and shockingly, no DIG command used anywhere, not an understood verb!) let’s proceed on to the castle, which might seem a little underwhelming so far but I expect I’m missing a lot.
Heading into the NORTH WING indicates that you feel a DRAFT, indicating perhaps the author was familiar with Hunt the Wumpus, as to the east is a pit. If you’re holding the staff you’ll levitate; if you don’t have the staff you’ll fall.
Dropping the staff is accounted for.
From the east of the start is a wizard with a sign. I haven’t gotten anything to happen here.
Inside joke, maybe?
Finally, to the south is … nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Again, I’ve been assured the game is beatable, but I’m still starting to worry (given the drop bug) I’m running into some other code-related issue. I’ll take suggestions in the comments if anyone thinks there’s something I missed.
And very special thanks to Ethan Johnson for assistance with getting the picture of our author, Mac Vaughn.
It turned out I had one bottleneck (the wolf) which opened up the rest of the game, and “puzzles” I was spending time on (like the ghost and the lift) were complete red herrings. I’m unclear if they’re “intentional” or not; we’ve certainly had games before where I suspect the author just kept writing, ran out of disk space / motivation, and stopped with loose ends still left in. At least they became intentional, and I’ll explain what that means when I get to the end.
Games Computing, July 1984. Haunted House was renamed The House on the Misty Hill and re-purposed as a type-in for ZX Spectrum. More on that at the end as well.
Matt W. suggested using the generic “food” rather than the crisps with the wolf. Doing anything with the wolf that’s wrong will kill you so I hadn’t thoroughly tested all the items yet.
(The coffin contains a dead body; I tried carting the coffin over to the ghost in case they matched, but nothing happened. I didn’t know yet the ghost was a total red herring. I took the coffin back to the starting point and dropped it. Even though the wolf had left, this annoyed the wolf who came back and killed me. Whoops.)
Getting by the wolf opens up the graveyard, the only other section of the game. Heading directly north leads to a “shovel” next to a “newly dug grave” (shovel is total red herring, and I did waste time trying USE SHOVEL across the map a few places, ugh) and farther north you fall in the grave itself and get stuck unless you have the right item.
Specifically, this is where the rope is handy, although I spent some time trying to THROW ROPE and the like before realizing the game just let me CLIMB while holding the rope and the action after was implicit. The game is not consistent about this (implicit action while holding an item); this comes to give me trouble later.
Heading east from where the wolf was leads to a crossroads but also a vase of flowers.
I rather grumpily realized what was going on here, and took the flowers over to the princess who didn’t want to be rescued. I then dropped the vase of flowers on the ground, the customary romantic gesture.
She now is willing to tag along to be carted over to the front step of the house and dropped off. The vase of flowers incidentally stays in place and is left behind. It’s like the world’s worst dating simulator.
North of the crossroads you get shut into a shrine.
Having prayed earlier, it seemed the appropriate place; it was used to solve a puzzle, not just be a joke!
You are informed if you try to take the statue that you are not Superman. That’ll be the last treasure I get.
With that resolved I could head farther north in the shrine to find “an old rusty handcart” and a small alcove with a treasure.
It immediately occurred to me to take the cart over to the giant statue and try to take it, but I was still getting the same Superman message. It seemed fair that it’d be impossible to take the statue even with a handcart.
Leaving that behind for now, I checked to the east of the crossroads…
Complete red herring.
…and to the south.
Here my running gag finally paid off.
Coventry Live has a 2021 story about a dog who loves Quavers Crisps and eats them out of the bag, with a picture.
This leads, straightforwardly, to an “eerie tomb” with a CRUCIFIX. I nearly had all my treasures!
I still thought, perhaps, either the ghost or man in the stocks would help with the statue situation. It was an odd scenario where the game requires all treasures at a particular spot (at the front of the house) but given how close the statue was to the location it seemed almost ridiculous to require moving it.
I warned earlier about implicit actions being done with held items; this time, the action is not done while holding an item. I tried to use a handcart, but you’re supposed to drop it first, then GET STATUE, and the game will automatically load the cart from there.
I don’t necessarily have immediate issues with red herrings; they can add texture and atmosphere to an environment that can seem all too “neat” and like living in a cryptic crossword. However, the parser was so janky it was very hard to tell if I was supposed to, say, keep trying to move the lift, or keep trying to scare the ghost with the uniform; when a book is visible in one room while held but can’t be examined in another, pretty much anything is possible. Red herrings need to come along with a parser that the player trusts is working like they are expecting.
I tried a little bit of House on Misty Hill and it really is almost exactly the same; some rooms have a little more description (“a dirty kitchen is full of pots which haven’t been washed in years”) but the red herrings are “enhanced”. The man in the stocks cries for help, and the magazine is now a “monster gazette” which seems more likely to be helpful / not a red herring than the old magazine. Thus, Lucas was clearly happy solidifying the red herrings; that doesn’t mean they were introduced intentionally at first, especially given my suspicion this was the first game he wrote. There’s parser jank in Journey of a Space Traveller, but not nearly to the same level.
I checked his later books (or book, the Amstrad and MSX books about adventure programming merely convert the code) to look for comments on his philosophy on red herrings, and found two notes:
Ardent adventurers don’t like games where they lose their lives too often, so don’t go overboard with traps like this one and do try to keep the responses humorous.
Beware, however, of writing too many red herrings into your game as they can waste an enormous amount of RAM.
Death can represent a punch line of sorts; the issue here is that there is no punch line, just hanging puzzles that seem like they are bugs.
In addition to Misty Hill, the game has yet another remix (somewhat) in The Monster’s Final Hour which gets remade yet again into The Monster Returns. I only say kind of because what seems to have happened is two distinct rip-offs, both off the same game: John R. Olsen’s Frankenstein Adventure.
In Frankenstein Adventure, you need to revive the monster (and then kill the monster in the grand finale). Haunted House / Misty Hill instead grabs a few characters from the game, similar to what Peter Smith’s Hitch-Hiker did with the Supersoft Hitchhiker game. The wolf is in both games (with the same death-message, even); the bog you can fall in without a map is in.
The house structure is vaguely similar and there is a secret passage opened essentially the same way. Haunted House then veers course and has the monster already awake (and distracted by some electrodes); it’s like Lucas grabbed a couple themes to start and then went free-form from there.
Monster’s Final Hour (1985, see above) is much more directly a remake of Olsen’s Frankenstein, where the main goal (revive the monster) is maintained. You’ll also notice the verb list is quite different. So while it seems like Monster’s Final Hour might come from Haunted House, it’s really just that Lucas went back to the original source. A diagram to help:
Absolutely staggering. I can see why the games have been so hard to sort out.
We still have many Lucas games in the future, but coming up: another type-in, this one from the United States, followed by an Apple II game involving real buried treasure.
Just to recap from last time, here was the state of my map, with special rooms marked.
I also had access to a candle, a box of matches, a bottle of spirits, some food, a map (all used) as well as a book of ghost stories, a tray of drinks, a packet of crisps, a bar of soap, a knife, a uniform, a rope with hook, pots, a painting, some electrodes, and some tomatoes (all unused). I was facing a wolf by a coffin, a monster in a secret passage, a room getting locked with a princess, a lift that wasn’t moving, and a room blocked by a ghost (supposedly afraid of uniforms, but nothing I could do with uniform was triggering it!)
I went through my usual verb list with the catch this is generally a two-letter parser.
HIT, SHOOT, and KILL all have a response about not being so violent, which suggests they don’t work at all. (It also explains when I tried KISS PRINCESS — it was required in Pillage Village, remember — that the response was “you’re not cruel.” It wasn’t trying to be progressive about kissing consent, the game thought that I was typing KILL PRINCESS.)
After multiple fruitless attempts and managing the uniform/ghost combo I started working on the monster instead. GIVE isn’t a verb but DROP is (drop is how I gave the spirits to the drunk) so I went through a variety of items just to test things out.
“But they’re Monster Munch! You don’t like them?”
I tried HELP out just in case this was the sort of game help is a required verb and the game informed me:
I suppose you could try praying!!
So I tried PRAY:
That didn’t seem to help!!
Maybe you didn’t try hard enough!!
Alas, PRAY HARDER gets no different reaction (I doubt the parser even looked at the second word, to be honest). I eventually hit upon dropping the electodes…
…which sort of makes sense if you squint, but not really.
Past the monster are two rooms.
With the antique my score was now safely 2 out of 7, and I thought it would become 3 out of 7 shortly with the keys. They do work in the princess room (USE KEYS)…
…but the princess refuses to move. This was the moment in Pillage Village where KISS was required. Princess, are you sure you want to hang out in the dungeon…?
The princess refuses.
With me befuddled, I tried more attempts at the ghost.
Maybe you’d prefer some Crispy Bacon Frazzles? I can’t eat them myself, there’s no EAT command.
The rest of my time was spent frustrated. I tried USE KEYS at the man the stocks and the tomatoes, no dice. I tried every verb on my list on the lift, again no dice. (“USE LIFT”: “You’re trying to confuse me!”) I am nearly guaranteed now to check either the walkthrough or at least the source code, but I wanted to report in on my progress here first. The main issue isn’t it doesn’t feel like I’m “stuck on a puzzle” as much as fighting against the system; I’m guessing at least once I’ve done the right thing, just expressed in the wrong way.
The wolf really doesn’t like crisps.
(Also, people picked up on last time there’s a certain other game from 1981 Lucas is “borrowing” from that is not by him, but I want to save getting into that for my final post.)
Writing an adventure game is very similar to writing a novel. Everybody can write a few unrelated sentences, but the novelist’s skill comes from stringing sentences together in such a way as to create a tale combining imagination, flair and ingenuity.
Two relevant places for today marked: Kidsgrove in red, Burton-Upon-Trent in blue to the southeast.
The British company ICL (International Computers, Limited) has come up here before; their game called Quest by Urquhart, Sheppard and McCarthy came from their computers as an after-hours project. They were curiously formed as sort of a forced integration of multiple companies from the 1960s. ICT (International Computers and Tabulators) was already a merger of elements from BTM (British Tabulating Machines), Powers-Sampas, and the computer divisions of GEC, EMI, and Ferranti; English Electric had merged in Leo, Marconi, and Eliot (changing names each time).
In certain contexts a government might be concerned about monopoly power, but the Wilson government of the late 60s decided the opposite; there was concern that the British computer market was simply going to collapse under outside pressure (especially from IBM). So, the government invoked the Industrial Expansion Act which pushed together the two companies into one in 1968, keeping the name ICL.
The resulting mammoth had a disparate variety of incompatible products; ICL decided to “start fresh” (with government money assistance, 40 million pounds) and develop the 2900 series. (Their own 1900 series was ailing and outdated, using only 6 bit characters.) At Kidsgrove in particular (site originally built by English Electric in the 60s) they made printed circuit boards but also were one of the sites developing software for the new device, in particular the (now well-regarded, unstable at the start) VME/B operating system.
Early releases of VME/B were characterised by one word – late. At one stage VME/B was being produced in Kidsgrove, but top management and validation remained in Bracknell. As days turned into weeks, management became increasingly impatient. “We haven’t finished it yet” was the reason for a conspicuous delay in handover to system test. “Then just put what you have finished on a tape and send it down here so that we can make a start on validation”.
A couple of days later a tape arrived. It was put up on a tape deck and the machine was booted up. Nothing happened. Consternation ensued. Much diagnostic effort was expended in trying to get the new version of VME to load. Eventually it transpired that the tape contained only an end of file mark.
“That tape you sent us – its completely empty.”
“But that’s what you asked for.” came the reply. Somehow a week’s delay was bought.
One of the people hired around this time was Andrew Espeland. I’m unfortunately just guessing he was at Kidsgrove but I have decent evidence, as he worked at ICL starting around 1973, had an address at Burton-on-Trent in 1983 and went to Burton Grammar School in the 60s, meaning there’s a fair chance he stayed locally in between. The nearest ICL location from Burton-on-Trent was at Kidsgrove. In the later part of his time there it is possible he did some telework, as we know Kidsgrove specifically was set up for that. You can see a demo below of a worker with Airbus connecting to an ICL terminal, circa 1982:
While ICL expanded all through the 70s (helped along by the government policy of buying homegrown computers) they were starting to be in trouble in the 1980s. They were intending to expand to a factory in Winsford (about an hour northwest of Kidsgrove) and the local government “bent over backwards” to aid in this, with 1,500 new houses built and “sterilising a major factory site” but ICL started to backtrack; from the floor of Parliament:
The matter is urgent because the loss of 1,500 jobs is in an area where unemployment is already at 11 per cent. The only other large employer, Metal Box, is due to close at Christmas with the loss of 500 jobs, many of them directly affecting my constituents, [it] would push unemployment up to 15 per cent by the spring.
This is a death blow to Winsford. I have just learnt that the men’s bitterness is such that they have today occupied the factory, and I submit that the House has a special responsibility to air their grievances as urgently as possible.
While the situation at Kidsgrove wasn’t quite as bad, they still went from 33,000 to 20,000 employees from 1981 to 1984. So it is possible Andrew Espeland was one of the redundancies; whatever happened, he decided to strike it out on his own as a software publisher in mid-1983 and founded Silverlind. He posted solicitations for authors during this time.
Esperland gave an interview to his local newspaper (Burton Mail) on November 23, 1983, featuring the Silverlind Master Diet Planner (written by Professor C. V. Brown and Dr. E. J. Levin of the University of Stirling)…
…although it was the sort of interview where he was starting from scratch with teaching how computers work, including explaining to the reporter “that software and hardware were not related to pornography.”
Silverlind is like a book publishing company, only we sell tapes instead of books. We offer the amateur a chance to turn professional. Everyone who has a computer thinks he’s great at coming up with programs, but not many people have the resources to market them if they’re good. That’s where we come in.
Please note that he went straight from ICL to personal computer tape distribution; this is different from the situation at Sumlock I wrote about recently where there was a branch computer store in the late 1970s that led to software publishing. Put another way, Sumlock’s ads and packaging come across as being sold by someone with product and consumer experience, while Silverland’s come across as being made by someone who came straight from writing operating systems to running a company. Silverlind did not last long, with ads starting by the end of the year and petering out by early 1985 with no increase in catalog size. The late 1983 ads include three adventure games.
All three are (probably) all by the same author, one we’ve encountered before: Steve W. Lucas. He is, as I explained earlier, sort of the British version of Peter Kirsch, writing a staggering number of type-ins starting in 1983, although many are repurposed ones he had already written.
The reason for the “(probably)” is we only have copies of two of the Silverlind adventures: Haunted House and Passport to Death. Gateway to the Stars (AKA Journey to the Stars) is lost, but assuming it is by Lucas we might see it again under a different name anyway. (I’m suspicious of “A Journey Through Space” which is in his Adventure Programming on the Amstrad book; there’s no tiger or lizard woman but Lucas often renamed things. The book game is allegedly “buggy and impossible to finish” which is another thing common amongst Lucas games.)
Via Everygamegoing.
While the previous Lucas game we played had versions for Amstrad and Oric, this one is for BBC Micro! Just like the other Lucas games this does have a clone-situation but I’m going to focus on the original for now and visit the duplicate situation at the end.
I have the full instructions from the inside of the tape, but they don’t give any context other than “you are standing in the doorway of an old mansion” and “you must recover the six treasures”.
You have a lamp which won’t work, a note and a gun when you start. As you visit the other locations you will find a variety of objects which may be of use – or are they red herrings?
Regarding the note:
The note is from my great grandfather ARNOLD J HARBUTHNOT. It reads:
As my sole living heir, I have sent you on this dangerous mission to find 6 treasures and rescue the princess. you must deposit these items on the doorstep.
Apparently there’s a princess too? In a haunted house? Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. (I will find the princess this session, but not rescue her yet.)
The overall structure of the complex has a house to the north, a path in the middle, and a castle to the south. Despite the Haunted House name the castle is more extensive than the house, but let’s start with the house first.
There’s no descriptions of rooms beyond their names, so you need to use your imagination.
Doing a grand tour, east of the hallway is a bedroom with a pair of slippers, and “an old four poster bed” with a pillow. North leads to a kitchen with a box of matches, a bottle of spirits, and some food, and going west after leads to a “large dining room full of cobwebs” that contains a candle.
West of the hallways is a library with a map and a “pen in a golden holder”. The map curiously says “not at the moment” when you try to read it; this is a game where items often only can be used in very specific cases, even if there is no logical reason to restrict them (like books). Trying to GET PEN reveals a secret passage…
…and going in is death.
Well, to be fair, the game did start by announcing we had a dead lamp. With the matches and the candle you can LIGHT CANDLE (…normally, one time it caused my game to crash…) and go into the secret passage safely. Not far in, you get stopped by a monster.
There’s a “sharp knife” you can find later but if you try to KILL MONSTER the game says “you’re a coward”, which is rude but fair for a standard adventurer who will likely rely on trickery or some gizmo instead to get by. Let’s turn to the middle path area…
…where off an “old footpath” to start there is a “snarling wolf” at a “coffin”.
Trying to OPEN COFFIN gets a blank response from the game (another thing that’s pretty common; 98% sure this game was written before Journey of a Space Traveller because it has more jank). I can get a reaction from the wolf by trying to GET WOLF…
That makes it mad. It attacks me. I am DEAD
…but that isn’t helpful so let’s move on! Further south is another split in the path where a signpost informs us that “FOOTPATH WEST IS DANGEROUS. YOU NEED A MAP” and this is the one and only spot the map can be READ successfully.
(I originally died while holding the map thinking it would be used passively. Not only can the map only be read in the right room, but you have to do the READ command before moving otherwise you’ll die.)
This leads to an Old Barn with a *PEWTER* trinket and a book of ghost stories, and just past is a tiny cave which appears to be empty. I tried to do SWEEP even though I had no appropriate item and the game told me I couldn’t swim. This is a two-letter parser. (On the BBC Micro, why!)
Reading the book only works in this room.
Moving on you can find a drawbridge (no puzzle, just PULL LEVER) followed by a “drunken man” in a Castle Courtyard that is blocking your way west (you can pass south unfettered). If you take the spirits from the kitchen and drop them he will helpfully pass out.
Go farther west and you’ll find the princess! Except now you are locked in, and typing HELP as the game suggests indicates that if you don’t have a key you should reset your game.
Ignoring the drunk man for the moment and going south into the castle…
…you can do a sweep down various rooms to the south and west and find a sharp knife in a kitchen, a tray of drinks in a restroom, a bar of soap in a bathroom, a packet of crisps in a dormitory, and a uniform in a changing room. (You might think to WEAR UNIFORM while in that room, but there is no response to this.) There is cryptically also a “magazine dated 1893” where READ MAGAZINE gets the message “I can’t make it out.”
35% chance this is a red herring, 30% chance I need an item, 30% chance I need to bring the magazine somewhere else, 5% chance this is a bug.
Heading east instead leads to a most curious room for a game called Haunted House.
You can THROW TOMATOES (as the screen shows me doing) but FREE MAN and RELEASE MAN are right out. Maybe this scene is here to be funny? Just south of here is a “hand-operated lift” with a “rope with a hook” inside but no apparent way to operate the lift.
To the far east you can find a “pair of electrodes” intended for ??? and a painting which the main character is actively offended by.
South is a pottery room with some pots (spooky?) and to the north is a ghost (spooky!)
You might think, ah, the book says the uniform will scare ghosts, but I have not been able to wear the uniform, nor does it get used “passively”. I tried SCARE GHOST and since the game has a two-letter parser it read the command as SCORE instead, telling me I had 1 out of 7 points possible.
There is a solution on CASA and my pain tolerance will not be high, but I admit there are things I haven’t tried like giving the crisps to the wolf, or stabbing the princess with a knife, or entertaining the man in stocks with a puppet show using slippers on my hands. I will also take suggestions in the comments for next time.
Renga in Blue 
