I am extremely sorry that I shall not be able to use the music of Thamos, but this piece … is now among the rejected works which are no longer performed. For the sake of the music alone it might possibly be given again, but that is not likely. Certainly it is a pity!
I’ve seen the end of the game. I wouldn’t say I “finished” exactly as you’ll see in a moment. My previous posts on Thissala are needed for context, although a brief recap: Thissala is a very large game made for Data General systems by David Auerbach, Paul Chiasson, and Peter Macaulay, with work starting even earlier than the megagame Ferret (1979 vs. 1982). It’s another “find the treasures” plot leading to the search for a lost flute.
Thus spoke Thamos. He then raised his flute in his hand, then lowering his hands the flute remained suspended in the air. And Thamos said:
Go
The flute ascended and disappeared over the trees and into the mountains.
Data General Eclipse MV/8000 from the Living Computer Museum, picture via Jimmy Lamar Sorrells on Facebook.
The “finish” was by using a debug-mode unearthed through the work of Rob and gschmidl. The game is clearly too outright broken to beat “honestly” but the abilities are extensive enough you might be able to come up with a “fake” walkthrough which only activates the debug commands when truly needed. I didn’t do that: I just wanted to see what I was missing, which includes a full endgame. (You can download the debug version of the game at this link. This runs in Windows with no emulator, but saving and potentially other things are broken, so this is mainly for playing with the debug menu.)
This means there are big chunks I haven’t seen “honestly” but I’ll at least give you a tour.
Initialized … Objects = 211 Rooms = 710
Thissala — revision 0.60
Please type HELP for latest information concerning the game and implemented commands
Middle of the parking lot
You are in the middle of a large parking lot that stretches off in all directions. In the distant north you can see a large mountain. To the northeast you can hear the sound of water.
At your feet lies a long square dowel.
The game is divided into sections (like Ferret) almost certainly due to the same memory issues Ferret has. The way Ferret managed was to make everything one-way; here it seems to be more freely possible to jump to section 2 and back to 1, but I’m not really certain as I used the “express” command built into the debug system. The format is “express section/room number”. You can also simply use section 1 for everything and teleport all the way to room 710. Unfortunately, if you teleport outside the section a room is designated for, it means going in a particular direction causes the game to crash. For example:
express 1/319
Whoosh …
Inside MacDonalds
You are standing inside of the Adrian MacDonalds, which looks very much like any of the other MacDonalds back on Earth. The resturant is, like the city, deserted. There is a doorway to the south, and an alcove to the northeast. Directly in front of you is a long high counter.
Sitting on the counter are some golden fries
On the counter is an astonishingly appealing Big Mac
Going northeast here has a crash, because 319 isn’t in section 1 of the game. I think the division is
1 to 127 (section 1)
128 to 296 (section 2, or 2/1 to 2/169)
297 to 384 (section 3, or 3/1 to 3/88)
385 to 505 (section 4, or 4/1 to 4/121)
506 to 651 (section 5, or 5/1 to 5/146)
652 to 748 (section 6. or 6/1 to 6/97)
but I can’t swear to this, as the code while in debug mode is unstable. For example, a teleport to 1/127 (which seems to be in section 1) results in a cave with some room exits mentioned but the game prohibits me from going anywhere. Going into the later rooms of section 6 results in garbage characters.
I’ll go through section by section first, open the locked postbox I was stumped by last time, and finally show off the endgame.
Section 1:
This has all the outdoors sections of the main game, as well as the “prison” area from last time. There’s a little bit of the initial cave area, but it actually cuts off before everything outside is included. For example, “inside the ground keeper’s hut” lands past section 1 in section 2. In the main game you can just go in and out of the hut with no trouble; no one-way only route like Ferret.
Includes also the White House transplanted from Zork. Art from David Ardito via Andrew Plotkin.
Section 2:
This has most of the rest of the King’s room area (including the library with the curtain which we never got to work). This leads up through the train station and the desert / Dry Gulch section. The library seems to link between the two, as I was able to walk the other direction back up to the library with teleports.
I wasn’t able to get down here in the regular game, but I can still explore with cheats:
Hidden room
You are in a small room that has two obvious exits east and west. From somewhere high above the eastern exit, a stream of light is focused on a square hole set in the southern wall.
There is an interperters guide here
On the ground here, is a metal pyramid, approximately 3″X3″ at the the base, that has a mirror-like finish.
I can show off what the pyramid does, but let me save that for a later section. Instead, I’ll keep going west:
w
Dusty Passage
You are walking along a dusty passage that travels east and west.
w
Ore Car Room
This is apparently the room in which ore mined in the tunnels would be loaded into mining cars, and sent out somewhere. On the ground are two rails, narrowly set on ties. At one end of the track is a bumper; the other end disappears under a steel door that is solidly imbedded in the stone wall of the room.
There is a hole in the ceiling, too high to reach from the floor.
Resting on the tracks is an ore car, large enough to hold a person with room to spare
The ore car you can “board” just like the boat in Riverworld, and there’s a blue and yellow button. Pushing the blue button takes you to a new area.
push blue button
You suddenly become aware of a moving sensation … the ore car is rolling. The steel door in front of you opens quickly to allow the car to pass into a tunnel. The stone walls of the tunnel flash by faster and faster as the ore car gains momentum despite the fact that the track is not sloped. A different set of steel doors open in front of you and you plunge out from the tunnel into another well lit room.
disembark
Bank Vault
You are inside the bank vault of the small local bank. In one corner is a stairway up. There are TV cameras high up in the ceiling that slowly pan back and forth observing you and the room. Running near one of the walls is a set of narrowly placed railroad tracks. One end terminates with a bumper, the other end disappears under a steel door.
Resting on the tracks is an ore car, large enough to hold a person with room to spare
You can go “out” to leave up the stairs, which brings you back to the bank with the gnome. Trying to go back down again has the gnome stop you.
Inside the local small bank
Fastened against the wall in the corner is a set of chairs. Secured to the floor is a small counter that was at one time used by townfolk to fill out deposit and withdrawl slips. On the north wall is a button marked in letters now barely visible “Ring bell for service”. In the corner of the room is a staircase going down.
Surrounding the stairway down, is a metal cage, with a closed door in the front
in
A little gnome pops out and says “Sorry … you cannot enter without the appropriate withdrawl form”
I think the whole reason for this section is to tote treasures over; I mentioned it a long time ago, but if you try to leave the main mountain while holding treasures the gnomes stop you, but taking them through the bank is safe.
It is possible to go back down and I’ll show that off later, as it needs a particular item.
Section 3:
Might as well start with Room 3/1, where it really gets into unknown territory:
The city’s periphery (Stone Ring) and the white ramp
Inward, there is the water ring, behind you is a white ramp.
Lying on one of the stones of the ring is a small brown tablet with writing on it.
On the ground is a mailing label with an address on it
On the ground is an envelope with a rare stamp attached
Reading the tablet first, which gives what I’d expect to be a room description:
You are standing at the outer most ring surrounding the City in the sky. This ring is made of large stones that appear randomly distributed. The ring is about 100 feet wide. Behind you to the south is the white ramp. To your north is the second ring, a ring of water, again about 100 feet across. The stone ring, which is truely circular and complete, heads off in the clockwise and counterclockwise directions.
(This irregularity is part of why I think the objects may be misplaced.) The label gives no description, but the envelope gives some ASCII art.
From here, you can’t go “in” as “The Water ring is sacred, and unsuitable for swimming” but you can go “out”.
The white ramp
You are standing on a narrow white ramp joining the ledge on minor mountain and the clouds interior. The ramp is unlike anything you have ever seen. It is translucent and obviously very thin, but it can support your weight without the slightest sign of strain. Through the ramp you can see the ground many feet below.
Trying to go “north” on the bridge results in the message that results in getting arrested (from last time).
A little gnome stops you on the bridge. After staring at you for a couple of seconds, he grows angry and curses you, waves his arms and suddenly there is a flash of bright light and when the smoke clears you find yourself in …
There’s many more rooms in section 3 devoted to the water ring area, but I’m still not sure where all this is in relation to the main game.
On the walkway.
You are slowly gliding along the outbound moving walkway leading from the City in the Sky. Below you is the second ring, the Water Ring. Outside of the plastic enclosing the walkway is a small sign.
I think there’s some kind of spinning mechanic but it doesn’t seem to be fully functional (at least not when warping in and sequence breaking the game). There’s one other significant chunk of rooms in section 3…
express 3/50
Whoosh …
Crystal Maze
express 3/70
Whoosh …
Crystal Maze
…but for reasons I hope you understand I didn’t bother to map them or figure out if there’s something coherent. I’ll save that for some future archaeologist.
Section 4:
Back to familiar territory, in the extra-large desert area, including the house with rooms where the authors never finished room descriptions. Shortly after the “end diggins” room are some rooms describing a tent, but since you can’t even leave the tent I’m pretty sure they didn’t get wired in.
Desert cheiftan’s tent
The tent is large, cool, airy and luxurious, and its entrance faces north across the centre of the encampment. The cloth walls of the tent flap gently in the breeze.
Section 5:
Remember that hidden room with the metal pyramid and the hole? Now let’s see what happens when you put them together.
put pyramid in hole
The ray of light is deflected by the metal pyramid. The light falls on the northern wall. Seconds later, there is a click from within the wall, and it glides open silently.
n
Entrance to the Pyramid
You are in what appears to be the entrance to an ancient Pyramid which has been buried for eons. The floor of the chamber seems to have long ago been coated with what had once been a slippery substance. Time, however, has transformed it to a hard slick surface so you must still watch your step. There is a passage North and West as well as the one to the South.
The entrance to the pyramid is 5/1 so the start of this new section. Going north:
Pit Room
While ambling along, the light from your helmet reflects off the floor Just in the nick of time you notice there is a pit North of you, apparently a trap designed by the builders to deter theives from stealing the royal treasures. Suddenly stopping at the brink, your foot dislodges a piece of the edge which plummets to the bottom of the pit. Counting the seconds before you here the sound of it hitting bottom, you estimate that the pit is about 50 Meters deep.(?) Had you fallen, there would have been no way you could have survived.
As you scan your surroundings you notice an inscription in the ceiling above you.
The inscription is unfortunately gibberish, even if you’re holding or trying to use the “interpreters guide” from the earlier room. Maybe I’m just applying the wrong verb. Potentially it’s a straight cryptogram, but I’ll leave it to my astute readers to take a stab if that’s the case.
Unfortunately, going north further is DEATH.
Obviously you do not know the secret of the pyramid and the sun god Ra has seen fit to punish you. Down you fall into a seemingly endless pit until suddenly you see the bottom of the pit. Looming up before you see meter long spikes of steel tipped with barbs coming up at you.
Suddenly you find yourself becoming impaled on the spikes. Death mercifully comes swift and ends the agonizing pain.
You open your eyes to find yourself floating in a dark empty void.
Suddenly from all around you is heard the voice of GOD saying:
” Time to pay, to pay, to pay….”
The exit from the Entrance to the west just seems to be a maze; if you get by whatever the sun god Ra is wanting it leads into a further Egyptian complex including a treasure room.
Treasure Room
You have entered the treasure room of the Great Pharoh and are amazed at the immensity of it. The walls are decorated with heiroglyphics, each one many feet high. The chamber itself is so large, that it could easily be divided into two separate chambers and it would still be amazing. To the North, too far to read, is writing scribbled next to a skeketon.
A large Platinum Shield rests in front of you.
An intricately woven Silken Robe lies on the floor
A large metal Broadaxe lies at your feet.
A skillfully faceted crystal cube shines in the lamplight.
Heading north there’s a little bit of a puzzle resolved by breaking a particular flask.
Northern Wall
Arriving at the northern wall you notice that there is a poem written on it in ancient Androvian. All around you you here the words “beware, beware, beware. death is stalking you.. AH ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha !!!”
There is a red flask, a small blue flask, and a green flask in the wall
On your right to the east which contains a recess made of marble
stones polished to mirror smoothness.
break blue flask
While breaking the blue flask, all traces of the others vanish. To your right you notice that the recessed part of the east wall is slowly sinking. (obviously the secret way out.)
e
Escape passage
You are in the escape passage of the pyramid. Passages continue to the east and back to the west where you came from.
e
Junction in the escape passage
After wandering down the escape passage, you come to a Northeast- Southwest junction inthe path.
ne
Subterranean Jungle Path
You seem to be on a jungle path underground in a seemingly ancient land. The long dead vegetation leaves a stench which is unbearable. The path continues north and southwest in a winding manner.
Lying in the vegitation you notice a titanium machete.
The machete lets you go further ahead into a ziggurat and even more ancient cultures / puns.
Babalonian Room
You now occupy an ancient Babalonian assembly room, once used as an area for the populace to gather before religious services. It also Served as a staging area for the protection of the Emperor in case of attack. There are passages to the Northeast, South, and West.
ne
Prayer Room
You have entered the prayer room of the ancients. There are motifs and wall carvings depicting the ancient gods of all races. As you scan the room you notice the images of Bal, Matu-Mico, Ra, and the Tana-kuktankalphanon(pizza-piea). there are passages off to the North East, and Southwest.
a coral bangle lies before you.
Somewhere in all this must be a major change, because starting at 5/83 there’s a spaceship.
Air Lock
You are in the airlock of a spaceship somewhere out in space. As you look out the large viewing port you notice that you are in space, traveling at a tremendous speed. Looking east you notice that there is an opening out to space but there is no door. For some reason the air in the spaceship is noy being vented into space. There is a passage out and one back west to the preparation room.
There is a spacesuit hanging in the corner by the exit to the airlock.
This is followed by a museum of sorts which might be in space although it was never clear to me (keep in mind there’s no guarantee anything is connected here, I’m just going by room numbering). At least there’s a reminder of the lore, which I was able to ignore for most of the game.
Center of the Rotunda
You are in the center of the Great Rotunda, in front of a shimmering monument. As you reach to touch it, your hand passes through, it is a holographic projection. Your approach seems to trigger something since it changes form and displays a huge plaque. As you attempt to read it, the words seem to speak directly to you through some telepathic link.
The voice says:
..
To thee who hears these words, the fortune of knowledge be yours.
In times of trouble, forget not the holy quest, remember these:
Forget not the quest, though your wealth be threatened.
Kindness amplifies all that can be thine.
Though often you conquer death, remember that it can conquer thee.
..
Above all remember this:
To the vision of Thamos be true, only thus will all be thine.
After comes what seems to be a completely disconnected museum of music. The exit west from the Museum Entrance is one step away from the hidden room past the curtain via one-way passage; this feels like a bug rather than what was truly intended, though. There’s also a museum of science hiding in the files, and I think it likely they’re all supposed to form one complex.
In the Chamber of Sound, “pieces of music from every known composer seem to be playing at once, creating a great confluence of sound.”
Some of the Riverworld rooms are tossed in here too, including leading to…
Section 6:
…the next teleport section, where 6/1 is the “Lower river along the shore”, 6/28 is the silver room (where you put in the coins to warp back to realty) and 6/29 is inside the boat (that you use to go back and forth from the island with the tower). 6/30 is a “warning room” where going south leads to blank space.
Warning room
You can see a passageway up to the gravel room. To the west and east, available light shows walls of stone. But strangely, to the south there is darkness. There is a slight draft coming from that direction indicating a passage, but you can see nothing.
By “blank space” I mean you get no text response at all from going south, but heading back north does go somewhere so it isn’t a softlock:
n
The room you are in apparently absorbs all light. You can not see which direction you are heading. Good luck
The Adytum
To the north is total darkness, to the south and southeast there are passages
Sitting on the ground before you is a famulus’ notebook
Since you’re likely curious:
read notebook
Notes on the Magic
of the Wizard
Quid
open notebook
The book is held together by some mysterious force. You will need more strength to open it
The “held together” is dependent on stats, another aspect of the game I’ve mostly been able to ignore. There’s “power”, “wisdom”, “coordination”, and “magic”; I tried boosting strength to 100 (via cheats) and it wasn’t enough, but 200 was sufficient to open the notebook and read it.
open notebook
The famulus’ book is forced open by your strength
read notebook
This book contains the notes of a famulus of the Wizard Quid. The information can not be read, but rather absorbed. The magic is now yours … use it wisely
As you finish reading what there is to read, the book bursts into flames, flames that incinerate the book, but do no harm to your hands
This boosts magic level from 0 to 1000. I have not experimented to see if this allows for any extra effects. The game just says magic “can be used in various parts of the maze to solve problems and accomplish feats” but that could mean it isn’t really linked up yet.
I’m wondering if there was a plan for magic words akin to Zork II. Image from the Zork 2 Invisiclues. Source.
There’s yet more rooms past this, but I again get the sense not everything has been plugged in to be fully functional.
Moist sloping path
You are continuing along a moist sloping path the runs along one of the edges of an incredibly deep chasm. The chasm appears to be slowly narrowing as you head down, widening as you head up.
d
Bottom of a moist sloping path
The bottom of the moist path still leaves you miles above the bottom of the chasm. The chasm appears to be more narrow towards the north. The path here levels out and continues north.
n
Rock ledge
You are standing on a wide rock ledge that extends partially across the chasm. There is another rock ledge on the other side extending out towards you. The other ledge ends about 8 feet from you and can not be jumped to.
Hanging down from the center of the chasm is a thick vine
An intricately engraved escutcheon lies at your feet.
(I can’t use the vine for anything, it’s too far out. No variant I’ve tried of jumping to the vine and/or swinging has worked.)
Trying to jump to 7/1 results in a full crash, so let’s get back to something I promised.
Open the Postbox
In my previous post, I noticed that you could examine a faceplate to see a combination lock. I did not know what the combination was.
I do now, because there are three “scrap of paper” items which each have two digits, forming a six digit number. I do not know where or how to find these objects without cheating. There is a fair chance they weren’t placed anywhere yet, because the result of opening the lock is…
push “1”
Click.
push “0”
Click.
push “1”
Click.
push “6”
Click.
push “5”
Click.
push “4”
Click.
There is a second click, and the post office box swings open
it has nothing.
look in box
The box contains:
…nothing. Absolutely nothing. Maybe it was supposed to have the item intended to trigger the endgame, eventually. Fortunately, I can use debug commands and get that item too.
The Endgame
The item in question is a withdrawal slip, which can be nabbed with ASSIST:28 (that’s the “set up for end game” debug command). There’s no description of it, but if you take it back to the bank and summon the gnome, the magic starts to happen.
Inside the local small bank
Fastened against the wall in the corner is a set of chairs. Secured to the floor is a small counter that was at one time used by townfolk to fill out deposit and withdrawl slips. On the north wall is a button marked in letters now barely visible “Ring bell for service”. In the corner of the room is a staircase going down.
Surrounding the stairway down, is a metal cage, with a closed door in the front
push button
From out of nowhere, a little gnome appears in response to your signal. He checks to see if you are carrying the appropriate withdrawl slip, and seeing that you do, waves his hands, and disappears. But as he vanishes, the gate in front of the stairs down into the vault swings open.
Now the bank vault has treasures. Remember these weren’t here when we snuck in via mine cart.
Bank Vault
You are inside the bank vault of the small local bank. In one corner is a stairway up. There are TV cameras high up in the ceiling that slowly pan back and forth observing you and the room. Running near one of the walls is a set of narrowly placed railroad tracks. One end terminates with a bumper, the other end disappears under a steel door.
There is a golden egg here
There is a metal broadaxe here
There is a crystal vase here
One beat later there’s an explosion, followed by an announcement.
In the distance, you can hear a large explosion … and within seconds, the ground on which you stand begins to vibrate. A gnome runs into the bank yelling “A hole has opened in the base of the mountain … better watch your own treasures … we gnomes are clearing out”. The gnome then runs up the stairs out of the vault, taking the steps three at a time.
You will see a cloud of dust in the distance upon leaving the bank.
To the distant north, in the direction of minor mountain, you can see a cloud of gray dust rising skyward.
Heading back to the mountain section, there’s a new long passage. (Notice also the stick.)
Eerie tunnel
The temperature here is very cold and there is a slight wind blowing from the northeastern direction. There is the smell of evil on that wind. The tunnel is bathed in a crepuscular glow; you cast a long shadow to the south. The tunnel continues to the south and northeast.
Resting on the ground at the top of the steps is a sharp stick
ne
Checkpoint
The room you are was carved in the rock millions of years ago. There is a passageway leading south, back to the stairs, one leading to the north and one, very large portal carved in the rocks to the east. Above the doorway to the east is a large sign that reads “GUARD ROOM — UNATHORIZED ENTRANCE PROHIBITED”
Standing in the cave, blocking the far northern exit, is a cyclops
No matter what action you try next, the cyclops will then try to get your name.
The cyclops says “Ah ha … what is that I smell … a human … here !” What is your name human ?
This is free-form typing but it doesn’t allow everything (a blank response gets something about not being tricked). You can do the “nobody” thing if you want, and if you take the stick and poke the cyclops with it (“poke cyclops with stick in eye”), he’ll shout about nobody attacking him.
The cyclops screams “HELP … HELP … I am being blinded by nobody”
The other cyclops hearing the cries of the guard come running out of the room and attack you
I’m unclear if there’s a way past the cyclops with the game in its current state. (Maybe one of the treasures will help, but some, like the instruments in the music museum, are impossible to get via regular play.) I know 6/48 is just to the north of him so I didn’t need to solve a puzzle here.
The tunnel to the south bursts open into a small room with luminous rock walls. To the north is a wide opening that enters into what appears to be a much larger room. Above the opening a strange rock formation, with another, much smaller opening above it.
Going north leads to Ragnarok. If you haven’t killed the monsters (the pirate / rat combo) by the time you reach here, they show up here. Or maybe even if they’re dead they revive here. Either way, entering is instant death without messing with stats.
Rangarok
As you cross the threshold of the opening, the rocks behind you slide together blocking your escape to the south. As you begin to look around, you understand that this is not really a room. The ceiling is is beyond view, and the walls are smoothly curved. The floor is like that of a sand-less desert, dryed and cracked. To the distant north, you can see what appears to be the only passageway out.
The nasty pirate lashes out at you with his knife but you avoid him.
The giant rat circles … He bites you squarely … and you feel the life running out of you
Let’s just keep skipping ahead, though. 6/50 is a warm tunnel.
Warm tunnel
Unlike the tunnels before Rangarok, this tunnel is warm, and exudes a blissful tranquility. The passageway from the south has closed shut, you must continue eastward, and upward.
u
Large field
You are standing in a large field, located high atop somewhere. In the sky to the north are two glowing yellowish-red balls of fire. Their sunlights illuminate the ground with a subtle glow, and the grass of the field grows strongly toward the suns. To the south, the largest of the moons is slowly rising up, while to the east, another sets. High atop distant cliffs, seemingly miles away, are perched the wildlife of the area. They are waiting for you … watching you … briefly there is an image of parchment … of battle … of victory.
In the middle of this wonderous field, floating no more than 3 feet of the grass is the oak flute of Thamos. The rays of the two suns converge on the flute, appearing to support it, motionless in the light breeze that blows over the field.
get flute
As your outstretched hands grasps the oak flute of Thamos, it begins to sing out a hauntingly beautiful melody, and then if by magic, it accompanies itself with harmonies new to the world. The flute plays for less than a minute, and then there is a sudden silence, which is shattered seconds later by a thunder clap … a bolt of light … and a blinding flash. When the smoke clears, you find yourself standing outside of the bank again … empty handed.
The northwest corner of the parking lot (that we started the game at, long ago) now has a white Chevy van.
Inside the Chevy Van
You are sitting inside the Chevy Van, at the driver seat. In front of you are two buttons. One is white, and marked “START”, the other is black, and marked “FORWARD”. Behind you, piled up neatly, you can see:
push white button
The engine of the Chevy van sputters into life, and automatically, the doors lock. In the side mirror, you can see someone attaching a car trailer onto the back of the van. On the trailer is a brand new Porche 928. From all sides you see people running toward you cheering. From the left approaches a mounted escort perched on top of beautiful white and brown horses. To the right you can see a motorcycle escort nearing and as they reach the van, the split to form a column on both sides. Above, you can see two helicopters circling, their blades apparently stationary, as their bodies rotate slowly beneath them. By now there are thousands of cheering people around you. Over their cheers you can here numerous brass bands playing with a confluence of sound that would make Charles Ives happy.
push black button
The Chevy van slowly moves forward, preceded by the mounted escort, and surrounded by two columns of motorcycles. The fence in front of you lowers to allow your passage. The people now are running along side; some are crying, others cheering madly. They are yelling THISSALA … THISSALA. As you pass by the remaining southern fence section, you notice a gray-beared man, perched on top of a great turtle. In his hands, he is carrying the oak flute. He bows in salute as you pass by … and his lips appear to say THISSALA. You have done it. You have liberated the good people of Makassar and they are greatful. You have obtained the total points, which is 1000 and have required 106 moves You are entitled to the classification of GRAND MASTER … congratulations In the crepuscular light that bathes the world now, you see fireworks flashing in the near-night sky, and they too spell out THISSALA. The mounted guard before you pulls off to the sides of the road and they salute you. The motorcycles break their columned formations and cross in front of you, and they to mouth THISSALA. The bands stop playing … the sunlight starts fading … and the warm air still blows.
Weirdly, despite the clearly broken way I reached the ending, that felt like victory.
There’s enough code lying around it does seem possible to link up broken points and make a “remastered” version of the game, but even given that I think there’s a lot of author intent missing: what’s going on with the vast empty desert, for instance? What was planned to manipulate the various statistics, and what was going to be the result of getting magic? It would be nice to ask one of the authors. Peter Macaulay (the author originally from Northern Ireland) has already passed, but one of the other authors (David Auerbach) was found (alive) by Rob while researching another mainframe. For privacy reasons I’m going to leave that thread be, as maybe in the future there will be the possibility of an interview and some more of the history of this game explained.
It turns out I was stuck on what was the only hard part; there are pieces where you can lose, but for the most part it’s cases where it is clear what you did wrong and you just need to back up and try again.
Before getting into the gameplay, a quick correction: I was taking the Romanization of the author’s name from Mobygames because I couldn’t find it elsewhere, but I realized the author’s name is printed (small and faintly) on the back of his book.
IF YOU DON’T READ THIS BOOK, YOU CAN’T ENJOY THE ESSENCE OF ADVENTURE GAME
Hence I changed Yū Numata to Yasushi Numata. Additionally, Busca in the comments points out there’s a sixth game, Burglar’s Adventure; you can see screenshots at the link I just gave.
I had hit a point where the Coke bottle was stolen by a baboon. This occurs in the movie (see above). As I indicated last time, Xi talks the animal into dropping the bottle in the movie; I assumed some sort of direct confrontation in the game (even if of a different nature).
There’s some fruit you can pick if you advance — I thought maybe I could trade — but the baboon disappeared and I thought I was softlocked. This is entirely wrong; you’re supposed to go backwards a fair ways into the village to the stump, and then look at the stump. This reveals the hiding place of the bottle.
Unless I missed a message, there’s no obvious way to realize this. It ended up being the hardest part (for me) in the game.
The remainder of what happens is more straightforward; there are a few “traps”, but of a relatively obvious nature. For example, back to those fruits I tried to give to the baboon:
You’re supposed to eat them. If you don’t, in the next scene where it gets dark and you need to sleep, you die of hunger. That’s what I mean about the “trap” being obvious. Certainly by normal adventure game practice you’d hang on to the fruit, but knowing about the starvation makes it essentially a non-puzzle.
There’s a second issue here, which is you get killed by a beast if you fall asleep. I caught on the fire needed lighting; start trying to do so and a rhino comes charging.
After a second try it gets successfully lit and the animal goes away. You can now sleep.
Onward! More “advance” … quite a bit. I appreciate the simplification here of removing compass directions when exploration isn’t the point of the game, but it means the author needs to do even more work to fill in the void left behind.
Bow and arrows just lying around. You need to take them.
Oh no, a lion! And that’s supposed to be Steyn there (this movie’s version of the man who is helpless saying coherent words around women). He seems cooler in this version. You can shoot the lion and he doesn’t even turn around, it’s like how the cool guy in shades walks away from the explosion without glancing.
And the truck’s in the tree, you just pass by here and admire the scenery.
Killing the lion was important because of a moment later where you pass by some goats. If you just keep walking you die of starvation. Clearly, the intent is to use the bow and arrow you still have handy.
Unfortunately, this gets you arrested (this also happens in the movie!) but because you did the good deed earlier, you get let off easy by the judge. We can resume taking the Coke bottle on our quest!
We now have the jeep available to take. I’m not even sure how this is sequenced exactly. (Fictional Xi does not know how to drive.) The implication is perhaps Steyn is helping, but he doesn’t get drawn in the Jeep, he only shows up in a scene later.
After some driving, you reach a gate. And the “puzzle” is to get out of the jeep, open the gate, and keep moving forward.
Steyn (who maybe was travelling with us) pulls out a telescope and we see some kids with some guerillas. Now comes the final part of the game, where we take them down. Except our bow and arrows were confiscated!
Don’t worry, we’ll see them again soon. First though, we need to take the shrub/weed out of the way here otherwise (later) we make too much noise. This was the only other “hard” part of the game I thought because it isn’t very clear at describing what happens.
Past that are a bow and arrows — they’re just lying around everywhere I guess — which describe themselves as “big and cute” when you pick them up.
Forward some more reveals another bow and arrows, this one small enough to make it easy to sneak.
Pick up the comically oversized bow (or forget to grab the weed) and you’ll get spotted here; as long as you only took the smaller bow you can continue.
The bow and arrow serve their purpose just fine, and they do so on the next scene as well.
Better than Solid Snake.
Then there’s just a rock, and oh no if you keep going you get shot! You need to LOOK ROCK and then do the shooting.
With that you get offered a cattle or money as a reward, and assume you blow off the money, the funniest death scene of the game ensues.
You’re supposed to pick the cash (I guess avoiding tempting any stray lions) and you finally can reach the end of the world. Movie version first, just for comparison:
I like how matter-of-fact this is.
Because it wouldn’t be a Japanese game without killing the god-boss at the end bonking God at the end with a Coke bottle.
Kazuma Satou in the comments points out he “finished the whole thing with no hints in less than the movie’s runtime.” It took me a little longer (both looking up things like the Japanese word for telescope and me trying to argue with the baboon).
In a more serious sense, there was clearly some major struggle in both this game and Genma Taisen in figuring out how to adapt a movie. The only reason The Dark Crystal worked in parts was exploration; here, both games remove that aspect entirely and rely more or less on binary live-or-die choices (like picking up the wrong bow; and really, are you going to ignore the charging lion?) This doesn’t have as many ridiculous moments like the fake-out questions or quizzing what your power levels are.
At least it turned out better than the arcade game. It was released before this game, mid-1982, as Gonta Road Rush (with some unfortunate imagery on the side of the cabinet). Quoting Game Machine from August 1982 (courtesy tweakbod from Gaming Alexandria).
The game follows “Gonta,” a tribesman, as he overcomes various obstacles to return to his home in Africa; the game consists of three stages in total. It begins with a city street stage, then goes through a tunnel and so on while avoiding moving cars one after another. Monsters that attack along the way can be defeated with the spear (button operation).
It was released in the US as Desert Dan with some graphical changes. The description of the video below claims “it’s probably one of the worst arcade games I have ever played.”
Adventure authors were not the only ones struggling with the idea of converting media, it seems. At least Happy Bushman has some scenes that vaguely resemble the movie!
Coming up: the grand finale ending to Thissala. No, really.
Recently I played Genma Taisen, published by Pony Canyon in Japan in March 1983 to coincide with the accompanying animated film. It was an official conversion; the “first” from Japan, maybe, although there were Space Battleship Yamato games (like this one and this one) and I don’t know if any were “official”. In the same month, Pony Canyon released another game, Happy Bushman. It was based on the live-action film The Gods Must Be Crazy, from South African filmmaker Jamie Uys (Uys is pronounced “Ace”).
Converting a slapstick comedy film might seem an odd choice, but there was logic to it. For me to fully explain what happened I need to start with Uys and the creation of the film:
Uys made his first film, Daar Doer in die Bosveld (Far Away in the Bushveld), in 1951, with what he describes as a “two-man crew” with just himself and his wife (the only exceptions being a few more actors and music). The plot has Hans Botha (played by Jamie Uys) being tasked to pick up a new schoolteacher, Martie du Toit (his wife Toit Hettie Uys) from a bus stop. The car has trouble with the brakes; Hans has trouble with speaking to women, zany antics ensue. The same character gets reused in a 1954 sequel, and then Uys does a remake in 1958.
This was done amidst apartheid South Africa, and the same year as the remake shown above he made the short propaganda film The Condemned Are Happy at the behest of the South African government showing the “benefits” of forced removals. Quoting from the film: “one Sunday I went to look at the new town, my eyes grew big when I saw the houses they had built … truly the white man is very clever.”
Jamie Uys rose in prominence and while he was one of the first to bring films internationally, he insisted on growing the industry locally. His most “serious” work, Dingaka from 1964, is a court drama where an African tribesman is on trial for murder. Quoting a preview article in South Africa Digest from ’64, It contrasts the “hectic life of the city” with the “simple, unsophisticated setting of the South African veld”. (This idea gets mentioned explicitly at the start of The Gods Must Be Crazy.) The music is quite good and the film as a whole suggests to me Uys simultaneously had interest in local cultures while also holding an “idealized” vision of them.
The idealization shows up strong in The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), which allegedly shows the authentic life of the ǃKung (one of the San peoples), starting in literal documentary style. The background was entirely made-up. The lead actor (Nǃxau) was a cook making a salary and quite familiar with modernity, but Uys claimed he “spent three months crisscrossing the Kalahari desert” to find his lead, and took photos and “marked the longitude and latitude” so he could find the people again. He claimed he met N!Xau in Botswana who had supposedly only seen one white man before (a missionary) and when he asked him to come work, he “didn’t understand, because they have no word for work.” None of this was true. To be clear: the issue isn’t that actors were acting — this was fiction, after all — but that Uys pretended the basic “documentary” frame held, and this was really showing the life of the San. More clicks were added to the soundtrack to make their language sound more exotic.
The film was test-screened in the US without much success; it was instead Japan where it first hit international fame. It was the biggest moneymaker of 1982, considering both foreign and domestic films. It turned out that N!Xau (and the idea of the San) attracted the Japanese imagination (Uye called him a “national hero” in the country); he flew to visit and did numerous interviews and learned to enjoy the taste of sake.
The Japanese loved this tiny star from Africa and couldn’t see and talk enough about his short khaki pants, shy smile and language.
After a film makes money in theaters, it can make money in television. Early in April 1983 it showed on Fuji TV, combined with a media rush similar to Genma Taisen, with both a new music album (in February) and and a new computer game (in March). Pony Canyon’s advertising for the game explicitly mentions the premier of the TV show coming up on Golden Movie Theater (and the availability of the album).
The album was, significantly, via Canyon Records; in other words, the game and the album both came from Pony Canyon. The artist for the game, Takaomi Shibayama, was from the music side of the business and has a long list of credits as art director through the early 80s. (As far as I can find this was his only game.)
One of his 1983 albums, via Discogs.
The designer/programmer on Happy Bushman was Yasushi Numata, part of one of Japan’s computer clubs. I haven’t talked about Japanese computer clubs much; as an example, The Theoretical Science Group of Tokyo University is probably the most “famous” of Japan’s early computer clubs now (as much as late-70s computer history in Japan can be famous) because of their creation of Heiankyo Alien which originated the “digger” genre of game, leading to Space Panic and (by indirect means) the ultra-seller Lode Runner. (There’s a video from F_T_B if you want to know more about them and their rivalry with the University of Tokyo Microcomputer Club.)
I’m not talking about the TSG today, but rather FORESIGHT, situated in Yokohama. They were founded in 1980 by three high school students (as opposed to being a university club). They started just exchanging information and programs related to the PC-8001. They began their own zine; our author first appears in the August 1980 issue with THE GALAXY.
Yasushi Numata had some other programs appear (including a Star Trek variant and a golf game) but the most relevant item he made was a book about programming adventure games for the PC-88 series. It was published after Happy Bushman (in October) and is elaborate enough that Numata had clearly been thinking about the topic for a while (it includes 5 original games).
Source. The games are Treasure Hunt Adventure, High School Adventure, Planet Adventure, Survival Adventure, and Monster Adventure, the latter two being RPGs.
I do not know how Yasushi Numata got connected with the Pony Canyon production. Shuwa System Trading Co. (which published the book) is entirely unaffiliated. He does have FORESIGHT listed with his name in the credits; my guess is the club was contacted first and Numata was considered the best candidate for the project.
The plane is animated flying from right to left. The “special thanks” is to Fuji TV.
The PC-88, FM-7 (and 8), and Sharp MZ computers all got ports. I went with the FM version but I’m playing on an 8 rather than a 7 (the two are generally cross-compatible with BASIC programs on tape, just the 8 was made first and was slower).
Just like in the movie, a plane drops a Coca-Cola bottle from above towards our protagonist. Unlike the movie, it doesn’t fall right next to him.
You play as the main character Xi from the movie, starting in the village. There are no compass directions, you can only move “ahead” (susumu) or “back” (modoru) so everything is strictly linear. I do not have a manual so I admit I had to consult a walkthrough immediately to realize this. I’ve tried to hold back otherwise for now.
If you keep going forward, you eventually reach an elder who stops you and tells you that you can’t leave the village as it is against the rules. The key here is the grass shown above at about the halfway point, where you need to break out “miru” and LOOK GRASS. This reveals the bottle, which you can then take.
With the bottle in hand you now get told that you need to return it to God. (There’s no long sequence where the bottle is shown to be useful and people fight over it. The game seems to be aiming for a loose adaptation like The Dark Crystal.)
Leaving the village, there’s a baboon who will eventually nab your bottle as you pass on by. (You repeat typing “ahead” all this time — it’s essentially a way of advancing the clock on the story.)
If you advance farther and come back, the baboon is gone. In the movie Xi talks to the baboon and explains how the object is evil which might be the solution here, but I’m going to save all that (and hopefully the remainder of the game) for part 2. Stay tuned!
(Special thanks to F_T_B for his help with research.)
Most soap operas take a while to work their way up to murder, but EastEnders kicks off with it from the very first scene, airing February 1985 on BBC One.
A door gets kicked in; the characters Arthur Fowler, Ali Osman and Den Watts find the “cantankerous old man” Reg (who had been missing a few days) nearly dead. It is revealed later another character attacked him trying to steal his old war medals. (Reg dies. Conversation reveals Reg was too much of a “nasty old drunk” for people to care.)
I would say “this sets a tone that would continue its whole run” but it’s a still-running soap with over 7400 episodes (as of this writing) so I can’t declare anything constant, but it did get a reputation as being gritty and topical. It was designed by Julia Smith and Tony Holland (previously of the police procedural Z-Cars) with the intent of being a “younger” competitor to ITV’s Coronation Street (first launched 1960). It was squarely designed as working-class and diverse.
By the mid-80s all sorts of British TV was getting adapted into games, like The Young Ones and Minder. In 1986, multiple companies were interested in EastEnders. The contract was won by the Welsh company Macsen.
It is having to work very closely with EastEnders — seen by nearly 20 million people each week — to get the correct amounts of excitement and authenticity. The best-loved soap in Britain has an almost religious effect on many fans and a poor game simply won’t be accepted, it seems.
The co-owners, Moelwen Gywndaff and Edryd Gywndaff, explained that they were “co-operating very closely with the BBC” and that “all the life is there, and if you get away from that, then you are getting away from the essence of EastEnders.”
Out by the end of 1986. Cover via Mobygames. The “PART I – THE ARCADE GAME” suggests they intended an adventure game for part II. I could see an EastEnders version of Urban Upstart working out.
I’m not clear what the original intent was with “close co-operation” — this was printed in the September version of Bang Weekly before work started — but it didn’t land that way. The production was rushed. The actual creation was done by the trio of Anthony Roberts, Paul Towers, Derek Laws under the label of Towers Software; Anthony Roberts himself explains:
I was part of a 2 main programming team that brought this Wonderful game to the Spectrum (and C64, although that one never made it to production!). We were holed up in a Welsh Hotel for 3 weeks prior to Christmas, after being commisioned by Macsen to produce this game from scratch. I have no idea where the music came from, it was given to us as a module we just called into as required. Macsen did indeed go bust, just as the game was released, and we never received a penny for our efforts!
For what its worth, if you could see past the awful graphics, (and lack of joystick control!!!), as a strategy game it was oddly captivating.
The music that was handed off was by Julie Dunn (who was called David Dunn at the time). She made other well-regarded music from the day; the game I recognized just browsing her work was Finders Keepers.
If you didn’t see the warning signs yet: EastEnders the video game is widely considered very bad, being a cryptic assortment of mini-games with barely any connection to the show. The video I’m linking below is titled Possibly the Worst Game Ever.
So how did Macsen get the contract for a highly-regarded show in the first place? The Bang article claims that “its track record of previous licenses” are what counted: games based on the TV game shows Blockbusters, Bullseye, Countdown, and Treasure Hunt.
The C64 ports of Blockbusters (and the “Gold Run” spinoff) are both by today’s author, Huw Ford. It is unclear if he was ever engaged to work on EastEnders (maybe he was going to do the never-made C64 port before everything imploded?). Given he worked on a 1985 game show conversion with a different company he had probably parted ways with them already, which may have been for the best: by the middle of 1987 Macsen was sunk with a debt of 350,000 pounds.
Prior to his game show work he launched his own label in 1983, HFS Software; he was 21 years old.
Confusingly, the name of the company shifted (with the same address) to WordLight and to Omen, not in any particular sequence; the Dragon 32 cover of Land of Tezrel uses both company names simultaneously.
Via World of Dragon.
Land of Tezrel landed on C64, VIC-20, Dragon, and BBC Micro, with the C64/VIC-20 versions by Ford only, the Dragon port by Anthony Mansell, and the BBC port by Gavin Cradle. Neither of the people porting have any other credits, although it is possible Mansell worked directly for Dragon Data; as Ford explains, while he was creating his games he “only lived a few miles away” from the factory (in Wales) and he was able to talk to the developers.
I went with the VIC-20 version I have (a later OMEN branded one) just because it felt like the original platform. Through discoveries I made later this turned out to be clearly the case; additionally, even though I have the (earlier-published) HFS version for C64 and the (later-published) OMEN version for VIC-20, I can say the VIC-20 version just slapped on a new title screen and really represents the earlier version of the game. I’ll get into that later.
The early ad called this “AN UNUSUAL ADVENTURE” and while it doesn’t seem like it right away — your goal is to gallivant around a standard fantasy world, find the Magic Ring of VORDA, and escape — I pretty quickly caught on to what the author meant. The entire game is outdoors on a 10 by 10 grid (just a touch larger than HOBBIT) but also has the player’s original position and most object positions randomized. The actual function of the objects stays consistent but the random elements are enough to toss this into adventure-roguelike territory. The closest comparison I can think of is Dungeon from Andrew Colin’s Introduction to BASIC; while there are major enough differences it could be coincidental, it’s possible Ford was referring to the guide while making this game. The other comparable game is Conquest of Memory Alpha with its own grid structure and randomness (a less likely crossover since that was a TRS-80 game).
The above screen comes from one of my starts. The start location is random with the exception of starting on the south side of the map (there’s a river dividing the north and south portions).
Stars mark important spots. It is indeed “dessert” and not “desert”.
We’ve seen a similar region division idea elsewhere (like with Reality Ends; one thing that helps this game along is occasionally describing when there’s an adjacent region, giving specific places more flavor.
Items (spread at random) include a sword, an “oracle box”, and a wand. One room has a path across the river which suggests you need to get a cape from a dragon to pass by. I never did find the cape.
The reason I didn’t find the cape was the wandering enemies that you can find. The dwarf (seen above) simply tries to swipe objects; I was holding a sword, I tried KILL DWARF, and it worked. I no longer had to worry about the dwarf swiping things.
At least the game clarifies it’s an EVIL dwarf, unlike the one in Twin Kingdom Valley which seemed to be peaceful that I left alone.
In addition to the dwarf, there’s a MONSTER and a DRAGON that show up. In both cases they will magic you away to another place unless you either type RUN (a command you can get by typing HELP during the scene) or by killing them. Unfortunately, at this stage in the game I wasn’t sure how to kill them; despite KILL DWARF working, when I tried it on either enemy the game didn’t understand my command, so I had to suffer getting teleported instead.
However: the teleporting isn’t bad! The teleport can land you anywhere on the map, including on the north side, so even though I didn’t find the cape to get over the river, I didn’t need it because I could just jump over by teleport instead. Before exploring that side, two other elements on the south side to note.
The first is a canyon (lower left corner) where at the end there seem to consistently be some KEYS. I say “seem to” because the randomness seems a little glitchy in this game.
Sometimes (but not on every game) a wizard would block the way in the canyon. The wizard asks if you have a fish to give. If you say NO (without a fish) he simply refuses you to pass; if you say YES (with no fish) he gets angry and teleports you away. On my winning run I didn’t see the wizard so I didn’t need to deal with the fish, but it’s simply a red fish (not a red herring) randomly placed elsewhere on the map the wizard wants.
The wizard showed up in most of my attempts, so I’m not sure why he was sometimes absent.
There’s additionally, in the mountains, a room with a waterfall. Saying the word VORDA teleports you there. (Usually: I did have the word refuse to work sometimes, and just like the wizard not showing up, I’m not clear why.)
We’ll return here later.
With that taken care of, let’s teleport to the north side of the map.
I had the sword. The I DON,T UNDERSTAND was a result of me trying to KILL MONSTER.
There’s a “ruined castle” on the east side with a LITTLE OLD MAN. The game says if you give the man some food he will give you a hint where the ring (the main quest for the game) is.
The food was nearby; he just says it’s in the Snow Queen’s Castle, which is not terribly helpful because after mapping things out that’s clearly the only other important thing where something might be hiding.
There are two sets of keys you need to open the gate. One is at the end of the canyon (I think always) and the other is randomly placed. With both you can OPEN GATE. This is near the end of the game but I was getting sent away by the GUARDIAN OF THE GATE. KILL GUARDIAN was not doing any good.
After numerous frustrating attempts (including bringing the wand over and trying to make that work) I checked the walkthrough, only to find out that it was for the C64 version and has a significantly different series of events, and it tells you to KILL GUARDIAN here (the exact thing that wasn’t working). I asked gschmidl for some help and he extracted a text file with the source code.
932 ifmid$(in$,u,3)=”use”ormid$(in$,u,4)=”kill”ormid$(in$,u,4)=”figh”then950
933 ifmid$(in$,u,3)=”run”then995
934 ifmid$(in$,u,3)=”hel”thenprint”{clr}if you are unarmed{down} ‘run'{down}”:u=256:nextu:goto930
935 nextu
936 print”{clr}{down}i don,t understand”
937 print”{down}and the”:printo9$(cq):print”has cast his spell.”:goto987
950 foru=1tolen(in$)
951 ifmid$(in$,u,4)=”wand”andwa=1andys>msthen22100
952 ifmid$(in$,u,4)=”wand”andwa=1andys<msthen22000
953 ifmid$(in$,u,5)="sword"then22200
I’m not quite sure why KILL DWARF worked, but after studying things over I realized the game wanted either USE SWORD or KILL SWORD. This isn’t a guaranteed win but at least the game now understood me.
With the RNG going my way, the guardian died and I was able to claim the ring.
Not quite the end, though! The game now wants you to find a wardrobe and escape (I assume this is Narnia-adjacent). Trying out VORDA which warps back to the waterfall reveals the wardrobe right away. OPEN WARDROBE reveals one last monster fight and then victory.
Regarding the C64 version, the sword is no longer out in the open: you have to jump into a cave to find it. The dragon also is no longer in a random place, and you need to SMASH a STALAGMITE to reach the lair if you want to claim the cape (still optional because of teleportation, though). Also oddly, the north side of the map now has a bit more structure to it; the second pair of keys are now consistently placed at a dead end, and the Snow Queen Castle becomes actual rooms rather than something you interact with indirectly while outside.
The author’s original vision seemed to match more closely with Colin’s Dungeon (pure RNG item placement, only three items can be held in inventory at a time, lots of random teleports) but with some changes to reduce the pure-slot-machine aspect in the initial VIC-20 version, and even more changes after to create the C64 version. The improvements did help, even though this is just an “afternoon game” (or at least it would be, had I not had the parser trouble with USE SWORD). I also thought the “region” system worked in the tight restrictions the author had in terms of content; the description of adjacent regions plus a few extra rooms were enough to keep the landscape from being flavorless.
This is a “street lamp” in the dark forest on the north side. In the VIC-20 version you can RUB LAMP and get a message about nothing happening; the C64 version has a joke about a genie coming out and falling over dead.
Due to the heavy randomization, this game also enters the rare pantheon of “early text adventures that reflected later careers”; Huw Ford eventually went on from writing game show conversions to work on gambling machine software, and the CEO of his most recent company calls him a “Jedi coder” who “knows every computer language” in an interview.
I’ve finished the game; I was nearly at the end. My previous posts are needed for context.
From the Microbee Software Preservation Project.
I had left off on an apparent combination lock with four symbols, where you had to enter an “input” as a string of numbers. I had tried every permutation 1234, 2341, 4231, etc. with no luck.
I decided after enough further struggle that I must be missing an item, so I re-checked every location and item in case some of the ones that were previously red herrings were not (the locked chest at the rope, a shield on a wall, the swamp that kills you, a random broken dagger, etc.) One of those items turned out to be the key, but I wasn’t able to reach a solution by thinking from that direction.
What I did next was flip from thinking about nouns to thinking about verbs. This is something that I’ve written about long ago with mainframe Zork, although in that case I was thinking of simply finding which verbs work (which eventually changed into my “common verbs” chart). I didn’t need a chart in this game because it provides all the verbs from the start.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to see what the verbs do! Sometimes they have a very specific failure response. I took a random tree near the castle and tried each verb in sequence; I was told after LEVER TREE that I needed the pick to do that (the broken pick from the start)!
With the pick in hand tying LEVER TREE gets a “nothing happens” response, but that means — especially given the custom-coding to check if you have the pick — that it must work elsewhere! I went through every item in the game again trying LEVER THING, finally hitting upon LEVER SHIELD.
I see what’s going on now with it — you’re trying to yank the shield off the wall — but that’s never the language I would normally use, and while I’m fairly sure I’ve seen LEVER as a verb somewhere else it’s rather rare.
The niche has a scroll which gives the combination I was seeking. There are repeats, which indicates a brute force method with just the digits 1 through 4 would have worked (but that would have been painful, and of course it’s better to solve the author-intended way).
4411 from the scroll.
There was nothing deep and/or significant here in the general content, and barring the two obscure secrets (the cauldron and the shield) there was nothing elaborate as far as puzzles go, but the art gave a pleasant buzz to the experience and easy is better than too hard (and despite that, this ended up going to three posts). There’s still two more games from the same author which we’ll eventually get to so hopefully Chris Norman will show up one day to explain the process.
The mini-map really is novel: we’ve seen a few but very few, and none that have a visualization quite like we’ve seen here. Morpheus Kitami suggested that some games of the 90s may have been influenced by this series, although the Microbee itself was obscure enough it’d have to be a circuitous route if that’s the case. Still, an idea come up with independently and not repeated can be just as interesting as one that influenced the industry. The game does get a mention in a 1984 Swedish magazine; for reasons I’ll save for another time the Microbee did manage to make inroads in Sweden.
Interestingly enough, the review complains about how the game applies a room and description after every command, and this can be irritating when using a modem. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I’m guessing for remote use the top part of the screen is sent after all commands (because sometimes that’s the only thing that changes). The Microbee developed strong network capabilities early (see Owen Hill’s background in telecom) but I don’t know the exact configuration.
Coming up: I’ve got a few things cooking, and I’m not sure what the order will be (there may even be another game tossed in the middle). One of them laterally involves a famous British TV show, one of them involves a Japanese conversion of a movie (produced jointly by companies in South Africa and Botswana), and one of them involves an Apple II game by two unexpected authors.
Eye of Min, as I previously mentioned, was part of a trilogy, the second and third games being The Sabre of Sultar and The Temple of Azragor respectively. They were originally sold separately. Clipping an excerpt from a 1983 catalog:
An adventure program featuring a graphic map that is updated as progress. in your search of the eye. When you have solved this excellent mystery, the next in the series is waiting, it is called “SABRE”.
Because of this, I can give you the “cover art” for Eye of Min, scan from the Microbee Software Preservation Project, which I find fascinating, font like a old-school zine:
Or maybe fliers for an unlicensed heavy metal concert.
I’m not done, but what I’m stuck on is potentially a “self-contained” puzzle so I don’t want to start prodding at the walkthrough (or the source code in BASIC) yet. I suspect I am very close to the end otherwise.
So last time I was stuck with a wand I couldn’t use (the solution will come up naturally later), a cave that only had 8 trees and nothing else, a well that I couldn’t enter without dying. Oh, and there were bandits, but that part was easy.
Just needed to actually hit them with a sword rather than a random item.
Nothing else seemed promising except the potential for something hidden. I had already tried PUSH and PULL on the bookcases but I went ahead and tried it on everything. Finally, I hit paydirt on the last item I hadn’t tested yet:
To be fair, I was thinking of the cauldron as a “utility” item to maybe mix a potion or two later (it still could apply for that later, but it’s now less likely). Heading north into the newly-found secret passage required lighting a candle or torch. This passage leads to a locked door. Trying to UNLOCK DOOR prompted me with what item. The “broken pick” at the start I figured was a red herring so I tried out the wand, and somehow that worked.
Not sure what I’m doing to invoke the magic. Or maybe it isn’t magic at all, and just applying the fact it’s a big metal stick.
Further in was a room with a locked chest and a rope; neither the wand nor the broken pick works this time on the chest. (There is a FIX command, but it seems to do nothing with the pick, so unless there’s a tool somewhere to allow repair I believe the pick is a red herring.)
At least I was able to get the rope. I assume the chest gets unlocked later.
I took the rope over to the well and did TIE ROPE; the game didn’t understand that. It wants TIE WELL.
This turns out to be a “knowledge puzzle”. One of the norms of these games that it helps to know is “will you find random things in certain places that are clues to puzzles”; an escape room game from the Flash era of course will, but at this time period it wasn’t common, and especially not common for the code to be “indirect” (example: as opposed to the code just written on a paper, you see five circles followed by three circles somewhere, meaning a lock gets opened by 53).
If you PUSH KNOB the game will prompt you with which one. Most of the knobs will kill you.
However, based on the fact the dead-end cave with no items had 8 trees, the answer to the puzzle here is 8. Pressing that knob specifically will open the next passage. I admit I solved this by brute force and only worked out what it was meaning after the fact. (Escape room logic has been done before in this era, but it isn’t common!) I also found out after the fact that the number of trees in the cave changes (randomization of a detail like that tends to be another clue that something is used for a knowledge puzzle).
Inside is what I assume is yet another knowledge puzzle.
If you examine the panel there are plates, and you can push the plates. It asks you to push them as a sequence.
Which order. e.g.2143.
Entering the wrong code is death.
The room fills with poisonous gas.
I had a couple theories having to do with smallest-to-largest or largest-to-smallest but I ended up (via save states) brute-forcing all 24 permutations of 1234. None of them worked. It turns out any number sequence is possible, so it might be you need 2123 or the like. I’ve combed over the rest of the game and haven’t seen anything resembling a clue (or at least, one I can share with you) but I figure I’d toss one this out here to you, the readers, before I break down and check spoilers. (If someone does check spoilers, all I really want to know is if this is a self-contained puzzle, or if I’m missing a physical clue I’m supposed to read elsewhere like the trees in the cave.)
In the 1960s, Qantas wanted to improve their flight reservation system. At the time, reservation clerks would get tickertapes from travel agents and enter flights manually; every single sales office needed to be contacted whenever a flight was full. Cancelling involved, again, manually calling every office.
To make the company run smoother, they obtained three IBM S/360s (each with 64K of memory) and spent 18 months with IBM creating a new system.
IBM S/360 being unloaded from a plane in 1966, from IBM Australia.
By the end of the decade the IBM systems were interlinked with Honeywell H632s, which weren’t even out when the reservation system was first being developed. Source.
The information on reservations still needed to be sent by wire; this meant engaging the PMG (Postmaster-General’s Department), which was responsible at the time for both postal and telegraph duties. The project manager for the Qantas job was Owen Hill (electrical engineering graduate in the ’60s, he was a “cadet” which means PMG paid for his degree while he worked three weeks a year for them). Tapes were sent at an approximate rate of 75 baud. The “end transmission” text was NNNN which was a problem in Australia due to the presence of Shannon Airport (SNN). While the system made everything run smoother it required constant nurturing, and Hill remembers being “down in Melbourne every two weeks” handling issues.
He found the situation frustrating enough that as soon as his contract was up he left for a job with IBM, and from there hopped to creating his own company: Applied Technology. He had discovered the magic of buying electronics in bulk and made his own mail-order business selling individual parts and especially kits.
Applied Technology didn’t stay pure mail order; they had a shop in Hornsby (just northwest of Sydney). A group of enthusiasts started to cluster there, one of them being David Griffiths. Griffiths had designed his own video card, the ETI 340, with plans printed in Electronics Today International starting in their April 1978 issue. It had a resolution of 64 characters across by 16 down (same as a TRS-80). It slotted into an S-100 bus meaning it could be used with an Altair or other S-100 compatible computer.
From the front cover of the issue.
The hobbyist Stephen Dennis tried to embark on the challenge of building the machine, but even after soldering it together it wasn’t working; he called the magazine to get a hold of the designer (Griffiths) and the two collaborated to turn the plans into a more general kit. It started to be sold (in the kit form) by Applied Technology. The store in Hornsby became a tight-knit cluster of enthusiasts.
[Matthew] Starr, who was just finishing high school, had become a regular visitor to Applied Technology’s nearby retail hobby shop. He’d already built his own David Griffiths system and even helped fix customer problems while visiting the store.
Matthew Starr (see above) and Owen Hill co-designed (along with some other Applied Technology regulars) a computer based around the already-created video card. It was codenamed “Granny Smith”. Hill and Starr went down to the offices of the publication Your Computer to do a pitch around Christmas 1981. Hill wanted to put a 32-page brochure in the magazine which essentially counted as a manual for the kit, with the last page giving ordering instructions. The editors agreed but thought the system needed a better name; on the drive home Starr suggested the Bee, which Hill improved to the Microbee.
You can read the insert/ad that printed shortly after here. The brochure promised that users could “build the most powerful state of the art kit computer complete for $399.00”. (That’s worth about $1,785 Australian dollars today.) It’s heavy on technical details including schematics.
Technically, the Microbee is similar to a TRS-80 (not only the 64 by 16, but a Z80 processor) although it had more expandability (something the company emphasized in early advertising) and the character graphics are programmable enough to allow for arbitrary graphics. While dK’tronics had to make a custom graphics rom as a piece of hardware for new character graphics on the ZX-81, the Microbee has the character-modification feature built-in.
The upshot is a system whose graphics float between pixel-based and character-based and have a feel unlike anything I’ve seen before. To give a general idea, here’s Halloween Harry from 1985; this was later the basis for the much more famous Apogee game:
So: high-res relatively speaking, but also divided into tiles to enough an extent there’s a “Game and Watch” feel even though animations are quite possible? You’ll also see this distinctive look in the adventure game I’m about to get to shortly.
The kit sales took off and Applied Technologies soon after started selling pre-made computers; where they really hit their stride was winning (along with Apple) the New South Wales education contract in April 1982, so they became one of the embedded “education computers” of Australia. (Apple was the expensive option, Microbee was the cheaper option.) I have the video cued where Hill talks about how the shop was so busy customers starting stepping behind the counter to help:
They eventually peaked at 11% of the market in Australia and with presence in more than 3000 schools. Most of the software for the system was Australia-developed (despite some sales elsewhere, most notably Sweden).
Microbee had its own software branch, Honeysoft. Outside authors sent in products and received royalties; one of their products from 1983 was a trilogy of adventure games by C. W. Norman. I thinkthe name is Chris W. Norman but I haven’t unearthed anything else about the author yet; since I’m just doing the first game for now (and this is only part 1 of ?) there’s still plenty of time for information to come up, or even the author to find himself while Googling.
In high-res mode the ratio of pixels wide vs. pixels tall is 1:2. This makes for a much wider look than the TRS-80 despite the character counts matching.
Eye of Min is a “single target” treasure hunt where you’re just looking for one treasure, the “priceless gem” in the title that is protected by “deadly traps and hideous monsters”. The game helpfully gives a complete verb list:
There’s a graphical window consistently drawn in the lower right corner of the screen; it’s top down somewhat like Ultima. I think the programmable-character style essentially encourages this, and if you flip back to the brochure excerpt you’ll even see the same standing figure used in both the sample and this game.
The figure moves around as you move around the map, and is actually quite lovely for an automap from this era. We’ve seen a few like with Time Adventure but they tend to be fairly abstract.
Here’s a map drawn by myself to compare:
The action starts outside and is a little deadlier than it might initially seem. From the pond with the bench, going east into the swamp immediately kills you via quicksand; north is a dark cave where going in without light kills you; west is a well with no rope where going down kills you.
Heading back to the start (with the curious broken pick, no idea if that’s just scenery) and going northeast is the ruined castle, and a switch of map scene:
It’s less deadly than the outside. The ground floor has a broken dagger, not-broken sword and scabbard, candle (on a dining room table) and pen (on a writing desk). The inventory limit is tight enough that you can’t just take them all.
Also, there’s a door you need to open to reveal the northern part of the map.
Off the side of the entry hall there’s also a guard room (shovel, torch) and a tower with a tinderbox. You can use the tinderbox to light either the candle or the torch and safely go into the cave.
The cave is seemingly a dead end. I have not been able to find a noun that the game lets you use to refer to the “8 living trees” and it really might just be scenery (the game is consistently using CAPS for when there’s an object you can do things with).
The only other piece of progress I made is with the shovel back at the guard tower; I did DIG while at the pond and the game asked me where, so I said BENCH.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to use the wand! The verb list has no “WAVE” verb or anything else typical; I ran through the entire list without luck. Perhaps it merely needs to be held at the right place, or there’s a magic word involved.
The game did warn about enemies, and after enough fiddling around with the wand, two bandits appeared blocking the way to the castle.
Unfortunately, due to the inventory limit (and me prioritizing the shovel) I hadn’t brought the sword from the castle along, so my attempts to beat the bandits over the head with a wand failed.
I suspect I’m just missing something basic that will break things open, but for now I’m stuck.
Testing the game isn’t as rapid as I’d like because the emulator I’m using (MAME) starts eating inputs if I try to speed the computer up. There is a walkthrough so I’m not looking for “spoilers” but I will take suggestions from anyone who hasn’t played the game. I sense this won’t be long and this will be part 1 of 2 (it’s just BASIC, and if nothing else, the graphics take up space) but I’ve been fooled before.
Enormous thanks to Sebastian Boell who (along with Graeme Philipson) interviewed Owen Hill and Owen Hill himself who gave permission to use the interview. Thanks also to Ewan Wordsworth, current owner of Microbee (he was formerly an employee and has a modern website).
I owned an Acorn Electron as a kid. It wasn’t the greatest games machine in the playground, but it did have the best game of all-time, Braben and Bell’s Elite, and one of the finest adventure games of all time, Trevor Hall’s Twin Kingdom Valley.
For a boy with a fertile imagination, and an obsession with the Fighting Fantasy books, Twin Kingdom Valley whisked me through the screen, and into a fantasy world of babbling brooks, Forests, Orcs, Trolls, Goblins, Dragons, Kings and treasure!
I’ve finished (as much as a game like this can be “finished”) so final spoilers ahoy; you should read my previous posts about the game before this one.
Mattias in the comments mentioned that some objects have images attached. Most don’t; LOOK BRASS KEY (or nearly any other item) gets the response “seems ordinary” and I had tried that enough times I assumed that there was no point to looking at items further (the intro text also doesn’t say anything about this as a feature). However, it turns out there are a few exceptions, like the diamond above (found at the start of the cave next to Watersmeet) or the picture in the cabin.
The picture ends up being a hint, because if you look at the wooden rod (back at the forest king area), you’ll notice a relation.
This turns out to be not needed to beat the game (and in fact I ignored it almost completely after using it) but that’s also true of the bridge in Crowther/Woods. You can WAVE WAND while at the fissure to get into the desert from the south, without passing through secret doors.
Since the secret doors are in close proximity to Watersmeet (and part of my gameplay involved going back there to heal up in between trips) it was better to use those anyway.
Incidentally, the desert has two “sand lurkers” (no idea what they look like, humanoid or not) and when I found them one was carrying a bag of silver…
…so I used a mace I found lying around to chip away at their health until they died. This is more complicated than I’m making it sound because unarmed enemies will run away when you whack at them, and out in an open desert I found it easy to lose track of them. I accidentally fell into the moat of the castle a few times while searching (which causes serious damage). Additionally, the one holding the bag of silver dropped it in the process (and it got scooped up by a castle guard) so I ended up getting no treasure at all from the process (until I later killed the castle guard).
While dealing with this came later in my sequence, it’s easier to explain now what happened with the princess: I took the guess she might be related to the Forest King (since the two kings hate each other as part of the narrative). There’s also the meta-element that the Forest King doesn’t have a character that can be killed while the Desert King does, indicating to me the Desert King is the violent one and the Forest King is the peaceful one. The one thing I hadn’t tried is bribing the guard when getting tossed into the dungeon.
I decided to not worry about max score and leave the dwarf in peace. He’s still got his One Ring to pine over. I’m sure nothing bad will come of it.
With the amulet being worn, you can then free the princess (who is just past the gold-key door, so all you need to do is basically take the amulet into the basement).
The silver key you get can then unlock the door at the bones; the bribe you handed over is right in the room. Given the circumstances, I think the intent is not that you’re stealing the gift back, but rather the Forest King is thankful enough about his daughter being returned that you’re welcome to take it back.
The diamond works too. According to Morpheus Kitami’s playthrough the bag of silver from the desert does not work so there’s some value threshold to the bribe.
With this all done, it was time to raid the castle and kill guards. As far as I can tell all you really need is a sword (which an elf happened to be carrying around, I did ASK ELF FOR SWORD and he handed it over); if there’s “experience points” muddling the experience it’s too small an aspect to notice.
Don’t attack if they’re clustered like this.
As long as you fight one-on-one (and go back to Watersmeet to heal) the guards are pretty easy.
The Desert King is pretty straightforward as well, as long as you get him alone. On this run for some reason he was up near the storage room and cellar.
The combat incidentally brought out the feeling Trevor Hall mentioned about why there needs to be extra rooms: when physical placement of the guards (and juking them so they aren’t clumped together) becomes an issue, “ordinary” rooms take on new meaning. This is very similar to the treatment of rooms on MUDs that I’ve written about before. For a time I found this section of game to be nearly indistinguishable from playing a regular MUD (except it being single player, of course).
One more encounter, with the last castle guard hanging out near the dragon.
One other fun aspect is the giant. I mentioned last time arming him with an axe; he’s still effective but described the whole time as an “ill giant”. If you go back to Watersmeet and he follows, he’ll swim and heal himself! (This happened after I had already killed the dragon; I’ll explain why that’s important in a moment.)
With all that done, I still had a few things to mop up. One of them was a witch in a tower who had a gold staff and a dagger; I was able to kill the witch normally and get the staff. According to my check of the walkthrough later, it was supposed to be a lot harder; the gold staff allegedly prevents damage, and you need to hand over a dagger which will cause the wielder to harm themselves in order to defeat the witch.
I found the moment so ordinary (see above) that I didn’t have a screenshot and had to reload a save state just now just to return to the fight. Maybe the gold staff only applies in the C64 or Spectrum versions? Or maybe the witch normally doesn’t have a knife? Did a guard wander in and suffer an unfortunate death, but in the process of grabbing the knife from the guard, the witch no longer had protection? Barring the BBC Micro version being different, this demonstrates how much chaos and variety the game has by relying on characters to be the “obstacles”; a hard-coded puzzle could have forced the player to reckon with the gold staff.
Another thing to mop up was the locked silver door in the Desert castle, and this one was fun to find. There’s a wooden staff locked behind the door, and this is another one of the rare cases where you get a visual:
Waving the staff did nothing (WAVE is only for the wooden rod) but the skull was suggestive that it was a weapon.
The staff is a one-hit-kill weapon. It’s pretty fragile (breaks after roughly two uses) but fortunately there’s really only one use that’s important: the dragon.
(Morpheus on his playthrough did not use the staff, but rather had healed the giant and went all weapons blazing with giant-buddy. I found the flames to be too dangerous to pull this off but there’s a lot of randomness involved; the best I could do before dying was get the dragon “weak”.)
With the master key I was able to get into the last remaining locked door, and as predicted, it had the Desert King’s chest. The chest is very heavy and you can’t be holding anything else at the same time (including the lamp!) I ended up toting it through darkness in the maze over to the rock fall and reached the final room.
Once you’ve proven yourself with the chest, you don’t need to carry it to enter this place, so there’s the slightly odd circumstance of spotting the secret of life, turning around and leaving to deposit the chest at home, and then returning for the secret of life. I think I’m satisfied enough to say I’m done with the game.
The gold river, incidentally, was supposed to be the seed for the sequel:
Near the end, you find a river of gold. You have to wonder where it would go? And that’s where the next game would take you. But how could you travel the river? What boat could withstand molten gold?
I had started on a dynamic landscape tool such that forests, deserts, etc would be different in each game restart, but never wrote any game code. No story line was written, but you would be able to travel the river of gold to a vast land. No more pathetic 17 locations. I recall some ideas like “A wooden boat would burn in a river of molten gold”, so the game had to be started well. Some part of the original game would lead you back to that river.
Unfortunately, Bug Byte collapsed while owing lots of royalties (the same circumstances that caused Matthew Smith to jump ship with Manic Miner) so the sequel never happened.
Now that I’ve seen enough context, I’m going to quote Hall at length from this interview where he discusses how the characters work. He explains how other games only had characters “appear to come and go” without the ability to give chase, and then goes into technical details:
Location database: up to 256 locations possible, each with a description, and list of exits (a direction code byte [including locks]+ 1 byte target location). One byte “image number” per location. Locations also have a zone.
Object database: object with weight, value, throw damage, hit damage, fragility and location.
Creature database: Creatures with location and inventory of objects, friend/foe flag, permitted zones and health. One of the creatures is “You”.
Graphics database: 256 objects, (including sub-objects), drawn on a 16×16 grid. Giving about 80-100 location images, using about 200 objects in the BBC version, almost all 256 objects used in expanded C64 version.
So: Your question on NPCs.
They could inspect the tables (except pictures, no need for that).
They have a decision tree including some random numbers, but basically:
Can I pick up a weapon?
Can I fight?
Should I flee?
Should I wander (in my zone)?
All their fight chances were similar to yours, except “You” always got the first blow.
Note that even if you chose to run away, the other blows still came.
The game had a combat exception rule that running if your last action was to fight, let you run away.
All in all, the rules were probably less than 1/2 K of code!
This 1/2 K code of code is what causes the game to be memorable, and for quotes like the top of this post (calling it “one of the finest adventure games of all time”). Just like The Hobbit, people did necessarily play to “win”; the experience could vary just based on where the NPCs roamed to. The game has a genuine air of replayability that many other authors of this time failed at; I’d say because of the lack of plot/minimalism it is even more replayable than The Hobbit.
Another curious moment: there’s a locked brass door in the dungeon area where the room has nothing in it, but I tried locking the door anyway and an elf and a troll appeared from nowhere. I was able to easily kill the troll because it didn’t have any weapons.
I say all this because I’m still on board with the outside perspective of Morpheus Kitami, and others who were less impressed: “I have mixed feelings, the game was fun, but it’s hard to call it a good adventure game.” It was very easy to have objects that you needed snagged by NPCs and roaming around, which is both a demerit and a feature. I had tried to store some items (including the flint stone) in the “secret door” section but didn’t realize elves could get in there; I hadn’t lit my lamp yet so ended up typing ASK ELF FOR STONE in the dark section as I wandered around until I eventually found where it went. The fact that this encounter could even happen in the first place was both absurd but also stunning, and the feel of a world where “anything can happen” is what gave it such prominence to those who formed core memories around it.
What Trevor Hall would do on a desert island, from The Classic Adventurer.
Coming up: our first encounter with the Microbee, a computer developed in Australia.
Last time I left off on a narrow fissure leading to Watersmeet, and a cave nearby that’s a maze. Also, just for the record, I had a brass key (from the very start) and a bronze key (from the witch where I traded the crystal ball). There was one gold door I was unable to unlock; we’ll get back to that today.
Regarding Watersmeet, I knew something special was going on because there’s some text about it in the intro of the BBC Micro version:
It is believed that the lake itself has some mystical properties which, some say, are derived from the many potions of witches and so forth, which have been split into the rivers and streams throughout the ages.
It is also said that a wise man may look upon the secret of life, which lies nearby.
I tried filling a jug and getting the same “refreshing” message I did with beer, so I was puzzled for a bit.
I pulled out the verb list and realized it had “swim”, so I tested it and found that swimming in the water healed wounds. There’s something else special going on, but I didn’t realize it until later.
The C64 graphic conveys a little more clearly this is a place you’d want to swim.
Analogous to Adventure having one “all different” maze and one “all alike” maze, this one required dropping objects to map things out. Fortunately, it’s relatively small; if you knew there was nothing else hidden you could find the two things inside without much effort (the paths tend to lead to them, rather than away from them).
The first thing is a “holdall”, a duffle bag for those Americans out there. It increases your inventory limit, but is a bit fussy to operate. In order to get any items in, you have to FILL HOLDALL, and then the game prompts each of your inventory items one at a time.
Also, make sure you don’t put a lit lamp in!
You can PUT THING IN HOLDALL to get something in just fine, but the only way I was able to get items was via EMPTY HOLDALL which dumped all of them at once.
For the second thing to find, you might notice from the holdall room four of the exits lead to Maze (4), and from there all of them eventually lead to a rock fall.
The upshot, in a maze-narrative sense, is that Hall wants the rock fall encounter right away, as opposed to making it a secret that may not be found for a while. A player normally wouldn’t have to do any mapping at all (except from their perspective they don’t know they’ve exhausted the maze).
At the rock fall you are informed you need to find the chest of the desert king if you want to pass.
From here I was stuck for a while; without the next revelation, I’m not sure if any more progress is even possible (although this author does like putting multiple entrances and exits to things, so I can’t say for sure until I’ve finished the game).
Back at Watersmeet, if you DRINK WATER straight from the source without filling a jug first, you’ll get a special ability: seeing secret doors.
This is a curious moment insofar as many players would not realize there is an issue here at all; someone who drinks straight from the water first would not know (nor would it be likely they’d test) that the water loses its magical potency once in the jug.
Unfortunately, with me getting the ability so late, it means I have to check everywhere I’ve been on the map. I’ve checked most places; back at the room-of-bones in the witch maze there’s a secret locked silver door to the west; as I have yet to find a silver key I do not know what is behind it.
The important secret door anyway is back at the cave I was just in, right at the entrance before the maze starts: there is a small hidden complex to the east: bedroom, kitchen, sitting room. Inside the kitchen is a gold key.
Conveniently, there’s a second secret door that leads right to the hall from last time that ended at a locked gold door. This goes to a dungeon which will eventually lead up to the domain of the Desert King, so the Forest King and Desert King areas are directly connected (you don’t have to go outside to travel between them).
Right away there’s two dungeon doors that take a bronze key (the kind I got from the witch); opening the first one frees a princess.
UNLOCK DOOR WITH BRONZE KEY
It is now open.
A princess flees. She doesn’t recognise you.
This happens so incidentally that it circles back to the author’s own mission statement about how you are not the main character of a story, but rather just the inhabitant of a world. It is possible the princess will come up later (I haven’t gotten back over the map yet to see where she ended up) but at least this particular moment felt like an anti-story of sorts (not in a derogatory sense, just in a “games can have different goals from each other” sense).
A second dungeon door had an “ill giant”. The giant was friendly so I tried handing over my axe; guards are on the floor above and it proceeded to wallop some of them off-stage.
The graphic that gets used for all the “dungeon breakout” rooms.
To see the aforementioned guards, just go up a trapdoor to a new section.
Remember, I don’t mark any of the wandering enemy locations because I don’t know where their “home base” is.
Once again (while mapping things out) I am mostly able to ignore the NPCs; I did get whacked once hard enough to die but I had a save close enough I didn’t lose any progress. For the most part the rooms are just scenery so information is progress.
There’s one “guard room” as shown here with a “uniform”, but the uniform seems to have no effect on the guards. “Wear” isn’t a recognized verb.
There’s a storage room and cellar that would normally be pure scenery except there’s beer in the cellar. The game does have a thirst timer and you will die if you don’t drink anything.
Just passing through and going up another floor leads to the main complex of the Desert King.
The ground floor has a study (scenery), dining hall (scenery), kitchen (scenery), and workshop (not scenery, there’s a cauldron of oil). My guess is in addition to a thirst-timer the game has a lamp-timer, but you can refill the lamp with oil from this cauldron.
The cauldron is depicted in the room, unlike most items, but it also is so heavy you can’t pick it up (even with all items dropped, the game says “you can’t carry any more”.)
Going back to the main stairs, and going up to the upper floors…
…it looks like from the map, other than locked doors, it’s still pretty much obstacle-free. It’s a little denser in guards, and you can find the Desert King himself wandering around, with a gold crown and a sword.
One of the doors is silver (like the one in the crypt) and one is given no metal-color at all, but I think that’s because to open it I need the master key. This is where the dragon from the cover art shows up.
Well, sort of shows up — again, no characters displayed in the graphics. I’ve been able to get the Desert King to follow me, so I’m wondering if somehow I could have him get inadvertently fried by the dragonfire.
There’s one more tower that has a witch with a “gold staff”. I have not tried tangling with her yet. You can also leave the castle out the front drawbridge but it just leads to the desert on the north side of the chasm; I haven’t tried searching thoroughly but it doesn’t look like there’s anything to find other than more scenery.
To recap my obstacles:
1. two silver-locked doors
2. one “no description” locked door that presumably needs the master key from the dragon
3. the witch and the king in the Desert castle
I assume the chest is behind one of the locked doors, so I’m not counting it as an obstacle. Looking back at previous content, we could also count the dwarf holding onto a diamond ring; I haven’t found anything to trade for it yet. I did manage to simply kill the dwarf, and this was a very sad encounter where it just kept running away as I chipped away at its health.
The heaviest moment of “you are just like the random enemy NPCs” in the game.
I haven’t tried my secret-door vision absolutely everywhere (secret entrance in the mountains, maybe?) and there’s the eternal issue of me simply missing an exit, but I think I’m hovering close to the end and I really need to enact a strategy to handle the NPCs rather than just run away from everything.
In general, other than the moment with the water, there haven’t been “puzzles” in a regular sense; knowing that a gold key should be taken to a gold door is closer to what I’ve termed a natural action, and the NPCs clearly have enough randomness and multiple approaches that they feel more like obstacles (akin to a CRPG) rather than puzzles.
I have the first two underground sections (the one from the locked grate, and the one from the cave at the trail) mostly mapped out and connected, so now seems like a good time to pause.
First entrance to the underground.
Second entrance to the underground.
It makes the geography a little clearer to start with the trail entrance, although in my playthrough I started with the grate and only connected it up later.
At the cave entrance there’s a metal door to the east (which is unlocked) and a passage to the west. Go west twice and you’ll end up in the Hall of the Forest King and tossed in a dungeon. I have yet to experiment with this section. (It sounds like they need a bribe; maybe this whole section is forced and it’s possible to retrieve the bribe, but it’s just as easily possible with this sort of game that you can avoid this encounter altogether.)
Prior to making it to the Forest King you can swerve down into a long hall and eventually reach a dead end with a gold door. The doors are helpfully color coded with keys (you’ll need a gold key for a gold door) but I don’t have the appropriate key yet.
Heading back to the cave entrance, and going through the open door, there’s a small section of rooms containing a “short wooden rod”, a “short dagger”, and a “crystal ball”. You might remember the crystal ball from last time; this is the area that links directly with the grate. Near the dagger is a locked bronze door (again color-coded, I’ll bring back the key later).
Also in this area is the part that took the most significant chunk of my time, an exit to a maze. The maze does not have graphics and swaps things to text-only mode.
The text-only mode is partly due to mazes being awkward to show graphics of, but also as a hint, as this is simply an “all different” style maze from Crowther/Woods. This starts in a “turny twisty little maze of passages” and different rooms have different names.
The different names can be used to make a map, but I admit I always find these kinds of mazes a headache. I went with old-fashioned object dropping. Fortunately, the different wandering NPCs don’t seem to want to brave the maze, so it doesn’t have a character like the Thief from Zork I picking things up. Unfortunately, your inventory capacity is too low to map all the rooms, but I remained stubborn and started moving objects to get rooms like “ROD 3” and “BALL 2” as I was mapping things out. Generally, the paths converge on a central area with a witch (if you move at random, you’re likely to eventually reach the witch).
The witch has no visuals attached (none of the NPCs do, but even the maze itself has no visual) so it’s just straightforward text. If you hang out for longer than one turn the witch starts to throw spells, and eventually you’ll die.
I took multiple tries at fighting (using the dagger) and had no luck; it’s possible I was causing damage via HIT WITCH WITH DAGGER but the game wasn’t giving any feedback.
Still, the witch didn’t start immediately attacking: maybe the witch is “neutral”? I had a crystal ball I wasn’t able to use for anything yet, so I tried GIVE BALL.
I still need to experiment with the moods of the NPCs and how far you can push them. There was an elf running around outdoors with an axe (the one the troll normally liked to hold) and I did ASK ELF FOR AXE and the elf just handed it over. I don’t know if “trade value” is a thing and if a series of swaps are possible; maybe the game can be won entirely by “diplomatic victory” rather than getting in standard RPG fights.
With the bronze key claimed, I went to escape the maze (I already had the exit mapped) and unlocked the bronze door. Unfortunately, the troll was waiting for me and gave me a heavy wallop. I fled through the bronze door, then locked the door behind me.
This gave some breathing space, but unfortunately led to a dead end: a stair going to a room with a diamond ring, some gold, and a dwarf. I haven’t tried contesting the dwarf over the treasure yet, but there’s no aggression so I suspect some more trade-swaps might be in order.
One last thing to mention with the witch maze: a side passage, leading to a room with bones:
The room has a shaft leading up to the Hall of the Forest King but it just results in you getting tossed in the dungeon again. I’m not sure if the shaft has a “reason” in a puzzle-solving sense or if it’s just meant to build more environment.
One last wrinkle, because I was trying to be completionist about my map: I already had everything mopped up when I tested one more exit leading back from the skulls to the maze. I didn’t know which room it was going to, but the all-different style of room name still applied, so I wrote down just this room description, then did a quick run through my already-made map to see what location it corresponded to.
I tried moving on to the third underground but it’s another maze. It makes reference to a Desert King, but I already burned my mapping energy on the first maze, so I’ll save that for next time.
