Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

The 2008 comedy movie Be Kind Rewind introduced the idea of “sweding”, recreating scenes of a movie from memory.

Yes, this is relevant to the game at hand. Let me back up a moment.

—

One of the legendary “lost copies” of Adventure is by George Richmond from 1979 (“with assistance from Mike Preston”). It was written in CDC Pascal and while people reported playing it in the late 70s / early 80s, until recently it was considered to be entirely lost.

That is it *was* considered lost, until roughly a year ago a mysterious “Tom A.” sent a source code package to Arthur O’Dwyer. However, it’s sat since then, and I can reliably say nobody except for possibly “Tom A.” has ever played it since 1982. (Download for a package including a Windows executable is here.)

Still, maybe nothing to get excited over. With another lost version of Adventure, you might think (as I first did before booting this up) that all we have here is yet another port, with extra rooms tossed for flavor.

That doesn’t describe this at all.

It’s more like — the author played Adventure, liked it, had some notes — then decided to write his own game from scratch, riffing off his notes but filling in the gaps with his own imagination. It’s like he made a full length sweding of Adventure.

Click here for a larger version of the map.

The picture above is a (mostly complete) map of the outdoors. You have to go *southwest* to the entrance of the cave, not south. There are two routes deep in the forest that lead directly to the maze of twisty passages (and not the same maze as the original game!) There’s a lake to the west that requires a boat to get across.

You’re in front of a Wellhouse. A stream flows to the southwest.
> in
You’re in a Wellhouse. The center of the room is occupied by a well.
I see objects here.
A bottle full of water.
Tasty food for nourishing Adventurer and beast.
A ring of unmarked keys.
A kerosene lantern. It is hard to tell how much fuel is left in it.

As far as I can tell so far, the game uses almost none of the original room descriptions. Early on you find a box of matches (which is required to light the lantern) and a claw hammer. Instead of XYZZY as a magic word, you get this:

You’re at a dead end. A plaque on the walls is inscribed with the saying: “If you were in a hurry you would ‘     ‘ along”. Unfortunately, the word you need is obscured.