IN THE DRAMATIC ENDING:
We fled by the ghost, who wasn’t blocking our passage, and found an ogre guarding some gold.
As you enter this room, the first thing that you notice is a pile of golden treasures nestled into a nook on the far side. Before you take another step, a foul-smelling ogre jumps out from a hole in the side wall and rushes forward to protect his gold.
With two strikes of our mighty ax, we were able to defeat the ogre.
?USE AX
ASSAULT ON OGRE , 85 UNITS
ITS LIFE FORCE IS NOW 15%
ATTACK BY OGRE
?USE AX
ASSAULT ON OGRE , 66 UNITS
ITS LIFE FORCE IS NOW -51%
OGRE HAS BEEN ELIMINATED
We were rewarded by a generous supply of gold! (How we were able to carry such a heavy weight, a common superpower of all adventurers, remains a mystery.) Passing by the ghost again (who wanders from room to room) we came across the last treasure of the cave guarded by bats:
Bat room: The ceiling is all but invisible for the tens of thousands of bats sleeping there. In one corner of this room lies an old, rusted chest. As you open the chest, the bats begin to stir. Inside the chest is a king’s ransom in jewels: diamonds, rubies, and emeralds.
The bats were indeed guarding, because our attempt to just take the treasure and run failed:
We attempted to swing our lantern to scare off the the bats, but at the moment of our swing the ghost wandered in and took the hit instead!
None of our weapons were effective on the bats afterwards. Pondering for a bit, we found a burning fire and brought it over:
With the bats gone, we had a clear route take all 4 of our treasures to the exit in triumph!
Where we traded our treasure for cold, hard, cash; accounting for inflation that’s about $161,000 in 2017 money. I feel like we may have been ripped off. Probably we took it to a pawn shop or something.
Or possibly we went the altruistic route and gave most of it to a museum and only sold off a few items to fund our expenses.
Still, we survived without wasting too many clone bodies, huzzah!
Side note: we had one monster we hadn’t slain. It doesn’t guard a treasure, so it’s optional. It has a “CURSE” in the room which strongly reduces attack value, supposedly neutralized by the apple. However, even with using the apple I still was only able to do 1 hit point of damage with using the fire, and the bones are quite good at killing us back, so I had to leave it be.
Assorted final comments:
1.) As pointed out by the players, the second half of the game was rather like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Given the built in feature that the game is supposed to be played with a dungeon mast — er, guide, that isn’t too surprising. You might want to read the article with the type-in, though — it really feels like one of those campaign books, complete with tables of enemies and weapons.
Link to the magazine with the article
2.) Being a guide let me smooth over a lot of issues that have might made the game otherwise unplayable. In some cases the players threw out 5 or 6 verbs in an attempt to do something, and I was able to just pick the right one. In other cases they weren’t using the right verb at all, but I went ahead and did it for them, because that’s a silly way to get stuck.
Also, even on successful commands the game doesn’t give a lot of feedback (there’s a very tight line / memory limit to the game, so I imagine the author just didn’t have room). As a guide I was able to work around that a little, except for cases where I couldn’t understand what was going on, even with access to the code.
The general feeling was a Mechanical Turk-type scenario where a computer’s very limited intelligence was “enhanced” by my being behind the controls.
3.) I still have no idea what rubbing the lamp does. It’s an understood command, and the lamp (if maybe not the verb) seems to be accounted for in the code, but I don’t quite understand this line.
2335 IF NOUN=28 AND M(50)>0 THEN 1070
4.) I never pointed it out, but the GUI with the 4 separate windows really is quite audacious and innovative for the time. I don’t think we’ll get another dynamic compass rose that displays available directions until 1980.
—
The author Thomas R. Mimlitch does show up later in the history of interactive fiction:
Educators who use Apple Writer II for word processing can create branching texts similar to Story Tree’s by taking advantage of WPL, Apple Writer’s built-in Word Processing Language. WPL lets users automate editing routine by writing short programs that take over the word processing. It was designed for repetitious tasks like printing envelopes or adding addresses to form letters, but it can be put to more imaginative uses. Thomas R. Mimlitch describes an ingenious WPL program which enables youngsters to write branching stories using all the editing features of Apple Writer. Once the story is typed in, the program runs in page by page, displaying each page on the screen and waiting for the reader to answer yes or no questions which determine the next page. In addition to a complete annotated listing, Mimlitch includes a sample story written by a ten-year-old. He tells about a group of neighborhood twelve-year-olds who became so engaged in their seventy-page narrative that they spent five months on the project.
[From The Electronic Text: Learning to Write, Read, and Reason with Computers by William V. Costanzo.]
Renga in Blue 
The array M appears to be monster stats. Cross-referencing the initialized values of M to the monster chart, I’m pretty sure that M(60) is the life force of the ice. Line 2335 appears to be reached from a test in 2300 on whether the verb was 8 or 11, which is CARRY or TAKE. And line 1070 is the line that prints “ICH VERSTEHE NICHT.” So it looks to me as though line 2335 is doing is preventing you from taking the lamp unless the ice is dead.
I don’t see any check on whether Verb=20, which should be “RUB” according to the verb chart, so it may be a red herring… but I haven’t looked too closely.
Makes sense to me. I feel like the author had to stop midgame with some of his ambitions when he ran out of space.
Awesome, thanks for running this!
Sorry to necro-post here, but I recently came across some information related to this game that you may find interesting, especially in light of your wondering whether anyone had ever really played this obscurity back in the day.
In the British Apple System Users Group’s (BASUG) “Hard Core” newsletter (later renamed “Apple 2000”), they frequently made reference to their extensive “Software Library”, which was made available to group members on disk or (early on) tape, and consisted of a mixture of adapted/enhanced public domain and original member-submitted programs of all sorts, grouped into more-or-less themed volumes. On the very first one of these, called the Introductory Disk, which was first released in December, 1980, there was an adventure game called Haunted Cave, which by their own description was a somewhat altered version of, you guessed it!, Spelunker. Now what makes this really interesting is that the two main alterations to the game in this version seem to have been that you now had a user-defineable amount of “lives” available (defaulting to 9) in order to make the game easier for beginners, and an added “Look” command, which apparently would bring up the room descriptions as originally only printed in the Micro article, thus completely changing the way the game would be played, and turning it into a much more standard solo adventure. The newsletter had several “How to play adventure games” type columns, as was common back then, and seemed to think Haunted Cave was an ideal introductory adventure for newcomers to the genre (which was even more in its infancy in the UK at that time, as you well know). Going forward, it seemed to be quite popular with the group members, but there were a few technical/code issues with the program that had to be worked out. Eventually, one of the members submitted a new machine code version to the newsletter, and someone then suggested that a built-in “Help” feature be implemented. This being done, they finally released the new, enhanced version on another Software Library disk in December, 1983.
So there you go! It seems that this seemingly unknown little game actually had a second life of sorts, as a title that quite a few members of the small but enthusiastic British Apple II community apparently cut their adventuring teeth on, near the dawn of the UK adventure gaming scene.
Unfortunately, aside from the newsletters themselves, all of this old BASUG material seems to be unarchived and lost, to the best of my knowledge. Which is a shame, because I found several other bits of interesting/mysterious info in there, including another lost adventure, the (Elric-themed?) Stormbringer, written in Pascal in 1985.
Sorry for the long comment on an old topic, but this game struck me as one of the more unique ones you’ve covered, so I thought it might be worth sharing what I’ve dug up.
Wow, thanks! And necro-posting isn’t really a thing when it comes to chrono-blogging — it’s easy for these kind of games to have new material to come up. Feel free to comment no matter how old the game is.
If Haunted Cave was available it’d probably be worth a new post just to try it out. I can’t imagine anyone past us lot playing this game otherwise.
Oh, and one last detail that I forgot: The (presumably photocopied) game map was also made available separately to group members, either via mail or in person at the regular BASUG meetings, adding to the impression that this game was really a “thing” with them for a few years.
Hi!
https://speccie.uk/software/tabbs-library-archive-2/ has two Mac disk images, the first of which will open in 7zip on Windows as well.
“Apple2000Apple2000 Apple II LibraryDOS 3.3D081.BXY” has Haunted Cave on it.
“Apple2000Apple2000 Apple II LibraryPascalP009.BXY”, is Stormbringer.
Both files open in CiderPress II, but I don’t know how to use them.
Pretend that had backslashes.
Apple2000/Apple2000 Apple II Library/DOS 3.3/D081.BXY
Apple2000/Apple2000 Apple II Library/Pascal/P009.BXY
oho! very nice catch
I’ll have to prod when I have a chance.
Haunted Cave is trivial to get running if you grab AppleWin’s MASTER.DSK and just copy the contents of the BXY over, overwriting HELLO. It’s the 1983 version.
Stormbringer has a README on the disk that makes me know less, not more…
One crash course in Apple II Pascal and many, many tries later, I got Stormbringer running. I e-mailed a disk image to Jason, but if anyone else wants it – https://limewire.com/d/7ocJ5#F0jfN5v5FI
(Who knew Limewire was still around?)
Great find! (is this Gus Brazil, btw?)
I took a look at it, and here’s a quick rundown:
It seems to be something of a traditional treasure hunt, but with a decent amount of combat. It’s certainly based on Elric, with plenty of the appropriate references, but he also threw in lots of other random fantasy stuff, like Tolkien, Lewis, Leiber, D&D, and even Douglas Adams. I’m afraid the writing level and spelling/grammar are not exactly Moorcock-ian, either…
The game is (c) Quentin “Q.J.” North, 2/84. Curiously, his name never showed up in Hardcore, and they didn’t mention adding it to the program library until the 8/85 issue. Doing a bit of poking around, I did find one letter by him way back in the 1/79 issue of PCW, regarding the PILOT computer language at Brighton Polytechnic, where he was presumably a student at the time. Funnily enough, he’s still there, as one of the head IT guys at what’s now known as Brighton University.
Interesting timing here, as aside from this and the Pico Adventure type-in from Nibble that I mentioned recently, there’s another Apple Pascal-related discovery that I’ve made, which will be revealed shortly.
I’m not Gus Brazil, no. Pico Adventure should be preserved imo – the Apple II Pascal suite seems very well thought out, even if I can only imagine what the constant disk switching must’ve been like on a real system, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get running unless it uses some arcane libraries.
Is anyone creating an archive/link reference for the various discoveries in the comments of this blog? It would be a shame to discover previously unknown stuff only to have it disappear in a sea of comments and link-rot again.