Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I mentioned in my last post I got halfway through the game without being aware I was some sort of super spy trying to retrieve a blueprint.

Part of the reason why is the events that follow have very little in common with a spy story. It’s really more of a comedy.

You start out needing a ticket to get in the fun house. It costs a dollar. In the parking lot, you find a “five dollar bill” but, upon attempting to use it to buy a ticket, this happens:

There’s a dollar coin stuck in a grate you need to get to buy the ticket instead.

This is followed by a mirror

a maze (thankfully brief)

and a room with a skeleton and three knobs. (Pulling them takes you to three different destinations.)

There’s a “rolling barrel room” that won’t let you leave unless you CRAWL out

a non-working fortune teller

and a tank with a mermaid.

Also, you can send the mermaid down the drain.

The closest there is to a spy-genre event is a pair of spectacles

that can be used to find a secret room back at the mirror. It feels more like Inspector Gadget than James Bond to me, though.

I’m really curious what the thought process with the design here was; did they first want to design a spy game, then picked the setting, then realized the setting was more of a comedy so made it that way? Or did Scott Adams (supposedly with assistance from Alexis Adams on this one) decide they wanted to try a comedy and realized it might not make sense to the average player without a frame story? Was there a genuine desire to make a spy/comedy hybrid? Or was it all just thrown together at random and this is what things ended up at?