Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Part of Dennis Donovan’s map from 1980.

In yet another episode of Whose Version Is This Anyway?: I mentioned in my first post that there was two later branches that was derived off Adventure 501 (a 551 point version and a 751 point version). There’s a part involving a spider and fly in the port I’m playing which is not in either branch, leading to the theory that this particular version was modified by an anonymous person off of David Long’s no-longer-in-existence original. The addition is very slight, so it’s perfectly fine to call it the “same game”, but it has a silly/annoying scoring trick I wanted to point out:

You have entered Haunted Chamber. A cold wind whistles eerily throughout the room. Strange chords from an unseen organ echo from all over. A passage leads east and a small hole leads south. There is a giant spider in the eastern corner guarding the door. He is grinning at you.

>THROW FLY
The spider grabs the fly, wraps it in silk, and proceeds to quietly munch on it, leaving the door unguarded.

This obviously loses the fly, but it also loses points. Even though the description of the fly doesn’t have the patented exclamation mark at the end (like all the other treasures do) it gets points if stored as a treasure.

I had explored the outdoors at the very beginning of playing this game, and had concluded there weren’t any additions. I apparently missed going west two times from the starting room, because there’s an extensive outdoors section:

I originally went north from the “Jumble of Large Broken Rocks” where I was led to the “High Cliff”, dutifully marking my map and assuming I had reached a dead end.

Soon after, I had reached the point of stuckness that I decided to peruse the Dennis Donovan map excerpted at the top of this post. The map really is a pleasure to look at, and it makes the game feel like a real location far more than any other map I can recall. It’s also useful for meta-solving; consider this portion on the lower-left corner:

This is technically of the 751-point version, although there only seems to be one small portion that doesn’t match with Adventure 501. This was sold commercially at the time; no high-resolution scan was available until earlier this year when Arthur O’Dwyer happened upon a copy.

I never found a “Thunder Hole” on my map, but it certainly looked like it was accessible. I made a return trip and found that going north from the “Jumble of Large Broken Rocks” also can go (simply at random) to the “Thunder Hole” area instead. Argh! This kind of trick I’ve only seen in Adventure variants, and I am deeply grateful nobody else picked up on it the way other authors ran with mazes.