You’re a biologist and the only non-engineer among the spaceship’s crew. To make yourself useful, you volunteered for the cryogenic deep freeze experiment. You’ve been on ice for fifty years, the time it has taken the crew to fly to the newly discovered planet Xepa, where they are to capture an alien egg and return it to Hoboken for analysis. Your time is up. The freezer lid opens automatically. You leap out, eager to take center stage away from all those engineers. But wait … something’s wrong. A deadly silence replaces the normal hustle and bustle of the crew’s activity. The entire crew has mysteriously disappeared. Surrounded by clickings and whirlings of instruments about which you know nothing, you try not to panic. You kick yourself for passing up that flight instrumentation course in Waco, Texas so you could attend the est retreat in Tahiti. Nevertheless, you conclude your only recourse is to try to complete the mission yourself, Thus, you must figure out how to suit up, exit the spacecraft, capture a specimen and return it to the ship’s lab for analysis. You can worry about how to get back home later!
— From the manual for Alien Egg
APX (Atari Program Exchange) was a program Atari had designed to sell user-written software: “all APX software is written by and for people just like you.”
1981 was still a year where “user-written” doesn’t entirely make sense as a separate concept from just software, since quite a few of the things being published “normally” were random folks sending software to publishers; that is, exactly the same thing that APX describes. I’m hoping they paid fine and it wasn’t just a way to eke out extra product for less money (I have no evidence either way).
Alien Egg is one of two adventure games by Robert Zdybel (the other is Castle, also from 1981) and the first game we’ve seen for this project only available on an Atari computer. He did go on to a long career after (including making Warbirds for the Atari Lynx, arguably one of the best games for the system) and is still currently at Electronic Arts.
I’m not sure whether Castle or Alien Egg came first; they both show up in the Summer 1981 Atari Program Exchange catalog (along with four text adventures by other authors) so I just picked one at random.
As the opening text I quoted earlier implies, you are on a spaceship where everyone has mysteriously disappeared, and your job, rather oddly, is to ignore all that, and go on with the mission: to find and retrieve an alien egg.
I’m going to start from the positive end first: this game had a nice sense of attitude. We’re still in the era where a lot of games feel drained of humor (due to having to pack so much in so little) but the author here felt free to make the narrator into a character of sorts.
This is crossed with a sense of unresolved mystery.
This is where the rest of the crew slept before their mysterious and untimely disappearance.
There are several bunks against one of the bulkheads. All of the are neatly made and empty.>U
CAPTAIN’S BUNK
This is where the Captain used to bunk before HIS mysterious and untimely disappearance.
Unfortunately, that’s about as far as my positive comments go. The parser was sheer suffering, and not necessarily for missing verbs. The verbs are even printed right in the manual.
Notice a complete lack of synonyms, like “TAKE” but no “GET”. At least the author was up-front about it.
No, the problem is the nouns.
The right thing to type here is — and I wish I was joking — TAKE SPACESUIT. It only gets referred to that if you leave and come back (the room switches to displaying in “brief” style).
The messages are almost as unhelpful as possible. Going in a direction that isn’t open yet just gets “SOMETHING IS IN YOUR WAY” without further detail what that something might be.
This game does have a context-sensitive HINT command (good) which sometimes has funny easter eggs (also good)
but the HINT command also sometimes acts like an EXAMINE command, and the intent by the author almost seems like it’s intended people use it as much as possible.
…
OK, let’s backtrack and go over the plot. You start off in the Astro-Navigation Room with a mysterious HATCH that won’t open but access to most of a ship, and find a TRIBBLE, CAP, SPACESUIT, and LAMP.
There’s also a PAMPHLET which indicates aliens are afraid of tribbles, and a SIGN indicating “ACCESS TO SECURE AREAS CONTROLLED BY VOICE COMMAND”.
One of the secure areas is reasonable to find using a command on a nearby sticker, and yields a locked chest. Further exploration yields horribly being stuck, unless one happens to do HINT in the Crew’s Bunks.
The Captain’s Cap belongs in his cabin.
Dropping the CAP in the cabin opens a secret compartment that yields a RECORDER.
WARNER is good enough to enter a computer room.
With the glove you can then MOVE ROD in the Reactor Control Room to shut off the nuclear reactor. This lets you finally OPEN HATCH and get to the bottom part of the ship, and outside. In the bottom of the ship you can find a KEY that unlocks the chest from earlier, yielding a BLASTER.
Then you can get on the surface of the planet, apply your newfound blaster to get past a rock and into a cave, and softlock yourself because you went down a bottomless pit.
Oops! Playing everything over again (or reloading a save state because modern conveniences, yay) and going a different direction, you find an alien and the titular egg.
Taking the egg back to the Biology Room and dropping it leads to victory.
Of course, as the manual says, “You can worry about how to get back home later!” So, later is … now? Hello? Where did everyone go? Is there instructions for flying this thing?
…
I do appreciate the game, feels, hm, written. (Compare with Miser, which is almost unarguably a better game, but had to be so crisp in its prose it lacked character.) Narration with attitude still wasn’t common for 1981, so that was enough to carry me through. I just wasn’t a fan of suffering to communicate.
READ BOOK only works in the Billards Room (it’s a book on Zero-G Billiards, but you can’t read it elsewhere, because … ???).
(Bonus: just like Miser, this game doesn’t have an inventory limit either! Two in a row! When previously there were almost none! Weird how that happens.)
Renga in Blue 
EST, my god.
I had to triple check when I first put it in that my spelling matched the text.
Probably they meant “best” but I’m not even sure.
No, they absolutely meant est. It is very very time-capsulish. I’m only just old enough to have caught jokes about it at the time (like this one), but when I was in high school some of my mom’s coworkers (at a university-affiliated educational research institute) were into its successor, the Forum.
Wooow. The lowercase spelling threw me off.
Did the coworkers have any stories?
They didn’t have any stories that I can remember, IIRC they were still doing it! I’m not sure if my mom was mentioning this to me as a sort of “Don’t get drawn into this” thing. Though I think it was probably much more benign than something like sc***tology, in the end.
It seems to be an engaging plot after all. Too bad the parser was so limited.
How did you get this running? There seems to be only one image floating around, which dumps me into Atari DOS on the two emulators I’ve tried.
I’ve tried the one on Atari Mania and the on on My Abandonware and they both list DOS like your image, they are different sizes. I have tried Altirra 4.30.
I actually managed to figure it out and will now tantalizingly leave it at that.
No, the actual answer is to use /basic /disk disk.atr /runbas disk.atr, which works for this game and Castle. Chinese Puzzle needs an extra /type “RUN `CHINA`~”.
Yes, it needs both /disk and /runbas for some reason.
got it before I woke up!
In Atari800Win I did
The /runbas is starting it in BASIC since it isn’t a DOS game, if you’re wanting to do command line stuff in Altirra you always do that if you have a game in BASIC (like all the APX stuff). I think sometimes the disks have an autorunner in DOS that kicks it over to BASIC though.
I get the reasoning behind it, I just assumed /runbas would imply /disk. In any case, it works now!
Thanks both. By a certain coincidence I am currently playing another Atari text adventure at the moment, that is Emerald Isle via the Altirra 4.21 in enhanced mode. I am not sure why the Jewels Of Darkness trilogy was released in DOS back in 1986 but this one wasn’t. At least it doesn’t appear to have been in any searches I’ve made.
No Amiga or Atari ST either! I’m probably going with C64 when I get there.
It’s one of those games I’m also not sure on the date on, I’ve seen both 1984 and 1985 but have done zero investigation since it’s in the future.
Earlier this week I replayed Dungeon Adventure ijn two days for the first time in 42 years via DOSBox-X and found I could remember parser responses verbatim. I can’t remember what I did ten minutes ago though.
My first impression of Emerald Isle is that it is surprisingly slapdash in places, not what I’d associate Level 9 games as being. There are misspellings and missing words in the first few locations and “glue silver coin” parses “you can’t do that to the gold coin.” I believe it was sold at a lower proce than the games before or after it. I’m not sure why it is like this.
One other quick thing to mention since you’re hitting the APX games — I haven’t played the unpublished Marketing Adventure yet, which I’m going to date as 1981 with a question mark (might be 1980, but that’s all the wiggle room there is)
https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-marketing-adventure_3156.html
It has Alien Egg too but it is called SPCSHP (“Spaceship Adventure” I assume) instead.
An update to this: in many cases, /autoprofile /launch (filename) will also do.
I see. That hardly seems obvious! The manual is no use either; thanks for the information. Oddly Altirra 4.21 will run most of the adventures I have tried in Enhanced (CIO) mode but the same games will not run in 4.30 with this option selected. It doesn’t appear to be much of an improvement version over version 4.21.
I’ve just downloaded Marketing Adventure. It looks interesting. They don’t come much more obscure than that.
I noticed Matt’s comments on EST in this thread, and while only tangentially related to adventures, this reminded me of something I delved into a little while back that may be of interest to fellow fans of the weirdest, most obscure corners of classic gaming history: The 1980 “Life Dynamic” series from Avant-Garde Creations. The early ads for these directly mention EST, “Actualization”, and other “trips”. They’re essentially text dumps of ridiculous late hippy/early new age era psycho-babble combined with bizarre abstract mini-games that supposedly have something to do with the vaguely defined self-improvement being proposed within. But let me tell you, as a connoseur of “unintentional psychedelia”, these things are like the holy grail. It’s just pure weirdness in software form, and a complete time capsule of a certain time, place and lifestyle. They quickly straighted up and found success as a company with much more normal game, utility and educational software, so these basically got phased out (although they extracted some of the more comprehensible mini-games and sold them separately on compilations), but if you want to melt your brain, 8-bit style, you really need to check the surviving examples out. Sadly, it seems that at least a couple of them may be lost, and most of the manuals/documentation (which must be equally zonked-out) are unaccounted for.