We just saw a one-move game in the May 1982 edition of Softdisk. While we’re going through light adventures let’s knock one more down, appearing in the very next month.
The actual title of the last game we played was The Room, the filename is A.SHORT.ADVENTURE.
As you might tell from the title if you’re a Star Trek fan, yes, this is an original series reference (the Gorn have also shown up in Discovery….?) To get you in the mood, witness Captain Kirk’s hand-to-hand technique in this slow-moving battle from the episode Arena:
Truly unmatched in the history of martial arts using Styrofoam scenery.
Moving on to the actual game, the title screen gives it as “by Anthony Chiang” and “Chiang Mini-Adventure #1”. The mini part is serious: this is very short.
This is almost more text than the rest of the game.
I should put extra emphasis — unusually short. It’s easy with modern gaming to find endless parades of 15-minute confections on itch.io, some even highly acclaimed, but adventure games circa 1982 tended to longer. I assume (given the last game we just saw) the Softdisk format allowed for publishing tiny projects that would normally never survive to us today.
YOU’RE INSIDE THE SHIP’S DOCK
OBVIOUS EXITS:
NORTH
Here’s the entire map:
In one of the Aardvark opuses they’d have everything criss-crossed multiple times with abstruse object interactions that take hours to detangle. Here, you pick up a “LAZER KEY”, walk a few steps away, unlock a door, and find the SPACE GORN.
WITH ONE MIGHTY SWISH OF HIS TAIL THE SPACE GORN SLICES YOU IN HALF. REST IN PIECE.
.
Just missing a few steps along the way: there’s a picture of William Shatner you need to tear down with a safe behind. You can OPEN PICTURE to find the safe combo inside (there’s a hint elsewhere to do this) and find a disintegrator gun. Fresh batteries for the gun are laying around in the open nearby. A quick hop back to the Gorn, and, victory?
Hmm, at least one catch. Given how little there is to work with … what if we had the Gorn shoot the gun instead? That doesn’t quite work, but the Death Dreadnaught technique works perfectly.
Again: this is, objectively compared to modern games, a minor bit of fluff. But compared to games from the time, intentionally tiny adventures (maybe not action games) are unusual; most self-respecting authors would pad things out with a few more deathtraps or obscure puzzles or at least a maze or two. I have the feeling there are many games like this that were made but — not having an appropriate commercial outlet — were never passed on. The closest comparison I can think of is the early Roger Wilcox work, and the only reason we have those is the author dug up his old tapes and tossed them on his own web page many years later.
And if for some reason the short works bother you, don’t worry; our next game is going to be both long and very heavy and I suspect might be the eventual winner of Most Difficult Adventure of 1982.
Renga in Blue 
Yes, when I talked to Anthony Chiang about Space Gorn he described it as “more of a gag than a game”. But next to the previous game you’ve covered it looks like a positive epic. :)
The 1986 C64 port of the game (from Loadstar) might be the more familiar version to people (complete with its Gorn loading screen. Anthony went on to work as a visual effects artist in videogames, film and television… he’s worked on a fair few space-themed projects, but sadly not Star Trek as yet.
At least one other (short) game from the Chiang Brothers (Anthony, Kenneth and Samuel) to come in 1982 too.