Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

The first, and easiest task, was watching the movie. This not only helped pass the time, but gave me a glimpse of scenes that could be used in the adventure. Rollercoaster, for those of you who missed the movie, concerns an extortionist who plants bombs on rollercoaster tracks, merry-go-rounds, and other fun places.

— From David Lubar, author of Adventures in Videoland, Creative Computing, January 1982

The concept of the videodisc was developed starting in the late 50s, going through the 60s, and was first shown to the public in 1972; however, it didn’t make it to commercial market as a format until 1978, under the name DiscoVision. Later, more famously, it become known as LaserDisc.

From the 1978 DiscoVision US demo video.

The very first videogame to utilize videodisc format was the gambling game Quarter Horse from 1981. It let you bet “credits” on a particular horse in a race, then show a video of the race, giving you any resulting winnings.

The very second is, oddly enough, a type-in Apple II adventure game from the January 1982 issue of Creative Computing, utilizing the videodisc of the 1977 movie Rollercoaster. The game was designed to have the Apple II hooked up to a videodisc player and then at appropriate moments in the game it would switch to scenes in the movie that matched the action in the game. Sometimes the scenes are static, sometimes they involve snippets so that there’s movement and sound in addition to pictures.

That’s a mental handful, so a shorter recap: this is a game that scavenges off of a movie made 4 years before, re-imagining various scenes as being part of an adventure game.

From Creative Computing. If the company sounds familiar, they recently came up in the game Explore where the manual dissed them for republishing old BASIC games rather than making new ones.

I had this game at the rear of my 1982 list (although publication delay puts it really at 1981) with the assumption that one day, I’d do something like Kay Savetz did and manage to hook up a real Apple II to a real DVD player with a real copy of Rollercoaster, making it the most technically complicated adventure game I’d ever played. (Of course, I don’t own any of the three, so that would have been an adventure in itself to wrangle together.)

From Kay Savetz’s video.

However, things quite recently got much, much, easier, as the laserdisc game emulator Singe added direct support for the game. Now playing was just a matter of downloading the emulator package and the game itself, which already game set-up with the correct video clips. The only difference in gameplay the text of the adventure is displayed directly on top of the video playback (in order to avoid having two screens).

The premise of the game is you’ve received an anonymous tip about a saboteur planting a bomb on a rollercoaster, and your job is to stop it.

Rather amusingly, it’s rather easy to die right away. You start on a midway, and can head north into a restaurant, where the game mentions you are hungry and a waiter asks if you want to eat. If you say YES, the game is over. (So you can experience the entire thing, including video, I have linked the appropriate place in Kay Savetz’s video below.)

The entirety of the map is not large, nor is this a long game: no doubt matching all the scenes to locations was onerous enough. And genuinely, nearly every scene and event has an image. There is the brief occasion where the game shows a person with binoculars, as sort of a “default” if there’s nothing to show…

…but otherwise, even the mundane act of putting on a uniform as a disguise is illustrated.

(That’s a depiction of “you”, I suppose. Except it feels like the person in binoculars might also be “you”? The inevitable result of using scavenged materials, best not think about it too hard.)

The game’s sequence is relatively straightforward. The uniform lets you pass into a shack, and get a book letting you know how to turn radios into jammers. There’s some coins lying around on the midway you can spend to play in a “shooting gallery” and win a teddy bear.

The teddy bear can be used to get by a belly dancer, which lets you in a storage room with a ticket. The ticket can be exchanged a game booth to play a ball-throwing game, where you have a choice of prize.

The book made it pretty obvious the radio was the right choice. With a toolbox from elsewhere you can then MAKE JAMMER and find an observation point where the roller coaster is visible. Trying to USE JAMMER gets…

…a most unfortunate result. The game is softlocked, although I didn’t know it at the time, and I wandered long enough to get a “time over” and have another rollercoaster-crashing scene.

The batteries were back at the teddy bear. If you LOOK at the bear it tells you it is the type that says “I love you” when pushing a button. So you can OPEN BEAR to get at the batteries before giving it away. Whoops!

Assuming you get the sequence right, you can save the rollercoaster and get a final scene.

The game was republished on disk later by Creative Computing, although with some slight tweaks to the text. In particular, the bear puzzle is easier, because when winning it some text is added where a passer-by complains about toys with newfangled technology. The softlock is still possible, but this is intended to hint (for someone who missed the batteries) that the teddy bear might be the kind that uses them.

It was fascinating to play insofar as we’ve only had very limited experience with moving images and sound so far, and it runs into some of the same troubles. The animated locations, for instance, play that way every time a room is entered; even when it is a 2-second clip, when I found myself passing through the same place for the 8th time (under the rollercoaster, say) the brief delay was slightly grating.

The transition from quiet to noisy (as any animated scene had sound) was also a bit disconcerting, although in one case it gave the right story effect; I was walking along the “quiet” Midway when the game decided I ran out of time and decided to start screaming along with the “you have lost” sequence.

The game’s scavenged images also made it have a problem with first person vs. third person. Sometimes, like shooting at ducks, the game shows “you” on the screen; more often, you just see locations, as if you are standing there looking around. If this was a longer game the disconnect might be confusing, but in a way this was simply a proof of concept of a genre that never emerged.

Was the project worth doing? Did it accomplish the desired functions? The main goal was to try an experiment with a fairly new technology. Here I feel partial failure. The new medium was used in an old way … the exercise has convinced me of the potential power of the video-computer connection. The fusion of these two devices will produce some spectacular results … The rollercoaster ride has just begun.

— David Lubar

If you’d like to spend a little more time in Videoland, Kay Savetz (with Carrington Vanston) has discussed it at length on the podcast Eaten by a Grue.

Also, special thanks to Ethan Johnson, friend of the show blog for information about the game Quarter Horse.