Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

How can I say it? I can’t say ‘I can remember the graphics,’ because there weren’t any graphics. But I remember what I imagined it being, because you entered all the commands yourself: ‘Go up elevator.’ ‘Move ashtray.’ There were no graphics on the screen, so you had to imagine everything yourself. The quote-unquote graphics that I imagined for the game I essentially created myself, because I had to imagine everything.

I got to thinking that it was very interesting that you had to visualize your own graphics. But what would a text adventure look like if it actually had graphics? I thought it would sell very well.

— quoted from Koichi Nakamura, executive producer for Spike Chunsoft, who worked on the first Dragon Warrior games, Shiren the Wanderer, and visual novels like Danganronpa and Zero Time Dilemma

Omotesando Street in Tokyo. [Source.]

This game is a nexus. While arguably, all games, even the most obscure ones, have threads leading to them and out of them, with Omotesando Adventure these threads are very bright. This is the first (as we currently know) Japanese adventure game, although it was written in English.

Art from ASCII Magazine, March 1982.

It showed up in ASCII Magazine, a hobbyist computer magazine that had been running successfully since 1977. They were the ones that translated and printed Ahl’s 101 Basic Computer Games in Japan, and printed quite a lot of source code in each issue. Sometimes the source code was given in specialized languages GAME (General Algorithmic Micro Expressions) and later PL/1; sometimes they were straightforward BASIC; sometimes they were raw machine code.

The code was displayed on TRS-80 or PET screens and then the editor, Susumu Furukawa, took pictures with a Polaroid camera and mashed them together.

Our selection today was in raw machine code, in the April 1982 issue; in particular, in a “parody insert” called Ah-SKI! (“An Annual Magazine for Tired & Histerical Computer Scientist”) tucked inside was Omotesando Adventure, a game named after the street ASCII’s headquarters were on.

This issue we are introducing the Adventure Game. It’s an entirely new genre, the like of which was never seen on a computer. We may even call it a “New Type” of computer games.

The goal, as an employee of a rival company, is to sneak into the ASCII offices and sabotage their next issue. Before I get into gameplay details, I want to discuss those bright threads. According to Susumu Furukawa the game was coded with Adven-80, a “general purpose” adventure writing code base published in Dr. Dobbs Journal, in an article by Peter D. Scargill. (Dr. Dobbs was one of the offshoots of the People’s Computer Company, and lasted long after the PCC was dead.)

The system is slightly less flexible than the Scott Adams one; that one allowed for arbitrary timers to allow complex timed object and location effects, like a tide that moves in or out. ADVEN-80 instead hardcodes in a lamp timer and seems to have variable storage but doesn’t seem to allow multiple timers (unless I’m missing some complex hack) so has a relatively static world.

What’s most fascinating about ADVEN-80 is it cites other prior systems as sources:

– Scott Adams games in general

– The GROW system (the node-based system which I’ve written about here)

– Ken Reed’s article for Practical Computing published in the UK from 1980 (that I’ve written about here)

– Blank and Galley describing the system of storage for Zork on home computer

– Greg Hassett’s article on How to Write Adventure games (which I’ve mentioned here)

So, to summarize, the first Japanese adventure game (that we know of) pulls a system from an US publication, which itself was influenced by both US and UK writing about how adventure systems work. This is essentially a synthesis of the early years of adventure history.

Sadly, that doesn’t mean Omotesando is well-coded; perhaps it is understandable as the first adventure from the country and also not being written in Japanese. As the instructions mention, Japanese is hard to parse (it doesn’t really lend itself to “VERB NOUN” style commands without feeling broken and awkward).

Adventure games were developed in America, and so at this point in time both the descriptions and the input are set in English. (Because of that our English has improved considerably. When we play adventure games here at the office, a Japanese-English-Japanese dictionary is an essential accessory).

Furthermore, while outputting text isn’t a problem, formatting a request for action in Japanese is difficult and so is analyzing the input. We think even home-grown adventure games are going to use English for a while.

This prophecy was a little true; the next two adventure games from Japan (both from 1982) use English commands but have text and responses in Japanese, and there were also 1983 games with the same arrangement.

The computer emulated here is a NEC PC-8001 from 1979, essentially exclusive to Japan. It did later make it to the US as the PC-8001A although it remains very obscure outside of its home country.

So, back to the game itself: it is set at ASCII’s own offices, where your goal is sabotage.

You start at the entrance of the ASCII building and eventually find keys to unlock the three floors it is housed on (which I have marked in three different colors on the map above).

I admit being highly stuck for a while at first due to a number of oddities in the system:

1.) You can only see room exits by using LOOK in a particular room. This is relatively normal. However, this also applies to objects, which is slightly odd, and the objects don’t even exist until you’ve done LOOK which is staggeringly odd. That means if you die (and you will die) and restart, it is quite easy to casually try to OPEN DOOR and have the game tell you it doesn’t see one, but that’s because you never materialized the door yet with a LOOK command. Phew.

One of the early GAME OVERs.

2.) You can both LOOK at items and SEARCH them. One, either, or both can reveal differing information, but even more importantly, they do nothing on an item being held. The first set of keys I found I was unable to look at, which is unfortunate because I would have seen they went to the fourth floor and to the security box. The security box helps disable the alarm, as shown above; you need to just UNLOCK SECURITY while holding the right key.

3.) The offices are full of extraneous desks and items that you can’t pick up, except the game is unclear in its parser messages so it took me a while to realize it was trying to give the modern “that’s just scenery”. That applies, for instance, to the computer above, playing the game that you are currently playing.

4.) Sometimes the parser is just regular finicky in all the traditional ways, like the guess-the-verb fest above. I had a spray gun that the game described as for cockroach removal (as long as it was on the floor) but it turns out the right command is KILL COCKROACHES.

The gameplay essentially travels through a series of keys before landing on a gold one. The gold one can be used to open a safe with a “magnetic monopole bomb”.

I placed the bomb at what the game described as the “central zone of ASCII”, ran outside, typed DONE like the game commanded me and:

Oof. That’s not good. Fortunately, a helpful Youtube video by くしかつ Kushikatsu goes through a complete walkthrough, whereupon I found I was missing two things.

First, an umbrella and a raincoat. I actually had grabbed the umbrella already but not the raincoat, because GET RAINCOAT didn’t work when I found it. You’re supposed to just WEAR RAINCOAT upon finding it. I’m not sure if this is really needed at all, but the outside is described as rainy, so I’m fine with the roleplaying.

I’m not sure what is going on with the Klingon reference. Japan did like Star Trek and Ahl’s book includes the famous Star Trek mainframe game.

Second, more importantly: Kushikatsu closed and locked the safe and all the doors. Very unusual! Leave no trace. The only other game with a comparable trick from the Project I’ve run into is Gargoyle Castle where you had to pick up all the trash.

So despite it being caught in a murky fog of dodgy parser choices, and despite the game not giving enough feedback for the reason of failure, Omotesando Adventure has a genuinely clever gameplay trick up its sleeve.

(There’s one more trick, supposedly, based on Jimmy Maher’s writeup. There is a way to save your game based on doing some in-game trick. I never did find it, and the walkthrough I mentioned doesn’t bother. Anyone who knows what’s going on feel free to drop a note in the comments.)