Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

80 Microcomputing, the TRS-80 publication we’ve visited several times before, had an “Annual Games Issue” in August of 1982.

The general theme was type-ins of games, including today’s selection, Conquest of Memory Alpha by L. L. Myers, with biographical info at the end of his type-in being the only information about the individual we have:

L. L. Myers serves aboard a nuclear submarine in the US Navy.

Goose Creek, which the author gives as an address, has a Naval Weapons Station base.

The majority of the text, rather than being devoted to technical details (although they do get slipped in at the end), gives background for the story. The short version is that Buck Starton is kidnapped by aliens and forced to land a ship on Algar V to search for Memory Alpha which contains “the total collection of human knowledge”. For the long version, I have done a dramatic reading:

(Click here if the in-line player doesn’t work, and no, I’m not sure why I went through the work to do this. It does feel a little like honoring the effort of writing the story, even if I’m being somewhat extreme in the delivery. But also, I have trouble mentally “capturing” this large a chunk of game lore without reckoning with it directly somehow.)

Unfortunately, the game does not live up to the drama. This is only marginally-kind-of an adventure game, and definitely not an RPG even though it keeps track of XP. The closest comparison I can think of is Klondike Solitaire.

Mind you, depending on how you play Klondike the chance of winning can vary from 5% to something like … 30%? (mathematicians don’t really know) and the same thing applies here, but I had to do some source diving to come up with a strategy.

You start at the upper right corner of the map.

There’s one glitch where you can exit to the east side and reappear to the west side. Otherwise this is a straight grid structure.

In order to travel anywhere, you need to light a torch. Then, you start moving around the “outer ring” of the map, which has repetitive location names; every room in a 2 by 6 chunk at the top, for instance, is called “The Red Hills”. Along the bottom you get “The Blue Hills”; on the right you get a “Large Bleak Plain”.

Somewhere on the map, randomly, is a plastic card. You need that plastic card to get into Memory Alpha (the center red marked portion, of 4 by 4 rooms).

While you are looking for the card, you get followed by ROBOT GUARDS, BARBARIANS, and RATS, the first two who will try to hurt you. At one point you’ll need to kill and eat a rat, so that you can avoid dying of hunger halfway through the mission. This act incidentally comes with an entirely random chance of getting diseased, and if you get the disease and die, even though the game tries to “reincarnate” you there’s a bug which just sends it in a loop:

The guards and barbarians have relatively interesting behavior; the guards will actively try to follow you, and the barbarians will occasionally also move around, and both will attack at random. If you kill a barbarian (using SHOOT LASER, although you have a limited number of shots) they will give a war cry and summon another one that you will encounter in the next room. Something similar seems to happen with robot guards but I never noticed any increase in enemy amount.

Assuming you find the card at all — and you might not, since according to the BASIC source there is a 9/100 chance the card may appear inside Memory Alpha making it literally impossible to get — you need to make your way to the front door, and contend with the robot tank there. You have a grenade that has to be used (THROW GRENADE AT TANK) otherwise the tank will vaporize you trying to escape. However, the grenade only sometimes goes off. You get a second chance if you miss, but not a third chance. Missing is entirely at random.

Once inside (USE CARD, PULL LEVER), you can make your way to the northwest corner and pick up a DATA WAFER, but in all likelihood you’ve already burned too many moves searching for the cards and will run out of torch light before you can escape. If your torch is dead you simply can’t move; the game is softlocked (or at least, you can hang out until you starve to death).

This screen is before I discovered you could eat the rats.

So, to recap, getting through the game (the “regular” way) requires

a.) killing and eating a rat and hoping you don’t get diseased.

b.) randomly finding a plastic card, which may not even be available, and hoping you find it fast enough

c.) killing a tank with a grenade (and hoping it works, as you only have one grenade; you can try to skip this step but I found I took enough damage looking for the card this never worked out)

d.) grab the wafer and then make it all the way to the start without your torch light running out — hope you didn’t spend too long looking for the card!

I did manage to work out an alternative strategy. By poking at source I realized you can throw the grenade at the doors leading inside Memory Alpha instead of bothering with a card at all. That means you will get hit by the robot tank as you escape (since you can’t destroy it) but since you skip the pesky “hunt around for a card” portion of the game you will have enough health to, er, tank it.

So that means the procedure becomes

a.) kill and eat a rat still

b.) go straight for the doors and throw a grenade, hoping it goes off correctly (you still might die randomly here)

c.) grab the wafer and make it to the start

You still have a chance of dying at this moment. If a robot guard is in the location with you it has a chance of taking a last shot and killing you.

Keeping the backstory in mind, that we are working unwillingly for an alien menace, it looks like we just doomed the human race.

I confess this is slight enough of an adventure I would have been fully willing to discard it, but I do have an entry coming up where this exact game is relevant, so I needed to cover it first.

I will say at least the game was interesting in the sense of being different gameplay; as I said, it doesn’t really fall into either adventure or RPG categories. Even simulation is pushing it. But devising a strategy that optimizes the gauntlet of RNG was at least vaguely satisfying.

The author clearly had some ambitions in terms of trying to “simulate a story” as opposed to dropping a bunch of superfluous puzzles in the player’s path. I do find a game where on some playthroughs you are required to fail by mere random chance kind of intriguing, but only in a meta art-gallery sense; it’s more fun to talk about than to play.