Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

My previous posts about Pimania are needed for this one to make sense.

From World of Spectrum.

One thing I’ve been puzzling at is how Pimania got viral. Mel Croucher’s April 1985 interview in Sinclair User rather elliptically mentions sales of 100,000 (same as Elite, which is about as big a seller as the UK market could have produced). I’m skeptical of this number but it was still “a lot”.

It hit the right moment to carry another wave of contest mania, yes; rather than just burying the Golden Sundial it went on a rotating exhibition (the way to win, remember, is to find the right place, day, and time to show up). But still, I think there was a lot more marketing push than the underground-comic feel to the art might indicate.

It was advertised fairly regularly in Your Sinclair, but Automata also ended up with an unusual arrangement with Popular Computing Weekly starting somewhere in mid-1983. I’ll let Mel Croucher take over (in the book Pibolar Disorder by Mel Croucher and Robin Evans, published 2018):

After a while, a magazine called Popular Computing Weekly surrendered to our idiocy, and made a deal with us. They would give us the back page of their magazine to do what we liked with, in exchange for us entertaining the masses and increasing their circulation.

In other words, they got free copy on the back page of a UK-wide publication! So while this led to comic strips and funny drawings, Automata was able to pitch their products, and specifically the Piman character itself, for free.

Quoting Mel Croucher again, this time from Deus Ex Machina: The Best Game You Never Played in Your Life:

Looking back, I don’t know if I invented transmedia in video games or not, but when I conjured up the computerised quest PiMania in 1981, I saw no reason not to break out of the confines of the computer monitor. It was released in 1982 as a video game, a rock album, a comic strip, a t-shirt, a magazine, a social network, and a real-world treasure hunt for a gold and diamond prize, all of which needed the other elements for maximum participation. The central character (usually Christian Penfold dressed as the PiMan) also made live appearances and TV recordings. The game went to Number One in the UK, Germany, Spain and several other territories we didn’t even know about, thanks to a new phenomenon called “software piracy”. At one point we had thousands of self-styled PiManiacs searching for the prize in the real world, and I trickle-fed them clues via the game content, the weekly comic strips and subsequent music albums. The prize was eventually won in 1985, and in 2010 a commemorative PiMania album was released on fashionably retro vinyl, complete with a PiMan mask, so I guess the little bastard is still selling, and I want to bring him back to life when Deus Ex Machina 2 is done and dusted. But that’s another story.

Regarding a T-shirt, there’s also a pitch for merchandise within Pimania itself, but I’ll get to that. I wouldn’t go all the way cynical and say the entire enterprise was unhinged capitalism, but there was at least some level of opportunism.

I say all this because by most metrics the game is pretty dire.

Continuing directly from last time, I had found a Scared Pi-Man and Bored Pi-Man and managed to trade some items. I theorized about at least one other form, and I found it as Hungry Pi-Man.

Hungry Pi-Man’s needs are fairly obvious, and he trades just like the other two:

CAN OF WORMS → DEAF AID
BAKED BEANS → HANGLIDER
TV DINNER → TELESCOPE

A pork pie is just like the duck with bored Pi-Man; it will cause him to steal something.

While I didn’t work out the pattern until fairly late, to simplify the narrative I’ll explain now: the rubber duck + bored Pi-Man and pork pie + hungry Pi-Man combinations are still important. Holding them in inventory is what summons the respective Pi-Man. The scared one doesn’t seem to be fussy, but the other two simply won’t show unless you have the right item, which is part of why it took me so long to find the Hungry variant (I just didn’t have the luck of wandering around with pork pie in hand, I dropped it in an object stash fairly quickly).

Because it also ends up being important, let me give a simplified map of the three forms of Pi-Man (there ends up being only three) as well as the “secret exit” to the ULTIMATE GATE OF PI.

This excludes all “side passages”.

The “secret or swipe” is what I’m calling the room where sometimes a green door appears, and sometimes the Pi-Man appears to steal one of your items (one that’s been traded for, like, the DEAF AID, but it won’t steal the CAN OF WORMS).

The gimmick turns out to be that if you don’t have a stealable item, nothing happens; if you do, then either it gets stolen or the green door gets open. So you have to risk item theft in order to get in the door.

Furthermore, this isn’t a 50-50 chance. In some cases it is more like 75-25 odds tilted in favor of your item getting stolen (if you have more than one traded-for item it will just steal one, but stealing an item still means no open door). In some cases it is, maybe, 100-0.

From this next part I am essentially reliant on the pamphlet “The Answer” that was released after the contest was finished. In order to win the game you need to bring seven specific items into the ULTIMATE GATE and drop them. Remember you normally aren’t allowed to drop them, so it is clear when dropping an item as a “sacrifice” works that it means something special.

The seven items are THE COMPASS, THE CALENDAR, PSALM 33, THE TELESCOPE, THE DEAF AID, THE BLACKBOARD, THE HANGLIDER. Any other traded-for items (like OXYGEN) the game won’t let you drop at all.

I never managed to get all seven items in.

This screen was my nemesis. I kept seeing it over and over again rather than having the gate open. The Answer claims that “The more useful the gift, the less likely it was that the Door would be revealed.”; in other words, a fairly nifty object like The Telescope (which gives you a picture of what the target location for the contest looks like) is allegedly much harder to get past the Swiper.

I say “allegedly” because I never got the telescope through, not after many, many, attempts. The randomness is pure hell. In addition, you need to get all seven items through in a fairly specific order.

Remember how the pork pie summons Hungry Pi-Man and the duck summons Bored Pi-Man? (Not something mentioned in The Answer, by the way.) The seven items you need are all from Hungry and Scared. You need to trade away the duck as part of the sequence (you get a CALENDAR from Scared); it means, assuming you stash the Calendar safely, you never see Bored again.

This isn’t terrible in that even though one of Bored’s items technically gives a clue (a MEGAPHONE, I’ll talk about it later) the megaphone doesn’t count for the seven items at the gate. So Bored Pi-Man is technically optional.

On the other hand, you need the pork pie to summon Hungry, so you have to wait on giving the pork pie to Scared until you’ve got all of Hungry dealt with.

That all still is just a matter of sequencing carefully, but the ending upshot is having one (or a few) items that need offloading at the Gate and the Swiper Pi-Man just refuses to let you through. I tried many different permutations. I did get close once — I would have made it to the Gate with six items, but I got stymed by an in-game ad.

You see, typing 10 to go into the green door only sometimes works. Sometimes it gives you an ad. The hard-fought after, sometimes-10-minutes-to-appear green door. I wish I was joking.

After hitting the ad-door the room’s randomness “resets” and you can have something get stolen rather than have the real door appear. I basically got stuck with my cargo and after many different approaches I concluded there was no way to get through.

People talk about the game being obtuse, but really, in a way, once the initial obstacles (opening key and movement) are resolved it is almost trivial; the trades are all very simple puzzles. The appearance conditions of the Pi-Man are arbitrary to work out, and breaking through the Swiper door is especially arbitrary. It is a game near-impossible (impossible?) to beat not because of obscurity but because of randomness.

So I apologize: no official ending.

Now the whole thing is in BASIC so we can still read the ending. After depositing the seven artifacts you are asked for one final key, which is 22. (22/7 being an approximation of pi, and 22/7 being the day the contest is asking for.)

AT LAST, BY ACCIDENT OR DESIGN YOU HAVE RETURNED THROUGH THE ULTIMATE GATE OF PI. REMEMBER WHERE YOU HAVE BEEN AND WHAT YOU HAVE SEEN…. REMEMBER TOO THOSE GIFTS THAT UNLOCKED THE GATE. DISTIL THIS KNOWLEDGE AND MEET ME AT NOON ON THE CORRECT DATE AND PLACE REVEALED. I’LL BE WAITING THERE FOR YOU EVERY YEAR, BEARING THE GOLDEN SUNDIAL OF PI

Ugh. The other aspect about all this is that I was able to speed up my emulator. Normally there’s a long wait between commands, but at least I could zip around the map, but it still got irritating trying to get the TELESCOPE through to the gate for the 6th time. I tried save state abuse and that didn’t help either.

Why didn’t any of the reviews point this out? Did nobody really finish the game?

In truth, even the winners, Sue Cooper and Lizi Newman (teachers from Yorkshire), really didn’t. They noticed, if you draw the directions “properly” that they make a horse. The correct place to go was a chalk outline of a horse at Hindover Hill.

Quoting from a C&VG article:

Not normally addicted to computer games, they have been playing Pimania since early 1983 on a Spectrum. When I asked Sue for an estimate of the number of keyboard hours they had put in, she replied: “Very little, we knew it had to be a horse fairly early on, so most of our time was spent in researching where!”

They then looked for prominent horses. The star constellation in particular (see the opening animation reference to “shooting into space”) is a Pegasus. They hit two “wrong” horses on the July 22 dates in 1983 and 1984. In 1985:

The clue that pointed them to the correct geographical location was the fact that Pegasus is near the Seven Sisters of the Plough. Their search, after a misleading pointer to Cambridgeshire in the Field Guide, finally put them on to the Seven Sisters cliffs between Seaford Head and Over.

However, they were not convinced that they had the right spot until they made a pre-visit the day before. They saw the large compass mounted on a pillar, close to the car park entrance at this beauty spot. They also noticed the inscription of Psalm 33 on a metal plate set in stone (and adjacent to Psalm 34 in the game) nearby. But it wasn’t until they saw the view down into the Cuckmere Valley, where the river meanders to its outlet at Cuckmere Heaven, that they became convinced that this was indeed the view shown in the Pimania graphic when looking through the telescope.

Here is the river as illustrated in The Answer:

I wish I could give a screenshot, but I was never able to get the Telescope up to the Observatory, where it gets used.

Nor did I get the deaf aid through, which has the Pi-Man listening to the notes CAGG. This is meant to be Ca, or Calcium, referencing the chalk outline of the horse; the GG is supposed to reference “baby talk for a horse”. This latter bit makes no sense to me, is this some kind of British thing?

Also, I never bothered with the megaphone — too exhausted — but if you take it to the Echo Chamber next to the Observatory you can use it to get

I WILL BLESS THE LORD AT ALL TIMES; HIS PRAISE SHALL CONTINUALLY BE IN MY MOUTH!!!

I am honestly sheepishly impressed with the contest part. The GG part is the only thing in the explanation that made me confused; everything seems genuinely workable (not that it stopped legions of Pi-Man fans visiting Stonehenge hoping that was the right place). While we’ve had map spelling things before, the geometrical angle of the clock makes it particularly slick (as well as the rooms corresponding to the parts of a horse). I do have one last piece of history to baffle over, though:

According to various sources, including in Pibolar Disorder, the intent for the final position was for the Finder to be at the horse’s arse. The teachers were instead at the horse’s head but Croucher gave the prize anyway.

…Mel didn’t have the heart to tell them the exact location of the treasure was in the horse’s arse, and he got Robin to change the official answer book accordingly.

But … why? What possible clue is there to the arse rather than the head? The ultimate gate of pi is at the head, the megaphone signals the head. (Even if you consider the megaphone a “negative clue” — as it doesn’t go to the ultimate gate — that doesn’t signal the arse.)

The answer book of course smoothly explains why the head works. There is nothing that contradicts it. Is the whole thing maybe a waggish joke Croucher was playing on future historians? (It makes a terrific conclusion to Jimmy Maher’s chronicle.) I don’t know, but if anyone has a theory as to what was intended there, I’d love to hear it.

July 19, 1984, Practical Computing Weekly.