(Continued from my last post.)
So I have some big, fist-pump and jump-up and yell kind of news. I realize for 99.999…etc…9% of the population it is completely unimportant, but it was exciting to me. I found an Apple II version of Witches’ Brew. In fact, I found multiple Apple II copies of the Adventure of the Month, filling in many gaps.
They were distributed on “Adventure Pack #1” by The 202 Alliance, an Apple II distribution network that also worked with crack groups, the folks who broke copy protection in the 80s. It’s on the Asimov archive as D3110ADV.SDK in a directory called shk_images and I hope you understand why it took a bit of work to find.
Cracktro screen from a different disk, via the Textfiles Apple II crack screen collection.
The first thing I did was make a beeline for Black Hole Adventure’s source code, as I had the theory (due to there being no author name) that maybe some credit was present on the Apple II source but removed from the other two versions (as had happened with other Adventures of the Month). Alas, no luck.
SIDE NOTE: I know I called that game rubbish and it really is, but it also has multiple endings in a way that is highly unusual for 1980 and doesn’t really come back until Deadline in 1982. One thing I’ve noticed generally about old adventure history is how innovations appear buried in jank games; people weren’t putting the pieces together and getting, say, multiple plot endings based on in-game actions plus an in-game automap plus dynamic changing locations plus (and so forth) all in the same package.
Anyway, voila:
I’ll play with the Apple version for the rest of this game just to commemorate the moment (I’ve got some more Atari coming soon anyway). There isn’t any inherent superiority to Apple and there’s even a smidge of missing content. You see, the book on the table of the witch’s house has multiple pages. I suspected this already but the parser was giving me a fuss until I tried TURN PAGE (not a noun listed in the game, you just have to guess).
The Apple equivalent doesn’t have the colorful ads on the bottom of each page.
Also, BONUS SURPRISE:
TRS-80 too! This time it came in an email attachment from LanHawk.
I’m not using this version though, because it seems to have either an oddity or a straight-up bug. The cave above should have a SHOVEL and a BAT but you can’t see either. The same issue happens elsewhere; various objects seem to be invisible that are clearly visible in the other two ports. Still the TRS-80 version was useful to have, because of this from the source code:
Not only do the comments (not present in other versions) definitively mark the game as by Peter Kirsch, but it gives something of a work schedule; this wasn’t written all in the month it was published, but rather was a revised version of a game written near the end of 1981.
Going back to the gameplay, the biggest breakthrough I had was realizing that wearing the magic charm bracelet made me essentially immune from the witch altogether. I had tested looking at the witch or even just looking at the bed and running across the death sequence from last time. However, I hadn’t tested this after wearing the bracelet, and managed to find a pillow and matches on the bed and a wand on the witch; I could filch all of them.
The wand of course is necessary for anything in the book. To summarize more succinctly:
invisibility: snake venom, human blood, nail clippings, cat whiskers
growth: saliva, tears, human hair, egg
shrinking: spider leg, bat wing, water
In all cases “PUT IN KETTLE, HEAT, WAVE WAND.”
I can get close to growth. For saliva you can just SPIT and for tears you can just CRY.
For the egg you can take the pillow, deposit it outside at the tree, and go through the branch-breaking sequence which you will now survive. This yields you an egg. That’s one sturdy pillow.
Incidentally, the AXEMAN who I had trouble with last time can just be referred to as a MAN. Unfortunately you can’t be friendly or anything; the best I can do is to KILL him with my baseball bat, which lets me filch his axe and an iron glove (followed by a scene with a vampire bat).
Speaking of vampire bat, you can go in a direction I somehow missed west into the woods and meet it, along with some flies and a snake. I managed to kill the bat but haven’t had luck getting the blood off of it.
Going back to the growth potion: it needs saliva (check), tears (check) and egg (check). But I can’t get human hair.
Not being able to get hair is very, very bizarre. I’ve got a dead body outside, and even if the axeman is outside, I could technically use my own character’s hair. I also can’t try grabbing witch hair. I can’t tell if this is meant to be a puzzle or if I’m hitting parser difficulty again. If it’s a puzzle then it clearly is in absurd object sourcing (aka Caesar’s ladder) territory.
I’m getting close to the threshold of using hints, but I am liking the game’s density; there’s a good feel of having more layers in each room than you’d expect. But a nagging feeling I’m missing some abstruse verb is not helping keep my willpower.
Renga in Blue 
As for the hair, I took a peek at the code. “abstruse” verb is probably somewhat accurate in terms of generic parser verbs across games. This verb is more specific toward the use of a certain item. (a tool/item you don’t seem to have)
Partial take back… It isn’t the verb, it is the item you lack.
I just moved on and it eventually resolved itself.
I managed to finish although finale won’t go up until tomorrow.
thx again for the TRS-80 copy!
Great find! The state of Apple II game preservation and documentation is shocking, atrocious, deplorable, lamentable, and several other adjectives that I don’t care to mention currently. A number of people have done very good work (yourself included) in the last few years to try and rectify this, but the situation remains dire.
Which reminds me: Is “Doom Valley” (Superior Software) on your 1982 docket? It’s an obscure adolescent effort that somehow slipped into Kim Schutte’s famous book, but despite tracing several magazine references to it and stumbling onto a funny backstory regarding its authors, I’ve never been able to find a disk image online, and not a single image of its packaging seems to exist either!
Doom Valley is on my list. It is also indeed lost.
What’s the funny backstory?
Search for “Robert Grumbles Alabama NASA” and you’ll see. Check out the AP article from Feb. ’85 in particular. The only thing missing from that story is Matthew Broderick and WOPR.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he seems to have gone into computer security and runs a company in New Hampshire. I considered trying to contact him through their website to see if he might still have a copy of Doom Valley sitting in the back of his closet that could be preserved, but I never did.
According to an issue of ComputerWorld from 1984, Robert even got a free trip to the UK, courtesy of the London Daily Star, to show how lax British computer security was. There is a solitary loading screenshot in one of the magazine reviews of Doom Valley, and a few other references, but not much else. A lot of the mentions that turn up are in Superior Software’s Thorne D. Harris’ legal columns/books, which are more about the process of copyrighting software. Juiced.GS did a profile of Robert and couple of years ago and he should be contactable through his LinkedIn profile.
TURN PAGE was the first thing I thought of about the book, for whatever that’s worth.
I see you said “it resolved itself”, but CUT HAIR (maybe with the axe) isn’t it?
You get something appropriate for hair cutting (pretty much instant solve when you see it).
Gathering ingredients to make potions from a spell-book in the home of a spell-caster who stalks you on a timer, so you can ultimately rescue a princess, puts me powerfully in mind of King’s Quest III. I wonder if this could have been an influence.
Plausible if she played it! (The only catch being Adventure of the Month in general was really obscure, especially for Apple II players)
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