Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

If you want a perspective on the Australian computer industry at the end of 1982, a good place to check is the February 1983 issue of Australian Personal Computer, which has a long section devoted to the upcoming Australian Personal Computer Show and a list of all the vendors showing.

Some of them are simply Australian branches of well-known international companies (like IBM Australia, or the publisher Addison-Wesley). Some of them are local computer groups (like Atari Computer Enthusiasts). Some are hardware sales groups (ComputerWave). But not many at all are local software houses.

Lothlorien Software, GPO Box 1033, Sydney 2001. Tel: (02) 398 4023.

Lothlorien Software produces a range of educational software whose key-note is ease and simplicity of use in both tutorial and lesson-making modes.

Each tutorial program presents and drills material, giving immediate corrective feedback. Teachers can rapidly compile sets of lessons to add to the comprehensive set provided on the master diskette.

Also see: Microbee: “…on display will be the recently developed Wordbee word processing package, Pascal and Logo, to provide a variety of educational environments and a range of options not allowed under Basic.”

A skim through ads for 1982 indicates the same: lots of emphasis on import. In other words, Australia’s home-grown software industry was taking a while to develop. It still wasn’t at zero, one exception being Cosmic Software, as owned by Tom Theil.

They mostly were known for arcade game conversions for TRS-80 that are genuinely decent, although quite frank in their clone-ness.

They worked with at least one outside group, Malabar Trading, who did Outland (sort of Missile Command with a city being attacked but where you have crosshair shooting) and Morgath (a series of three “action adventure” segments put together into one plot).

Every game I could find of theirs was published in 1982, and that includes what seems to be their sole adventure game, Doomsday Mission, as written by John Bland and Phil Salomon. Being a fairly technically solid outfit otherwise it is not surprising their TRS-80 adventure (even if it was another “outsider publishing venture”) would not be in BASIC but in machine code.

(And before I start showing screenshots, I need to give thanks to George Phillips, who helped me get this running in trs80gp. The emulator needs to be in Model I mode; additionally, it can’t have any disk drives attached at all, which is doable with trs80gp -m1 doomsday.cmd -dx.)

The plot involves the building of an orbital space station able to fire nuclear missiles at any alien attacks. The wise powers that be have decided to give control to the stations over to large language models the machines, and things have gone horribly wrong.

This has what I informally call a “kick opening”, where the game kicks you pretty hard with an opening puzzle, leaving you stuck with few options. (Another example is Savage Island, Part II, where you had to either HYPERVENTILATE or BREATHE DEEPLY.)

I started almost immediately by making a verb list which usually only happens on pretty hard games:

MAKE and LISTEN are the two worth keeping track of; they’re not always typical nor are they easy to summon up in a game context. (MAKE is typically used for something like getting a plan for a bridge which you then have to assemble with MAKE BRIDGE. It can be hard because you are making something which doesn’t technically exist as a noun in the world yet.)

Rather unusually for a kick opening, this is honestly a good puzzle. I solved it by thinking about the reaction to using any kind of violence. If you shoot the phaser you’ll get a fatal backlash from the space station:

When making the verb list, literally every attack variant was intercepted the same way (BREAK, HIT, KICK, etc.)

After some contemplation I realized since there were intense sensors for weapons or violent activity, it would be in the station’s interest to stop a PHASER from getting through. So I just did DROP PHASER as the first action, and made it through the gas safely.

No weird actions, just a slight subversion of expectations as: while you start with a helpful inventory object you need to immediately dump it.

Past the initial puzzle is a much more open map, one feeling vaguely reminiscent of Star Trek, just with a lot more dead people.

There’s a 3D-chess game that you can kill time with before the game kills you.

There’s a SPACE SHUTTLE in the bay below that is full of dead bodies and that I haven’t been able to enter.

Next to the space shuttle is an airlock. While there’s a space station, stepping out of the station kills you as you float into space. There’s a hook nearby I assume you need to attach a tether to, but I haven’t found any appropriate item.

There’s an ELEVATOR which traps you in with a weirdly non-thematic message.

I’m otherwise fairly stumped on progress, although I still need to make a couple more circles of the map for secret interactions.

You can also hop in the bed and SLEEP for some reason.

Despite the amateur feel, there’s clearly some passion being tossed around which I appreciate. Also,

“THE COMPUTER HAS GONE BESERK, THE ONLY WAY TO DESTROY IT IS TO UGH GASP GROAN”, HE DIES.

implies the man is saying the actual words “ugh gasp groan” as he’s dying, which is hilarious to imagine. Hence I would normally follow by saying “I’m not ready to check hints yet” but as far as I can find there are no hints, so I guess I’ll have to just figure it out then.

(Or hack at the binary, where the text is plaintext. But that’s definite last resort.)