Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

We have had games authored by very young people, most notably Stuga, written when the authors were 10, 12, and 14 respectively, and where a later commercial version would go on to become the “Zork of Sweden”. For today’s game we go even a little bit younger, but to explain, let me first jump back in time more than usual–

1908, meeting of suffragettes at Caxton Hall prior to the “Rush of the House of Commons”. Via Museum of London.

Caxton Hall in London has been the site of many significant at least noteworthy meetings, like the first Pan-African Conference (1900), Crowley’s Rites of Elusis (1910, “Saturn” through “Luna”), Churchill press conferences during World War II, and the announcement of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955), warning of the dangers of nuclear weapons. Russell himself:

I am bringing the warning pronounced by the signatories to the notice of all the powerful Governments of the world in the earnest hope that they may agree to allow their citizens to survive.

With less fanfare, there was an April 1956 meeting chaired by Dudley Hooper of the London Computer Group, intended to unify people from different fields with a common interest in computing:

The Group aims to encourage the spread of knowledge in the computer field and to act as a focal point for the exchange of information. It is thought that understanding of an “integrated” approach can best be achieved by an organization providing facilities for individuals each with a specialized knowledge and interest to meet and discuss their common problems, scientist alongside manager, accountant alongside engineer, linguist alongside actuary.

This group merged with another scientist group a year later to form the British Computer Society, a still-active group and one of the oldest and most distinguished in the country.

The Society spun off sub-groups, like the Computer Education Group formed in 1965, which published a quarterly bulletin, Computer Education. Significant for our story today, the Computer Education Group had another spin-off in the 70s called the Small Computer Users Group, with a renaming to Mini-Computer Users in Secondary Education (MUSE) before landing on Microcomputer Users in Secondary Education (also, conveniently, MUSE).

Anthony Hopkins, vice-chair of MUSE in 1980, surrounded by some teachers. From Scunthrope Evening Telegraph, November 11, 1980.

One of their goals was supporting members in having good software; a complaint in early British education technology was a lack of appropriate software for the topics teachers wanted, and to that end MUSE had their own catalog. At the start of 1982, they had about 100 programs in their libraries mostly for the PET, Apple II, and 380Z (the latter using the CP/M operating system). This was even before the BBC Micro hit and swept up most of the schools.

Sadly, we don’t have much left of MUSE’s actual items. They seem to have been fairly straightforward and technical.

Despite fairly open conditions (teachers just sent in what they wanted) the entrance into the MUSE library was not automatic. For example, the group EZUG (Educational ZX-80/81 Users’ Group) had a committee of three who assessed the appropriateness of material sent in for inclusion into MUSE. At the start of 1982 there were “about 50” programs sent for ZX computers, with only 14 accepted. Eric Deeson (founder of EZUG and a member of the committee) also noted that:

Unfortunately, teachers, like other people, are often somewhat frightened of submitting their own programs to outside scrutiny.

Eric Deeson, from Your Computer, March 1982.

Despite all that, the catalog contained at least one adventure. Specifically, Dragon Adventure, made “around 1982” according the main author, William Stott, who was a teacher at the time in Hillington, the borough at the far west of London. Quoting Stott:

The basic framework of game locations and puzzles (including any violence directed towards dragons and trolls!) was produced by a group of Year 5 children on a wet Friday afternoon (thanks to Tracey, Tracy, Julia, Joanne, Amanda and the others). I put this into a finished game so the children could try out their own work, and also wrote a version for the Commodore PET (the other Y5 class had loan of one – my class had the use of the only BBC in the school that term).

Year 5 in the UK incidentally indicates ages from 9 to 10. So this has the youngest authors yet of any game we’ve seen, and this is also first mass classroom project adventure I know of. The game was spread across Hillingdon and made it in the MUSE distribution library for a while, before said library closed up shop during the late 1980s.

It was converted to run on the Acorn Archimedes around 1990, and was further updated in the late 90s for the more modern RiscPC with the addition of sound samples and pictures of the items carried. It has been available in RiscOS format as a free internet download since 1999. Over the years it has been occasionally used in various classes I have taught. Various minor changes have been made in response to the sorts of things children tend to type in and try to do in the game.

As far as why it was justified for MUSE, Stott explains

Its aim is to stimulate memory, language work and discussion within small groups, and to help foster a logical approach to problem solving. Within the UK National Curriculum for English, the program helps to develop oracy (both the speaking and listening), spelling and reading comprehension skills.

Stott continued to use the game in his classroom and converted the game again to a z5 file and the modern Glulxe format. This is the version I’m using because it does not seem (after some comparison with a video) to be much different from the Archimedes version. I’d really prefer to grab either the BBC Micro or Commodore Pet versions but both seem to be lost with the ashes of MUSE.

The introduction does differ on the two platforms, although both convey the same information. The Archimedes does it with straightforward instructions, while the more recent port has a dialogue.

The faces of the council members look grim. Gilgern continues to speak.
“Of course, something must be done soon,” he says in that gruff, hearty voice you have come to dislike so much. “Must restore public confidence and encourage the return of people to the land. Can’t just leave the place to the likes of dragons and trolls. We must all make money again. Isn’t as though it’s just arrived, dragon’s been there for years. Just that people found out about it, that’s all.”

The dragon you are tasked with removing can be either:

a.) slain dead with the Sword of Erondil found at the Castle of Abercorn

b.) made to leave by breaking an enchantment that holds the dragon

I want to emphasize how staggeringly rare this is for 1982 (assuming this content was all in circa 1982, but again, no archive to check). We have two ways of approaching the central task of the game. Could this be a case of the children, led to brainstorm freely ideas for the story without making a game in the traditional way, came up with the story branch notion themselves?

(It turns out to be a very minor change, so I don’t think it is a part that only ended up in the modern port, at least.)

The game’s environment is fairly open with lots of inventory items to juggle. In the modern port, there’s a “rucksack item” that you can use to hold everything at once; that would have been too far ahead of its time to put in the 1982 game.

Early on there’s an inn with a silver coin and an important clue.

I managed to rack up a package with some parts requiring assembling (with screwdriver), an empty mug, some matches, an old boot (with the aforementioned screwdriver), a flute, an old lamp, and a bell, all just by wandering around.

(Oh, and a parachute, but that turns out to be a red herring.)

There’s a cottage where the door closes and locks behind you. If this happens early you are stuck. In a classroom context this could be trouble, quoting Stott again:

These newer versions [referring to the modern ports] make it easier to recover from unwinnable game situations without having to restart (demanding less teacher attention!).

I admit I’ve never thought about having students play adventure games to learn English but having the teacher run around solve “tech issues” which amount to getting the students out of their softlocks!

You do need to go in the cottage because it has a key and some bananas; if you’ve got the lamp with you, you can RUB it to teleport out.

You can take the key over to a castle and unlock it. Climbing up some stairs has them collapse behind you, at which point you encounter a monkey with a sword. Hence: bananas.

In addition to the sword you get a booklet about playing enchanted music (this uses the flute from the big item scoop-up earlier). This represents the two ways of defeating the dragon. You go down to a cave (with three different routes to get there) and either KILL DRAGON with the sword or PLAY FLUTE. The latter gets more points so there’s clearly some judgment on the game which is “optimal”.

Either way, there’s still one more obstacle to go: finding the dragon treasure. This is the only spot in the game that caused me difficulty. You’re supposed to ring the bell (another random item out in the open) and wait for a troll to appear, then hand over the bell; the troll will trade with you for a horn. Then the horn can be played to get at the final secret.

It helped to go in with style expectations: this was going to have a bunch of objects that each applied to one puzzle only, and the puzzle-object correspondence was going to be pretty simple. But in this context, with a game by children and for children, there’s nothing wrong with that! The slightly unstructured map I’m guessing is also genuinely theirs, and I’m really hoping they stumbled into the idea of a peaceful or violent ending (at the very least they designed in the violence, given the Stott quote from earlier about “including any violence directed towards dragons and trolls”).

There’s two other “student games” from Stott, Goblin Adventures and Fairytale Adventures. I’m still unclear when they were actually written — possibly 1990? — and if they’re 1990, and you don’t want to wait excessively long for me to reach that year, you can try them from the archived Deansfield Primary School website here.

(And thanks to Ethan Johnson for helping on some MUSE research for this post.)

The fancy version of the game has an auto-map. I wish I knew if the original had one; it is technically possible, but Nellan is Thirsty (another children’s game, it’s funny how aiming for beginners created modern features) is the only one we’ve seen yet from the era that has had one.

Coming next: “He can make even the act of putting on his dressing gown appear as a gesture of defiance.”