Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Molimerx is a company we’ve only brushed by briefly (see: The Golden Baton); they were a specialist in the TRS-80 based in the UK, specifically, Bexhill in Sussex.

They really were one of the earliest and more prominent companies of that time, and lasted from 1978 all the way up to 1987 before petering out. A. John Harding founded it in 1978 with his wife Marion. Quoting Harding’s holiday 1986 message:

I started Molimerx in August of 1978 so this is the eighth time that I have had the pleasure of wishing our customers a Merry Christmas. I do so this year with no less enthusiasm but, I suspect, considerably more weariness. Most of you will remember the gusto with which we all got involved in the microcomputer revolution in those days. The joy of actually finding out what information was held at which address — and the miserliness with which we held onto that information! Now its all business and nowhere near as much fun. The first microcomputer I owned, boasted — and I mean really boasted lK of memory, which one had to program with toggle switches for each bit. Now 256K is considered small.

John Harding, from the magazine 80-U.S., February 1983.

This 1985 catalog lists 400+ items which is a good run for any company of that era. Other than them being the initial publisher of Mysterious Adventures they’re mostly known for the 1980 lawsuit Molimerx vs. Kansas City.

There were a couple companies caught up in this (Kansas City Systems was selling both Microsoft and Scott Adams products on the sly) but on Molimerx’s end the actual instigation of the lawsuit had to do with dominoes. Specifically, J. W. B. Dunn had written a Dominoes program (copyright 1979) intended to be distributed exclusively by Molimerx. The author Dunn had come across the Kansas City version — a friend had bought it via mail order — and wanted to compare it. He found it to be identical, and further investigation led to the lawsuit, which ended up establishing the legal certitude of software copyright in the UK. (See: the book Programming for Software Sharing and also an article here from 1981.)

(There’s also some allegation from Marion that Molimerx almost had a deal with IBM to get LDOS rather than MS-DOS as the IBM system default but John threw the deal. This makes no sense as LDOS was developed by Logical Systems in Wisconsin as explained by one of the developers here. Molimerx was LDOS’s distributor in England but they would not have been the ones dealing with IBM. The actual near-miss-for-IBM-default company was Digital Research with the CP/M system. Marion then claims that LDOS was then sold for the BBC Micro, which never had LDOS. I think something happened because the narrative is quite dramatic but multiple stories got jumbled together.)

However, despite or perhaps because of their pioneer status, Molimerx was prominent in the way Instant Software from the US was — they were mail-order kings when that was relevant, but now a lot of their catalog is lost, including the “children’s adventures” Dreamland and Wonderland. We do have a copy of Temple of Bast but no packaging. It is Malcolm McMahon’s only game.

Via Ira Goldklang.

Our job is to … rescue? unearth? “liberate” for the British Museum? a gold nugget from Egypt.

This feels like it ought to have the same start as Pirate Adventure from Scott Adams; that is, you start in a London flat, and then magic your way over to Egypt-land, grab treasure, and take it back. That might be genuinely the case here, but there’s justification beyond straight averice, as you can’t step outside:

This means the opening has you confined to a relatively tight area:

Importantly, it is a tight area with a lot of gizmos to play with. This feels like the kind of game where you need to mash things together and build things, which is risk with this kind of parser. What I’ve thrown at it has worked so far, but since I’m stuck (as you’ll see in a moment) I can’t guarantee things stay that way!

For the things in the opening room (SCREWDRIVER, FUSES, ELECTRIC METER, MAIN SWITCH), the fuses are the most immediately helpful, as you are told there’s one lighting fuse that works and one main fuse which is dead. You can MOVE FUSES to swap them, then plug in a nearby LAMP in a electric socket upstairs to test it. You can also, in a different room, get an EXTENSION CABLE that lets you tote the lamp for one extra room in any direction, but I’m not sure what the purpose of that is.

Next to the opening room in different directions are a paperback guide to reading Egyptian, a can of spaghetti (!?), and a floor safe that requires a key to open. I suspect maybe the key is in the can because the can is hard to open.

Out back there’s a “hen run” you can DISMANTLE with a screwdriver (fortunately the game gives the exact verb here) to get some wire and some posts.

The shed has the previously mentioned extension cable, as well as ENGINE OIL, an empty SPRAYER, SCREWS, and an ELECTRIC BAND SAW.

If you’ve fixed the fuses you can use the band saw to try cutting open the can, but it busts mid-saw.

I don’t have much else to play with; upstairs I was able to find a pin hiding under some floorboards and turn an unraveling vest into a THREAD. The game asks WHERE? if I want to TIE THREAD but I haven’t found anything that this helps with (yes, I was doing the equivalent of clicking on every item in a scene in a point-and-click game).

Still interesting to have a heavily MacGyver style opening with realistic technology in what originally was advertised as an Egyptian treasure hunt. So far no magic has entered in. Maybe we’re not going to teleport after all? (Eh, who am I kidding, we’re probably going to teleport.)

I’m happy to take guesses from y’all as to what to do next. (Or you can can even just play to test things out, here’s a link to play online.) There’s no guide or walkthrough to consult so we’re on our own.

The MAIN SWITCH works via MOVE SWITCH so you can shut everything off/on. I’m not sure the use of this, but I wonder if the whole point of having an extension cable for the lamp is to be able to test power things and it otherwise isn’t necessary.