Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Due to the growing threat of Communist expansion and nuclear proliferation, the U.S.S. Nautilus has been totally refitted with modern equipment. This includes 16 missile tubes carrying the new Trident-1 nuclear missiles; a water-cooled reactor; two torpedo tubes armed with MK-48 torpedoes; and totally new submarine-quieting, mobility, and self-defense systems. For the crew there is a new and separate health room, and an easy access passageway in the fore and aft sections of the ship.

You are a new crew member aboard the Nautilus. Although you have received extensive training before starting your tour of duty, experience is the best teacher. You will learn much during your stay. You are currently aboard with a skeleton crew, testing to see if (and how) the ship can be safely operated in the event that most of the crew should become incapacitated.

Remember that you, as a member of the United States Submarine Corps, are helping to ensure that the United States continues to maintain a credible, surviving deterrent to nuclear war in the 21st century.

Steven Neighorn has graced this blog once before, with the game Crime Adventure. Specifically, at the age of 15, he made some kind of deal with Neil Bradley (aged 12) to get a game of Neil’s into Softside magazine; it made the October Game of the Month.

I have a little more information about that now. I found the previously missing Apple II source code, and that has Neighorn’s name (and only his name) in the comments. From the very last line:

2220 REM STEVEN C. NEIGHORN, A270, 8/3/81

So the sequence seems to be:

1. Neil Bradley wrote the game.

2. Steven Neighorn added his name to the credits (and probably did some editing…? I’d love his perspective) and sent it to Softside.

3. Peter Kirsch made TRS-80 and Atari ports, both which scrubbed the mention of Neighorn.

Neighorn did write other adventure games, including today’s, and I do think this one is almost certainly his (unless Neighorn somehow found an entirely different 12-year-old writing Apple II adventure games to take credit from). We are talking about a young teenager so I don’t think the debacle above is worth fussing over. Also, despite a couple awkward moments, this ended up being a much smoother game than Crime Adventure.

While this is a Softside game, this isn’t a type-in nor was it an Adventure of the Month. It had only TRS-80 and Apple II ports (no Atari).

This was a disk-version-only game. Softside came with a disk version for those who didn’t want to do all that typing, and sometimes they included extra games on the disk not printed in the paper.

I tried both but I was getting better vibes with the Apple, and based on Crime Adventure leaving credit on the Apple II version I’m guessing the original platform was Apple anyway.

(Assuming you are reading with something that sees YouTube embeds, I dropped a video link above for another “soundtrack to listen to while reading”, although it is more dramatic than this game needs.)

Things start relatively peaceful. The sub is at depth 0. A couple turns in (or right away, on TRS-80), disaster strikes.

You face several crisises:

a.) the electrical backup generator is damaged and will eventually shut down

b.) the nuclear power will eventually go critical

c.) the crew is all unconscious

d.) your ship is in the depths and needs to surface

e.) you’re hungry and short on food

The last one feels like silly adventure-dom, the other four come off as decent in a plot-integration sense even though they’re applying multiple timers. This game manages to mostly feel like objects are placed where objects ought to logically be placed, even though this is clearly a simplified little-to-no-research layout of a nuclear submarine.

Still, a submarine makes for a compact adventure map where it is completely realistic to have movement constrained. (See Nuclear Sub from 1980.)

I have this drawn as if the sub is facing the “east side” of the map, so right is “fore”, left is “aft”, down is “starboard”, up is “port”.

Exploring, the aft portion of the ship has an engine room with a broken drive train, next to a room with a generator.

There’s otherwise a hatch that just refuses to open for no specific reason, a bulkhead you’re not strong enough to open, and another bulkhead with a clear warning label sign that specifies how you will die if you try to open the thing and walk in:

The middle part of the ship has controls: a “missile compartment”, a periscope room, a “main control room”, a “radio shack”, and an “access hatch” that requires the ship to be surfaced to be able to open. The radio shack has a broken radio, although it takes some effort to fix. The control room is the important part for the very start of the game:

This stops the meltdown.

The front part of the ship has a weight-training area…

This lets you open the bulkhead where you need to be strong back at the aft end of the ship. To save time, I’ll mention that bulkhead has a radio repair manual.

…some lockers that need keys (white and blue), a safe, a wrench (which you’ll need shortly), a stuck bulkhead, a bunk with a “decoder”, and some unconscious crew.

For the unconscious crew, there’s fortunately some smelling salts nearby that will get them active and following you. Then you’ll have what is presumably a large group of people following you through the rest of the game.

Once you have the crew woken up, you can open the bulkhead at the front of the ship and get a radio repair kit. This, combined with the repair manual, lets you fix the radio. Then as long as you PUT DECODER / RADIO you’ll get a message:

This is sending you code for a safe. Also this is before I worked out how to deal with hunger and I died a few turns later.

The safe has a tape recorder, and there’s a video player nearby that I had a _very_ hard time operating.

I tried lots of combinations of PUSH PLAY or START PLAYER or WATCH TV with no luck, and made a big list in the meantime to make sure I didn’t miss a verb. Instead I missed the game wanted the period marks with the television.

The room with the video player also is related to another difficulty: the hunger. There’s a “stores room” with a “frozen tv dinner” that you can cook in a stove; I got that far. But the game kept saying I couldn’t EAT it. That’s because eating it only works in the mess hall, even if you’re starving.

My next issue I resolved was power. This was just a matter of carting the wrench back to the broken drive train and saying FIX train. I was also able to use the wrench on the hatch (where the game didn’t give you any reason why the hatch was stuck) and find a white key.

White key in hand, I found the corresponding white locker and got a radiation suit.

This let me plunge into the radioactive area (fortunately the crew does not follow) where … I found a blue key.

Yes, that could be more dramatic. The blue key let me get at a captain’s outfit, and then I was stuck.

I had all the problems solved except for surfacing the sub. I had messed with “ballast control” in order to swap from “dive” to “surface”, and I had a “remote microphone” to give commands, and I (it turns out correctly) had a guess I needed to captain’s uniform on to give the command and have it be accepted.

All attempts at saying “UP” or “SURFACE” failed. I could try “FIRE” and the game asked me what I wanted to fire (there’s missiles and torpedoes) but it told me I couldn’t use them yet.

I finally checked a walkthrough to realize I had to be standing in the right place to give the command, even though the microphone is described as giving commands remotely.

This lets you open one last rescue hatch and find rescue boats coming to find you.

What happened to the Soviets? I was expecting a dramatic firefight in the climax. Maybe the author planned one but couldn’t pull it off.

So I suppose that sounded underwhelming as described, but the meltdown and power issues hung over most of the game for me, so there was an implicit drama in each step — trying to rush to find the solution in time — that was provided even by something as mundane as discovering a TV dinner. And while I realize our author was likely the just the editor of Crime Adventure, this game satisfyingly didn’t have anything as weird as a secret golf course in the back yard of someone who got kidnapped, where you need to hit a ball in the hole in order to discover the secret room where they’re held.

More improvement could still be used. The nuclear reactor scene ended being potentially the least dramatic ever across all media, and while having weapons that don’t get used is theoretically fine, I was expecting a missile malfunction where it was threatening to launch and destroy the eastern seaboard or some deft-maneuvering scene where I had to outrun a Soviet convoy. Or a shootout with a spy aboard where Sean Connery tells me “be careful what you shoot at in here”.

I wouldn’t have been disappointed to get the game tossed on my January 1982 subscription disk, though.