I’ve finished and it was a near thing; I was on the verge of ragequitting for reasons you’ll see in a moment.
Zoomed-in view of the cover.
So, last time I left off I implied I was in for a grind, insofar as the way the middle part of the game works is
a.) find a palace [or turn around at the one you were just at and land again]
b.) find three clues that open secret doors and lead to a the “final room” that lets you charge your ornithopter up using the spell ENCHANT
c.) get any items along the way and USE MAGIC DETECT on them to find the ones that are spells, giving them to the wizards in your party
I’m not going to give all the spell effects, but I will give the names: invisibility, extinguish, reflector, sleep, freeze, ball of fire, jump, flame sword, shrink, spider climb, penetration, part waters, teleport, levitation, rope trick. That’s fifteen spells you need, and if you explore thoroughly enough I think you find six of them on a given run? However, they are a completely randomly chosen six, so if you’re trying to get a full set of spells (as the manual implies you’ll need in the final section of Atlantis) you have the experience akin to open Pokemon deck after Pokemon deck trying to find a shiny Growlithe and failing.
I played through, I am not kidding, 30 times. It started to get very repetitive. It didn’t help at the beginning that I was missing one of my search tools: a command that works, in addition to LOOK ITEM and MOVE ITEM, is LOOK UNDER. Not LOOK UNDER (ITEM), just the phrase LOOK UNDER. I missed it somehow perusing the manual but sometimes that’s how something you need is hidden.
This is just from LOOK, but MOVE and LOOK UNDER are equally likely to find something. The cage is totally useless.
I started to get a pretty good sense of the generation plan the game uses. The game starts with Entrance-Library-Ballroom-Reception, with a clue 1 in one of the rooms, which opens a secret from there. The new section has a clue 2 somewhere in the first couple rooms.
Once entering the last new secret area, there’s a clue 3 again in the first few rooms, and that clue will go to a “Grand Hall”, “Pillared Hall”, or “Windowed Hall”, all which are connected together in some way.
The riddles are all pretty straightforward as long as familiar with a little Western mythology, like “MONSTER WITH ONE EYE” (CYCLOPS) and “A WOODEN HORSE ENDED IT” (TROJAN, referring to the war, not TROY). The rotated-alphabet translated just served to add an extra level of annoyance after about the 4th iteration of the map.
In the midst of all this, you can have people fall in pits or under rubble (use rope or a shovel) some “trogs” which you have to keep shooting (if you turned your “reflex” score up at the start of the game, although I it set to 0 so I could actually ignore them) and enemy warlocks, which were the most annoying of all:
Just like the first part of the game, you can OFFER SPELLNAME to make them happy, but if they refuse your offer, you’ll get in a wizard duel. Then you choose a wizard and a spell to cast, and there’s whole table the game refers to:
I think the intent was to create maybe a rock-paper-scissors sort of game; if you choose EXTINGUISH and they choose to cast a fireball, the attack is canceled. But unless the warlock gets bored (random, sometimes they’ll just let off) that just leads to another round, and there doesn’t really seem to be any real strategy involved, just RNG. I ended up just using save states a lot and restoring if I had an unfriendly wizard so I didn’t have to deal with the duels. I think the one-shot nature of the duels is the main problem; there’s no real accumulation of action that happens that leads to interesting strategic choices.
None of that compares to the fact that I just. could not. get. the last. spells.
Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over … look, grinding in an RPG I can sometimes find sort of soothing, but this isn’t like that. It is like I had to type the same walkthrough 30 times in a row, except some mild elements were jumbled so I couldn’t even do it on autopilot and also I had to keep saving my game just in case one my wizards got killed and I lost a bunch of my precious spells I was accumulating.
I never did find the spell Shrink. I took the gamble that maybe — due to the random nature of the game — I didn’t really need all the spells, and fortunately I was right. I took off, flew northeast long enough, and eventually found Atlantis.
Now the game enters yet another completely different mode. This is a maze where the walls are invisible, and you have to keep using GO DIRECTION in order to search around.
At various spots in the maze you are blocked by obstacles. These obstacles are randomly chosen and placed. The only obstacle that repeats is sometimes you see guards, where you need to use an attack spell (like SLEEP).
Each scene is a sort of puzzle where you have to pick which spell off your collected list works. It is not a highly intense puzzle in that a.) except for the guards which will kill wizards, you can keep going through your spell list until you find the right spell and b.) in some cases it isn’t intuitive anyway which one works so it doesn’t feel encouraged to try to “solve perfectly”.
Why this and not SPIDER CLIMB?
Still, the overall effect was decently novel and fun, with my only problem being the nagging worry that a lack of SHRINK would undo me. It did, once:
I was curious about the randomization anyway so gave the map a re-roll and had different encounters. I don’t know in reality how much leeway I had.
Probably the most interesting puzzle. You need PANIC HORN here.
I finally wound my way through the maze to a Well of the Worlds, leading to a choice of three exits, only one which let me make progress (left, in my case).
After some more searching and crossing my fingers I didn’t hit a SHRINK point, I came across a Crack of Doom.
You need to DROP ORB (not USE ORB, that undoes the whole process to the start of landing at the island) and an explosion will start. You then need to book it off the island. A tunnel nearby leads you to near the exit, and then you need to tangle with the maze a little bit longer to make it back to your ride.
So despite appearances, there was almost no RPG in this game. The adventure aspect was very odd (the single puzzle in part 1, the search-and-solve-riddles in part 2, and use-the-right-spell in part 3) but I’d say it qualifies most squarely in that bracket. I try not to speculate too heavy on what-is-an-RPG or what-is-an-adventure because in the end it is kind of arbitrary but there does seem to be a genuine difference between, say, choosing to use flame because it has a 30′ range and attacks 3 monsters at once, versus using TELEPORT to get past a wall. The spells here are essentially treated as puzzle tools as opposed to strategic options.
This is not the last Clardy we’ll see in 1982. He went on to collaborate on an Atari 8-bit game (dropping the RPG part entirely) which has some similar concepts to this one, except it is science fiction. I’m still going to save that for an entry far into the future in case that one abuses me with the RNG as well.
When we talk about “gameplay genres”, how arbitrary are we being? Are all gameplay genres purely cultural occlusion, where people just mimic what came before, and the possible landscape of combinations of elements is far vaster than we give credit for? One of the things I find fascinating about early games are cases when they pushed into territory nearly unrecognizable by modern categories.
Robert Clardy (picture above) got his start in programming at Rice University in 1970, mashing together classes from electrical engineering and mathematics (as Computer Science didn’t exist as a major yet). As he writes in his autobiography:
There were no classes in computer graphics, animation, computer-aided instruction, or anything to do with entertainment. At that time, those professions did not exist, and there was nothing there to study.
This was the age of punch cards, which Clardy describes as torture (“the CIA was particularly interested in the process, but later switched to waterboarding”) but things improved when Rice got a IBM System/360 (with teletype!) in his junior year. “Video terminals” were added his senior year and as a senior project he made an animated computer movie.
He then went to work for Boeing, while keeping one eye on the personal computer revolution. The Apple 1 was not available near him, the TRS-80 (the first PC he saw) didn’t fully strike his interest, the Apple II’s first release with only 4K memory was too weak, but in 1978 he took the plunge:
16k of RAM, now you’re talking! I bought one with 16k RAM, an RF modulator to enable it to use a TV set as the display device, and a cassette tape drive for storage. And, it only cost $2000. What a deal!
He then took the further step of forming his own company, Synergistic Software, and putting out Dungeon Campaign, inspired by Bob Bishop’s Dragon Maze.
Bob Bishop was a very early adopter of the Apple II (serial number 0013). Dragon Maze came straight out of the Apple II reference manual, along with Rod’s Color Pattern, Pong, Color Sketch, Mastermind, and Biorhythm.
(Dragon Maze incidentally also inspired Beneath Apple Manor, which is sometimes called the first roguelike. Given Dungeon Campaign also generates mazes it likely should be given co-credit?)
This was followed by Wilderness Campaign (1979) and Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure (1980). All of these early games fall into the paradigm of: you’re not controlling a single character, or even a “party” with named characters, but an army. The number of people alive in the army are roughly equivalent to “hit points”. Apventure to Atlantis holds to this same paradigm and is a direct sequel to the prior games.
From the manual, via the Asimov archive.
A group known as the Atlanteans created flying machines and embarked on a campaign of world conquest. A wizard known as a High One (“you” in the prior games) ended up conquering an island taking it as a safe refuge (The Sargalo), creating magical barriers against the marauders. When Apventure picks up, the previous High One has died, and you now play their successor. The original magical barriers are now falling, and you need to address the Atlantean threat.
The opening scene has some animations. The volcano eventually erupts.
The author has taken some leaps since the slow-as-molasses feel of Dungeon Campaign and the animated opening gives the feeling of mid-1980s rather than late-1970s Apple II. (I’m not sure how to describe it, exactly; once Apple II programmers were capable enough, the games eventually all settled on the same sort of feel and aesthetic that I associate with Choplifter and The Oregon Trail.)
The game has you roll statistics for Wisdom, Intelligence, Strength, and Charisma. Wisdom affects spell success, Intelligence affects puzzles, Strength affects combat with monsters, and Charisma affects the ability to attract wizard followers. This is classic D&D first edition style where you just hit a button and hope you get lucky with a number from 8 to 18. For my first attempt (which will fail for reasons I’ll get into) I ended up with 10 Wisdom, 15 Intelligence, 14 Strength and 18 Charisma. The manual goes through some great lengths (including tables) to convince the players these all have great importance, but you don’t have that much control over dice rolls in the end. Here’s the Charisma table, for instance:
I wasn’t above save-state cheating the various rolls that this game does (I am neither the wargaming nor CRPG addict) but in truth the game is fairly generous about the random elements so it doesn’t hurt as much as you might think to fail certain rolls. For example, the way combat works is you gather troops at the throne room you start at (S for Summon, not magic, just the royal guard gives you resources) and then if you lose all your troops you get warped back where you can summon more without any apparent penalty. After leaving the island (to hunt down the Atlanteans) you can’t do any more summoning, but combat isn’t important in that phase of the game as much as magic.
You might be wondering where the adventuring comes in. It will come up organically. The credentials are still not heavy but it does fit I think better than Super Spy did.
Despite the vector graphics being old-style Sierra, I think the lower-case test goes a long way in making it feel like the game is from a later era.
although you only enter the first letter of each one. You can TAKE NOTE from the table and read it to find your quest…
…although there’s an oracle to the north that explains more or less the same thing.
The other two objects in the throne room are an ORB, which lets you reverse time to undo mistakes, and a BOOK which has some spells: detect aura, magic detect, divination, enchant, panic horn. Detect aura looks at alignment of stats of wizards before you recruit them, magic detect finds the magical nature of objects, divination reveals secrets, enchant “restores levitation plates”, and panic horn infects nearby monsters with “rage and fear”.
Leaving the castle results in a top down view. You can still GO EAST / WEST / etc. although for the most part (with one exception) the physical map isn’t important, because encounters are random.
You can see my little figure having left the castle and two “steps” west.
On the map there are random encounters with monsters. This uses your Strength stat but there’s not much you can do otherwise, and if you lose all your guard you get sent back to the castle for more.
More importantly you can run into wizards. It took me a while to realize (even though we are supposedly a wizard of our own) that what we’re supposed to do is OFFER the spells from our spellbook to the wizards and then they may (based on a Charisma roll) join our party. The problem with all this is it doesn’t always seem to work.
You see, the wisdom is important insofar another wizard won’t join you if their wisdom is higher than yours. I thought the point of underlings is to get them to do the things you can’t?
After enough play (and wizard rejections) this was prevalent enough I clearly needed to do a reboot with a higher wisdom. A couple attempts later I landed on:
Wisdom: 16
Intelligence: 14
Strength: 17
Charisma: 15
So I essentially did stat-scumming. I’m not sure how I feel about that; the era both on tabletop and on computer tried to encourage going forth with whatever poor stats might come about. Fighting Fantasy claimed in their first book (Warlock of Firetop Mountain) that it was possible to beat the book using any stats; this was true for that book (and compensating for a stat being low was somewhat fun!), but most of the subsequent ones a player with substandard stats was clearly going to get trashed. Here, as mentioned earlier, I’m not sure how much low stats really matter — I could just be more patient recruiting and eventually get enough low-wisdom Wizards to join up — but it also doesn’t reflect good gameplay here, since it just forces repetition and not very interesting choices.
With a higher wisdom, I was able in fairly short order recruit five wizards, each with a different spell (detect aura, magic detect, divination, enchant, panic horn). Then there was the matter of: how to get off the island? This was directly an action-graphical puzzle along the lines of something from later Sierra or even Lucasarts games, where you have to time some action to go along with what’s going on.
The Monkey Island II spitting contest, from the Monkey Island Wiki. Part of the puzzle involves simply timing your spit with the wind. It isn’t reflex-based, but it is acknowledging the action in the physical space can differ based on what is going on in visuals of the game’s world.
In Apventure there is an ornithopter that keeps landing and dropping off more monsters. You need to wait for the right moment — and it will tell you it isn’t a good moment if you do it early — and hit U for USE. Then you USE the spell PANIC HORN. This causes the monsters being dropped off to rage and the Atlanteans to get killed, leaving an empty vehicle that you are now able to board.
I do want to emphasize how fascinating a moment this was. I can’t call it the first real time puzzle (we’ve had a stream of action-adventures by now) but this is the first I can think of chronologically that is Sierra-Lucasarts style; where you’re keeping an eye on events and timing an action to solve a puzzle, but you aren’t otherwise involving action-game-physical movement.
This is followed by a more straightforwardly action-game section, so it isn’t like Clardy was trying to discriminate, it was more innovation by accident.
This is the “journey” section of the game. You move your craft around, pick weapons (keys 1 through 5, 3 through 5 are spells) and shoot with the space bar.
The landscape appears to be randomly generated. The main objective at this phase is to look for “palaces” you can land at.
Then the game enters back into “adventure mode”, kind of. The maps of the palaces seem to be generated more or less at random, and you can take off, land, and get a new map if you like.
The same basic rooms (bedroom, library, ballroom, etc.) get mashed together with different sequences and different door placements. I haven’t worked out yet if the map is fully generative or if there’s a fixed set of random maps being drawn from, but I suspect the former.
Your character that’s on the bottom is aiming a weapon, and you can use the joystick to point and shoot at particular enemies.
We just shot a “trog” that seems to be on top of the bookcase.
You might have pit traps appear. If you’ve found rope you can rescue the person who has fallen in, otherwise they are reduced from your fighter forces.
That’s “rubbish” in the corner although it took me a while to find the right word. You can also LOOK WALL or LOOK CORNER to get names of things if you see something that’s ambiguous.
And you might — and here’s where it is actually useful — find items.
Once you have an item, you can LOOK at it to get it “in focus”, then cast MAGIC DETECT in order to find if it has a hidden spell inside. Assuming it does, you can then teach it to one of your wizards (it prompts which wizard you want, so I hope you didn’t forget the names you taught them).
You find through exploring a series of NOTEs. The pattern seems to be the first has “plaintext” while the other two are “encrypted”.
The encryption is just some manner of Caesar cipher (the manual is very explicit about this) and it isn’t terribly interesting to solve, but it does count as kind of a generative puzzle tossed into the mix. The hints all give riddles about words that need to be said in particular places. So the place of rugs is PERSIA and that opens one door. Past that door is a note 2, with a clue about carrying the world (ATLAS) which then opens an area with a note 3 about stones in a circle (STONEHENGE). When I used the last note I ended up in a “mirror area” that required solving a fourth riddle, which just meant I had to type STONEHENGE backwards.
In that dark area I was also able to use the spell ENCHANT, which will cause the ship’s plate levitation to magically start working again.
Once taking off you can turn around and land directly at the same palace to get a newly generated map. I will need to be doing this multiple times in order to find all the spells (ones like “spider climb” and “shrink”), which then get apparently used (in some kind of puzzle sequence) for the grand finale where we find Atlantis. I’ll save that for a second and likely final post after I’m done grinding.
One of my warriors vaporized by a wizard. You’re supposed to send a wizard vs. a wizard in a wizard duel, but that gets complicated so I’ll also save it for next time.
It turns out my major issue was technical: I was playing in TRS-80 Model 3 mode. The Model 3 was out when this game was — it was first released in 1980 — but for whatever strange reason the game was refusing to interpret a particular parser command while I was in Model 3 mode versus Model 1. It is faintly possible the development platform was a Video Genie — which was popular in the UK — and there is some obscure technical incompatibility (the Video Genie is the same clone from Hong Kong as the Dick Smith Model 80).
Anyway, it is only sort of the game’s fault I got stuck; I tried the parser command I needed quite early in my solving process, just it wasn’t understood. The parser is still finicky but Part 2 of the game (in Egypt) is strong and nearly all the puzzles were satisfying to solve.
To recap, I realized I needed to put the “Alice oil” in the sprayer to get it to work, but no amount of whacking helped. One thing I knew (from the instructions) is that the game did understand prepositions and indirect nouns, so I thought maybe this was a case where rather than making a separate prompt for indirect noun, the game switched parser modes and required having the command typed as a whole phrase. Just FILL SPRAYER doesn’t work, you have to FILL SPRAYER WITH LIQUID. Trying this on Model 3 gets
BAD COMMAND FORMAT
LanHawk in my comments had in the meantime tried the game and found the command worked. He was in Model 1 mode, although we didn’t realize yet that was the issue until I did some experimentation.
Voila, what I was expecting to happen. Before stepping through, I want to mention two other things I sleuthed out in part 1 of the game.
First, I was able to recreate picking up the key at the start. I still think this is a bug. One version of the sequence goes: EAST, GET RUG (this reveals the safe), WEST, OPEN CUPBOARD, DROP RUG, MOVE SWITCH, LOOK SWITCH. There is a hidden key now with that sequence.
I still think this is a bug. Without dropping the rug, if you LOOK SWITCH before moving it, the game says SWITCH IS OFF. After you move it, the game says I DON’T SEE ONE upon doing LOOK SWITCH (but you can move the switch back to off!) The I DON’T SEE ONE gets overridden if and only if you’ve dropped the rug in the room. That’s in the territory of Koble’s Chinese Puzzle in terms of not making sense. I assume something in the game’s object table got jumbled up.
Somewhat more sensical (but still frustrating) I managed to pull off making a fishing line. I had a PIN and a THREAD; before you can tie the thread to the pin you need to BEND PIN. Then the tying works. You can also then BAIT the PIN with some spaghetti.
All remaining screenshots, passing through the mirror into Egypt, will be in Model 1 mode.
You land on the other side of the mirror at a dais, right next to a temple. The temple is guarded by “foo dogs” who give “kamic vibrations” if you try to enter the temple.
You can FISH LAKE in this location and get a fish which will be useful later. It’s also helpful to visit the bottom of the lake (just DIVE LAKE or, if you’re holding too much, you’ll sink down by going into the lake anyway). You can then use the SCREWDRIVER from way back at the house to PRY the grating open.
The water tunnel then takes you up into the temple.
The “tingling sensation” at the pool is important and will come back shortly. This whole section is a very tight puzzle, akin to the opening area, but without having to fuss about combining objects together. This section is more about magic, but there’s at least enough logic that I never felt like I needed to wave things randomly everywhere, and the tight space itself limits the things you can do with magical objects besides.
Going north is blocked by the same dogs as before, but you can go south.
The message is quite serious and you need to read it literally. You must be invited in. If you go in without the invitation you will die. The clever bit is the death isn’t immediate; you start getting chased by a mummy and can try some futile fighting back (for example, using fire against it; a message later indicates the mummy is flameproof).
Mucking about with options, I realized I could RUB the LAMP in the main temple. Rubbing once gets a dire warning, so of course I had to rub it again.
This is not a game over! You need to get turned into a rat. As you are not a (wo)man but a rat, you can now go into the tomb. You can then grab a “silver ankh” (it is small enough) but not do anything else.
The presence of the mirror is a classy bit of game design here. It clearly is set up to go back home using Alice-spray, but its location here also serves to emphasize the rat-ness of the player at this moment.
Fortunately, the pool with strange tingling also works for spell removal so you can turn back into a person. If you’re carrying the ankh, it will drop to the bottom of the pool, but you can DIVE to retrieve it again.
Now, what to do with the silver ankh? I prodded around a bit thinking about how it represents “life”, and tried touching the cat statue.
This is of course the Temple of Bast, the cat god, so the cat is able to invite us in the tomb.
You are then safe from the mummy. Unfortunately, while you are free to safely get the gold, you can’t get it out again (remember the weight pulls you down in water!) You have to get out via the front, but the foo dogs are still stopping you.
There’s another secret object farther in. First, you need to get the torch by the archway lit (SOAK TORCH WITH OIL, and yes, that took a while to find, followed by LIGHT TORCH at the eternal flame) and the you can go in the sarcophagus and close it. After closing it (and only after closing) do you see a “secret panel” you can enter.
I was originally confused thinking it was something you were supposed to SLIDE.
The maze is mercifully tiny; small enough that it mainly serves to cause a little drama as the torch light is limited.
At the end there’s an electrum amulet, which will let you get by the dogs. You can grab mirror, gold, amulet, and spray and take them all outside back to the starting point.
You can attempt to revive the foo dogs along the way.
Once there you can drop the mirror off and spray it with the Alice oil.
So you’re back in London: now what? There’s not even a SCORE command, nor some special trophy case you take the gold to where the game says “you’ve won!” However, there’s a mobster lurking outside.
He is now your friend.
This ended up being much better than I expected. I ran into parser oddities early so didn’t have high confidence. However, the intricate use of object ended up being fairly logical in the end, and despite solving-for-unprompted-magic-items being one of my major grumpy points, the use of magic was sparse and clear enough I didn’t run into the issue of having to mark up a large map and test every single magic word in every single room or wave completely random objects hoping they had something to them, etc.
The main fall-down overall was technical. This is a case where I wish the author had a modern copy of Inform because they could have done a bang-up job. I especially liked how the steal-the-treasure concept ended up getting both played straight (you are, indeed, just going in a sacred place and grabbing gold) averted (you are invited in) and subverted again (the whole goal was to pay off a mobster) all in the same plot.
Let’s get back to graphics, shall we? Up next on the docket is a Apple II hybrid RPG-strategy-puzzle-adventure game by an innovative author whom some of you may recognize.
The Weighing of the Heart. Anubis reads the scales. Osiris presides to the right. From The Met.
So far I have still only opened up one more room (an attic) since last time. The object puzzles are elaborate enough that (in a way) the objects themselves make up the exploration space, not the rooms.
Also as was prophesized, due to this, the game really fell down hard on its parser. This is true even of the very first puzzle I solved immediately after my last post: dealing with the fuses. Specifically, I had a broken fuse, I had some wire from disassembling a hen run, and I could FIX FUSES. I’m don’t 100% visualize what was wrong on the bad fuse but at least the shenanigans are slightly believable.
Where things then fall down hard is putting the fuses back in. INSERT FUSES doesn’t work (SORRY I DON’T KNOW HOW) and PUT FUSES is even worse; the game says OK as if it was successful, and you have to carefully look at the room description to realize the game just parsed PUT as a synonym for DROP.
No, the right action is REPLACE FUSES. Then you can MOVE SWITCH (if you haven’t already) to kick the power on. This allows the saw in the back to work properly. (What happened before, if you don’t remember, is you could swap fuses and still run the saw, but it would cause both fuses to bust. So the game explicitly added a fixing route that was wrong.)
The saw can be used to cut up a pair of post into pieces, but that’s also wrong. You need to get some BOARDS from upstairs (they were LOOSE FLOORBOARDS hiding a PIN)…
Nice repurposing here — the boards would normally just be the thing hiding the “useful object” but they become useful in themselves.
…and cut those instead.
Then you can take the posts and boards together with some screws to make a ladder.
I tried the ladder in every room and always got NOWHERE TO CLIMB TO. It then struck me there might be a secret exit up, and I’m finally trained enough by the school of hard knocks (Nuclear Sub from 1980 plus my recently-played Doomsday Mission) to try LOOK UP.
Upstairs is dark, but you can grab the extension cable from the shed and the lamp from the study to provide some light.
Getting the mirror ends up unfortunate:
IT’S RATHER CUMBERSOME PERHAPS IF I … WHOOPS!
OH DEAR! I COULD DO WITHOUT SEVEN YEARS BAD LUCK!
While there are PIECES OF BROKEN MIRROR, they aren’t super useful and going down the ladder kills you.
If our heart is judged worthy is not mentioned.
This is mostly where I’m now stuck. redhighlander in the comments mentioned the ladder but also a fishing rod, which I haven’t been able to make and I assume is useful later. I did somehow manage to get a key and I think it was a bug. I was able to get a key by … looking at the main switch?
Somehow my screenshot didn’t save, but I looked at the switch and I was told I saw something, and suddenly I had the key. The key I could then use to open the safe to the east.
The blue liquid is poison. Drinking it kills you. I assume it is topical (on either yourself or an appropriate item) but I haven’t been able to rub it.
While I have a saved game past the key-finding bit, so it doesn’t really matter I can’t replicate the behavior (probably, unless I soft-locked in some other way) I’m very stuck parser-wise now. I peeked at the machine code and you can take the SPRAYER in the shed and have the LIQUID inside of it, so I guess then you can spray … the mirror probably? However, all attempts at POUR LIQUID or FILL SPRAYER or the like fail.
I’m 85% certain I’m just stalled on a parser issue but knowing what the issue was doesn’t necessarily help solve it. I also don’t have anything approaching a fishing rod and I could see it possible I softlocked myself out of one.
Any and all help at this point is appreciated. I’ll keep going a while longer but it is faintly possible my journey will end here. The weird appearance of the key makes me especially nervous about more lurking bugs.
Temple of Bast eventually had some sales in the US via Hypersoft. From 80 Micro, April 1986.
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.
Well, I wasn’t trying to be topical. This happens to be the next in the series of the Softside Adventure of the Month, once again in a game by Peter Kirsch (at least according to the TRS-80 version stored at Ira Goldklang’s site).
Softside, May 1982.
You are the Captain of the Titanic on her maiden voyage. Suddenly a large white object comes into view through the window. Can you avoid the historic collision? If not, can you save the lives of your passengers and crew?
We’re the captain, and the only one running the vessel. We’re at the wheel and LOOK WINDOW reveals a looming iceberg. Fortunately we can TURN WHEEL:
So, that was a good game, let’s move on to…. oh wait:
(Apparently in Time Zone you can save Caesar from getting stabbed by Brutus and he just slips and dies instead. Oops.)
So, the game now explains you need to try to save as many people as you can and potentially grab some treasures along the way. I made a beeline for a lifeboat and did GO LIFEBOAT:
Great, now that the game is over, we can …
Oh, wait, I should rescue some people? I suppose. I did appreciate the clever schtick here in leaving open the possibility of just running for it. In practical circumstances I expect most players will want to rescue everyone although I could see someone leaving behind one of the more ornery passengers (and there are some!) intentionally.
Incidentally, nobody gets on the lifeboat on their own: on this version of the lifeboat, with a very, very, reduced crew complement and number of passengers, for every single rescue you GET PASSENGER (or whomever) and then GIVE PASSENGER at a lifeboat. There are six lifeboats, and you need to be careful a particular one isn’t full, otherwise it will sink when you add one more.
Orange locations have lifeboats.
I was initially worried about optimization, but this game weirdly has no timer. In fact, you need to wait, as there’s hot soup in one location you need to eat, and in the bottom there’s a key, and the key lets you in a cabin to rescue one of the passengers.
Most of the game involves finding keys in unusual spots and/or getting passengers to move.
For one lady, they are playing music too loud. You need to go downstairs, have a chandelier nearly hit you…
…grab a broken bulb from the chandelier, and use it to cut a wire on a fuse box. This causes the music to get cut off so you can rescue the lady.
If there are no empty seats the response will be “you see nothing special” when you LOOK LIFEBOAT.
One passenger is Chinese and you have to find a Chinese-English dictionary in order to be able to rescue her:
There’s a librarian here you need to rescue too.
The steward is sleeping in his cabin. You need to do the newspaper-under-the-door, poke the keyhole trick to get the key and unlock it. The actual process is PUT NEWSPAPER, SLIDE NEWSPAPER, POKE KEYHOLE, and it took me about eight tries to get the sequence down. Kirsch may have branched into interesting ideas but his parser can still be jank:
One passenger is described as a “naked lady” and has her toe stuck in a drain hole in the tub. You need some margarine from the kitchen to free her.
One woman is too drunk to grab so you need to ask a waiter for COFFEE (the waiter is clearly asking an open-ended question that lets you get any item you want) but surely there’s lots of requests that work for drunkenness? As well as coffee, at least?
The last interesting bit is that there are two possible endings. One you’ve seen already (when you just ditch everyone) but that ending also applies even if you do a complete rescue. You need to send for help to get the alternate ending.
Then once you finally step on a lifeboat after getting everyone else on there will be rescue at the end.
I appreciated that Kirsch was experienced enough to completely mix up his standard operating procedure; here there are a whole bunch of puzzles that can be solved more or less in any order. I didn’t even mention the two treasures, which are purely optional. You can find a diamond ring in a vacuum machine; also, there’s the captain’s own safe at the start where you don’t remember the combination and have to MOVE the safe to find the combination. Not common to have a combo-lock which is your own character’s safe!
I also never quite expected the Titanic to be the setting of more or less a comic romp, like Airplane! on a boat. It’s curious because there are obviously serious moments (you rescue a baby from a crib) but they are flatly given in the same tone as incidents like Mrs. Vanderbilt hiding under a table (“oops, excuse me madame, hiding under the table won’t help”) and bodily picking up the waiter (after he’s dispensed coffee) to toss him into a lifeboat, too.
A 1950s toy car from Mettoy. In 1949 they had opened a new factory at Fforest-fach, Wales and they had steady growth all through the 1950s.
Between 1979 and 1983, two-thirds of the toy manufactures in the UK collapsed. (This is according to The British Toy Business: A History since 1700, which I’ll be referring to for this intro.)
The trade itself blamed changes in age (over the 70s the number of children under ten went from 9.3 million to 7.7 million) but foreign makers under similar conditions didn’t have a struggle with this. The economic situation in general was bad, with heavy inflation across the world map, and only Hong Kong toymakers improving over the span, but still, the collapse was disproportionate. A report from the British toy association in 1983 called the time period “amongst the worst in living memory”.
More locally to blame? Outdated practices both at a financial level and a technological one. An analyst looking at toy firms in 1978 found that 115 of the 360 looked at had financial accounts too old to be helpful. Consumer research was lax to non-existent. Marketing was amateur. One 1970s toy fair held in Britain went so badly that the foreign attendees threatened to stay away permanently.
The CEO of Mettoy, one of the affected companies (headquartered in Wales), had been asked why they hadn’t branched into electronics; the answer was that the Americans and Japanese could simply do it better.
Mettoy in particular was in deep trouble, and threw out in 1982 — as sort of a desperate attempt at staying relevant — the spinoff company Dragon Data, which manufactured the Dragon 32 and Dragon 64. They were essentially Tandy Color Computer clones and software from one could easily be adapted to the other (Madness and the Minotaur, for instance, had a Dragon-adapted version published by Dragon Data).
While the Dragon had some die-hard fans, it wasn’t picked up much by third parties, the major exception being Microdeal. Quoting John Symes, director of Microdeal:
Dragon has been of no help whatsoever to any of the software houses; they didn’t even tell us they had reconfigured the Ram — it meant we had to withdraw two games.
People bought games after playing them in the shop but found they didn’t work on their machines at home — naturally they assumed the machine was at fault — it must have cost Dragon a lot of money in unnecessary repairs.
Microdeal published Mansion Adventure and we will be seeing them again on the Dragon, just not here. Instead, we’re playing a first-party game, one published by Dragon Data itself: Dragon Mountain.
From World of Dragon. This is the entire awesome 80s all in one picture, including the dragon-figure to the left who seems to be eating his weapon.
There is no author name, just the company label, and there’s a fairly straightforward premise:
Dragon Mountain is an adventure game with all the action taking place underground, inside a mountain where a ferocious dragon guards his store of treasure. Your aim is to enter the mountain, find your way to the Dragon’s Den and carry away the treasure. However, you will have to deal with a variety of creatures roaming the inside of the mountain before you can accomplish your goal.
We’re in a fantasy world, we’re dealing with fantasy monsters, gotcha.
In historical context, they’re a company against the financial wall trying to build their initial product; they’re not going to stretch the envelope as far as plot goes. Fine. However, I think this is close enough in resemblance to another game there may even have been (let’s say 20% chance) some lifted source code. I’ll get through the game itself first and then I’ll return to the strong resemblance.
The “classic” Dragon look has black against green but even back in the 80s we had TV settings, so I used the “inverse” feature of XRoar and boosted the brightness a little to get the screen as shown.
The game is essentially divided into two floors. The first floor is almost completely obstacle-free.
The overall map of the first floor is a five-by-five grid.
The only exception to the “obstacle-free” aspect is in the upper-left corner, where there’s a locked door that needs a key. However, since the key is laying out in the open (just like everything else) I don’t think I’d call it a puzzle.
Another UK game which understands LEAVE but not DROP.
While exploring, there are three timers running:
a hunger timer
a thirst timer
a sleep timer
So technically speaking, all three count as puzzles, insofar as you need to EAT FOOD that you’ve found somewhere when the hunger timer hits, and DRINK WATER when the thirst timer hits.
Weirdly enough, there’s multiple food items, and when I ate one, it caused the other one I found in an adjacent room to disappear. I discovered this because my inventory was full — the limit is generous but not unlimited — and the hunger daemon hit, so I ate my food, walked over to pick up the food I had left behind, and found nothing.
Where the “action” starts is in the second floor, which is a three by three grid.
You need a cloak from the first floor to make sure you don’t freeze in the cold.
There’s wandering elves, a demon, and a dragon. You find out methods of defeating all three from that locked-door room on the first floor. Specifically, the demon needs a sword (just laying around on the first floor) and elves can be bribed by gold (also laying around on the first floor). The dragon is marginally trickier: it needs to be killed by a dagger found laying around on the second floor.
After KILL DRAGON. The screen flashes so this is a little dramatic.
Past killing the demon and dragon, and bribing away the elves, there’s only one more obstacle: a door locked by magic.
There’s a spellbook which I assumed had the right word to get through but the game kept saying I couldn’t read it. This is the only tricky part of the game. There’s a “grotto” at the upper right of the second floor which (for some reason) makes it so the spellbook is readable while you are standing there.
Using the magic word, you can escape, get the treasure, and win.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve spotted yet what game this resembles, but it might help if I mention that the items on the first floor are randomly scattered. This presents essentially no obstacle whatsoever — with no wandering encounters and the like, the only way to die on the first floor is by not finding the water / food in time — but it does strongly suggest a different game, one also published by Dragon Data.
The screen above is from Madness and the Minotaur, which was one of the most difficult games of 1981; honestly, one of the most difficult adventure games ever. It had so many random elements and obstacles it was nearly impossible to overcome, and Dragon Mountain strikes me as just a (very) lite version of Minotaur. Specifically, the vibe of rectilinear layouts PLUS food and hunger daemons PLUS the fact that Dragon Data also published Minotaur for the Dragon. The company even had source code access (remember they published a Dragon port) and quite possibly did some simplification to make this game; that’s extremely speculative, though. I think it is almost guaranteed that the author(s) at least played Madness and the Minotaur.
While I don’t consider Dragon Mountain an interesting game in itself, the context of a company trying to build up product that likely grabbed from one of their own published products for inspiration is a fascinating one. And if nothing else, this is the first adventure I’ve been able to confirm as coming from Wales.
From World of Dragon.
(OK, in a game design sense there was one interesting thing: you can gather several gold objects from the first floor, but none of them give “score” or count as treasures in the classical sense; they’re only needed to bribe the elves, as the dragon’s treasure is overwhelming enough that’s the only treasure you need.)
(If you need to read my previous entries on Prisoner 2, here’s a handy link.)
I’ve reached the ending; really it was a matter of finding the keyhole, as the resolution with the Caretaker is identical with the original game. There are still were some absurd surprises along the way.
The first came from just returning to the court in order to scrounge up more cash and score. There’s more hangman, and it started with the same words as before, but then things got very strange indeed.
The word is QRBU.
Instead of providing real words, hangman started providing literally random combinations of letters. I know they are random because after finishing I consulted with David Mullich’s original design document, which you can find here.
If a random number between 1 and 2000 is less than the SCORE, then a word of 3 to 8 random letters is constructed, otherwise, one of these words are chosen: FREEDOM, LIBERTY, LICENSE, INDEPENDENT, AUTONOMY, SOVEREIGN, AUTARCHY, LIBERATION, ANARCHY, ESCAPE, RELEASE, HOPE, FREE, DIGNITY, INDIVIDUAL, RESPECT, or PRIVACY.
In other words, the higher your score is, the more likely you will get a gibberish word at the court. Once your score reaches 2000, the court will only provide gibberish words.
The word is XZKDFGQ.
After I had stocked up on as much score and credits as I thought I could pull off, I took a shot revisiting some locations. In the Theater in particular I got met by the Brotherhood, just like the first game.
In the middle of the word VOUCH.
The visual effect is to show text a few letters at a time scrolling across. There’s a whole scene where people are conversing:
DOES ANYONE HERE KNOW #?
I’VE BEEN WATCHING HIM.
They take a vote and you are able to be admitted and be given missions. I was given a mission to sit on a throne and say MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB. Fortunately in this case I knew it was talking about: the “switchboard” location with one of the two mazes.
Some of the letters suggest directions, but some eventually do not, and I eventually just had to map the whole thing. The rooms are at least unique so you can treat it like an old-school Adventure map.
I will have to say in a way this is even worse than any of the bad ones I’ve mapped before (like the Adventure 500 Crazy Maze) insofar as the map is randomly generated. That is, if you leave and come back, the map will be entirely different. With the opening Castle, it isn’t tedious to map and there is a feeling of some humanity in the algorithm. With the maze here, it’s quite almost literally filling in a spreadsheet with arbitrary values.
To make a more lateral comparison: there are hand-made Sudoku puzzles and computer-generated ones. When the Sudoku craze first hit there were books with pages and pages of the computer generated puzzles, but I could never get engrossed in them like the ones made by humans (anything of the puzzle books published by Nikoli are hand-made puzzles, for instance). Some of this has to do with humans making interesting and creative logic in a way the algorithms were not, but some has to do with: the hand-made ones were pieces of art being sent into the universe, part of a person’s life being experienced. Solving them is like sharing a piece of humanity.
Prisoner 2 making the map-truly-random-maze-by-hand aspect part of the experience bump up against the feeling of inhumanity is part of the Point, of course, just like trying to solve a hangman game with random letters. Akin to the first game, it was a point I could admire more at a meta-level rather than when I was burning hours of my own time trying to baffle over what was going on.
Moving on: the throne (shown above) is in the maze. You can SIT and get the curious display shown (confirming later with the design notes, this is all that happens, the A and B displays mean nothing). Typing MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB here will fulfill the request of the Brotherhood. You can go back, get the hint AN ISLAND IS NO MAN, and get a new quest. This animation shows the one I got:
For this one (“RUN THE ISLAND”, “TO THE SHRINKS”), you need to go back to the hospital and the bit where you can “break the source code”.
From here, type RUN THE ISLAND. Then the game will respond that the subject has delusions of grandeur, but you’ll also have fulfilled the Brotherhood’s request, and they’ll give you the hint (?) DRINK AND BE MERRY.
From here I got a mission to go to the newspaper and set the headline to DEUS EX MACHINA. The original game made it a puzzle where you had to put in the right ASCII codes. Here it is a little easier; you simply shuffle letters around until the text becomes what you want:
This sends you back to the Castle, but you can then return to the Brotherhood and get the hint “THE TRUTH SHALL REVEAL THE PLUG”.
After this I got a mission repeat (shrinks again). Looking over the design doc, there’s only one other mission, to set the file cabinet at the Carnival on fire. You can do that by buying MATCHES, then going to the bit where you can add weights, and typing the commands ESC and I. This moves the cursor one step up (this is just Apple II shenanigans). Then you can tap right-arrow until you get launched out of the carnival. If you have the mission you’ll then set the file cabinet on fire.
After pressing ESC-I, the cursor is to the right of “TYPE WT”.
Yes, that’s a fairly obscure string of text there, but at least in this version of the game I just followed the literal directions on screen over on the right side.
The hint received from the Brotherhood for doing this task is INPUT THE PLUG.
Anyway, as you might have surmised, the Brotherhood doesn’t do anything useful past this point; you can just repeat missions over and over. I still had no keyhole. I did wander and participate in some wacky activities, like math.
The result of typing “4”. According to the design document this whole section does nothing for the credits, score, or overall goal of the game. Except I suppose in a “feeling of despair” sense.
I finally found the keyhole in the other maze, at the Grail Hall, an entirely new building for this version of the Prisoner. It is just … another maze. At least this one was made by hand, but the opening rooms are indistinguishable so I spent a lot of time just wandering around.
Once you get deeper the rooms start to get very curious indeed.
For the last one you get booted back to the Castle at the start, and yes, those are meant to be adventure game references, the last being The Wizard and the Princess from On-Line Systems. There’s also a Mystery House reference (where you get a MURDER flag set on your character if you get in there). The real route to go is FORWARD repeatedly, which is no doubt an intentional tweak by the author. (The most naïve thing a player will do upon finding their first maze is just going the same direction repeatedly, and authors put forward effort to make sure that would never work.)
With keyhole in hand I could return to the Caretaker. The same phrase as in the previous game (THE ISLAND IS A COMPUTER GAME) worked, and it gives a setup that will let you “unplug the computer”.
The game references a Master of the Caretaker; here, it implies You were the master all along. This mirrors a bit in the slightly nonsensical troll ending of the original show The Prisoner, where Number 6 finally unmasks Number 1 and finds himself.
In the show, there’s a big goofy shootout and they drive to London and … people were upset. It was meant to be provocative. According to the creator Patrick McGoohan who was happy with the reception: “as long as people feel something, that’s the great thing, it’s when they’re walking around not thinking, not feeling, that’s tough, that’s where all the dangerous stuff is, cause when you get a mob like that, you can turn them in to the sort of gang that Hitler had.”
The Prisoner game ending makes slightly more sense; The Master is yourself, in that The Master really is yourself, you are the one choosing to play this computer game, you are the one that chooses to keep going even when given literally random words in Hangman, and plenty of encounters that make no progress.
This whole questline is in: where you can get cloned at the diner (by requesting you want ESCAPE rather than anything off the menu), but then you need to pay 10000, which you get via a loan from the bank, which you can get via the items mentioned above. All three take serious work to get. When you finally get yourself cloned a pirate ship appears and kills your clone with a cannonball (seriously!) and you get sent back to the Castle. No progress is made.
Unfortunately, trying to convey the lesson in interactive form — making the player suffer pain to teach about pain — is, again, better to read about than actually try. I’d say the original is superior not because the jank somehow provides some noble reinforcement, but rather, here, there were not only one but two old school mazes. The mapping time taught nothing new and fell into cliché rather than out of it; the adventure references didn’t really imply anything other than the author having a laugh.
But at least it was trying to say something; while I’ve managed to derive interest out of most of games we’ve looked at here, that’s only by contextualization as cultural artifacts (or at least object lessons in game design) rather than as self-contained art.
Still craving more slightly off-kilter Mullich antics? Take a trip over to the CRPG Addict and Mullich’s other Edu-Ware games from this time period:
The graphics share some commonalities with Prisoner 2, like doors with identical placement to the Prisoner 2 mazes and a “casino” that looks very similar.
Every decision is scored. The Island keeps you under constant surveillance and monitors your every movement. The score is set to zero at the start of the game and is incremented or decremented based upon whether or not your actions are those of an individual. The more individualistic you are, the greater your score will be. This score is revealed only upon winning, losing, or suspending the game and is closely linked with your chances of escaping. Many doors will be closed to you until your score reaches a high enough value. Since this score is mostly invisible to you, you must weigh and verify your own decisions to determine if they are in your own best interests. The authorities (i.e., computer) will give you no help.
From the front cover of the original manual.
Prisoner 2 has at least four versions out there, probably more. This ends up being important later.
For Apple II, there’s versions 1.0 and 1.01. I started with 1.0 (which gave me a code of 444 to start) and switched later to 1.01 (which gave me an entirely different code, 314). 1.0 seems to always give 444 as a starting code while 1.01 changes it. There’s also versions for the Atari and MS-DOS. The DOS version is lost, but the v3.0 of the Atari port is available.
Here’s Highretrogamelord playing through the opening on Atari:
The bit at the start with the airport (where you try to type a destination but the game types “THE I” for you before cutting off) is in 1.01 but not 1.0.
The opening maze was simply a top-down invisible maze in the original The Prisoner, but it is a much odder 3D-maze here. I’ve heard it compared to Wizardry, but Wizardry lets you turn around. In this maze you are always facing north, while using F, B, L, and R to move north, south, west, and east respectively. Here’s my map from playing 1.0:
Star is the start. F is the finish. Up-arrows are teleports that jump you back to start, saying “WHAT COMES UP…”
The weird effect of not being able to turn is that you can move “south” without seeing it, meaning there’s an extra layer of obfuscation to the game. At least with this map you have to discover the issue quite quickly to get anywhere (the third turn goes “south”) but check out this map I got playing 1.01 (note this is generated randomly, so if you play it will be different):
Yes, there’s a key not present in the other version.
With this map, just going straight east will result in getting teleported back to the start. I could see someone getting frustrated thinking there is some trick to skipping the teleport as opposed to realizing you can make a turn.
Also interesting about the new map is that it is more or less a straight shot to the exit, meaning players are likely to miss the key.
I don’t know if that means the key is elsewhere in 1.0, or that feature got removed. I did check the map quite thoroughly so I don’t think there’s a hidden exit.
You exit at 6 (just as the show, and the original game). The map is in four rows, buildings 1-5 on top, 6-10 on the second row, 11-15 on the third, 16-20 on the bottom, and is surrounded by a picket fence.
I mashed together screenshots like one of the old maps from Nintendo Power.
If you attempt to climb the fence, a bouncing ball appears (I assume meant to represent Rover from the original show) and you get warped back to the start.
The bouncing ball is not that menacing in Apple II format, but I’d recommend taking the minute to see the original from the TV show if you haven’t:
Moving on: you can CTRL-C out to “put the game in stasis” whereupon it will give a score. I started with a score of -3. You can also get a “hint” at a cost of 25 points.
I then tried all 20 locations.
1 — HOSPITAL
There are doors with a choice of Free Association (press L for left), Shock Treatment (F for forward), and Psychomotor Skills (R for right). B exits. I believe these were separate buildings in the old game.
Psychomotor Skills asks you to push the buttons the game asks for.
Shock Treatment asks for … I’m not entirely sure.
You get asked why did you resign, which I guess you can game over with if you like by typing your code.
However, if you type anything else, you are just told the subject is easily shocked and sent on your way.
Free Association is a slightly colorful version of the original, where you are supposed to say words in response to other words.
If you type FREEDOM you hit an Easter Egg of sorts.
This shot was taken with v1.0 and the old code.
Huzzah! I only found this post-game in the first version. The point is to make you think the game has crashed and you respond with the usual Apple II syntax of LIST 444 to debug the code. It is slightly less believable here, since the game doesn’t feel like it is about to crash otherwise, but I still can see an Apple user from the time being fooled into typing the code.
2 — CARETAKER’S HOME
It tells me I need a keyhole.
3 — TOWN HALL
It tells me I need a toga (which can be obtained at the clothing shop at the southwest of the island). Once inside:
I can type one of the number options but nothing happens and I get booted out.
4 — SWITCHYARD
I only found out the name of this thing by buying a MAP from the general store later and doing LOOK while in the room. This also gives the “official” names of all the rooms.
Once entering: there are a series of three doors, and there’s a letter in the middle left.
I don’t know yet what any of these mean. There’s no equivalent to this in the original game.
5 — CARNIVAL
You need a clown suit (again from the clothing store) to enter here. Then you can add weights to cause a clown to go flying and lose some score. This is just as inscrutable as it was in the original game. I seem to remember there was intended some way to “break out” but it didn’t even work for me?
6 — CASTLE
This is where you come out at the start. If you go back in the map resets.
7 — BANK
This asks for an account number. You don’t have one.
8 — COURTHOUSE
You are asked upon entering if you will put yourself on trial. If you do so it starts a game of hangman.
This is the only way I’ve found to increase score (it helps that the score is on the display as you are playing). The score boost seems to be better with less mistakes to the letters. If you lose you get a GUILTY verdict and thrown out and the “doubling” part (DECREASE SCORE BY X, INCREASE SCORE BY Y) gets reset. I’m unclear what relation the prosecution/defense lines have to the game, because I hit “guilty” once with the prosecution being all the way up to “reset to new game” and nothing happened.
Eventually after enough wins there’s a “TILT” message followed by WINNING IS LOSING. You can go back in the courthouse afterwards and repeat the whole process.
9 — THEATER
There are slightly unsettling nursery rhymes shown on a loop.
10 — GENERAL STORE
You can buy stuff, including the MAP I mentioned earlier, and a PAPER and BOOK which are useful for the next two places on my list. For some curious reason the shopkeeper will “adjust” their prices when you enter but all they do is increase all of them by one.
11 — NEWS STAND
I can’t get in. First it requests that I have PAPER, but then after it says THEY WON’T LET YOU IN even after holding the PAPER. This is true even when my score is up.
12 — LIBRARY
You buy a book from the general store and go in, where you get to burn books.
13 — SCHOOL
Professor Worm challenges you to spell words. The letters you type don’t always correspond to the letters on your keyboard so this is harder than it sounds. I have yet to get any of the words right.
14 — CAT AND MOUSE BAR
You have an above view where you can move around with U, D, L, and R. You can walk up to the bar and buy a drink, whereupon nothing happens and you reset back to your starting place. You can go to the right to leave.
15 — CHURCH
You can confess your sins, or give out your resignation number, or whatever I guess. There’s an open text parser and there’s ambiguous responses. The text parser has a limit to the character count that the original game didn’t have.
16 — CLOTHING STORE
The TOGA and CLOWN SUIT I mentioned earlier are here. I guess you can buy all the rest of the items and find out if any cause an effect somewhere.
The shop-keeper is in the middle of saying ALLOW ME TO ADJUST MY PRICES. Just like the other store all just go up by 1.
17 — GRAIL HALL
More doors like the switchyard.
18 — RECREATION HALL
There’s a pit you can cross by stepping on platforms without falling into a pit. It is fairly tricky and I haven’t managed yet. It seems (based on other locations) like it might take significant effort but only with the result of my score goes up by 5 or something.
19 — GEMINI DINER
There’s a list of items. If you read the menu and try to buy any of the items it says they’re not on the menu.
20 — CASINO
There are three slots. One slot gives vacuous statements that are either from 1984 or are 1984-esque.
Trying to use the second machine gets the response YOU DON’T HAVE THE MAKINGS. You don’t have a dollar, either.
That’s quite a lot to chew on and I’m not sure what I should be messing with. The original game just let you get into various shenanigans that seemed like escaping but weren’t, but the real way to escape was to go to the caretaker and tell him the right phrase. Here, I need a “keyhole” to even make it to the caretaker, and who knows if the phrase has changed. I suppose I should farm hangman a few more times for points (the word list is pretty small) and buy all the gear from both stores to see if they cause any new effects.
One other thing I should do is comb over the manual more, and in fact, I want to talk about it a little, because it is far more “in universe” than the original manual was, which gave straightforward if enigmatic advice. (“7. Above all, this is a game of psychology. While the Island is trying to keep you off balance, you must try to hoodwink the authorities. From your knowledge of the Island, try to guess how their minds must work. Your one hope for escape is to second guess them.”)
For the new manual, it is written as if from a journalist who is writing about the Island, titling it “A Wolf in the Fold: The Conspiracy Behind the Microcomputer”. The supposed journalist rambles about modern life and technology and mentions a journal that appeared as a mysterious text file called BOTTLE:
I tried to meet this Caretaker — I’m told he represents whomever is in charge. His house was easy enough to find, but his door was locked. I’m not so interested in answers that I’m willing to cool my heels until I’m let in. It’s time for me to leave.
Let’s see, if I can’t confront the top, I’ll sneak out through the bottom. My “official” map says there’s just a white picket fence surrounding the place. Yes, I see it there, down the street. Just climb over and . . . What the Hell is that? I’ve run into watchdogs both animal and electronic before, but nothing like this! It’s after me! I can’t outrun it …
A later section called THE KEY TO ESCAPE has the journalist allegedly explaining the secret:
Perhaps it takes an objective eye to see what one is facing, for I believe that I have discovered, from the bits of information I have gathered, the way out of The Island It’s all so deceptively simple. All one needs to do is CANCEL THIS LINE … CANCEL THIS LINE … CANCEL THIS LINE … INTERRUPT … INCOMING MESSAGE … BEGIN
This is followed by some text which is not from the journalist at all.
For those who don’t want to read all that (you’re tired and this is a long post, you’re on mobile, I’m happy for you or I’m sorry that happened, etc.) I just want to draw your attention to the fact it comments on how game is a remake and the commercialism implicit therein:
Such hypocrisy! Look at how he has succumbed to market pressure by taking a successful game (and don’t believe it is any more than this) and injecting the obligatory sound and high resolution graphics effects, just to make it competitive with everyone else’s product. Where is the originality? And he speaks of individually! Now there is doublethink for you.
I’ll attempt to bust open a few doors next time, or at least get caught by Rover in a more creative way. In The Prisoner 1 I missed an “ending” where you supposedly escaped and yet you really hadn’t (matching the episode Chimes of Big Ben where Number 2 figures out that he hasn’t made it to London but still is in the village). I’m hoping there’s some equivalent in Prisoner 2. I’ve put the relevant episode below with a time-stamp for the ending:
David Mullich’s work might be one of the most famous Apple II games of 1980 — insofar as Apple II games from that year could get famous — but I found it too janky and difficult to control to really get the experience the author was hoping. Some of this was certainly intentional: the premise has you on an Island trying to escape, with a confusing array of events trying to pry out the reason why you resigned from your top-secret job (rendered in-game as a three-digit code).
I absolutely admire the high concept of having a secret that the game then tries its best to pull out of you. I still can’t think of anything quite like it, and it meshes perfectly with the medium; that is, despite the game being based on a TV show, it does something the TV show could never accomplish.
Just like how I could admire the method of defeating the dragon in Crowther/Woods conceptually while decrying the actual effect in real gameplay, the same happened here: I just had so little congruence with what was going on the end result was more me admiring the meta-structure of the thing rather than getting any Art out of it. I can understand, given the scale being tipped heavily to Craft over Art in this era, lingering for while; additionally the person of Mullich himself is intriguing biographically, and he went on to work on important games like I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream and Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines.
All this might be moot, because Mullich had a second shot at the same material with Prisoner 2; not the earliest “remake” because you have to count, say, graphics getting added to Goblins, but certainly early. The original was a combination of text and ASCII art coded off-the-cuff in BASIC; this game instead is rendered in attractive Apple II graphics, looking like something that might come out of On-Line Systems were it not for the heavy social awareness and nightmare scenario.
Just like the original you have to navigate out of an initial maze…
…and then try to escape, visiting 30 building sites in the process. But while I’ve run across at least one activity that is identical, the buildings have a much different feel and I expect some activities are different.
Also, the original solution of just walking in to the Caretaker and telling him you’re playing a computer game doesn’t work.
I originally planned to play this simultaneously with the first Prisoner game, being informed it was essentially the same game with graphics, but I discovered quite quickly it was different enough it needed its own posts. That doesn’t mean my playthrough here will necessarily be long — and I can already tell there is some identical content — but I do like having another swing at the universe with some of the rough edges removed. Maybe it will go better this time. (Are the rough edges what made it Art, though?)
I’ll report back at my efforts to get into all the buildings next time. At least some of them don’t let you in at all (which I don’t remember happening much in the original!)
Renga in Blue 