Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve had progress on both the informational front and the game front.

Information-wise, I had help from AtariSpot on a Discord server who sleuthed out two stories in the Sacramento Bee. Our intrepid duo of authors were indeed teenagers at the time at Bella Vista High, and a July 18, 1984 story goes into more detail on the founding of the company.

Steve Forrette had his mother design the logo, and (by the news story) had managed to sell 70 copies of the game (perhaps the 500 from the book is an over-estimate for rounding purposes). He got meagre profit due to costs:

I got more than I bargained for in selling it myself. I had to pay for postage, the phone, envelopes, baggies for the disc. But I learned a lot about how businesses work. I didn’t want to just sit back and let a big company sell it.

The company may have also had some sort of afterlife, as Strident tracked down Pelican the company in the comments, although I’m still unclear if the connection with the early-90s company (which was located in Connecticut and created educational “book making” software for classrooms) is accurate or not.

On the game front, I needed to whack at the game’s verbs. I first went through my “standard list”; fortunately the game is quite clear about if a command isn’t understood because of something being out-of-vocabulary or not.

One verb in particular, STAB, ended up being just the thing to take down the hermit, as long as I was holding the fork:

The inside of the shack has a rope. I took it over to the logs, and tried various commands, including MAKE BRIDGE and MAKE RAFT, with no luck. I was worried there was some pun I was missing (like the fork).

I eventually did a small peek at the BASIC source just to extract the verb list, and came up with BUILD. Argh! Notice I have been testing MAKE for a long time as a verb but not BUILD.

This quickly led me to BUILD RAFT, followed by GO RAFT.

I avoided it the first time around, but I’ll just give the tunnel effect now:

The game has by now established one of its Patterns. Some paths will be deathtraps, and not every deathtrap is a puzzle to solve. Some deathtraps are simply meant to be avoided, and that’s the only “puzzle” in them. (I will say, since I get stuck later, I’m not 100% definitive there’s no safe route through the tunnel, but there are so many circumstances where the player is simply meant to avoid something, I think it really is a red herring.)

In a theoretical sense, this is the most elemental type of puzzle you can have: here are three buttons, pushing the right one leads to victory, which one do you push? However, the fact it is easy to back out with a save game file means it isn’t a puzzle so much as a special effect. Quoting a comment I made on Pyramid of Doom:

I know traditionally the “diegetic plot” of an adventure is the one that goes through without deaths, but I’ve come to think this paints an incomplete picture. This particular death is amusing enough that it’s hard to imagine it won’t be “in the head” of the player, making the environment seem more dangerous. On the surface, the player is walking through a door. Underneath, the player is avoiding a death-trap. Without both branches simultaneously, part of the story is missing.

Skipping the tunnel, you can make your way around the moat to the north side of the castle, where there’s a dock, and a door you can go in.

Then there’s another deathtrap, although an announced one.

The sign hints adventurers shouldn’t be “sitting around on the job”, so if you SIT CHAIR, it will kill you.

This was more “experimenting for amusement” rather than being tricked. The later deathtraps are also well-signaled.

You’re supposed to ignore the chair entirely and pull the torch instead, opening a door into a new area.

There’s a suit of armor that will chop with you an axe if you try to pass by (again, this was an obvious trap, but I set it off anyway for amusement).

Acid will work to destroy it; past there is a locked chest I have yet to be able to open.

Heading a different direction leads to two levers, and yet another “signaled deathtrap” circumstance.

The sign tells you DON’T PICK THE WRONG ONE! You are instead supposed to pick the RIGHT one, that is, PULL RIGHT (or PULL LEVER, then say RIGHT when prompted). PULL LEFT fills the room with water and kills you.

Past that there’s an art gallery with a couple branches; one has a fountain with a *silver coin* and a keyhole, and this was the moment I was sure this was a treasure hunt, even if the game’s ad was coy about the fact we’re here to collect treasure.

Another branch had a *crown* in a side room, some wood in a firepit, and a table full of wizard items (hat, wand, crystal ball, manual). Some writing on a rug warned to “touch only what you can read”. Consequently, most of the items involve death when touched.

Reading the manual gives the clue “the answer may lie to the west, but may also be death”, and I admit I haven’t worked out where to apply this yet.

Finally, there’s a very small side maze:

This all leads to a huge jade sculpture.

Shockingly, the rubies are not a trap and can be taken straight out. There’s also a ladder and a magnifying glass nearby.

The ladder at least I put to good use, back in a room with a fire and a hearth where the top was too high to see. Applying CLIMB LADDER I was able to find a bowl of fruit.

From here I am stumped, and stumped in the kind of way I don’t even have active puzzles for the most part. I’ve got a locked chest and a keyhole in a fountain but in both cases I’d expect a key that I don’t yet have, so there’s nothing active to deal with there. This indicates I’m probably missing a secret, perhaps using the “answer lies to the west” clue.