Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

From Mobygames.

We’ve so far seen two games by Dale Johnson, Mad Venture (with Christine Johnson) and Palace in Thunderland (with Ken Rose). In Mad Venture there was an item that mentioned Palace, and in Palace there was an item that mentioned Mystery in Madness, Dale Johnson’s third game.

>READ BOOK
IT READS, “LOOK FOR THE NEXT ATTRACTION, MYSTERY IN MADNESS” AT YOUR LOCAL COMPUTER STORES SOON!”

The game never was finished as Mystery in Madness, but there was a 1982 version called Mission in Madness.

This was followed by another 1982 version called Madsquerade, which added what I might call “programmer art” to the game.

From A2Can’s Twitter feed.

Neither of these versions are that famous, and in fact I have no access to the early graphical version. What I do have access to is the version from 1983 called Masquerade (eventually dropping the “mad” bit altogether) as published by Phoenix Software. It includes new art by a name that might be familiar.

Yes, that’s the same Rick Incrocci who did Lucifer’s Realm.

Back in ’82 I bought my first Texas Instrument Computer – then an Apple II. I fell in love with computers and things just started happening. I had been a cartoon illustrator for many years prior – so making the move to computer graphics was no big deal (I bought two very expensive graphics tablets that Apple used to make – back then, they were about $800 each). I was doing computer graphics for a few Chicagoland educational houses – then places like Phoenix and Penguin Software just started calling me out of the blue. It was a small world back then – just a few computer artists in Chicagoland and a lot of small software companies that actually worked out of their homes. Not any more.

— Quoting Incrocci from the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities

I wish could explain exactly the history sequence here, but it is still a little mysterious. Dale Johnson died in 1999 so nobody can ask him. I especially don’t know where or how the earlier two versions surfaced — were they published? I haven’t found any ads indicating such, and Mad Venture and Palace in Thunderland had both fairly prominent spreads. Maybe they were just given out at the Northern Illinois Apple Users Group, or even shown off without distribution? Everyone in the Chicago area knew each other, so at least it isn’t shocking that Madsquerade landed into the hands of Phoenix for publishing.

I’m going to play the Incrocci version but I may refer back to the text game sometimes, especially if the puzzles start to get gnarly; perhaps there will be a different description or puzzle sequence that will help decipher what’s going on in the 1983 version of the game.

By “everyone seems to know”, there later was a French version called Marmelade, which is the sort of thing that can only happen if your game gets widespread; additionally, it made the charts at Softalk. Still, the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities, who got their numbers from Ron Unrath, founder of Phoenix Software, gives an estimate of 1500 copies sold. 1500 is not huge even for that era, but I suspect widespread piracy; Paul Berker (of the prior Phoenix games Birth of the Phoenix and Adventure in Time) mentions at “pirate parties” most people he bumped into at Apple II meetings knew about his games but hadn’t bought them.

Masquerade has our hero a detective on the hunt for the crime lord Mr. Topp. In both of the early versions the intro reads:

YOU’VE BEEN TRACKING A NOTORIOUS HIT MAN FOR WEEKS. YOUR MISSION IS TO FIND THE “TOP MAN” IN THE ORGANIZATION AND DO AWAY WITH CRIME!

For the 1983 version:

YOU’VE BEEN TRACKING A NOTORIOUS HIT MAN FOR WEEKS. YOU TRAIL HIM TO A SEEDY HOTEL ROOM, BREAK IN, AND WITH THE BUTT END OF YOUR TRUSTY .44 MAGNUM, KNOCK HIM COLD. THIS COULD BE THE LEAD YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR.

This makes it a little clearer what’s going on at the start:

That is, we weren’t hanging out in a hotel room and got ambushed; we did the ambushing. Searching the body reveals a wallet with one (1) dollar and a business card.

Ivan Tupickemoff — Professional Assassin — Hours by Appointment

Plot-wise I’d think we’d want the assassin awake for interrogation, but maybe things went a bit wrong. Perhaps we need to wake him up as part of the game (there’s a tricky aspect to that you’ll see in a moment).

Moving the body reveals a key (note: SEARCH and MOVE revealed different things — this also is probably a game where you need to SEARCH multiple times). The key unlocks the briefcase which has a mask and mysterious box that gives a high-pitched squealing sound; I have yet to find a use for the latter.

Just outside the hotel room is a phone booth with a bomb. The bomb is set to explode at 6:15 exactly. In addition to the gun we start with a watch indicating that’s about an hour away.

Just as a test, I went outside the hotel and waited, and you can indeed witness demolition followed by rubble. Since no items seem to result, this seems to be more of a general time limit we have to worry about than a return-later style puzzle.

Before moving on to town, I want to mention one difference in the text-only version of the game. There’s a meta-conversation where there’s a room in the hotel with an adventurer.

YOU ARE IN A PRIVATE HOTEL ROOM

EXITS: EAST

OBJECTS: ADVENTURER. APPLE.

>LOOK ADVENTURER

HE IS EXHAUSTED. HE MUTTERS, “AT LAST I FOUND THE TOP MAN, BUT, AS USUAL, GOT KILLED. LET’S SEE, THAT’S ABOUT 17 DIFFERENT WAYS I MANAGED TO KILL MYSELF. (GASP, COUGH!) THE PUZZLES SEEMED SO EASY AT FIRST, BUT THEN I REALIZED THAT THERE WERE MULTIPLE SOLUTIONS AND ONLY ONE IS RIGHT. BUT WHICH ONE…”

This is explicitly discussing up front one of the game’s patterns, which is that you can solve puzzles in a “wrong way” using up an item that’s needed for later. I know one bit where I’ve likely already hit this. I’ve never seen the “main text” of a game — as opposed to hints from the game’s manual — explicitly call out one of the gameplay patterns early like this.

(Aside: is there a better term than “gameplay patterns” here? That’s all I’ve been using in the past but I’d love a term that implies “things that aren’t true about all text adventures generally, but just about some games in particular, and they can take some work on the player’s part to extract out and might even be subconscious tendencies of the author they aren’t aware of”.)

Moving on past the hotel room to the main town, there’s not any explicit investigating going on: rather, you are being followed.

The “mysterious figure” who is watching you shows up in the graphical game in the lower left corner as a shadow. Once the figure is following it has a random chance of throwing a knife and killing you outright like one of the dwarves from Crowther/Woods Adventure. You might think to use your gun to just shoot the person, but alas, your gun has no bullets.

There is a way to forestall the figure appearing for a while: wear the mask. The figure normally appears immediately upon leaving the hotel area, but the appearance is delayed at least slightly if you’ve got the mask on.

Here’s the map of the town I have so far:

Due to knives it took a couple passes through to see everything. There’s a movie theater early that wants $5 for entry (only a dollar to start from the assassin’s wallet, alas) and there’s a zoo that wants $1 for entry.

While paying the $1 works for the Zoo, there’s a popcorn seller immediately inside who wants $1, so I suspect you might get in the Zoo via a different route and save the dollar for popcorn.

Other scenes in the zoo: a fence that’s electrified and will kill you if you climb it, a building with security that will kill you if you try to go in, and a snake by a rock that will kill you if you pick up the rock.

Another part of the zoo has a bird, but if you try to take the bird and throw it at the snake (copying the Original Adventure solution) it just flies away.

Finally there’s a “beggar” and a “monkey house” I’ve done nothing yet with.

This one’s going to be tricky, I’m sure. I’m not just basing this on the previous Dale Johnson games (Alice in Thunderland was delightful but absolutely personified tough-as-nails puzzlebox) but the fact there was a contest with $1000 for a solution to the game, invoking the same shenanigans as various UK companies. The contest was eventually won and paid out but after Phoenix already got sold to another company (American Eagle) for reasons I’ll save for another time.