I have reached a point where I started to think I was hitting at least one of the “broken moments”, and after doing some more research I ended up reading all the way through this thread discussing the issue.
There’s enough “open threads” to the game that it is a mystery what might be caused by broken source code and what might be caused by our inability to solve the last lingering puzzles. From that thread, someone hacked the game in order to get a “dark hooded figure on horseback” to appear (which seems to be bugged to never appear).
>EXAMINE FIGURE
You have looked upon the Dark Angel. This is the angel of death: to be more specific, your death. It has cost you your life to look upon it.
If you avoid the death, the horse will drop some manure that will be useful later. Without that item it drops a whole chain of puzzles from being solvable, and there’s one moment after (testing with hacking in the manure in one of the rooms) where the game just outright crashes.
I’ll try to report what remains in the game that I needed to and was able to solve (less than I thought!) followed by what maybe is happening with the broken parts.
Returning to parts that did work — I had quite thoroughly checked all cardinal directions on my map, but I hadn’t tried all permutations of GO or ENTER or the like that seemed logical, and I realized at a lake, I had neglected to SWIM.
Instead of going east into the purple mist (which teleports you to the castle, as shown) you can dive and find a “plug” at the bottom of the lake, but let’s save the plug for later and explore the castle:
On the outside portion there’s a garden that will be important later.
Soon after I hit one of the gnarliest, most extreme examples ever of the Parallel Universe Problem. (Condensed: imagine you go from A to C in an adventure, with no issues. You restore a saved game. You try going from A to C but you get stuck at B, which you didn’t get stuck at before. What was different? You’re in a parallel universe but it is non-obvious what changed. That’s the Parallel Universe Problem.) I cheerfully explored around castle Gargantuan, including visiting a portcullis…
To either side of the portcullis stand two huge and imposing statues, their arms raised and holding huge swords.
…and went in what I thought in was another direction, to explore even more of the map.
Lots of juicy things over here: an emerald in a fireplace…
…a zombie nearby a weird room with a purple sphere…
…a flamethrower which explodes when you try to use it…
…and a decently clever way out, where you spot the same purple mist that teleported you to the castle, and jump on down to what otherwise seems like doom.
Mid-exploration I was wanting to try bringing in a different object, so restored a saved game and went through the swimming process again and…
…got stopped by the statues. First of all, I didn’t even know by going south I was entering the portcullis, I somehow had assumed it was to the north (given there is no description of opening and the like, it was a puzzle I had earmarked to check out fairly soon). Second, I was utterly baffled why I got stopped on one run-through but not the other.
Fortunately, there’s not that many items in the game, and some more experimentation revealed I had the cloak with me and worn on my first trip through, which makes the statues let you through. So I had solved a puzzle without realizing I had solved a puzzle!
Returning to thwacking at various puzzles throughout the game, I found that back at the church where there’s a rope at the bell, you can CUT ROPE rather than ring the bell. The rope then works at a railing up higher, allowing you to steal a minute hand off the church clock (which is a treasure).
Not really stealing, remember. This all goes to the altar.
I was now truly stuck — including puzzles from last time — on the spider, the creature, and the geyser. I also now had a flamethrower, zombie, garden, and purple sphere all puzzling me. I also found if I dived into the lake I could find a plug which the game suggests you can pull but I had no way of doing so.
Roger Durrant suggested in comments I check out the “Crystal Grotto” some more. I ran across a completely undescribed “wall” while poking around:
There doesn’t seem to be any way to reveal by normal means there’s a special “wall” object; I just was prodding for secret passages and gave the noun a try, despite it being unmentioned.
The tap will cause boiling water to start flowing. This affects the geyser out past the Charon area, and lets you go on through to a sewer and a train line:
If you avoid reading the warning sign (which only applies if you’ve read it, like Wile E. Coyote) then you can find a platinum cup, which was visible earlier as being on top of the geyser, then escape entirely through the geyser hole itself.
So all that was handy, but I was still horribly stuck, and I finally got around to reading that entire thread I mentioned at the top of this post. There I found I was stuck exactly where everyone else was, namely:
a.) the flamethrower doesn’t seem to do anything useful; it seems like it ought to fry the spider but it doesn’t work (the thread indicates some way to fix it with the pen so at least it doesn’t blow up, but I never could find the right verb combo for that; since it doesn’t work anyway, I didn’t try too hard)
b.) there seems to be no purpose to picking up the critter (that prevents you from picking up the harp, sticks to you when you try to set it down, etc.)
c.) there seems to be no purpose to killing the vampire (the stake does nothing)
d.) there seems to be no way of pulling up the plug
From game hacking, we know pulling up the plug lets you enter Neptune’s realm, which has a trident which is a treasure, but also, importantly, lets you enter Elysian and bypass Charon. This lets you also keep the coin (assuming the route can even be taken).
The missing and buggy-to-obtain manure can be dropped at the garden, to then obtain a purple cube which the gardener gives you, which can be taken to the purple sphere to get the purple sphere, and then have the game crash when the zombie tries to follow you.
Some or all of this might eventually be fixable by hacking the game to its intended form, so I will leave this game off on an open question mark for now. I’ve touched all the treasures but I don’t feel like optimizing a “run” when the run is obviously incomplete. I will keep an eye out for updates (or the PET version of Catacombs miraculously being found, although that one has been sought after now for a long, long, time).
Let’s return back to 1982 for now, shall we? I’ve got a trio of short games up next in the hopper (one where we need to pull off an assassination in a hospital) followed by an investigation game for Apple II which starts with a dead hitman in a hotel room.
I’ve made a smidge of progress nibbling at the edges, enough for an update.
The tough thing about writing about adventure games is how often progress isn’t plot really as much as baby steps not made with any continuity, and certainly not delivered in a way that lends to clean narrative.
For example, one of the things I tried that failed was handling the spider and web. I had a matchbox and I thought perhaps I needed to bring it over to causes a fire (I’ve set many a web on fire now in adventures) but I hadn’t opened the matchbox yet. It only contains one “spent match”!
Additionally, the web and spider both were parsing LIGHT in such a way I suspected fire was the wrong direction (LIGHT WEB: “The web can’t be lit.”) so I decided to go a weapons route instead.
So, a sword isn’t a weapon? That’s curious. (Neither is a wooden stake, which I’ll get a hold of later.) The parser message does suggest that the right weapon will work, as trying to kill random objects doesn’t provide a similar response (“I think you should see a psychologist about your kill happy tendency!”)
The next thing I had earmarked to try was filling the glass carafe with holy water, which I had more success with: it worked! I then took the holy water over to Dracula, where I struggled for a while with verbs (POUR WATER didn’t work, either before or after waking DRACULA) finally coming up with throwing the entire carafe (you can’t just throw the water):
The wooden stake is the only thing achieved from this, and I haven’t used it for anything yet. I still have the suspicion Dracula gets some other use before getting taken down.
Despite what seemed like a fairly robust parser, I was running into enough verb difficulty I decided I need to do my big list again:
That’s pretty sizable, but it is interesting how much I’m still running into gaps; for example, there’s a puzzle with a geyser and a hole (still haven’t solved, but it seems like the hole needs blocking) where I tried to INSERT CLOAK (which of course isn’t understood).
I incidentally went on and tried my “extended comedy list” of verbs that I’ve really only seen in one place (mainly because it was discussed in comments recently), and guess which verb I found?
I suspect this is fishing and not sailing a boat, but with this game who knows?
One other extended verb I tested was STAMP, being hinted at from the inscription at the catacombs. I had originally assumed an item that you then stamp things with, but the response indicated STAMP was standalone:
Little happens except your foot is smarting a bit.
Oho! I expected to try it in the catacombs and die (given the warning) but I got the same response. Not Subterranean Encounter style to the warnings, then. After some experimentation I found STAMP worked at the Cube rooms, allowing teleportation from one room to the other.
This doesn’t unlock anything new (you can simply walk between the cube rooms), but I suspect later there will be good logistical reasons to do this.
Having done all that, I browsed back in the sea of green verbs and looked for anything helpful. I was staring at the very first word (CUT, I have no idea why I have it first) and realized I could try it back at the grass at the Elysian Fields:
If you try to visualize in a completely literal way this makes no sense — an entire supernatural field, and scissors will really reveal a secret item? — but I think this suggests not to get too fixated on physical reality in this game, and as long as two things go together in some sense (cutting and grass) they might be a solution to a puzzle.
Speaking of puzzle solutions, another verb that struck me was PRAY, which for some curious reason I hadn’t tried yet at the lost souls.
The failure to enter the gates shown above might be necessary at some junction for logistics purposes, but there is a way through the gate — you just need to open that Good Book from the church.
Yes, the furry ball seems to mostly serve as a way to prevent you from picking up objects, much like my own cats. If you go down you’ll land in front of the church.
To recap what’s needed for this part of the narrative
a.) you need to hand a coin to Charon to enter the land of the dead
b.) you need to cut grass at the Elysian Fields, the immortal rest place where the heroes go, with some scissors, in order to find and take a large diamond
c.) you can then pray to get sent to heaven, and use a Good Book to enter within
d.) then use the opportunity just to swipe a golden harp and get away
A fun clash of kleptomaniac adventurer and religion. (Although remember all treasures go to the altar! The instructions even chidingly remind you that the treasures aren’t really yours. I think it best not to read too much into the symbology of it all.)
I’m not left with much to ponder over: just the spider and the geyser and the small creature. Maybe the creature and the spider will fight, I haven’t tried that yet. However, being a hunt-the-object adventure there are no doubt some hidden puzzles, so I should probably comb over the whole map again looking for things to poke at.
If nothing else, I should try putting together gathering all the treasures I’ve managed so far into one “run” to see where I’m at scoring-wise (technically out of 250, although remember due to bugs potentially only 240 are possible). The inventory limit is pretty tight so this is one of those games where you solve the puzzles first and then do the “real walkthrough” where you only take the items you need when you need them.
This continues directly from my previous post, although a brief technical note before getting to the blog post proper: there is a saved-game feature but it is very fussy to get to work on DOSBox (Canalboy in his instructions says it took five hours to figure it out). I am sidestepping all that entirely with the emulator DOSBox-X which has very good save state features so I can ignore the issue.
…
For any large-scale and relatively wide-open treasure hunt, the first order of business is mapping things out. Let me take you on a tour.
From a pamphlet advertising the Classic Quests.
The game starts at a church, and all treasures go on the altar.
There are a few dark niches which require a lamp we’ll get to fairly soon. It is in one of these niches that I ran across my first death.
You are in a high ceilinged chamber, there is an exit to the south and a dark passage leading up. The west wall looks as though it used to contain some kind of doorway, but not now. There is a rope hanging almost in the centre of the chamber, it disappears up into darkness.
>U
It is very dark in here.
>U
Something nasty in the dark has found you very tasty. You are between a hard place and a rock, with flames rising om the ground all around, seemingly fueled by the very rocks themselves.
When you die you go to Hell, and this might be like Acheton where there could be a way out. This is indicated by a Good Book elsewhere in the church.
The “entering Heaven with certain holy writings” bit at least suggests it might be possible to go to Heaven on death rather than Hell. The “defiling the holy altars” part incidentally also indicates swearing at the altar will also kill you; this is true, but not with the word “shit”, which is apparently a noun rather than a verb (it maps to “manure” which is an object, and I think the one that’s supposed to be buggy).
Nearby the Good Book — on the opposite side of an Aisle — is a podium hiding some keys. Open questions are:
there’s a font with holy water, where is there a container that allows getting it?
and
is there some secret associated with the “west wall looks as though it used to contain some kind of doorway”?
The holy water I incidentally suspect will got to a vampire we’ll see close to where the lamp is, and the west wall I suspect is one of those secrets that gets resolved “from the other side” (that is, this is a placeholder for arriving via elsewhere on the map) but with less confidence, as there’s some nonsensical map connections elsewhere.
(Nonsensical map connections are more of a schtick in ’77-’82 games than they are in ’86 games, but I suspect the geography is mostly matching the original. However, I’m going to try to avoid speculating too much about the early version of the game because whenever I play Brian Cotton’s next game, there’s both early and “revisited” versions so I can compare so I can get a sense of how much fiddling was going on.)
Popping around outside there’s a graveyard I got lost in last, but the maze is fairly small (don’t worry, there’s a bigger maze later) and I was able to get to a tomb, which unlocks with the keys.
Just inside there’s a closed coffin with a lamp and sword. I can’t confirm — that’s not a bizarre combo to just come up with independently — but I’m wondering if there was more influence from Zork than Adventure on this game. Zork had some religious bits with the Land of the Dead, but original Adventure is squarely secular (resurrection in that game is from the computer-narrator itself).
To the east of the coffin is Dracula. (Guessing it was his original hang-out point, but the big stake in the chest messed with his sleeping arrangements.)
Dracula doesn’t immediately try to kill you (“Count Dracula is looking around to see what’s for tea.”) so may have some utility behind putting him down again (you can’t stab again with the stake, alas). You can run away and he doesn’t follow, although he does take the stake from you, so there doesn’t seem to be a reason to wake him up early.
Just a bit farther there’s a coin marked OBOLUS and a ferry at the river Styxx. The coin can go to Charon for a one-way trip.
The “you can’t carry anymore” in the screen above hints at the fact there’s a fair number of items and the inventory limit is pretty rough. Based on Roger Durrant there’s going to be a lot of strategic juggling to get the right items to the right places. It isn’t done by absolute number of objects either, items have weight, so a cloak is heavier than some keys. Have I mentioned yet — like Zork — there’s limited battery to the lamp, so the whole game is under a timer?
The area isn’t large, or at least I haven’t made it large yet. The fuzzy ball covers a slab which indicates to watch for the fuzzy ball’s mother, and if you try to set the critter back down it just jumps back into your arms.
Is there something hidden in the grass at the Elysian fields?
How do you deal with the geyser?
You can also land yourself in a room just described as “Lost souls” with no apparent escape…
All about can be heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth of many lost souls, who cannot find their way to heaven or anywhere else.
…leading to the natural question: is the lost souls room just a trap or is there a way out?
Ignoring the river and proceeding on, there’s some catacombs. I have the “maze with no other purpose to be maze-y” rooms marked in blue.
There are two mysterious rooms that are “almost perfect cube[s]” where the north wall has a “shadowy figure”. What can be done in the cube rooms? Next to ne of the cube rooms is a “glass carafe” and a ruby. I have not yet had the opportunity to test if the carafe works on holy water.
There’s an “ancient room” with a message
N- S-AM--NG -N THE -ATA-OMB-
which I assume says NO STAMPING IN THE CATACOMBS, which is fine because I haven’t run across anything to do stamping with yet. I assume this is to prevent the traditional item-dropping solution to the maze, but honestly wouldn’t using a stamp be more clever?
One last section I explored — an offshoot of the catacombs — was a crystal palace.
There’s a treasure room with a “warning to all those who wouldn’t be king” adjacent to a room with some laundry. If you try to leave, you get told “not yet cretin”, but the laundry has a crown hidden within. If you wear the crown you can get out of the “cretin” passage.
The only real puzzle otherwise is a spider (“hairy with lots of legs”) with a web blocking one direction.
I scissors on me so I can safely say they aren’t the answer to how do I pass the spider web? It may be none of the puzzles are that hard individually but the logistics of solving order is where the real suffering lies.
For me to be sure, I have to solve a real puzzle first (I don’t count the crown or mapping out mazes as puzzles). Maybe next time?
The old Gothic church, so the locals say, used to have a veritable labyrinth of passages beneath it, but the whereabouts of the entrance to the passages has long since been forgotten. The church itself has fallen into disuse for a variety of reasons, the main one being the sinister aura that surrounds one of the large tombs in the church graveyard. The church’s treasures have long since disappeared without a trace.
An ancient local legend, all but forgotten now, tells of a vast underground land inhabited by weird monsters guarding wonderful treasures. Could there be any connection between this legend and the lost treasures? By the way, if you do find any treasure, take it back to the church, and lay it on the altar – after all, it doesn’t belong to you!
CATACOMBS is a large and complex adventure which is definitely not for beginners. Many of the puzzles to be solved are unusual, with ingenious solutions, and will stretch your imagination to its limits.
This is a game I vacillated on if I was even going to play it or not (or at least, play it anytime soon).
Back in the halcyon days of January 2020, when I was generating my 1981 list of games, one of the prominent “lost game” companies was Supersoft. We’ve seen them before with Hitch Hiker’s Guide and the saga involving a lawsuit.
They were not the only adventure game Supersoft published that year, and a Personal Computing Ad from November 1981 lists
Three of these are by Brian Cotton, and all are lost in their 1981 form (Commodore PET). Goblin Towers exists in a later 1984 form for C64. Brian Cotton eventually (through 1981-1982) had a series of five games (Catacombs, Witch Hunt, Cornucopia, Forestland, Goblin Towers) where I had them sorted as either 1984 games or “lost”.
Based on the earliest advertising anyone has been able to track (“anyone” mainly being Gareth Pitchford) Catacombs was the first of the games and started being advertised March 1981. The timing here — that is, the exact month of March 1981 — has an enormous amount of significance, as our Quest for the First Britventure in 1981 mostly stopped at The Golden Baton and a May 1981 ad. Our quest would have ended there had it not been blown away by the existence of A. Knight’s Galactic Hitchhiker from 1980. But Galactic Hitchhiker was a one-person-game sold by a one-person-company, that is, not sold by a real “professional” distributor like Molimerx or Supersoft.
By having an ad date of March 1981, Catacombs is the first original “professional distributed” British adventure game.
And… we don’t have the original anymore, nor the early C64 version (which, based on the Cotton games we do have, probably just involved copying the source code from the PET verbatim). There was yet another version made as part of a “Classics Revisited” set from 1986/1987, for a wide variety of platforms…
…but at least for Catacombs, those versions were all lost too in 2020. I had Catacombs sorted in my “I guess we’ll never see what it’s like” folder, marked with grim digital red. There I thought it would remain, until in 2022 a collector stepped forward and uploaded the entire Classic Revisited set to oldgames.ru (in DOS format). Suddenly, as of September of last year, it became possible to play all of them.
This stuck me with a dilemma; Catacombs is extremely important in British adventure game history. We can say British adventures on personal computer started with Galactic Hitchhiker but British adventure games as an industry started with Catacombs. But is it worth it to play a “remix” which I knew to be different?
Eh, whatever. I’ll be getting to playing this in the 2030s sometime anyway, might as well check it out early.
Some quick history on Supersoft before starting the journey–
Pearl Wellard (left) and Peter Calver (right) were accountants in 1978 who both worked at the same company. The company obtained a computer (a PET, the “proper business computer” of the Trinity) and the pair was the ones who ended up setting up the system. After that they got hooked enough to start writing and selling their own PET software under the name Supersoft.
There wasn’t software for the PET in those days. There were only about 1000 PETs in the country.
The pair ended up giving their jobs up after 18 months to work at Supersoft full-time.
Our turnover in the first year was £2000 — in the second year it increased to £100,000.
There’s not a great deal of info on the duo’s early years otherwise (Peter has done interviews, but mainly because of their purchase of Audiogenic in the mid-80s. Who cares about that old PET software, right?) I did want to share a bizarre excerpt I found from a freeform “gossip column” in the January 1981 issue of Personal Computer World, that is, from two months before Catacombs got published:
Supersoft’s Peter Calver has a PET name for partner Pearl Wellard. Pearl has threatened the Editor with all sorts of dire horrors if he reveals that it’s Pearl*****. (A prize for the first correct entry.)
I think we’ve had enough preface, but I should add one other thing: based on the thread at CASA, one puzzle has a bug that makes it unsolvable and one puzzle is currently unsolved. This is a hunt-the-treasure game where you are supposed to gather everything together, type SCORE, and pat yourself on the back for a job well done, so there’s no “ending text” anyway (people have extracted the text to confirm). I think the max score is ~240 out of 250? It is difficult to check without spoilers.
For my first session I decided to explore freeform, without even making a map, just to see what I was up against. Poking in the church I quickly found the altar where the treasures were destined to go (at least according to the ad copy in the catalog).
I found a notice board which felt Zork-ish.
Trying to wander away from the church, all I found was a maze.
Avast, casual exploration foiled! … I guess I’ll whip out the maps and start taking in things seriously next time, and share what some of the puzzles are like.
(In the meantime, could someone let me know what the actual theoretical high score is, given the bug?)
I have finished. While this took three entries just like Temple of Bast, this wasn’t nearly in the same class in terms of complexity and difficulty. I was stumped early by lacking a verb (I was using MAKE rather than BUILD) and here it was even simpler.
Last time I left off a chest I was unable to unlock.
I had discovered a clue I missed before. The coin (normally just treasure) also had writing on it.
I hence took a long sidetrack trying to get the chest on fire (even though there weren’t any “burn” verbs that worked) with no luck. There’s a piece of wood from elsewhere (with the potential for a portable fire) but it seems to have no method for setting it ablaze.
It turns out the solution was much, much, simpler than I was thinking. The hint is meant to refer to the bowl of fruit on the top of the hearth, and you are supposed to EAT it.
To be fair, I was a little hesitant on chowing down on things after the bottle of acid from the start of the game. I do think I’m a little hesitant about random consumption in general; I’m used to the food from an adventure being fed to someone else, which happens 85% of the time (including in Original Adventure). That 15% of the time still exists where you are intended to just try eating something with no provocation other than to see what happens. (See also: the strength-giving berries in Katakombs where it took me abnormally long to just try them out.)
The keys unlock the chest giving a *piece of paper* (money, it’s just a treasure) but also work on the keyhole in the fountain.
This unlocked the last section of the game. There’s a maze, a small section with a bridge, and another maze.
The location you land from the trapdoor is marked in green.
Before the first maze, there’s a treasure which is also a trap.
The sign indicates to beware going south, which drops you down a bottomless pit (I imagine most players would know by now to take warnings seriously, but again this seems to be about narrative flavor more than anything tricky). The gold on the other hand had me stumped for a while because the standard for such treasure-gathering games is that asterisks always means a treasure must be taken with you.
The gold is entirely a red herring, even with the asterisks. You get a full score without it, and you cannot take the gold without dying.
To the east there’s a circular study with a book containing half of a clue.
IT SAYS: THE ANSWER TO THE SECOND LEVEL IS…
After the maze…
…comes a “large cavern” with a pentacle, a slab, and double doors to the north.
The slab has writing you can’t read, and a crack with a gold medallion hidden in it. The pentacle has writing to tell you to sit inside for protection, which is useful for opening the doors.
From where the minotaur came you can get another treasure (a gold candelabra).
Just past that to the west is an area with a stream and a bridge…
…and there’s a keypad with numbers, where the game says you can PUNCH (number) to input something. There’s a also a raft at a stream that is blocked by some ropes.
Making further progress requires turning south, to the other maze.
At least the authors here have the excuse they could re-use the art from the maze rooms. Everything else has unique drawings.
There’s a pistol with an ivory handle at a bed (another treasure)…
…but also the second half of that clue from the book, written on a random sign in the maze.
IT SAYS: … VERY GROSS.
Putting it all together
THE ANSWER TO THE SECOND LEVEL IS VERY GROSS.
This all lines up to indicate that the keypad needs the number 144 (a gross, that is, a dozen dozen).
The bridge appears once the keypad number has been entered. On the other side, there’s a PEAR (which when examined, is actually a PAIR of scissors) and a roll of tape.
This was the last thing I found while playing, but it’s just LOOK BRIDGE while on the opposite side.
The scissors can free the raft from the ropes, and the tape is needed to be at hand in order to patch a hole.
There’s one more death that can happen here, if you’ve been keeping the BAG OF SAND the whole game, which so far, never was useful (and in fact, only serves as a trap).
THE ENORMOUS WEIGHT OF THE BAG OF SAND CAUSES THE LIGHT-WEIGHT RAFT TO SINK TO THE BOTTOM OF THE STREAM. YOU DROWN.
I avoided this during my game just because, weirdly, I had been experimenting with the other trap (the gold you can’t pick up) and had already dumped my inventory (thinking maybe you just needed to be holding nothing and the gold was carryable). I never bothered to pick the sand back up, so I got saved from one trap by another trap.
In the end, this was pretty straightforward and pleasant. I think the difficulty spike at the beginning was a little rude, even though you could resolve the fork issue by typing LOOK FORK; at the very least, there’s a callout of Subterranean Adventure in a Family Computing article circa 1983 that complains quite specifically about that puzzle. The deathtraps, despite showing with some regularity, were all “polite” in that they had some kind of signal. With that tunnel with the poison darts, for instance…
…if you LOOK TUNNEL before going in, the game tells you about the trap.
YOU DISCOVER THAT THERE ARE POISONED DARTS HIDDEN IN THE WALLS.
There are some games where this would just indicate a puzzle to be solved; some of getting in the “flow” was realizing what kind of game this was.
(Design-philosophical aside: for gamebooks especially I tend to mentally sort them into how much they reward thoughtful choice-making. That is, a book may have a left and a right lever to pull, and there is no clue at all which to pull, and you just have to guess — see my compaint on Forest of Doom. Or, it may be, as here, there will always be a signal for what the right choice is, so you can role-play to an extent someone who can’t fall back on a saved game and try to do the right choice the first time. This is a little more pleasant. There can be use to the effect of a “blind choice” but I do find if a game starts using blind choices I make later choices much more at random, even if the author sometimes provides hints for what’s the best option; I’ve lost my feeling of trust that my time won’t be wasted.)
I wish the authors had a further chance to establish an identity and work on more games, and at least they planned it. On the piece of wood (the one that doesn’t set on fire) the whole point of it is to serve as an ad. It has writing and you can READ WOOD:
The follow-up game never surfaced.
One last comments on the graphics: I’m not sure how much fresh analysis I really can do (since you’ve been seeing them along with me) but they’ve been genuinely pleasant. Compare with Asylum, which was entirely graphical, yes, but always felt like some “programmer art”; that is, it was made functional, enough to give a visual sense of the world, but never had the sort of pixel art one might take seriously as a real style. Here, on the other hand, there was clear effort at style and texture. The perspectives and directions don’t always make sense, but the authors threw themselves into thinking what the TRS-80 was really capable of (like the stylized trees from the start of the game or the wood panel texture shown below).
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.
IN THIS ADVENTURE, SUBTERRANEAN ENCOUNTER, YOUR GOAL IS TO ATTAIN THE HIGHEST SCORE POSSIBLE IN THE FEWEST NUMBER OF MOVES.
Via 80-U.S., November 1982.
According to the 1985 book Microcomputer Market Place, Toucan Software was owned by Scott Mckenna and Steve Forrette. They only published one game which sold 500 copies. They are about as obscure a company can get; they never filed any official incorporation papers. (There’s another Toucan Software that emerges in the 1990s, but there seems to be no relation.)
Today’s game is a team effort between the aforementioned pair, and I’ve not been able to find either. The closest I got was a reference to a Scott McKenna who went to Bella Vista High School in that time span (in Fair Oaks, 1981-1985), so I’m going to guess the company was another one of the teenaged-entrepreneur larks, but I can’t confirm that with certainty. It does make sense that under such circumstances the authors would only sell 500 copies of one game and disappear after into history.
But it’s an interesting game! We’ve had TRS-80 games with graphics before, but none seem to have been influenced by the growing market for graphic adventures on the Apple II; they formed their own ecosystem with little relation.
I get the sense McKenna and Forrette at least saw a graphical Apple II game.
This games keeps the Scott-Adams style “YOU SEE” and “OBVIOUS EXITS”, but also fills more than half of the top of the screen with an image. We haven’t seen that before with the TRS-80, and the two other graphical TRS-80 games I know of coming up in 1982 don’t follow this pattern.
If the authors got the two-thirds-top-of-screen graphics look from, say, one of the [Sierra] On-Line games, they may also be enamored with the amount of random death. That bottle from the initial shot is acid (don’t drink it! you can POUR BOTTLE and it asks on what, but I have found nothing that works).
Heading east and then north from the starting room arrives at a “shack”.
Trying to enter kills you. You have one line where command can technically be typed, but the game seems to be coded to send every reaction to death.
How about a low move count with a low score as the game’s objective?
Heading south rather than north leads you to a castle.
There’s some logs on the south side (that are too heavy to move), while the east side has an open drawbridge.
I’m sure what happens next will shock you.
That’s almost everything I’ve managed so far, but go back at look at where the path splits. The game says there are “two forks in the path” which you could kind of read as a north fork and a south fork, but the way to actually read it is there is a fork and also a fork.
LOOK FORK reveals one of the forks to be a dinner fork, so this isn’t quite the same as Mad Venture where fork referred to both the literal location and the object. This is a joke rather than a mind-bending warp of reality.
I poked around some contemporary material that indicated the game was short (41 rooms) but given what happened last time, that doesn’t mean it will be easy. (At least it’s written in BASIC!) If you’d like to poke around yourself you can find a couple version of the game here, and AUTORUN (under the DISK EMU column) seems to work for the first version.
Back when we were first exploring early British games in 1981 we came across Trevor Toms who made a “Create Your Own” adventure system and wrote a game to go with it, City of Alzan. Both were published by Phipps Associates.
In 1982, Phipps published a tape that had just Trevor Toms system games written by Mike Farley:
From zx81stuff.
Greedy Gulch, the first on the list, involves entering a ghost town, finding a nearby mine, and getting a nugget of gold within. I originally had the thought to play all three games on the tape and cover them in one entry, but for reasons I’ll get into Greedy Gulch was a serious pain. It seems particularly to have been designed to troll the player like one of those Super Expert levels for Mario Maker.
I made a decision which may have been bad in retrospect. I switched from playing the ZX81 version to the ZX Spectrum version.
I had decent reason: while the opening room is more or less the same between the two…
Yes, it’s a top-down map. The game does this in the streets of the ghost town you start the game in.
…once the room descriptions started the ZX version had more room for text and managed to describe things more vividly.
In particular, there’s an emphasis on sound. A fair number of authors of this time appealed mostly to visual senses.
There are more pictures in the ZX Spectrum version but that seemed like just extra flavor.
I felt confidence, after mapping out what turned out to be a small opening town, that I would be over with the game quickly.
Some places, like the general store, require typing ENTER STORE, while other places just are connected (inconsistently) via compass directions.
The town felt like it mostly was meant to serve up a bunch of objects: a hat, a plank, a lamp, some matches, a leather bottle, an axe. A little more fussing about revealed a tin of oil in a cabinet, although the ZX version made it harder to find.
The ZX81 version just says “THE WALLS INSIDE THE CAFE ARE LINED WITH CUPBOARDS.”
The issue here is that it is sometimes hard for a player to know when something that’s part of the “regular paragraph” text of the game is important, as opposed to the “separated text”. There’s a longstanding tradition for objects that can be picked-up/manipulated to be mentioned separately, so the player does not waste time poking a bunch of unrecognized nouns. Trying to do something with the tables, for instance, is entirely unhelpful. In the ZX81 version of the game this mixing of important objects in the main text doesn’t matter because it is so short in order to draw attention; with the ZX version it isn’t as clear that the cupboards should be zeroed in on. So while the extra text is more vivid it also causes play issues with the way the game’s nouns are handled.
One last item I managed to pull out was a map. A nearby hotel mentioned a ZEEK THE MINER entry…
…and in a nearby assay office (with maps sorted by name) I was able to get Zeek’s map by typing GET ZEEK.
Having gathered everything I could manage, I tried going east to a ravine, and typing JUMP RAVINE leading to a desert.
I was just experimenting, because I hadn’t been able to do something else crucial that I figured would be important: fill the bottle with water. If you try to follow the path of Zeek on the map you die of thirst. There’s a “pump” just before the ravine that seemed like it’d work, but all my attempts (FILL BOTTLE, GET WATER, etc.) failed to yield results.
My best was typing USE PUMP which got the water to gurgle. I had to look up what to do here: you just need to USE PUMP twice in a row, which causes the gurgle to flow enough to get the water.
So, water in hand, I went back to the desert, and with a little false start (I thought it the path started North-East-East-East-South, but I had one too many Easts) I was able to trek through. However, I should emphasize something.
The ZX graphics drawing routine in this game is very slow. Ludicrously slow. Even cranking the system to 300% each step took a while. This will be important later.
Anyway: the result of my trek was a “plateau” where I could refill water.
Eyeballing the map, I figured I then needed to go east to head to the mine, but that landed me back in the desert, where I then could not get out and died of thirst. Whoops!
My last save was at the start of the desert, so I trudged back through the slooooooooooooooooooow loading graphics screens again, saved at the plateau, and then went in the correct direction (west). I was able to successfully light a lamp at the mine.
Well, not without the parser difficulties that dog the entire game. Here you need to STRIKE MATCH (?!), which automatically also lights the lamp (?).
Then immediately afterwards I got bit by a snake:
To be fair, this was intentional. I was testing, and with axe in hand, I … was not able to use it against the snake.
It turns out, the proper weapon again a snake is a gun. Yes, apparently it is easier to shoot a snake with a gun than it is to simply chop it with an axe. Learning!
I had seen a gun, back in town, but I originally thought it was possibly just scenery: the sheriff’s office had a locked gun cabinet, but I never managed a key. Testing back a saved game step or two, I finally after much heartache found USE AXE (trying to SWING AXE or BREAK CABINET or any other logical command didn’t work).
However, the gun was unloaded, and I was completely and truly stuck. I consulted a map, which indicated two places I hadn’t found. First was a backroom to The Store.
After some failed movement, I came across OPEN DOOR. Apparently that rectangle to the right is a door. Argh!
The ZX81 version, straightforwardly, says
THROUGH THE GLOOM YOU SEE A DOOR AT THE BACK
There’s a crate with some ammo in it, so you can load the gun.
(At this point, I was having some serious inventory-juggling problems; I hit my limit and needed to drop items to carry more. You can’t take everything with you on the desert trek, it seemed like, although I didn’t work out the true horror of what this implied until later.)
Going back to the map, I went to the other place of mystery, the barber, which I knew had a cellar beneath it.
Again, I ran through many, many verbs; this time, I struck out entirely and had to check a walkthrough, which advised me to LIFT BOARD.
!!!?!???!??
Look, it isn’t even 100% clear we’ve got a floor made up of boards. They don’t show up as a noun anywhere in the description, only potentially (potentially!) implied by the sound description. And on top of that, the verb that has to go with the board is relatively unusual, and plenty of my other actions I tried prior should have had the same effect.
I can’t even say the ZX81 fixes this problem.
Oh well. You need a light source in the cellar, which burns out the oil in your lamp, but fortunately, there’s that tin from the cafe that works. The cellars has some poles. I wasn’t immediately sure what they were for, but I knew I was now deeply in trouble as far as inventory juggling went.
The items that seem to go to the mine are
leather bottle (for the water), map (for the route, and you can’t just leave it behind, I tried), loaded gun, poles, plank, hat, matches, lamp, axe.
That’s three items too many. I thought maybe the axe was done, having smashed a cabinet. I didn’t record exactly what my other discards were, but I did get far enough to shoot the snake, then die immediately after:
It took me a couple iterations of slow (so slow) desert travel to realize, but you need every single item taken over to the mine. That means you need to cart some items to the plateau, drop them, then go back for a second load. This would not be a problem if you could just retrace your steps by the map but … you can’t! Trying to retrace leads you nowhere. Even though the game gave a clever method for avoiding maze-mapping on the way to your destination, now you’re in a maze that you need to map. So it’s like the game gave an easy route to a puzzle only to yank it away, haHA! you thought that bit with the arrows was the exit, but no, that’s just another spot that kills Mario.
It took me a couple tries to handle the logistics correctly and the desert wasn’t loading any faster, until finally I made it to the mine with all items in hand. (You can drop the map and bottle at the water spot, and after lighting the lamp you can drop the matches.)
I still had to work out the mine collapsing, and it required again a very novel and very specific verb, not in any game I’ve played before. PROP. You need to PROP ROOF.
To get by the “pole too long” problem you need to chop them down with your axe, but that only works if you remembered back in town to apply the command SHARPEN AXE at the blacksmith. Otherwise it’s back to a whole sequence of desert runs for you!
Then you can finally safely get the gold. To the west is an Adventurer’s Delight. What is an Adventurer’s Delight, you may ask? A maze that is completely useless and serves only to waste your time.
At least I was expecting troll behavior by now so I didn’t spend too long.
Gold in hand I went back to the starting place to reach victory.
It felt hollow.
I’m probably being unfair on Mike Farley’s game, but I’m going to take a psychic break on other things before trying to tackle his other two from this tape. Some aspects were truly just bad luck, but the structure really does seem intended to wind the player up before providing failure. Simply having the desert travel not be a pain would fix 95% of the issue; I wouldn’t even have minded SHARPEN AXE had it been a small matter to travel back.
This is all more the pity because the ZX descriptions really are decent! If I evaluated the game purely on room description writing (the later ZX version, not the original) it would be in the upper tier compared to other games from the era.
By the way, it may have been a bug, but as far as I can tell the water at the pump only fills once. So you might think to just make another full trip to fix something you’ve forgotten, but no: if you try to do another extra loop past the one the game intends, you’ve softlocked the game.
Renga in Blue 
