Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Via TechBlog.

Another set of games, another teenaged programmer prodigy. In this case, one in Australia named Brendan Jones. According to this forum post by the author, he was 16 at the time he tried to get his RPG Sorcery for the VIC-20 published (’83 or ’84?), and he describes the process with a quote where I’ll keep the color commentary:

Did try, but this was through two clueless Aussie companies. Ozisoft and Imagineering. Ozisoft gave all their games to some dweeb to evaluate who stuck them in his Dad’s garage and forgot about them. Imagineering sat on it for a year and ignored all my letters until I finally threatened to sue their asses. (I was 16 or something at the time.) Imagineering was owned by a guy called Jodee Rich, who went on to create OneTel = one of Australia’s biggest corporate colllapses. I reckon Richard Garriot with his zip-locked plastic bags had a far better idea.

I have the nagging feeling there’s a one-sided story going on here, but we’re focused more on his text adventures anyway. (*) As they span 1982 to 1983 he was a young teenager at the time. They were written (along with some games by Nigel Dunk) with an Adventure Compiler of the author’s own invention. Quoting the author and again keeping the color commentary:

The compiler prepared the adventure from a specification for use with a machine language library. The library was very fast, handling most of the adventure management. All the programmer need do was specify the behaviour of objects in BASIC. It was a shame that text adventures became extinct, superceded by bloatware adventures that keep stopping to shovel animated cut scenes down your throat.

The author lists the games as being:

1: Marsh Castle (1982)
2: Carnage of Karn (1982)
3: Rocky Island (1982)
4: ?
5: Fatman: Crime and Vice (1982)
6: Spyflight (1983)
7: House of Demons (1983)

What’s number 4? No idea; the author skips the number without mentioning it. Marsh Castle is lost as well; based on the author’s notes it sounds like there was a corrupted tape. Perhaps missing game number 4 was a tape missing entirely.

As the comments above imply, none of these games had commercial releases (that I could find, that doesn’t bar dodgy bootlegs at least) although they did spread a bit past the author’s home, so they don’t count exactly as private games.

I played C64 versions of all three.

You start in a spaceship with access to a spacesuit, a tape recorder, and an airmeter. There are no instructions given for your quest; you need to listen to the recorder to find things out. If you try poking at the buttons first, disaster happens.

The recorder informs you about the “mud-erer” Squeen who you must defeat:

The red button lets you onto the asteroid you are docked at, which is rather small (this is originally VIC-20 remember!)

I get the strongest vibes with games like Death Dreadnaught with horror-ick-in-space. There are various dead bodies:

This is followed by a bit where you need to put on a radiation vest to survive:

(The interesting thing about the above is you can’t put it over your spacesuit, so you need to go back to your original vehicle, take off the suit, put on the vest, then put back on the suit over it. Taking off the spacesuit while on the asteroid gets a messy decompression scene.)

You have to shoot a robot with a laser, then face off against the big bad:

The way to defeat him is to say the word “karn”. Sure, ok? Weirdly, I figured this out because there were also rooms with the words LORADI and HIRADI on them and I thought there was some sort of code word thing going on even if I didn’t fully understand it.

Huzzah we won, we can go back to the spaceship and leave, next game.

Rocky Island has you escaping an island. There’s a fun bit at the start where you try to leave your hut and a parrot insists on coming along.

You pick up a dead passenger pigeon with a note by “Cheryll” about “an island with fathers aircraft” so there’s rescue by (how the pigeon found you but not Cheryll is not explained) and then you have to deal with a lion:

I was close but not quite there. I needed to get some poison back at the “cupbord” (I was using the wrong verb) and then use that to poison the bird.

The lion walks over and eats the pigeon.

The lion then curls up an dies..

There’s also some nearby vines so the next part you’d think would be easy:

You need to SWING VINE. (As the walkthrough I had to check for this said, “don’t think about it too hard”).

There’s there’s the slight opportunity to excitingly fall in a pit, but otherwise you nab some matches, get some sticks, light the sticks at the peak for a fire to get rescued, then crash the game.

There’s a 50% chance this was just a bad transfer so I’m not going to fuss too much, but rather move on to the last game, which has an absolutely garish color scheme on C64 so I switched to black and white.

This is the most gung-ho of the games and the most creative. It is also the worst in terms of interactivity; the old story of taking a very simple system and trying to make something requiring complex action, so the guess-the-verb goes through the roof.

Also, the author doesn’t have the chops yet to write characters and action scenes and so forth.

This is the channeling the same energy from the Death Wish series of movies or the later NARC arcade game: we’ve gotta go clean up the streets. (MOVIE TRAILER VOICE: Dealers are making up their own rules … and no-one is able to stop them!)

So we start by distracting a thug with some whiskey, then going by into a sleazy nightclub and talking to the bartender, who is our inside man.

This gives a gun and gas mask, which it seems like we’d go to a police station for rather than a sleazy bar? Whatever. Next up is a scene with a “junkie” who says “go away, I’m flying!!!” when you try to talk to him, so you need to HIT him and then try talking again, because that’s what happens in the movies:

You can then FRISK YUPPIE and confiscate some cash from them (no crime or anything, you just do it)…

The “vasalene” is meant to GREASE MANHOLE so you can open it in order to get to the Fat Man you’ll find in the sewers.

…and use that to make it into the “massage parlour”. You can then ask for Janine who will try to tell you where the Fat Man is hiding but gets cut off.

Fortunately, because you’re on a crusade to clean up the streets, you can survive the gunfire, step outside, and shoot the car that’s doing a drive-by.

The last bit requires wearing your gasmask in the sewers, meeting a Pusher who you shoot in the neck, before reaching your final destination.

The parser pretty much leaped past impossible (with words like GREASE and FRISK in addition to the general jank) but at least I appreciated the game was trying to a genre not commonly seen in text adventures. No, the rapidly-cranked out output of a 14(-ish) year old is not great, but it still can be fun to read about, and it especially interesting to see an attempt at telling more scene-based stories in the medium; the only other author really going that route for the moment has been Peter Kirsch.

(*) To be fair the author applied for essentially the only two big distributors of software in Australia. If this was the UK there’d be less of a problem. We saw recently how a teen-aged Simon Wadsworth put The Scepter out through Bug-Byte; when the follow-up game led to him being ghosted by the company, he just swapped to another company for his other two games. Here there weren’t as many options. As far as why Australia’s software industry had a slow start, I’m still not sure, but I suspect it may partly have to do with copyright law. Quoting the CEO of Imagineering in 1984 (one of the two companies that Jones sent his RPG to):

“Our business is suffering from the current software copyright situation and it is a problem that has been around for a couple of years well before the Federal Court decision last December which brought it out in the open,” he said. “Computer games on disk have been extensively copied, illegally, for a couple of years now and it has affected a large part of our business. “But our legal advice has always been that it would cost us around $100,000 to mount a test case. It has also occurred in some of the microcomputer business packages as well, but the Federal Court decision last December in the case involving Apple threw doubt on the whole matter of legality of software copyright.” That case, he said, had shaken the whole computer industry in Australia and countries which export business software. “But if there is one thing Justice Beaumont (the Federal Court Judge who made the decision last December) and Albert Langer (Software Liberation) have done, is that they have forced the computer industry to join together, get our own house in order and look at some of the issues involved.”

What the “last December” (December 1983) is referring to was a judicial decision in Australia that software was not under copyright. Apple had brought a lawsuit against a company with a computer called the Wombat that was an exact clone of the Apple II (and copied the internal ROM software). While Apple lost the initial decision they won the a follow-up appeal, yet another appeal (all the way to the highest court) was decided 3-2 against Apple, and this was decided in 1986. Remember, the UK had copyright starting to get settled back in 1980. In order for software copyright to hold Australia needed to pass new law, rather than just interpret existing law.

The upshot is that budding Australian bedroom coders from the early 80s like Brendan Jones didn’t have as many outlets as ones from the UK.