Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

It’s been a while since we’ve revisited our Spooky Domicile namespace chart, but we’ve had enough new entries I think it’s time:

So the games have been piling into Haunted House, and the only spot left standing without a namespace clash is Haunted Mansion. For today’s game, assuming you’re paying attention to my title line, we’re dealing with Morgan, specifically Scott Morgan, who we saw near the start of our 1982 with Aqua Base, a James Bond-style story with the world’s most ineffective super-villain.

(And more importantly for us, a dodgy parser that pretended to parse things that it didn’t, so PUSH NOUN-THE-GAME-REALLY-DOESN’T-UNDERSTAND says “nothing happens” as if you typed something sensible. Something for me to be alert for.)

From the Internet Archive.

His games were all for the TI-99 computer and published by American Software Design and Distribution Co. out in Minnesota. Previously I only had a PO Box (see for example this catalog) but the Haunted House manual links to an actual address in Eden Prarie. It is most definitely a residential area, not a business district.

View of the street via Google, although not at the exact house.

This suggests the business was originally a garage outfit before the proprietor later got a PO Box. I’m not going to say the proprietor is Scott Morgan himself; the catalog lists his name just on the page of adventures, and usually if the owner of one of these distribution outlets that feels like spreading their name around in one place they plaster it everywhere. Still, I get the vibe we’re dealing with a 2 or at most 3 person operation here.

On to the game! Haunted houses, despite not being from the Adventure Ur-text of caves and treasures, lend themselves quite naturally to the adventure game format. It doesn’t take research for an average bedroom coder to fill a house, and having a restricted environment (as adventures usually require) is quite natural for horror. The player has an excuse to get shut in with the general and simple plot concept to just get out. Here, we need to also get a ruby first.

Given the forewarning on the parser, it seemed wise to make a verb list. Here’s how my attempt came out:

This excludes motion verbs, LOOK, and TAKE, but otherwise, that’s really everything: just GO, OPEN and PUSH. DROP doesn’t work. I have not found a mechanism for dropping items.

Unfortunately, it turns out my usual verb-sleuthing method was failing me, because the game has hard-coded phrases. Essentially, rather than understanding individual verbs everywhere, it will them only when given in the right place with the right noun (that is, they’re hard-coded in).

Despite this I managed to get pretty far.

After finding a letter warning you “YOU’LL NEVER FIND IT” and a screwdriver hidden in some bushes, you can go in the open door of the house which vanishes.

The very first thing I found (going west) was a wizard hanging out at a book that he wouldn’t let me read, but where he was otherwise non-threatening. Weird but ok. Wandering elsewhere, I found a glowing cube, some powder, a “door with strange keyhole”, a chair (UNSCREW CHAIR so you can pick it up), and a cellar with a chest containing a “triangle” and a locked door.

Having everything in hand I could manage, I went over to the wizard and noodled with all the objects available. I took the powder and tried to THROW it which caused the wizard to disappear.

(Remember, THROW isn’t understood as a verb generally! Just at the wizard.)

The book doesn’t have any words in it but it does have a key, which I used to unlock a “wine cellar” with an empty bottle. Stuck again, I tried the strange keyhole, and found the triangle was able to unlock it somehow.

Yes, this is a “figure out the arbitrary magic” game.

Past that there was some “pink liquid” I could load up in the bottle, a playroom with “bloodstained walls”…

…a ghost preventing me from going up an exit…

…and a dead body at a guillotine, with a silver cross (if you LOOK BODY).

Silver cross in hand I wandered over to Dracula, in order to steal his chocolate chip cookie.

SHOW CROSS. Again seems to be bespoke-coded for this location.

The cookie, when eaten, teleports the player outside the house. Useful since escape is one of the objectives! But I still don’t have the ruby, and I suspect it is past the ghost, maybe right past the ghost with no more puzzles, but even if I’m just an inch away I can’t get by the inch.

My available inventory. The ghost has no description.

I’ll take suggestions if someone has any. All the other puzzles were “easy” (if involving arbitrary magic) so I suspect I’m overlooking something simple although perhaps with a very specific bespoke verb attached.