As promised, here is the next in the Scott Morgan series. (Previously: Haunted House.)
Here, we start at a ghost town and are meant to recover three treasures from a local mine. The ghost town is straightforward enough; nothing is blocked off.
You can grab a gun, twine, explosives, a backpack, a shovel, a mirror, and a bell just laying out in the open.
The bell is just for atmosphere. The registry book has the hint shown which will come up in just a moment.
The Saloon is a little more interesting. There’s a player piano with a knob you can turn to make music, and a ghost sitting at a bar.
This happens when you LOOK GHOST. I love the moment of meta and this is honestly the most memorable part of the Morgan games so far for me; they’ve mostly been robotic and could use more of this kind of humor.
Trying to head north in the mountains, you find an old hook, followed by the mine. The mine entrance is blocked by a bear who is described as “HUNGRY”.
It wasn’t too hard (given the inventory I had building up) to work out the game intended for me to go fishing at a lake on the far south of the map. It was a little harder to work out you could LOOK MINE to get another object (some poles) — for the most part, look has never applied to the location name in any of the previous Morgan games, it only applied to the objects.
With a pole, hook, and twine in hand, you can TIE TWINE / TO HOOK followed by TIE TWINE / TO POLE while at the lake, and then do the verb CAST in order to go fishing.
Yes, this is still the bespoke-phrases-only parser, and no, I did not figure out CAST on my own: I popped open the binary of the file and looked around for text phrases.
With this sort of game you could say I am playing against the technology, not against any kind of story.
Going into the mine itself, there’s *silver* to the west. (It needs to go into the backpack, you type INTO BACKPACK followed by SILVER, and no, there aren’t any directions in the game or even the manual about this syntax.) To the east there’s a dead end, where I was stuck for a long time. When you look at the explosives they say you can set them for 1 or 2 minutes. The right command is not SET EXPLOSIVES or DROP EXPLOSIVES or anything like that, you are just supposed to type out
1 MINUTE
and then wait and the explosion will happen. You don’t even need to drop the explosives! (Not like the game has a way to drop items, anyway.)
This leaves a BIG HOLE and some more exits. You can get *DIAMONDS* down one passage, a ladder down another, but otherwise the sticking point is a monster.
If you LOOK MONSTER you get turned into stone. Yes, somehow a medusa wandered into our Western adventure. You may recall from the inventory list we had a mirror, yet I haven’t been able to get the mirror to work. SHOW MIRROR is directly in the binary code, but it doesn’t work!
I suspect there’s a literal bug at this point preventing finishing the game. Looks like all I was missing was some gold past the monster which you use the ladder to get to, and then the message:
YOU ARE RICH!!! AND A WINNER
THANKS FOR PLAYING!
GET IN SEARCH OF THE FOUR
VEDAS FROM ASD&D TODAY!
I’ll call this a wrap. Incidentally, having Four Vedas as the next game in the “series” is kind of odd. Here’s the catalog with the order so far:
If we’re going from easier to harder, wouldn’t Stone Age (the last game marked Intermediate) be next? And why are the games not given in order in the catalog?
This may have all parsed as fairly simple to manage, but I did took a fair amount of psychic damage working out both the fishing and the exploding, so despite the intrinsic interest of a game based on Vedic religion, I’ll have to save the rest of the Morgan series for some other time.
Next up: Something that uses The Graphics Magician. Need to keep the Apple II fans from nodding off out there. Then there will be a couple more tiny games followed by the return of Level 9.
Renga in Blue 
I have to wonder if the identical 1982 publication date for this game and the very popular (for the era) home arcade game Miner 2049er is coincidental, or perhaps the arcade have was an inspiration for the adventure game?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miner_2049er
I think it is more likely to simply come from the same common turn of phrase — a miner 49er is someone who was in the California Gold Rush (1849).
2049er just does a pun on the phrase, and this game takes it straight.
The first thing that came to my mind when seeing the title was this:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0907036/
Yes, Scooby Doo from 1969.
It makes me think of “My darling Clementine,” “was a miner 49er” etc.
I’m not exactly sure that “Miner ’49er” was a “common turn of phrase” in 1982…at least not so common that not just one but two games capitalized on the popularity of the turn of phrase in the exact same year.
It seems much more likely that the kid who programmed the adventure game played the much more popular arcade have, and was inspired to make is own themed game later that year.
I definitely sung the song when I was a kid, it was still in the Common Kid Song list at least in my neck of the woods
also the TI-version didn’t come out until ’83
I usually would prefer not guessing connections just because there’s so many ways things can happen.
‘course, what I would really prefer is finding Scott Morgan so we can ask him! Weirdly given the hyperlocal aspect to the company this is more likely than some of our other authors.
FWIW it would be the song for me, too. Not something I heard anyone say in daily life, but we were sure singing “Clementine” at summer camp in the 80s and things like that. (Bing Crosby apparently got #20 on Billboard with it in 1941. Probably I heard it in Warner Brothers cartoons or something, too.)
I was born in 1971 (in the US), I heard “Clementine” (and its variant “Found a Peanut”) over and over as a kid, I’m not sure I ever heard of Miner 2049er till now.
At my school in the UK in the 1970s and 80s we used to sing Clementine regularly… Definitely knew “miner 49-er” from that (the Scooby Doo repeats, the song popping up all over the place – such as in Columbo, and my dad singing it regularly). It’s pretty weird how much we knew about the American goldrush through our exposure to US media back then! I hadn’t realised there was an Atari arcade game that was the inspiration for our very own Manic Miner.
A while back, I downloaded something called GameBase – the Universal Retro-Gaming Frontend, which seems to be powered by (or a version of) MESS. It comes pre-loaded with tons of games, including a bug-free version of this game that I was able to complete. I can’t remember which version of GameBase I downloaded, unfortunately.
“Miner 49’er” is a classic arcade game released in 1982 by Stern Electronics. In the game, players control a miner who must collect gold nuggets while avoiding various obstacles and enemies. It’s a fun and challenging game that was popular during the early days of video gaming, and it’s a great example of the simple yet addictive gameplay that characterized many arcade titles from that era.
Well I remember playing Miner 2049’er on my Atari 800 back in the early eighties when I should have been doing my homework. I remember that, Picnic Paranoia, Pogoman, Bruce Lee, Darts (your animated hand became more wobbly the more you drank) and Zaxxon. Although the first pieces of software I bought for it were inevitably text adventures. Savage Island Part I, The Wizard of Akyrz and Dungeon Adventure were the first three I purchased. Was it really 1983?
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