Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

The first programming contest was held at Texas A&M back in 1970 on a large mainframe using punchcards. Teams competed to finish problem tasks within a set time.

From the 1974 running of the contest.

This eventually transformed into the The Association for Computing Machinery’s Scholastic Programming Contest, and even later the International Collegiate Programming Contest. Back before the contest was international, in 1988, there was a set of 8 problems that teams has 6 hours to complete, using Apple Macintosh computers. The contest had recently switched from allowing both Pascal and FORTRAN to just only having programs given in Pascal (this made it easier to give problems, as they were designed previously so that neither language would have an advantage). The winning team — for the second time, and they only started competing in 1986 — was Caltech.

Caltech’s team had two graduate students (David Gillespie and Scott Hemphill) one senior majoring in biology (Adam Greenblatt) and one junior majoring in computer music: Ron Goodman. Likely, Ron — also the founder of the group Synthesized Music Enthusiasts of Los Angeles — was responsible for the victory lap that happened after winning, as all programs were finished with 43 minutes left to go:

We spent the remaining time fooling around, programming the computer to play musical scales.

Ron Goodman later went on to work for Creative Labs (most famously known for the Sound Blaster). In 1998, while working on some new mixer software as well as the Nomad (a predecessor to the iPod) he started to get major arm and wrist pain. He was diagnosed with De Quervain’s disease and tried to use a pre-existing software to help:

Eventually, intense pain prevented me from clicking the mouse. I found a free utility that would click for me, and I asked the author to make a few tweaks to make it more usable. He was “busy” and politely suggested I do it. Slowly, I did! My dev environment required that I come up with a name – I chose RSIGuard with far too little consideration. I thought I’d finish the program in a couple of months, never imagining I was starting a 20+year project.

Ron made a small webpage and received an order for “50 licenses” from Hewlett-Packard. He decided this was the time to leave Creative and start his own business; Mr. Goodman still works as the product manager for RSIGuard today.

You’ll notice all this, including the contest, is long after the year for today’s game (1982). Goodman was another one of the teen programming prodigies we’ve seen and was quite involved with computers all the way through the 80s; for example, in 1983 he wrote a technical article for Dr. Dobbs about the shift and rotation commands on the Z80 processor.

Goodman was 15 or 16 at the time he sent Building of Death for publication in the TRS-80 tapemag CLOAD.

CLOAD, October 1982. Technically speaking this is the month a disk started being available, so it was also a diskmag.

The copy provided by the CLOAD editor just states that

Just in time to miss Halloween – Building of Death. This is an adventure game with many ways to die.

and it isn’t more complicated than that: we’re in a building, we need to get out. The novel bit is that the Building of Death is a department store.

Now, just being written by a teenager doesn’t mean a game is bad; Frankenstein Adventure, published in CLOAD exactly a year before this game, is a good case in point — it genuinely is one of the best from 1981.

I regret to inform you, alas, that this game does not accomplish the same feat. It is quite dodgy.

Just to illustrate with one screen:

Yes, immediately after using the word PLAY to play a portable game from the toy department, we are informed trying that the game doesn’t understand the word PLAY. The cassette incidentally is “A cassette labeled ‘Adventure hints'” and if you go back to the TRS-80 at the start you can LOAD it or CLOAD it (I had to look this up) but this gets a checksum message I never was able to get by.

It doesn’t really matter though; I checked the source code and if you manage to get in farther the computer explodes and you die.

Just to give a general sense of geography, let me first give a zoom-out of the entire map…

…and a zoom-in on the starting area, which is the only part that feels like a normal department store.

Some observations:

1. The large grid makes me wonder if the author was riffing off of Conquest of Memory Alpha, like Danny Browne did. The layout and parsing in the actual source code are different enough that I don’t think so, but the author may still have played it, as there’s a similar notion of a “central area” that the player breaks into.

2. Rooms are incidentally specified by X and Y coordinate; here’s a line from the source code, where (7,0) is at a vending machine:

260 IFC$=”INS”ORC$=”PUT”IFB$”QUA”THENC$=”DRO”:GOTO230:ELSEIFX7ORY0THENPRINT”Where ???”:GOTO120:ELSEI(0)=512:PRINT”The machine rumbles for a second then stops.”:VM=1:GOTO120

3. The vending machine lets you use a quarter that starts in your player’s inventory to get food and some garlic. The food must be eaten to avoid starving (yawn) and the garlic fends off a vampire that randomly enters the store later and starts hunting you. Somehow you are supposed to WEAR the garlic, garlic breath like Adventure Quest doesn’t work:

A vampire attacks
But your garlic warded her off

4. Most of the inventory is stuffed in the upper right corner, where you get some no-slip boots, a flat handball, some dill pickles, some meat, and the aforementioned food and garlic. Only the meat, food, and garlic are useful. Throughout the map you can also find a chalkboard, a torn leash, a bottle of vitamins, and a comb; again, none are useful. Most of this map is a red herring.

5. The red-marked rooms all have lions which kill you. None are worth visiting, and one even specifies the lion has a key, but that’s just another red herring.

Most of the experience of the game — due to the giant grid — is walking through large, empty halls. Again, it invokes the Memory Alpha experience, and can also be compared a little to a CRPG like Wizardry.

Again useless. Leading up to here are simply “dimly lit hallways” and rooms with strong stenches.

Barring randomly being killed by lions (and also one bit where there’s a spider on a key, again a red herring, just don’t get the key) the central part is where the action really begins.

Starts from the lower right.

First, a dog you need to give meat to.

Then, a door you need to KNOCK to get by. (The portable game from earlier gave a hint about this.)

Then there’s some grease you need to JUMP over. There’s an explicit hint elsewhere about acting like a kangaroo, but I still wasted a fair amount of time trying to wear the no-slip boots which have no purpose at all (“I don’t think you want to put it on”).

Proceeding further I get exceedingly stuck on a door.

Here’s the relevant bit of code:

315 IFC$=”OPE”ANDB$=”DOO”THENIFX0ORY0THENPRINT”Oh! You are upsetting!!!”

The command OPEN DOOR only works at the “front door” to the building, in the far left corner at (0,0). Otherwise it gives the weird response shown. You can still open the door, but you need to TURN DOOR (??) or TURN KNOB.

Then you can straightforwardly find the front door key, although don’t leave just yet! There’s also a room with a “rusty pin” where if you take it summons an elevator and you are asked if you want to go in. Say Y and an animation starts.

On the top you can find a bulletproof vest.

Leaving teleports you out close to the exit, and with both front door key and bulletproof vest in hand you can leave safely.

The first part of this gets animated with a “screen shake” effect but I’m going to be polite and leave it off.

So yes, dodgy. At least memorable and slightly unique-feeling, with the vast majority of the content as a red herring; I did kind of like the fake keys as it wasn’t too hard to catch on to the fact they were unnecessary.

This game is otherwise noteworthy insofar as a tape (now diskmag) was willing to publish it as late as 1982; they clearly were still scrounging for material.

13000 I(1)=512:PRINT”You lost your sunglasses. It is much too bright to see. Your
eyes are burning up. You are blind.
Do you wish to continue this adventure as a blind person (Y/N)”