This game returns rewinds us back in time a bit to February 1980.
That was extraordinarily early in our journey. While Scott Adams (with Alexis) had cranked out his first six games, and Greg Hassett had a library of work, there were only a handful of adventure games available on home computers otherwise. Dog Star Adventure had been printed in Softside, but there otherwise guidance was limited how to write an adventure game, and you had odd experiments like Dante’s Inferno from Softside January 1980, which was done entirely with movement.
Roberta Williams was able to run out of adventures to play: “She loved them all, and then there were none left.”
Treasure Hunts were still heavily the norm, making up 2/3rds of games.
1979 is the most representative part of chart here. By the end of 1980 the share of Treasure Hunt plots compared to others became less than half.
Magical Journey also brings us back to a familiar name: Peter Kirsch. He has been the editor (and often author) of the Adventure of the Month series (Arrow One was the latest one featured here). Not long ago I found, in a 1982 volume by Hayden (the book publisher who also put out Crime Stopper) a Softside compilation that also included an adventure game by Kirsch dated Februrary 1980.
Via The Internet Archive. Some games are reprints, some (like Magical Journey) appear here for the first time. I assume Softside couldn’t fit every game submission, especially ones prior to the August of 1980 when they went full-sized.
The REM statement giving the author and date on the first line is missing from all current archived versions.
MAGICAL JOURNEY
BY PETER KIRSCH
FINAL VERSION
FEB. 1980
Hence I technically had this game on my list, but as 19xx.
It is nice to have both temporal and author context; it’s one thing to play an author we’ve seen a lot of now produce something with a “retrograde” feel of collect-the-treasures (his later work went heavy on “cinematic scenes”) but we can also see a little bit of his “scene based” approach in primal form.
There’s incidentally only the TRS-80 version; the porting to Atari and Apple II didn’t happen until the Adventure of the Month series started.
Fun innovation to start: you have a sack for the treasures, meaning you don’t have to worry about the inventory limit in regard to treasures (of course, wouldn’t get rid of the inventory limit entirely, early 1980 here).
This was intended to be a quick game to throw out but I ran into a wrinkle fairly quickly. But to narrate like everything is normal, you start in a bog-standard forest, climb a standard tree, grab some twigs (see above), find a shovel, climb a mountain…
…then go down into darkness. It asks you to make light. I was puzzled at first and thought I had missed something, but no, I had scooped everything up available.
W/S/E in the opening Forest just loop.
That leaves the TWIGS, which I certainly don’t visualize as being light-providing in size, but I tried RUB TWIGS anyway, whereupon the game said WHAT? and then showed me the room description.
Doing some deciphering, I found the line in question that was supposed to trigger (by searching for the word TWIG).
930 IFD(B)13THEN950:ELSEIFE$=”IGS”IFI(2)=1THENDK=1:R$=”BURNING TWIGS”:K3=2:GOSUB1100:H$(2)=R$:PRINT”GOOD DEDUCTION! YOU HAVE CREATED A SMALL FIRE AND YOU CAN SEE!”:GOTO5000
Wild note: the game looks at the last three letters of the noun to find out if you have, in fact, typed in the word TWIGS. I have never seen this in a parser before. Finding the comparison line in the book:
930 IFD(B)13THEN950:ELSEIFE$=”IGS”IFI(2)=1THENDK=1:R$=”BURNING TWIGS”:K3=2:GOSUB1100:H$(2)=R$:PRINT”GOOD DEDUCTION! YOU HAVE CREATED A SMALL FIRE AND YOU CAN SEE!”:GOTO5000
That’s, erm, exactly the same. Well.
I decided to try to keep going — maybe the bug was only isolated. You explore the tunnel here a little, find a locked door and a spot that’s soft…
…dig in what is apparently a one way passage to land in a forest…
…and find multiple colored trees with multiple colored keys hiding and a note. Trying to read the note gets the message WHAT?
830 IFD(B)6THEN850:ELSEIFE$=”OTE”IFI(12)=AORI(12)=1OR(A-20)”*(I(12)=0)THEN?”NOTE SAYS: “CHR$(34)”THERE ARE 17 TREASURES HIDDEN. CAN YOU FIND THEM ALLPRINT”CHR$(34):GOTO380
Well, here is a typo at least. A-20 is supposed to be A=20. But even fixing that, you can’t read the note.
So I’m going to have to do some repair to the code and report back. I did manage to explore out a bit more and I can give a few teaser screenshots.
This is broken too. Your bottle does not fill.
It does seem like that Kirsch already has the “continuous journey” idea in mind given the treasure-holding sack and the one way passage, although I’m unclear if I skipped anything, and if those skips were because I missed a puzzle or if the game’s code is literally broken.
I suppose having to diagnose type-in typos makes for the authentic early-1980 experience!
Renga in Blue 
just for the record, it turns out the big line that was trouble was
1100 FORK2=1TO5:IFC$(K2)=H$(K3)THENC$(K2)=R$:GOSUB1150:RETURN:ELSENEXT:RETURN
which gets called a bunch, and had been reading
1100 FORK2-1TO5:IFC$(K2)=H$(K3)THENC$(K2)=R$:GOSUB1150:RETURN:ELSENEXT:RETURN
so the equal sign was a subtraction sign.
The funny thing here is that there are other slight changes to the code like someone who was typing was clearly thinking through it, but they landed on a game that was impossible to solve.
This reminds me of typing in basic games on my Atari 400 with a friend. Most magazines included a utility that, when you entered some checksum data for the game, would verify it for you. Verifying manually was almost impossible for larger games.
YOU ARE ON A FLAT AREA OF BLUE GLASS. THERE ARE SOME UNINTELLIGIBLE WORDS, SYMBOLS AND NUMBERS BENEATH YOU. A TEENAGE PROGRAMMER BLOCKS YOUR WAY. HE SAYS, “GIMME A DICTIONARY.”
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?
The problem is that the source code is not written to be easily read.
In any case, I remember when I was ten and typed listings from the magazines. Many times you ended with a syntax error (or worse), and did not have a clue of what to do.
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