Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

An Unearthly Child, the first serial of Dr. Who, aired in 1963; in 1967, the Doctor made his first appearance in comic book form, via TV Comic issue 800.

Dr. Who is on a planet with his grandchildren (John and Gillian) and is facing off against spiders. The comic authors were somewhat unclear about the general mood of Dr. Who (which involves outwitting more than shooting alien species) but here he goes full blaster.

From the blog Die, Hideous Creature, Die! which includes details about the Doctor cheerfully destroying a species.

In Dr. Who Adventure I got to use a Dalek ray gun on a spider and it crashed the game, which somehow seems appropriate. But let’s rewind:

I had left off on planet Peladon. One thing I hadn’t experimented with was the verb SEARCH, which works in any random room for hiding hidden things. I ended up hitting zero going through the entire planet, even when trying SEARCH multiple times, except for back in the Maze:

I originally visualized this as a lockpick or a guitar pick; this is the kind of pick for digging.

The discovery of the item also let me test out just what the map was like, where I discovered that every direction (north, south, east, west, up, down) looped back to where the pick was. This indicates that escape from the maze is more or less random, so I shouldn’t sweat mapping it.

I also discovered, on a later playthrough, that you don’t always find the pick when searching — and it isn’t a matter of searching multiple times, but rather, you have to “loop again” and that resets the chance of the search working. I don’t know if this is true generally for the map, but if so, then trying SEARCH multiple times won’t help at all; you would need to re-enter each room multiple times, and try SEARCH each time, hoping for the random chance of the designated object showing up. I’m not up to that level of suffering yet though.

The “peladonians” are the “wandering random enemy” of the planet, but they’re only sometimes an enemy. Here are two separate attempts to TALK with them.

Success or failure seems to be random. HIDE on the always hand always works (when it is a creature you can hide from at all, there’s a nasty spot later where you can’t). You can also simply just move to an adjacent room, it isn’t like the aliens have any physical reality to them; it’s just a dice roll if you see one in a particular room, and if you step out and come back in they’ll be gone unless the dice roll makes them show up again. We’ve seen this kind of behavior most recently in Africa Diamond; somehow it was more irritating in that game, I think because it kept switching through what creature might show up, whereas here — being always the same encounter on the same planet — it has a vague tinge of realism.

Leaving the planet behind I hopped around a little. Note that not all of them have real episode equivalents, or at least, the author was mis-spelling from some half-remembered episode.

GALAFRY (the actual planet of the Time Lords, but spelled wrong)
PELADON (as already seen)
SKARO (the planet of the Daleks)
DIETHYLAMIDE (probably invented for the game)
HIDAOUS (probably invented for the game)
DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (a Cybermen base from the episode The Invasion)
MUTOS (not a planet; the derogatory term for an alien race on Skaro)

I did a lot of hopping around, for our purposes let’s visit the remaining planets as listed in order.

SKARO

Because it isn’t Dr. Who without Daleks. (Upon the Who “reboot” starting in 2005 it seemed like Daleks might have finally been done away with, but alas.)

I admit, I was initially tentative about exploring here, but Skaro turns out to be safer than some other places, as there aren’t instant-death spots like passing TARDISes and the geography, while jumbled up, isn’t mind-rending.

Stepping out of the TARDIS I found some jelly babies. They’re one of The Doctor’s favorite snacks, and one of the common elements I’ve found across a few planets (that is, some sort of “personal object” of The Doctor is lying around). They’d be my first candidate for the “key of time” items just because of the theming but if so, I haven’t found one on any planet yet.

The atmosphere is nice; it turns out you can ignore red screaming sirens, though.

The most important thing I found (via SEARCH in a random room) is a dalek ray-gun.

You might think I would immediately go back and try to use it on the actual daleks, but I was still slightly nervous at this moment and didn’t want to force a confrontation. You’ll get to see the gun in action later though.

DIETHYLAMIDE

There is no planet Diethylamide, a place of fog and mountains. That’s ok, not everything needs to be a reference.

I’m missing some exits in the northwest that almost certainly just go to death. The reason why is that it turns out to be horrible to test death-exits in this game.

There’s no save feature, and if you die, you simply go back to Time Lord Central and have to hop into the Tardis and type RESET a lot to get back to the planet you want. It isn’t even the time spent that was grating as much as the act of intentionally hurling bodies just to check every direction (N/S/E/W) to make sure they’re all accounted for.

There’s a troglodyte wandering around, and it likely is responsible for the occasion where you get knocked unconscious and sent somewhere random with your items missing. Lying around the planet (or requiring a SEARCH in one case) I found a DESIONATING RENTICULATOR, a BLUE CRYSTAL, and a WHITE CRYSTAL.

No idea what any of this does.

HIDAOUS

A slime world, again made-up for the game. There’s not much I can find (although I haven’t bothered mapping thoroughly yet), just a landing point, a set of “LOST IN THE SLIME” rooms (with a SKULL hidden therein) and a tree with some bananas. I expect I’m missing something, or maybe the author just ran out of disk capacity.

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

Where Cybermen are hiding, based off a real series.

I know the Cybermen are supposed to be a threat on par with the Daleks, but I’ve never quite felt the same level of concern with them.

In the game version, they are at least a little more deadly than the Daleks since you can wander into death:

Still, in essence the procedure is the same: hide if you see a threat. I’ve snagged a long scarf (Tom Baker ahoy) and a “large rock”.

MUTOS

A planet with a mysterious monolith, and the one I’m definitely not done mapping yet.

There’s a bit where you can find a sonic screwdriver, and also a sign which says to DIG HERE. DIG works to use the PICK to go down into a sewer, although it seems like you can get the same way from another direction. Either way, the moment where my mapping ceases is right here:

There’s a spider where I softlocked the first time through (no items, no way to escape, HIDE doesn’t work) and the second time through, ray-gun in hand, I managed to hard crash the game.

I think maybe there’s supposed to be a PRINT statement there, but when trying to replace the line then playing through again it still seems to be buggy.

So this is at least a good place to do a write-up. My big problem, other than that stalling point on Mutos, is figuring out what the Key of Time parts are. The magazine article claims there is a way to tell what the parts are, and I have no idea. The game has a score but the only way to check it I’ve found is to quit the game. I’ve tried taking items to the Time Lord who needs the pieces at the starting area but I haven’t got a positive reception yet. Maybe I need all the pieces at once.

Cybermen from The Invasion, one of the “lost” serials of Dr. Who, since the BBC didn’t routinely start archiving their materials until the late 70s.