Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

Not too long from a finish, and fortunately not quite so absurd as assuming the existence of an unmentioned item. Still, it is pretty odd.

I knew DIG worked already from testing it on the sand (you find nothing). I guess it sort of makes sense in a shallow pool, but it certainly isn’t the verb I would have used (and I already tried other searching verbs which I thought would have been equivalent).

The tiny graphic is a blue key. This can be taken up to the locked door you can arrive at via rope tied to anchor.

The problem is, going through the locked door takes you back to the strobe room! So it seemed nothing was gained at all from the exercise. However, you can pick up the rope and anchor again after using them, and there’s no way to jump down without them, meaning that the only way to re-use the rope and anchor is to find the blue key, and take the alternate exit after having reclaimed them from the railing.

Almost there. I was stuck on an endless hall, and this was more or less a verb issue again. I tried pushing and pull and some other things on the appropriately marked wall…

…but you’re instead supposed to just GO WALL.

The chest is a red herring. Something about the skull nagged me so I tried smashing it, and I couldn’t do it without using the anchor. This yields a “remote control” with a button, and the only thing left to do is try pushing the button in literally every room in the game while facing every direction. (Fortunately not that many rooms.) I hit paydirt back near the start, at a wall marked “Lost”.

This is the time bomb that has been threatening to blow us up for 30 minutes.

Roger Jonathan Schrag will return for us in 1982 (he wrote another adventure published in a two-pack, just the other half was a different author). I will say I find it fascinating he describes himself as a “hacker” type most interest in testing the limits of coding the system.

I was a kid at the time I did all of my work for Adventure International. I wasn’t doing it for the money. I wrote these programs for the intellectual challenge and for the novelty of seeing my name in full page color ads in the magazines. Checks sort of came in whenever they came in. Sometimes there were sales reports attached. Sometimes not. Since I wasn’t doing this for the money, I really didn’t care much.

— From a portion of the interview with Roger Schrag

He incidentally went on to port the Scott Adams adventure system to Color Computer on his own initiative. While he did get royalties, it seems to have been just for the challenge.

Not every author has been of the description. We’ve had authors impressed by the concept of the parser, impressed by the idea of building a world, impressed by the idea of an interactive story, or even fascinated by the educational potential of adventure games.

What we still haven’t had much of is a business-focused type, making a plan and assembling an organized team, which is what we’ll get to next time.

(And no, I’m not counting On-Line Systems as being very organized — it was a near-miracle Time Zone got finished. This is an entirely different company.)