While exploring the remote planet Zol 1X you hear rumours of a fabulous treasure. It was buried in a tomb by Zolan, once emperor of the whole cluster, before the Terran conquest many centuries ago. Although many people have searched for it, the missing treasure has never been found. You decide to find it.
Despite the above sounding like we’re about to reach another sci-fi planet (like Forbidden City perhaps) this is really just a very abbreviated version of Adventure.
You’ll see an “adventure” marked on there. We do not possess Gamestape 1 so we are not clear what adventure that might be, but it easily could be The Zolan Adventure as published later that year by the new company Softek.
From World of Spectrum. A cave entrance, I guess? The title screen of the actual game says The Zolan Adventure.
The tape case above advertises itself as “Possibly the only truely playable adventure for the 16K Spectrum” and to be fair this is a very early game for the ZX Spectrum, so maybe if you exclude games ported from other platforms it wins by default. Perhaps the copy-editor couldn’t think of anything else to write other than “this is a game you can play from the beginning to the end”, although it turns out that’s not fully true in that the game has no end condition.
There’s an “instructions” file that seems to be broken (and what manages to pad the tape to be 16K) so I just had to wing it. What I discovered is a brand new way to be bizarrely minimalist.
This shows me moving around the outdoors, with six different moves. So not only are room descriptions reduced to almost short lines, but they get stacked right on top of each other as you move around. The general effect is odd in a way that’s hard to pin down; I got used to it, but at first it felt like moving a piece on a board game rather than an avatar through space. After enough lines the game simply clears to display the next line, but that doesn’t make the effect any less weird.
(This is different than just the overall gimmick of having scrolling text with input on the bottom; Amnesia and My Angel both play with the idea, the latter calling it “novel mode”. However, both have enough text to establish the output as readable prose.)
Part of my mapping the outdoors in progress.
As already mentioned, this is an Adventure derivative, so it starts with a building hut to go in with four items: keys, a bottle of water, a “torch” (referred to elsewhere as a lamp), and a wand. Normally you’d get to scoop all four items up, but this game rather unusually has an inventory limit of three.
Normally that’d be the sign of a lot of suffering to come but the game is so short it works out.
All of outdoors. Making this took more time than playing the rest of the game, and the only thing of interest other than the hut is a “cracked mirror” in the forest.
Going the usual valley to stream to grate route, you can take the keys from the hut and unlock them and go down to find the first of what turns out to be four treasures.
The rest of the game.
Being underground requires having the lamp (torch) on. I fortunately was experienced enough to just try ON on its own since LIGHT doesn’t work. The only items on the verb list other than directions, get/drop, and on/off are OPEN and UNLOCK. For some reason KILL magically works in one location even though it is not understood elsewhere.
I get the strong impression of an author who wanted to do a lot more but just stopped working and called it done. The honeycomb room suggests multiple exits but you can’t actually take any of them; the sole reason to go in the room is to pick up the gold key (which doesn’t unlock anything, it just is a treasure).
To the far west there’s a ledge with a silver dagger, and if you take more than one turn hanging out you’ll fall and die. Making a typo counts as a turn, so one time I typed GET DAGER (dropped the G by accident) but that was already too much; when I tried to GET DAGGER and go UP I died.
In fact, you need to avoid typos altogether while underground, because the time limit is set to be exactly the number of moves it takes to do everything. We’ve had light ultra-optimization be interesting (see the games of Paul Shave) but that’s been in cases when the game forces the player to do optimizations they might normally not bother with, throwing an item between locations to avoid an extra trip, for example. This is more like “do the steps you normally would do, just don’t make a typo”.
The result of running out of light.
With dagger in hand you can go in a pit with a snake and KILL SNAKE, then go south into a treasure room and the only sci-fi element of the game.
If you try to take the chest the “optical sensor” will trigger and you will die. This presents essentially the only puzzle in the game, and you have enough information you can solve it yourself if you like (otherwise, read on).
The cracked mirror from the aboveground gets dropped here. This is enough to confuse the sensor and get out with the chest. Once the chest is out the cave will start collapsing, so you also have a bonus time limit to travel to the surface.
The chest does not unlock or open. The only thing you can do is take it (and the other treasures) back to the hut and … wait for nothing to happen. I made the executive decision to quit and check my score.
According to this walkthrough I did the correct action; the BASIC source has no end message, and you can consider getting the chest to the hut to be a win.
I’ve always held the standpoint that short does not equal bad (… if nothing else it knocks another entry off my 1982 list quicker …) but that also doesn’t equate to good, either. Eno is a pretty good contrast; that game was set all in one room and centered around one unified puzzle, and there were enough interesting parts (and a sense of humor in the writing) that I enjoyed my short time with it. Here, my time was imbalanced for making a meaningless map (other than it looks pretty for the blog) and my puzzle-solving time was essentially 3%. The strict inventory limit and torch timer seemed to be just trying to cover for a lack of much interest. The wand that doesn’t work and honeycomb cave with no extra exits strongly suggest the author here really did plan a more proper Adventure derivative but didn’t have the chops to pull it off.
I almost managed the feat of being able to say Transylvania pulled off not having any jank puzzles, but alas, I ended up looking up how to deal with the moose head.
Before doing that, though, I realized I could RIDE BROOM. This results in a colorful description of flying through the air before crashing in a tree.
This is only a hint for the cabin insofar as indicating it is important. This would have been a perfect opportunity for a little more detail, to avoid having the player refer to a second-order object on the moose head itself, and PULL ANTLERS.
I suspect the original text version was just fine, but the author got tempted by not only having the head only be rendered visually but making the player refer to the antlers as an entirely separate object.
Searching the cloak finds a lock pick. I took that over to the door at the cave (which I suspected might stay closed, but I guess not) and popped it open to find a cave with a crystal ball.
The crystal ball can’t be taken, just looked at. It reveals a figure wearing a wizard’s cloak (check) and a shiny gold ring (check) and waving the ring at the statue. In other words, waving the ring (which I had tried many places) does work, I just needed to be wearing the wizard cloak too (which I had just found) in order for it to activate.
This reveals an alien creature who says he is “deeply indebted” to you and then crushes your ring.
It is possible to get a little stuck from here because now you just need to wait for time to pass. Eventually you see a “shooting star”.
After doing so you can head back to the place with the statue and find a new encounter, a flying saucer.
This scene leaves you with a mysterious black box with a button. But this is exactly what you need to win, as the button serves to open the sarcophagus with the princess.
Now winning is just a matter of following the directions from the book: wave elixir, pour elixir, and clap hands.
Before getting to the end, a digression.
I’ve come across many people for whom Transylvania is one of their core childhood memories; Jimmy Maher makes it one of the rare early graphical adventures on his Hall of Fame list. So people certainly remember this one fondly, and…
…actually, I was just fine with it, antlers notwithstanding. This clearly was intended as a romp, and one that had appeal to children (attested by many childhood recollections I’ve read) so I’m not going to ding too much on the simplistic writing.
The game design was curiously open and mostly attempted to be “easy”, but that’s far better than the games we’ve seen (ahem The Mask of the Sun) that try to add very hard elements.
Speaking of The Mask of the Sun, I’d like to go double-meta for a moment, as I found this thread while searching around for reviews at the intfiction forum. It’s about Apple II graphical adventures as a whole.
I couldn’t believe I saw them again. They were all terrible adventure games. The writing is especially awful. The art was mind blowing at the time, especially because I understood the advances in Apple II programming that were producing the art in these games…
I really remembered Mask of the Sun, and I was excited to watch it be played on YouTube, and then, it was really terrible IF. It starts with a story, and then it’s a lot of maze, of roads. Solve maze, go inside, new maze. Almost at random, you get to put a thing from one place to another place.
Especial reward, an animation that was not possible on Apple II. Oh, that’s why I remember it.
— J. Robinson Wheeler
There is the general implication (not just this quote, but elsewhere) that these games are only good for nostalgia. Mask of the Sun indeed had some design issues which I went into, but it’s certainly not true that every game is bad in the same way.
When I write these things, I want to distinguish between things in a old style that you have to grant to move forward, and things that are genuinely bad regardless of style. An inventory limit is an example of the former: there’s nothing technically inherently wrong with one, and not having one means you miss out on puzzles like Magic Mirror or Adventure Quest had. Eventually games started to get so much inventory that they started to obtain a “rucksack” style object, but this is not just good or bad, but a tradeoff.
On the other hand, something like the antlers being separate is a bad design choice overall, even compared to other games of the time (which did not necessarily do such a thing).
One of the ways paradigm shifts in gaming happen is to revive one of the previously “bad” elements with a twist. If I told you about a game that is timed and you have to keep starting from the beginning to win, you might think I meant an NES game, but I also mean the multi-award-winning Outer Wilds. Part of what Dark Souls did was simply restore the idea that the difficulty of a game can push back, and the “troll level” in Mario Maker came from a similar re-think of the rules of game design. We shouldn’t think of our current state of game design as perfected and older design as regressive: there are different expectations and design goals that can be met.
Referring back to Transylvania, the time limit and inventory limit (onerous to modern players) clearly are meant to have a particular effect, and it was on hour 4 that I finally went to triumph with the princess, which made it satisfying in a way that would otherwise be hard to duplicate.
There is a sequel, although it goes in a different direction: the hero from this game, Princess Sabrina, and Prince Erik find a vampire lord has killed King John the Good. You can switch characters while playing. That doesn’t seem to match the ending here, so maybe alternate universe? In any case, we’ll need to wait a while before arriving at The Crimson Crown.
I remember playing this for hours when I was younger. With every move toward a new screen the eerie scratching of the Apple disc drive would scuff along making a sound that added to the suspense!
It had to as the game had no sound effects and no music. This somehow made it even spookier. Every screen rendering (slowly) before your eyes as if some creepy phantasm was programming it just for you.
So my “waterfall” prediction of an easy chain of puzzles was essentially correct. I was misunderstanding a message in one of the rooms.
You can see this coffin by doing EXAMINE on the cart, but because the coffin did not respond to any of my actions (OPEN, MOVE, GET, etc.) I thought perhaps it was just scenery. Since I was out of things to try I gave it another go, and then it finally occurred to me that maybe the wagon was considered a location, and I could ENTER WAGON.
Grr. This likely wasn’t even intended as a puzzle.
Opening the coffin reveals a corpse, some hungry mice, and a silver bullet. You can placate the rats with bread and carry them around.
The silver bullet was what I had been waiting for with the werewolf. LOAD PISTOL and then SHOOT WEREWOLF:
Comparing the two deaths (werewolf and vampire) I still would say the werewolf is slightly more difficult to wrangle, since you only need one item (the cross) for the vampire, and showing crosses to fend off vampires has about as much mythological heft as shooting werewolves with silver bullets does.
Getting back into the game, the mice in hand meant I knew where to take them next. The cat will chase after the mice if you drop them down:
Fortunately, the witch never shows up. I think.
The broom I’ve found no use for (even when attempting to SWEEP every room in the game) but I was able to test my theory about the weak acid revealing the stump’s message.
The knocking teleports you in a cave, I assume the cave previously blocked by rocks. (I think this means the door is never unblocked, although you see it in this picture.)
Again following the waterfall, I could get the flies with the flypaper. Before taking them over to the next logical place (the bullfrog) I tried reading the book.
Trying to take the book teleports you out of the cave. It just a couple steps then to feeding a bullfrog some flies:
Again quite direct, even telling us where to go next. Is this game about to fall? Heading to the goblin and saying the magic word causes the goblin to drop the key and run screaming.
I was then able to take the key over to the locked grate and open it, finding an elixir underneath.
And there the waterfall finally ends. The book suggests the sequence SHAKE ELIXIR, POUR ELIXIR, CLAP HANDS, and all three actions work but get NOTHING HAPPENS in the place I’ve tried it — the statue and the sealed sarcophagus. My guess is we need an open sarcophagus and then it will work?
I’m close to out of options though. Other than the elixir I still have yet to use the shiny ring from the castle, and the broom from the witch hut. I tried every verb on my list on both the sarcophagus and statue to no effect, and I’ve tried everything I can think of with the ring. I did make one other discovery, in a log cabin that I previously could get nothing to happen…
…but I haven’t gotten anything more than this to happen. (The head is incidentally not in the text description.) I suspect I’m just looking for one more waterfall and then I’ll be at the end of the game, but it is of course possible there will be a last surprise.
PC-98 Japanese version as sold by Starcraft, via Mobygames.
So I need to emphasize: the structure of this thing is very odd, even taking the span of all videogames from 19xx to 2024 inclusive. Very shortly after writing the last post I killed the big antagonist of the game (at least in a plot sense), the vampire. That’s supposed to happen near the end of your game. The only comparable game I can think of from the All the Adventures Project so far is Castlequest.
You can take the wooden cross (lying out in the open)…
From this room, with the colorful gravestone description.
…and SHOW CROSS (a perfectly natural action) to get a blast of sunlight.
A STREAM OF BLINDING LIGHT ESCAPES FROM THE CROSS.
It only takes a little thought to try bringing it to the vampire — you just need to not be holding the garlic. That seems to be the hard part of the whole thing (someone who hoovers up all the items just might not know the vampire is there!)
With the vampire dead, you’re able to take the shiny ring that previously had a barrier. (I have no idea what it does.) Another blocked place also opens up. There’s a ladder at the top of the stairs in the castle.
The ladder is not described in the text. I was making the incorrect assumption there would be nothing graphics-only (since the original game was just text). The ladder shaking happens if the vampire is still alive.
Up the ladder is a sarcophagus which just might have our princess, but it is “hermetically sealed”. Magic, then?
And that’s nearly all the progress I’ve been able to make, except I pushed the gravestone and found a locked grate. I assume that’s where the goblin’s key goes.
Being stuck, I made my verb list.
There’s enough verbs that in this situation I generally want to just play “normally” and only consult back in special circumstances. I will at least observe:
It is possible to SAY in a freeform way so there’s surely a magic word somewhere.
SEARCH and EXAMINE have been failures nearly everywhere (“YOU SEE NOTHING UNUSUAL” except for at the creepy statue). TURN seems to map to the same word, oddly enough, suggesting that another (hypothetical) secret will involve that physical action.
You can PET as a verb, but the black cat doesn’t allow it (“SORRY – YOU CAN’T”).
In terms of movement, JUMP is noteworthy (it asks for a direction) and I haven’t gotten FLY to be recognized but that makes me wonder if we’ll pick up the capability somewhere.
I’ve tried various random things like: feeding the cat bread, moving some giant rocks blocking a cave next to the stump…
I have to wait for an opening where the werewolf isn’t around to test a random action like this. Here he showed up the next turn.
…throwing the flypaper in various places (but not every place yet, the werewolf makes this slow), and trying every word in my entire verb list on the statue while wearing the ring.
I’m not ready for hints yet. I might be if this game had more dubious coding. Also, the fact that the vampire-killing is so simple make me think that somehow all the puzzles are simple, and I just haven’t hit the “waterfall” yet (where the thing you get from puzzle A lets you solve B, which lets you solve C, which lets you solve D, etc.)
This is a good time to stop and admire the graphics.
Here, let’s compare and contrast:
Let’s be fair: Time Zone had the graphics pumped out and a ludicrous rate, and Transylvania’s author did the graphics over 11 months. So there’s a little more care and love. But it’s still interesting to poke at the specifics.
Both at least attempt at some kind of stylization on the stairs. I would call Transylvania’s geometric shift and slight asymmetry elegant; it conveys the darkness of a long-decrepit castle. The Time Zone picture tries to convey something similar (with an old Pyramid) but it comes off more as a glitch than intentional.
The Transylvania art also tries to convey contrast with light and dark, with the coffer having both lights and shadow. The Time Zone art has no light contrast at all. (This may have been somewhat a result of the tools: Penguin’s graphic tools were likely more advanced than the ones used by On-Line Systems. At the very least, the Penguin graphics seem to have a wider variety of “colors” to pick from, color including intermixed texture possibilities.)
I’m also impressed at how image maintains the 3D structure even with the shadow over it, and the color used at the front.
I have long been the opinion that you can have “good graphics” at every pixel level; it is possible to adopt a style that works within the constraints. While early graphical art often looks janky, we need to consider not only the skill of the artist, but the time they had (production time was very fast back then) and the tools. The Tarturian rendered its graphics as literal lines of BASIC; the authors made a tool for generating them, but there were still hard technical limits to how good they could make a face.
(Jimmy Maher was able to interview today’s author, Antonio Antiochia, in detail. Check that link if you’d like to see more.)
Antonio was a 13-year old in 1979 who was at Eastern Michigan University, where his father worked, and was playing with computer terminals in a lab.
A picture of a computer terminal from Eastern Michigan University circa 1978, via the Aurora ’78 yearbook.
He found he could access games with a guest account and came across Adventure, but due to a lack of any starting instructions was unable to get anywhere. (Jimmy mentions in the comments to his post it might have been Wander instead, because of the lack of a tutorial to start. However, Wander was a lot rarer and there were enough ports of Adventure a rogue one could have the instructions cut off.)
The game still stuck in his head and he was able to return later and make progress all the way to the end. He was then out of adventures to play, and while he was already a capable programmer at age 13, he wrote his own on paper rather than on computer.
I came up with dozens of adventure plots in my spare time (and a few other games), drawing their outlines, their maps, etc., based on a wide variety of themes (a bit heavy on the fantasy genre) — simply out of the joy of creativity and discovery. It was cool.
Antonio later learned about Scott Adams games on home computers and the Ann Arbor Community High School Computer Club, so become a regular there. He wrote his own game on an Apple II (Land of Ghaja, now lost) and distributed it to the club, then later followed with Transylvania. These were essentially private games.
Like with Magic Mirror, getting Mr. Antiochia hooked up with a publisher happened by accident. In 1981 his father was calling Mark Pelczarski to order supplies (the store Micro Co-op) when Mark mentioned starting a publishing company (Co-op Software, but eventually Penguin). The elder Mr. Antiochia mentioned his son had written an adventure game, and Mark said to “send it in”.
The game was text-only in BASIC. Since not-yet-Penguin were to be known mostly for their graphical software, it seemed wrong to publish without graphics, but Mark was able to give his own software (including not-yet-released portions) to Antonio. Antonio then spent nearly a year making graphics, and the package of BASIC + graphics + assembly language provided by Penguin was put together into Transylvania.
There are incidentally later versions, like a Macintosh black and white version, a “high res” Apple II version, and a larger version with more puzzles published by Polarware. I’m sticking with the 1982 original.
The story begins at midnight, as we have been tasked with the King to rescue the Princess Sabrina, “in the clutches” of a “murderous Vampire”. We have 5 hours.
Reading the stump is a puzzle, as it is “covered with sediment and too fuzzy to read”.
The map is quite open. I was able to get to what I suspect is at least 80% of it from the start, possibly more. There are no locked doors. The puzzles seem to be gating the ability to pick up objects and find information, rather than get into locations.
The note says that Sabrina dies at dawn.
Here’s the first part of the map:
Wandering the map results in a lot of activity, both in terms of sounds and in terms of danger. There might be a “grim chuckle”, or an owl, or the sound of bats.
After a set number of turns (I think?) you start to get chased around by a werewolf. If you pause without running while a werewolf is the room you will die. Sometimes it leaves the trail, but not much. (The closest we’ve had to that effect is Masquerade.) You might additionally get picked up by an eagle and dropped in a random spot, which suggests to me the author was familiar with Hunt the Wumpus in addition to Adventure.
Here both are happening simultaneously.
There’s a “small hut” which is clearly a witch’s house, where a black cat hisses at you if you enter and doesn’t let you take either of the items (a broom and some weak acid; I’m guessing the latter helps with reading the stump).
Of items that can be grabbed just lying around, there’s also a garlic clove, a wooden cross, a stale loaf of bread, and a flintlock pistol in various locations (the latter two in an “Old Frame House”), although the werewolf being present means you can’t pick up an item if it is around.
(Also, the gun is not loaded. I’m guessing we find a silver bullet somewhere for the werewolf.)
For non-movable characters / antagonists, there’s a bullfrog, a goblin with a key (there must be at least one locked thing somewhere) and a admittedly unsettling statue.
Trying to break the statue didn’t work, but maybe I need a particular tool.
The werewolf is restricted to this part of the map, because there’s a castle area to the north that is the domain of the vampire instead.
If you are holding the clove of garlic the vampire doesn’t show up at all.
Other than that you can encounter some flypaper (I assume for obtaining a bribe for the bullfrog) and a shiny ring in a coffer, although the ring is protected by a “mysterious barrier”.
I have some ideas I need to test, but the presence of the werewolf makes testing require multiple “runs” (there’s enough time to grab the wooden cross, for instance, but then you have to ignore some other things). This means even if there are no fancy daemons or timers the game isn’t 100% trivial to solve. Mind you, there is an overall timer — death by dawn — so it is possible the timer plays into other events.
Fingers crossed for good progress next time!
There’s a sailboat you can hop into, but it leads you back to “home” and you can’t go home without Sabrina.
It was a number of things coming together. I’d seen the very original computer game called “Adventure” back in 1977, which was played on mainframe computers (on which my son worked). Then we got involved with a team playing Dungeons and Dragons. I needed a new imaginative idea to replace Vision On which I had been making for some 10 or more years, when I heard The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the radio and was knocked out by it! So I met up with Douglas Adams and outlined a general idea to him in the hope I could get him to write it up, but unfortunately he had just agreed to write the TV version of Hitch-hiker … and though he liked the idea didn’t have the time. So I just went at it myself, trying to combine all of the above.
— Interview with Patrick Dowling speaking about the origins of The Adventure Game, via an interview at Off the Telly
I managed to finish the game, although there were parts I didn’t fully comprehend.
The screen above comes from typing WATER PLANT at the start. Of course, being able to do so requires knowing the verb WATER works (and I can assure you it is very rare compared to “POUR WATER” or the like) but even then it failed in a cryptic way, by asking “How?”. For some games — like the Scott Adams ones — this is a prompt for another parser action. That is (to compensate for it being a two-word parser), you might respond with
WITH TUBE
indicating the thing we do the action with, and that resolves the “how”. Alternately, the command itself might have needed rephrasing, like possibly WATER PLANT WITH TUBE. That wasn’t the case here either.
Here, “how” should be interpreted as “there is no way to do the action you are thinking”. This requires visualizing the game like the author does. The tube and the plant should be thought of as in separate places to the extent that you can’t just tilt the tube over or grab it (TUBE is not a recognized noun, even). Both are fixed in place.
This reflects the television show occasionally have this sort of locational puzzle, where you need to do an action (involving some science trick) which brings together distant things in a room, or at least manages what might first seem an impossibility. For example, the first episode has a ball with a clue that rises to the top of a cylinder if all the players are standing in particular places:
This is showing the aliens explaining the puzzle.
The proper resolution is to put weight down in a spot to substitute for a person.
So the right way to visualize the plant puzzle is as “here’s some water, here’s a plant it needs to be brought to, now bring them together”. I at least guessed something like this early.
In the room to the north (the one with the computer asking for 1 drogna and the closed door requiring 12 drogna) there’s also a button, and pushing the button causes an uninflated balloon to appear. This gave me the idea to fill the balloon with water and use it as a water balloon, but my attempts at FILL BALLOON and the like came to naught (they were technically off my verb list already, but with a parser this dire anything is possible).
I finally came back around to trying WATER PLANT again — even though it had already failed — and was surprised when it worked.
I was so surprised it took me some effort to realize I was doing the implicit actions of filling the balloon, bringing it over, and squeezing. Most adventure games would require the steps in between. As is, the setup is so convoluted I am only 95% certain everything I said above is correct, but at least I’m through the puzzle, and have claimed my 12 drogna “peice”! (You need to refer to it as “12 drogna”, not “piece” or “peice”.)
Now, there’s a matter of not being able to INSERT anything in the computer room (see above). The right thing to do is either PAY COMPUTER (to activate the MZ-80K) or PAY MACHINE (to activate the door opening). In neither case are the nouns described that way in the text, so another vibe I need to roll with is that the game is happy to freely modify how a noun should be referenced from how it initially gets described. That is, (as imaginary examples) you might find a BROOMSTICK that needs to be referenced as a STICK or an APPLE II that needs to be referenced as a COMPUTER.
Paying the computer first:
The computer types out the following: WHAT IS YOUR NAME?
Giving your name, and then trying to type something random has the computer give exactly what sort of prompt it needs.
I never — and this is after finishing the game — found any phrases the computer recognized. The computer was even giving messages like I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHERE which is exactly the thing it asked me to type.
Nevermind that: I could PAY MACHINE in order to open the bars to the west (“Right,the bars slide apart”), and pass through. The bars slide shut behind you but there’s a button in a random spot later you can push that will cause them to open again; this allows later access to the computer, but since I never found a use for the computer it didn’t really matter.
This is the complete map for the game. The first thing encountered past the bars is a random green button with a strange result.
This seems to serve no purpose other than if you go north in a dark section up to where the “monster” is you get “evaporated”.
A brief primer on evaporation: it was introduced in the television show during Season 2, as a new “end game” called The Vortex. Players would move from place to place on a triangle grid avoiding an invisible (to them) enemy that was made via computer generated graphics, and if they hit the enemy, they were “evaporated” and had to “walk the galactic highway” to escape as opposed to just leaving. The video below starts about 30 seconds before an evaporation:
I admit I don’t understand the “strategy” of this game, given the enemy is invisible. This seems like just a lottery? It is important past the theoretical because to escape the MZ-80A version of The Adventure Game, you also need to pass through The Vortex (with identical rules). Evaporation in the TV show doesn’t kill you (they needed to accommodate those five-year-olds), evaporation in the computer game does.
But that comes later. For now, we entirely ignore the dark section and go to the south instead.
Keeping in mind this was based on an educational show with math puzzles, I figured while there might be a code for the safe somewhere, it was equally likely the game meant for you to brute force list the different permutations of ABCD (as a math exercise) and go through each one. Brute force worked fairly quickly:
Playing the arcade game is just a matter of ignoring the computer so you can save your 1 drogna for the game instead.
OK…It isn’t a game at all,really.A camera is located nearby and you can see a dark passage,a huge,hairy monster and you can see BOX.
This was highly deceptive, as you’ll see in a moment. Heading west from the arcade gets a riddle:
Going further you meet a robot who wants to play chess. You have to beat it to pass, but there’s no trick, it’s just a matter of playing multiple times until you win.
Off a side passage from there is a storeroom with a button (that opens the bars at the start), a torch, and a “dissintergrator”.
You can only refer to it as a GUN. I was never able to use it.
Going back to that message about the monster and the BOX — I tried taking my torch over to the dark place and lighting it, but none of the verbs I came up with worked. I wasn’t able to shoot the monster with the gun either.
I eventually found that the box is not at the monster at all but a side room, but you can only see it if you are holding a torch. It’s truly the weirdest of implicit actions — I guess the torch is providing light but makes no indication of such?
This room was originally empty. There’s no indication otherwise the torch is doing something.
Pushing the red button just kills you. The box can be opened to find a 1000 drogna piece. And that is that.
Regarding the safe at the arcade game that had the key, that goes to a “grandfather clock” in another side branch back at the chess-playing robot.
And a little bit further someone is taking fares back to Earth, and the 1000 piece works. I have no idea if the 6 also gets used somehow, everything is implicit action.
Now, to escape, we have to go through what this calls the EVAPORATION GAME.
This was incredibly finicky and I suspect the emulator might have been bugged. Sometimes I picked a kosher direction and it didn’t work. In between moves the “evporators” would move, and sometimes then I would get a turn back, and sometimes the game would just lock up in an endless loop.
Eventually, by sheer luck, avoiding both the evaporators and the crash (equally deadly) I made it to the end and won everything.
Cryptic things I never worked out:
how to use the computer
how to use the gun
if the safe had another intended method of opening other than brute force
what the whole point of getting the key from the safe and finding the 6 drogna piece was
why pressing the green button makes the monster hostile, and if there’s any way to escape when it is non-hostile
Even when I knew what verbs I should stick to, the parser felt like wading through mud, because so many of the nouns were either not recognized or were described in ways that required me to guess what their “parser equivalent” was (like the gun). The torch was especially cryptic and I only worked out what the game’s intent was after the fact.
The one thing this had going for it is atmosphere; it really did feel like I was on Arg rather than a generic planet. The game might have been stronger had it done more with the game show elements: multiple characters, science puzzles with multiple solutions, and cryptic alien hosts that would sometimes give hints to make sure shooting ended in time. (Ian Oliver, producer: “Many of the ‘hints’ from Chris the butler and company were issued in desperation – we had to be out of the studio by 10pm come hell or high water.”)
This was a little too ambitious for what was likely someone’s first adventure game. Even an advanced parser wasn’t strictly necessary — you can just subsume a lot of action under USE — but there needed to be proper feedback when and why things don’t work, implicit actions needed to be described when they happened, and nouns needed the in-game text to match the name the players use. However, the NPCs required to match the show likely would have strained even Infocom’s resources.
(One last bonus anecdote from TV production before I check out: two of the series were recorded in a studio with no air-conditioning, and because of the structure of the game allowing the players to explore anywhere at any time, it meant most of the sets needed to be lit. On a normal production only one would be lit at a time. This led to the place being more sweltering than normal during a summer shoot.)
Next up: Transylvania for the Apple II. I know some of you have been waiting for this one. It’s finally time.
The Adventure Game (1980-1986) was a British gameshow where contestants were tasked with escaping from the planet Arg. It’s essentially an early lo-fi version of The Crystal Maze, and if that doesn’t ring bells, just think of it as a series of escape rooms.
It wasn’t filmed “live”; the article linked above discusses 3 hours being filmed for each (half-hour) episode. Being made for children, it was intended as educational, and so a lot of time gets spent setting up real physics and math problems. The lead, Patrick Dowling, previously worked on The Great Egg Race, a competition with a series of engineering tasks, named after a vehicle powered by a rubber band that transports an egg.
The various mechanisms (at least in the 1980 season which I was sampling) get explained before the players go through them, and there’s a lot of emphasis on players talking through their thought process.
A scene from the first episode, explaining a puzzle involving clown doors.
The guests tended to be two “show business personalities” and one “guest” (that is, someone not used to TV) and the showrunners would sometimes customize puzzles based on the guest’s personal knowledge to make them more comfortable.
One of the common elements through episodes is a colored floor of shapes called Drogna that the players need to logically step through. It was later turned into a game for the BBC Micro.
Contestants from the first episode solving the Drogna puzzle.
They sometimes played an adventure game on a computer as part of the obstacles. Season 1 used a HP 9845 workstation while later seasons used a BBC Micro.
The above is from Season 1 Episode 3, with Maggie Philbin, Moira Stuart, and James Burke (of Connections fame). Yes, that’s an automap in 1980, meaning the innovation can be found by either making a game for children or making something that will make sense over television.
THERE ARE THREE EXITS E,S AND W AGAIN
THERE’S AN UGLY GREAT TROLL DEMANDING FOOD – HE WON’T LET YOU PASS
FISH
HE’S GETTING VERY, VERY ANGRY.
SPRAY
HE’S GETTING VERY, VERY ANGRY.
CUCUMBER
HE SAID ‘CUCUMBER? YUK!’ AND THREW IT AT YOU.
In the above segment, they’ve passed by some spam sandwiches and attempted to give their cucumber sandwiches instead. They go back for the spam sandwiches but don’t run across the troll again, eventually going in another direction. Going that way they encounter an ADDER, and rather than interpreting the ADDER as a snake, they are supposed to use the SUBTRACTOR they are holding.
STOP! THERE’S AN ADDER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TUNNEL.
SUBTRACTOR
OH GOOD – THE ADDER IS NOW SUBTRACTED AND HAS VANISHED.
It looks like there might be some control on the part of the showrunners of the adventure game portion as it is going on or at least creative editing. (That is, the game might not be “fully playable” in a real sense — remember this isn’t live.)
We know at least one of our authors (Brian Howarth, see Arrow of Death Part 2) was influenced by the show, but our interest today is in a program made by Kuma for the Sharp MZ-80A that places the player as a contestant.
Via Sharpworks on Twitter. The MZ-80A was the “follow-up” to the 80K and comes with a proper keyboard.
We saw Kuma once before with the game Quest / Fantasy Quest by John Wolstencroft; this game has no author given and may have been “in-house”. It gets a mention in KUMA’s August 1982 catalog but doesn’t stick around for long. Strident suggests some kind of licensing issues (maybe because of the release of Drogna in ’83) although Sharpworks suggests the game was a “rush job” and withdrawn for quality control issues.
I know, at least, the game is supposed to be cryptic and hard.
I might say “I’ll try my best to solve honestly before succumbing to the lure of the walkthrough” except the game is ridiculously hard to control, even compared to some of the legends we’ve seen on this blog so far.
That’s a truly unorthodox verb list, and even knowing the verb that seems to fit an action doesn’t necessarily help. For example, you might think, given the direction on the sign, the next step is to WATER PLANT but the game just asks “How?” and TAKE TUBE has the game respond “TUBE?” (that is, it doesn’t recognize the noun). I tried WATER PLANT WITH TUBE and variants, also with no luck.
The only thing I’ve been able to do is SAY MYNAME to go to the next area. (The game actually instructs you to “speak” your name, yet SPEAK is not a recognized verb. There should be a name for this phenomenon, maybe “disjoint instructions”?)
The introduction said we have one Drogna “peice” already, but I have been unsuccessful in using it, even with USE (USE DROGNA: “What for?”). TYPE at least gets a response…
…and PRAY gets “OK….I’ll pray for you!” (Who puts an easter egg verb in a list of only 9 of them?)
I’m hoping there’s some basic communication norm I’m missing and things will start to go more smoothly after, but I don’t have faith anything about this game will be smooth.
(Also, thanks to Ethan Johnson for helping identify the HP computer used in the first season of The Adventure Game.)
Before reaching the finale, I’d like to mention two other historical tidbits on the author.
First, a number of people associated with CHROMAtrs — including the author himself — show up in this thread. A “Chuck Sites” who seems to be speaking from personal knowledge mentions
South Shore was lucky to get Robert French to write ChromaBasic. At Thirteen he could program circles around anybody. And he could type unbelievably fast too.
and a StevenHB, who actually worked for South Shore (the company that sold the hardware) adds
I worked with the author of CHROMA Basic, who was a (shockingly) young student from Kentucky.
with Robert French himself chiming in:
Wow, I just ran across this web page by accident. I’m the “shockingly young student from Kentucky” that StevenHB referred to above. I was 14 when I wrote and sold Chroma BASIC to South Shore, and I still remember it well. I also remember writing a Pacman-equivalent and some other games.
In the mid-80s Robert French’s other “big” TRS-80 product was a BBS system he called The French Connection.
I mention it not because the context will help with understanding Strange Adventure — it doesn’t really, other than being another showcase for our author’s machine language skills — but rather to dissuade any future historians from accidentally mixing up the program with a much more famous BBS. One of the very first personal BBSs (from 1979) was also called The French Connection, and was run out of California by an infamous con artist named Stephen Cohen. It was intended as a dating service. His shenanigans include posing as “Tammy”, who would not only keep the interest of lonely men but also extract their money (subscriptions were $18 a month).
My guess is Robert French was not aware of any of this when he named his BBS software.
Back to the game! Continuing from last time, I had vaporized a rock into rock dust (see above) and I was stuck on a “tiny hole” where the HELP command claimed some kind of hidden switch.
I pulled open the source code to solve the puzzle. First I checked the BASIC code to find the room itself:
17000 RO=33:PRINTB1$;” YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM. THERE IS A “;:IFAI=0THENPRINT”TINY”;ELSEPRINT”LARGE”;
17010 PRINT” HOLE AT YOUR FEET.”;:IFAI=0THENPRINT
17015 PRINT”THERE IS A PASSAGE TO THE EAST.”
It looks like the hole changes from TINY to LARGE when the variable AI is something other than 0, so I traced next where the value of AI gets changed.
156 AI=1:POKETR+NO,34:A=0:RETURN
Fine, where does line 156 get called? I traced it back to line 151, which seems to trigger when you drop an object, and specifically
IFRO=33ANDNO=7THEN156
That is, if the room number is 33 (the small room with the tiny hole) and the item we are dropping is 7, the flag changes.
Fine, which item is 7? From the machine code part I turned, with this section
SIC JEW ROP LAM BOT KEY RIN BOAT RUB LAS BAT PIL
The SICKLE is item 1, so counting from there, the RIN is 7. The ring?!? Why the ring?
Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve done it. I have found, after hundreds of games, the most absolutely pure piece of moon logic ever in an adventure game, and yes, this one deserves the name of “moon logic”.
The diamond ring drops into the room below.
The dragon does not block your way (nor stop you from taking the ring) so you can just be on your way if you want, and my first time through I did that, because this puzzle is rather difficult. Not “pure moon logic” this time, just rather tricky. Rather than plow in the order I solved things let’s just get this puzzle over now.
Examining the dragon has the game say THE DRAGON IS JUST THE KIND OF DRAGON YOU MEET EVERY DAY. The HELP indicates the dragon might be sleepy, and that refers back to the NOTE from early in the game: DEAR JOHN, SLEEP WELL. GOOD NIGHT, MOTHER. I tried SAY GOOD NIGHT (SAY GOOD also works) and the game claimed nothing happened, meaning it understood the word GOOD, even though it doesn’t represent a takeable object of any sort. I also, separately, had tried to DROP PILLOW (one of the treasures I had) but also to no effect. You need to combine the actions: DROP PILLOW, and then SAY GOOD NIGHT.
Not moon logic! Not the greatest of puzzles, either — there should always be an indicator if you have half of a solution so you know you are on the right track — but not completely arbitrary either.
The bag can incidentally be used to scoop up the rock dust from earlier, which is otherwise too fine to pick up.
Proceeding onward, there’s another area with some *HONEY*, and a crack. I was able to open the crack but only because I had previously extracted the verb list, and this is how I found WI stands for WIDEN.
Probably the only time we’ll see a game that requires this verb.
The room past the crack has some *SPICES*. With the honey and spices in hand we can go out of the cave (from a western exit) and find ourselves blocked by a bear. If you throw the honey he eats it and is still hungry (and of course being a treasure that is a bad thing). The spices scare the bear off:
Past the bear is … er, whoops!
HELP informs us our decision to push the button earlier may not have been wise.
Even given the trolling, I admit I loved this moment. I anticipated already that blowing up a rocket with an unseen missile seemed unlikely to be helpful, and the game already had shown the HELP command (which encouraged pushing the button) to be a bit of a trickster.
This is true of the very first room. Climbing the tree gets you eaten (by the tree).
Re-doing everything and passing by the button:
Here the game switches to sci-fi setting.
There’s a “mysterious puddle of water creeping around the room” early on that you can destroy by throwing the sponge from earlier in the game. Close to that is an experimental lab with a flask, which gets used right away when you hop in another side room and have the door seal shut behind you.
You eventually find a teleporter which leads to an engine room, and can start the engines, then go back to a control room to launch, and have the entire rocket blow up.
For whatever reason the self-destruct system has also been activated but only triggers upon launch (or maybe it is a long enough timer it takes travel into space for it to be meaningful); that can be taken care of with another button.
If you try to go back out the airlock, things don’t go well, as you’re in orbit.
For some reason this spelling made me laugh.
The teleporter has been redirected to the planet you are orbiting, instead.
To get anywhere on the icy surface you need to throw the “rock dust” for traction, and yes, that’s very easy to miss if you weren’t ready for that. (Back at least a saved game slot! At least the game has saving!)
Notice how, in a real-universe sense, we have completely stranded ourselves on a single island on a faraway planet with only our 9 treasures to keep us company. Maybe dragon eggs are edible.
I admit I appreciated the near-twist to the ending, and felt like it matched the general theming of the HELP command with attitude and other troll-like events. I realize, in an absolute “do I recommend this” sense, the answer is quite definitely no, and if I came up with a rating system (perhaps with a clever acronym, someone want to make one up for me?) this would score near the bottom on essentially every metric, but that’s not really the point of me playing this kind of game in the first place. Usually there’s something interesting and different and memorable in even the most out-there of games, and being given wrong advice by what normally is a meta-command surely qualifies; even the snarky narrator of the Infocom version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy didn’t go that far. The closest I can think of a similar trick being pulled is the Ice-Pick Lodge game The Void, and given the company responsible is mostly famous for Pathologic, this clearly dives into territory only explorable by avant-garde Russians and fast-typing 14-year-olds.
So I unstuck myself from the parser issues, had reasonably smooth sailing, then ran into more parser issues.
The first thing I tried was test something Voltgloss theorized, that HELP was not just a “meta” verb but an essential one. We’ve had, for instance, absolutely essential information given by the HELP command but not by the “proper in-universe” portion of the game.
Having tested enough times, I’d say it is more the traditional meta-shtick, although the game does a pretty good job of customizing the message for the location.
Typing HELP here says THAT SAND MIGHT COME IN HANDY.
Trying to go east and typing HELP again, though, indicates otherwise:
This is enough to indicate to me this is a “you got trapped” gag, not an actual puzzle.
Up next is the second hole, with the magic word AYUDAME. I was unable to get out of the hole while holding the rope, as I was trying things like THROW ROPE and the like, and just going UP didn’t work. The key was simply to be going UP while holding the rope and the game would let you use the rope automatically (mind you, I not sure what specific action the avatar is really taking).
From the HELP in this room, which led me to suspect I simply needed the right verb and the magic word was saved for later.
I had already marked on my map there was a tree where an attempt at using CLIMB failed because I lacked climbing equipment. With rope in hand I immediately tested CLIMB again (this time, not UP — yes, the parser is inconsistent) and was able to find an oil lamp hanging out on the top of the tree. Where they often tend to be found.
The result of trying HELP here. This is honestly where the flavor of the game is, it’s otherwise fairly straightforward sci-fi-fantasy blend.
The magic word AYUDAME, incidentally, I started testing in each and every room, marking as I went, before hitting paydirt in an entirely random place: the front of the cave immediately after getting bitten by leeches.
I knew I next needed to resolve the antiseptic bottle (the one where OPEN and APPLY and so forth didn’t work), and finally resorted to poking open the source code (or rather, in this case, the machine code file that needs to be run before the BASIC one). Here’s what I’ve come up with (this includes some information from later in this play session).
NO, SO, EA, WE, UP, DO, (directions)
GE, (get)
DR, (drop)
CH, (chop)
TH, (throw)
CL, (probably clean?)
SP, (spray)
RE, (read)
EX, (examine)
SAY, (say)
PU, (push)
SH, (shoot)
WI, (don’t know)
SM, (seems to be also open?)
OP, (open)
LI, (light)
UN, (unlight)
SAV, (save)
HEL, (help)
IN, (inventory)
SC, (score)
Using the key (and making sure I had a lit lamp) I was able to find and enter two locked doors in the cave. One led to a TRS-80 with the message PRESS THE BUTTON TO FIRE MISSILE.
The other contains the actual button to fire the aforementioned missile. The funny thing structurally is I pushed the button first and found what it did after.
No idea where the rocket is and what happens if you don’t destroy it.
Exploring around a little more I found a rock with the message DING-A-LING; saying DING revealed a *ring*, one of the treasures. I also came across a bigger rock blocking my way, some oars, and a boat at an underground lake.
Historically, text adventures have been awful at boat control, and this game is no different. I had already dumped the verb list and nothing seemed close to helping, until I finally realized the boat was portable enough I could just pick it up, and walking NORTH into the lake while holding the boat was considered equivalent to using it.
Just a bit past that are a LASER PISTOL, some BATTERIES (needed to operate the pistol), and a *SOFT PILLOW* (another treasure).
I was able to to take the pistol back to the large rock blocking my way and shoot it.
Now, though I’ve found myself stuck in the room immediately after.
HELP gives a message about there being a hidden switch in the hole, but I have no item that seems to help with the cause of pushing it (or at least none that the parser will recognize; you’d think the sickle has a long end so you could flip it around to push whatever’s in there). Given how arbitrary the magic word use was I suspect I’ve missed a hidden object and I need to comb back over the rooms I’ve been in.
Robert S. French is another one of the teenaged computer experts (like Stepka with Castle Fantasy, and Goodman with Building of Death) that wrote one adventure game amidst their tech-savvy early life and went on to prominence in a field other than games. In Mr. French’s case he has his name on 18 different patents related to parallel computing and now works at SETI in astronomy research. His most recent paper he lists as Orbits and Resonances of the Regular Moons of Neptune.
From Robert’s own web page he lists this period — prior to starting a Bachelor’s in Computer Science at MIT — as working at Various Companies from Louisville, Kentucky.
Implemented accounting and inventory software for several companies. Managed a small programming department at a mail-order company. Developed a new BASIC interpreter that was sold with the ChromaTRS color graphics board for the TRS-80. Developed dozens of utilities and games for the TRS-80 that were sold commercially. Developed some of the first shareware for the Amiga, including a well-regarded Mandelbrot set exploration system. Tutored students in programming concepts.
There were a number of “color conversions” for the basic black-and-white TRS-80, including one from a company in Canada sold in 1979, although the most prominent was ChromaTRS, which started being sold for Model I and Model III computers in 1982.
French’s contribution was writing CHROMA BASIC. From the manual:
CHROMA BASIC is a new program for use with a CHROMAtrs (T.M.} COLOR ADD-ON. Included in the CHROMA BASIC program are many, easy-to-use, graphics commands that can either be written into any Basic program or used independently.
His heavy familiarity with machine code interfaces explains a bit of technical oddity to today’s game, Strange Adventure, rather optimistically entitled Adventure #1 (there was no Adventure #2). In order to run it you need to first run an assembly language file which stays in memory (and seems to handle some parser aspects) before loading a BASIC file to run the game. You also need to crank the memory to 64560 when prompted for “Memory Size”. (I needed help from the trs80gp Discord group to puzzle this out, and George Phillips — one of the trs80gp co-authors — worked out the issue. Thanks!)
Regarding the “American Software Co.” label, Mr. French sold some other software by this name, mainly arcade clones.
It is, as the instructions say, another treasure hunt with asterisks around the names of treasures. This time there’s more than one, and the first one is in the very first room of the game.
Typing GET JEWEL has the game respond I DON’T SEE IT HERE which isn’t a great first impression. You’re supposed to GET SICKLE and then CHOP TREE.
THE JEWEL HAS FALLEN OUT OF THE TREE.
And that’s the only treasure I’ve seen so far. I’m stuck pretty early, in one case almost surely on a parser issue, with other puzzles I’m not sure. Here’s the lay of the land so far, zoomed out:
There’s a “jungle path” that passes through, marked in green; you start on the far east and there are “branches” along the way.
The first branch has a crowbar and a sponge out in the open, and a cryptic note.
This area also has some quicksand that doesn’t kill you right away, so it might be a puzzle, or it might just be a time-wasting trap.
I haven’t fully caught the vibe yet which option (ignore, or it is a puzzle) I should expect.
The next area has traffic you can kill yourself on…
…and then there’s a dead end. You can drop down a hole to find a rope (and no verb I’ve tried lets me use the rope to get back) and a magic word on a wall.
I have yet to try this in every single room, but I worry the game might be coded so you have to see the word before it works.
Finally, trying to go farther west forces you to cross a stream with leeches. The leeches bite you and after enough time the bites become infected and you die.
Fortunately, there’s a cave just past the stream with with SOLARCAINE ANTISEPTIC that ought to work. Unfortunately, no verb I’ve tried has worked for using the bottle. What I did discover is that the verb is a two-letter parser; that is, if you type DRINK BOTTLE the game turns it into DR BO, thinks you meant DROP BOTTLE, and the bottle now appears on the screen, confusing someone (like myself) who didn’t realize the parser limits yet). And yes, I realize the antiseptic ought to be applied topically, but I haven’t found a command that actually does that.
Also, if you go deeper into the cave and try to do any command, you trip over a rock and die, presumably due to lack of light.
My attempt at making a verb list at the moment is consequently an absolute mess:
I can tell easily, for instance, that WEAR is being parsed as WEST and RESET is being parsed as READ. However, I’m not clear about “CL” — the game gives a vague response, so it might be CLEAN (especially given the sponge) but maybe it is CLOSE instead? I’ll have to keep investigating. “SM” on any object I’ve tried says that the object is not a door, but is SMASH the most logical verb then? I could of course plunge into the source code but I’m not at that level of desperation yet, even though I have the nagging feeling the bottle solution might involve an unmentioned noun (that is, something like CURE BITES even though the BITES aren’t given as a specific target).
Renga in Blue 
