Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Let’s skip from our cavalcade of obscurity over to something at least a few more people have heard of. Escape From Rungistan tells the story of a tourist (controlled by us) visiting the fictional country of Rungistan.

This game forms some core memories to Apple II buffs; an academic blog post theorizes the following:

So student #1 will let loose in a class discussion with what is probably a brilliant analysis of Aristotle’s Poetics as applied to Escape From Rungistan which he/she plays religiously every evening on an Apple II emulator. But after they’ve finished speaking, since no one else in the class has ever played Escape From Rungistan (or heard of it)* there is an awkward silence.

(*Okay actually that’s not 100% true. I’ve played Escape From Rungistan.)

It’s on the syllabus, week 3, after World of Tanks and before Spacechem.

The game inspiring such writing — even in a theoretical imaginary student sense — means it must have had a publisher with decent reach, and indeed it did: Sirius Software.

From the Summer 1983 Sirius Software Catalog.

We’ve played Sirius Software before with the Tim Wilson games: Kabul Spy and Blade of Blackpoole. This game starts the ouerve of a different author, Bob Blauschild. Bob seems to have been another outside contractor (like Tim Wilson) who I think (but alas can’t confirm) is the same Bob Blauschild who worked in analog circuit design around the same time. At the very least, Rungistan represents some technical chops, as it is made in a combination of assembly code and BASIC, and relies heavily on animation, heavily enough that animation becomes part of the puzzles of the game. (One of the first video results for this game includes in the title “you got Quick Time Events in my text game”.) The Mask of the Sun had some animated puzzle moments but that game was made by a team whereas this was one person.

Some frames from the initial animated sequence.

It also represents technical chops because the game has extremely gnarly copy protection; it breaks all standard cracking tools and 4am’s essay on the issue is worth a read.

What happens when a drive doesn’t see a state change after the equivalent of two consecutive zero bits? The drive thinks the disk is weak, and it starts increasing the amplification to try to compensate, looking for a valid signal. But there is no signal. There is no data. There is only a yawning abyss of nothingness. Eventually, the drive gets desperate and amplifies beyond reason and starts returning random bits based on ambient noise from the disk motor and the magnetism of the Earth.

Seriously.

Returning random bits doesn’t sound useful for a storage medium, but it’s exactly what the developer wanted, and it’s exactly what this code is checking for. It’s finding and reading and checksumming the same sequence of bits from the disk, over and over, and checking that they change.

So after our protagonist’s ill-advised visit to an unfriendly country somewhere in Africa, they find themselves in a cell awaiting execution, and you take over from there.

Note the game not only has animations but music at appropriate moments; I’ve got about 30 seconds worth from the opening in the video below so you can hear what it’s like.

The two books shown above (the book on “navigation of Rungistan waterways” and the “book of aviation”) likely provide a method to explain our avatar’s proficiency in vehicles later, despite being a tourist and not James Bond.

After this I was heavily stuck; the sink doesn’t work, we are too weak to move the bed, the window is too high to reach. I was so stuck I used a feature the instructions mentioned: HINT PLEASE, which told me I could CALL GUARD. I had already tried YELL and gotten beaten by a hose, but I guess I was supposed to yell more politely.

The food was an arbitrary guess — any puzzle that asks for a noun that the player hasn’t seen yet has the difficulty multiply by at least double — but there’s a mouse that occasionally is animated walking by and I suspected I’d get some cheese if I asked, just because that’s almost guaranteed from adventures of this era.

The guard brought a tray…

…which had STEAK, a CANDY BAR, and as predicted, some CHEESE.

The steak you can just eat to get stronger (you’ll see why in a second). The cheese goes to the mouse and then the mouse can be picked up; you need to time typing GIVE CHEESE to be when the mouse is visible and walking in the cell.

With the steak eaten, you have enough energy to MOVE BED; the game asks where to specifically, so you have to say TO WINDOW.

You can then STAND ON BED to see out the window, and see a child outside. The child is afraid but you can hand over the candy bar and he’ll toss you a shovel.

I was stuck for quite a while after because of the parser. Trying to DIG FLOOR and DIG WALL and so forth didn’t work. (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND.”) I finally broke out my verb list and found it to be no help whatsoever. The game sends any misunderstood input to the same set of messages (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND” or “THAT WON’T WORK. TRY SOMETHING ELSE.”) making it impossible to tell if CUT BED is misunderstood because it is considered nonsense, or if CUT is just never a verb in the game. This sort of information-protection can make sense with nouns (and modern Inform even defaults to it) but only accepting very exact phrasing means the game has trouble giving specific feedback on why things go wrong. If you try to EAT BED a good response is saying the bed isn’t edible; while “I don’t understand” is technically correct it also is much vaguer, and I could see being led astray by being slightly wrong about how a parser command is phrased.

I finally went back over the previous events; I contemplated how the game already had me asked about FOOD despite it not being a listed noun. Maybe I needed to DIG TUNNEL, thus using the word tunnel without prompting? The game then asked me WHERE? I tried typing DIG TUNNEL ON WALL and the game asked me WHERE? again.

After five more minutes of fussing I remembered the bed wanted the command given in two parts (like a Scott Adams game).

Following the sage advice to go north:

OK, I expected that. Going east instead:

This is animated.

As long as you do nothing while the snake animation is happening (it goes all the way across the screen from right to left) you can make it past safely.

It looks like we’re in for a bout of exploration (and probably random deaths). This seems like a good stopping point. I’ll report back in the grisly details next time.