“A diablero? You are crazy! There are no diableros.”
“Do you mean that there are none today, or that there never were any?”
“At one time there were, yes. It is common knowledge. Everybody knows that. But the people were very afraid of them and had them all killed.”
“Who killed them, Genaro?”
“All the people of the tribe. The last diablero I knew about was S⸻. He killed dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people with his sorcery. We couldn’t put up with that and the people got together and took him by surprise one night and burned him alive.”
“How long ago was that, Genaro?”
“In nineteen forty-two.”
“Did you see it yourself?”
“No, but people still talk about it. They say that there were no ashes left, even though the stake was made of fresh wood. All that was left at the end was a huge pool of grease.”
— From The Teachings of Don Juan
My main key to progress from last time is to realize that I probably should just try anything that might possibly be a verb that is referenced in the game and in the manual. Doesn’t matter if no other game might consider such a thing: this game does not do its magic by SAY BLAHBLAHMAGICWORD (or at least, not so far).
Regarding the manual, I haven’t talked about it yet, as we only have the Dragon version. But Gus Brasil pointed out it was essential for something so I spent some time looking over all the notes.
From Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
When a location description is preceded with the words “I AM IN DANGER!”, there is only one correct response which will prevent you from being killed. There are no second chances, but there are subtle warnings. which can prevent you from getting into situations for which you are not prepared.
I’ve seen this already with machete man, and we’ll see this again shortly — this is indicating the way the code works, which really requires typing one specific thing in response. “Not prepared” suggests these will not be self-contained (like a puzzle where you have to WRESTLE the enemy but there’s no items or knowledge involved).
The manual also says you remember a poem on waking up:
Remember well the power word,
Remember that which twice you heard.
Awake to that which dwells within.
Throw off the yoke of ignorance.
I spent a long time trying various interpretations, and especially looking for anything early on that indicated something had been encountered twice. The closest was the shack which the game says you recall being familiar.
I still haven’t reckoned with being watched.
I tried using SAY on each one of the words in the poem in case any of them was a trigger: this was close to right. I needed to test each one as a verb. While in the shack:
Oho! This leads to a room with no exits or anything you can interact with, but you can AWAKEN to get out.
I discovered after some mucking about that you can DREAM OBJECT. In particular, at the well you can DREAM WELL. If you LOOK, though, it appears that nothing has changed; however, attempting to type DREAM again, the game says:
NOTHING.
And you are able to AWAKEN — even after wandering away from the well — to jump back to it. If you do something in the “real world” while you are dreaming it still stays.
I hadn’t unearthed the box while in “real world” state, but it stayed here after teleporting back to the well from awakening. This seems too elaborate to be a bug but I’m not sure what’s going on. It’s not the normal world-separation I’m used to with this kind of mechanic.
You can DREAM WELL while not even next to the well, and it’ll jump you over there; this puts you in the “sleeping state”, so awakening will warp you back to where you started dreaming. DREAM CANYON works similarly, taking you over to where the poisonous snake is. It’s almost like a warping “checkpoint” system?
Because you can dream of places you are not even at to travel to them, that lets you warp to a new area. I was able to DREAM ROCK to go to one of the flat rocks I had been seeing in the desert but had been unable to get to.
I found out, after the fact, that I had typed GO ROCK in one of the rooms which describes it being nearby but you aren’t close enough yet. If you are to the west or east of the flat rock, GO ROCK works.
Just to the south of the previous location.
The “looking familiar” means this is a “remember” spot. Using REMEMBER here says
I USED TO PRACTICE THE SORCERY TECHNIQUE OF “GAZING” AT THIS SPOT!
You can GAZE ROCK and find it has a blue shade. This seems to be a hint that blue = safe (the blue pool is safer than the yellow one, that is). There’s another rock you can walk on which is more ominous. You “start to feel anxious”, and gazing upon it gives a yellow glow.
Flat rocks marked with colored squares.
So the end result is I figured out GAZE and DREAM a little out of order, but the game lets you. For the new location with DREAM, you can dream about the mountains in the distance.
At the top of the mountain is another REMEMBER moment.
None of the verbs I might suspect seemed to be understood. I almost thought I had progress by pretending the parser understood more words and typing TAKE FORM OF CROW, but all that’s happening is “FORM” and “OF” get ignored — the game understands that as TAKE CROW, not shapechanging.
This doesn’t work either.
I can at least report two other locations found off the mountain. One is some “rich soil” where it immediately occurred to me to try planting the seeds.
I have been unable to take the bush afterwards, so I don’t know what purpose it serves. LOOKing just says I’ve never seen one like it before; gazing does nothing.
Off in another direction is an eagle’s nest.
I assume shape changing is needed here for progress.
I’m fine with speculation/hints now, although do use ROT13 as usual. I especially want to know if I am missing out on the shape-changing for puzzle reasons (in which case I’m happy to keep whacking on it), or frustrating-parser reasons (in which case I’m happy to spoil). To recap where I am:
1.) I can DREAM in addition to GAZE in order to teleport to other places. (There may still be teleport destinations I can infer, I should make a full list.)
2.) I supposedly can shape-change but I have no idea how.
3.) I’ve planted the seeds, getting a bush, but the bush doesn’t want to be interacted with.
4.) I now have an eagle to get by, in addition to machete man. Regarding the snake that causes death upon being picked up, I’m guessing that’s a non-puzzle and the snake is just a shape-change target. The same might be true for the lizard.
5.) I still haven’t used the bowl, the mat, the shotgun, the debris, or the brush. I still don’t have a rope for getting into the well. I still don’t have any way of helping the blighted cactus.
To perceive energy directly allowed the sorcerers of don Juan’s lineage to see human beings as conglomerates of energy fields that have the appearance of luminous balls. Observing human beings in such a fashion allowed those shamans to draw extraordinary energetic conclusions. They noticed that each of those luminous balls is individually connected to an energetic mass of inconceivable proportions that exists in the universe; a mass which they called the dark sea of awareness. They observed that each individual ball is attached to the dark sea of awareness at a point that is even more brilliant than the luminous ball itself. Those shamans called that point of juncture the assemblage point, because they observed that it is at that spot that perception takes place. The flux of energy at large is turned, on that point, into sensorial data, and those data are then interpreted as the world that surrounds us.
— Carlos Castaneda, from the 30th anniversary edition of The Teachings of Don Juan
Long-time readers of this blog will know one of the tools I deploy when stuck (or even before I am stuck, if I know the game is going to be on the tough side) is a verb list. I plow through a set of verbs I know have worked on games in the past and mark which ones are active.
Sometimes a game’s parser will fight against any attempts to create such a list, but El Diablero helpfully states I DON’T KNOW THAT for any unknown verb, and only uses that phrase for unknown verbs.
I’ve never done anything resembling an exact sort, but for verbs that seem to be appearing more often I have shuffled them to a left column; the result here is that if a verb appears in the third, fourth, or fifth column, it is notable and worth remembering. LIFT just is a synonym for TAKE here; GAZE on the other hand is clearly its own verb, as LOOK on an object with no description gets the response
NOTHING SPECIAL.
while GAZE gives
NOTHING APPARENT.
Usually GAZE has applied to either crystal balls, mirrors, or reflective surfaces like water. The first two have not showed up in the game (yet?) but there has been a pool of yellow water and a pool of blue water, and both allow the use of GAZE. (Gazing is also one of the “powers” mentioned in the Castaneda books, similar to how sorcerers “perceive energy”, but I’ll save discussing that for the end of this post.)
Gazing at the yellow water leads to a tunnel; there is no pool on the other side to travel back. The only way to go is south, where a man with a machete kills you.
I get a loaded shotgun later, but that doesn’t help here either.
The blue pool is more interesting, as it leads to an entirely new desert area with a map the size of the first one. Again, it is rectilinear, so I have made an RPG-style map.
Well (with no rope), tombstone, blue pool, shack with dirt floor, thick brush.
The well has inscriptions just like the dead-end at the canyon. The game explicitly mentions needing a rope if you try to go in.
The tombstone has the name of your lost teacher. DIG is not a verb the game understands.
The shack is unlocked and two rooms. On the north side there’s a window where you can look in and see no-one. When you step in the shack, there’s an old shotgun and the feeling like you’re being watched. I have not been able to act on this information.
The shotgun is described as having one round. The game tells you to save it when you try to shoot random things. I don’t know why it doesn’t work on machete man. Is machete man even real? I don’t think it’s the sorcerer; following Castaneda, we’re more likely to encounter El Diablero shapeshifted into an animal.
The shack has (in its other room) a bowl, some seeds, and a mat woven of blue and white threads.
You can PLANT the SEEDS to form a mound of dirt but I haven’t gotten a result yet.
Finally, the shrub, when taken, reveals a tunnel. Going down the tunnel, you find a hardwood box that is locked.
That’s certainly enough to chew on. Listing out my issues:
1.) What do I do with any of the objects: a crow, some debris, the brush (assuming it is more for than hiding the tunnel), the bowl, the mat, the shotgun, the seeds? The seeds can be planted, but where do they go?
(and before you ask, unless I’m missing something in the parser, you can’t fill the bowl with either the yellow or blue water)
2.) What should be done with the snake? It isn’t an obstacle, it just kills you if you take it. My best guess is taking it safely will then allow it to get re-used later (perhaps fending off machete man).
3.) How do you fend off machete man?
4.) What do I do with the inscriptions at the canyon and the well?
5.) Is there a way to get into the well?
6.) What can you do with the blighted cactus?
7.) Is the tombstone important other than giving your teacher’s name?
8.) How do you get the lizard? Or if you don’t get the lizard, what do you do with it?
9.) Is there any other hidden exit? Does gazing work on anything other than the pools?
The last point reflects that gazing is important to the Castaneda-verse. In one his later (and frankly, more bizarre) books, The Second Ring of Power, he goes into the mechanics behind gazing at things, including stating that women have an easier time gazing while they are in their menstrual period because they are not focusing (???).
La Gorda told me then to gaze at the middle part of the canyon until I could spot a very dark brown blotch. She said that it was a hole in the canyon which was not there for the eye that looks, but only for the eye that “sees.” She warned me that I had to exercise my control as soon as I had isolated that blotch, so that it would not pull me toward it. Rather, I was supposed to zoom in on it and gaze into it. She suggested that the moment I found the hole I should press my shoulders on hers to let her know. She slid sideways until she was leaning on me.
I struggled for a moment to keep the four actions coordinated and steady, and suddenly a dark spot was formed in the middle of the canyon. I noticed immediately that I was not seeing it in the way I usually see. The dark spot was rather an impression, a visual distortion of sorts. The moment my control waned it disappeared. It was in my field of perception only if I kept the four actions under control. I remembered then that don Juan had engaged me countless times in a similar activity. He used to hang a small piece of cloth from a low branch of a bush, which was strategically located to be in line with specific geological formations in the mountains in the background, such as water canyons or slopes. By making me sit about fifty feet away from that piece of cloth, and having me stare through the low branches of the bush where the cloth hung, he used to create a special perceptual effect in me. The piece of cloth, which was always a shade darker than the geological formation I was staring at, seemed to be at first a feature of that formation. The idea was to let my perception play without analyzing it. I failed every time because I was thoroughly incapable of suspending judgment, and my mind always entered into some rational speculation about the mechanics of my phantom perception.
There’s also gazing into distant things like clouds; fog is especially difficult and not something most sorcerers can handle. I don’t honestly know if any of this gets woven into El Dialbero (…probably not the menstrual periods…) but poking at the mythology gives me something to do while I’m stuck on the game. The game does allow for GAZE SKY and GAZE MOUNTAIN (and understands the nouns!) so events might eventually go that way.
There are authors from prior centuries that used to be world famous that are now obscure, or at least known more to niche enthusiasts rather than the wider public. The most popular and most prolific author of the mid-19th century was G. M. W. Reynolds, even beating out Dickens.
“Again these awful words!” ejaculated the old man, casting trembling glances around him.
“Yes—again those words,” echoed the mysterious guest, looking with his fierce burning eyes into the glazed orbs of the aged shepherd. “And now learn their import!” he continued, in a solemn tone. “Knowest thou not that there is a belief in many parts of our native land that at particular seasons certain doomed men throw off the human shape and take that of ravenous wolves?”
The best selling poet in all of American history was Rod McKuen, who sold 60 million books and performed to a rapt audience at Carnegie Hall. I won’t expose you to the horror, but I can link a sample at the blog post entitled Slightly Creepy Seventies Bad Poetry.
Carlos Castaneda used to be a household name, with his first three books (The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, A Separate Reality, and Journey to Ixtlan) making him a superstar anthropologist; the third book earned him a doctorate from UCLA. They describes his dealings with an indigenous Yaqui sorcerer who used peyote for drug trips and had mystical powers like levitation and teleportation. Castaneda was taught to see the inner workings of the universe, while dispensing 1960s New Age wisdom to us, the readers.
Via eBay. $2.70 or best offer. They printed a lot of these.
While the first book held to strong reviews, critics eventually started to question the veracity of the events — not as in doubting the magic, but doubting Castaneda ever even had dealings with the Yaqui. The Yaqui did not experiment with peyote (to the disappointment of drug enthusiasts who took pilgrimages based on the books) and before Castaneda died in 1998 it was pretty well established he was a fraud.
Ken Kalish, the author of today’s game, El Diablero, does not seem to have been a true believer. He used the novels instead as a sort of fictional background universe.
Carlos Castenada purported to be an anthropologist who found himself apprenticed to a Yaqui Indian ‘sorcerer’ from Northern Mexico, called Don Juan Matus. Although there were unfortunately some things which involved peyote, the basic idea dealt with an underlying reality beneath common perception (which even Aristotle referred to).
This interview was admittedly given long after 1982, but I don’t think the peyote comment would be compatible with him being a superfan at the time. (The word “purported” and quote marks around “sorcerer” also are suggestive.)
After graduating college, Kalish worked in construction for two years. He used some of the money he made to get into stock speculation (he listened to a radio station for market reports). He ended up making a “nice profit” which he used to obtain a computer:
So now, I was walking out of the Radio Shack with a Color Computer, chock full with a whopping 4k of RAM and also with Color Basic from a fairly new company called Microsoft. Before too long, I’d piggybacked two sets of 16k chips with a soldering iron, had bought the Microworks editor/assembler cartridge and was thinking, “hmm, I think I’ll write a game or two myself on this thing. The first step will be to figure out how to clear the screen…”
He became (relatively) famous for his Tandy CoCo work, mainly for his arcade-style games like Starship Chameleon.
El Diablero is his only text adventure.
You awake, dazed and confused, in the middle of a desert. You had been learning the techniques of sorcery from an old man. The old man told you that an evil Sorcerer, a “diablero”, had become his enemy. Now, your teacher is missing and you are alone. Worse still, you cannot remember those spells you had already learnt.
I admit I like the vibes from the setup, even if the actual gameplay effect is to drop us in a large desert.
I played the Tandy CoCo version. There’s also a port of this for the Dragon.
You can’t drink from the yellow pool; you are told it is too dangerous. The same is true for a “bluish” pool at the northeast corner of the map.
The room descriptions are mostly the same (“I am in a desert, cactus all around.”) with only slight variations (“I am in a desert. There is a large slab of rock nearby.”) and the map is rectilinear, so rather than my usual node-based method I drew things out like they were a tabletop RPG map:
Before taking the tour, I should mention one unusual property of the game: while you can type GO NORTH, GO EAST, etc. to travel around, the usual abbreviations of N, E, W, and S don’t work. The game instead uses the keyboard’s arrow keys, and you don’t have to hit ENTER after pressing, say, right arrow. However, because the author wanted to reserve “left arrow” for deleting text, the symbol @ gets used for autotyping GO WEST. This sort of makes sense if you look at a real keyboard:
The emulator I was using (XRoar) maps the “[” key to “@”, so to keep my sanity I wrote an AutoHotKey script to make the left arrow work normally.
#Requires AutoHotkey v2.0
#Singleinstance
#HotIf WinActive(“XRoar”)
Left::[
(Just in case anyone wants to follow in my footsteps. The game itself is here.)
So back to the map! There’s three animals (lizard, crow, snake). You’re allowed to take the crow…
…the lizard “scampers away” from you…
…and trying to take the snake kills you. Fair enough.
The snake marks the entrance to a small canyon section. Here’s a repeat of the map so you don’t have to scroll back:
There’s some “debris” in the canyon you can just take, and a “strange inscription” that is “not understandable” if you try to read it.
Other than the two pools I already mentioned, the only place left of note is a blighted cactus.
I haven’t gotten anything productive to happen, nor have I had any indications of somehow having the ability to cast magic. El Diablero, the nemesis, is out there somewhere; it is unclear if we are meant to defeat him or run away.
This game is allegedly quite hard, as mentioned by both by the interviewer of Ken Kalish and Alastair, who wrote the CASA Solution Archive entry. There’s even a GameFAQs entry (very unusual for an obscure text adventure) which claims the playtime is about 12 hours. I’ve got my week clear just for this game, and I’m even willing to do one of those “well, I haven’t made progress but here’s what I’m pondering” type posts. (It’s been a while, eh? I’m still quite interested in the thought process of solving puzzles, not just plowing through history.) Please hold off both spoilers and speculation for now, I’ll let y’all know when it is time to start piling on.
Let’s do something a little different and have one of today’s co-authors introduce the game. This is a video from 5 years ago when Al Lowe was selling his source code from his days at Sierra. He included some pre-Sierra materials from when he was co-founder of Sunnyside Soft.
…and the floppy disk, that we copied ourselves on my neighbor’s pool table. We set up an Apple II, open the lid of it, blew an electric fan at it, and put in five disk drive cards and pairs of disk drives … we ended up producing hundreds of games in one evening on my friend’s table.
Prior to changing professions to software, Al Lowe was a veteran music teacher. A few years before, he had been caught ill with chickenpox and in isolation he was able to try out a DEC timesharing terminal remotely hooked up to a PDP-11/70.
This gave him the computer bug, enough so he bought an Apple II, and used it for keeping track of band information. When going to a band conference in the summer of 1982, he also went to the National Educational Computing Conference held the same week.
From the proceedings of the previous year’s NECC conference.
Most educational-software material on the market today could be done in a workbook … what kids need is brain-world coordination.
He felt he could do better, and he (with his wife Margaret, and his neighbors Rae Lynn and Mike MacChensey, all in education) founded Sunnyside Soft with Dragon’s Keep and Bop-a-Bet as starting titles. Bop-a-Bet is a maze game where you need to zap letters in alphabetical order, and Dragon’s Keep is an adventure game with menus rather than a parser (more on this later).
In Dragon’s Keep, I used paddles! They were left-over from Pong – each paddle had a knob that could turn and a button to press. You held it in one hand, press the button with your left thumb, and turn the knob with your right hand. Your opponent had another paddle just like that. Since I couldn’t afford a joystick, I used the paddles to create backgrounds. You would turn one paddle to move the cursor up, and turn the other paddle to move the cursor across, and then you would press the button to draw the picture. Picture Etch-A-Sketch with a Paint program.
In early December, the company had a booth at Applefest in San Francisco.
At the same event was Ken and Roberta Williams, with a large space at the entrance devoted to Sierra On-Line. They had just added the “Sierra” to their name. Allegedly this was to avoid overlap with another company, but also, quoting marketing director John Williams, the original name of the company was “generic as could be and dull as dishwater”. The booth had a mural of a Sierra waterfall to announce the change. Richard Garriott was there, showing off Ultima II (now a Sierra product) while dressed as Lord British.
Of course, such events are for networking as much as sales. According to Steve Levy in his book Hackers:
Ken tried to throw himself into the spirit of the show, and took Roberta, looking chic in designer jeans, high boots, and a black beret, on a quick tour of the displays. Ken was a natural schmoozer, and at almost every booth he was recognized and greeted warmly. He asked about half a dozen young programmers to come up to Oakhurst and get rich hacking for On-Line.
As part of this schmoozing the Sierra founders came across the much smaller Sunnyside booth, and were impressed by how the look of Dragon’s Keep resembled a Sierra title. This connection led them to publishing the titles under the Sierra label.
As Sunnyside ceased to exist soon after this, copies are rare; it is possible the “pool table copies” were the only ones ever made under that label.
Three pictures of the same copy, from Larry Laffer dot Net.
The back of both Sunnyside games came with a “mission statement” which is worth quoting in full:
SUNNYSIDE SOFT is a progressive software company, whose staff members each have over 15 years of educational experience. We intend to utilize this newest teaching medium to its maximum potential, in both educational institutions, and in the home.
Our immediate goal is to develop innovative computer materials which challenge and stimulate children, while meeting the educational priorities, of teachers and parents. Future products will include games designed to teach skill development, programs for primary grade skill and concept development, as well as management and organizational programs for administrators, athletic, and fine arts departments.
Notice the “organizational programs” — they were clearly thinking of the software Al Lowe already wrote for music classes.
Our authors have published instructional materials for several nationally known companies in other formats, and our collective experience includes learning theory, elementary curriculum, administration, music and the fine arts, and computer programming and literacy.
We are eager to develop new materials to meet your specific needs. Please contact us.
Rae Lynn MacChesney / Margaret Paul Lowe
Albert W. Lowe / Michael MacChesney
Sierra added a map and stickers to Dragon’s Keep enhance the appeal, and included a parent guide which outlined specifically what skills were being taught.
In the game, a magical dragon is holding 16 animals captive in and around its magic house. The player must find each animal and set it free. Sometimes the dragon appears and won’t let an animal go. The player must then leave the scene and return later when the dragon has gone.
Dragon’s Keep is designed to help your child develop reading comprehension skills. These skills include identifying details, making inferences and drawing conclusions.
The stickers correspond to the 16 missing animals.
From The Sierra Chest.
Navigation and action is all done via a menu system. We’ve seen this with Kadath in 1979 so isn’t the first appearance of this kind of thing, but it’s still pretty early.
The menu is slightly out of the ordinary, anticipating a child who has never touched a keyboard before. There are at most 3 options at any time, and even though the options are numbered, you don’t use number keys.
Instead, you move a cursor to the left by hitting the space bar, and then you hit enter once the cursor is at the option you want. This is at the level of games for children I’ve seen where the goal is to push the C key, and the authors anticipate this will present some challenge level. I personally would have included the numbers as a secondary scheme but they clearly didn’t want to muck up the directions.
This shows going into the back yard, and presents one of the major oddities with the game: map traversal isn’t all two-way paths. Notice there’s no option to go back to the front of the house, so someone who wanted to reconsider and climb up the ladder instead now doesn’t have an option.
Even if you think — well, I’ll go back in the house, and then I’ll be close enough I can go up the ladder, no, you get entirely different options:
(There’s a dog behind that chair! Mean old dragon.)
Eventually the map kind of makes sense, but if the goal is to teach map skills, this is a curious way to do it. The navigation reminds me more of regular-gamebook style, where sections often get elided or skipped over; that is, if a section of map requires you travel 3 sections to get to a dead end, the game won’t necessarily have you take every step back, because in terms of narrative it can feel strange to read the exact same texts in reverse order. There are books that do this anyway; Scorpion Swamp of the Fighting Fantasy series has an “open map” so has more adventure-style map movement, but that translates to sections that look like this:
290
You can see signs that others have walked this way recently. Ahead is another clearing. This is Clearing 26. If you have been here before, turn to323. If you have not been here before, keep reading. As you enter the clearing, an arrow whizzes past your head. You see three mangy-looking SWAMP ORCS armed with bows. The other two let their arrows fly. If you have the Golden Magnet charm, turn to 83. If you do not have it, turn to 151.
Notice the “if you have been here before” failsafe (which is made even more complicated here because you’re allowed to flee from this encounter, so section 323 might kick you back into combat).
For example, the game has a school. To get to the school from home you go to the back yard (with the fish), then follow a river…
,,,then go to the mountain, which happens to have a train…
…then from the train station go to the bus stop…
Dog number 2. Notice the stickers show brown dogs and these dogs are white.
…and finally from the bus stop go to school.
The dragon at that last stop represents the other element of the game: in some scenes the dragon will be there at random. It really is truly a random dice roll if the dragon shows up, plus the dragon will just stop you from rescuing an animal in the immediate scene; you can leave and come back. (Unless you leave the school. In which case you get back sent to the front of your house, and you have to take all those steps to return.)
The dragon shows up in scenes, not rooms, so if you’re in a library and pick up a book to read, the dragon may show up at the book but won’t be in the room.
Ah yes, the “hen is at the station”. One of the other quirky things about the game is that it generally expects you to think about where animals might be where you still don’t have the stickers placed and go where the animals might be. To problem is quite a lot of the animals are in odd locations so that logic doesn’t work that well. If you’re still looking for a rabbit, and you remember you saw a top hat you neglected to look inside, sure, that’ll work:
A calf? At the zoo.
In the end, the game is more “about” the skill of lawnmowering through all the story options. The hen (hinted at in the book, the only animal with this treatment) is the most curious find, as you locate it by taking a nap at the train station.
Mind you, the odd directionality isn’t that bad, and parts of the map (as given at The Sierra Chest) do direct around like normal, although I should make one last point that there’s not really a geographic sense to any of this — I have no idea what the real layout of the house is.
In the end, the game requires enough reading I’d say it has legitimate educational purpose, but I think modern children might find the overarching idea too simplistic.
In historical terms, other than uniting Sunnyside with Sierra, the interface was noticed at the time as a potential new direction for adventures. Jay Lucas had an extended 1983 review in Infoworld which begins with an extended rant about his difficulty with text parsers:
I used to be hooked on adventures, but like most of my computer colleagues, I closed my adventure era because of reoccurring frustrations. The programs have limited vocabularies, and I often had to go through four or five synonyms to find the word acceptable to the machine. Once past the word barrier, I was still limited to the choices of responses envisioned by the program author.
He then goes on to do a mock-example, then point out that the game “cleverly avoids” such issues.
Of course, this is a game which isn’t even trying to have puzzles. It was rather harder for people at the time to imagine what a “crunchy” game would be like with a menu system (Kadath pulled it off but had a wild navigation gimmick that wouldn’t work elsewhere). At least Sierra didn’t drop the notion, as the Sunnyside crew followed up with Troll’s Tale in 1983. Perhaps the most interesting use was taking the text-parser game The Dark Crystal (published early 1983) and converting it for a menu system in Gelfling Adventure.
Menu version on the left, parser version on the right.
Up next: a con-artist anthropologist, and the game based on their work.
I’ve finished the game, and be sure you’ve read my other posts before this one.
(Also, in my second post, by accident I picked a screenshot of a room that held a secret. Can you find it before I talk about the room?)
A little more on the nonsense-monster name thing to kick things off —
Rather more famous than The Gostak is the Lewis Carroll poem Jabberwocky.
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
The poem is an exercise in imaginary words, although curiously enough, if you look up pictures of the Jabberwock they most look the same. That’s because it was illustrated by John Tenniel in Through the Looking-Glass, the novel where the poem appears.
More interesting visually is the Bandersnatch; if you look up depictions, there’s a wider variety of approaches.
A collage made up from random pictures on an image search. I needed to add a date restriction to avoid clashing with the Netflix show.
There’s still some curious consistency having a creature that walks on legs, but the creature is still in a real sense an infinite beast encompassed by every visualization at once.
That’s not how I thought of Qedejiv the weird and Baryon the bad and Zezotim the blue and (most importantly) the Elmralat. I didn’t have (nor do I have) any visualization at all. I am not one someone with aphantasia: I visualize things all the time. But with no reference, I had them stored more conceptually. If you were to insist on a visualization, Rob’s comparison to “weird fantasy” like Dark Crystal seems appropriate, and that may even be what the author was thinking of. But I only had that feeling as a mood, not something concrete I could draw.
Last time I had found a horn which seemed to have three “Brothers”, including the green treasure I had already found, with some link to the Elmralat: “Held afore from him / Who bears the Elm / And in a secret / place was hid it.” I supposed I needed to bring the red book to Remesis the red and the blue book to Zezotim the blue, getting the last two treasures, and then something special would happen with the horn and it would then need to go to the Elmralat. Then I would defeat and/or make friends with the Elmralat, Mortal Kombat style.
I was correct on all accounts.
The one major catch is that I was running into a game-crashing bug.
I tried many different combinations of horn and treasure and I just couldn’t get them to combine; either they would stay separate or I’d get the crashing bug. I finally broke down and went for a walkthrough.
Spellcheck, you don’t know what a Sesajat is? This is from the legendary Dorothy Millard (or Irene), author of many C64 adventure games. These include Yellow Peril, where you are trapped in a world where everything is yellow.
Fortunately, I didn’t spoil much other than one puzzle later which would have been very difficult to get. As far as why my game was bugged, I don’t know, but the intent seems to be you pick up the horn first, then pick up the treasures, and they automatically go in the horn if you do so. (This wasn’t happening in my game, but I think you need to have found the horn before any treasures for things to work correctly.)
Back on track! I took the horn over to the Elmralat and hit one of the nasty parts of the game, which Dorothy observes: the travel agent sends you somewhere random. I got lucky the first time I played and got sent to the correct place (the forest) but on this playthrough I got sent all the way back to the ice river and had to walk back and try the travel agent again, hoping for a more favorable outcome.
The incorrect first destination.
The right way to land.
Toting the horn to over to our infinite beast, the first obvious thing to try is to GIVE it just like you do with the books, and that turns out to be correct:
This gives you a “frosted glass sphere”. Dropping the glass sphere breaks it but reveals an “iron key”.
A key. Hum. No idea.
OK, here is where the secret comes up. I think the only plausible way you could work this out is wondering about the verb “pull” off the list, which hasn’t been useful anywhere at all. It is only useful here:
You can pull the floorboards.
This leads to yet another map section, although a mercifully small one.
On the way there’s a healing balm that’s the only useful potion of the game…
…the kind of room which doesn’t describe the room but rather gives your mental state…
…and some creative writing.
I guess that explains what the letters on the talisman are. This is meant to be a hint that the talisman is about to be relevant.
North of here is a locked cell with a padlock, where you can use the key. Inside is an old man.
Who is he? An old hero? A king? A random chosen one? Admittedly this makes about as much sense as The Dark Crystal did if you don’t read the companion books.
There: that’s our quest. Now we need to take the TREASURE OF CESIS all the way back to the start, and we’ve won.
Sorry for spoiling your secret, C. Steadman.
I more or less ignored all the treasures; as I already theorized, there’s no “storage place” so the point total is based on what you’re holding, so it’s pretty limited anyway. You could scoop up the gold pieces (I didn’t bother) for a few points, but given they’re placed at random and I’m already past the 14,000 point mark, I think I’m fine stopping there.
I can’t say I appreciated the bugs, the dodgy parser, or the floorboards puzzle (where out of the 150+ rooms you have to guess that one room description might hold a secret) but the atmosphere was utterly unique, and probably wouldn’t have worked in any other context than a cryptic C64 game.
I got through a major bottleneck — the ice river — and the game more than doubled in size. I also know, sort of, what the overall quest is now, and it isn’t just grab the loot.
Just to give a sense of scale, here’s the full map zoomed out, with the new rooms marked in dark or light blue (except for lairs, which are all marked in red):
At the very least, while it’s still obviously possible, I think this is a little hefty for a lost type-in. I had this concern while researching because the other game I’ve seen a disk “published by Brunswick” (apart from Boothman’s own work) is the game The Dungeon of Danger. We know where The Dungeon of Danger came from: a book in the Mostly BASIC series by Howard Berenbon. It came out originally for Atari computers in 1980, then was ported to Commodore and Apple. The CRPG Addict has written about the game here.
Picking up right where I left off, the first issue I managed to tackle was the mysterious “1 gold piece” objects lying around; I went through all of these commands and nothing worked.
take gold
take 1
take 1 gold
take 1 gold piece
take gold piece
take coin
take money
take cash
take gold coin
take peice
take all
tak gol
ta go
(It’s actually a two-letter parser. I’m guessing this is why potions use SLURP rather than DRINK, since DR is already taken for DROP.)
Thinking perhaps the author was D&D inspired, I tried
take gp
and it worked.
When you’re at one of the Beings (as I’ll call them) and you take an item, if the item is considered “valuable” and the Being is unfriendly they won’t let you take it. Gold pieces aren’t valuable enough to fret over, it seems.
While I might need to care in a winning run, I subsequently have ignored the money. It (along with some of the treasures, and the “minor” monsters like the ogre) gets randomly distributed, and I think it is just a matter of points.
With that resolved, I went back over the object list…
bottle of wine, meat, plank of wood (2), rug, crystal ball, dagger, potion, silver thimble, brick, silver sword, some rope, green moss, silver trinket, green treasure, old manuscript
…as well as the verb list, and tried to test things together.
USE will be handy momentarily. BREAK is mean to work on an object being held — I don’t know which yet. SLURP on the unlabeled potion I had access to had no effect, and the game says “you got the wrong one!” INSPECT is the game’s version of EXAMINE, LIST is INVENTORY, and BASH is the combat verb.
Without aid, you can bash nothing.
This was cryptic since it seemed like maybe I was supposed to use a brick to bust open a secret wall? Or just bash a bottle of wine on someone’s head, bar fight style? BASH is instead usable with the silver sword, and I was previously envisioning some kind of epee. Instead, I guess it’s Cloud’s sword from Final Fantasy VII.
This vaporizes the sword and the Being and is usable only once. Trying to use a dagger in the same way gets a similar message, but the dagger just gets dropped on the ground and no slaying occurs. My best guess is that some of the Beings can be befriended but some cannot, so the silver sword needs to be saved for a Being where you can’t make friends and you need them to let you pick up whatever is nearby. Or maybe it’s just optional for points!
What’s not optional is we need to get by the ice river. (Importantly, “ice” river, not “frozen”. I was thinking of slipping on thin ice, but it is a flowing river, just with ice in it.)
The one bit on the map where you don’t have to worry about crossing, because you can access the other side via a different route.
I went through every item I had available trying to USE it or simply be holding it and walking in the relevant direction. While nothing worked I was suspicious of the rope’s message on USE, which was different than the others:
Can’t use it on anything.
USE SWORD, for comparison:
I can’t use one of those.
I tried USE in many of the rooms (with the traditional mark-as-you-go method) but realized about halfway through why the game gave me 2 planks of wood rather than just 1: they want you to make something by combining the three things. I was still thinking “frozen” river, so, maybe, snowshoes? Instead I got a raft.
This let me open up the two blocked exits from last time.
I took what turned out to be the long route first (“Cavern of Rototars”) so let’s follow that way and loop back to the “Long Twisting Tunnel” at the end.
This is a place where a sword is required, as the Being won’t let you take the potion. Too bad the potion is the wrong one (at least on the save file I was playing with, maybe there’s one good “random” potion and the rest are bad).
Moving on, up some stairs to a new area…
…and to the first object of interest, a magic talisman.
Cool symbol, don’t know what it signifies, am happy to take guesses. USE TALISMAN gets the standard “I can’t use one of those” so it isn’t like the rope. HELLO TALISMAN:
Don’t bother, it doesn’t understand English.
Fair. Moving ahead are two more Beings, Xeginem the mysterious and Minitex. Xeginem has one nearby chamber marked “Cavern of Xeginem’s dog” and south of the lair of the Minitex is “the cave of many Minitex”.
Don’t know what a looney is, there’s also a leper in the earlier section but I don’t think it’s a “leper” like from English. The response here might be wry humor.
An item close by of special note is a red book, which asks you to return it to its owner. One supposes this would be Remesis the red, but I haven’t had been able to test this theory yet.
Along a side route there’s a castle.
The rooms are colorfully described, including a kitchen with stale bread, a pantry with a washing board, and a zombie butler, and a blue book.
The blue book almost certainly goes to the blue Being, or rather, Zezotim the blue. However, I also haven’t gotten test it yet. (Sorry! This session had a lot of mapping. To be fair, the player’s “energy” level has started to be an issue. I don’t know if I’m just supposed to optimize my moves fast or there’s a recharge, like a potion I haven’t found yet.)
Turning in an entirely different direction — west of the Minatex — leads to a “dwarf with cold feet”, some “black grapes”, and a travel agent.
This bizarre … encounter? … in-joke? … drops the player in the last section, the area of the dread Elmralat. The game gives more warnings than any of the other Beings, and it just sits there and acts grumpy, just like all the other Beings.
Three last points:
Point 1, nearby the Elmralat is a bag of sapphires. It gets treated differently from other treasures, because if you drop it somewhere random, a “small elf” appears, takes it, and runs away saying
Ha ha,I shall hide it better this time!
(I still don’t have a treasure “storage” area and don’t know if there even is one.)
Point 2, Elmralat seems to be referenced in that manuscript from last time.
In times of yore
Tehre was remembered
a magical cone,which
so say many, did hold
Three Brothers,in
Comp’ny with another
Held afore from him
Who bears the Elm
And in a secret
place was hid it.
The “Elm” is likely “Elmralat”, yes? I’m unclear how this translates into action, but I can move on to point 3, which is I found the magical cone. If you read back in this rambling mess of a travel blog, you’ll notice I said the ice river leads down two paths, and I started by taking the longer one. The shorter one is only two rooms: a passage leading to a dead end.
I’m guessing since I have the green treasure for returning the green book, I’ll get a blue treasure for the blue book and a red treasure for the red book, and they somehow get inserted into the cone and represent the Three Brothers. There are so many other things going on I doubt that’s quite the ending of the game (what’s the talisman for?) but I’m hoping this won’t take too much longer. I went into this game expecting the same kind of public domain one-shot I got from Alien and instead I got an epic that kept sprawling, even if it is mostly exploration and unhelpful creatures.
For this game, written by C. Steadman for Commodore 64, it will help to go over how public domain software got distributed in the 80s and 90s.
The most straightforward way was friends and family passing disks (see: early distribution of Mission secrète à Colditz). There were also clubs with monthly meetings that had “librarians” who kept up catalogs that members could access (see: the Toronto PET Users Group and Fantasyland). Magazines starved for content could do reprints (or toss the software on their disk or tape, if they came with one). Download from an online service like The Source was possible (as I discussed with this post and “Apple City”). A less-scrupulous vendor might mix public domain software with new software in a package sold on store shelves.
Relevant today is another method: companies that had large catalogs of public domain software where people could choose to get copies for nominal fees. This is different from the “commercial package” method, as this was a case of the user clearly getting what they expect. “Package” disks were also common from this sort of company, with numbered disks akin to the user groups, like this disk of demoscene art. Such companies could still mix “new” games in their catalogs or even distribute “new” public domain software — that is, software not easily findable by any other outlet.
(Incidentally, the idea of “freeware” where author retains the copyright and “public domain” was quite fuzzy in the era. The Smurf Adventure declared public domain status in its source code, and sometimes authors would include a message that meant they clearly were intending the same, but it seems like everyone assumed “no copyright notice = public domain” when that really wasn’t the legal case. At the very least, “anonymous source code” tended to also equal “permission to distribute”, but there were plenty of times where an author name was included but stripped off in a later version. A company or author might even add their name to source code that wasn’t really theirs.)
A mysterious public domain collection from early 1983 Australia, via michaelcarey at the Lemon forum. The disks had been re-formatted and he was trying to find out the origin of the collection.
Valley of Cesis survives to us through two public domain distributors.
Starting with the less-common copy, there’s a version of the game via The Guild Adventure Software. The Guild was founded by Anthony “Tony” Collins in the UK in October 1991. It focused on conversions between platforms, and also kept up a library of public domain games.
The company didn’t last long, dying out in fall 1993 with the games sent to other publishers; relevant to today’s story, the C64 merchandise wen over to Binary Zone. (Especially relevant because Binary Zone is still selling the game so you can’t download this version of the disk.)
A listing of software from The Guild includes public domain dating back to the late 1970s with Dog Star Adventure. Valley of Cesis is far back enough that its presence doesn’t indicate anything in particular (that is, the author Steadman likely doesn’t know of Collins and probably didn’t even know that this outlet was republishing their game).
The second distributor was Brunswick Publications out of Australia, run by Peter Boothman. Peter Boothman was a jazz guitarist in Sydney who has records dating back to the 70s, and somewhere in the 80s he picked up “Commodore 64 author” as a side gig, writing games like the three Telnyr CPRGs. The first Telnyr (1990) is listed as being from Brunswick; the obituary I linked says his company was founded in the “late 80s” so that’s as specific as we’re going to get.
The timing (1982 vs. starting in late 1980s) means it likely wasn’t the “initial distributor” of the game, but since the it hasn’t shown via any other vectors, it is possible it stayed in the Commodore club scene of Australia and went no farther until Boothman picked it up. It is even possible C. Steadman knew Boothman personally.
The other evidence we have of C. Steadman’s activities is a pair of articles in Personal Computer World. The first appeared in the UK edition, October 1983, and the second appeared in the Australian edition, November 1983. Both are identical. I’m unclear about the policies of this particular magazine, but in general magazines are one or two months off from their newsstand date anyway; in all likelihood Steadman when sent the article once and it hit both countries “simultaneously”.
So we can’t tell from this evidence if the author is Australian or from the UK; my inclination might still be for the former because of Boothman, although I should point out the article says the software is tested for “PET, BBC, Microtan 65, VIC, and Acorn Atom.” BBC, Acorn Atom, and Microtan 65 would be especially odd for an Australian to have handy.
Now I’d normally plow ahead with the game, but let me give one last bit of background, as I’m going to make a reference only some of the people reading this blog will know offhand. Specifically, The Gostak, which gets categorized on the Interactive Fiction Database as a “wordplay” game. However, unlike Nord and Bert or Counterfeit Monkey, you’re not manipulating words directly, but rather trying to parse what’s going on in the world you’re seeing from contextual clues.
Delcot
This is the delcot of tondam, where gitches frike and duscats glake. Across from a tophthed curple, a gomway deaves to kiloff and kirf, gombing a samilen to its hoff.
Crenned in the loff lutt are five glauds.
Everything, including the verbs the player types, is based on the modified language of the game: clearly English, but with a whole passel of unknown verbs and nouns. The contextual clues end up enough to accomplish the main goal: you, the gostak, must distims the doshes. (Aaron Reed has written about the game if you want to read more.)
Before you get too excited, no, Valley of Cesis doesn’t go this far, back in 1982. But the main characters (who all have lairs) are given names that could come from the Gostak-verse and have no descriptions, and so I obtained the same sense of understanding-without-understanding as I was making progress. What seems to be the primary mechanic of the game involves making friends with these vaguely-defined beings which have no real way to visualize them, unless you want to make something up.
There’s a long pause when the game starts which indicates some kind of randomization going on. The “1 gold piece” items that get scattered across the map do seem to change, but nothing else. I have not puzzled things to the end so I cannot be 100% certain about this.
The “1 gold piece” there is only from the iteration of the game I was making the map.
I’m not even sure what the end is, exactly. We do seem to be gathering treasures and we have a score going up, but our inventory limit is three (or four depending on object size), and I haven’t found any “treasure store” area where the treasures can be dropped and the score retained. This may be another game where you just get as big a score as possible and give up when you like, but maybe there’s even some kind of goal the game isn’t disclosing?
The above text is quite standard when you enter a lair, that is,
BEING_NAME is here.
He doesn’t like you here.
Don’t come back here in a hurry.
I originally thought there was going to be some sort of grisly death or a passage was blocked I needed to puzzle out, but there is no consequence for going into a lair room as many times as you want. (I think. There is a “timer” where you run out of energy but it seems to be based on number of turns you’ve taken, not where you go.) In the process, in addition to Sesajat, you can meet:
Tetsotoh
Qedejiv the weird
Madewob the mad
Baryon the bad
Remesis the red
Zezotim the blue
Duxwetil the green
There are other, more “ordinary” creatures scattered about: an ogre, a rabid dog, a large balrog. They are equally quiet and you can just ignore them and they won’t do anything.
Here I tried to get a reaction by giving meat, but all this did was drop the meat on the ground.
Other than the friendship which I’ll get to in a second, the only obvious obstacle is an ice river running through the map. It blocks some exits so the game says “You cannot cross the ice river without aid.”
There’s two wood planks on the map, some moss, and some rope, but I haven’t gotten any of them to be helpful. The game helpfully gives a word list (take, use, open, break, drop, look, close, slurp, give, inspect, pull, score, bash, list, hello) so I don’t think it’s a communication issue, I really don’t have the right object yet.
Well… maybe there’s a communication issue. I say this because of the 1 gold coin pieces spread throughout the map, which have eluded my efforts at picking them up.
I could probably resolve this easily by peeking at the source code, but hey, the author asked in the title screen not to, I should give just a little more slack before I go there. They might be optional anyway.
Regarding making friends: I found a green book where I could INSPECT it and find that it wants me to “give it to my owner, whoever he may be.” Duxwetil is green is so was worth a try:
My current thinking is most or all of the beings will trade for the right object, I just have to find out what it is. For reference, here’s all the objects I’ve found so far:
bottle of wine, meat, plank of wood (2), rug, crystal ball, dagger, potion, silver thimble, brick, silver sword, some rope, green moss, silver trinket, green treasure, old manuscript
The manuscript gives a cryptic message…
…and that’s all my cards on the table. I’m happy to take speculation for what to try in the comments (don’t even bother with ROT13); if for some wild reason you know this game already, hold for now.
To clarify something on the video nasties from last time, 72 were listed for banning, but not all were prosecuted for obscenity; only 39 were. One on the list that was not only listed but prosecuted I was rather surprised to see.
Above is the trailer for Evilspeak. I always considered it one of the “goofy” horror movies of the 80s/90s era, along with Chopping Mall, Death Spa, and Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (because just one Christmas horror movie isn’t enough). It involves a child who is bullied at a military academy so he uses an Apple II to summon the Devil.
I’m serious. That’s the plot. (There is “Satan summoning” type imagery and some genuine gore.) It is hilariously dated now but it does give a good sense where the mind-space of the morality judges was at the time.
And yes, we’re going to get to how Ship of Doom got its association–
So I left off last time with a square microbattery, a coin, a laser coin, a hook, a torch, and a silver rod with a square slot. As Mike Taylor pointed out the microbattery really ought to go in the rod, but with INSERT failing, and PUT failing, and then a bunch of other verbs failing, I was still stumped. Of course I missed the fact at the time that PUT had set the item down, so I went through the correct verb and was sidetracked a while realizing I hadn’t actually tested the verb yet.
With the sonic screwdriver, direct from Dr. Who, it was time try to open the case with a key in it.
Unfortunately, I went through every verb on my verb list, with no luck. Then I went over to the key hole at the computer room and tried every verb again, still with no luck. After some severe bafflement I realized that the game does not recognize the word SCREWDRIVER at all. You have to refer to it as a SONIC.
… pardon, need to go take a moment …
OK. I’m back. No primal screaming here, nope. Why on EARTH would you accept the adjective and not the noun kljASFJGkjlj234
… sorry, let’s try that again …
OK. Breathe. Things did go better from here. It really would have helped had the game had a few more error messages — it isn’t really revealing much even if you’re typing a noun that the game doesn’t recognize. On top of all this the verb is a pretty odd choice, but at least I had it on my standard list: POINT.
Now the key goes back to the key hole, but before I show that off, let me give the result of using EXAMINE (or GAZE) at the key hole, and get an ad.
Fun! So with the key inside, it seems that a heater has been activated.
So we can go back to the frozen body, wait a beat, and see what happens when it is unfrozen.
The little girl is not helpful and if you spend enough turns hanging around she’ll strangle you to death. You should instead shoot the door and move on, although the game also lets you KILL GIRL if you want (spoiler: the whole ship is going to blow up anyway).
You can scoop up the knife in the first room you encounter and a mirror in a side room (which I’ll talk about later). While you are doing this aliens start appearing, akin to the dwarves in Adventure. You can SHOOT ALIEN to kill them or try to run away, and they may or may not follow.
Shooting an alien has a decently high chance of success, but you might just miss, giving the alien a chance to shoot back. The alien’s aren’t bad shots either so there’s essentially a random chance of guaranteed death.
Nearby there’s a laser beam which will trigger a security system if you try to pass.
I don’t know why CRAWL is an understood verb. Maybe the authors thought they were going to use it but thought better of it. It doesn’t work anywhere.
I got through by … EXAMINING it? I honestly don’t know what happened here or what this sequence was supposed to represent, but I saved my game and I didn’t have to think about it any more.
Yes, but why? Is Fred behind the scenes hacking the tech, C3-PO style? I sort of imagined Fred more like the robot from The Black Hole.
Moving on there’s a couple colorful scenes, including a human tied to a table awaiting androidization; if you release him, he’ll strangle you.
There’s also an android working on a ship attached to a rope, and you can chop the rope and the android will float away. I found quickly I could TIE ROPE to the hook I had earlier, and I spent a long time trying to get the rope to work in another scene with a switch in a control room.
The switch is a red herring; you’re supposed to instead go to a PIT ROOM (no other description) and realize it makes sense to THROW ROPE, and climb up to a higher level.
The aliens can appear anywhere, and sometimes one after each other in sequence.
You can use the coin from way back at the bank to get the drink from the bartender, but it knocks you out with a giant headache and you end up imprisoned. This is a good thing.
This is a good thing because you can use the mirror I mentioned earlier to cause the bars to “fuse” so you can escape. (I do not know why the mirror didn’t work on the laser beam earlier.) The verb here has to be USE; again my verb list came to the rescue.
This room represents the final challenge, and is essentially brute force. There are six button combinations, and each take you to a different place. Green-orange-red just ejects you into space which is not helpful. Red-green-orange and orange-red-green drop you back closer to your starting ship, which will be helpful in a moment. Red-orange-green takes you to a computer room.
Why do we even have that button?
Down brings you back to the combo room. I used orange-red-green to get back to the Map Room nearby where the key with the Artic ad was and it was a short trip back to the ship. I was unclear until I hit the escape button if starting self-destruct really had shut down the tractor beam.
Look, a passenger!
The game events seemed colorful enough but it came in really jerky jumps and starts due to me having to struggle with the parser every time I wanted to use it. The fact it was only two-word was really saved it from some unmanageable guess-the-phrase battles.
So back to those tabloids. In an interview Charles Cecil talks about people wanting to use swear words in his first game (Inca Curse):
I made my first game for the Sinclair ZX81 in 1981. That was my first commercial project; a text adventure called Inca Curse. I immediately learned about frustrating players. Players would type something like ‘look at man’, and the game would reply ‘does not understand ‘look at’. I know a lot of players would then type in expletives.
This causes him to get creative in his second:
I made sure my next game – which was Ship of Doom in 1982 – would understand swearing. You could type in any expletive, and the game would understand it. You could try out those expletives in the ‘Android Pleasure’ room. That was okay, until I got busted by The Sun. They thought games shouldn’t have pleasure rooms. I remember they ran the piece at the bottom of page three, which felt ironic really. It even went on to be discussed in parliament, as the Obscene Video Act at them time. If video games had been included in that act at the time, I would have been an extremely unpopular person.
Here’s the room in question:
If you “do the deed”:
SHE POINTS OUT THAT PERHAPS YOU WOULD BE MORE SUCCESFUL USING A SCREWDRIVER
This is what raised the attention of an alert parent who discovered their child in the room in question. The subsequent chain reaction of events led to a story in The Sun about the Pleasure Room —
Computer Game Nasty Zapped by the Sun
— which caused some returns from Whsmith. Artic also heard from a couple who bought the game expecting erotica and was upset to find a sci-fi text adventure. Others traders wanted the tapes specifically because of the notoriety; as Richard points out, despite the returns, they were able to sell out.
While the first-mover status (in terms of getting on the ZX text adventure market early) might have helped Artic, and along with the better art, the moment of news fame surely was the biggest boost, just like controversy over Death Race helped Exidy back in the 70s (which had stopped building new copies of the game already, but suddenly got an influx of orders after it became a scandal). They published five more adventure games following this one. I don’t know otherwise if they would have gotten that far.
Via Mobygames.
Coming up: A short Australian game involving a combination software distributor / jazz musician, followed by one of the most obscure games in the On-Line Systems catalog.
Does my hon. Friend agree that pornography is a drug, and a very dangerous drug at that, as it rots the mind and can persuade individuals to commit great violence and cruelty against innocent people?
The 1987 ZX Spectrum game Soft & Cuddly was infamous for gauche horror imagery and being distributed with a barf bag. The advertising leaned into this; an insert poster distributed with the October 1987 edition of Crash boldy declared the game
THE FIRST COMPUTER NASTY
One of the tabloids — The Star — ran with it, quoting Mrs. Mary Whitehouse of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association as saying “It is the product of a sick society.”
The British obsession with deviant media really kicked off in the 80s with the introduction of video stores, and the fact that videos were not covered under the rating system and so could be released uncensored. This led to a moral panic about “video nasties” (a term introduced in 1982) that included horror films being accused of spawning particular murders; the Video Recordings Act 1984 eventually led to a set of 72 videos being outright banned in the UK. These were not all recent videos and included, for example, the 1963 movie Blood Feast.
An Egyptian caterer kills various women in suburban Miami to use their body parts to revive a dormant Egyptian goddess while an inept police detective tries to track him down.
The raw paranoia that such media produced is vaguely reminiscent of the Satanic Panic in the United States.
The trailer above includes such tabloid headlines as
Scarred for life: Experts links street riots and child abuse to diet of filth fed to our young
and
Cruel movies fan hacks 4 to death
However, despite Soft & Cuddly cozying up to the title in order to trump up sales, the first game called a “digital nasty” in the tabloids came rather earlier, in 1982, in the form of an innocuous text adventure published by Artic Computing, Ship of Doom.
…
Ship of Doom was the second game from Charles Cecil (he was now 19), and the third in the series from Artic, hence Adventure C. (Previously: Planet of Death, Inca Curse.) Again it had ports to ZX80 and ZX81, with a port that followed for the ZX Spectrum. (The latter is what I played.)
Via World of Spectrum.
Richard Turner, one of the founders of Artic, worked together with Cecil so I am calling him a co-author.
He and I had quite good imaginations so we came up with some nice stories. We also had a love of puzzles and we liked stuff that you had to figure out. That was of more interest to us at the time than arcade games — which I wasn’t that good at anyway.
This game represents a turning point in their catalog, as Richard had talked with a Whsmith manager about selling the tapes, and discussion turned to business in general. The manager explained Richard’s company needed to be Vat-registered and also that “the artwork [was] rubbish and we needed something a lot better.” The cover above is the last of the “complete minimalism” covers in the Artic catalog of 8 adventures, and re-prints additionally added new art. Sales (according to Richard) went drastically up.
Via World of Spectrum.
As the text on the packaging (in either version) informs us, our spaceship has been scooped up by an Alien Cruiser looking to enslave humanoids and we have been stuck by a tractor beam (as told to us by Fred, our pet android). Our goal is to disable the tractor beam and escape. It’s not exactly Star Wars because there’s no stormtroopers to greet us; in fact, the entire opening area of the vessel is empty of aliens or even deathtraps. This seems to be the “apathy alien” style like how the Star Trek crew boards a Borg vessel but the hostiles don’t bother to acknowledge the crew’s presence until they become a threat.
In the typical fridge-logic sense it is puzzling, but honestly, I kind of like it. Alien stuff should be alien and it makes the experience feel stranger.
Room descriptions are minimal; the opening setup is here to provide us objects and devices to fiddle with.
A “shady room” has a dark corner, but fortunately nearby there are some infrared glasses. If you wear them, leave, and come back, you’ll find a SQUARE MICROBATTERY.
Other than those objects and the hook from an earlier screenshot I’ve racked up a laser gun, a coin, a silver rod with a square slot, and a torch (British, so flashlight). I feel like the battery ought to go in the torch or some such but OPEN TORCH gives me
I CANT
with the Ken Reed standard message showing again and LIGHT TORCH just says I CANT DO THAT YET.
As far as obstacles go, there’s a body in a block of ice (can’t move or even shoot it with the ray gun)…
…a key under a glass cover (you can shoot it with the ray gun but the whole thing vaporizes and you softlock the game)…
…and a computer room with a red light and a key hole. I presume the key goes in the hole.
I’ve gotten a whole lot of I CANT from the various things I’ve tried. I don’t feel like anything is broken, really, and I’m guessing I’m missing a simple interaction. Inca Curse (game B) wasn’t terribly hard but Planet of Death (game A, without Cecil) was so this is really a coin flip on what level of pain I’m in for.
I did go ahead and make my verb list, which I’ll provide now.
I’ll wait on finishing my historical story about Artic’s encounter with the British tabloids, as I haven’t reached the room that caused the controversy yet. Cliffhanger!
It’s similar to Bally’s Alley, except the environment is more coherent, there’s one (very minor) puzzle, and most significantly, there’s graphics.
TREASURES OF CATHY
(C) 1982 BY JOHN COLLINS
KEY WORDS IN, UP, DROP, GET
49 LOCATIONS 18 TREASURES
BUT CAN ONLY CARRY 6
EACH TREASURE = + POINTS
BUT -1 POINT/MOVE
TRY FOR SCORE > 1000
Again, you’re just trying to find treasures, and there’s a move counter that ticks away. There’s no particular goal score or end game message, which is fairly unusual for an adventure game, but perhaps the author was thinking in terms of what console game players want.
Unless I’m overlooking something, there’s no “end room” treasures should be brought to, either; this is like Fantasyland (the surreal Canadian VIC-20 / C64 game) where the goal is to get maximum treasure in your inventory, not in some specific place on the ground.
Having been forewarned from last time, I had my MAME configuration set to what I might call “normal” keys; pressing 1 will show a 1, 2 will show a 2, ENTER is the same thing as GO, and the backspace key will cause a real backspace. This fiddled with some of my other key combinations I came up with but I found it faster to pop open the MAME key guide to check any modifications rather than keep the default.
Fortunately, you don’t need to type the full words IN, UP, DROP and GET to use them. Just the initial letters will do, except for drop, which requires DR. Using my revised MAME keyset this makes for:
. 6 becomes (U)P
. 9 becomes (I)N
E 9 becomes (G)ET
E 8 . 5 becomes (DR)OP
I tried to go for gold and get AutoHotKey to do combinations, but it wasn’t behaving itself well with MAME, so I just kept a text file of the four combos I needed to the side of my playing window and things went smoothly.
Collins ran out of keys so left out UP and IN, and you have to type them as commands instead.
The last extremely-tight-sized game we’ve had with graphics was Adventures in Murkle for the TRS-80, done in a 4K using glorious ASCII. That game built the outdoors by having a set of graphics that could be turned on and off: some trees, a stream, a building.
A sample: turn off the stream and now you have just a forest.
This game does some the same, turning off or on pieces of graphics to represent particular rooms outside.
Here’s the full map of the outdoors:
The trickiest part for me — especially because I wasn’t sure if I was doing the input correctly until it worked — was finding that I could go UP at one of the trees and find a nest with a key.
Remember, taking an item just requires typing the letter “G”. The bizarre part is that the screen doesn’t clear when you enter a command, causing your typing to land directly on top of the text that says INPUT CODE. So if you want to type I or even IN, it overlaps exactly the text that’s already there, and you can’t see anything!
With the key you can go into the house (to the north) and the cave (to the south). I’m not sure if the house serves any purpose. There’s an axe, which I toted along with me, but any object use in this game is invisible.
All indoor rooms have the same picture.
The cave to the south makes an interesting choice for the graphics by going abstract. There’s a small box that gets filled in different ways with squares. I like the idea of non-literal graphics and I can’t think of any other game that quite does it this way.
Bob is an item you can take.
Maybe the author meant for you to consider this the literal end.
There’s legion of objects like a gun, a pen, a book, and water, all which might be useful in a normal game, but are just window dressing here. They’re the sort of thing someone would expect to find in an adventure game and manipulate, and I get the impression not that the author ran out of room (Irvin Kaputz style) but rather just wanted his game to feel a little more like an adventure by having objects that could potentially be noodled with.
The source code on this is astonishingly small, so there aren’t really any mysteries (not even a strange magic word that we never got to use). The code is so tight rather than just have two people click the link and see it, I’m going to cut and paste the whole thing here, and it’ll be over faster than you expect.
2 NT=0;GOTO 25
3 U=ABS(*(R)÷10000);V=RM÷100;W=ABS(RM);RETURN
4 GOSUB 3;TV=V;TV=W;RETURN
5 R=(I-49)×2+198;GOSUB 4;R=R+1;GOSUB 4;RETURN
6 VA=H;VB=H;FOR I=0TO K;TA=E;TB=F;NEXT I;RETURN
7 GOSUB 3;R=R+1;IF ULINE V,W,U×U;GOTO 7
8 LINE V,W,1;RETURN
9 CY=-16;CX=O;PRINT “0=COM,MOVE 1=N,2=S,3=E,4=W,5=NE,6=SW,7=NW,8=SE,9=↓
10 PRINT “INPUT CODE!”,;L=KP-48;IF (L9)GOTO 50
12 G=ABS(*(A));M=0;FOR I=1TO 5;IF G=0I=5;GOTO 20
14 G=G÷10;IF RM=L M=I;I=5
20 NEXT I;IF M=0CX=O;PRINT ” DEAD END ?”;GOTO 9
22 M=M-2;IF M20B=A÷4;Y=RM;IF Y MO=49;H=12;E=35;F=53;GOSUB 6;E=33;F=50;GOSUB 6;E=35;GOSUB 6;E=44;F=67;GOSUB 6;↓
26 IF BIF YPRINT “YOU HEAR A “,;E=2×A;FOR Z=0TO Y;GOSUB 6;NEXT Z;↓;GOTO 29
28 PRINT “YOU ARE AT “,
29 I=A-1;GOSUB 5
30 N=0;FOR I=50TO 67;IF *(I)=A CX=13;PRINT ” I SEE “,;N=I;GOSUB 5
32 NEXT I;IF A<12R=237;GOSUB 7
34 IF A11IF A48IF C0GOTO 94
62 IF C=68IF *(76)=82GOTO 88
64 IF C=85IF (A=6)+(A=15)A=A-1;RUN
66 IF C=73IF *(50)<0IF (A=10)+(A=20)+(A=44)A=A+1;RUN
86 RUN
88 CLEAR ;PRINT " SCORE= ",P;IF C=1RUN
90 FOR J=68TO 73;I=*(J);IF IGOSUB 5;IF C=68PRINT " 1=DROP,2=NO";D=KP;IF D=49T=-1;GOSUB 97
92 NEXT J;E=35;F=53;GOSUB 6;↓;RUN
94 T=1;FOR I=68TO 73;IF *(I)=0;*(I)=N;*(N)=-*(N);GOSUB 99;I=73;N=0
95 NEXT I;RUN
97 *(I)=A;N=I;GOSUB 99;*(J)=0;RETURN
99 C=N-49;P=P+T×C×C;RETURN
It’s a poem of code. Data is entered separately, using the same trick as Des Cavernes (including having everything be stored in one array).
Incidentally, regarding line 90, with PRINT ” 1=DROP,2=NO”, the dropping in this game is improved: rather than you needing to keep track of numbers and then typing the right one, it will go through each of your objects in turn and ask if it is the item you mean to drop. This is the sort of kludge that really would only happen in this sort of environment but it’s good to see the author was still trying for an improvement.
There’s nothing in the end here terribly novel in terms of content (…except for the rooms represented by abstract pictures…) but that doesn’t take away from the historical and technical interest, and the fact people kept trying to do adventures on every machine possible, kind of like how modern systems are required to run DOOM.
Renga in Blue 
