Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve got a slightly different post today, and I think if you take a look at the first screens of the two products (sold by totally different companies, with totally different authors mentioned) you’ll see what I’m talking about:

First, Adventure-65 for the Ohio Scientific series of computers:

Second, just “Adventure” for VIC-20:

Yes, it is exactly the same game. The first is from Technical Products Company in Florida, with the proprietor Daniel B. Caton (not necessarily the author, but he’s the only name I’ve seen associated with the company products). They have ads listed back to 1978 and had the unusual specialty of the Forth language, as Caton was an astronomer; Forth was adopted in 1976 by the International Astronomical Union and used all the way through the 80s as “the astronomer’s programming language”.

The second is from Computermat, and seems to have first been advertised in a winter 1982 magazine for VIC-20 while eventually also showing up for C64. In all the cases the game (paired with “Caves of Silver”) is listed as being by Mark William.

Not only are these these same game, but these are the exact game as an Apple II game we’ve played before: ADV.CAVES.

The game was extremely short and had not much to remember it by, other than

a.) There was a kitten that could be used to scare a dragon. Not only that, but the dragon moved elsewhere so the kitten had to be kept around in case it got used to solve the puzzle again for the dragon adjustment.

b.) There was a pit with a fairly low chance of being able to CLIMB out. There was no reason to go into the pit except it gives points (every new room gives points). I originally thought a 100 point run required being stuck in the pit forever, but I finally found repeated iterations of CLIMB would eventually work to escape.

OK, there is one difference — the VIC-20 version has an ending. With the other versions you’re supposed to just be satisfied when you reach 100 out of 100.

My guess is that ADV.CAVES was the original game, and simply released as public domain. It’s hard to trace the path from there. If you look at one of the other mysterious Apple II compilation disks that ADV.CAVES came from, there’s source code in HORSERACE.bas…

19900 REM THIS PROGRAM WAS
19901 REM DOWNLOADED FROM
19902 REM ‘THE SOURCE’ VIA
19903 REM WALT MARCINKO’S
19905 REM “APPLE CITY”
19907 REM SOURCE #: TCD912

…which indicates this may have been someone downloading through the online service The Source (1978-1989) and grabbing all the source code they could. Of course, this pattern doesn’t apply to every single program on the disk, but it’s one possible vector.

Then, since ADV.CAVES was public domain, both William and (probably) Caton packaged it up for their respective systems. There are other sequences, like: William wrote the original game for Apple II, then packaged it for Ohio Scientific and had it sold by Caton, then packaged it for VIC-20 and C64 and had it sold but Computermat. I find this scenario unlikely; while some people transitioned between computers this is an unlikely set.

Certainly repackaging public domain work was hardly new, and we’ve even seen an author way back in 1979 calling people out on the practice. I’m consequently still leaving ADV.CAVES at 1980, and putting the other games at 1980 (for OSI, just a guess based on when the company was active) and 1982 (for VIC-20) respectively.

(I’m also tagging this to link with the old ADV.CAVES post, so for the benefit of someone reading in sequence: you might want to know this post was written 5 years after the other one.)

None of this quite matches the cheekiness of Keypunch, which cheerfully packaged loads of software without permission (we have confirmation from one author of this). We’ll next be turning our attention next to another public domain game — this time for DOS — that received similar treatment.

(In the video above I’ve linked a demonstration of what using The Source was like, from a 1983 video.)