Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

In the 90s and beyond, Paul Rinde would go legit, eventually having a large Mobygames entry with titles like “Senior Vice President” at companies like Wizardworks, GT Interactive, and Infogrames, eventually becoming CEO of Destineer. (Wizardworks admittedly launched with dropping a bunch of user-made DOOM levels on a CD-ROM, but at least they started making collections with regular companies, like this 9-pack of the SSI Gold Box games.)

In the 80s, though, he founded Keypunch Software which cranked out multi-packs of software. Sometimes they grabbed from the public domain, sometimes they did not. It was possible to send games to them — John Romero’s game Subnodule ended up being done that way — but otherwise it seems like they scavenged whatever they could get, meaning authors did not necessarily get paid.

From Mobygames. “Sub Hunt” is actually Subnodule (and it even says so when you load the game).

When they published Cavern of Riches in their Adventure Pak — without permission, as the author confirmed — they broke the game with a bug when trying to add color, making it impossible for the score in the game to go up, thus making it impossible to win.

Today’s Pak of Interest is Space Games, a set of four games for DOS. It includes versions of Star Trek, Lunar Lander and Space Invaders. Space Invaders is quite funky, allowing up-and-down control and starting your ship at the top of the screen.

The fourth game was a public domain game from 1982, Alien.

From an old eBay auction.

This is one of those cases where I think a lot of people were exposed to the game through the Keypunch version, as it doesn’t seem to have been widely known otherwise. It lists a date in March 1982, but as when the code was started, not finished? Also there’s what was a very standard IBM title screen at the time.

This look hits a nostalgia chord for me.

There was in fact a whole raft of IBM freeware games that used the format, sometimes with the mysterious tagline after (MAV-5-5-K in Alien’s case). The programs LCM and ZAP-IT were also by MAV-5-5-K. SERPENT was by USR-5-5-K. ATTACK was by MOD-5-5-M. That post I just linked includes a comment by Glenn Snow, who ran a BBS starting in 1985 called The Snow’s Dorm which collected many of these games. He explains:

… I ran the BBS well before (1985) it became connected to the Internet. I started The Snow’s Dorm using the RBBS “BBS-in-a-box” setup, which came on a CD-ROM, and included hundreds of free or shareware files which could be offered for download to the BBS’s users. … As for the games you are talking about, they were just included on the original RBBS CD-ROM, and my BBS was only one of several hundred which made those files available for download from that CD-ROM. I have no idea where the “mystery codes” you’re talking about came from or what they signify. Quite likely they were just a categorization scheme for keeping track of who wrote what. It was a common practice for members of PC user groups to include their user-group identification as a way of getting in touch with the author. (These groups were flourishing well before generalized email became a reality, so you couldn’t just put a “john-doe@system.com” style email address as a contact point.)

He wouldn’t have been getting a CD-ROM in 1985, but there eventually was one for RBBS-in-a-Box and it does indeed include Alien.

I feel like someone, somewhere, has to know about what the cryptic XXX-5-5-Z format is all about, but let’s move on for now with the actual game.

The premise of the game puts you as the sole survivor of a luxury liner caught in a storm near a planet. You manage to make a landing, but the planet itself suffered from the storm and everyone human is dead. Your goal is to find a spaceship and escape.

The above minimal directions, combined with the fact that it wasn’t understanding any other commands I was throwing at it, led me to think this was another pure-explore game rather like Chaffee’s Quest. That’s close to correct: it is possible to get nearly to the end of the game without anything other than compass directions.

The main thing I missed is trying out LOOK, or rather —

The game understands upper-case only. If the game doesn’t understand a command — any command — it just repeats the room description. Because the game starts out on the plain shown above, I was trying “s” “e” “w” for a while and getting the same plain description, and this seemed “normal” — it made it appear like the first puzzle was getting to some kind of structure. In the middle of this I tested “l” and also had identical behavior.

A storm approaches, and if you take too long to get indoors, you die.

I had thus put “look” out of my mind (or rather as the game wants, LOOK) since it is very standard for the LOOK command to repeat the room description. I found out much later — after I had gotten to essentially the end of the game — that LOOK is more like a general “search” command and it will give unique information at particular cases. When I realized I should use all caps for directions I never bothered to re-test if LOOK did something different than normal. Mind you, normally LOOK says

Danger is everywhere…watch out

so I might have fallen into the same issue even without my parser-comprehension mishap.

For example, LOOK reveals there’s a blaster here, but we’ll get back to that later! I dutifully tried to map square by square, with lots of death along the way. On the outside, there’s death because you lingered too many turns. On the inside — once you arrive at a cave — there’s death by pretty much anything.

A sampling:

The goal is to pass through the cave through a narrow path (narrow because most any deviation is death) before finally arriving at an abandoned base:

The map is somewhat broken in this section:

The goal, at least as planned by the author, is to get to the end of the rail line which has a tram, then ENTER TRAM. (You find out the command ENTER TRAM from using LOOK, which I still didn’t think to try yet.) However, there’s another room that weirdly enough drops you in a tram no matter which direction you can go. I don’t think I can blame this bug on Keypunch.

The tram destinations here either lead to a.) a blocked-off place you can’t go to b.) back to two possible rooms in the tram area c.) back to the bugged room so you have to hop right back on the tram after getting off or d.) to a waiting space pad where you need an security code.

Stumped about the code, I combed back over the map to check if I missed anything, or if there were any clever messages along the route I took that could be re-interpreted as a security code. I finally go round to trying LOOK again, and, whoops:

One of the other rooms in the tram area gives the security code straight out, no real puzzle-solving required:

I even tried LOOK SCREEN and USE PANEL and so forth when I got to this room (prior to re-discovering simple LOOK) just because it seemed special.

With the code it is then easy to hop in a ship and leave:

I did say this wasn’t pure exploration though! With LOOK you can find that skeleton early on is holding a blaster, then GET BLASTER. Then, in addition to the cave, there’s a metal door you can blast into:

While inside you can also find a skeleton with a knife, and use the knife to try and fail to fight off a slug-thing:

The whole section turns out to be a dead-end though, because there’s a sealed door. You can get in through the other way. The door-blasting segment is purely for color.

I think the author-intended order to things was: the player finds the blaster early, and they bypass the cave at first and look for the “front entrance” which they blast open. Then they have the fake-out encounter with the knife — this might be the first alien the player meets — where the player hasn’t realized yet there’s a huge amount of ways to die and you’re never going to defeat them all and there’s a path that avoids all of them. Stumped, the player turns to the back entrance in the cave, and saunters through danger to the tram section, discovering along the way they could loop back to the knife area from the back.

Despite the moments of action I still think this game is safely sortable with the pure-exploration crowd. I’d rank the ones we’ve seen as roughly

Explore < Quest < Dante's Inferno < Alien < Gold

which weirdly seems kind of high. I might have even enjoyed it more than Gold? I suppose I was willing to be good-natured about the thing knowing this was likely some high school student uploading to a BBS and only ended up in a commercial package by circumstance (all the other games listed had some kind of commercialization). Also, the deaths were always different and amusing and the weird bugs and spelling mistakes just gave it the “public domain charm” for me as opposed to annoyance.

One of the exits just crashes the game.

I’m not going to argue with this review from The Almighty Guru which ranks the game at 7 out of 50. But I still … enjoyed? … it? I guess the game accomplished what it set out to do, which seemed to be kill the player mercilessly.

Next up: The return of Robert Clardy.