We last saw Robert Clardy with the odd hybrid game Apventure to Atlantis. This one’s even odder, and combines a shoot-em-up like Galaga and an adventure game.
From Mobygames.
To understand how this happened, it will help to back up to 1981. Synergistic Software had released Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure the year before and moved into a new office. They were working on Atlantis, and Synergistic put out a newsletter titled The Synergistic Source.
It includes reprints of some reviews of Synergistic products, and also hypes up the upcoming game Apventure to Atlantis. As part of this, Clardy philosophizes on his goals in his essay “What is an Apventure?” It reminds me a little of Ron Gilbert writing a “manifesto” (Why Adventure Games Suck) placing his design at LucasArts in opposition to what was going on with Sierra On-Line. There are five important differences with Clardy’s essay vs. Gilbert’s:
1.) it mashes Clardy’s earlier RPGs together with Atlantis, muddying the definition of an “adventure” in general
2.) it feels very much written as a after-the-fact justification, insofar as Clardy’s first game was simply made by modifying Bob Bishop’s Dragon Maze and likely had very little philosophizing involved
3.) since this was written in 1981 it is only based on Sierra On-Line’s early work
4.) it’s meant for commercial self-promotion
5.) it doesn’t land quite as definitively and coherently as Gilbert’s rules.
Still, it’s useful to see someone this early in gaming history being introspective about their work, and what is said here gives a concept of what Clardy was going for.
Apventure is a term meaning an Apple-Adventure that we’ve coined here at Synergistic Software. These are adventure games specifically designed to take full advantage of all of the Apple’s many capabilities.
Clardy consolidates this to mean “animated, with no static displays”, “sound effects”, and “random events to keep the challenge of the apventure fresh.”
The third feature listed above, random events at all stages of the adventure, is also rarely seen in other adventure games. Every apventure is different. The hazards and obstacles and the placement of treasures and magical items all vary from game to game. A fresh adventure awaits your every visit.
He then goes on to quote a review of Mystery House and Wizard and the Princess:
In a sense, this is a linear adventure. Without object A, you can’t get object B. Without object B, you can’t get to a new location, and so on. If you get stuck at any point, you can’t go on to new areas. True, that’s part of the rules in this universe, but it can be frustrating, especially when you know there are undiscovered wonders beyond your reach. The other problem is that once the game is solved, there is nothing left to do with it. Since it is linear, you will have encountered every obstacle and seen every location after a successful play.
This is the essence of Clardy’s idea. As he states, he wants each game to allow resets where each involve a “new world”, where “your old maps are obsolete”, and where “a variety of resolutions or paths that can be followed to reach the goal”. Essentially, he’s saying all adventures should be adventure-roguelikes.
We heard an identical sentiment from Tom Rosenbaum which led to the making of Madness and the Minotaur.
Tom loved to play adventure games but was disappointed in the computer adventure games that were out there because they had no re-play ability. Once you solved them, playing again was exactly the same. Tom also liked board games like Civilization, and decided that a computer game with the randomness and unpredictability of games like this would be something he would enjoy playing over and over.
Despite us seeing many experiments now, the adventure-roguelike essentially died as a form; it was more suited to RPGs with recurring systems of monster combat that could easily be built off of; the narratives of adventures are more likely to be one-shot. Despite many attempts at “adventure creators”, even using modern AI, the necessity for custom content means the genre tends to land into “hand made” territory. Diverge too much and you’re not dealing with an adventure game any more. AI Dungeon isn’t really an adventure as much as a story-telling companion.
(Incidentally, Clardy chopped out the last part of the review paragraph he was quoting: “On the other hand, finding the solutions and conquering the obstacles is a pleasure. For all the frustration encountered, the program made me think, and provided hours of fun.”)
In addition to being different from play to play with random elements, every Synergistic Apventure must have a variety of resolutions or paths that can be followed to reach the goal. During a given game, you should never get bogged down trying to figure a way past a given barrier or hazard. If you can’t figure out the secret of some obstacle, just go some other way. The other way may be longer or more dangerous, but at least you aren’t stuck forever.
This feels like the RPG “contract” where you can sit around and level up if a boss is too difficult, so again seems to be aspiring to another genre. Atlantis did have some puzzles with multiple solutions (in the last island sequence especially) but plenty more that did not. There are adventures with hand-crafted alternate solutions to everything (or like Wishbringer, at least a way forward) but the modern avoidance of being stuck comes down more to a design sense closer to the ideas encapsulated by Gilbert’s essay.
Probe One: The Transmitter is not called an Apventure, but that’s likely just because it’s for Atari. I don’t know why Atari but probably because of the programmer he was working with: Clardy is listed in the manual as providing the design with everything else credited to Lloyd Ollmann Jr.
This is Lloyd Ollmann Jr.’s first game and he went on to have a career all the way through the 80s and 90s, including (along with Clardy) working on the adventure game The Third Courier. (The CRPG Addict played it and he called it “a nearly pure adventure game masquerading as an adventure-RPG hybrid”.)
From the back cover:
You are the commander of the Terran Confederation scout ship PROBE ONE. You have been sent to bring a newly developed matter transmitter to Terra before it can fall into the hands of the Drelgan Hegemony. The device is the only hope the human race has of averting extinction in their war with the Drelgans.
We hear an emergency call from a research colony which was attacked by a warship. The colonists, dying of radiation, programmed labor droids for security. The matter transmitter in the title was at the colony and it needs to be rescued.
REQUIRES: 40K, ATARI 400/800, BASIC cartridge, Paddles or Joystick.
Joystick or paddles required!
Specifically, the little white thing that kind of looks like the ship from Demon Attack is your gun. You can move it left or right just like the ship from Demon Attack, and every once in a while droids appear that you need to shoot down exactly like Dem–, like, hm, the UFO from Space Invaders, except the droid will stop in place somewhere and if you wait to long it will come down and nab you.
I mapped the left and right joystick controls to my left and right keyboard arrows, and “shoot” to my up arrow. The droids can appear slow (at the easy difficulty level, 1) or fast (and the hard level, 5). I picked 3.
The keyboard controls otherwise are
G go
T take
D drop
U use
O off
L look
I inventory
? display all valid commands
where if you see, let’s say, goggles, you press T for Take, and then type the word GOGGLES and then hit ENTER. This is all while also being ready to spring with the joystick. My keyboard configuration was fine but this seems like it’d be obnoxious to keep switching from joystick to keyboard and back.
This is most comparable to the middle sections of Apventure to Atlantis, which had randomly generated palaces where occasionally you’d wander in a room and see a critter you need to shoot. The shooting was always from a single point on the bottom of the screen and you changed your angle to aim. Here the shooting being just left-right scrolling feels a little better (in a gameplay sense, not a verisimilitude sense) but that’s good because droids can pop up at any time.
It also copies the Altantis schtick of objects being cryptic blobs of pixels that are hard to decipher, and you need to LOOK CORNER or the like to get an idea what the object is.
If a droid gets you, they don’t kill you outright, but rather carry you to the opening room. (Although “each attack may cause some internal damage” so eventually you will get hurt.) The terrible part about this is that your objects get left behind, and your gun is considered one of those objects, so you no longer have the joystick-or-paddle-controlled ship on the bottom to shoot at droids. This is especially bad if the gun ends up somewhere you can’t get to.
For example, in one of my playthroughs, I went north twice, then went back south once and fell down a gravshaft. The gravshaft teleports you somewhere random. However, it isn’t always the same random, so if you fall and lose your gun after, and then try to go back to get it, you might have no plausible route to retrieve it. You can make the game unwinnable by doing this.
The main key for making any progress I discovered early is the goggles which always appear in the first room. You want to USE GOGGLES to look for traps and secret exits in every single location. For example, you can see the gravshafts with them on, and if you leave a gravshaft room while wearing goggles, you won’t fall in.
I’ve found, so far, multiple crystals (blue, black, white) in addition to the goggles, but I don’t know how they work. It doesn’t help that there’s a four item inventory limit and the gun and goggles are essentially required at all times.
The game also gives you a “translator”. It makes the famous song from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and where I first tested it, it opened a new secret door. I have no idea why a translator would open a secret door, especially since I’m supposed to be at a “human” base?
Oh, did I mention some of the drones are invisible? They will block exits if you try to leave so the only way I found one was being told there was a sentry, but since I couldn’t see one, I tried shooting randomly in a bunch of places before succumbing to getting scooped up again back to the start.
Anyway, the general summary is: I’m feeling the burn, but I’ll keep persisting for now. Ernst Krogtoft, who has terrific photos of a real copy, was also deeply puzzled: “I played for about an hour and I never really knew what I was doing or what was going on.”
I do get the sense this is structured enough like Atlantis that I should eventually have a breakthrough. If nothing else, having a save state feature (which the original does not have) might “fix” the game to be playable since I can undo unfortunate trap accidents.
Renga in Blue 
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