The title translates to The House of Professor Folibus, and yes, we’re back in France.
When I wrote about Des Cavernes dans le poquette I mentioned, as an aside, that the Sinclair ZX81 dominated more than the ZX Spectrum. As late as a May 1983 issue of Micro Systèmes (a magazine that had been around since 1978), the ZX81 gets twenty mentions and the ZX Spectrum gets zero. While the ZX Spectrum French debut was in June of 1982 (compare to the UK getting the product in April) the rollout was sluggish and I haven’t entirely deciphered why. My best guess is related to the SECAM format for televisions, which was France only (Europe otherwise used the entirely different format PAL). It already takes some effort to cope with linking the black-and-white ZX81 to SECAM, but the color format of the ZX Spectrum had even more trouble.
The competitor Oric-1, which took off at the same time in the same price category, was instead easily able to cope. Quoting the CPCWiki: “the Orics were the only machine in their price range to ship with an RGB output socket, which made them the only machine in their price range to be usable with French SECAM televisions, via their SCART(/Peritel) sockets.”
From a post by yannick1000 in the ZX Spectrum World forums.
Thus, in a curious way, a ZX81 book from the UK — The ZX81 Pocket Book by Trevor Toms — ended up being more influential in France than its place of origin.
If that book sounds familiar, yes, we’ve covered it before. The City of Alzan was the sample adventure game. The system got used for Greedy Gulch (and two other games on the same tape I haven’t gotten to yet). It was derived off a 1980 article in Practical Computing, and that article was used for both the Artic games and the massively popular Quill system, but the Trevor Toms system itself in the UK didn’t go as far. The ZX Spectrum smashed up the ZX81 market enough that it became irrelevant by 1983.
In France, the book became the ur-text for early French adventures, kind of like Crowther/Woods Adventure for mainframe games and Omotesando Adventure for Japanese games. This is because of La maison du professeur Folibus by Alain Brégeon, which essentially kicked off French adventures as a real genre.
The game isn’t exactly the first French text adventure; Bilingual Adventure (1979) and Mission secrète à Colditz (1980) came before. But Bilingual Adventure was not well-distributed outside the US, and it was just a port of Adventure; Colditz was a private game for family and friends and only published later. If we want to be finicky, using Hugo Labrande’s phrasing in an interview with the author, we can say it is the first original French adventure game with wide distribution.
Alain Brégeon wanted to work with computers since he was a child and through the 70s he was, as he calls it, an “inspecteur” maintaining large systems (that is, mainframes). He started to get interested in “small systems” (home computers) in the 80s and got a ZX81 in kit form (as he notes, it wasn’t like IKEA, it required soldering). Given his expertise and interest in electronics, he started selling hardware for the system he made out of his garage (including, yes, SECAM adaptors).
Not long after, Brégeon obtained a copy of the Trevor Toms book (original from 1981, translation published early 1982). He became interested in the adventure system, especially City of Azlan, admiring the “codification quasi booléenne” (quasi-Boolean codification) of the logic.
This made him want to write his own adventure. He had already published a bowling game in an earlier issue of Micro-Systèmes, and in issue 24 (July/August 1982) his game appeared with both source code and, importantly, a detailed explanation of how it worked.
There are two “modern” versions of the game. One, by Xavier Martin, adds art in all the rooms. The other, by Antoine Vignau & Olivier Zardini at Brutal Deluxe Software, is a conversion to Apple II; it includes an English translation and manual that lists all the vocabulary the game uses.
You find yourself in Professor Folibus’ laboratory. To get there, you had to go through a thousand dangers and avoid as many traps. But you are not at the end of your troubles. This house is in fact a labyrinth from which you will have to discover the exit while showing intelligence and cunning because there is no shortage of traps on this route.
— From the Brutal Deluxe manual
I wanted to see the art so I tried out the Martin version some, got stuck, tried the Apple II version, and stayed stuck. I don’t think this game is long — there’s only so much space in the source code — but it starts with a frustrating sequence where I must be missing something.
This is, akin to Medieval Castle, a story where you go in somewhere for no obvious reason, and then the goal is to get out. Unlike Medieval Castle, this place you’re trapped is quite deadly.
You are in front of a house; the door is open.
I had a little trouble at the start; the directions (N/S/E/O) don’t work. You’re supposed to use ENTRER (ENTER), and the door closes behind you.
You are in a corridor. There is a door to the east and a door to the west. There is also: fire, candle
It seems quite natural to pick up the candle and light it, but that’s a mistake. Heading east, there is a room with a strange smell where it explodes and you die:
(To restart the game you’re supposed to type GOTO 10. This is normal for ZX81.)
I will say the deaths in this game are somewhat distinguished from the ones in my last game, Pharoah’s Curse. Heading east just on its own reveals the smell but you don’t die; with a little more caution you can avoid the death, and even on deaths you can’t avoid (as you’ll see shortly) you at least bring forward the death by actions a little more elaborate than going east rather than west (falling into a pit) or opening a box revealing a snake. It isn’t quite as elaborate a setup as the “hang you by your own rope” moments in Journey (1979), but it leans more in that direction.
Even without the candle-death the odor room doesn’t seem to provide any use. Going west instead leads to a room with a paper; after GET PAPER there’s a KEY you can also get. What you can’t do is read the paper or otherwise examine it, and I would have been fiddling with that moment for a while had I not had the Brutal Deluxe verb list in front of me.
Further west is a machine with a red button and a green button. If you push the green button it starts “getting carried away”; if you push the red button it simply “starts”, but either way, after a few turns the whole house will explode.
To the north from the exploding machine are a closet and some wires. You can find tools in the closet and REPAIR WIRES.
REPAIR is an uncommon verb to use here. I’ve had FIX in games, and MEND once, but I don’t think I’ve ever had REPAIR. One of the interesting things about playing non-English games is they’ll sometimes reach for verbs whose English equivalent isn’t in the typical stock of adventure verbs. Colditz had “assommer”; “knock out”, and distinct from “hit”, which I don’t think I’ve seen in an adventure otherwise.
Unfortunately, fixing the wires just leads to the same result as before with the machine. But maybe it is meant to fix the elevator to the north?
Going up just results in the game saying “the elevator does not move” and going down is not possible (I assume there’s no basement). If you hang out in the elevator, the cable breaks and you die, or as the Brutal Deluxe version says
You crash down: deaed
If you press the red button it does provide power, enough that you can go UP in the elevator, but immediately upon arriving there’s an unfortunate scene involving a damp room and an electrical wires.
“Une corde” is a rope.
There’s not a lot to noodle with! I suspect I am missing something very simple. I imagine the electricity comes from the generator, so if the generator were off, I’d be able to survive stepping south. However, I need the electricity to go up the elevator. Hence … ?
Here’s the verb (and noun) list from the manual if it helps any.
Renga in Blue 
I think in the first paragraph you meant “the Sinclair ZX81 dominated more than the ZX Spectrum”, not “the Spectrum ZX81”!
yes indeed!
Your name seems familiar… you wouldn’t happen to be the same RavenWorks from Twitter, would you?
Hmmm. How many turns do you have before the generator explodes (after having repaired the wires and pushed the red button to, apparently, get the generator to power the elevator)?
You technically have a 3 turn window (after arriving and using the elevator) before the explosion happens
I did manage to figure it out, and it might be exactly what you’re thinking:
lbh arrq gb gvzr vg bhg fb gur rkcybfvba unccraf evtug jura lbh trg bhg bs gur ryringbe; gur ryringbe jvyy snyy naq oybpx gur rkcybfvba, naq gur cbjre jvyy phg bhg evtug jura lbh fgrc ba gur jverf fb gurl jba’g xvyy lbh
Similar to “Des Cavernes…”, there seems to be some translation dodginess here (“briquet” is lighter, not fire), so watch out for that if you’re using the English port.
A couple points of interest:
I don’t think it’s mentioned in the Labrande interview, but Brégeon also published a very “French touch” sci-fi RPG-ish ZX81 game called Crystal 5 that was submitted to his little shop-based label by another author. It was only really rediscovered and preserved/dumped a few years ago.
In poking around about the actual creation vs release date issue of Le Vampire Fou recently, I saw several mentions of it being “the first adventure written in French” in the old magazines, so it seems that Brégron’s game may have been somewhat forgotten less than two years later.
I was puzzled by “briquet” but I figured the translators had some usage knowledge I wasn’t seeing. (both the Brutal Deluxe guys are from France)
Also, you don’t light the briquet on its own, like a lighter — you have to use the fire to light it, more like it was a candle.
the RPG looks groovy, I’ll mention it in my outro (…once I get there, I got stuck later…)
I still dont understand why that clickbaity title on Le Vampire Fou article happened. That’s the December 1983 issue IIRC and by that time there was already Loriciels’ Kikekankoi on the Oric, another one earlier in 1983 whose name escapes me but written by a teenager, and another one in Québec in 1982… I talked to most of these people but realize now that I never did publish their interview or made an article about them, woops :)
I’ve seen ads for La Caverne des Lutins dating back to the September, 1982 issues of a couple of magazines, so perhaps that was the first original French language adventure to actually be sold commercially in France? All the ones that have been covered here so far were either type-ins, private projects or not really distributed there.
The earliest ads I can find for Kikekankoi are from November, 1983 issues, so I think that and Le Vampire Fou were released almost simultaneously, as far as I can tell. I’d like to know about the other one you mentioned, if you can recall the title. There’s quite a bit of unclear/unknown dating of some of the early French titles on CASA, and some are just missing entirely.
I found it – Morts Subites, on the Oric, may 1983. La caverne des lutins is actually a translation as someone pointed out to me rather recently :) And dr génius was september 1983 I believe. This all makes me want to dive back in my notes to see what never made it into an article :)
Could this be the first game that requires you to climb in an elevator shaft?
Kidnapped and Castlequest from 1980 both had elevator shenanigans.
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/kidnapped/?order=ASC
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/castlequest/?order=ASC
Doomsday Mission, too, although I don’t know when in 1982 that game came out.
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/doomsday-mission/?order=ASC
You are pretty much on the money regarding the relative lack of success of the Speccy in France and the quick traction the Oric-1 got: at the time, the standard video output for micros was a UHF modulator connector for a TV. Instead, Paul Johnson (founder of Tangerine and the Oric’s main designer) added a 5-pin DIN port that allowed sending the RGB signal to a monitor. This meant that in order to connect the micro to a French TV all that was needed was a cheap DIN to SCART adapter, easily available. In contrast, the Spectrum and other micros required a PAL/SECAM converter, which was more expensive and difficult to get, or else the signal would show without any colours at all, which was the main differentiator for the Spectrum (and the VIC-20, which had a similar fate).
The funny thing is that this had not been a deliberate move with the French market in mind, but a design decision for convenience; regardless, it was what triggered the Oric-1 almost immediate acceptance in France and made any other foreign micro a difficult proposition. This was the case until micros began to appear designed specifically for the French market (e.g., the Thomson TO7, Hector HRX, Amstrad CPC French model, Matra Alice and many others).
It is interesting to learn that micros had a TV modulator while it was much simpler to output the video signal as RGB (I think it is RGB, correct me if I’m wrong). Only the Spanish Spectrum 128k had that connector, while the most famous (and simpler), Spectrum 48k mod is to bypass the TV modulator (useless nowadays), and output the video signal directly.
Maybe it would’ve been easier to output the video signal directly and then sell the needed adapters for each market. Don’t know, it is what I think with a slight idea of what’s happening inside the micro and the advantage of the perspective of the years.
Yes, the Spectrum 128k (since the first model distributed by Investrónica*) introduced a dedicated socket that output composite video and RGB signals, and also had the old RF/UHF TV lead socket for backwards compatibility. But it was already 1985, so it was some time after the first wave of micros. By this time it was abundantly clear that video output to a monitor was more of a priority for certain users. Before that, each manufacturer made decisions on what they thought was right… or cheapest.
*There is a technical difference between the Spanish and UK 128k models: the DIN pin arrangements are slightly different. This is relevant when using a SCART adapter. The Spanish model’s composite signal goes from SCART pin 20 to DIN plug pin 3 and pin 1 is not connected, whereas the UK model goes from SCART pin 20 to DIN plug pin 1 and pin 3 is not connected. Hence the Spanish 128k will require either a Spanish RGB cable, or you will need to alter the internal connection inside the DIN plug.
I don’t know what the landscape was like at the time, but in the US, it wasn’t until the late 90s that a signficant proportion of televisions outside the high-end supported anything other than RF inputs, particularly not the smaller models that people most often used for computer monitors. I bought my first “serious” TV in 1998 – a 32-inch RCA – and was surprised to find that it only took RF input. An RGB signal was the easiest and best-quality thing to output, but it meant that the overwhelming majority of users would need to buy a separate device to drive the screen.
Well, to be fair, the Apple II was really the first foreign system to have success in France, well before the Oric, and that continued into at least the mid 80s. Maybe a slightly different sector of the market, but probably more important nonetheless, especially for adventure games.
Is is “Brtual Deluxe Software” or “Brutal Deluxe Software”? You have both versions.
first one’s the typo, fixed, thanks!
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Thanks for the info, that’s really interesting! I think a new, updated article about the origin of French adventures would be a great idea. By the way, do you know what game “Lutins” was translated from?
Hmm… That was supposed to be a reply to Hugo, not a stand-alone comment. Sorry!
I cannot for the life of me recall where I know this tidbit from but it’s from the last couple of years (I used to think it was original too). I scoured my notes and my brain somehow remembered the name “Troll Hole Adventure”, which is a 1981 game (https://oldcomputers.net/interact/MV_catalog.pdf). I do not know for sure if it is true or who taught me that (maybe Jason hahaha).
There hasn’t been too many new developments as for the history of French IF but some of the info I had I saved for an article in a magazine. It’s been 3 years, maybe they’ll let me post it online :) I can also send it to you by email if you’re interested (my email is on my website).
Maybe you learned about it from this thread?
https://www.abandonware-forums.org/forum/autres/les-aventuriers-de-la-traduction-perdue/807286-index-des-jeux-fran%C3%A7ais-sur-micro-ordinateurs/page15
Yes, it looks like you’re right! Lutins is definitely a translation of Troll Hole Adventure for the original US Interact version of the system. There also appears to have been a sequel called Mysterious Mansion Adventure, but it doesn’t seem to have been translated into French, and may be MIA currently.
However, it’s good timing that we’ve been talking about this subject, because I may have just stumbled onto something very interesting. Perhaps you (and Jason?) have researched this, but it seems very obscure, so I’ll post what I found here just in case.
There was a little known (but technically impressive) system called the DAI that was released in Belgium in 1980 and had a small presence in France and Switzerland. I just came across a couple of pages dedicated to it (after reading a brief system profile in an old issue of Micro 7 magazine), and I noticed that there’s a small library of adventures for it that seems almost totally unknown (kind of like the UK and German Colour Genie games I mentioned recently in another comment). Check out Bruno Vivien’s Paradai site, and note these games listed on the Programmes page in particular:
Testament
Trésor Maudit
Super Mystery House
L’enfer de Dante
Les Cimetière des Eléphants
The last two seem to be very faithful French translations of Dante’s Inferno and Jungle Adventure, part 1 (both previously covered on this site), but it’s the others that really caught my eye. Super Mystery House looks really cool, almost like something that would have come out in Japan at the time. But even more so, Testament is very intriguing: “Jeu d’aventures. Vous devez trouvez un trésor dans un vieux manoir (en français)”. There’s an extensive Revues section of the site, with a bunch of old DAI user group newsletters/fanzines, and poking around there I found the first mention of Testament in a program exchange section of the May/June, 1982 issue of DCF (DAI Club France). If the game is what it appears to be, it may be one of the first French adventures.
There’s plenty more to investigate here (including a previously unknown RPG called Super Castel, for instance), and what may be some of the first Belgian and Swiss games ever released, so I thought it was worth mentioning.
Sorry for the long comment!
BTW, I had to reply to my own comment to get this one in the right place, so hopefully you see it okay.
Oh wow, what a great find Rob! Thanks for letting me know! I happen to know an academic who is studying the DAI and trying to get as much info on it as possible, so let me ask him :) Definitely some great information that’s very relevant to the history of French text adventures!
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