Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Before hopping back from France to England, I should quickly mention I had an update to my last Folibus post; the commenter Gus Brasil pointed out a method of surviving the ending, although you still remain permanently blue. I’ve only added a single paragraph but go check if you’re curious.

Now let’s swim over–

When he was in his teenage years, Rob Steggles placed three advertisements that appear in consecutive months in late 1982.

In the October 1982 Computer Gaming World, he put in ad selling American Trader, a truck driver simulator, for the BBC Micro. No known copies of this game presently exist.

A month later, in Laserbug Magazine, he put up an ad for three pieces of software.

All three games are relevant for today’s story. First, note that American Trader has already dropped in price, suggesting sales were not brisk.

Second, remember the presence of the fairly technical disassembler (“invaluable to the assembly language programmer”) being added to the list.

Third on the list is today’s game, Temple of Disrondu. It includes a mention of a copy existing for TRS-80. We are tasked with killing the evil demon Disrondu, but must first find three magical treasures to do the deed. Of the two versions, the TRS-80 one is the one that has survived to us; I’ll explain the circumstances in a moment.

The third advertisement — December 1982 — was placed in White Dwarf Magazine, a British magazine for tabletop RPG enthusiasts.

This indicates a large collection of manuals and figures. Steggles was well-known to his friends as a talented dungeon master in D&D campaigns, and he apparently dabbled in Traveler as well. Quoting Rob:

Ken [Gordon] and Hugh [Steers] and I were all in the same class together at school together in Woolwich. Ken and Hugh were the computer whizz-kids and I used to tag along and do Dungeons & Dragons scenarios which they and several others would play. We all played Zork too and some of the Scott Adams adventures and loved them. As I remember it, Hugh started designing his first parser on an old TRS-80 and Ken was heavily into the Apple side of things where (I believe) he met Anita Sinclair.

In fact, his DM prowess is why Hugh Steers (with Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon) tapped Steggles to join their new company Magnetic Scrolls: to be the writer on their first game, which ended up being The Pawn. Quoting Hugh:

Rob did play a fair bit of it. He was very creative and able to adapt dynamically – as you would need to be to make interesting gameplay from random dice throws … D&D gameplay relies heavily on the skill of the person hosting it rather than from the rules.

Hugh additionally comments “that we saw Rob as an author that also had the talent to develop the dynamic type of fiction needed for an interactive story”. Histories of the group of four in the company generally say they played to their talents, with Rob being the non-technical one of the four. I do want to emphasize “non-technical” is a comparative statement, given Mr. Steggles was previously selling an assembly language decompiler. As he mentions in an interview:

Ken and Hugh were the programming geniuses: I knew a bit of 6502 but not enough to go to their level.

The reason we have the TRS-80 version is because Hugh himself rescued a copy off a tape in 2021. I’m guessing this was a personal copy and not one that had been sold. I’m unclear about is if the parser used in this game is based on Hugh’s work — remember the quote from Rob earlier said Hugh’s first parser was for TRS-80.

For the announcement, Hugh commissioned a new work from the artist Gustavo Gorgone depicting the final battle against the demon.

Magnetic Scrolls ended up being a significant force in the 80s British adventure industry, with Rob himself also penning Guild of Thieves and Corruption, but that’s all a story for a different time (or, if you can’t wait, there’s Maher’s account of events). Let’s turn to Rob’s earlier game, made while he still owned 40 TTRPG figures:

The game starts not as you approach the Temple of Disrondu, no equipment in hand (as a sensible adventurer might do) but rather after you’ve already entered. You can go back up to find the cave you entered and a desert, which is an interesting touch (and as far as I can tell, entirely just for color).

I’m stuck early, and this seems to be more the Scott Adams small-spaces style rather than a wide-open barren game. This makes sense as Steggles has called The Count his favorite text adventure and that’s the smallest and tightest of the Adams games.

In the opening room, when you LOOK at the FOUNTAIN, you’ll see a KEY. When you LOOK at the ALCOVE, you’ll see a STATUETTE.

The statuette is reachable but the key is not (“I CAN’T REACH IT”), which is unfortunate because just to the north is a locked door.

The metal triangle looks tantalizing but the description is YOU SEE NOTHING SPECIAL, so I’m not sure whether it is large or small or ornamental or the kind you play in an orchestra.

To the west you can find a FONT with some HOLY WATER; the font can be moved to reveal some FLINT & STEEL.

To the east there’s a storeroom with various supplies: INCENSE, a CLAY POT (with OIL), a WIRE STAND, and a TORCH.

As you might expect, you can light the torch with the flint and steel, and you can burn the incense, but that isn’t helpful anywhere I’ve tried:

OK IT BURNS AWAY

I can’t tell if this is a “kick opening” meant to require some big insight (like the clever-but-cruel puzzle that kicked off Doomsday Mission) or I’m just missing something obvious. I went ahead and made my verb list:

However, nothing I’ve tried on the key has worked; I can’t climb up to it, or throwing anything at it.

I might be doing something wrong with the THROW syntax. Observe that

WHAT SHALL I DO? THROW TORCH
OK-
WHAT AT?
WHAT SHALL I DO? AT KEY
I DONT KNOW THAT VERB

defies the normal Scott Adams syntax. THROW TORCH AT KEY just says YOU CAN’T DO THAT and I don’t know from this parser whether that means “you said that wrong and I’m going to give you a default message” or “that’s a nonsense item to be throwing at a key to try to be knocking it off a fountain”.

Of course, maybe I’m supposed to do something else before getting the key, but I haven’t had luck noodling with the objects in the store room — what’s a metal rack for? — and while I have the statue to Aphrodite and there’s those frescoes, they don’t combine in any way I can find, and PRAY isn’t helpful either.

Now, you might be thinking “oh, this is a Steggles game, and The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, and Corruption were all super hard, what were you expecting?” And possibly, yes, this is an extension of that, although the style is very much a Scott Adams tribute stuck on the 16K of a TRS-80, with minimal text description, so this still feels like a different world than the eventual one obtained by Magnetic Scrolls.

However, given the history, I don’t want to give up on the game too soon. (I know, often when I try to establish that, the game requires an absurd action I’d never, ever, do, but humor me.) So if someone wants to try a hint, please stick to ROT13, please.

In the meantime, the easiest way to play the game is via the BBC Micro port. Yes, the “real” release was lost, but with the TRS-80 code it got back-ported to be playable on the BBC Micro again. I should warn you there are some crashes not present in the TRS-80 version (try to EMPTY POT, for instance) but it otherwise seems to play exactly the same.