(This immediately follows my post on Bally’s Alley, which you ought to read before this one.)
From the 1981 Montgomery Wards Christmas Catalog.
In 1982, John Collins started advertising — in the ads section of the Arcadian, as usual — a second adventure game.
It’s similar to Bally’s Alley, except the environment is more coherent, there’s one (very minor) puzzle, and most significantly, there’s graphics.
TREASURES OF CATHY
(C) 1982 BY JOHN COLLINS
KEY WORDS IN, UP, DROP, GET
49 LOCATIONS 18 TREASURES
BUT CAN ONLY CARRY 6
EACH TREASURE = + POINTS
BUT -1 POINT/MOVE
TRY FOR SCORE > 1000
Again, you’re just trying to find treasures, and there’s a move counter that ticks away. There’s no particular goal score or end game message, which is fairly unusual for an adventure game, but perhaps the author was thinking in terms of what console game players want.
Unless I’m overlooking something, there’s no “end room” treasures should be brought to, either; this is like Fantasyland (the surreal Canadian VIC-20 / C64 game) where the goal is to get maximum treasure in your inventory, not in some specific place on the ground.
Having been forewarned from last time, I had my MAME configuration set to what I might call “normal” keys; pressing 1 will show a 1, 2 will show a 2, ENTER is the same thing as GO, and the backspace key will cause a real backspace. This fiddled with some of my other key combinations I came up with but I found it faster to pop open the MAME key guide to check any modifications rather than keep the default.
Fortunately, you don’t need to type the full words IN, UP, DROP and GET to use them. Just the initial letters will do, except for drop, which requires DR. Using my revised MAME keyset this makes for:
. 6 becomes (U)P
. 9 becomes (I)N
E 9 becomes (G)ET
E 8 . 5 becomes (DR)OP
I tried to go for gold and get AutoHotKey to do combinations, but it wasn’t behaving itself well with MAME, so I just kept a text file of the four combos I needed to the side of my playing window and things went smoothly.
Collins ran out of keys so left out UP and IN, and you have to type them as commands instead.
The last extremely-tight-sized game we’ve had with graphics was Adventures in Murkle for the TRS-80, done in a 4K using glorious ASCII. That game built the outdoors by having a set of graphics that could be turned on and off: some trees, a stream, a building.
A sample: turn off the stream and now you have just a forest.
This game does some the same, turning off or on pieces of graphics to represent particular rooms outside.
Here’s the full map of the outdoors:
The trickiest part for me — especially because I wasn’t sure if I was doing the input correctly until it worked — was finding that I could go UP at one of the trees and find a nest with a key.
Remember, taking an item just requires typing the letter “G”. The bizarre part is that the screen doesn’t clear when you enter a command, causing your typing to land directly on top of the text that says INPUT CODE. So if you want to type I or even IN, it overlaps exactly the text that’s already there, and you can’t see anything!
With the key you can go into the house (to the north) and the cave (to the south). I’m not sure if the house serves any purpose. There’s an axe, which I toted along with me, but any object use in this game is invisible.
All indoor rooms have the same picture.
The cave to the south makes an interesting choice for the graphics by going abstract. There’s a small box that gets filled in different ways with squares. I like the idea of non-literal graphics and I can’t think of any other game that quite does it this way.
Bob is an item you can take.
Maybe the author meant for you to consider this the literal end.
There’s legion of objects like a gun, a pen, a book, and water, all which might be useful in a normal game, but are just window dressing here. They’re the sort of thing someone would expect to find in an adventure game and manipulate, and I get the impression not that the author ran out of room (Irvin Kaputz style) but rather just wanted his game to feel a little more like an adventure by having objects that could potentially be noodled with.
The source code on this is astonishingly small, so there aren’t really any mysteries (not even a strange magic word that we never got to use). The code is so tight rather than just have two people click the link and see it, I’m going to cut and paste the whole thing here, and it’ll be over faster than you expect.
2 NT=0;GOTO 25
3 U=ABS(*(R)÷10000);V=RM÷100;W=ABS(RM);RETURN
4 GOSUB 3;TV=V;TV=W;RETURN
5 R=(I-49)×2+198;GOSUB 4;R=R+1;GOSUB 4;RETURN
6 VA=H;VB=H;FOR I=0TO K;TA=E;TB=F;NEXT I;RETURN
7 GOSUB 3;R=R+1;IF ULINE V,W,U×U;GOTO 7
8 LINE V,W,1;RETURN
9 CY=-16;CX=O;PRINT “0=COM,MOVE 1=N,2=S,3=E,4=W,5=NE,6=SW,7=NW,8=SE,9=↓
10 PRINT “INPUT CODE!”,;L=KP-48;IF (L9)GOTO 50
12 G=ABS(*(A));M=0;FOR I=1TO 5;IF G=0I=5;GOTO 20
14 G=G÷10;IF RM=L M=I;I=5
20 NEXT I;IF M=0CX=O;PRINT ” DEAD END ?”;GOTO 9
22 M=M-2;IF M20B=A÷4;Y=RM;IF Y MO=49;H=12;E=35;F=53;GOSUB 6;E=33;F=50;GOSUB 6;E=35;GOSUB 6;E=44;F=67;GOSUB 6;↓
26 IF BIF YPRINT “YOU HEAR A “,;E=2×A;FOR Z=0TO Y;GOSUB 6;NEXT Z;↓;GOTO 29
28 PRINT “YOU ARE AT “,
29 I=A-1;GOSUB 5
30 N=0;FOR I=50TO 67;IF *(I)=A CX=13;PRINT ” I SEE “,;N=I;GOSUB 5
32 NEXT I;IF A<12R=237;GOSUB 7
34 IF A11IF A48IF C0GOTO 94
62 IF C=68IF *(76)=82GOTO 88
64 IF C=85IF (A=6)+(A=15)A=A-1;RUN
66 IF C=73IF *(50)<0IF (A=10)+(A=20)+(A=44)A=A+1;RUN
86 RUN
88 CLEAR ;PRINT " SCORE= ",P;IF C=1RUN
90 FOR J=68TO 73;I=*(J);IF IGOSUB 5;IF C=68PRINT " 1=DROP,2=NO";D=KP;IF D=49T=-1;GOSUB 97
92 NEXT J;E=35;F=53;GOSUB 6;↓;RUN
94 T=1;FOR I=68TO 73;IF *(I)=0;*(I)=N;*(N)=-*(N);GOSUB 99;I=73;N=0
95 NEXT I;RUN
97 *(I)=A;N=I;GOSUB 99;*(J)=0;RETURN
99 C=N-49;P=P+T×C×C;RETURN
It’s a poem of code. Data is entered separately, using the same trick as Des Cavernes (including having everything be stored in one array).
Incidentally, regarding line 90, with PRINT ” 1=DROP,2=NO”, the dropping in this game is improved: rather than you needing to keep track of numbers and then typing the right one, it will go through each of your objects in turn and ask if it is the item you mean to drop. This is the sort of kludge that really would only happen in this sort of environment but it’s good to see the author was still trying for an improvement.
There’s nothing in the end here terribly novel in terms of content (…except for the rooms represented by abstract pictures…) but that doesn’t take away from the historical and technical interest, and the fact people kept trying to do adventures on every machine possible, kind of like how modern systems are required to run DOOM.
Next time: a game that inadvertently intercrossed with the “video nasties” moral panic in the UK.
Renga in Blue 
“YOU HEAR A CLAP, I SEE BOB”
I’m trying to decide whether John Collins was a lost Beat poet, or possibly an early adherent of the Church of the Subgenius…
The “end” room and the Bob room are right next to each other, which makes me think the author had some sort of “narrative conclusion” in mind.
Something about these reminds me of TwinyJam, the jam for making Twine games with 300 words or less, and the games that handled this by having every link and piece of feedback be a single word: https://gritfish.itch.io/singular and https://kiey.itch.io/youre-at-a.
It just struck me… Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but what’s with the whole “Cathy” thing? Does that name ever show up in the game itself, or in some sort of background story or game plot that’s written elsewhere?
I’d guess it was just some kind of tribute to his wife or daughter, but it occurred to me that if he actually meant “Cathay” that it would sound like the name of an old-fashioned adventure novel.
Could be his <a href=”https://www.custer1972.com/class_profile.cfm?member_id=4795258“>mother</a>.
I enjoyed reading this article on another adventure game for the Astrocade. I was especially happy to see that you included the game’s BASIC listing in it. That was a good idea just to get across the limited resources available to a programmer using Bally BASIC, as only 1.8K of RAM can be used.
The classified ad that you post in your article calls the game “The Treasure of Cathy,” a slight variation of the game’s title. Some of the comments conjecture where “Cathy” fits into the game. The program “Biorhythms: Fact or Fiction,” was released by Collins Computer Company and was written by Cathy Collins. It came out in 1982 on tape and appeared in Arcadian 5, no. 10 (Aug. 16, 1983): 154. as a free BASIC listing. This program was submitted to the Astrocade newsletter by John Collins, so I suppose that Cathy was some relation, possibly his daughter or wife. “Biorhythms” is an educational demonstration written in Astrovision BASIC by Cathy Collins for a Science Fair. The description of the game is “Leap years are accounted for and plot sine curves for physical, emotional, and intellectual cycle, with day in cycle identified.” You can download this program here:
https://ballyalley.com/program_downloads/2000_baud_programs/arcadian/programs_a-h/programs_a-h.html#BiorhythmsCathyCollinsAB
If I can think of any other adventure games on the Astrocade, then I’ll point them out to you.
Thanks! And that makes sense about the naming.
Oh, I flat-out missed the granddaughter née Catherine Collins in the obituary for Collins’s mother that I linked above! Think that pretty much settles it (and that the daughter was named after his mother).
Pls, Can you tell me where I can find this game? I have searched ballyalley with no result
here you go:
https://ballyalley.com/program_downloads/2000_baud_programs/misc/john_collins/john_collins.html
Nobody else said it, so I might as well: ACK!