Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

For this game, written by C. Steadman for Commodore 64, it will help to go over how public domain software got distributed in the 80s and 90s.

The most straightforward way was friends and family passing disks (see: early distribution of Mission secrète à Colditz). There were also clubs with monthly meetings that had “librarians” who kept up catalogs that members could access (see: the Toronto PET Users Group and Fantasyland). Magazines starved for content could do reprints (or toss the software on their disk or tape, if they came with one). Download from an online service like The Source was possible (as I discussed with this post and “Apple City”). A less-scrupulous vendor might mix public domain software with new software in a package sold on store shelves.

Relevant today is another method: companies that had large catalogs of public domain software where people could choose to get copies for nominal fees. This is different from the “commercial package” method, as this was a case of the user clearly getting what they expect. “Package” disks were also common from this sort of company, with numbered disks akin to the user groups, like this disk of demoscene art. Such companies could still mix “new” games in their catalogs or even distribute “new” public domain software — that is, software not easily findable by any other outlet.

(Incidentally, the idea of “freeware” where author retains the copyright and “public domain” was quite fuzzy in the era. The Smurf Adventure declared public domain status in its source code, and sometimes authors would include a message that meant they clearly were intending the same, but it seems like everyone assumed “no copyright notice = public domain” when that really wasn’t the legal case. At the very least, “anonymous source code” tended to also equal “permission to distribute”, but there were plenty of times where an author name was included but stripped off in a later version. A company or author might even add their name to source code that wasn’t really theirs.)

A mysterious public domain collection from early 1983 Australia, via michaelcarey at the Lemon forum. The disks had been re-formatted and he was trying to find out the origin of the collection.

Valley of Cesis survives to us through two public domain distributors.

Starting with the less-common copy, there’s a version of the game via The Guild Adventure Software. The Guild was founded by Anthony “Tony” Collins in the UK in October 1991. It focused on conversions between platforms, and also kept up a library of public domain games.

From one of the ads for the company as collected by Gareth Pitchford, simply selling a conversion from Spectrum to C64.

The company didn’t last long, dying out in fall 1993 with the games sent to other publishers; relevant to today’s story, the C64 merchandise wen over to Binary Zone. (Especially relevant because Binary Zone is still selling the game so you can’t download this version of the disk.)

A listing of software from The Guild includes public domain dating back to the late 1970s with Dog Star Adventure. Valley of Cesis is far back enough that its presence doesn’t indicate anything in particular (that is, the author Steadman likely doesn’t know of Collins and probably didn’t even know that this outlet was republishing their game).

The second distributor was Brunswick Publications out of Australia, run by Peter Boothman. Peter Boothman was a jazz guitarist in Sydney who has records dating back to the 70s, and somewhere in the 80s he picked up “Commodore 64 author” as a side gig, writing games like the three Telnyr CPRGs. The first Telnyr (1990) is listed as being from Brunswick; the obituary I linked says his company was founded in the “late 80s” so that’s as specific as we’re going to get.

The timing (1982 vs. starting in late 1980s) means it likely wasn’t the “initial distributor” of the game, but since the it hasn’t shown via any other vectors, it is possible it stayed in the Commodore club scene of Australia and went no farther until Boothman picked it up. It is even possible C. Steadman knew Boothman personally.

The other evidence we have of C. Steadman’s activities is a pair of articles in Personal Computer World. The first appeared in the UK edition, October 1983, and the second appeared in the Australian edition, November 1983. Both are identical. I’m unclear about the policies of this particular magazine, but in general magazines are one or two months off from their newsstand date anyway; in all likelihood Steadman when sent the article once and it hit both countries “simultaneously”.

So we can’t tell from this evidence if the author is Australian or from the UK; my inclination might still be for the former because of Boothman, although I should point out the article says the software is tested for “PET, BBC, Microtan 65, VIC, and Acorn Atom.” BBC, Acorn Atom, and Microtan 65 would be especially odd for an Australian to have handy.

Now I’d normally plow ahead with the game, but let me give one last bit of background, as I’m going to make a reference only some of the people reading this blog will know offhand. Specifically, The Gostak, which gets categorized on the Interactive Fiction Database as a “wordplay” game. However, unlike Nord and Bert or Counterfeit Monkey, you’re not manipulating words directly, but rather trying to parse what’s going on in the world you’re seeing from contextual clues.

Delcot
This is the delcot of tondam, where gitches frike and duscats glake. Across from a tophthed curple, a gomway deaves to kiloff and kirf, gombing a samilen to its hoff.

Crenned in the loff lutt are five glauds.

Everything, including the verbs the player types, is based on the modified language of the game: clearly English, but with a whole passel of unknown verbs and nouns. The contextual clues end up enough to accomplish the main goal: you, the gostak, must distims the doshes. (Aaron Reed has written about the game if you want to read more.)

Before you get too excited, no, Valley of Cesis doesn’t go this far, back in 1982. But the main characters (who all have lairs) are given names that could come from the Gostak-verse and have no descriptions, and so I obtained the same sense of understanding-without-understanding as I was making progress. What seems to be the primary mechanic of the game involves making friends with these vaguely-defined beings which have no real way to visualize them, unless you want to make something up.

There’s a long pause when the game starts which indicates some kind of randomization going on. The “1 gold piece” items that get scattered across the map do seem to change, but nothing else. I have not puzzled things to the end so I cannot be 100% certain about this.

The “1 gold piece” there is only from the iteration of the game I was making the map.

I’m not even sure what the end is, exactly. We do seem to be gathering treasures and we have a score going up, but our inventory limit is three (or four depending on object size), and I haven’t found any “treasure store” area where the treasures can be dropped and the score retained. This may be another game where you just get as big a score as possible and give up when you like, but maybe there’s even some kind of goal the game isn’t disclosing?

The above text is quite standard when you enter a lair, that is,

BEING_NAME is here.
He doesn’t like you here.
Don’t come back here in a hurry.

I originally thought there was going to be some sort of grisly death or a passage was blocked I needed to puzzle out, but there is no consequence for going into a lair room as many times as you want. (I think. There is a “timer” where you run out of energy but it seems to be based on number of turns you’ve taken, not where you go.) In the process, in addition to Sesajat, you can meet:

Tetsotoh

Qedejiv the weird

Madewob the mad

Baryon the bad

Remesis the red

Zezotim the blue

Duxwetil the green

There are other, more “ordinary” creatures scattered about: an ogre, a rabid dog, a large balrog. They are equally quiet and you can just ignore them and they won’t do anything.

Here I tried to get a reaction by giving meat, but all this did was drop the meat on the ground.

Other than the friendship which I’ll get to in a second, the only obvious obstacle is an ice river running through the map. It blocks some exits so the game says “You cannot cross the ice river without aid.”

There’s two wood planks on the map, some moss, and some rope, but I haven’t gotten any of them to be helpful. The game helpfully gives a word list (take, use, open, break, drop, look, close, slurp, give, inspect, pull, score, bash, list, hello) so I don’t think it’s a communication issue, I really don’t have the right object yet.

Well… maybe there’s a communication issue. I say this because of the 1 gold coin pieces spread throughout the map, which have eluded my efforts at picking them up.

I could probably resolve this easily by peeking at the source code, but hey, the author asked in the title screen not to, I should give just a little more slack before I go there. They might be optional anyway.

Regarding making friends: I found a green book where I could INSPECT it and find that it wants me to “give it to my owner, whoever he may be.” Duxwetil is green is so was worth a try:

My current thinking is most or all of the beings will trade for the right object, I just have to find out what it is. For reference, here’s all the objects I’ve found so far:

bottle of wine, meat, plank of wood (2), rug, crystal ball, dagger, potion, silver thimble, brick, silver sword, some rope, green moss, silver trinket, green treasure, old manuscript

The manuscript gives a cryptic message…

…and that’s all my cards on the table. I’m happy to take speculation for what to try in the comments (don’t even bother with ROT13); if for some wild reason you know this game already, hold for now.