Of the consoles that launched in the US during the 70s, the Atari 2600 undoubtedly became the most famous, with the games still able to be re-packaged for sale in modern times; the Intellivision (1979) makes second place in overall historic sales. The Odyssey 2 (1978) falls in third.
There were more US launches during this time, but they have less recognition: the RCA Studio II, Fairchild Channel F, APF MP1000, and the Bally Professional Arcade, the last one being sometimes dubbed the Astrocade. As a child during the early 80s I hadn’t heard of any of them.
The most ill-fated of these might be the RCA Studio II, which launched in January 1977 only to be followed by a discontinuation announcement in February 1978, but today’s topic is the Astrocade, which had one element that made it unique of all the systems: the combination of Bally BASIC and a tape drive.
The ad above from 1982 touts how “you can even create your own games in Astrocade BASIC” and ends with:
Astrocade, the home entertainment sensation that’s a personal computer too.
Bally BASIC was published in 1978. The system did not have a keyboard but you could use its keypad to enter in arbitrary text with enough patience, using a template to tell you what the keys meant. The fact you could not only write games but save them to tape meant the Astrocade attained a “home brew” fanbase contemporary with the console that none of the other second-generation consoles had at the time. This was a console that had “bedroom coders” we’d normally associate with computers, and these coders created tapes that were sold in newsletters. So Astrocade’s “official” catalog is only a small subset of the games (and art demos) made available in the late 70s and early 80s. Here you can watch a computer art tape published in 1980 by W&W Software Sales:
He also had interest in adventure games, marking Bally’s Alley as “the first in a series of adventure programs I hope to write” and also claimed it “may take days or even weeks to complete”. It first appeared in the classified ads for the Arcadian, May 19, 1980.
While a tape hasn’t survived to us of the game, the original typed copy has (complete with handwritten notes for the variables) and in November 2022 it was typed in by Paul Thacker. He considered it a “work in progress” but it’s sat since 2022 with no changes so I’m assuming it’s in the ballpark of what Collins intended.
Bally’s Alley – An adventure game; one player. Game can last for days or weeks; can save at any point for restart; can go in nine directions; find the ten treasures and return to house; can only carry four treasures at one time. Each move subtracts a point. A magic word-sound-color will be helpful.
— Description from the Bally / Astro Professional Arcade Software and Hardware Sourcebook, Summer 1982
Now we get to the most complicated part of the whole proceedings: running the thing. First off, this has to be done with MAME, which officially got tape support in 2019. There’s a video here of the process. That’s fussy enough as it is, but the more painful part is the keypad.
To type a “red character” you press the button 0, which switches you to the reds, then press the button with the letter in red you want. So the letter Q, for example is 0 and then 8. On top of all that there’s no one-to-one mapping on modern keyboard. Adam Trionfo suggests keyboard stickers:
However, this is not the default mapping in MAME! Here are the keys for the “bottom four” of the pad, which let you change between “green mode”, “red mode”, “blue mode”, and “yellow mode” (or WORDS).
E = green
0 = red
. = blue
enter (number pad) = yellow
The last three seem like they’re trying to do something with the real number pad, except the number pad versions of the keys don’t work! (That’s is, 0 on the number pad does not get read by MAME as the red key — you have to use the regular key 0.) On top of that, the colors are a lie; while the “green” button turns the screen green to indicate your setting, and the “yellow” button turns the screen yellow, red goes to orange and blue turns the screen pink, and I’m not kidding:
What you see when you press “blue”.
If this was part of a Myst-style-game puzzle using cryptic old equipment, I’d ding it marks for being too unrealistic.
There was some more cryptic mess behind the scenes (hot tip: of the four slots the cassette is required to be plugged into port 3) but I’m going to save any more technical discussion for the comments and move on here with the game itself.
The game unfortunately does not give you a starting location, but I worked out later the player begins at Bally’s Alley. Just to the north is the player’s home where the treasure goes:
The book description earlier mentions ten treasures. Poking in the source code, there’s only five listed, but maybe there’s some weird way they’re doubling, kind of like Pokémon vs. Shiny Pokémon.
1 lets you pick a direction, 1 through 9, or from the format here, N, S, E, W, UP, DOWN, SW, NE, NW. No southeast! The author ran out of buttons.
(In MAME, 1 through 9 are 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, R, S, and H respectively.)
Command lets you type an arbitrary word or abbreviation. G stands for GET and DR stands for drop. (In MAME, E H for the “G”, and “E S . 8” for the “DR”.)
When you DROP you specify by item number which thing you want to drop, so 67 would be the ROPE as shown being carried above.
Paul Thacker tested the game and this is the only part of the map he managed to make:
He concluded perhaps there’s something still broken in the source code (part of it was messy and handwritten), and I think he’s right, but not in this exact spot. I realized some of the random connections were because rooms were getting duplicated. In the Garden, it appeared sometimes I could go north to Bally’s Alley, and sometimes I could go south to the Garage. Instead, these are both two entirely different rooms with the same name! I confirmed this by dropping an item, which was only present in one of the variations.
The “duplicate name” trick continues through the early areas but it isn’t utterly nonsense, at least:
I’m unclear if the “rope”, “knife” or “keys” serve any practical purpose. If they do it seems to be commandless (that is, you can go through a particular exit if you are carrying the right thing, but the game doesn’t ask you to CUT something, which would be hard to figure out how to type anyway). They did help with the early mapping but once I got the hang of the author’s tendencies I didn’t need them.
If the keys are needed anywhere they’d be at the Well With Locked Cover, but I dropped them and tested both exits and I wasn’t stopped by a lack of keys.
Past the well was the final section I was able to get to, a “color maze”. The rooms are varying colors using the Astrocade’s curious choices for a main palette.
I was able to find a lamp (see above) and some coins (the only treasure I saw) but then I hit an unfortunate room that was “blank”, that is, there was no room description.
I could still try to move around; going NE leads back to one of the pink rooms, and going down just loops in the same room, but I suspect the down-exit is broken and not intended to be the game’s real destination.
This was an astonishing technical feat on a platform clearly not designed to have a text adventure, and it was delightful to enter territory likely nobody but the author had ever seen. If nothing else, it was wild to see a game with the southeast exit (and only the southeast exit) missing. Still, this boils down to mostly exploration and mapping (there’s a magic word mentioned in the source and two other possible words, but I still don’t see any effects other than movement). I’m still willing to take another swing if the source gets a fix (the file is marked “WIP” because of the uncertainty on the handwriting).
However, we aren’t done with Collins yet: he called this the first in a series, and he did manage to make a second adventure! His second is also for the Astrocade, this time with graphics, and seems to be more than just an exploration journey. Stay tuned!
Special thanks to Kevin Bunch whose book Atari Archive I used as a reference (it’s one of the best books out there about second-generation consoles) and who helped me get over the technical difficulties with MAME.
If the idea of playing another game by the author of early Magnetic Scrolls works appeals to you, I’d certainly recommend trying this. If you don’t want to try the BBC Micro version I’ve got a download here for the TRS-80 version. Just drag and drop the file onto trs80gp and it’ll launch.
I will say the first puzzle might be worth spoiling, but it is mostly smooth past that.
Zoom-in on the wrist bands, shield, and dagger, the three items needed to defeat the demon.
So what I suffered last time turned out to be a colossal piece of disjoint visualization — that is, I was seeing the situation very different from the author, based on text that could be understood multiple ways — combined with my uncertainty about the parser (and the fact an unusual verb is required here). I will say it is a four-word parser and there even is a special data line for prepositions, which is a slight hint of Magnetic Scrolls going on to make one of the better parsers of the British companies.
3010 DATA 9,ON,IN,AT,INTO,OVER,ONTO,ACRO,WITH,TO
I needed to get a key from a fountain. The only description you get upon finding the key is that
THERE’S A KEY THERE!
and the fountain otherwise receives no description. TAKE KEY responds:
I CAN’T REACH IT
This was my first visualization issue. I figured, if the key was in the fountain at “ground level”, it would be easy to grab it, and otherwise SWIM FOUNTAIN and GO FOUNTAIN ought to really work anyway.
I thus thought of it being a fountain with tall layers, where you can see the key on top, but you somehow need to climb the fountain or shake the key loose.
I am fairly certain now, no, this is a regular all-on-the-ground fountain, and the key is floating in the middle and our player doesn’t want to get wet (??) I guess (???). So we just need to extend our reach a little. (I guess this technically could also be consistent with snagging a key up high, but honestly, what I visualized completely excluded such a solution.)
The other important item is a WIRE STAND, and this one does give a description
IT’S A THICK WIRE BENT INTO A STAND
and if you’ve ever fiddled with one of these in real life, this is not the kind of wire you can bend by hand (it even says “thick wire”). Of course I should have tested it, so I wouldn’t call this unfair, just I’m giving the reason I got sidetracked.
Something like this. I’d expect to melt it under heat or something.
If you try BEND STAND, the game says
USE BEND INTO WHAT?
which is prompting for an exact creation. What works — and I did figure this out once I realized what the game was going for — is a HOOK. Then you can GET KEY from the fountain and finally move on with the game.
Incidentally, if the game had said “it’s just out of reach” instead of “I can’t reach that” I probably would have worked this out faster.
Just to prove this game really is designed on the tighter side, here is the entire rest of the map:
The first new room, the altar room, uses the items I’d been gathering up thinking there was going to be some Aphrodite ritual: a statuette and the incense.
There’s no explicit instructions, but the indent plus the burner for incense make their case pretty clear. I also realized quite naturally I should try to GO PRAYER MAT and the game then explicitly mentions you should try out PRAY.
I also needed to light my torch with the flint and steel before this. I don’t know if there were any “dark rooms” being kept track of; I don’t think there’s an inventory limit so I had my lit torch the rest of the game.
The flash of light is the WRIST BANDS appearing. They have “odd glyphs” which you can’t read (yet).
Because of the sequencing here, I could see someone forgetting about this by the time they get the ability to read glyphs.
The next room uses the metal triangle from a few rooms ago, as there’s a triangular space on a dias.
You can climb the stalagmite to get back, so this isn’t a one way trip (for now) but given the mention of something metallic inside, you’ll need to do some destruction later.
The niche has some brown powder with writing indicating to mix with water. Conviently, there’s a stream to the west that serves to do this very task, leaving you with a potion. Drink the potion and now “odd glyphs” are readable:
Go ahead and scoop it up, there’s no inventory limit.
The WRIST BANDS tell you to say APHRODITE at the evil temple? But where is the evil temple? Well, if you go back to the stalagmite room, open the door (not controlled by the keyhole, I was confused at first), and head north, you’ll find a wardrobe. Move the wardrobe to find the temple.
Importantly, the pool has some nasty green liquid which turns out to be acid. The APHRODITE phrase that the bands mentioned opens up a secret stair down, leading to a sacrificial room.
Given the black rock I just scooped up was quite thoroughly described (…unlike the fountain…) I quickly realized it was in the shape of a toe and added it to the idol. This opened up a gold keyhole, but I had no gold key to go with it yet.
Heading back and wandering some more, I found a plank of wood and a platform with a key of ice on it. I scooped up both (the plank and the key, that is, the platform’s too big).
Applying the key to the glass keyhole led to a room with a chasm. I immediately thought to PUT PLANK ON CHASM and it worked.
A weird case where solving a puzzle too fast turned out to be a problem, as you’ll see.
The next room has a stone block which I spent entirely too long fiddling with (it’s the only pure red herring of the game) and a ZOMBIE MOVING TOWARDS YOU. I thought back to all my resources and remembered the holy water back at the font I moved at the beginning. I didn’t have a container at the time but I did now (with the empty jar that used to hold a potion). I scooted back up the stalagmite, grabbed the water, and took it back to the zombie and hurled it:
And now we reach the part of the game I had second-most trouble with after the hook. This is entirely a self-contained riddle. The answer makes sense but I think there’s something unfair to it. However, what I’ll do is withhold giving the answer here, and put my thoughts in the comments instead.
If you get it wrong, THE SHIELD SPIN TOWARDS YOU AND SLICES YOUR HEAD OFF. If you get it right, you have the magic shield and are one step closer to defeating the demon!
From here, two issues remain: finding the dagger, and finding the gold key for the evil temple (which will lead directly to Disrondu). I alternated between noodling with the stone block at the zombie and the stalagmite at the cave, and it occurred to me that I could re-use the jar yet again to pick up the acid from the evil pool.
The metal box has the dagger of truth, but also, this melts your path out. However, that wardrobe from earlier had a POLE in it, so you can bring it over and CLIMB POLE if you want to as a substitute and get back up. The game isn’t softlocked! Classy. (Well, that means the pole is huge, right? Eh, I’m done trying to visualize stuff.)
Now is the part I was stuck third-most after the riddle, but I’m not calling this one unfair at all. Just I kept trying to do things to the STONE BLOCK and never realized I had overlooked trying to LOOK CHASM back one room over. I had to actually look at the map from the Strand Games website to see what was going on.
Climbing up leads to a ledge with the missing gold key. I was then able to bring it back to the evil temple, unlock the last barrier, and make my way down to Disrondu.
There’s been enough lead-up, I don’t need anything more than exclamation marks.
And thus ends our visit to (sort of) the start of Magnetic Scrolls. Other than heavier than normal use of prepositions I didn’t spot anything that would indicate the company’s future; this was much closer to Scott Adams than anyone else.
The most pleasant part in the solving sequence was the triple re-use of the jar; it didn’t originally occur to me to scoop up the acid, but the first re-use applying the holy water immediately gave the idea that I could scoop up any liquid I wanted to. This was essentially a small piece of object transformation, which is one of the key elements I’ve identified in the past as being a way for these super-old games to have puzzles that strike the right balance between simplistic and arbitrary.
Using the word ‘design’ makes it sound like we had a grand plan thought out over many months of agonizing over analyst presentations and consulting focus groups. If we liked it, it was good. There was no pressure to articulate why but usually if it made us laugh it was good. If we thought it was a bit dull, it got cut.
As far as what’s coming next, I’m not sure. I’m slated to write about a game with a very high technical start barrier (think back to that French pocket calculator game in difficulty, although this game’s American) but that might get postponed if I run into too many emulator woes. So there might be a wild card! We’ll see.
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.
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.
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.
As I suspected, I didn’t have much game left to go. This continues from my previous post, where I was stepping off an elevator and getting electrocuted.
My confusion was thinking that the explosion was encompassing the entire house; that is, there would be no way to survive the explosion no matter what. However, assuming you can step out of the elevator and survive the electrical cords, while the explosion will cause the elevator to collapse, you will survive.
To be fair, the text upon dying says
LA GENERATRICE VIENT D’EXPLOSER LA MAISON N’EXISTE PLUS, VOUS NON PLUS
or
The generator just exploded. The house no longer exists, neither do you.
and I don’t think you’d normally read it other than “there was no way to survive that”? But moving on–
As long as you wait (either typing ATTENDRE, WAIT or RIEN, NOTHING) you can get the timing exactly right so that you step out of the elevator right as it collapses but also (because the generator is gone) you don’t have to worry about the electricity killing you either.
However, you still have to worry about the room immediately killing you some more. That “corde” (rope) is not takable, but it is oriented in such a way you might be tempted to climb. The verb list is confusing here but it turns out you can still jump, and the game prompts you to open the window first. If you do so, you die:
You crash to the ground
I don’t know what the deal with the rope is, but I appreciate the extra beat in there where you have to intentionally do an action leading incrementally to your doom rather than just wandering into death via a single step.
You should instead ignore the rope and window and just move on through the door:
The door has just closed. Hello…
How do you write this in 4 letters?
In French, this is COMMENT ECRIVEZ VOUS CECI EN 4 LETTERS, and is a word puzzle. The word puzzle works in both English and French; you’re just supposed to type THIS (or CECI) to move on. (There’s shades of the word puzzle in Avventura nel castello which worked equally well in Italian and in English.)
This allows you to find the Professor’s time machine.
There’s buttons to go to the PAST, PRESENT, or FUTURE, but if you try to do PAST or FUTURE (that is, do actual time travel) the game informs you that it isn’t a very good time machine and you die. With PRESENT:
There’s three pills on the ground and a laser gun. I bet you can guess at least one of the pills is poison. We’ll get back to the pills in a moment, though.
To the south is a mysterious black cube, and you can go up to a “saucer”. Neither serve any purpose other than make you hopeful you can … launch into space I guess?
From the cube room there’s one more room to the east, where you can find a book and rubber gloves. The rubber gloves need to be worn as there’s an electrified door to the west of the pills. The book is useless and can’t be read or opened. (I was hopeful it would kill the reader with a joke so good it makes you die laughing, but alas, this is another boring non-death room.)
Now, back to the pill room. With the gloves on you can go west into a room with a shower and a hole.
If you try to use the shower you find out it is full of acid. If you try to go DOWN (entering the hole) you find out it is full of water. So clearly the next step is either take the pills or use the laser gun.
The laser gun works with nothing, even though FIRE is a verb. I get the honest impression the author was starting to run out of space for puzzles and had something involving the gun and saucer which got cut.
With the pills:
1.) swallowing the Q pill is death
2.) swallowing the Z pill is not immediate death, but swallowing Z alone doesn’t help
3.) swallowing the K pill will make it so you can escape the house through the water
So you might think, horray, just swallow the K pill, and you’ve won? Well:
Phew, you found yourself outside, and irradiated. You die after a few days.
Hmm. What about the K pill and the Z pill?
Phew, you found yourself outside. But, you are all blue. It must be the pills.
And irradiated. You die after a few days.
So either you can escape the house and die of radiation, or escape the house and die of radiation while you’re also blue. And people were mad about Infidel’s ending.
I do appreciate the sense of humor the game had, and how it mostly invoked deaths in a “participatory” way, where the player is at least partly complicit (rather than choosing to turn left instead of right). A game like Revenge of Balrog which relies on stepping the wrong way for death doesn’t give off the same “death labyrinth” vibe (even when it is a literal labyrinth). Or to put it another way, navigating which action to take rather than what direction adds an extra edge. The fact deaths were almost in every room felt consistent rather than mean, and I was disappointed when there seemed to be no way for the saucer or book to result in yet another goofy demise.
I can at least explain where the author’s ending probably came from. Remember this was derived off of The City of Alzan, which the author admired. The game had two multiple routes through. One of them led you to catch the plague in the city (the whole reason you were trying to escape in the first place) and if enough turns pass, the plague kills you:
OH DEAR. YOU MUST HAVE CAUGHT THE PLAGUE IN THE TOMB. IT SEEMS THAT YOU HAVE DIED.
However, you can escape with the plague! The game will congratulate you like normal if you do so:
YOU MADE IT OUTSIDE THE CITY WALLS. THIS IS INDEED A RARE OCCASION. WELL DONE.
I speculated that maybe somehow leaving the city cured you, but taking a more realistic view, you “escaped” only to die just a little bit later. The author was clearly copying the same dismal ending.
ADDENDUM: I used the walkthrough in the Brutal Deluxe manual to confirm I had the “best ending”, but Gus Brazil in the comments points out there’s a way to survive still. The blue-generating pill also makes you immune to the acid in the shower, so if you swallow both pills, take a shower, and then escape, you won’t die of radiation. However, you still are permanently blue — it’s the exact same ending just the death is missing — and I do still think the author was thinking of Alzan when he wrote all that.
After this, Alain Brégeon did stay in games at least a little. Rob mentioned in the comments a 1985 RPG, Crystal 5, which he says has the “French touch”; by this he likely means something approaching this quote from The CRPG Addict:
French RPGs of the 1980s feature weird combinations of plot elements from mythology, fantasy, and sci-fi, NPC dialogue that makes little sense even in its original language, vague quests, and odd in-game asides. It’s as if their developers felt that RPGs were the next frontier for the Surrealist movement.
But what Brégeon is truly famous for is his later work on the Amstrad made with Patrick Beaujouan: the action-adventure game Carson City from 1986 and the traditional parser adventure Le passager du temps (The Passenger of Time) from a year later.
As far as direct influence of Professor Folibus, we have at least two games upcoming: Cauchemar House by an anonymous author in an unknown year (but almost certainly following Folibus) and The Manor of Dr. Genius from 1983. The latter was for the Oric but adapted the Toms engine. We’ll have to get deeper in adventure history in general to see if there are any other “trap labyrinth” games from France.
For now, though, let’s hop back over the Channel to England, and specifically, the start of the legendary company Magnetic Scrolls (kind of).
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.”
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.
Vince Apps has previously graced us with Devil’s Island and Forbidden City, and other than self-publishing under the title Apex Trading, he was mostly distinguished by having a whole set of books of BASIC source code in his name. For example:
40 Educational Games for the Electron
40 Educational Games for the BBC Micro
40 Educational Games for the Dragon
40 Educational Games for the VIC-20
40 Educational Games for the Atari
40 Educational Games for the Commodore 64
40 Educational Games for the Spectrum
40 Educational Games for the Amstrad
Some above even got Spanish and German translations.
The “Educational Games” series of 40 had picks with a minimum of complexity so they were easily portable. Less easy to port were the games in his Commodore 64 Program Book — now not solely “educational” works — and only some of them show up in his Texas Instruments version of the same.
However, the MSX version of the Program Book got the same set of games, including two adventures: the previously mentioned Forbidden City, and today’s game, Pharoah’s Curse.
This is the kind of adventure game that even your older friends and family may like to play, as it involves logic, memory and the powers of deduction —- you don’t have to be a crackshot arcade games player.
On this adventure you will be seeking for treasure, of course, but you will have to decide whether or not to collect stone urns, iron rods, boxes, earthenware pots and daggers on your way to the centre of the pyramid.
You will have to decide whether or not to go East, West, North, South and whether or not to open doors, enter ante rooms and tackle mazes. Beware that floors may crumble, walls may collapse, mists may envelope you as the tombs are protected against robbers such as you.
This text is from the printed book, not the game text. This game turns out to be extremely simple — even compared to the author’s last two games — and in such cases I always like to see what “script” the author has in mind for the players. The author mentions “deciding” twice. I think the expectation is that with the deathtraps in place (which you’ll see in a second) the player will be nervous at every step, basically relying on the power of possibility space, as I’ve written about long ago:
I know traditionally the “diegetic plot” of an adventure is the one that goes through without deaths … On the surface, the player is walking through a door. Underneath, the player is avoiding a death-trap. Without both branches simultaneously, part of the story is missing.
For Alien, which had a similar number of deathtraps, I think the author was just amusing themselves. Here, the author is hoping you’ll feel a tangible feel of danger and make it so even a choice of East, West, North, and South has some gravity. (Using authentic C64 load speeds, maybe there is something to fear. The game also runs fairly slow so if you die without saving it takes a while to get back to where you started.)
Anyway, let’s go raid for treasure!
You start in a “Valley of the Tombs” complex with multiple places to raid. In a Maze-Like Complex of Caves you can find a parchment with a clue.
In three burial chambers there are caskets, where you can find a key, a cloak, a mummy, and a box. The mummy, unexpectedly, does not sit up and mutter curses; the box, on the other hand, kills you.
The cloak includes a slip of paper with the clue:
HE WHO CARRIES UNTO HIS OWN REFLECTION INSIDE ON SHALL GO
TRANSLATION BY ADVENTURE TRANSLATIONS INC.
COPYRIGHT 2040 B.C.
The key goes to a door leading to the next section, with two pyramids. The first has some sand and you can just DIG SAND to reveal a secret entrance. If only all tomb raiders had it that easily. Or most of them are falling in the pit traps and so forth.
There’s an iron rod (which is useful) and a dagger (which isn’t). The iron rod was mentioned by the parchment earlier as being used to STRIKE a man, and the STRIKE verb is important. At the second pyramid there is a statue you can STRIKE with the rod.
At the inside there is a mirror, and here is where the second clue (from the cloak) comes into play, and the very specific word go in the phrase “ON SHALL GO”. GO MIRROR while holding the cloak leads to the last area.
This is simply a matter of navigating around the instant-death rooms until you reach the End, whereupon there is a sign you read that triggers the winning screen.
There was a large rock we moved earlier to open a passage to find the parchment, but this one is just a red herring.
Especially given the ending where the “treasure” was just a room, this came off as treating the idea of an adventure as an abstract exercise, which might be true if this was written for the book. However, this game was published in ’82 and the book was in ’84.
Devil’s Island, being by the same author and having a similar number of death rooms, makes a good comparison, in that I found that game plausibly sell-on-a-tape worthy, whereas this one seemed far too light. Oddly, I think the “hard” bits in Devil’s Island are at their essence unfair and bad design: the starting puzzle being real-time without letting the player know, the woodcutter that has only a random chance of appearing, the randomly appearing guards where you need to “run or fight”. But they made the experience “crunchier” so I had to reckon with it longer.
What I mean to say is the manifestation of some of these more outrageous elements we’ve seen in games is because otherwise (given authors who can’t handle complex mechanics) the game would be “for beginners” and there’s only so many that can go on a store shelf before the customer starts to be grumpy.
Coming up next: Il y a une porte en fer à l’ouest, et une autre au sud marquée « DANGER ».
One of the earliest homegrown computers for the British market was the Nascom 1. (This is the same computer Level 9 got their start on.) Alan Butcher had obtained one in ’78, and at his company (British Telecom) there were enough other people interested in the same computer that he was able to start a computer club.
From the Centre for Computing History.
This club soon expanded past British Telecom employees to the general public. An early member who joined was Bob Simpson, who we’ve mentioned here before: he was the founder of Micro Power. Micro Power had some early Nascom games but they were essentially focused on Acorn computers like the Electron and the BBC Micro. They published Seek, the game that was essentially stateless and all action happened in the connections between rooms, and a game they just called Adventure, which had a princess who didn’t want to be saved and an out-there “meta-narrator” mechanic.
They were started out as half-computer-store half-publisher, with Micro Power’s growth as a major software company happening organically.
As the place became a hub for people, they would bring along programs they’d written and Bob would say, ‘I will sell that for you.’
— Chris Payne, Marketing Assistant for Micro Power
Alan Butcher (who eventually became the software manager) notes that people in the publishing side spent time in the store:
Having the retail outlet helped a great deal in keeping in touch with customers; the shop would be packed with enthusiasts only too willing to give feedback.
Part of the Nascom club I mentioned also had David Elliott as a member (described as a “young kid” by Chris Payne), which is how he got connected with Bob Simpson and Micro Power. David Elliot is the author of today’s game, Eldorado Gold.
Computing Today, May 1982.
David Elliot has been interviewed but he doesn’t mention his text adventure game (originally for Nascom, see above) at all. He calls his first game Alien Destroyers, even though it almost certainly was Eldorado Gold. (That Nascom ad was from May; the first ad for Alien Destroyers was in September, and the ad includes a BBC Micro version of Eldorado Gold.) So: why did he neglect to mention it? Was it because the book all this is coming from (Acorn: A World in Pixels) was specifically oriented towards the Acorn products anyway? I don’t think so based on his phrasing:
Alien Destroyers was my first game, and not the best implementation, but a learning experience. Funnily enough, it being one of the first Micro Power games, meant it was on the back cover of magazines tor several months. It was quite nice for me, but I expect a bit boring for the readers and a push to get new games written.
I don’t mean “derived” like we recently saw with ADV.CAVES where the exact same source code had a new company name dropped on top, but clearly the author was using the original source code and map as a reference and tweaking it to make his own game.
From the Centre for Computing History.
The meta-structure of both games is identical. You start at your shack/hut, with a mule nearby. At hand is a map, a lamp, a gun, and carrot(s). You can wander into the desert and follow the map to a secret canyon, make your way to a mine, dig holes in the mine to get some treasure, and take a ladder that goes directly from the mine to the starting residence, obtaining victory.
The original game was simple but managed to have some charm due to, first of all, the main narrator being THE GHOST OF BACKPACK SAM who takes on a old-time-Western accent for even basic parser messages.
GOOD LUCK AND I HOPE YOU DON’T END UP A GHOST LIKE ME.
The mule also can be befriended with the carrots and the saddlebags it carries around can increase the size of your inventory. The canyon includes an encounter with Indians that can result in a gun battle although the best route is to steer clear because it will eventually kill you; the gun that the game starts you with is in fact a red herring. (This is similar to how Time Zone had a number of scenes with angry indigenous people where the right play is to avoid them.)
The source code was distributed past its TRS-80 origins — it was one of the games on the ADV.CAVE disk of Apple II games, and had a printing in The Captain 80 Book of Basic Adventures. Speaking of computers popular in the UK, there’s ports for the Atom, BBC Micro, C64, and Nascom; there’s even a version for Microbee (a computer essentially exclusive to Australia).
So it makes sense David Elliot got a hold of the source code; what he did maybe could be thought of as a parody.
You start in your hut with a chart showing a path to a mine, and a gun. Outside is the mule, as in the other game, although the mule only is carrying around a shovel, not saddlebags. Just to the west of the mule is a carrot.
I’ll speak more of the mule in a moment. The ghost town in the original game just has a saloon where you’re meant to find keys that are used to open up the mines. In this version, there’s a bank with some bank notes you can try to take, but then you get tossed in a jail. It’s just a trap — you’re supposed to steer clear. The only thing you really need is some more cartridges for the gun. Given the fact the gun was a useless red herring in the original game, this gives a hint that things are going to roll down differently.
Hey, it worked in Deathmaze 5000.
Going in the desert and following the map/chart is identical; there are no Spanish coins in the cave, just a jar of oil (which can be used to revive the lamp if it runs low, but you don’t need to). If you go into the Indian encampment rather than a shootout there’s just nobody there.
I wonder if anyone was disappointed by the ad copy and cover image.
There’s no keys in town, so entering the mine is not handled the same way as before.
And now is where I reveal the big change I alluded to. You use the gun, twice.
First, the mule just eats your carrot if you try to feed it and never gets close, so instead of the mule being a helper who follows you around, you’re supposed to SHOOT MULE.
Since there’s no keys, you also use the gun (with the extra cartridges from town) to blast the door.
The mine is essentially identical: you can grab some gold, diamonds, and silver, two of them requiring the shovel to DIG.
There’s a ladder you can use that will take you up a secret passage back to the starting location. Then you need to go back to the hotel in the ghost town (as the instructions say) and type SCORE to win.
It almost seems like this was meant to be a parody game; that is, the young author started with the source code and mucked about with it as a learning exercise, especially noting how useless the gun was. He decided to make the gun be an integral part of the game and simplify the mule mechanic by just making it a poor victim.
OK, it isn’t that much a mystery the game didn’t come up in an interview. At least its existence is interesting as a historical snapshot.
Perhaps you’d like to play the author’s game Swoop instead. It feels halfway between the gameplay of Galaxian and Demon Attack. Patterns of birds that swoop down are trickier than either of those two games and birds will aim for collision more often, giving a different flavor to the gameplay loop.
I’ve managed to beat the game, and while not the most cryptic game ending I’ve ever managed to resolve, it surely is in the top 5. I in fact had been mid-sentence trying to write my “I’m sorry, no idea how to finish this” post when I tested something and made a breakthrough.
First, to clear up some things I was puzzled on last time.
Regarding the goggles and the gravshafts, if you are in a room without wearing goggles, and then you put them on while in the room, the gravshaft is now “visible” and any future passes through the room do not require goggles. If you are simply entering the room while wearing the goggles (which does show the gravshaft, and even mentions in the text description there is one there) it will not give this effect. Taking the goggles off causes the gravshaft you spotted to “disappear” and you’ll walk in the trap if you try to leave. Yes, this seems like a bug.
This is a case where I entered the room wearing goggles. The better approach is to enter without goggles, put them on, and take them off again.
Additionally, the change of color when wearing goggles is the sole thing making drones invisible. This is meant to encourage the fact you shouldn’t leave the goggles on; I had at least one time I forgot I had them on so I thought a drone was just invisible normally, but it really is a goggles-only condition. I’ll grant this is canny in a game-design sense in that the traps are relatively nullified out if the goggles can be worn all the time.
One other method to deal with the traps is to use a WELDER. This also seems to be bugged, as if you’ve “spotted” the trap the welder doesn’t work, but if you haven’t then you can use the welder to seal up the hole.
There’s one last very important fact about gravshafts I didn’t discover until later, but let’s get back into gameplay.
The way the game is supposed to be configured — and I’m not sure it is airtight — is that you start on a floor where you can immediately find goggles, and then while carefully avoiding traps, find a white crystal and a black crystal. Somewhere on this floor there will be a place you can use the TRANSLATOR and open up a door, and to get down further, you need to use a white crystal to remove a force field.
The force-field door and translator door incidentally both visually appear (although don’t open) with the GOGGLES, which makes another good reason to test them in every room. Also, “floor” is somewhat approximate, as some of the rooms in this area might still be up or down stairs, but there’s still always a “white crystal barrier” blocking off any further objects.
Picture from a different playthrough; that black rectangle is stairs leading down, and they need me to USE WHITE CRYSTAL to pass.
The second section is where you find a welder and a blue crystal. So just to list all items: gun, translator, goggles, white crystal, black crystal, blue crystal, welder. There’s only one more we’ll talk about in a moment (a remote).
Other than an auditorium, which is just for color…
It is possible to find items or even gravshafts here.
…there’s another force field. This force field requires you to USE the BLACK CRYSTAL. The black crystal, oddly enough, causes all the objects you are carrying — except for your gun — to disperse to random spots on the map. The best option here on a playthrough is to drop everything but the black crystal, use it, and then don’t worry about where it snuck off to (you’ll see why in a second).
With the force field removed, you can enter into a room with a “faint hum”. The goggles reveal a gravshaft, although oddly, it won’t stay revealed if you do the wear/take off goggles trick. The goggles also reveal the remote.
Here I was trying to figure things out so brought every single item. I was holding the gun but it’d normally go in the gap to the left.
I tried every single item and saw nothing. I went back and tried every single item on every single room and saw nothing new. Don’t forget the shoot-em-up thing was still going on: I fought off waves and waves of drones in the meantime (I started getting decent at shooting them down, they more mostly an annoyance if I was trying to use goggles, since swapping the goggles off takes enough time for them to get you).
(Incidentally, last time I commented how swapping between joystick and keyboard would be a pain. There’s a contemporary review of the game that points out the annoyance, and suggests the game be played cooperatively, where one person uses the keyboard and the other the joystick.)
I thus was ready (and started) to write my final post, but for some reason it occurred to me even though the game doesn’t let me GO DOWN, perhaps I could USE GRAVSHAFT. At no other point in the game had I tried to USE an item “in the world”.
Access denied!!!
Huh, that’s a new message. I went back and tried USE GRAVSHAFT elsewhere — with one of the goggle-revealed gravshafts –and found I could “teleport” to a new room that way without getting hurt. So there was something special about the hum-room gravshaft.
It still wasn’t staying revealed without the goggles, but mucking about with my items, I somehow found if I picked up the white crystal the gravshaft suddenly appeared. Put it down, it suddenly disappeared.
The condition turns out to be extremely finicky: you have to be carrying the white crystal and the blue crystal and not the black crystal. As long as all three are true, the gravshaft in the hum room will reveal itself, and you can USE GRAVSHAFT.
This is on a return trip where I realized getting the black crystal was counterproductive, so I didn’t even bring it.
USE GRAVSHAFT takes you to the final room. There’s no visible exits other than the gravshaft, but if you wear goggles you can see an exit to the north. Then you can try to GO NORTH and crash the game.
Whoops! Again I considered maybe I was at the end and the game was broken. However, I took the time to ferry items over in the shaft just to see if I could cause something new to happen. (Incidentally, if you try to bring the black crystal to the end, you’ll get teleported back to the starting room. Black sheep of the crystal family.)
Nice of the game to tell me dropping the white crystal is death rather than just killing me. It never was clear what the two crystals are actually doing.
I finally hit paydirt with USE WELDER which opens up a shimmery rainbow door.
You still can’t just walk through, but since the REMOTE hasn’t been used yet, it didn’t take long to test out USE REMOTE and get the final animation sequence.
Bye bye, crystals.
We get back in our rocket and take off.
Winning is 100 points, each normal droid kill is 10, each invisible droid kill (with goggles) is 20, 10 points for each item. The score is pointless because you kill an overwhelming number of droids to make it to the end and you can always farm more.
I was unimpressed with the random generation aspect. I tried a “serious attempt” on this three times, and on my second attempt, the map yielded no black crystal, making the game impossible to win. So at the very least the random part is buggy. Additionally, there was nothing interesting in the random setup — which crystal you see first is honestly boring, along with if there’s a gravshaft in the auditorium or not. Randomness is interesting in Rogue because the exact layout of walls tactically affects what happens with the monsters; here, the drones appear in an identical way no matter what the layout is, and because the puzzles need a specific sequence, the items still appear more or less in the same order.
In a holistic game design sense, if you’re making a roguelike, the random aspect needs to contribute something to the game that makes multiple games play in a truly different way. With fixed adventure puzzles there isn’t the same benefit (and this was an adventure, despite the exhausting mini-game spread throughout, where I literally sometimes had to stop mid-typing to fiddle with arrow keys). And sure, someone could try “generated” adventure puzzles — like the riddles changing in Apventure to Atlantis — but doing it in a satisfying way seems to still be only in the capacity of human hands.
Referring back to the essay I mentioned from Clardy:
While Synergistic Apventures are full of obstacles, hazards, puzzles, and traps and while they may take hours or days (or even weeks in some cases) to play, it will never be because you are stuck trying to guess what the author wants at some point. The puzzles have logical solutions and hints are given. That doesn’t necessarily make them easy, but you won’t have to call us for help.
Consider the promise broken. The game never explains why the crystals act the way they do, and the only “alternate” solution has to do with using a welder instead of goggles to handle a gravshaft, but to find out the pit is there to begin with you’d normally use the goggles anyway. It seems like the author really just wanted to be making more RPGs, but the genre boundaries were still ill-defined.
We’ll be seeing another Clardy-Ollmann Jr. adventure team-up, but only in (squints) 1989 with The Third Courier. That’s punting it down a bit.
Let’s try a “normal” adventure game next time, shall we? (Maybe. It’s a company where the two times they’ve been featured here the game seemed initially normal and later went off the rails.)
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.
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.
In the 90s and beyond, Paul Rinde would go legit, eventually having a large Mobygames entry with titles like “Senior Vice President” at companies like Wizardworks, GT Interactive, and Infogrames, eventually becoming CEO of Destineer. (Wizardworks admittedly launched with dropping a bunch of user-made DOOM levels on a CD-ROM, but at least they started making collections with regular companies, like this 9-pack of the SSI Gold Box games.)
In the 80s, though, he founded Keypunch Software which cranked out multi-packs of software. Sometimes they grabbed from the public domain, sometimes they did not. It was possible to send games to them — John Romero’s game Subnodule ended up being done that way — but otherwise it seems like they scavenged whatever they could get, meaning authors did not necessarily get paid.
From Mobygames. “Sub Hunt” is actually Subnodule (and it even says so when you load the game).
When they published Cavern of Riches in their Adventure Pak — without permission, as the author confirmed — they broke the game with a bug when trying to add color, making it impossible for the score in the game to go up, thus making it impossible to win.
Today’s Pak of Interest is Space Games, a set of four games for DOS. It includes versions of Star Trek, Lunar Lander and Space Invaders. Space Invaders is quite funky, allowing up-and-down control and starting your ship at the top of the screen.
The fourth game was a public domain game from 1982, Alien.
From an old eBay auction.
This is one of those cases where I think a lot of people were exposed to the game through the Keypunch version, as it doesn’t seem to have been widely known otherwise. It lists a date in March 1982, but as when the code was started, not finished? Also there’s what was a very standard IBM title screen at the time.
This look hits a nostalgia chord for me.
There was in fact a whole raft of IBM freeware games that used the format, sometimes with the mysterious tagline after (MAV-5-5-K in Alien’s case). The programs LCM and ZAP-IT were also by MAV-5-5-K. SERPENT was by USR-5-5-K. ATTACK was by MOD-5-5-M. That post I just linked includes a comment by Glenn Snow, who ran a BBS starting in 1985 called The Snow’s Dorm which collected many of these games. He explains:
… I ran the BBS well before (1985) it became connected to the Internet. I started The Snow’s Dorm using the RBBS “BBS-in-a-box” setup, which came on a CD-ROM, and included hundreds of free or shareware files which could be offered for download to the BBS’s users. … As for the games you are talking about, they were just included on the original RBBS CD-ROM, and my BBS was only one of several hundred which made those files available for download from that CD-ROM. I have no idea where the “mystery codes” you’re talking about came from or what they signify. Quite likely they were just a categorization scheme for keeping track of who wrote what. It was a common practice for members of PC user groups to include their user-group identification as a way of getting in touch with the author. (These groups were flourishing well before generalized email became a reality, so you couldn’t just put a “john-doe@system.com” style email address as a contact point.)
I feel like someone, somewhere, has to know about what the cryptic XXX-5-5-Z format is all about, but let’s move on for now with the actual game.
The premise of the game puts you as the sole survivor of a luxury liner caught in a storm near a planet. You manage to make a landing, but the planet itself suffered from the storm and everyone human is dead. Your goal is to find a spaceship and escape.
The above minimal directions, combined with the fact that it wasn’t understanding any other commands I was throwing at it, led me to think this was another pure-explore game rather like Chaffee’s Quest. That’s close to correct: it is possible to get nearly to the end of the game without anything other than compass directions.
The main thing I missed is trying out LOOK, or rather —
The game understands upper-case only. If the game doesn’t understand a command — any command — it just repeats the room description. Because the game starts out on the plain shown above, I was trying “s” “e” “w” for a while and getting the same plain description, and this seemed “normal” — it made it appear like the first puzzle was getting to some kind of structure. In the middle of this I tested “l” and also had identical behavior.
A storm approaches, and if you take too long to get indoors, you die.
I had thus put “look” out of my mind (or rather as the game wants, LOOK) since it is very standard for the LOOK command to repeat the room description. I found out much later — after I had gotten to essentially the end of the game — that LOOK is more like a general “search” command and it will give unique information at particular cases. When I realized I should use all caps for directions I never bothered to re-test if LOOK did something different than normal. Mind you, normally LOOK says
Danger is everywhere…watch out
so I might have fallen into the same issue even without my parser-comprehension mishap.
For example, LOOK reveals there’s a blaster here, but we’ll get back to that later! I dutifully tried to map square by square, with lots of death along the way. On the outside, there’s death because you lingered too many turns. On the inside — once you arrive at a cave — there’s death by pretty much anything.
A sampling:
The goal is to pass through the cave through a narrow path (narrow because most any deviation is death) before finally arriving at an abandoned base:
The map is somewhat broken in this section:
The goal, at least as planned by the author, is to get to the end of the rail line which has a tram, then ENTER TRAM. (You find out the command ENTER TRAM from using LOOK, which I still didn’t think to try yet.) However, there’s another room that weirdly enough drops you in a tram no matter which direction you can go. I don’t think I can blame this bug on Keypunch.
The tram destinations here either lead to a.) a blocked-off place you can’t go to b.) back to two possible rooms in the tram area c.) back to the bugged room so you have to hop right back on the tram after getting off or d.) to a waiting space pad where you need an security code.
Stumped about the code, I combed back over the map to check if I missed anything, or if there were any clever messages along the route I took that could be re-interpreted as a security code. I finally go round to trying LOOK again, and, whoops:
One of the other rooms in the tram area gives the security code straight out, no real puzzle-solving required:
I even tried LOOK SCREEN and USE PANEL and so forth when I got to this room (prior to re-discovering simple LOOK) just because it seemed special.
With the code it is then easy to hop in a ship and leave:
I did say this wasn’t pure exploration though! With LOOK you can find that skeleton early on is holding a blaster, then GET BLASTER. Then, in addition to the cave, there’s a metal door you can blast into:
While inside you can also find a skeleton with a knife, and use the knife to try and fail to fight off a slug-thing:
The whole section turns out to be a dead-end though, because there’s a sealed door. You can get in through the other way. The door-blasting segment is purely for color.
I think the author-intended order to things was: the player finds the blaster early, and they bypass the cave at first and look for the “front entrance” which they blast open. Then they have the fake-out encounter with the knife — this might be the first alien the player meets — where the player hasn’t realized yet there’s a huge amount of ways to die and you’re never going to defeat them all and there’s a path that avoids all of them. Stumped, the player turns to the back entrance in the cave, and saunters through danger to the tram section, discovering along the way they could loop back to the knife area from the back.
Despite the moments of action I still think this game is safely sortable with the pure-exploration crowd. I’d rank the ones we’ve seen as roughly
Explore < Quest < Dante's Inferno < Alien < Gold
which weirdly seems kind of high. I might have even enjoyed it more than Gold? I suppose I was willing to be good-natured about the thing knowing this was likely some high school student uploading to a BBS and only ended up in a commercial package by circumstance (all the other games listed had some kind of commercialization). Also, the deaths were always different and amusing and the weird bugs and spelling mistakes just gave it the “public domain charm” for me as opposed to annoyance.
One of the exits just crashes the game.
I’m not going to argue with this review from The Almighty Guru which ranks the game at 7 out of 50. But I still … enjoyed? … it? I guess the game accomplished what it set out to do, which seemed to be kill the player mercilessly.
Renga in Blue 