Greetings, Halfling. I an Gandalf the Grey, your guide. Your task is to find the 5 objects and cast then all (alive or otherwise) into the Cracks of Doom in order to destroy, once and for all, the terrible power of the Dark Lord.
This is not the first or even the second Supersoft game we’ve looked at using an outside franchise. Pythonesque wasn’t licensed (and is a loose enough adaptation of Monty Python it likely didn’t need to be) while The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was (yet suffered a lawsuit anyway, ending in destruction of product). The Hitch Hiker business clearly would have left Supersoft skittish. Hence, this game is also known as Cracks of Fire, with the Tolkien references torn out. Given the Tolkien Collector Guide was unclear if the Cracks of Doom version even came out (see picture above), it clearly is the rarer of the two.
This is the second adventure game Bob Chappell wrote after The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (His first game generally was Nightmare Park.)
The “treasures” you are collecting this time are items “forged of Mordor” and your goal is to tote them over to the “cracks” nearby where you pitch them to their destruction. This is an alternate universe Lord of the Rings where Frodo starts from the center of Mount Doom and works his way out. The alternate reality aspect threw me for a loop; even if you try not to think about it too hard, there are some deeply odd moments, like a weirdly passive Saruman the White hanging out near both Shelob and Gollum. Look, it’s just easier to talk about the game in context–
You (Frodo) start out at the Mountains of Mordor. Two moves to the east lands you at “the very edge of the Cracks of Doom”, where the Evil Artifacts go. Found there are a small sphere where if you drop it you get a key (exactly like Valley of Cesis) and a manuscript.
Regarding “brandish it high”, the game helpfully comes with a verb list (if you just hit ENTER with no prompt) and the verb BRANDISH is on there. We’ll be using it soon.
Also outdoors you can find a “majestic falcon” near a “smooth blood-red pebble”. Just north of that is “the Red Book of Middlearth”.
I don’t know Gollum being bound only by the “.i.” means a three-letter word with an i in the middle, or just some general word with an i in the middle.
Going down a hole at a “swampy stretch”, reveals a sleeping orc captain near a locked portcullis, and a “rune tablet” in an adjacent room. The tablet says…
Read the rune tablet.
…which I suppose is meta? As I already mentioned I found a key, and it does fit the portcullis, but opening it awakens the guard. With the items seen so far, it doesn’t end well.
Fortunately, even without applying the key, there’s one more place to explore, a very tiny maze.
As usual, despite being small this took a while to get mapped out in a sensible way. Important items lying around are: a brown weed, some rotting orc meat (“looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys!”) and the Phial of Galadrial. Yes, it’s just sitting there. (The phial ends up being essential to carry everywhere.)
There’s also a gargoyle with a missing eye, but the red pebble occurred to me as a good replacement candidate.
Pushing the nose of the gargoyle then drops you to your death. You need to push the eye instead in order to open a passage to the east, but I didn’t discover that until later, so let’s save that bit of exploration for just a moment and head back to the orc captain. Remember the cryptic instructions about using “brandish”?
After this happens, orcs start rushing at you at random through the game. They serve the function of the dwarves of Adventure (or Vogons of Hitch Hiker’s) where you need to be paying attention and BRANDISH PHIAL at the right moments, lest you die. It is surprisingly hard to keep from messing up and sometimes immediately after killing an orc another one would come.
Don’t get excited: we aren’t recruiting an undead army. Rather, we are reading the tablet that said to read the tablet. I did figure this out quite quickly but only in a sense of not having many options. I don’t know how the clues connect.
There is a deep rumble and the east wall slides back.
A harsh voice croaks
The Dead Marshes….
Not much here. First, there’s a troll. Give it the meat to get by. (The screen below shows up simultaneously fending off Orcs.)
Past that you can find a iron fist (“forged in Mordor”) which is our first anti-treasure. I confirmed you can bring it to the Cracks and toss it in for 20 out of 100 points. I am saving it in case it is needed for a puzzle.
Moving on is an “elven crystal cup” (sure, why not) followed by the Balrog, wielding that most dire of weapons, the gosub error.
I don’t know why a weed would help with a Balrog, I was just trying everything I had.
Note also: the Balrog killing you on a give turn is random, and this randomness can trigger when you enter the room. Since you presumably need to enter the room to defeat it (I have not defeated it yet) that means the RNG can just decide to kill you.
With that charming enemy left on the back-burner, let’s proceed to the area past the gargoyle, Minas Morgal.
The sequence is whiplash-inducing. Starting at the far northeast, there’s a dwarf; as the room is titled Crystal Offerings, you’re supposed to GIVE CUP and you get a hat in exchange.
The hat incidentally has a feather that can be removed separately…
The Feather of Thorondor
…and taking the feather back to the falcon gives the message that the falcon picks up the feather and the binding spell breaks (this doesn’t happen with other items). Is this a good thing or does it softlock the game? In Tolkien, Thorondor is the king of the Eagles in the First Age, but I honestly don’t think it helps to dwell too much on the lore as it might be misleading.
From the Lord of the Rings collectable card game.
Moving on, there’s another dwarf with a pipe. Give him the brown weed and he’ll drop off a globe of green fire.
Past that is yet another dwarf hanging out at a Cave of Crystal Presence. I haven’t found anything useful there.
Once past the three dwarves we get into more hostile country, with a “rock-hewn chamber” and a wolf pelt. Taking the pelt reveals a Palantir.
This feels like it ought to go in the Cracks of Doom, but if you try to carry it around, it’ll eventually “affect your mind” and then “seriously damage your mind” up to where you can’t reach the Cracks in time: the Palantir kills you.
Past that is Shelob. Shelob you can defeat with the phial, but it has the same RNG as the Balrog and can kill you when you enter.
But still, she was there, who was there before Sauron, and before the first stone of Barad-dûr; and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness.
(That’s from real Tolkien, not the game.)
Off by a lake you can find Gollum. I have not managed to get him to acknowledge any actions.
Just a little further, Saruman the White is just hanging. He also doesn’t acknowledge your presence.
There’s some “strange fruit” just past that was poisoned by Saruman, so he’s still evil. Finally, the most cryptic room at all in this section:
You can take the slates, but you can’t read them or “inspect” them. I am quite befuddled.
Since that was quite a few random elements, here’s the list of objects so far, excluding already-used items: 7 slates, strange fruit, wolf fur, Palantir, iron fist, globe of green fire, dwarf hat, feather.
Spots of confusion are: the Balrog, the falcon, the dwarf at the Crystal Presence cave, Gollum (with the “.i.” clue), and Saruman.
The inventory limit is four (the game logically says you are “only a Halfling and cannot bear more”) so I haven’t tried every item on every obstacle yet (like the green fire on the Balrog) but nothing strikes me as an immediate obvious combination. I did try the “phial” on Gollum to no effect.
One last element I should highlight is there is a built-in help feature and it works differently than any I’ve played for the Project. Usually such hints have been contextual (based on what room you are in); here, the game asks if you want help from Gandalf, and if you say yes, you get the next hint out of a pre-made list. So there’s X hints behind the scenes that get revealed one by one, and that probably make some kind of walkthrough (I haven’t checked in enough to spoil, but I did check enough to see if this was the kind of game where essential info was in the help command).
I have beaten the game. You can read my posts in order here.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I broke through most of the rest of the game myself, but I did have to look up hints on two things.
Essentially the game consists of:
going through a number of “secret walls”; some of the walls have specific flags and conditions that are cryptic
evading deathtraps
gently applying the commands ACTIVATE, PUSH, OPEN, ENTER, and BLAST as needed
If you add TAKE, DROP, WEAR, and REMOVE, that’s essentially all the commands in the game. There are esoteric conditions and fussy spots with verbs that make this non-trivial to handle. For example, one room I was stumped on had a DOORLOCK I couldn’t get through, and after much suffering I finally came across PUSH LOCK (not DOORLOCK) which revealed a bulkhead. Opening the bulkhead is then a deathtrap and kills you, so all that time I spent on the lock was wasted. Good times.
A TRACTORBEAM GRABS YOU FROM INSIDE…. PULLING YOU IN!
THE BULKHEAD SLIDES SHUT.
YOU ARE IN
AN OBSERVATION STATION BELONG TO THE UNITED STARS ORGANIZATION. BUT IT IS OUT OF ORDER. THERE’S NO POSSIBILITY OF RETURN…..
To be fair, maybe not wasted — this sequence is what led me to really grokking what’s going on. PUSH, TOUCH, and OPEN all are mapping to the same action. Given how broken the parser was being overall I made the guess at the highly reduced verb list was all I really needed. (I found out later that the source code behind the scenes is checking the noun first, then the verb, so the verbs PUSH, TOUCH, and OPEN lead to the “I’m confused about everything” message if being applied to anything other than one of the “secret wall” type objects.)
It also led me to test out referring to the HOWALGONIUM-CLIPS just as CLIPS; it still didn’t work, but with a little more testing it worked as long as I tried to WEAR them directly and not pick them up.
That is, you ignore the “HOWALGONIUM” even though it is part of the same word, just like you ignore the DOOR of DOORLOCK.
I had been trying to take the INFO-CUBE everywhere and doing INSERT CUBE and various other “why is there no machine that reads this” maneuvers, but given my newfound zeal to stick with a reduced verb set, I found all I needed was ACTIVATE. (On the word INFO, though, not CUBE. God forbid the nouns be treated with any consistency.) The game then asks which INFO-MODULE I wanted (1 through 9). Each of the 9 represents a hint:
SPACE-SUIT……..1…..2……..DOOR
SUITS COMPLICATE IDENTIFICATION
NOTHING IS AS IT APPEARS TO BE!
ROBOTS DIMINISH CHANCES OF SURVIVAL!
THE INFO-CUBE IS A KEY
BLASTING IS HELPFUL AT TIMES!
CLIPS SECURE ENTRY
ONLY ANSON ARGYRIS MAY SURVIVE
AFTER 2 ACTIVATIONS, THE INFO-CUBE BLOWS-UP!
The last hint is true: you can only use the cube twice before it goes away, but fortunately there’s the magic of saved game states.
One thing you might notice from the list (ACTIVATE, PUSH, OPEN, ENTER, and BLAST) is that there’s no SHOOT on the list. That verb is not understood. So back where I was getting shot by the Laren, all I needed to type was BLAST LAREN (not SHOOT LAREN) and get a little animation of a crosshair moving from the enemy getting vaporized. (I could swear I had tried it, but I must have tried it on other things and not this moment.)
Even though the manual takes pains to say you have a blaster and a disintegrator and they’re different, there is no difference and no reason to do anything other than blast things.
Past the alien led to a new area, with the same one-way exits as before and the same instant death rooms as before:
I marked the room with the Laren in blue.
For example, just past the alien is a “SEEMINGLY UNIMPORTANT” room, with only one exit mentioned: to the north, which tosses you right into a deathtrap. There are “MARKS” indicating the east wall has been tampered with.
Using The Method ™ the right way to proceed is just PUSH WALL.
This leads to a “distribution corridor” where there is a spot where a crystal goes. Ignoring that for now (since we don’t have a crystal) yet you can take a loop around to the north, reaching a large “BIO-POSITRONICON”.
The machine stops you to quiz you who the founders of the Free Traders was (that’s the folks you’re the Robot Emperor of) which essentially counts as copy protection; the name is mentioned in the manual.
I don’t know if they were thinking piracy prevention or they just wanted to incorporate some of the lore.
Moving on you find an “INFORMATION CELL” with the missing crystal and an AMMUNITIONS CLOSET that frustrated me a long time (more on that in a second). If you keep going you get a dire message about everything being doomed, and then a step further kills you.
You’re already Dead Robot Walking when you see this message.
I flailed around here for a bit until I realized the AMMUNITION CLOSET cannot be referred to as a CLOSET (again, wonderful consistency) but instead as AMMUNITION. You’re supposed to BLAST AMMUNITION which reveals an invisible door, and then OPEN DOOR (not OPEN INVISIBILE). This lets you find a one-way door that leads you back to the transporter with the gap needing a crystal.
Before using the crystal, I should mention as an aside you can also find a room nearby with a BULKHEAD that opens to be a GATE. At the time I found it, none of the commands I tried worked, and it turns out I wasn’t supposed to open it yet.
Just remember this room later.
Returning the transporter/crystal combo, DROP CRYSTAL will activate the transporter, and then you can step inside and find yourself … sent to the west side of the map, with the frustrating wall that I could never open.
Even using the standard verbs got nothing this time. All the previous parser suffering had me decide it was time to reach for hints; I used Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure Games II this time.
The offending room is near the bottom at “Hall Well Hidden Bulkhead”, marked 13.
The hint “THE INFO-CUBE IS A KEY” is supposed to apply here. I admit this occurred to me but I tried to ACTIVATE the cube while in the room with no help. For some reason, dropping the info-cube is the key. Once you’ve dropped it in the room, PUSH WALL then works to reveal a TRANSPORTMODULE.
This has smoke. Art-wise we’ve had nothing like this for the Project.
Moving on (in a one-way circle) is a transmitter station that had an “accident” (ew) a “gravity trap” that crushed some Laren (ouch) and a desert.
I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this and I prowl the “bizarre” tag on itch.io for fun.
The desert has a spacesuit and a key. The key is a trap that will kill you if you take it. You want the spacesuit (and you can only WEAR it, you can’t take it or the game gets confused). The transport doesn’t work, so it appears we’re trapped in a loop again, but I had a clue from the info-cube in mind:
SPACE-SUIT……..1…..2……..DOOR
That is, “when you find the space suit, take two steps, and then there’s a door. That means in the northwest (with the transporter malfunction) the command OPEN DOOR ought to do something, and indeed it does, opening another passage to a computer room, followed by a defense room.
The display shows Laren being killed by the automated defenses.
Past this is a transporter. Now: I had actually been in this section before. It is possible to arrive here from the start of the game, where you are in a dark room, as there is a ROBOT hanging out that normally just lets you pass by. If you pause and try to do some action, the ROBOT catches on and activates a transporter, sending you here. Then entering the transporter kills you. For some cryptic reason, entering the transporter while wearing the spacesuit instead sends you back to the east side of the map, near where you killed the Laren.
Here is the final challenge. Remember the GATE I mentioned? Now you can finally open it.
You have to drop the spacesuit, and drop the mask (or rather REMOVE each), and it works. You might wonder “well, you’re not wearing the spacesuit already, can you drop the mask right away and get into the gate early?” The answer to that is no: the game says
YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG!
like it has always been doing when conditions are off. I admit this part really doesn’t make sense to me since it is unclear what you would have triggered in that whole jaunt with the spacesuit to make the gate suddenly work! At least, unlike Chinese Puzzle (which this was starting to remind me of) there is technically a hint off the info-cube, namely, “SUITS COMPLICATE IDENTIFICATION”. I guess that means the door can’t identify us for leaving, but why wasn’t the door working before?
I assume setting up a sequel which never happened.
Regarding the art, there’s an assembly routine called FASTDRAW and each of the rooms has a TXT file with the information to draw it. There’s some kind of compression going on because the byte size can vary quite a bit. I still don’t think it’s any kind of vectors; rather, the screen is divided into multi-pixel columns and those chunks are being expressed in the draw data somehow. Whatever is going on has to be very clever because even at authentic speeds it goes fast for an Apple II routine.
I know “outsider art” doesn’t make sense as paradigm for adventure games this time, because nearly everyone was making outsider art. Every company was starting fresh; even the starting-to-be-commercialized Sierra On-Line was just getting out of their “summer camp” period. Still, this was far more outside the curve than normal, but I have a notion as to why: this isn’t an original setting at all. This is based on a book series from Europe.
In the original disk version, there’s a file called DATEN.TXT (that is, “data” in German), and the main basic file is marked:
Perry Rhodan is a space opera book series that’s been around in Germany since the early 60s, with two billion in sales. Some books have been translated but as far as I can tell this one never was — and of course the title is given in German and it was sold only in Europe — so I strongly suspect our pair of authors was from Germany or Austria, maybe with subscriptions to an overseas publication; they saw Wolf’s solicitations and decided to send the game in.
And yes, the Laren come from Perry Rhodan. You can read more about them on the Perrypedia, and you can read a summary of the original Caves of Olympia book here. The plot goes in a very different direction but this was clearly meant to be a sort of fan-fiction. The main character in the book is Sanssouq (a psychic with amnesia) but he meets the game’s protagonist Vario-500 (in one of his masks) as part of the story.
The Hordes of Garbesh, referenced at the end of the story and seemingly setting up a sequel, are from Perry Rhodan book #328.
Coming up: Tolkien, Star Trek, another haunted house, and the glorious return of Infocom.
ADDENDUM
I found the German version of the game. We’ve certainly had multiple languages on our games before due to translation after the fact (there are some ’82 dated translations in German of the old APX text adventures, for instance). This one is marked 19xx so never raised any eyebrows, but given the file names still have German in them, and the source material, what we likely have is the first adventure game written in German. What got published in the US must be a translation made afterwards.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games. Both the box art and disk use just “Caves” rather than “The Caves” but I’m giving the title screen priority.
First off, just to make it easier to visualize what I meant regarding the graphics (and how it completely ignores the vectors-with-fill paradigm everyone else was following), here is a portion of the game animated:
When I get closer to the end (or so frustrated at the game I don’t care about spoilers) I’ll poke at the source code, at least some of which is in BASIC, and see if I can decipher what’s going on behind the scenes. For now, let’s worry about the gameplay instead which still is drawing heavily off of paradigms I normally associate with gamebooks.
Single movement commands sometimes imply a long journey
Has paths that lead to random death
Starts the player with weapons and a shield device, includes a running energy counter
I’ll discuss all of these, in order.
First, consider the gamebook Fire on the Water (the second Lone Wolf book, where the player obtains the legendary and overpowered Sommerswerd which lasts for the remainder of the twenty books). Every place on the map marked is included in the story.
Given there are only 350 sections, the game cannot afford to have one “step” between sections represent ten seconds or twenty seconds (as might happen in a traditional adventure game). Sometimes the transition between sections involves travelling many miles. By doing this, the game is also (as is traditional) uni-directional. “240: After three uneventful days at sea, you find shipboard life rather dreary.”: the player wouldn’t have three days of travel, followed by backtracking to the previous section. In one memorable series of travel sections, we’re trying to identify a killer (before the player is required to pick out of the suspects and have a confrontation); it doesn’t make sense to repeat scenes.
Here’s a description from the game:
YOU ARE IN
A SORT OF ANTEROOM.
AHEAD OF YOU – TO THE SOUTH – YOU SEE A 5.23 KILOMETER LONG CORRIDOR. TO YOUR RIGHT THERE IS AN EXIT…
On the map below, the 5.23 km encompasses the “Anteroom” going south to an “Armory”.
I don’t think it’s implied that every exit is in >1 kilometer range, but certainly it means some other exits have to be, and while in most adventures going north-then-south would imply stepping back and forth between a door, here it might indicate an hour of travel. This makes the opening I was puzzled about — where we went straight from the outdoors to past the meteorological station into the caves in one move — make more sense. It also makes the one-way passages you see (like the 5.23 km one) feel a little more palatable at least in a story sense, although in a gameplay sense they still made me grumble.
Second, regarding paths leading to random deaths, all the ones marked in red seem to be instant death with no escape. One of them (the Stasis Field) I originally couldn’t enter because I got blasted by a combat-robot, but I managed (after using an item I’ll mention later) to get by, just hitting a second death! This is a tradition back to regular Choose Your Own Adventure, and is a low-mechanics way to make a narrative seem like it has “challenge”.
Three deaths smooshed into one screen.
Third, regarding the weapons and the shield, here are details from the manual:
As the solitary prototype of the Vario-500 line of robot, you are equipped with a Force Field Generator, a Disintegrator, and a Blaster. The generator will keep all attacking objects or dangerous energy discharges from you, unless it becomes overloaded. Normal physical activities will not be impeded by the presence of the force field. This is due to the intellitroller implanted within the generator housing. This device actively controls the force field and instantaneously adjusts for changes in body position and the number of possessions you are carrying.
Your disintegrator will disrupt the molecular-energy bonds of almost any target. This will cause whatever you are shooting at to be effectively converted to an expanding cloud of gas. The blaster will project a high intensity energy beam, melting most any object in its path. Both of these weapons are very effective. Depending on the result desired, one weapon may be more desirable under given circumstances than the other. Your knowledge and deduction will have to be your guide.
I can theoretically type BLAST (melting) vs. DISINTIGRATE (converting to gas) to get different actions, but I haven’t seen anything happen with either in practice. I might even be using the wrong verbs.
I have the force-field figured out, sort of. ACTIVATE FORCE-FIELD changes a message in your inventory to indicate it is on. I only say sort-of because the one place I’d like to use it I get blasted anyway.
The place I’d love to use it is where there’s a Laren (one of the alien bad guys). Trying to shoot him or move past him results in death in every combination I’ve tried, with the force field both on and off.
He’s quicker to the draw.
I’ve solved two puzzles, at least, one which I alluded to already. In the northwest corner of the map there is a “cocoon center”.
Wearing the mask, colorfully, informs us
YOU HAVE CHANGED BACK TO THE EMPEROR OF THE FREE TRADERS!
which is apparently enough to make robots grovel at our feet. Some lore from the manual to help explain:
Before the Laren invaded the star system, you (Vario 500) had hundreds of different cocoon-masks to enable you to take almost any form you desired. Most of the masks are now hidden all over Olympus, useless to anyone except yourself. The Anson Argyris mask was left in the caves after the Emperor had “officially” fled the planet, as it was necessary as an instrument to penetrate key chambers of the caves, should the robot have need to escape. It should be noted that you are only considered the Emperor (Anson Argyris) when you are wearing this mask.
In other words, we helped build the facility but forgot about the details, yet the robots there will remember us as long as we’re wearing the mask. Other than passing the robot (which allowed us to walk right into another death-trap) I haven’t got any useful result yet.
From the Armory I found a micro-bomb which I was able to use on a suspicious part of wall. This opened up a transmitter that I was able to hop in and go elsewhere, but unfortunately, elsewhere turned out to be that Laren death scene. So two puzzles solved leading directly to death!
I’m also facing a less-deadly foe of (probably) the parser. There’s another “wall” that looks suspicious and it seems like I ought to be pass through, but no verb I’ve attempted works, and I haven’t been able to blast it.
PUSH WALL even has a different message than normal: “YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG!”
Here’s another parser boss:
I don’t know what the clips are exactly, but based on poking through the manual for clues, they might help fix matter transporters, and one of the transporters (just south of the frustrating wall) is broken and kills you if you try to enter. Hence, I’d like to bring one to the other, but the game won’t let me. Yet another hint indicates wearing the mask ought to be sufficient to take the clips, but again, no dice (“THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!”)
The Anson Argyris mask is necessary to perform certain tasks within the caverns to make escape possible. Some items may only be picked up if you are wearing the mask. For instance, the hairclips used in some identification procedures.
The general summary is I still don’t understand how to communicate with the game or what its norms are. I assume I already have everything I need to fight the Laren but I can’t. The same is true for getting through the wall or fixing the transmitter. Maybe everything will go smooth once I get the hang of it?
Howard W. Sams — previously employed for Goodyear and General Battery — eventually landed at the battery manufacturer P.R. Mallory during the 1930s (headquarters: Indianapolis, Indiana). While there his responsibilities included sales literature and he got involved with technical printing like with the Mallory Yaxley Radio Service Encyclopedia (1937).
He tried to coax his employer into diversifying into technical publishing in general; being rebuffed, he founded his own company in 1946, named after himself. Howard W. Sams and Co. became prolific in publishing “Photofact” guides and their technical manuals are still valued by people who work with old electronics.
The company Sams eventually became large enough to purchase Bobbs-Merrill Publishing (famous for The Joy of Cooking) and diversified into textbooks in general before selling the company to ITT Corporation in 1967 (while eventually being sold again in 1985 to Macmillan Publishing).
As a technical publisher, they got into computers early, like with the Computer Dictionary & Handbook (Sippl, 1966)…
You might assume they would immediately make a natural segue into programming languages when those books started to appear, but their books through the 70s tended to stay at their roots in electronics, aimed the “circuit design” layer. The first book of theirs I’ve been able to find with programming is the 1977 volume How to Program Microcomputers, followed by The Z-80 Microcomputer Handbook from 1979. Both stick solely to assembly language. In 1980 Sams finally broke into the mainstream source code market with the Mostly BASIC book series by Howard Berenbon (an automotive engineer in Michigan who worked on computers in his spare time).
Berenbon, from the second Mostly BASIC book, 1981.
I’ve referenced the first book before as it has an early CRPG, Dungeon of Danger. It is not impressive as a game, but it does represent Sams entering the software industry, in a sense. They soon after entered the software industry proper (with boxes on shelves). But why?
It could be brisk sales of the book (enough for a sequel) gave them favorable thoughts. However, my current best theory has to do with a competitor: in late 1980, the California company Programma was bought out by the Hayden Book Company. The timing is suspicious: in March 1981 Sams formed the spinoff division Advanced Operating Systems, and they hired a former Programma employee, Joe Alinsky, to be in charge of the division.
Unlike Hayden, Advanced Operating Systems planned to build their catalog from scratch. Palmer T. Wolf (previously at Instant Software) was hired as the “Software Acquisition Manager”. Wolf blitzed classified ads in the trades looking for submissions.
InfoWorld, Nov 23, 1981.
In the original 1982 printing of Caves of Olympus, he even included a letter in the manual identical to one from magazines. I haven’t been able to unearth anything about the authors (Thomas and Patrick Noone) and if they had any prior relationship with Sams, but it is possible they simply saw one of the ads and sent their game in. (Wolf claimed “50 submittals” in his first six weeks, so around one game a day.)
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
The above is the cover from 1982. The survival of Advanced Operating Systems as a separate division from Sams was short-lived; they got wrapped back into the fold in 1983 (without Alinsky and Wolf), so a re-print in 1984 of this game is purely under the Sams label (I’ll show what that cover looks like in a later post).
This is the only adventure game published by Sams and the only game by Thomas and Patrick Noone. (The credits also list a documentation editor, Jim Rounds; shockingly, a company renowned since the 40s for providing documentation for technical devices cares about their documentation.)
On the devastated planet Olympus, beneath the ruined palace of the Emperor, lie the Caves of Olympus, the last fortress to withstand the onslaught of the evil Loren hordes.
You are Anson Argyrus, an advanced Vario-500 robot. Stranded and alone, you must make your way through the caves to safety and freedom. Cunning is your ally, reasoning is you1 weapon, as you battle against the destruction waiting at every turn-false chambers, one way doors, death traps.
But negotiate the caves successfully, and you’ll escape to join the rebel forces gathering to counter the Loren invaders.
We’re a robot! I think the last time we got close to that was Cranston Manor Adventure but that was pretending the “I am your puppet” perspective had a digital avatar in the world conveying information to us. Cyborg from Michael Berlyn united both the the player-avatar and the computer-narrator. Here, we are straight out playing a robot, no human attributes at all. Not only are we a robot, we’re a small robot “a little more than fifty centimeters tall” and who is centuries old. We are in fact old enough to have helped build the Caves of the story, but our “bio memory” has failed us so we don’t remember what’s inside.
Regarding the graphics, the display uses Jyym Pearson logic where you press enter to swap between text mode and graphics mode, and you pretty much have to keep swapping between the two as you’re walking around as you don’t get enough information conveyed while in graphics mode.
I should also highlight — and it will become more obvious soon — the actual graphical style is very different than anything we’ve seen before. Essentially all the 1980-1982 Apple II games have used some form of vector graphics, like Mystery House; some have looked better, and have incorporated wavy lines and fancy fill effects and the like, but still there’s a sort of basic continuity where it is easy to recognize Apple II graphics as falling within a certain family tree.
No vectors: Caves of Olympus relies heavily on pixels. This is very different from every other adventure game I’ve played in 1982.
Notice the random break-up of mountain ridges by pixels rather than smooth curves. It’s almost like the authors added “noise” as a stylistic feature. It looks as if at least part of the images are being stored as bitmaps.
I’m not sure what to do with the ID-STRIP. Trying to TAKE, EXAMINE, etc. just gets the message RESULT: NEGATIVE! and if you waste more than one turn before going inside the meteorological station, you die. So I’m going to assume the strip works automatically for someone travelling north to keep the Bad Guys out.
Going in, we arrive at a “vestibule”.
TAKE INFO-CUBE: “THE CUBE GLOWS IN A WARM LIGHT … WHAT INFORMATION MIGHT IT CONTAIN?”
The room description includes some “narrated action” which skips some steps. Rather than going from straight outdoors to the room we’re in, our robot hero goes from the outside to a meteorological station, and from there into the caves. The part in the middle is skipped over, more like a gamebook than a regular adventure game. Not all room descriptions are like this but there are some others which assume action rather than just description.
For example, heading north, there is a dark room with a combat-robot (fortunately you can just sneak on by)…
…and the room farther north is both described and depicted quite oddly.
This sort of room description tends to get avoided in modern text adventures, since it doesn’t hold up well to repeated viewings. For example, if you go back to the starting vestibule, you get the same dramatic description as if you just entered the room with the station exploding behind you.
Moving on further, you reach a hall with a dead creature.
Taking a turn west, there’s a combat robot, and trying to move on further is disasterous.
I’ve explored more rooms but I’m still getting a feel for the geography (and what interactions really work) so I’ll save more details for next time.
(And thanks to Allen Wyatt, who has been helpful with the history here, as he worked for Advanced Operating Systems starting in mid-1981. He moved to Michigan City to be closer to AOS in late 1982 but had to move again a few months later to Indianapolis when the operation got wrapped back into the main headquarters location.)
I’ve finished the game, and you’ll need to have read my previous post to make sense of this one.
Before I get back into the game proper, I’d like to do a side trip into history, as this game (and the Softside adventures in general) relate to something interesting about the history of “public domain” distribution companies and preservation as a whole. With that in mind let’s visit the retailer Currys (“Britain’s Electrical Specialists”) before they were bought by Dixons in 1983–
(Ad allegedly from 1980 according to the channel. Does anyone know what is up with UK stores and their lack of apostrophes?)
In 1982, Les Ellingham was a special project manager at Currys, and had the task to launch selling Atari 8-bit computers. Ellingham proposed starting a user’s group in order to more easily show off the Ataris, and got space in a pub in an upstairs room. This was the genesis of BUG (the Birmingham Users’ Group).
The first night — advertised on posters — ended up having a “massive turnout”, and based on the success of the group, they started also producing a newsletter (edited by Ellingham).
The main objective is to encourage Atari owners in this country to begin writing their own programs, but for those of you who are not as yet ready there are plenty of reviews and hints, and tips for beginners. The magazine started in conjunction with the Birmingham User Group, but is now produced independently although several BUG members contribute material. It has grown quite quickly and many people see it as the UK equivalent to ANALOG magazine.
Page 6 had a strong focus on adventures, trying to keep up a list of every Atari adventure game ever made, and issue 10 (July/August 1984) was a “special issue” devoted solely to the game genre.
Like many Users’ Groups from the 80s, they had a library of public domain software, and unlike many Users’ Groups from the 80s, the entire library is online. Disk #82 (Super Adventures 6) includes both Robin Hood and The Mouse That Ate Chicago (for Atari, of course). The games aren’t technically public domain in the legal sense, being copyrighted by Softside, but if a game showed up in a magazine disk, it seemed to be fair game for any distributors. For those of us delving into gaming history, that’s not necessarily a bad thing: I get the impression that the BUG specifically might be the reason we have a complete Atari collection for the Softside Adventure of the Month games (whereas for TRS-80, for instance, we only have a small selection); one of the early games in the series (I think Alien Adventure?) I only found on a Page 6 disk.
One practical upshot is that when Dale Dobson ran through the complete series, he played the Atari versions which were the only ones readily available. The other upshot is that while Robin Hood had a bug for Atari not present in the Apple, the reverse seems to be true here.
The mice were supposed to be wandering about more than they were (Sam in particular can be lethal), but for some reason their routine was broken. I switched over to Atari and was able to finish the game.
First, a detail I missed that is purely for story. The mountain that was too steep to climb has a cave, and you can enter it to see what happened to Hans and the Professor.
Second, something I had attempted in the Apple version which worked, except (I think) I had the emulator speed too high. If you go to the river where the fight happened and try to GO RIVER, there’s a message…
GASP…PANT…CHOKE
…which made me think I just couldn’t swim. There had briefly flashed on the screen another room, wherein our intrepid mouse-slayer had gone to the bottom of the river.
You need to HOLD BREATH in order to do this. Fortunately, this maneuver is repeated in other games so I puzzled it out quickly. The same command shows up in The Institute, Secret Kingdom, Savage Island (both parts) and Nuclear Sub.
It immediately occurred to me — especially given the CAT BURGALAR reference when trying to enter a house — that I needed some milk. The grocery store was still open and obliged, and I was able to drop the saucer and use POUR BOTTLE to get a saucer with milk. I tried taking it to the front of the (still-closed) pet store but no cats were being attracted.
Back when I was playing the Apple II version I wandered for many, many turns waiting for the stores to be open. Knowing Kirsch’s prior game had “drama timing” I figured that was the case here (that is, certain events aren’t based on X turns passing, but rather when the player reaches goal Y). As another example, even in the Atari version the mice don’t start wandering until you enter the powerline area.
I was unsure the first time around, but I think the way to read this scene is that Maja is the super-huge mouse, and the other three are simply regular-huge. That is, Maja is Godzilla, King of the Monsters, and can only be taken down by a similarly impressive monster.
Sam is the one that was hanging on Hancock Building (and is the only one of the four that killed me by hanging around). The other two are Puji and Fiji, neither who get descriptions.
To take down Puji, you shoot the powerlines while the critter is nearby. Trying to shoot powerlines at any other time simply has the shot miss, and yes, this doesn’t make any sense.
(Game design reflection moment: this game is supposed to be about discovering the weaknesses of the mice. It is perfectly fair to have only this one succumb to an electrical trap — maybe Sam and Fiji are are too alert and dodge, and Maja is so big he just ignores it. What isn’t fair is having the shot itself fail when the wrong mouse is in the room. In a way, this is trying to make the gameplay easier by preventing a softlock — probably the powerline-shooting would only work once. In a Lucasarts style game, this would be unacceptable. However, I honestly would rather have had the mouse-evasion-plus-softlock scene; I would have known to reload, and it would have given a strong clue I was on the wrong track, just with the wrong victim. A simple UNDO feature, not yet invented, would have evaded this being a real gameplay problem, or the game could even auto-UNDO, similar to failing at one of the grail traps in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The general design lesson is that preventing failure doesn’t always make life easier on the player.)
I was on the right track with cheese on the bridge (which never worked, likely because the cheese-hungry Fiji never goes that way); if you DROP CHEESE at the quicksand your player will automatically put it in as a trap.
This is the moment where the music store but not the pet store opens. The music store, just like the grocery store, is happy to give you something for free if they have it in stock.
(Game design reflection moment #2: drama time is often seen as the superior alternative to constant time advance, but drama time can be so cryptic to decipher that it only works in particular circumstances. Certainly Outer Wilds did fine with not only constant time advance but real time. So while it is a more “modern” approach — maybe not the best term since it shows up in 1981 — it isn’t automatically better.)
The music store was more cryptic than the grocery store to figure out but fortunately there aren’t that many instruments that are associated with mice. We need a flute.
With flute in hand you can attract Sam’s attention; as long as you’re in the room adjacent, PLAY FLUTE will cause him to come towards you. Given the bridge hadn’t been used yet, it was quickly clear what route I needed to take.
There’s still the giant, Maja, to contend with, but fortunately the pet store has decided to open. (I get what the author was after using drama time. Due to the plot beat which you’ll see shortly Maja’s defeat has to come last. If I was designing this I would have made the method of defeating the smaller mice available right away and had some specific connection to the pet store owner — maybe they’re too afraid to come until they’ve seen you’ve defeated 3 out of 4, and then they’re willing to let you in.)
I already had the milk-in-a-saucer so I already had a plan: take the cat to the enlarging machine, drop the saucer off to keep him from wandering, activate the machine, and … profit?
This could have been Kirsch’s best game so far. Everything is one connected puzzle. Nearly all the action the player takes is participatory comedy, which is rare even in modern games. The writing could be better but generally hits the right tone all the way through.
However, details matter enough in game design it was still a miss. The promise of being able to figure out the mouse vulnerabilities via observation was an illusion. The movement was random and a bit broken (and even in the Atari version, I had a dead mouse randomly appear somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be). The powerlines puzzle was broken in an effort to keep the wrong mouse from being fried.
At least the ending was comedic and satisfying at the same time.
Yes, I’m sure that won’t be a problem at all.
Coming up: the return of the warm, soothing glow of Apple II graphics.
Then Hans, holding a dripping cheeseburger in one hand, said, “This is a great moment, Professor!”
“Yes, Hans, we shall be able to enlarge anything we so choose. We shall be richer than kings and emperors. We shall own the world.”
We’ve reached August for Peter Kirsch’s next installment of the Softside Adventure of the Month. (Previously: Robin Hood Adventure.) I don’t have absolute confirmation this time the author is him (the author credit tends to be on the TRS-80 version, which nobody seems to have) but the structure is identical to his other games.
So many of our authors, tentatively stepping into the waters for the first time, crank out either a Crowther/Woods fantasy or a haunted house game. Kirsch, needing a game every month, is trying out all the genres. This is not just a giant monster story but also a comedy.
Hans carefully watches the Professor as he turns on the machine as cheese from his burger slowly drips onto the platform.
The two men stare silently at the hunk of carbon as it begins to glow.
Suddenly, unnoticed, a small mouse scampers onto the platform to the cheese…
Giant mice with catchy names have been unleashed and are destroying Tokyo Chicago, and our job is to stop them.
We’ve encountered August 1982 Softside before as it is an adventure-heavy issue, with Operation Sabotage being the cover game and Kirsch including an article about his adventure-writing process (which we looked at while exploring Magical Journey).
I have both Apple II and Atari versions but I stuck with Apple II since I had already set up a disk the same time as Robin Hood. I have a download at this link.
The narrative experiment here is to create a wide-open map where the mice essentially roam freely. You’re just supposed to set up … traps I think? Unfortunately, given I have yet to defeat any of the mice, so I don’t know if that’s true generally.
I can give the complete map (so far), the items I’ve gotten (which is not many) and the general behavior of the mice. A zoomed out look at the landscape first:
I’ve divided the map into four regions; the southeast (where you start) is the Laboratory, to the southwest is the Bridge, to the northeast are some Stores, and a powerline-laden road leads to Downtown in the northwest.
Before the action starts, your inventory has a wallet with $39.98.
The road you start on includes a “quicksand bog” which is so far the only place I’ve found you can die…
It’s a Kirsch game so it uses GO instead of ENTER. I’m still recovering after Sharpsoft Haunted House.
The laboratory is three rooms: east and west rooms with a MACHINE and a room in the middle with LASER-SHAPED RODS. The machine has a red RESET switch, a green #1 button, and a green #2 button; if you hit these in order the machine will theoretically work (if something is in the laser room that it can transform). I have managed to make something GIANT but I’ll show it off later.
Moving on to the Bridge area…
…there’s a small town to the south with houses you can’t enter.
These turn into SMASHED HOUSES later. Your JEEP incidentally gets the same treatment.
The Bridge that I’m using to name the region is given with an ominous weight limit…
…and a curious scene on the west side. I don’t know if this is meant as a joke or a hint. Knowing Kirsch it could be either.
You might think this is indicating with a bright klaxon that I’m supposed to get a mouse to follow me, and its enormous weight will drop it to its doom, but I haven’t gotten any of the critters to visibly follow me over to here yet, despite the smashed houses.
Hitting the northeastern area and the stores:
The hardware store, helpfully, has a high-powered rifle. It costs $39.99, and your wallet has $39.98, so you are one penny short. Cruel, cruel capitalism.
Fortunately, outside, there is a “young lady” who wants a “penny for your thoughts” and is being literal.
With the change added to our account we can obtain the rifle.
Two of the stores (the pet store and the music store) are closed with the owners “out to lunch”; the fourth store (a grocery store) is open, and the owner is the opposite of the hardware store owner and is giving away everything for free, as long as you say what it is and they have it in stock.
This is kind of like the storage room in Dog Star Adventure where you had to specify what you wanted, but with some comedy logic to it.
At the end of the line there’s a MOUNTAIN which is too steep to climb; I assume this comes into play later.
Now, to Downtown, and finally meeting the critters!
First off, at where the powerlines start, is MAJA.
I don’t know what the “small rodents” indicate; I do know this is the only mouse that wanders, although he sticks to the powerline area.
Chicago has more stores, but try to enter them and you get rebuffed by a gust of wind.
Satisfyingly, not long after both of these buildings become SMASHED versions (this happens offscreen). Wandering further there’s another mouse (SAM) wrecking havoc:
Weapons useless, just like King Kong. If you try to shoot MAJA you just miss.
I have seen either of the other two mice. I might being hearing one of them as I have been walking around with the message
SQUEAK…SQUEAK
sometimes appearing, although this may be connected to the fact that in the laboratory I created giant stinky cheese.
I haven’t been able to FEED MOUSE or tempt the monsters onto the bridge via dropping cheese in the middle or anything like that. I’ve honestly been having trouble communicating in general, with the only verbs working off my standard list being READ, DRINK, POUR, PRESS, PUT, PUSH, SHOOT, THINK, HOLD, PLAY, GIVE, and ENTER.
The machine incidentally does not work to create a giant rifle (even if you try to convert it before the cheese). I suspect it only works on particular types of matter.
That’s all I have. Despite the size of the map, a lot of the rooms are “filler” (YOU’RE IN DOWNTOWN CHICAGO, no description otherwise) and I suspect some of the geography will be leveraged in the puzzles as we try to lead mice in various ways to their doom. I’m happy to take any speculation people want to make on what to try next.
conquering one bit where I had previously tried a verb correctly, but not on the sub-noun the game wanted, revealing a new area
using an item from the new area to bust through the bricked-up door, but it’s pretty esoteric; this leads to the treasure-deposit room
solving one final puzzle in the treasure-deposit room which is really esoteric
For the sub-noun issue, I warp back up to the bathroom with the gold taps.
I had tried TURN BATH with the notion of perhaps running the water (and to be more literal, RUN WATER) but was running into the generic refusal message so moved on. I was instead supposed to type TURN TAPS. (Which, sure, I guess the game suddenly wants to start referring to sub-nouns now! That will come back again shortly.)
LOOK TOWN advertises one of the co-author’s other games:
IT’S SO FAR! FOR A CLOSER LOOK YOU WILL HAVE TO BUY MEXICAN ADVENTURE!
I tried hard mucking about the roof to see if I could fly the broomstick anywhere, but no dice. In the process, though, I tried to BURN BROOMSTICK (well, at least it is a verb I knew works) and the game informed me I needed a draught in order to start a fire.
If you recall, the bricked door help mentioned a draught, so I brought the broom down and tried burning there:
There was no real coherent thought otherwise; I wasn’t solving a puzzle as much as solving a trail. With the door busted open I could enter the final room, which is a dungeon with a skeleton. LOOK SKELETON reveals a NOTEPAD, and looking at the notepad indicates the treasures go here.
Our task is to collect the house’s treasures and make them harder to find.
So I dropped the treasures I had (bottle of wine, gold ring, bracelet, book) and I was informed by SCORE that I had only 69 out of 100 points. I did a large search (more than an hour) across the house trying to wheedle out more treasures, including trying to unscrew the gold taps (since they are described as gold).
There was really only one treasure remaining, at it was there at the dungeon the whole time.
I don’t think there’s a “reasonable” way to solve this. I had the intuition something unreasonable was happening so I checked the source code. The only time I recall seeing a comparable puzzle was with Avventura nel Castello where I had to pick up a bone from a skeleton (even though a bone isn’t described).
You don’t pick up a bone. You pick up the skull. I combed over the source code and there’s no hint for this, and there’s no message that happens when you get the skull — it just lands in your inventory. You can then LOOK SKULL and find it has a golden bullet, which lands in the room you’re in (probably the dungeon).
Now typing SCORE confirms we have all 5 treasures and the win.
As I predicted, the source code includes a big pile of bespoke commands. I don’t recommend anyone coding a text adventure like this ever.
This screen is from the later MZ-700 version, which doesn’t change anything other than the starting room (you begin at the pond rather than the rock).
This is still fascinating in a historical sense because it might seem all the various tutorials we’ve seen (like the Ken Rose ones) are maybe being a little overmuch about the difficulty, but clearly here is a pair of authors who couldn’t conceive of a different way of handling a parser other than listing every single verb-noun combination a player might possibly type.
Except: remember, Secret Kingdom did have a decent parser! It must have come after this game. I think we can now assume the publishing order matches this ad listing’s order:
Game 3: Haunted House by A.J. Josey and Geoff Clark
Game 4: Secret Kingdom by Geoff Clark.
…meaning I’ve been going in reverse order. (I figured out what the G. stood for as it gets listed with Mexican Adventure. Still not sure about Josey, but you’ll notice Dark Star is solely that author’s work.) After combing over the source code, I don’t think Colditz is connected (other than the Sharp programmers in general were clearly struggling to write a parser).
I weirdly had fun puzzling this out, but that’s mainly because Rob joined me in the comments to similarly take whacks at it, and I was thinking in a meta-sense of this being a mysterious artifact. I never got any sense of being in a haunted house. The game does try for random atmospheric messages and there’s even a bit where a ghost can steal your treasure if you try to wear the bracelet or drink the wine, but given the vast majority of what I typed in gave error messages I was not “engrossed” in a story sense, but rather as a historical challenge meant to be conquered.
No source code diving yet. I managed get at least part of the “vibe” of the parser, although some authorial decisions still mystify me.
Sharpsoft User Notes, via AbeBooks. Books 3 through 6 cover 1982.
“GO” (as in “GO NORTH”, “GO UP”) seems to be purely for directions, and furthermore, the way the parser works is to simply strike the verb out and just look at what was typed for the noun. This means GO EAST works the same as EAST. However, this also means other perfectly natural GO statements won’t work; for example, typing GO UNDERGROWTH gets parsed as UNDERGROWTH and hence:
I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN BY THE COMMAND ‘UNDERGROWTH’
Earlier when I was trying to GO POND and it wasn’t understood, the game is simply wanting ENTER there instead.
YOU FIND A DEEP HOLE IN THE POND AND HAVE DROWNED!!
(Für Elise plays, mourning our player avatar’s loss.)
The purpose of the hollow log is simply as a floatation device, so as long as a player is holding the log, they won’t die going in the pond, and will be able to find a key instead.
Using the key you can then unlock the (otherwise not-visible) door at the front of the house, and go inside. Despite the threat from the rock, we are not trapped in.
The Sharp speaker is used here to add a “catcall whistle” sound to this moment.
I don’t yet have a full map of the inside, but at least I’ve got more to explore than last time.
Just to the north is a COMPUTER in a drawing room, and we are told it is a SHARP MZ-80K. I tried to insert my tape a few ways and was having trouble, so just went straight to HELP which told me to LOAD CASSETTE.
It’s unique for the desire to acquire treasure to be a secret objective that requires revealing a little ways in. I’m still not sure where we are supposed to drop the treasure; not outside, which suggests perhaps we aren’t taking the treasure with us, like how The Great Pyramid had us simply sort the treasures in a particular room. (On the other hand, Katakombs initially asked us to take the treasure to a Dark Crypt, but in the end a golem broke open the way so we could take the loot away for ourselves. I guess we “passed the test” so the denizens acquiesced.)
Heading up the stairs next, I found a library with a book that has gold leaf. This book does not let you open, read it, or interact with it anyway, so it’s just a treasure. (This is one of the vibes I mentioned — the game is cheerful about simply not letting you mess with a thing outside the context it is intended for.) Also upstairs is a study containing a desk with matches.
With the matches in hand you allowed to try to BURN things, but a ghostly voice stops you and says it is dangerous to play with fire.
Present in the hall upstairs is a LAMP, which foiled my attempt at taking it with “A STRANGE FORCE”. Again, interpreting the vibe can help: this means you shouldn’t be thinking of taking the lamp at all, but doing something else with it. Indeed, if you look at the lamp, it is described as “oriental”, implying the right action is RUB LAMP.
Upstairs there’s a bedroom with a window you can enter, taking you to a ledge with a bracelet (a treasure) in addition to a bathroom with a BATH that is described as having GOLD TAPS, imply treasure-ness, but I haven’t been able to scavenge anything.
Down at a “Parlour” there’s a cupboard that is enterable, and a green knob. Typing PULL KNOB reveals a basement area.
Inside the basement there’s a bottle described as valuable (still don’t know where the treasures go) and the room that is currently mystifying me:
I haven’t found a way to refer to the supports (and burning doesn’t work). Typing HELP indicates there is a “draught” but I’m not sure what to do with this information. Whatever is supposed to be done here seems to be entirely bespoke (that is, I need the exact two-word phrase in order to move further).
I realize for you just reading along, it may not be apparent how badly the parser is doing. It absolutely is awful. Even ENTER (which I thought before was honestly coded) gets befuddled here; when I tried to ENTER BATH the game says I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN BY THE COMMAND ‘ENTER BATH’. With essentially no reassurance than any verb in particular might work, the game has a much stronger aura than normal of “guess what the author wants”. In this case I’m not even sure if the magic phrase will involve DOORWAY, DOOR, SUPPORT, SUPPORTS, or BRICKS as the noun. So it might be possible I run across a solution but don’t pair it with the noun the game is hankering for. To find something worse I have to go the very bottom with games like Deathship which didn’t even bother to describe what happened if you did an action successfully.
Again there is the lure of the source code. I don’t think there’s any going back if I check (given what I’m likely to see is a list of complete phrases that lead to completing the game) so I really still want to hold off if I can.
Today we re-visit the Sharp series of computers, and specifically the Sharp MZ-80K, the original built from a kit. Haunted House is the third game we’ve had from Sharpsoft. We’ve already tried out Colditz (1981) and Secret Kingdom (1982). The author of the latter, G. Clark, is listed as a co-author for this game, along with A.J. Josey. However, it is faintly possible (for reasons I’ll get into) that one or both authors also worked on Colditz.
(I realize they’re not technically pseudonyms, but I still always feel like an author is mysterious when they use their initials. If nothing else, it makes it impossible for me to search if they’re on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatnot and still making things.)
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I don’t have an additional history to throw at you here that wasn’t already in my last two posts, except I found a review that points out “all the Sharpsoft games” are £5.85 and this was considered expensive. We’re getting the deluxe experience, everyone!
The start of the game includes some music, so I’ve made a video to let you get your Beethoven on:
It does not set up this “introductory adventure” as spooky to me, but whatever works.
I know there’s 100 points but not what those mean. “Extensive vocabulary”, heh.
I’m not sure what the objective is yet. Normally with this ambiguity I would automatically say “take the treasure to the right place” but haunted house games do often have an “escape” or “kill vampire” theme so I’ll hold on that until I’ve had confirmation.
There are only four starting rooms, in a two by two square. At the start, to the northeast, is the room shown above with the warning. The rock seems to be unmovable and unclimbable.
To the northwest is some undergrowth concealing a cassette (you can find it with LOOK UNDERGROWTH, looking at the cassette reveals it is a standard C12).
To the southwest is a pond with a log. The log is described as hollow and the pond is described as having shallow parts.
The last room, to the southeast, has a GARGOYLE which is also a GRIFFIN, somehow.
You’ll notice there seems to be no way in the house. The HELP command at the house indicates you should UNLOCK DOOR, and the game does seem to indicate a door is present if you try to unlock it (“YOU DON’T HAVE THE KEY TO THE DOOR!”) and there is otherwise no way to see the door is there. (You can look at the house, but the game just says it looks haunted and you shouldn’t go there.)
Now I suppose I should mention the relation with Colditz —
The parser is dodgy, much dodgier than in Secret Kingdom. I could see a writing progression going Colditz – this game – …. – Secret Kingdom with improvement between games.
To illustrate, here is my verb hunting list:
That’s almost too tiny to do anything, and I think JUMP has an auto-reject message as “A FRIENDLY SPIRIT STOPS YOU.” EAT doesn’t really eat, it just goes EAST; that is, only the first two letters are being used to parse EAst. WE, NO, and SO also all work, suggesting this is a two-letter parser overall, but then if you take that non-visible door and try to UN DO (rather than the full UNLOCK DOOR) the game says
I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN BY ‘UN DO’
The phrase “UNLOCK DOOR” is hard-coded in so that you have to be standing in that exact spot for it to work, and you have to type the full phrase.
All the parser reject messages follow that same form (I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN) so you can’t puzzle any extra things out other that what is on the list. Despite the pond and log seemingly both hiding something, I haven’t been able to get help from either. I even used my entire verb list specifically on the LOG just to be sure.
Come to think of it, this is in some ways worse than the Colditz parser — even though that was a one-letter parser at least it became clear early on what worked to communicate, and the game tried to hand out explicit command combos. Here, it’s like the parser is pretending to be one that understand things but falls incredibly short even though the game clearly requires some “normal” parser commands to make any progress. At least I don’t have to type LOOK DETAILS rather than LOOK to examine the room.
I’m going to keep taking my best swing at this a little while longer, but this seems a candidate for assuming that puzzling out directly from the source code will be part of the game.
ADD: If someone wants to play and doesn’t want to deal with emulator wrangling, I dropped a copy in the comments where you just need to start the mz80k executable, then load the save state.
Ken Rose’s Adventures in Adventuring column has featured in this blog once before, where I wrote about the first three installments, including Journey to Planet Pincus. The column was printed in the bi-monthly magazine Softline (essentially an extension of the Sierra brand, at least when it started) and was meant to teach people how to program their very own adventures in BASIC.
Today I’m going to take down the remaining issues of 1982.
Just like the previous three installments, there’s a prefatory article explaining the thing being taught; unlike the previous three, the source code has no commentary with REM statements. My guess is as the games started getting longer it became harder to justify the print space. The September article even discusses the increasing length:
You’ll probably notice that as these programs become more sophisticated, they become longer. Most of the length is taken up not by the logic of the program but by the descriptive words needed to flesh out the story. In fact, in most commercial adventure games, the program takes up very little of the disk. The bulk of the disk is filled with the wordy descriptions used to make the game interesting.
The articles still explain what’s going on section by section. I’m hence treating these as “teaching exercises” rather than full-fledged attempts at games; each games tries to emphasize one particular aspects of adventures as opposed to being complete experiences.
I did manage to avoid having to type in any of the type-ins. Werewolf and Minotaur I found on this disk at the Internet Archive. It was uploaded from “crates” via the Rhode Island Apple Group, and this particular disk comes from the Big Red Computer Club (a public domain distributor similar to Brunswick Publications). However, I couldn’t find any Apple disks that had the Diamond game.
What saved me is the Atari. All the programs from the Adventures in Adventuring series were converted to Atari and then sold on disk. You can find the files in a thread here.
Brian Hall, credited on the disk, chimed in: “Seeing pictures of the floppies really warms my heart! This was one of my first paid projects during high school.” When asked how he got attached the product, he responded: “I think I had approached them with the idea, and they agreed. I *think* that came as a result of having been mailing them high scores (when mailing in a high score was a thing!)”
However, there’s a catch! Disk 2, the one shown above, is corrupted. I used the Atari Explore disk utility and was able to rescue Diamond and Minotaur; Diamond is the file that I didn’t have in Apple form. I have a hacked version of the disk here (with the menu for disk 1 — pick option 2, Please Pass the Zork, which will actually play Diamond).
So the upshot is I’m playing July on Apple II, September on Atari, and November back on Apple II. All three only give credit to Ken Rose (and given Michael Rose — who after some Internet scrounging I am 98% sure is Ken’s younger brother — was pretty explicitly mentioned in Jan. and May, I’m not going to assume he’s not involved here, but it is faintly possible).
The Werewolf Howls at Dawn
The easiest way to control time is to set up a counter that keeps track each time a move is made. These moves can be called hours, or minutes, or stardates, and they can be incremented every time another move is made. This is the technique illustrated in this month’s program.
This is essentially a 5-minute game. The idea is you’ve been bitten by a werewolf and have a limited number of turns to get some wolfsbane which will cure your condition, so the game is showing off how a “timer” works in a game.
The room descriptions, at least, are colorfully done. There are regular messages indicating your slow transformation into wolf-form.
Tight limit, but very short game.
Curiously, the parser has regressed: it’s the type where you type in a verb, and then if it applies, you type in a noun. This game is so simple the author apparently wanted to isolate just the time-changing aspect.
This is just a bit west of the starting location, rather than right where you start, even though the narrative essentially picks up with you bonking the werewolf on the head.
You just need to grab some CATNIP from the cave and some PLANT CLIPPERS from a swamp. Then you need to pass by a panther, with THROW CATNIP.
Remember you type THROW and CATNIP separately.
Past the panther is an alcove with the medicine you need. The clippers need to be used to CUT first, then you EAT.
This game isn’t that surprising in context; if all I was doing was demonstrating a global timer, I’d also want the game to be short in order to quickly show off how it works (and how it’s not just a simple “move” increment but actually using a clock). The only part I’d do differently is make sure that typing in something wrong (like a bad direction) would not increment the time, and discuss the idea of how meta-moves and mistakes shouldn’t count, because something as simple as a typo can then kill the player.
That’s a funny-looking werewolf den.
The main issue is that not everyone would encounter this game in context! It was, as I mentioned, on a public domain disk, and made it to an unofficial DOS port. I imagine some people popped it open expecting something a little more substantial, when something substantial might have actually interfered with the demonstration.
The Case of the Pig-Headed Diamond
The September article is titled The Thing’s the Thing and is “about” objects. Again the game is quite small.
This month we’ll deal with the handling of objects in an adventure program — how to pick things up, use things, and drop them. Our adventure has a mystery theme, in that we will be trying to recover a stolen diamond of little value.
The game has switched back now to a two-word parser. I’ve been wondering if all these games were really written in sequence for the articles or if there was a certain amount of scrounging from the archives, so to speak. Again, the map is quite simple:
The room descriptions have been nuked for functionality. (And less room in the magazine.)
There are no room exits so mapping is slightly slower than the previous game (which was good enough to mention every possible exit in descriptions). The overall effect is for the game to feel even more like a demo than Werewolf.
You first need to grab a shovel, and then use that shovel to dig out a ladder from a garage. Why the garage has a dirt floor is left unclear.
Then take the ladder inside to find a chandelier.
You can use the ladder to help grab the diamonds.
CLIMB LADDER
YOU HAVE OBTAINED SOME DIAMOND—LIKE PENDANTS HANGING ON THE CHANDELIER. YOU CLIMB DOWN THE LADDER.
…and then the Atari BASIC broke down and kept insisting on “TWO WORDS PLEASE” over and over after making the heist. Oh well. I think I’ve seen enough here.
There’s a pig in the bathroom for some reason. Also, you can grab ice cubes rather than diamonds.
ADD: Matt W. in the comments points out the actual goal: bring the ice cubes back (the chandelier is a fake-out) as well as some matches. If you drop the matches first at the bank, then drop the ice, you’ll get a “win”.
4020 IF OB(3) = 1 THEN PRINT : PRINT “THE MATCHES FLARE UP AND MELT THE ICECUBES AND OUT FALLS A CHEAP INDUSTRIAL GRADE DIAMOND. NOT MUCH, BUT ENOUGH TO WIN.”: PRINT : GOTO 4100
I would much prefer to teach good game design at the same time as teaching the programming, but I suppose the author felt it was appropriate here to noodle around with fake-outs, especially given the number that appear in the next game.
The “adventure” part is so barren I can understand why this game was left off the Apple II disk. It really is just a demonstration.
The Labyrinth of the Minotaur
For the November article, Ken Rose feels obliged to teach us about mazes. Could we skip teaching the masses that one, please?
Ever since Adventure, it has been almost a requirement that an adventure game contain a maze. Perhaps the neatest among the current ones is the maze in Zork I, because of its complexity and the necessity of exploring it thoroughly.
I assure you it is not “almost a requirement”, especially given the author’s own Palace in Thunderland did not have a maze! To be fair I think the percentage of adventures with mazes has been roughly 80%, not counting “confusing geography” as a maze, and some of that no-maze percentage comes from multi-title authors like Scott Adams and Peter Kirsch who shook off the need to have a maze in all their games.
I can say of all the games, it is the only one that felt “substantial”; it took about an hour to map out.
The game gives only five gems to map 20 rooms. You can do the “relay” method to an extent (take the red gem you used in the room 1 and transfer it to room 6) but that only works if some of the exits don’t warp you back a significant way, and you might notice a room two away from the exit room goes nearly back to the start.
In addition to that annoyance, the game includes death rooms next to signs.
Worse than a death, this is a softlock. You have to test out N/S/E/W to realize they all loop after here and your game is over.
Another sign tells you “Don’t go west” and the exits of east, south, and west all kill you. (That is, both following the sign and following its opposite by going east are both deaths.)
You’ll finally hit a sign that says ABSOLUTELY DON’T GO NORTH and that’s when you finally do want to go north, escape, and reach the twist ending.
I’m not sure why being cooked by the minotaur earlier made sense, then.
The maze is a “cheap” way to extend game time. It forces the player to slow down and map and requires almost no design thinking on part of the author. And I guess people were still having … fun with it? At least I appreciated the moments of cruelty mixing things up, even if I only muscled through by using save states on my emulator.
Postnote
The author indicates the development so far has been systematic…
Those of you who have been following this series of articles can probably see how we have been using various routines to build up from very primitive programs to some level of sophistication. If you entered the game late and are feeling a bit bemused by all this, pick up earlier issues of Softline and you’ll be able to see why these things work as they do.
…and I’m not quite so sure, given it isn’t using the exact same structure every time. For example, in Minotaur the maze data is all saved together as one data file, and only uses N/S/E/W:
10010 DATA 2,7,1,1,1,7,3,2,3,8,3,3,3,4,5,4,5,5,5,5,21,
16,16,16,1,1,7,7,4,8,8,9,4,9,10,8,5,15,15,15,7,16,11,11,
17,7,12,12,8,13,13,12,9,19,14,14,15,15,14,15,11,16,16,
6,12,17,17,11,13,18,18,18,18,20,20,20,20,20,20,20
while Diamond splits things up, and includes UP/DOWN directions.
10020 DATA 3,1,0,0,0,0, “LONG SHADY ROAD”
10030 DATA 5,2,0,0,0,0, “BOTTOM OF HILL”
10040 DATA 0,0,5,0,0,0, “DUSTY GARAGE”
10050 DATA 8,2,6,4,0,0, “OPEN FRONT DOOR”
10060 DATA 0,0,0,5,0,0, “OVERGROWN GARDEN”
Any of the source code could be helpful for a budding adventure writer, just if I was building the series I would have tried to build up the source code so later months always duplicated prior months precisely. We saw something approaching this systematic approach with Basement and Beasties. At least the line numbers essentially match in terms of section organization. For example, moving around in Minotaur starts at 1410:
1410 IF VIS = “NORTH” THEN R = N(R)
1420 IF VIS = “SOUTH” THEN R = S(R)
1430 IF VIS = “EAST” THEN R = E(R)
1440 IF VIS = “WEST” THEN R = W(R)
and it does as well in Diamond, just the logic has sightly different structure:
1410 R1 = R
1420 IF VIS = “NORTH” AND N(R) > 0 THEN R = N(R)
1430 IF VIS = “SOUTH” AND S(R) > 0 THEN R = S(R)
1440 IF V1$ = “EAST” AND E(R) > 0 THEN R = E(R)
1450 IF V1$ = “WEST” AND W(R) > 0 THEN R = W(R)
1460 IF V1$ = “UP” AND U(R) > 0 THEN R = U(R)
1470 IF VIS = “DOWN” AND D(R) > 0 THEN R = D(R
I can’t claim this is arbitrary as teaching material, then, although I’m most curious where things eventually lead, as there are three more months to go in 1983. Will there be a “culmination” adventure including all the previous learnings, or will the series just fade out?
Renga in Blue 