Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Aardvark is a company I’d never heard of before starting the project, but we’ve spent an awful lot of time with now. They originally wrote their games targeted at the ludicrously small-memory requirements of the Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P computer, and made some odd parser sacrifices to get there (like only understanding the first two letters of each word). Despite this they’ve been rather clever in terms of geography, with (for example) Bob Anderson’s Circle World having a fair number of locations only reachable by teleport, but having all areas united together by the end. Earthquake, the game we most recently looked at, had an almost completely wide-open map, but led to puzzles where the thought process sometimes went “what store would have a solution to this” and not simply thinking about items.

Via Worthpoint.

Derelict is another Bob Anderson game from 1982, where he is again listed as co-author with Rodger Olson (founder of Aardvark). I’d be cautious about saying this was an equal collaboration; quoting Bob Retelle (of Trek Adventure):

Credits often resulted from “Hey why don’t you write an adventure based on xxxx” and it became “By Rodger Olsen and (whoever)”. At least I got paid (sometimes).

(Regarding getting paid, Retelle points out how ports were considered “owned by the company” so the original author did not make money off them. In one case a store told him about how the TI-99 port of his RPG Quest II was popular, except this was the first he even heard of a TI-99 port existing. Also, there is no Quest I and calling it II was a marketing stunt.)

Our goal is to raid a 1000-year old alien vessel for treasures. This is kind of like Queen of Phobos if we were one of the thieves. The catalog says it is “the new winner in the ‘Toughest Adventure at Aardvark sweepstakes'” and notes there are “no irrational traps and suddenly senseless deaths”.

This ship was designed to be perfectly safe for its builders. It just happens to be deadly to alien invaders like you!

This description made me hesitant. Earthquake was genuinely good (almost recommendable) but still had the miserable Aardvark parser. Any game designed as “easy” can get away with a less robust parser, not just because the player will have less moments of stuck-ness in order to test the boundaries, but because easy games tend to ask the player to communicate fairly straightforward actions.

The two versions of Derelict I’ve been able to find are for the Commodore PET and C64. I went with the Commodore PET this time. There’s a short series of messages about being pulled in a ship by an alien tractor beam, and then:

My first problem was just trying to pick anything up: GET BOOTS says “IT’S NOT IN SIGHT”. This is another instance of a parser’s try-not-to-reveal-too-much attitude is hurting, those boots are clearly right there! The default message is trying to avoid noun-hunting but it ends up leading to a bit of nonsense right at the start.

You’re instead supposed to TAKE MAGNETIC (or TA MA, this is a two letter parser) and you can do that for the other items. The sign indicates the treasures go in the room for points; yes, it’s one of those games. (Oddly enough, not common for Aardvark! They’ve been cranking out escape games, not Treasure Hunts.) Moving on with all three things (boots, spacesuit, oxygen):

Here is the usual airlock setup where you close one door to open the other one, go outside, and then:

I… what? Didn’t you say I was wearing the oxygen, game?

READ OXYGEN gives the message ATTACH/DETACH OXYGEN. Ok, fine, but it seems weird to make this essentially a puzzle. (And give the oxygen a response to reading! The magnetic boots give a blank message when you try to read them.)

Finally, through with that, I went outside again, did LOOK #1 DROID, and got the response

WHAT?

(EXAMINE doesn’t work at all, READ gives a blank prompt.)

Hmm, maybe try the booth instead? LOOK BOOTH:

THAT’S NOT HERE

Oh that’s right, it needs the noun from the start, it needs to be called “glass” instead. LOOK GLASS:

THAT’S NOT HERE

Game. Excuse me. You literally have the text “THERE IS A GLASS BOOTH HERE”.

Ye flask indeed. I don’t remember having anywhere near this trouble with Earthquake, but keep in mind this game has already tried to having both items being worn and things attached, and I have no doubt there’s something weird and complicated going on in the landing bay, but I’m still unclear what that thing is. Maybe it is best to just move on and explore.

This one’s going to be a headache to map out, isn’t it? And likely buggy.

I remember discovering some of the bugs of other games in early testing (it was pretty common for Rodger to hand out tapes of new games before they were put in the catalog), but it was like pulling teeth to get him to fix any of them.

In “Mars Adventure” (or was it “Pyramid”.. hmm.. I forget exactly), there was a stairway with exits that didn’t line up with the next locations. That is, you’d exit to the East, say, and end up in a room with exits to the North and South. Going south would take you back to the first room (it should have said West). Made it really tough on people who liked to map the advanture. Rodger’s response was something like “tough”.

Another one let you eat the key that was absolutely essential for escaping (maybe that was the Pyramid bug). Again the answer was “well, then don’t eat the key”.

Let me get a bit farther and report back next time. Aardvark games always stayed in tight constraints so there’s no way this goes out long, but if the parser difficulties stay this could still require multiple parts.