A day has passed since the success of Adventure Quest and jubilation reigns in Valaii! At sunset yesterday the city was beseiged by a sea of orcs, with more arriving every hour, and it seemed that the defenders were doomed. But at sunrise, the watch looked out over an empty plain – the attackers had given up the assault when on the point of victory.
Initially, the only reaction was stunned amazement. But gradually a rumour began to spread: first whispered in quiet corners, lest the telling should make it untrue, but eventually shouted in every street…
“The Demon Lord is dead!!!”
Dungeon Adventure marks the third of a trilogy that the Austins (Pete, Mike, and Nick) of Level 9 produced in 1982 (previously: Colossal Adventure, Adventure Quest). It was originally (or at least as soon as marketing started on the second game) the Middle-Earth Trilogy but later had Middle Earth references ripped out. To be consistent with my prior playthroughs, I again am playing the non-Tolkien Atari version made with graphics.
I managed to get through Adventure Quest without hints, but to be honest it was a near thing. I have heard this game is harder. I’ll try my best.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
This continues directly from the previous game, during the celebrations of the Demon Lord’s defeat. It doesn’t seem to be the same character, though! You (not being as heroic as Prior Protaganist) realize the Demon Lord “must have been very rich” and decide to make a beeline for the Black Tower, when about “a mile from the tower itself” you are hit by a sleep spell.
Some time later you wake, cold and wet, on a mudbank below a bridge spanning a wide river. All of your weapons and magic are lost. It seems that you were robbed and then your body was thrown into the river but that, rather than drowning, you have survived long enough to be washed up on the shore.
You clamber soggily up onto the bridge and ponder over your fate. Can you take on the Dungeons of the Demon Lord unaided? It seems you have little choice, as this is where the adventure starts….
Ah, the Metroid reset! You know, where an experienced bounty hunter really ought to have a full armament of gear and all the special suits acquired from previous adventure, but due to early happenstance of the plot has nothing.
This reverts back to a “collect the treasures” plot, which is curious since most companies/people get it out of their system (so to speak) and move on, but we have had games like Ghost Town go back to basics. It does make things a bit more modern because, as the manual indicates, there was popular demand for a way to carry more items (the previous games had a max inventory of four) so there’s now more than one way to exceed that.
You start at the entrance of the suitably grim dungeon of the title, although the earlier BBC version has you in a slightly different position, down from here.
I’m not sure what the deal with the driftwood is yet (described as “resinous” in inventory). The “huge” packing case is large enough to enter.
You can go in yet further and find a “store room” where the treasures go.
The button “scans your body”. I’m not sure yet past that.
Checking out the rest of the layout of the outside, there’s:
a.) Two sleeping giants where you can climb a tree next them. Grab a nearby berry and throw it, and they’ll get mad at each other and run off.
b.) Past that puzzle (the only one I’ve solved) there’s a belt and the berry you just tossed. The belt makes you stronger and that four-item inventory limit is already increased. (I think the “portable treasure room” is the other way the manual was talking about of having more lugging capacity.)
c.) Other oddities include a part of the forest where you get hit by a sleep spell and wake up back at the mud bank; a large bird in an “untidy nest”; an impressive tower that seems to be impossible to refer to; a “seed pod” by some poppies that makes lots of noise when you drop it; a “circle of distorted monoliths”.
I don’t understand how and why I got this scene. I experimented later and it never came up, even after waiting a long time and repeating the same actions.
d.) There’s a siren that kills you. SWIM is not one of the verbs in the game. Oops.
That’s it for outside, for now. If enough time passes the sun eventually sets and a ghoul kills you, so there isn’t unlimited time to hang out without a light source.
Speaking of light sources–
This is as far as I’ve gotten popping into the ugly orc mouth before hitting darkness. Right before the darkness is a jeweled crucifix (counts as a treasure, but might also count to fend off a vampire or some such) and a miner’s hat with a lamp (which has “neither fuel nor wick”, also counts as a treasure).
The only other place worth mentioning is a trap, but at least it is an obvious one.
It’d be fun if the treasures were accessible right away, but you still need more treasures, since our goal is to catch them all.
(a.) I only had a “simulator” and not an “emulator” and it doesn’t handle memory like the original PC-1 (or the equivalent Sharp 1211)
and
(b.) Jim Gerrie had a port but it seemed to be buggy.
Unfortunately, as of this writing nobody has dumped the BIOS for a PC-1 or 1211, so (a.) remains an issue, but Jim Gerrie has fixed his code, and the issue it had is fascinating and reflects on the raw ingenuity of early 80s programmers.
Before getting into that (and how the fixed game plays) I wanted to mention a second article from Trace Issue #2, the same one that Des Cavernes was printed in. There’s a page-long introduction to Crowther/Woods Adventure that gives a good window into the French knowledge of adventures circa April 1982.
A comic that goes with the article. The computer is saying “you are alone in a dark room… what should you do??”, with the responses “Oh… lighting…” and “don’t forget it”.
The article announces that the “famous” game Adventure, originally in FORTRAN for a PDP-10 can now run on a TRS-80. (This is referring to Microsoft Adventure, based on the version Gordon Letwin originally wrote for Heathkit.) It is “enough to entertain you for long hours, but in English”. I am not clear if the author was aware of Bilingual Adventure; probably not given it was written for the CP/M operating system.
The article goes on to say…
La disquette “adventure” inaugure un nouveau type de jeu où le participant tient un rôle et vit des aventures dont le déroulement est fonction de ses actes. Aux Etats-Unis, on achète une “disquette” d’aventures comme nous achèterions un “livre” d’aventures. Les auteurs ne sont plus Stevenson ou Conan Doyle mais Scott Adams et Microsoft … C’est le progrès !
…translating as:
“Adventure” inaugurates a new type of game in which the participant takes on a role and experiences adventures that unfold according to their actions. In the US, we buy an adventure “disk” like we would buy an adventure “book”. The authors are no longer Stevenson or Conan Doyle but Scott Adams and Microsoft … it’s progress!
Then, the publication’s “14 year old tester” named Stéphane (who “perfected his English with this game”) gives some “tips and tricks” for tackling Adventure. One section is on “Phrases magiques, passages secrets, objects énigmatiques” and mentions the magic words XYZZY and LWPI. (LWPI is specifically from Microsoft Adventure, and transports the player to a Software Den that’s only in that version and spinoffs. I really should write about it as a standalone article someday, although the differences are really quite minor.)
So while Folibus had technically just come out in a different publication, it was for an entirely different system and it isn’t like awareness of what an adventure even was would spread out immediately, and Adventure in particular was being played in English, not French, despite the technical existence of one translation.
This means that while Crowther/Woods Adventure was “famous”, Des Cavernes would be for some readers the first real encounter with anything like an adventure game.
Now, I’m hedging with “like” an adventure game because even with fixes in, Les Cavernes is a bit unusual, as it is an adventure-roguelike with everything randomly generated. Other than some language fixes, the big issue Jim Gerrie ran into with his port was with the quasi-random number generator itself.
In a technical sense, there is no such things as a random number generated by a regular computer chip. (It’s possible to hook up radio receivers to use atmospheric noise like the website random.org does, or use some related manner of gizmo; I’m meaning normal traditional computer chips.) The best they can do is apply a mathematical algorithm which provides a sequence which gives the appearance of randomness, and this can sometimes go awry. Usually this randomness gets kicked off by a “seed” of some sort, perhaps taken from the system clock (concatenate hours, minutes, and seconds, for instance, into one number) but it can be given explicitly, as Des Cavernes does.
10 “A”:INPUT “NO.=”;D,”L=”;F : F=4*F
In order to then turn this into something appearing “random”, the original game uses the SIN (sine) function. Quoting from Jim Gerrie:
In the end I realized the problem was also a result of a slightly lower level of mathematical accuracy between the MC-10 and Pocket PC. The game relies heavily on the mathematical accuracy of the Pocket PC and its BASIC. Simply put, it needs 10 decimal digits to come out of SIN, whereas the MC-10 could only give 9. That is because the decimal is multiplied by 100 to give two hole number digits, which are used for combat calculations, plus 8 decimal numbers, which are used to store maze node information for 4 directions of moves. The Pocket PC apparently could give you a number like
90.12345678
Whereas the MC-10 can only give you
90.1234567
The 8 decimal number give 4 groups of 2 numbers which store the node information for the four directions of movement. If the first digit is 4 – 9 then you can go in that direction. If the second digit is odd and there is a monster present, then you will be blocked. If you defeat the monster then you will be allowed to move to a new room by adding one to that digit to make it an even number and then a new SIN number will be generated based on the current number. Since I was missing an 8th decimal digit I made it so that it is simply replaced by a zero.
In other words, using 90.12345678 as an example, it was supposed to give the “random” two digit numbers of
12, 34, 56, 78
but instead was giving
12, 34, 56, 70
due to the pocket computer having one more digit of precision than the desktop computer, and since individual digits matter in terms of generating the rooms, always delivering a 0 was causing an issue.
This put together with other fixes create something resembling a game, although I did find I could still run into a “trap seed”, with a no-win scenario. For example, seed 1111, any difficulty:
Here’s the complete map of the level:
There are 10 rings scattered around (some may start in your inventory). If you have the appropriate ring, you can kill a particular monster. In the seed above, I only had RING #1, which apparently is no good with dragons. (KILL DRAGON just has a response of NO!, or if you prefer the French, NON!)
After mucking about with multiple failures, I found a better seed: 2321234. This starts you with rings 1 and 10, so there are technically 8 more rings to find. I played at difficulty 1 (the choices are 0 through 5); higher difficulties add more monsters so are more opportunities to get stopped.
This comes out to be a mess, but at least it is manageable with some persistence. The important thing is not to treat this like a game of Solitaire where you get one shot at a seed. There are far too many dead-end spots like the dragon room I showed earlier, or long dead-end loops (which I’ll show off in a second). No, what makes this playable (once you find a seed that works) is to keep returning to that same seed and add to the map you made last time.
For the map above (not complete) I “died” around 10 times hitting various impossible spots. The thing to keep in mind is that monsters generally don’t have to be killed (although killing one will get a point), and will only block some of the exits (or maybe even none of them).
Monsters will respawn when you re-enter a room. It may seem at first there is no such thing as re-entering a room — nearly everything is a one-way exit, and the two-ways exits I found I think were by luck only — but the map does create “loops” that will eventually return to sections. This is both good and bad; good in that there is some sort of continuity that makes it feel not like I’m just plotting the output of a spreadsheet, but bad in that the impossible loops I alluded to can happen.
Here I have marked out in yellow one such loop. If you enter into the loop without any way of killing the monsters within (vampire and dragon) you are stuck in a softlock with no way out and need to reset. This is very discouraging if you try a new seed each time, but it feels a little like a “discovery” when repeating multiple attempts on the same seed.
It turns out that this seed does have Ring #6 in a reachable spot, and that ring kills vampires (helpfully — and almost certainly by coincidence — there was a vampire in the same room as the ring so I could test it).
Since monsters respawn and each kill gets you a point, you can technically get an infinite score if you can find a loop that brings you by a monster you are able to kill. I found a perfect such spot, as either ring 1 or 10 (I have no way of knowing which) works on wizards.
Yes, that’s a two-way exit. This seems to be complete coincidence, although I do think the map-making algorithm (which I still don’t fully understand) does have “regions” where it is more likely to loop to a room that’s close than a room that’s far. I might be wrong about that guess, though. Since there are two killable monsters in adjacent rooms, it is possible to get any score at all desired by just hopping back and forth and using the KILL command over and over.
I confess I did not persist to try to get absolutely every ring, but in the end this is only adventure-adjacent; this is more of a strategy game like Wumpus which generates a layout you have to reckon with, and what you reckon with just might be impossible, but there’s nothing more complex than mapping going on (and keeping track of if you’re repeating a room you’ve already visited).
Still, I’m glad I got to play this, as it makes for another terrific example in the roguelike-adventure stash (they all take radically different approaches to how they generate their maps; probably the game most comparable to this one is The 6 Keys of Tangrin) and I got to boggle a bit over the sheer technical achievement: remember, this was on a pocket computer. I could see myself playing this more if the PC-1 was the only computer I had, and it was the only way to get at those new famous “adventures” and experience the “objects énigmatiques” within.
Also, despite the room names being generative off a list of descriptors, some of them briefly felt like real locations. Here, I’ve entered a teenager’s bedroom.
Dykema was in college, aged 21, when he started selling subscriptions from his parents’ basement. Tom notes that he “hired a programming genius down the road” to help with producing content, and he wrote about “four programs a week”. The circumstances mean today’s game (Killer Mansion, on Coco-Cassette #1) may have been from Tom or it may have been from the unnamed programmer or a combination of the two; I haven’t been able to tell.
It is not, as the name might suggest, a horror-themed game set inside an abandoned house featuring supernatural creatures. It is, instead, a horror-themed game set inside an abandoned house featuring “an insane man” who is a killer. Note the difference!
We are a detective who has chased the killer to a house and must go inside, and I’m unclear why we can’t call for backup other than it’s the 80s and this sort of thing happened all the time.
The only goals here are to a.) deal with the killer without getting killed first and b.) find the money that was stolen.
As this is a single game on a multi-game tapemag it is not terribly complicated, especially if you realize one of the main gimmicks. There’s various items where it seems you might want to open them (a desk, trap door, dresser, chest) but the command OPEN will always kill you, even if applied to something that it doesn’t make sense to open.
It says “door” even if you try this on a desk, or a rat.
With that out of the way it is a little more plausible to make progress. There are what are allegedly clues scattered about, but they aren’t important to bother with.
In one room (“Coal Storage” on my map) the killer gets to you and the game informs you that you need to have taken the killer down first before entering that particular room.
Another nearby room (Hiding Room, where you can see a “silver key” before things start up) a fight sequence begins and then the game prompts you for an item to use.
There’s also a “maneating watchdog” who will also start to get testy unless you have the right item; fortunately, there’s a bone not far by it will take. After it will be “friendly”.
Then there is a control panel with three colors of lever, red, blue and yellow. All drop you in a trapdoor. Red kills you, yellow drops you on a bed in a nearby “Guest Room”, and yellow, the helpful one, plops you in a “dungeon”.
To the east of here is a skeleton where using MOVE on the skeleton reveals it is holding a knife. (Really, the only hard part of this game is communicating. Using the levers also takes MOVE, PULL and PUSH aren’t recognized.) To the north there’s an ice pick and a locked door, and of course trying to open the door kills you, but somehow doing USE PICK is a perfectly safe way to handle explosive materials and you get through.
Then you can use the knife to win the fight against the killer.
With the killer dead, you can safely go into Coal Storage, where a paper says “X marks the spot” and there’s a piece of dirt floor. Take the shovel nearby over to the floor, USE SHOVEL, and then USE KEY when a chest is revealed.
This is best compared to a game like Space Gorn; not meant to be a long experience, just a short vignette to fill another slot on a monthly tape. It has about as minimal a parser can be while still working.
The term that comes to mind is “fake facade”. Each room, if you peruse the map, has a couple elements to allegedly interact with, and for a while I was fooled into trying each item checking for deathtraps (I even used skull emojis at first to note each one down). So it gave the impression of a little bit of depth, even if the kind that’s trial-and-error death, but once I realized the gimmick, things came down to figuring out how to implement the parser commands successfully.
But hey, at least it took me 10 minutes to map out rather than 3 hours! (The compass rose helped.) I needed this kind of breather. Especially because, coming up: the final 1982 game of Level 9, which will likely be hard to map and come with at least one maze. Although I’ve got an update to do first on that French game for pocket computer.
The copyright date on this game is 1981 although it may not have been published until 1982 (when it first shows up in the Dynacomp catalog). This is the year of the first Cannonball Run movie, sort of like the Gumball Rally movie but even sillier.
When I left off, I was enormously stuck on either crossing a collapsing bridge or getting by a locked gate. As I guessed, the bridge was just a trap, and the gate was the way to go. What I did not guess is that the locked gate would open more or less by magic.
This was down where there was a volcano erupting and lots of ash. You could PLAY RADIO (as hinted at by a sign nearby) to hear an update on the volcano:
THANKS FOR TUNING KXXX
AND NOW FOR THE NEWS:
MOUNT SAINT TROY ERUPTED TODAY SPEWING ASH AS FAR EAST AS AMIKAY
ROUTE 14 IS COVERED WITH UP TO FOUR FEET OF ASH IN PLACES
BE SURE TO CARRY A SHOVEL IF TRAVELING THAT WAY
MOTORISTS ARE CAUTIONED NOT TO GET TOO CLOSE TO THE VOLCANO
AS FURTHER ERUPTIONS ARE EXPECTED AT ANY TIME
THE NEAREST ACCESS ROAD IS COUNTY ROAD T8
HAVE A NICE TRIP
I had also found to approach further I needed to not be holding the shovel (“YOU ARE ON ROUTE 14 / A GREAT PILE OF ASH BLOCKS THE ROAD HERE”) and for some reason I was able to get by, which was clearly a bug, since holding the shovel means the player is stopped. Playing around with the bug some more I finally was able to SHOVEL ASH and get a message about clearing the ash away, and progress is possible.
Studying the radio message carefully, while I knew I had already checked every exit from every room in the volcano area, I wondered if I had checked any of them before listening to the radio, with the idea that hearing about “COUNTRY ROAD T8” might be the trigger to find such a road in the first place. I tested every exit and while I was at it tested the locked gate, and…
YOU ARE ON COUNTY FIRE ROAD T8
T8 LEADS INTO THE HILLS TO THE WEST
TO THE NORTHWEST IS MOUNT ST. TROY
SMOKE AND ASH POURS FROM THE MOUTH OF THE VOLCANO
THERE IS A LOUD POP! YOU HAVE A FLAT TIRE!
…what? Somehow the radio (plus the shoveling, I think?) was enough to trigger the door being open, which makes no sense at all. I’ve certainly had games with secret passages not revealed until you have the relevant info (as I had been testing here) but I’ve never had that be what triggers a lock to open.
Ugh. My first time through here, I didn’t have the spare tire replacement and had to re-do my steps so I had one before going through the tire-blowing. It happens both east-bound and west-bound so once through you can’t go back the same way.
Next is just a small maze-area of intersections, including a picnic table with a transit coupon you need to get through a toll gate later.
Also, if you like death scenes, there’s a volcano if you go the wrong way.
YOU ARE AT THE BASE OF THE VOLCANO
PLUMES OF SMOKE AND ASH RISE INTO THE AIR ABOVE YOU SUDDENLY, THE VOLCANO ERUPTS! PYROCLASTIC FLOWS POUR OVER THE RIM OF THE CRATER. GREAT BLACK CLOUDS OF ASH AND SMOKE COVER THE AREA. YOU ARE CHOKING! THE TEMPERATURE RISES TO 800 DEGREES. YOU ARE PAR-BROILED.TOO BAD
BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME!
Heading past the maze north runs you into “T5 WESTBOUND THROUGH A FOREST” where going west results in “A LOG BLOCKS YOUR WAY”. Fortunately, I had a chainsaw at the ready (my very first item picked up in the game) and did SAW LOG.
The road then turns south to an ENDLESS TUNNEL and this is a sort of gag to the player who might be wondering “did the code turns this into an infinite loop so it really is endless?
YOU ARE ON THE COAST ROAD
THERE IS A TUNNEL AHEAD TO THE SOUTH
A SIGN READS: ENDLESS TUNNEL
>S
YOU ARE IN THE ENDLESS TUNNEL
>S
YOU ARE IN THE ENDLESS TUNNEL
>S
YOU ARE IN THE ENDLESS TUNNEL
>S
YOU ARE IN THE ENDLESS TUNNEL
>S
It is not literally endless and you end up in the small town of Endless on the other side. The only things to do in Endless are take a toll road east back to Bordertown (using the coupon from the picnic table) or take a ferry ride over to the next town.
You may be thinking, “didn’t we use our ferry ticket already to get at the gas station card and be able to fuel up the car?” You’d be absolutely right. Fortunately, in the throes of being stuck on other things, I combed back over the original towns and found that if you use the ferry ticket up, it (“another one” I mean) magically re-appears back at the dump where it first appears.
YOU ARE AT THE ENDLESS FERRY
A BOAT IS WAITING TO LOAD
HAVE YOUR TICKET READY
>W
YOU ARE ON THE FERRY TO GOLD ISLAND
THE SEA IS ROUGH AND YOU ARE SEASICK
THE FERRY FINALLY DOCKS ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE ISLAND
TO THE NORTH CAN BE SEEN A SMALL TOWN
The town of Yellowbar is large, annoying to map out, and a lot of it consists of recently built homes on “Simba Estates”. To be fair this describes my experience sometimes in navigating such communities. Would it kill them to use a grid?
>NW
YOU ARE ON GOLDEN DRIVE
THERE IS A CAR PARKED HERE
A SIGN TO THE NORTH READS:
SIMBA ESTATES
>N
YOU ARE AT THE INTERSECTION OF GOLDEN DRIVE AND ANDERSON
THERE ARE MANY NEW HOMES HERE
>W
YOU ARE AT THE CORNER OF MARCUS AND ANDERSON
>N
YOU ARE AT THE INTERSECTION OF MARCUS AND BARBER
With the “CAR PARKED HERE” I should put up a reminder we’ve been chasing the directions of a poem.
STAY ON THE ROAD OF THE GOLDEN BAR
‘TILL YOU FIND THE PLACE WITH THE PARKED CAR
FOLLOW THE LION ‘TILL YOU FIND THE SCHOOL
I guess Uncle Marcus is highly confident the parked car is just going to stay there forever. In a planned community? Maybe it’s one of the slacker Home Owner Associations. (To be fair, we’re in Imaginary Country Gamma, not the real United States or Canada or whatever.)
I spent a while searching for a “lion” and the general feel was oddly like a real road rally scavenger hunt as I went through the variety of road names (Jones, Miller, Johnson, Adams, Jackson, Barber, Anderson, Murphy, Thorp, Lomac, Todd, Owens…) searching for a potential pun, but no luck. However, I hadn’t tried messing around with the railroad tracks yet.
There are a couple points where there’s a railroad crossing, and trying to go along the railroad says you can’t go in a car. You have to disembark here and walk. Going in a tunnel collects another death.
OK, YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR CAR
>E
YOU ARE ON A W-E SET OF TRACKS
THERE IS A MOUNTAIN TO THE SOUTH
>E
YOU ARE ON THE TRACKS
THERE IS A TUNNEL ENTRANCE TO THE EAST
>E
YOU ARE IN A RAILROAD TUNNEL
IT IS VERY DARK BUT TO THE NORTH
YOU CAN SEE A LIGHT. IT IS GETTING CLOSER AND CLOSER. IT IS A TRAIN!!
YOU ARE RUN OVER. TOUGH LUCK!
However, one part of the tracks leads you to a “roaring” noise that surely is what was meant by the lion.
YOU ARE ON THE TRACKS EAST OF TOWN
THE TRACKS SWING SE AND WEST HERE
>SE
YOU ARE ON THE TRACKS SOUTH OF A LARGE MOUNTAIN
A SIDING TO THE NORTH PARALLELS THE TRACKS HERE
THERE IS A CABOOSE SETTING ON THE SIDING YOU CAN HERE A ROARING SOUND COMING FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CABOOSE
>N
YOU ARE AT THE EAST END OF THE CABOOSE
THERE IS A DOOR INTO THE CABOOSE HERE
THE ROARING SOUND IS LOUDER HERE
>W
YOU ARE IN THE CABOOSE
THERE IS A DOOR AT THE EAST END
THERE IS A SMALL CROWBAR LAYING HERE
The roaring is not a train about to run us over (as the game intentionally seems to indicate) but a waterfall.
YOU ARE ON THE EDGE OF A CLIFF
IN A CANYON BELOW TO THE NORTH IS A RAGING RIVER FILLED WITH ROCKS A HIGH WATERFALL TO THE NE POURS TONS OF WATER INTO THE RIVER
A BOILING CLOUD OF MIST RISES FROM THE BASE OF THE FALLS
THERE IS A TRAIL LEADING INTO THE CANYON TO THE NW
The trail leads to the penultimate section of the game.
A fork in a trail leads one way to Bradley Academy (abandoned) and the other way to a baseball field (also abandoned).
THE TRAIL HERE RUN N-S
TO THE EAST IS THE ROARING RIVER
TO THE WEST A HIGH CLIFF RISES 200 FEET
>N
YOU ARE AT A FORK IN THE TRAIL
THE NW FORK LEADS UP THE SIDE OF THE CLIFF
THE NE FORK CONTINUES ALONG THE WEST BANK OF THE RIVER
A SIGN TO THE NW READS: BRADLEY ACADEMY
A TRAIL LEADS SOUTH
>NW
YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE CLIFF
THERE IS AN OLD SCHOOLYARD HERE
THE SCHOOL BUILDING HAS BEEN TORN DOWN
SOME SCATTERED LUMBER LIES ABOUT HERE
TO THE WEST IS A LARGE BOULDER
TO THE EAST IS THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF
A FENCE BORDERS THE OTHER THREE SIDES OF THE YARD
Just a reminder of the last part of the poem:
FOLLOW THE LION ‘TILL YOU FIND THE SCHOOL
CLIMB ON UP AND SEE THE JEWEL
FROM THE TOP YOU CAN SEE REAL GOOD
THE THING YOU WANT’S BENEATH THE WOOD
TAKE THE THING THAT YOU’LL FIND THERE
THEN GO AND SEARCH; YOU’LL KNOW WHERE
“Climb on up” seems to refer to a fir tree that you can climb.
YOU ARE ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF A LARGE POOL
THE POOL IS A CALM BACKWATER OF THE RIVER
THE RIVER BENDS TO THE EAST HERE
THERE ARE MANY FISH IN THE POOL
A SIGN READS: NO FISHING
THE TRAIL TURNS WEST AROUND THE POOL AND TO THE SOUTH
>W
YOU ARE ON THE NORTH SIDE OF THE POOL
THERE IS A LARGE FIR TREE HERE
THE TRAIL LEADS TO THE EAST
AND WEST FROM HERE
>U
YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE TREE
YOU CAN SEE A BASEBALL FIELD TO THE NE
ON TOP OF THE CLIFF
THERE IS A TRAIL TO THE NE LEADING UP THE CLIFF
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL IS HIDDEN IN BUSHES
AT THE BASE OF THE CLIFF
Specifically, at right field in the baseball field, you can find a piece of wood and a boulder. At the SW corner of the Bradley Academy, you can also find a piece of wood (a “board”) and a boulder.
YOU ARE AT THE SW CORNER OF THE SCHOOLYARD
THERE IS A LARGE BOULDER HERE
THERE IS A SMALL BOARD LAYING ON THE GROUND HERE
However, despite the crowbar in hand, neither boulder wants to budge (with PULL or PUSH or MOVE) and there is nothing under either piece of wood.
For a time, I felt quite a nice vibe from the game here, as I started searching around both the baseball diamond and the school looking for some way of thinking of “BENEATH THE WOOD” in a less literal way, kind of like the lion. Since I had it mapped out the game felt briefly like a real scavenger hunt.
Unfortunately, yes, “briefly”, especially when I found out what was required. At least I had the right suspicion: home plate at the baseball field.
YOU ARE IN RIGHT FIELD
THERE IS A LARGE BOULDER HERE
THERE IS A PIECE OF WOOD LAYING ON THE GROUND HERE
>W
YOU ARE ON FIRST BASE
>W
YOU ARE AT THE SW END OF THE FIELD
THERE IS A WOODEN PLATE IN THE GROUND HERE
CHALK LINES LEAD TO FIRST AND THIRD BASE
Home plate is made out of wood! The other two pieces of wood were deceptions. This would be classy if the game did not then
a.) require guess the verb
b.) require guess the noun
c.) hard crash upon resolving both a.) and b.)
PUSH PLATE (“NOTHING HAPPENS!”), MOVE PLATE (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND MOVE PLATE”), and LIFT PLATE (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND LIFT PLATE”) don’t work. You also can’t take the item, either. No, the game is fishing for the exact verb and noun LIFT HOME (and yes, it seems like a moment before LIFT isn’t even an understood verb!)
>LIFT PLATE
I DON’T UNDERSTAND LIFT PLATE
>LIFT HOME
THERE IS AN ENVELOPE UNDER HOME
SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE 1730
READY
This could have been the best moment in the game — I really did puzzle the answer out carefully, and the boulder plus crowbar led to enough side-deception to make this work.
1730!V0$\P1=1\X(12)=L\\GOTO300
The double-slash at the end (before GOTO 300) is wrong. There should be only one. This is not the sort of error that would be done by disk corruption; I’m fairly sure this was an authentic author-typo, meaning nobody bothered to test the game to the end (and nobody complained because who would find LIFT HOME?)
Rather than fixing the code (before starting with the RUN command, type that 1730 line but with only one double-slash before GOTO 300) and going through everything again hoping it wouldn’t break, I changed the code to give me the envelope at the very start. The envelope has a ferry ticket (so you can go back across, you can then take the toll road to freeway-country) a latchkey, and a note.
THE NOTE READS: GO SEARCH MY HOUSE IN EASTPORT-WHERE YOU STARTED!
Weirdly, UNLOCK DOOR never works and always claims you don’t have a key, while you’re holding a key. You can just go WEST while at the locked front door with the key in hand, though.
Now we’re in a relatively normal house-searching game! No more driving.
YOU ARE IN THE MASTER BEDROOM
THERE IS AN LARGE OLD BED AND A
SMALL DRESSER HERE
A DOOR LEADS NORTH
>OPEN DRESSER
THERE IS A PAPER WITH NUMBERS ON IT IN THE DRESSER DRAWER
>GET PAPER
OK
>READ PAPER
THE SLIP OF PAPER READS: 22R-12L-45R-7L
In addition to the safe combo in a dresser, there’s a padlock key in a desk. This lets you tromp downstairs through a padlocked door into a storage room and the final challenge of the game: fiddling with the parser, yet again.
YOU ARE IN A STORAGE ROOM
THERE IS MUCH JUNK SETTING AROUND THE ROOM
THERE IS A FRAMED PICTURE OF UNCLE HARRY ON THE NORTH WALL
ON THE EAST WALL IS A LARGE MOOSE HEAD
THERE IS A DOOR TO THE WEST AND SOUTH
I was out of places to go and this came after the locked door and its picture, it ought to be hiding the safe, right? Still, it was infuriatingly hard to come up with the only verb that would work, SLIDE.
>SLIDE PICTURE
THE PICTURE SLIDES TO THE SIDE REVEALING A SAFE IN THE WALL
Fortunately, you do not then have to master a parser syntax for working out how to spin right 22 times etc.
>OPEN SAFE
AS YOU DIAL THE COMBINATION THE SAFE CLICKS OPEN
THERE IS A RUMBLING SOUND
A SECTION OF THE NORTH WALL SLIDES BACK
REVEALING A ROOM UNDER THE OUTSIDE STAIRS
>N
YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM UNDER
THE OUTSIDE STAIRWAY TO THE COAL SHUTE
THERE IS A LARGE CHEST HERE
THERE IS A DOOR TO THE SOUTH
>OPEN CHEST
THERE IS A STACK OF TWENTYS AND A LETTER IN THE CHEST
>GET LETTER
I DON’T UNDERSTAND GET LETTER
Sure, let’s give the parser one last quirk. No, just read:
READ LETTER
THE LETTER READS:
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE PERSERVERED TO THE END OF THE SEARCH! THE MONEY YOU HAVE FOUND IN MY CHEST WILL PAY YOUR WAY TO ENGLAND THERE, YOU’LL FIND YOUR NEXT ADVENTURE. SOMEWHERE IN WHEMBLY CASTLE LIES HIDDEN A HUGE TREASURE OF JEWELS AND GOLD. HIDDEN THERE BY YOUR GREAT, GREAT, GRANDFATHER ALMOST TWOHUNDRED YEARS AGO. MANY HAVE SEARCHED, BUT NO ONE HAS FOUND IT. WITH YOUR LOGIC AND INTELIGENCE I KNOW YOU WILL BE ABLE TO FIND IT! GOOD LUCK!
UNCLE HARRY
“LOGIC AND INTELIGENCE”, eh?
Thus the sequel (published with this game by Dynacomp) is now set up. However, I’m not sure how obvious it was from the size of the maps (and the moments of parser struggle, and the hard game crash): this took a lot of energy to play, so I’m going to kick the sequel (Whembly Castle) further down my 1982 list.
Some aspects had a unique aura. I’ve never seen an attempt (in computer game form) to capture the gimmick rally and while the riddle was not airtight it did give the experience a stronger feel than Just One Map Section After Another. The sheer amount of mapping went far too extreme but I can at least see conceptually what the author was going for. The noble failures of history can be just as useful to look at as the masterworks.
From the Japanese movie poster for Cannonball Run III (aka Speed Zone), via eBay. Cannonball Run (1981) and Cannonball Run II (1984) were followed by one last sequel to make a trilogy in 1989, where the racers all get arrested right before the event starts and the sponsors need to find new drivers.
I did finally get to grips with the monstrous map, and I even included the whole thing so far as a 4143 by 2839 image file, but first a few words on rallies vs. races, and the tradition of “gimmick rallies”.
There’s a very important difference between rallies and races which is best exemplified by the final leg of The Gumball Rally movie:
It looks like Franco’s team loses by just a few seconds (thanks partially due to a stop for Linda Vaughn). In reality, this is a rally, and the thing that counts is overall time. There was a time difference of 10 seconds at the start, meaning he actually won!
Rallies (needing to travel along real roads) are asynchronous and are scored by all sorts of things. I already alluded to the use of puzzles in “gimmick rallies”; they often track ability to navigate more than speed, which is why rallies tend are done in teams (one driver, one navigator). For a recent real life example, here’s a clip from a gimmick rally cued up to some directions being read:
This is all relevant to Uncle Harry’s Will because I think the poem that serves as instructions really does give the vibe of the slightly-corny directions you’d get in a gimmick rally. They were certainly around in 1981; Jean Calvin’s Rallying to Win (still available in an updated edition) was first published in 1974 and mentions different species like the photograph rally (where all directions are in the form of photographs of locations), the scavenger hunt, or what the book calls the “grand old man” of gimmick rallies, the poker rally:
The instructions call out route-following procedure, but ordinarily there is no tight time schedule. There will be an elapsed time for the entire run, and along the route either five or seven checkpoints. Instead of receiving a time at the control, each team draws a card from a standard deck of playing cards. At the finish, the team with the best poker hand is the winner.
Here’s the map I mentioned; click the image to view its high-resolution glory. Dark blue marks positions that hold items, showing how few objects there have been so far.
The freeway took an enormous amount of time to map but it was the kind of map where I wasn’t discovering new things but just figuring out what looped back to where, and then repositioning multiple times to have the map make a modicum of sense. It’s still incredibly messy.
There are two gas stations (marked in orange). It takes much longer to happen than with Gumball Rally Adventure but your car does eventually run out of gas, essentially the equivalent of the lamp in Adventure. It takes so long it no longer has the incessant simulationist feel of the previous game. However, while the gas station lets you buy GAS, OIL, and a TIRE (letting you get by that one road I mentioned last time) it initially tells you that you have no money.
I was able to find a way to get access to the gas station’s services which I’ll show off shortly. Note on the map the Border Crossing on the west side. Just a bit to the east there’s a Passport Office with a border pass you can use:
YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR CAR
YOU ARE IN THE PASSPORT OFFICE
HEAPS OF OLD PAPERS COVER THE COUNTER
THERE IS A BORDER PASS LAYING ON A COUNTER HERE
However, as you can see from the map, the border doesn’t really go anywhere! All you can find is a “BOTTLE OF COKE”, and if you try to take it with you it turns out to be the other kind of coke.
YOU HAVE BEEN CAUGHT WITH A BOTTLE OF COCAINE. YOU GO TO JAIL!
GEE WHIZ! JUST WHEN YOU WERE GETTING SOMEPLACE!
WELL, BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME. AT LEAST YOU’LL KNOW
BETTER THAN TO DO THAT AGAIN!
Turning over to that poem now, the first part of the poem seems to indicate the final destination:
BEHIND THE WALL, BELOW THE RISE,
IN THE ROOM MY TREASURE LIES
IN ALL DIRECTIONS YOU SHOULD DRIVE
TO FIND IT, YOU MUST STAY ALIVE
ON YOUR WAY ACROSS THE NATION
I think this might be the house right at the start; if you go around to the back there’s some stairs down and a second locked door. (“Below the rise”?)
YOU ARE ON THE WALKWAY AT THE BASE OF THE FRONT PORCH
STEPS LEAD WEST TO THE FRONT PORCH
ANOTHER WALKWAY LEADS NORTH AROUND THE SIDE OF THE HOUSE
>N
YOU ARE ON A WALKWAY AT THE NE CORNER OF THE HOUSE
THE WALKWAY CURVES WEST AND SOUTH HERE
THERE IS A WIRE FENCE ALONG THE BORDERS
>W
YOU ARE ON THE NORTH SIDE OF THE HOUSE
STEPS HERE LEAD DOWN TO THE BASEMENT
THE WALKWAY HERE LEADS EAST AND WEST
>D
YOU ARE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE STEPS
A SMALL DOOR IS SET INTO THE NORTH SIDE OF THE HOUSE HERE
THE DOOR IS LOCKED FROM THE INSIDE
The next part of the poem refers to a “station”, presumably a gas station, and says there is a “smoky hill” that will lead the way.
YOU’LL HAVE NEED TO FIND A STATION
THE SMOKEY HILL WILL LEAD THE WAY
I KNOW YOU’LL FIND IT, COME WHAT MAY
The hill in question is visible one of the western towns, Lakecity.
Specifically, at the ferry:
YOU ARE AT A FERRY DOCK
A FERRY IS HERE WAITING TO LOAD
ACROSS THE LAKE SMOKE CAN BE SEEN
RISING BEHIND SOME HILLS
>N
YOU ARE ON THE FERRY CROSSING A LONG LAKE
THE FERRY PULLS INTO A DOCK ON THE EAST SHORE
YOU CAN SEE SMOKE BEHIND SOME HILLS AHEAD
THE DOCK IS TO THE NORTH
This leads to a route which culminates in a “paper bag” by a road which has a card for free service at a gas station. Once you get the car you can BUY OIL, BUY GAS, and BUY TIRES while at one. I’m still puzzling over if the card is meant to be the goal of following the ferry directions, or if there’s something else entirely going on. (Or maybe even if the map is bugged. There’s one road where one part is inexplicably one-way such that I’m almost sure it was unintentional.)
If it wasn’t for the direction that makes your tires go flat, you could go to the paper bag in a much more direct way. It only affects the car going westbound, so if you go east you can land right back at the starting town.
I’m also still unclear about the next part of the poem:
FOLLOW THE SUN AT THE END OF DAY
TO GET ACROSS, YOU’LL FIND A WAY
STAY ON THE ROAD OF THE GOLDEN BAR
“Follow the sun at the end of day” surely means that we’re driving west, but there are only two places on the map where I have the opportunity to drive west and are unable to; everything else is mapped out. First, most straightforwardly, is a “RICKITY” bridge near the Passport Office that collapses. I suspect this is meant as a trap rather than a puzzle.
YOU ARE ON RICKITY ROAD
THERE IS A BRIDGE TO THE WEST
A SIGN READS: RICKITY BRIDGE
>W
YOU ARE ON A RICKITY BRIDGE
THE BRIDGE BEGINS TO SWAY AND ROCK
IT FALLS WITH A CRASH INTO THE RIVER
YOU ARE KILLED! TSK. TSK.
GEE WHIZ! JUST WHEN YOU WERE GETTING SOMEPLACE!
WELL, BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME. AT LEAST YOU’LL KNOW
BETTER THAN TO DO THAT AGAIN!
This even happens if you’re on foot! (By the way, the way the game treats walking on the street while out of your car is repeatedly saying IF YOU’RE GOING TO WALK, IT’LL TAKE FOREVER. If you walk over the spot on the map that pops your tire, the game will still claim the tire-popping happens, but you can walk back to the car and drive off like normal.)
The other more likely possibility for going west is back at the lake. If you drive southwest there’s a sign about tuning into the station KXXX, which is a hint that you should try to PLAY the RADIO:
THANKS FOR TUNING KXXX
AND NOW FOR THE NEWS:
MOUNT SAINT TROY ERUPTED TODAY SPEWING ASH AS FAR EAST AS AMIKAY
ROUTE 14 IS COVERED WITH UP TO FOUR FEET OF ASH IN PLACES
BE SURE TO CARRY A SHOVEL IF TRAVELING THAT WAY
MOTORISTS ARE CAUTIONED NOT TO GET TOO CLOSE TO THE VOLCANO
AS FURTHER ERUPTIONS ARE EXPECTED AT ANY TIME
THE NEAREST ACCESS ROAD IS COUNTY ROAD T8
HAVE A NICE TRIP
Just a bit further, a “great pile of ash” is blocking the way.
YOU ARE ON ROUTE 14
A GREAT PILE OF ASH BLOCKS THE ROAD HERE
However, weirdly enough, if you have the shovel with you, the way is blocked (“YOU CAN’T DO THAT”). The way to get through is to not have the shovel. This is 100% clearly a bug; the author must have swapped a logic statement somewhere. (Or there was a very slight corruption of the file which did the same thing, that has happened here before.)
YOU ARE ON ROUTE 14 A N-S ROAD
A DIRT SIDE ROAD LEADS EAST
>S
YOU ARE AT THE MAIN INTERSECTION IN THE
TOWN OF AMIKAY. MOST OF THE TOWN IS COVERED
WITH A FINE WHITE ASH
Going west you are blocked by a “locked gate” and … that’s it. I’m stuck from here. The map is big enough I’m sure it might be worthwhile to check over everything again, but the shovel bug in particular has lowered my confidence significantly and I might poke in the source code before too long.
Uncle Harry has died! You are called to his house on the east coast of the country to hear the will. The will leaves everything to you! The only problem is that he failed to tell where “everything” is located. Not even a map! The only thing that might help is a poem which gives clues on where to look.
In 1975, Art Walsh and Fred Ruckdeschel were both working at Xerox in the area of Rochester, New York. Fred was Art’s supervisor. In 1975, Ruckdeschel had just bought an Altair:
… it only came in kit form, cost $495, I think. And you you got a a box full of components in a in a shell which look like a big bread basket. And, he put one together.
He said this is neat. And, so that we could use it in our laboratories and have our machines directly input their output, into a computer and do all sorts of image analysis on it. Which we were able to do. And he, he tried getting me interested in the computers, and I’m used to working on mainframes, but, and it was also cheap.
Both Fred and Art got further into computers, writing articles for Byte magazine.
Ruckdeschel’s articles were fairly technical and eventually he wrote a two-part book of over 1000 pages on mathematical algorithms in BASIC. From November 1978 Byte.
Art had a lull between assignments where he programmed his computer to play bridge, and around the same time Fred had made an oil tanker simulator. Ruckdeschel had the notion that they since the pair had two programs already, and they could produce a few more and a start a new company together.
We formed a company, and it was one of the first software companies [1978], and the name is Dynacomp. And we ran ads in Byte Magazine … we started getting an order here and there for our software.
This was all while they were still at Xerox. The pair eventually had a personality conflict and by 1981 decided to split their company (and catalog) in two, with Art going one way with the company Artworx, and Ruckdeschel keeping under the Dynacomp name. (Some titles were kept in both, which is why both had a version of Cranston Manor Adventure.) For our purposes today, Dynacomp is more our target of interest, because Fred Ruckdeschel had a North Star Horizon at home and it was one of his favored computers, meaning his company kept the North Star part of the catalog.
Dynacomp incidentally lasted a bit longer than many other mail-order kings; they got up at least to the early 90s. Artworx had similar longevity, but at least I can explain theirs: their Bridge game was an evergreen product. With Dynacomp, I’m not entirely sure why they lasted so long. It may have been they didn’t focus entirely on the “hip” computers (like Apple and Commodore) but rather went for unusual niches, most with some variant of the CP/M operating system. In addition to their large collection — really the only large collection — for the North Star Horizon, later catalogues list support for:
Osborne, North Star CP/M, SuperBrain, NEC PC 8000 CP/M, KAYPRO II MORROW DESIGNS, HEATH ZENITH Z-100, HEATH ZENITH H-89 8″, CROMEMCO, ALTOS, XEROX 820, IBM PC/PC Jr., SANYO (with MS DOS), PANASONIC, COMPAQ Z or BA, CANON AS-100, DEC RAINBOW 100 (with MS DOS), and other CP/M IBM 3740 systems.
SuperBrain, now that’s a oddball computer. I found a Usenet thread from ’88 with someone trying to locate a commercial C compiler for CP/M and getting a recommendation for Dynacomp (a company that “no one has heard of”).
The SuperBrain came out in 1979. Check out that 70s design aesthetic! From Wikipedia.
The North Star Horizon has only come up here recently due to the discovery of a new cache of software thanks to f15sim, essentially a gigantic chunk of the Dynacomp catalog (given there are disks supposedly still left to upload, maybe the entire Dynacomp catalog). I wanted to try out three games from I hadn’t heard of before: Gumball Rally Adventure, Uncle Harry’s Will, and Windmere Estate, all (probably) by R.L. Turner. They’d been out there in the Dynacomp catalog already (see the Winter ’82 one here) but uncatalogued on Mobygames and elsewhere; the North Star just never has gotten much attention.
I unfortunately have not dredged up any details on R. L. Turner other than he seems to have been a car enthusiast, as his first game in the Dynacomp catalog (probably) is Gumball Rally Adventure. The (probably) is because it is listed as copyright 1980 from Novel Software, but there’s a Turner Motel, and the theming matches quite strongly with Uncle Harry which we’re about to get to, and they’re right next to each other in the catalogue, so–
YOU ARE IN GOOFY’S GARAGE ON THE EAST SIDE OF BIGTOWN. THERE ARE FIVE CARS PARKED HERE. YOU MAY CHOOSE ANY ONE TO DRIVE. EACH CAR HAS BEEN PREPARED FOR RACING AND IS GASSED UP READY TO GO. ALL FIVE CARS HAVE A SPARE TIRE IN THE TRUNK. THERE IS AN EMPTY 1 GALLON CAN HERE. ALONG ONE WALL IS A GAS PUMP, AIR & WATER HOSES, GREASE GUNS, ETC. THE EXIT IS ON THE WEST SIDE OF THE BUILDING AND LEADS ONTO A NORTH-SOUTH STREET. WHICH CAR WILL YOU DRIVE?
This is essentially a simulation game in the vein of Camel, The Oregon Trail, etc. where you are trying to get from point A to point B. Except if you don’t have the map which presumably came with the game, it’s super easy to get to lost trying to get from one coast to the other.
This is based on the ’76 movie and some of the vehicle choices seem to match what’s on the show.
(The trailer references It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World from more than a decade before, which is a comedy where people were racing across the country to find a treasure hidden at the Big W. This movie was also part of the trend invoking the brief fame held by Cannonball Runs, getting from one coast to the other coast of the US as fast as possible, like Will Wright did in 1980.)
I have no doubt there’s an “optimal” vehicle choice (they allegedly have different gas consumption and handling) but I wasn’t interested enough in the proceedings to figure out.
The basic idea is:
1. Type START to start your engine, STOP to stop.
2. Type a number to change your speed.
3. If something is a “sharp” curve the car’s speed needs to be fairly low (25, sometimes lower) or the car will slide.
4. You’ll lose a shocking number of tires to flats, you need to CHANGE TIRE when it happens.
5. At various gas stations you can BUY GAS, BUY OIL, or BUY TIRE. Make sure you buy more than one spare because of the aforementioned flats.
6. There’s the occasional police radar speed trap.
7. There’s the occasional other special encounter, like a school bus and a hitchhiker (who will, according to the source code, steal your car if you try to stop, but I was never able to get her to trigger).
YOU STOP FOR THE BLONDE. SHE GETS IN AND PULLS A GUN. SHE TAKES ALL YOUR MONEY AND YOUR CAR. YOU LOSE!
8. There’s a bit where it “goes dark” and you are supposed to type LIGHTS ON. It’s a car, after all, not the middle of a dungeon.
9. I’m not entirely sure if the map is bug-free; I managed to get to one point where it “overlapped” a road in a way that didn’t make sense, and I checked every route going west and all of them dead-ended.
(Orange is a gas station, red is a tire blow-out spot, blue is police radar.)
Despite the very mild gesture to special encounters this is entirely “simulation” gameplay without anything resembling a puzzle. However, it does get at something I’ve wondered, which is the Route to Adventure Without Adventure; that is, if we didn’t have Crowther/Woods or Wander, and we somehow got to an Adventure archetype, by what route would it come? By adding a map a game like Camel gets close to feeling like an adventure, maybe? However, that’s not what happened here as the author is clearly aware of adventures and adds a response to PLUGH:
MAGIC WORDS DON’T WORK HERE
It was worth spending the time here because of Uncle Harry’s Will, which is clearly playing with the same idea, but dumps the speed/gas simulation aspect.
UNCLE HARRY HAS DIED! UNCLE HARRY HASN’T BEEN HEARD FROM IN A NUMBER OF YEARS. HE WAS PRETTY MUCH A RECLUSE AND DIDN’T HAVE MUCH CONTACT WITH THE FAMILY. IT WAS SAID THAT UNCLE HARRY WAS RICH AND HAD HIDDEN A LARGE TREASURE WORTH MILLIONS.
WHEN THE LAWYER CALLED, HE STATED THAT YOU ARE THE LONE BENIFICIARY. HE ASKED THAT YOU COME TO HARRY’S HOUSE FOR A READING OF THE WILL. THE WILL WAS QUITE SIMPLE. IT STATED THAT THE MONEY WAS YOURS IF YOU COULD FIND IT. THE ONLY CLUES TO THE LOCATION WERE IN THE FORM OF A POEM. NO OTHER CLUES! NOT EVEN A MAP. I GUESS YOU’LL HAVE TO MAKE A MAP AS YOU TRAVEL.
Looking at 1981, the only other “rich person dies with an eccentric will” game is Stoneville Manor; the rich person in that game wasn’t technically our relative! So this is arguably the first “claim your inheritance” adventure plot (eventually followed by games like Hollywood Hijinx and The Mulldoon Legacy and…. IFDB lists 14 games and I’m pretty sure it is missing a few).
BEHIND THE WALL, BELOW THE RISE,
IN THE ROOM MY TREASURE LIES
IN ALL DIRECTIONS YOU SHOULD DRIVE
TO FIND IT, YOU MUST STAY ALIVE
ON YOUR WAY ACROSS THE NATION
YOU’LL HAVE NEED TO FIND A STATION
THE SMOKEY HILL WILL LEAD THE WAY
I KNOW YOU’LL FIND IT, COME WHAT MAY
FOLLOW THE SUN AT THE END OF DAY
TO GET ACROSS, YOU’LL FIND A WAY
STAY ON THE ROAD OF THE GOLDEN BAR
‘TILL YOU FIND THE PLACE WITH THE PARKED CAR
FOLLOW THE LION ‘TILL YOU FIND THE SCHOOL
CLIMB ON UP AND SEE THE JEWEL
FROM THE TOP YOU CAN SEE REAL GOOD
THE THING YOU WANT’S BENEATH THE WOOD
TAKE THE THING THAT YOU’LL FIND THERE
THEN GO AND SEARCH; YOU’LL KNOW WHERE
The big difference here between this wacky uncle and his later variants as that this one is asking you to drive cross-country. It’s possible R. L. Turner (and the fictional uncle) are fans of road rallies with a puzzle element. These are road races where the racers need to follow instructions and there are puzzles embedded within.
Here’s an example of an easy gimmick: a misspelled street name. Let’s say that your current Route Instruction is “Turn right at Smith” when you come to Smyth Street. According to the General Instructions, the word “Smith” must appear on a sign where you do this Route Instruction, but the word “Smith” does not appear on the “Smyth St” sign.
I have no idea if Uncle Harry’s Will is really following this tradition (which includes straight puzzle hunts), because I still have yet to get that far. The map alone is a serious time investment; there are multiple connected towns and a freeway to map out, and finally one-way exits make sense. You spend most of the time in your car, although you can LEAVE CAR to enter locations on foot. The only adventure I’ve played that I can think of that’s remotely comparable is Amnesia (1986), which put in every intersection in Manhattan.
Rather like Amnesia, most locations in Uncle Harry’s Will are bare-bones. Amnesia doesn’t make the player map things out, but we have to. Driving onward!
YOU ARE ON MAIN ST. IN THE TOWN OF EASTPORT
MAIN RUNS NORTH-SOUTH
>N
YOU ARE AT THE INTERSECTION OF MAIN AND FIR
>E
YOU ARE AT THE INTERSECTION OF DOCK AND FIR
>N
YOU ARE AT THE CORNER OF DOCK AND PINE
>W
YOU ARE AT THE INTERSECTION OF MAIN AND PINE
>N
YOU ARE AT THE EASTPORT ZOO. THE ZOO IS CLOSED
Before driving away too far I should mention there’s a by-foot location right where you start in the town of Eastport: you can walk up to a house which is locked and the game asks for a key you don’t have.
>LEAVE CAR
OK, YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR CAR
>W
YOU ARE ON THE STEPS LEADING TO A WALKWAY UP TO THE FRONT PORCH THE WALKWAY HAS A WIRE FENCE ALONG BOTH SIDES HERE
TO THE WEST IS THE FRONT PORCH
>W
YOU ARE ON THE WALKWAY AT THE BASE OF THE FRONT PORCH STEPS LEAD WEST TO THE FRONT PORCH ANOTHER WALKWAY LEADS NORTH AROUND THE SIDE OF THE HOUSE
>W
YOU ARE ON THE FRONT PORCH THE FRONT DOOR IS TO THE WEST TO THE EAST STEPS LEAD DOWN TO A FENCED WALKWAY
>W
YOU HAVE NO KEY
I can give the starting town at least, which has no items to nab.
However, the freeway (which you can see a part of) makes things very confusing, as it is possible to have it merge with an existing freeway without it being clear.
YOU ARE ON A NORTHBOUND FREEWAY
>N
YOU ARE ON A NORTHBOUND FREEWAY
THE FREEWAY PASSES THROUGH MOUNTAINS HERE
>N
YOU ARE ON A NORTHBOUND FREEWAY
>N
YOU ARE ON A NORTHBOUND FREEWAY
THERE IS AN EXIT TO THE NE AHEAD
>NE
YOU ARE AT THE CORNER OF PARK AND OAK
(In the clip above, we landed back in the starting town, but it wasn’t clear that’s what was going to happen until I tried the exit, and sometimes exits just lead to more freeways.)
Here are some highway rooms where I’m fairly sure I did a loop and have some duplication:
Taking Route 60 south from Eastport I was able to find a dirt road with a chainsaw, my first item.
YOU AT THE END OF THE ROAD
THERE ARE CUT TREES EVERYWHERE
THIS IS AN OLD LOGGING CAMP
THERE IS A CHAINSAW LAYING NEAR A LOG HERE
Further down there’s the town of Baycity where I was able to find a shovel in an old hardware store and a ferry ticket in the dump. Everything seems to be totally abandoned.
The abandonment (so far) means no police radars, but I did find a spot that clearly invoked Gumball Rally with a flat tire trying to go west from the starting town.
YOU ARE ON FORD ROAD
THERE IS A BRIDGE TO THE WEST
THERE IS A LOUD POP! YOU HAVE A FLAT TIRE!
>CHANGE TIRE
YOU HAVE NO SPARE TIRE
THERE YOU SIT WITH A FLAT TIRE!
AND NO SPARE! NEXT TIME, GET MORE SPARES!
READY
Well. I would buy one if I could find a store with living people! I’m sure they are somewhere. This seems to now be treated more like a puzzle than a simulationist checkbox.
I’ll try my best to get more of a full map next time and maybe reckon with the poem. Even with the abandoned towns this could end up being a neat idea but the number of rooms (over 300, according to the advertising) is overwhelming.
At least the reward ought to be better than a gumball machine! Although I could see the plot having a twist at the end.
For the old-school type readers, only 20 of them are parser this time, although it does include a explicitly Zork-based game. Also the return of C.E.J. Pacian with a survival horror game.
One thing I didn’t comment on last year but I should note — there is allowed the use of artificial intelligence in cover art. The rules require they be labeled (although it is 100% obvious which ones are using it, they have all the same bizarro glossy sheen). Note well, please — this is the one sort of competition where it is totally OK to scrawl something out in Microsoft Paint. It will have much more soul. I’m sure you mean well and I’m not holding it against anyone, but still please consider if you enter in the future to simply not include a piece of cover art. It’ll be fine!
This lists, straightforwardly, the games I know about that are missing, or have some technical barrier to playing them. Most of these were unearthed by people other than myself. Many are from the folks at CASA Solution Archive.
This is no doubt incomplete so feel free to reply with other possibilities. (Note I am not being super-inclusive; if something seems much more like an RPG but maybe-sorta could be an adventure, I am not including it.)
Wander (1974 original, Peter Langston, Mainframe)
I’ve played the modules for these now. This was a system originally made before Adventure, and the modules have a different feel from the normal mainstream of adventures, but people didn’t pay them much notice at the time.
castle: you explore a rural area and a castle searching for a beautiful damsel.
a3: you are the diplomat Retief (A sf character written by Keith Laumer) assigned to save earthmen on Aldebaran III
library: You explore a library after civilization has been destroyed.
tut: the player receives a tutorial in binary arithmetic.
However, these were made in a later port, and the original written in HP Basic is lost.
As I remember I came up with the idea for Wander and wrote an early version in HP Basic while I was still teaching at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA (that system limited names to six letters, so: WANDER, EMPIRE, CONVOY, SDRECK, GALAXY, etc.). Then I rewrote Wander in C on Harvard’s Unix V5 system shortly after our band moved to Boston in 1974. I got around to putting a copyright notice on it in 1978.
Underground (1978, Gary Kleppe, Mainframe)
According to David Cornelson, this was on the Milwaukee Public School’s mainframe in PDP Basic. While the original tape is lost it is possible the game made its way elsewhere.
Gary Kleppe himself later has added some details. The full list is in the comments, but here’s a few relevant parts that might help identify the game:
* At the entrance to the caves is a robot, but you have a laser pistol with which you can shoot it.
* There is a chess set locked down by a computer. If you initially play against the computer you will lose, but if you’ve found and read a certain book then you can beat it and it will give you a trophy (a treasure). After that you can blast the computer to take the set which is also a treasure.
* There’s a room where the description is written backwards, as is any message that gets displayed to you while you’re there. You also need to type commands backwards for the parser to understand them.
I first played Adventure at Colorado State University (almost finished the game then the administrators did away with it :-( ). That version had a jeweled “loaf” in a cottage in the forest (evil witch, Hanzel and Gretel type cottage (made of candy)).
There’s also a “700 point” adventure variant apparently written in PL/I, which would make it the only game other than Ferret I know of to use the language; I also find the version from Norway written in NORD-FORTRAN 77 (for NORD computers) to be unique.
World of Odyssey (1979, Powersoft, Apple II)
A new ADVENTURE game utilizing the full power of DISK II, which enables the player to explore 353 rooms on six different levels full of dragons, orcs, dwarves, goblins, gold and jewels.
The same technique is used in programs such as World of Odyssey, from Powersoft, and Journey, from Softape. Their “maps,” however, are different from the original Adventure caves. Journey features some entertaining twists and traps and is written in a tongue-in-cheek style. Odyssey is another complete, complex, computerized cavern.
Discover the floating island and rescue the beautiful princess. To win you must recover the enchanted crown, but you face the threat of magic spells and demons.
This might be a CRPG. This might be an ambiguous hybrid. This is all the information we have.
New Adventure (1979/1980, Mark Niemiec)
Martian Adventure (1979/1980, Brad Templeton and Kieran Carroll)
These were written at the University of Waterloo and it mentions here that “Archive tapes for this mainframe exist and it might prove possible to get at the source code for these games.”
Adventure 751 (1980, David Long, Mainframe)
Written about in detail here. Has the unusual condition of an attempt at a BASIC port made without any access to the source code, but I’ve never been able to get it to run properly. Was on Compuserve, and there was a poster sold of the map; here is a portion that includes the section unique to Adventure 751:
The BASIC port was by Carl Ruby. The source code is up there if anyone wants to give it a try. It was giving me legions of errors.
In April, 1982, Carl Ruby, a junior at California Lutheran college, discovered this game and attempted to write a version in BASIC for the school’s Apple II computers. However, it wasn’t until 1986 when his father bought an Apple IIc that he was able to get any real work done. Learning machine language, and the data compression trick, he almost squeezed the entire program into memory, but in 1994 he discovered Microsoft QBASIC and the Apple Adventure project was abandoned. He completed a Microsoft version in 11 days, and it was completely debugged in October 1996.
The Pits (1980, Jim Walters and Dave Broadhurst, Mainframe)
(Note that one of the lost Adventure variants from the earlier link was also on Prime systems, described as having over 1000 points. It is faintly possible the correspondent was confusing The Pits with Adventure.)
Sinbad (1980, Highland Computer Services, Apple II)
From the folks that brought you The Tarturian. Compute Sep./Oct. 1980 called it a “hires adventure-like game using over 100 pictures.”
This was in the company’s Oldorf/Tarturian phase so I’d expect a game like that.
From The Tarturian.
Spaceship to Nowhere (1981, Algray?, TRS-80)
Mentioned in a 1981 Algray catalog. Controlled with the arrow keys. Algray distributed games from other companies so it may not be the ones who made the game.
A Remarkable Experience (1981, Hoyle & Hoyle, Heathkit/TRS-80)
A Physical Experience (1981, Hoyle & Hoyle, Heathkit/TRS-80)
Discussed in this thread. This is the first and third of a trilogy. We have the second game (I haven’t played it yet) although here’s the cover of that one:
CPS Games Entire Collection (1982, Atari/ZX81/ZX Spectrum)
The Domed City
The Fourth Kind
The Ghost of Radun
Hasha the Thief
The Lord of the Rings: Part 1
Peter Rabbit and Father Willow
Peter Rabbit and the Magic Carrot
Peter Rabbit and the Naughty Owl
The Seven Cities of Cibola
The Tower of Brasht
Tummy Digs Goes Shopping
Tummy Digs Goes Walking in the Forest
The Wizard of Sham
You can check the ad for descriptions (and some wargames which I think are also lost); The Fourth Kind, intriguingly, is all about trying to communicate with extraterrestrials.
Love (1982, Remsoft, ZX81)
A game written “by women for women”. “A 16K ZX81 women’s adventure game set in the riotously funny Poke Hall. Meet the voluptuous Griselda, the rude Sinclair, Indian mystic Mr. Ram Pac, and more.”
An aeroplane carrying UN ambassadors crashes near to a ski lodge where you are staying. For some unknown reason, unknown parties have captured the ambassadors. Your job is to rescue these ambassadors and return them to the ski lodge.
Also weirdly, appears in a legal guide to software copyright notices and gives a copyright of 1984 (rather than 1982).
Cathedral Adventure (1982, Phillip Joy, ZX81)
Mentioned in Sinclair User Issue 3. 15K of Basic, “describes more parts of a cathedral than I ever knew existed—more than 30 in fact. Shortish descriptions are given, sometimes including a cryptic clue—no pun intended—and more than 70 words are recognised.” The writer was stuck on the Mad Monk and couldn’t get farther.
Gods of Mt. Olympus
Marooned in Time
Lunar Mission
although absolutely everything listed in the catalog is gone. The catalog is the only evidence we have of the games or the company even existing.
Some of PAL Creations Catalog (1982, Tandy Color Computer)
They did Eno, Stalag, and Mansion of Doom, which I’ve written about before. They had other games listed in the ad here which are lost. (Space Escape isn’t, but it lands in 1983.) Eyeballing them, I think the adventures are
Isle of Fortune
Scavange Hunt (with that spelling in the ad)
Dark Castle
Witches Knight
Beacon
Evasion (sequel to Stalag)
Funhouse
Scatterbrain
Mother Lode
although they are mixed together with non-adventures so it’s hard to tell. Beacon is “can you signal the ship before it runs aground?” — I could see that easily being almost a mini-board game. Without the game we can’t tell.
Adventure (1982, Simpson Software, ZX81)
Helpful title, eh? Mentioned here in issue 2 of Sinclair User as being “set in a mythical castle containing evidence of an extraordinary mixture of living beings – hobbits, dwarves and pirates, among others. It is a non-graphics adventure with 25 logically-connected locations written in 11/2 K of Basic.”
Fun House (1982, ASD&D, TI-99)
We have the manual. We even have a picture of the disk. We don’t have access to the game, though. I’ve played games from the series before starting with 007: Aqua Base.
Takeda Building Adventure (1982, Micro Cabin, MZ-700/MZ-1200)
The only Japanese game I’m missing for 1982, published the same time as Diamond Adventure. (Totally different author. Diamond Adventure was by N. Minami. This was by Akimasa Tako when he was a junior high student and the game was sent to Micro Cabin by family/friends without his knowledge; he later did an Alice in Wonderland game.) I’ve seen copies come up for this before but they’ve been expensive. Please note there’s a part 1 (from 1982) and a part 2 (from 1983) but they look very similar and some websites confuse them.
Part 1 (red font) on top, part 2 (black font) on bottom. Source.
Weirdly, I have enough I could technically make an entry for this game because more than a decade ago someone made a website re-creating the game in HTML format. It’s essentially a death maze. Unfortunately the website is long gone and only a very small part has been stored at the Internet Archive, but I was able to play for one move.
Glamis Castle (1982, John Bell, Apple II)
This is the sequel to Haunted Palace, by Crystalware, the funky 3d-game that had a mystery attached which wasn’t solved in the game but through a contest.
There’s also an Atari version, and I know who has a disk, but there’s logistical issues in dumping it (please don’t bother with this at the moment).
However, the Apple II version is totally lost, and based on the predecessor (Haunted Palace) it would be different enough from the Atari version to be worth having, plus it will be easier to get a dump.
ICL Quest (1980-1983, Doug Urquhart, Keith Sheppard and Jerry McCarthy, Mainframe)
I’ve written about the Windows 95 version here. It is somewhat buggy, but there’s a version that’s for C which needs technical help porting it to be playable on modern systems. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, ping me and I’ll re-direct you for access.
Your score would be 400 (total of 400 points), in 507 moves.
You can read my prior posts on Starcross at this link. For those avoiding the ending, now is the time to veer away.
From bryron9 on Twitter, who points out the sticker on the shrinkwrap means 100% full preservation would technically need sealed packages to get the sticker variants. Also, based on Jimmy Maher’s writeup it looks like not everyone was aware the saucer is the player’s ship, the Starcross itself (“there were no actual flying saucers in the game”)?
I was rather close to done. The globe puzzle I was especially close on. As arcanetrivia pointed out in the comments, I essentially described how to solve while lamenting being unsure how to solve it.
The most obvious behavior to play with is still the fact you can put things under the globe and on top of the globe … I tried having the teleport on the floor so that the thing from above lands on it and teleports, but no dice (additionally, why would that help?)
As far as my understanding of the mechanism goes, I was confused by two things:
1.) I thought the blue rod simply did not exist on the other settings, and the globe was of equal thinness on every setting. The real idea is that the blue rod is always present under the “force wall” even if you can’t see it. This meant my thinking that required the last step be to have the globe at its smallest setting was wrong.
2.) I thought the way the teleporter worked was simply to teleport all items that step on it. Instead, it teleports things that step on it and things that are close enough. I do not know why you would think this before it happens.
I managed to finally get the thing to work by mucking about, and I’m fairly sure I tried this combination before in almost exactly the same way, but I must have had something slightly off: Set the dial to medium (2 or 3) so there’s room on top. Slide one teleport disk under the globe while in small mode. Drop the other teleport disk on the floor as normal. Put an item on the globe. Set the dial to max size (4). The item will fall and trigger the teleport, and the teleport will teleport both the item and the rod to outside the globe.
>SET DIAL TO 3
The globe flickers out for an instant and then reappears, expanded. The silvery globe is the size of a beachball.
>PUT BASKET ON GLOBE
The metal basket is now on the globe.
>SET DIAL TO 4
The globe flickers out for an instant and then reappears, expanded. The silvery globe is the size of four feet and seems embedded in the floor. You hear the hum of the transporter disk activating. There is a loud click, and then the metal basket appears resting comfortably on the red disk. The blue rod must have been in range of the disk, because it appeared as well!
Looking at the image from the Zork User Group hint guide (see above) I may have not visually have placed the globe quite as much into the ground. In addition, I always assumed the rod was on the top, so even with a teleport that gets “close items” the rod doesn’t seem like it’d be close. I think it’s meant to be jammed in the middle somehow, even without the globe to anchor it? You know what, I still don’t understand this puzzle.
With that done, all I had to do was figure out what was going wrong with my ray gun so that I could get extra charges (and as a reminder, flying via shooting the gun is the only puzzle I remembered, so I knew it was running short). I needed Invisiclues for this. I previously went through my verb list and maybe didn’t pay enough attention to the SHAKE verb, especially because of a bug:
>SHAKE GUN
It rattles loudly.
This happens before you’ve shot it at all. Afterwards, SHAKE GUN gives a blank prompt.
Just to prove that it isn’t just a modern interpreter issue, here’s the same bug in the Macintosh version.
The bug implied to me that no useful information was being given and I was just hitting a glitch, but no: the rattle is very important. It implies something is stuck in the gun.
>LOOK IN GUN
In the barrel is a silver rod!
>GET SILVER ROD
Taken.
With the silver rod out, there’s no “backfire shot” and you have 3 shots rather than just 2. This is enough to make the Newton-propelled flight. Before showing that off, I should demonstrate the use of the silver rod:
>JUMP
Gravity is almost non-existent here, so your jump easily carries you to the hatch of the drive bubble.
Drive Bubble Entrance
You are floating (clinging?) outside the drive bubble, a crystalline half-sphere covering the aft end of the artifact’s axis of rotation. Small knobs like handholds lead up the surface of the bubble, away from the end of the cylinder. The drive bubble is transparent and through it you can see the controls for the main engines of the artifact, which must be aft of here. The only way in is a hatch which is closed. Beside the hatch is a silver slot.
>PUT SILVER ROD IN SILVER SLOT
The silver rod slides into the slot and the hatch opens.
>IN
Drive Bubble
The drive bubble is on the axis of rotation at the aft end of the artifact, so there is no “gravity” here. It is transparent and you can see the tips of the tallest trees of the forest beyond. Far off, at the opposite end of the axis, is another bubble much like this one. The room is a featureless gray except for one small white slot. One way out is the hatch, which is open.
Floating near a white slot in the wall is a white rod.
>GET WHITE ROD
Taken.
>PUT WHITE ROD IN WHITE SLOT
As you insert the rod, the walls come alive with a white tracery of controls, dials, and gauges. In addition, a black slot surrounded by an ominous dead-black circle appears.
Putting the black rod in the black slot is an emergency stop and the game ends. The black slot (which you are required to pick up to enter the artifact) is otherwise useless.
You do need to go through the silver rod-white rod process because otherwise there’s a later moment where a button mysteriously fails (without mentioning it is because the drive bubble hasn’t been properly set, and also there’s no way to go back).
Just to be clear on our inventory now, our rods (after using up silver) are clear, violet, brown, blue, pink, black (boo!), gold, and green. Yellow and red got used on repair, and white was found right where it gets used.
The repair hatch in the forest.
Let’s go flying. To be clear on the visual, here, we’re at the aft of the cylinder where there’s a “drive bubble” and we’re flying to the opposite end where there’s a “control bubble” and the end of the game.
>JUMP
You push against the surface of the bubble, and because there is no weight here, you shoot into the air and away along the axis!
Floating in Air
You are floating at the axis of rotation of the cylinder, near the drive bubble. There are enormous trees “below.” There is no gravity here.
>SHOOT GUN AT DRIVE BUBBLE
A blast of orange flame issues from the gun, and the recoil propels you at an impressive speed through the air. Eventually, air resistance slows you down, but you are still in the weightless area near the center of the cylinder.
Floating in Air
You are floating at the axis of rotation of the cylinder. There is grassland “below.” There is no gravity here.
>SHOOT GUN AT DRIVE BUBBLE
A blast of orange flame issues from the gun, and the recoil propels you at an impressive speed through the air. Eventually, air resistance slows you down, but you are still in the weightless area near the center of the cylinder.
Floating in Air
You are floating at the axis of rotation of the cylinder. There is a metal band “below.” There is no gravity here.
>SHOOT GUN AT DRIVE BUBBLE
A blast of orange flame issues from the gun, and the recoil propels you at an impressive speed through the air. Eventually, air resistance slows you down, but you are still in the weightless area near the center of the cylinder.
On Control Bubble
You are floating outside a 100 meter crystal bubble which protrudes from the fore end of the cylinder. Inside, you can make out shadowy mechanisms and odd constructions. There are odd knobs of some sort which you could use to pull yourself down the bubble. At the other end of the cylinder you can see the drive bubble in the midst of enormous trees.
>U
There is only air there.
>D
Control Bubble Entrance
You are floating outside a 100 meter crystal dome which protrudes from the fore end of the cylinder. Inside, you can discern shadowy mechanisms and odd constructions. Near you is an entrance which is closed. A small slot surrounded by gold crystal is next to the hatch. Small knobs which might make good handholds dot the surface of the bubble from the axis to the hatch.
You must specify you are shooting at the drive bubble, otherwise your path goes awry and you plummet (fortunately, I was already doing this by default, I discovered the interesting death later).
To get inside the Control Bubble you need the gold rod:
Control Bubble
This room must be the main control room of the artifact. The control bubble itself is transparent and you can look out upon the interior of the artifact. Far off, hidden among the tallest trees of the forest, is the matching drive bubble. One way out is the hatch, which is open.
The walls are gray except for a single small slot surrounded by clear crystal.
Clear activates the mechanism, and the remaining colors (brown, green, blue, violet and pink) all activate particular controls. I like how we are in a typical Collect the Twelve Orb McGuffins of McGuffinville but they get used for specific technical purposes (rather than the typical fantasy plot where It Just Works when you have the right number).
>PUT PINK ROD IN PINK SLOT
When the pink rod is inserted into the pink slot, a ghostly image appears on the wall alongside it, but the clear slot and its contents fade from view. The pink screen includes a small square, a large square, and a display showing nearby space. This view shows an empty area with a stylized depiction of the artifact itself.
The other colors all give “spots” which are buttons to activate some control.
To make things work, you first use the small and large squares as zoom-in / zoom-out controls; you want the view to be of the solar system. Once you’ve done this, the brown button will swap between planets. (In practice, I was hitting buttons more or less randomly until i had my first reaction, and then it started to be possible to “puzzle out” the rest.)
>PUSH LARGE SQUARE
The view screen now shows the inner solar system, from the sun out to Jupiter.
>PUSH BROWN SPOT
The view screen now shows the Sun brightly highlighted.
>PUSH BROWN SPOT
The view screen now shows Mercury brightly highlighted.
>PUSH BROWN SPOT
The view screen now shows Venus brightly highlighted.
>PUSH BROWN SPOT
The view screen now shows Earth brightly highlighted.
Your goal is to fly to Earth. I was hoping we could get an alternate ending by flying to Jupiter (“ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA”) but alas, the game just informs you that the ship knows where you came from, so it shuts down and you’ve failed the trial.
>PUSH VIOLET SPOT
The highlighted image of Earth now is connected to that of the artifact. The line terminates in the center of Earth.
>PUSH VIOLET SPOT
The highlighted image of Earth now is connected to that of the artifact. The line terminates in a parabola looping around Earth.
>PUSH VIOLET SPOT
The highlighted image of Earth now is connected to that of the artifact. The line terminates in an ellipse surrounding Earth.
>PUSH VIOLET SPOT
The highlighted image of Earth now is connected to that of the artifact. The line terminates in a circle around Earth.
>LOOK
Control Bubble
This room must be the main control room of the artifact. The control bubble itself is transparent and you can look out upon the interior of the artifact. Far off, hidden among the tallest trees of the forest, is the matching drive bubble. One way out is the hatch, which is open.
The walls are gray except for five small color-coded slots (pink, brown, violet, green, and blue) arranged in a pentagon.
Of the colored slots, the pink one contains a pink rod and the blue, green, violet and brown rods are in place in the like-colored slots. Alongside each of those are spots of the same color.
The pink screen includes a small square, a large square, and a display showing nearby space. This view shows the inner solar system, from the sun out to Jupiter. The symbol representing Earth is lit. A line on the display connects the position of the artifact with that of Earth, and terminating in a circle around Earth.
Green adds dots (and this is where the step fails if you haven’t prepared the Drive Bubble) and then blue launches. Finis.
All the displays flash once. There is a sensation of movement as the artifact positions itself to follow the course you have set.
The artifact, under your assured control, moves serenely toward Earth, where the knowledge it contains will immeasureably benefit mankind. Within a few years, there could be human ships flying out to the stars, and all because of your daring and cunning…
A holographic projection of a humanoid figure appears before you. The being, tall and thin, swathed in shimmering robes, speaks in your own language. “Congratulations, you who have passed our test. You have succeeded where others failed. Your race shall benefit thereby.” He smiles. “I expect to see you in person, someday.” The projection fades.
Your score would be 400 (total of 400 points), in 507 moves.
This score gives you the rank of Galactic Overlord.
One word (“immeasureably”) might be a typo; no dictionary I’ve found spells it that way (no “e”), although there are some old religious books that do.
There’s questions that have been built up, not only historical, but in terms of understanding the plot. I’ll be referring both to Jimmy Maher’s and Drew Cook’s commentary.
The most immediate question, for me, goes back to the 1982 Lebling quote I started with (which was said when the game was done but not out yet to the public):
Starcross is intended as an entry level game for people who like science fiction but who haven’t played many adventure games before.
Why does Lebling call it “entry-level”?
There is of course aspiration vs. reality; there’s also marketing vs. reality (no doubt why Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, surely one of the hardest of Infocom’s games by any metric, got marked “Standard” level). I’m not sure either quite explain the circumstance here. For one thing, his statement is targeted at “people who like science fiction” — that is, this is meant for a hard sci-fi buff who would no doubt realize the life support dot puzzle at glance. I can compare my past self with my modern self here: I remember first coming across the dots and being utterly baffled but I was too young for a chemistry class, and here (even though I didn’t remember anything other than suffering) it took me roughly five seconds to get. It was, at this point in my life — keeping in mind I now work on educational software professionally — quite “easy”.
I have now seen multiple people say they couldn’t get past the opening puzzle, even though (for those who have dealt with polar coordinates) it isn’t really a puzzle.
Still, I think Lebling was overlooking some of the tougher spots, especially the ray gun. The silver rod inside might seem from a designer standpoint almost trivial, but from a player standpoint it is extraordinarily tricky. On top of that, thinking to use the ray gun as a propulsion method is an audacious jump even for a physics buff; there are so many opportunities that feel like the ray gun ought to be used to shoot things that get passed by, for it only to show up at the end — this is a structural trick of the highest order, arguably the climax in my history of nonviolence (the cavalcade of games that give the players weapons that don’t get used as weapons). I can understand now why this was the only puzzle where I remembered the solution.
(The Invisiclues even mention there’s a ray-gun based way to get the blue rod! So someone might get stuck only with two shots and not realize they solved the globe puzzle wrong.)
In the end I’m going to attribute this to a combination of only being partially aware of how hard things will be for the audience (surely they would have tweaked the map puzzle otherwise) but also the truth that this game is a bit easier for a sci-fi buff who really needs everything to work logically. For such a person it is easier than a fantasy world with arbitrary rules (even if those rules are “simpler” in essence: do bell, book, and candle in order). When I made my first post I even had one person on Mastodon mention they found the game a “breeze”:
…what makes Starcross good is that it’s goals unravel in a natural way. Yes, death happens in the game… and is part of that natural way of explaining goals to the player. I totally get that that isn’t everyone’s favored play style, but for me, that clicked very easily. With the adventure genre, everyone experiences them VERY differently.
Both Maher and Cook struggled with a question that can be condensed as:
What’s up with the ending?
There are clear markers we are in some sort of test. (I’ll call the test-makers the Creators.) The original title of the game (as also given in Lebling’s notes from November 1981) was The Gift from the Stars: this is intended to give technology to a race who proved worthy. The spider was first, followed by the weasels, followed by the now-expired lizard.
“I can’t help you there, I’m afraid. I’m quite a stay-at-home, I haven’t left my ship for ages; nothing interesting out there any more. Those furry ones were interesting for a while but they’re stagnant now.”
Lebling’s notes explicitly say “The ship contains secrets which wish to be discovered, but only by a race advanced enough (and clever enough and lucky enough) to penetrate its mysteries.” (I should caution the notes are from the game-in-development and not all of them match the final product. This part seems to be unchanged.)
I still hold what I’ve already established, that this cannot be a full-environmental-control sort of test. Zork III had the Dungeon Master pretend to be needing bread in order to point out a secret door. He set the puzzle up entirely himself, where every piece is controlled. The weasels and spider here, instead, are their own beings. They were previously ones given the test. There was no reason to expect, as a guarantee, that the chief weasel’s brown rod held around his neck would be an object of trade.
Perhaps originally the Creators had more of a controlled method in mind, but things have been going wrong and they’ve worked around the issues. I would suspect, for instance, the ray gun being left behind with the silver rod left inside the Weapons Deck was their doing:
Weapons Deck
This was the armory of the artifact. A massive bulkhead has been burned away, giving free access to the weaponry. Unfortunately, it appears that the vast stock of futuristic armaments has been mostly destroyed. Gigantic projectors are scorched and shattered, strange battle armor is reduced to splinters, and wall racks for small arms are mostly empty.
Mounted in a wall-rack is a genuine-looking ray gun, large and formidable, with a long, ugly barrel. It’s difficult to tell whether or not the gun is fully charged.
Why would anyone but the Creators do that? But the blasted deck itself I don’t think was the doing of the Creators. Here’s Lelbing’s Nov. ’81 take; notice the change in setup, and the idea there would be other weapons:
You find a zap gun here, which has an enormous recoil to it (you can use it to propel you to the control room). It has only a certain number of charges, of course. It also has a key in its barrel which tints the blast its color. None of the other weapons works.
I believe the Creators did not burn the Weapons Deck simply because other aspects of change (the built village, the debris at the yellow deck which requires using the safety line) are from independently-thinking entities, not from the Creators. My guess is the weasels (the “furry ones” as Gurthark-tun-Besnap calls them) were of a much more complicated group than we see: they were advanced enough to be flying around in a ship. I further surmise there were factions in a war, and the chief (“a perfect example of barbarian dignity and splendor”) is the one who won. The group has intentionally taken the lower-tech route, possibly in response to whatever happened with the futuristic armaments; possibly lower-tech won out over higher-tech.
Drew Cook discusses their context in reference to attitudes to colonialism; I think they do fit the stereotypes (as the Earthling is tasked by the Creators to steal an item from their sacred idol) but there are two layers making this complicated: first, that the Creators are the ones making the Earthling do this in the first place, and second, the weasels had to intentionally pick what we think of as a “lower-tech” society. They fit the model of the “savages” that Lebling originally sketched out (he uses the exact word in his ’81 notes) but their decision not to play along with the Creator’s game makes them more advanced in a way.
Drew had another question — “is this a ‘big store’ con?” — which I already explained my answer is no. Now, we could still wonder why we have the exact means of getting by obstacles, but that’s true of any adventure game whatsoever, and we don’t think of all their narratives (in the meta-textual aspect) giant controlled tests. There is always necessary elision and simplification to present the world to the player.
This also means the obstacles would necessarily be different. That is, when Maher comments…
The only problem I have with that is that, absent all those challenges that arose from the general chaos inside the ship, actually figuring out the controls isn’t really that difficult, especially given (presumably) at least a few days to do it. Surely this spider fellow could have pulled it off.
…yes, that is true, but this was likely a matter of the Creators working around things; there likely were other obstacles we didn’t see that others being tested did. Perhaps, even, rather than the weasels being split, they faced some sort of enemy which required massive warfare (landing them at their current state).
The other aspect to this that’s worth considering is the dead lizard. Based on the “rules” of the game, resurrection and time-rewind ought to be possible for each candidate a set number of times. According to the source code, in the section titled DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION, it is four times.
The expressionless voice seems despairing. “Four failures. They would not be pleased. Such promising candidates, too. If only…”
The voice trails off into background hiss. Nothing more happens, ever.
The lizard has already been through trials, and finally has resolved to escape, burning his last life. Had the pink rod (clearly necessary for the win) gone flying after the last failure, the Creators would have given a replacement, but all they needed was an open possibility for the one being tested to find it.
Regarding life support starting to fail immediately upon the player’s arrival: it brings the artifact test to a full end, and consequently it does it in a way I don’t think the other candidates had to face. Nothing I’ve mentioned is contradicted if the Creators decided to kick off the crisis themselves, but I should add that the docking procedure (and the artifact essentially hitting themselves with a foreign ship) could have caused just enough stress to push everything over the edge. Indeed, the life support is only flashing with low urgency at first, indicating it got pushed to malfunctioning as slightly as it could go. (That would mean, the red rod wouldn’t necessarily be used? Sure, but they also definitely were the ones that placed the black rod, and that one doesn’t get used.) I think one upshot of all this (just like a wonky design gone awry in a real escape room) failure might not have been because of the subjects themselves; again, there was no absolute guarantee the player could have gotten the brown rod from the chief. Perhaps the reason the spider decided not to venture forth is they landed in a “buggy” scenario that was impossible to solve so they knew to give up. Lebling’s notes say the winner needs to be clever and lucky enough. How many deaths and transfigurations did they suffer before they decided it was enough?
I’ve avoided what I suppose really ought to be the main question, which is how does this play?
For the conditions, extraordinarily well. I’ve heard this characterized as a step back from Deadline, but it’s more of a lateral step: leaning into simulating as many conditions of the environment as possible, and hewing closing enough to real physics that puzzle solutions present themselves as the natural result of these conditions. I did end up blowing my perfect-no-hints streak, although I technically never had one in the first place since the ray gun use was in my memory. This still felt the most solvable of all the Infocom games so far to me, and I need to distinguish hard and solvable. Hard allows for hiding things obscurely and requiring death and keeping track of events from the past; solvable means if you’re paying close enough attention you can get through all those things.
Coming up next: based on a suggestion of LanHawk, I’m going to make a megapost explaining which adventure games I know about are currently either lost or behind so-far insurmountable technical barriers. This is good timing as I’m also about to play two games for the North Star Horizon that were previously lost media. I’m also about to hit my “lock” threshold where I solidify my 1982 list. After I pass the 75% mark, any new games I find — even from 1982 — will land on my “loop back” list. (Keep in mind I’ve been putting loop backs in my queue at any time, so that doesn’t mean I’ll stall if there’s a new discovery, but I do want to have a tangible end in sight.)
Renga in Blue 
