One thing that’s felt unusual about the All the Adventures project compared to studying, say, short story authors, is the vast number of people in the early days “just passing through” and either writing one or two games. Even most relatively prolific authors have had their main work confined to a small span of time, so we can’t look at their works like we might cinema and compare Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) to Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Other authors who have gone into games have just touched upon adventure games briefly. Yes, normal publishing (and cinema, and art, and etc.) also have one/two-hit wonders, but the nature of the genre here seems more transient. Even the Infocom veterans really produced most of their work in the 80s and the diehards like Steve Meretzky had trouble keeping the flame alight.
In the case of Bob Blauschild, before he wrote his two games for Sirius (Escape From Rungistan — which we’ve already looked at — and today’s selection) he worked in chip design, and after he was done with his games he resumed with chip design. He has other published works but they’re all things like a chapter in the 1990s book Analog Circuit Design titled Understanding Why Things Don’t Work.
In an early attempt to build an electric light, Thomas Edison used a particular construction that glowed brilliantly for a brief moment and then blew out. An assistant made a remark about the experiment being a failure, and Edison quickly corrected him. The experiment had yielded important results, for they had learned one of the ways that wouldn’t work.
Learning through our mistakes doesn’t apply only in the areas of dealing with IRS agents or meeting “interesting” people in bars — it’s also one of the most important aspects of the creative process in engineering. A “failure” that is thoroughly investigated can often be more beneficial in the long run than success on the first try.
But let’s not be wistful and just enjoy the game, eh?
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
Critical Mass maintains the animation and sense of humor of the first game, except it adds color and an extra stakes of saving the world from nuclear annihilation.
On June 1st, the United Nations received the following message: “Good morning. Just thought I’d drop a line to let you know that precisely at 8 p.m. on June 9th, I’ll be destroying the world’s five largest cities with thermal nuclear weapons. It ought to be a real blast! Sorry, but that’s about all I can tell you. Thanks for your time and have a a nice day!”
The delegates gathered quickly. How could this demented person be found and stopped? The task would require someone who could understand how the sicko thought. Well, naturally, they thought of you! Hurry now, you’ve got just nine days to prevent this heinous crime and save 50 million lives! That is, unless you’ve got something more important to do.
I’m just trusting this one on CASA in terms of the publication date, even though the manual etc. say 1983. Likely it was right at the end of the year.
The red center animates ticking down. This is slightly less elaborate than the zoom-in of Rungistan but this may have needed to be a compromise for color.
The mushroom cloud is animated rising.
After the opening graphics the game asks you to flip over to side B. (Note if you’re playing on the WOZ version, AppleWin isn’t happy with the second side WOZ file, but the package comes with a DSK version.)
The envelope on the desk notes that a message was received at 1:00 in the morning on June 1: at 8 pm on June 5th, the five largest cities in the world will be obliterated by thermo-nuclear devices.
The call “was traced to a pay phone at the Central Park Zoo” but there were no clues, and we must “find a way to neutralize this treat”. Our first destination is a contact in London.
Just to be clear, this is not a “realistic” nuclear paranoia type game, like maybe Wasteland, but more of a James Bond setup where for some reason only one person can save the world. The scenario includes a great deal of emphasis on time, and there’s a long explanation in the manual:
Each command uses 1 minute.
Taxi Rides use 30 minutes per ride.
A boat on the Sea uses 30 minutes per direction.
A boat near Land uses 1 minute per direction.
Walking uses 1 minute per direction.
Time elapsed for city to city travel varies by type of transportation.
If you are knocked unconscious a certain block of time will pass.
If you do not enter a command within 10 seconds of your previous command, the clock will advance 1 minute.
The last sentence is highly significant: the clock advances in real time. With an emulator on max speed you can watch the clock advancing quickly to doomsday.
Yes, that’s a bit anxiety-inducing. I might be doing a lot of reloading to redo sections faster, although my general suspicion is that the real-time part is more or less insignificant but city travel time might be very important.
After reading the envelope, it vaporizes, Mission Impossible style, and then we have nothing else to do but hop in an elevator.
More anxiety-inducing than the real time aspect is having commands not get accepted and having the clock tick down as a result. You can’t just GO ELEVATOR so you need to PUSH BUTTON instead first.
The elevator says there is a “special command word” but typing GO DOWN seemingly works.
As you keep riding down, the elevator “has a nervous breakdown” and the number ticks down and lets you type more commands, but all I’ve attempted so far gets me a “you can’t stop it” response.
After some fiddling around (and trying the word LITHIUM from the opening room, which also doesn’t work) I decided to invoke a page from Rungistan and try JUMP, which works to represent you going into the air by the room-picture moving down. You need to time JUMP such that you’re in the air as the elevator hits floor 1.
A grim beginning! I enjoyed the author’s prior game quite a bit so I’m willing to give some latitude here even given the ticking clock (I have the magic of save states to smooth it over) although I suspect this might be a harder game than Rungistan.
This continues my previous post identifying adventure games that we don’t have access to at this time, to the best of my knowledge. These new entries have been drawn out of the comments there; thanks to everyone who chipped in!
Three major updates from that list:
First, LanHawk managed to sleuth out Fun House from the esoterically titled SINGLEFILE.dsk in an Atari Age thread. So that’s one less missing game!
There’s also some discussion in that thread on Glamis Castle. Via Atarimania, there have been two attempts at dumping what was packaged as the Atari version of the game, but both had House of Usher instead. Was it also a scam game? Weirdly, based on the files in Haunted Palace, it seems that Glamis was written first. Perhaps only the Apple II versions were finished but Crystalware had to put something on the Atari disks and hope people wouldn’t care; perhaps no version was finished at all (but why would Haunted Palace be done, then, in both Apple and Atari versions)?
I should add that the games from CPS Software I mentioned last time might not have ever existed, and there is a fantastic long examination from The Wargaming Scribe of the one game we do have a copy of (King Arthur, 1983) which is so bad he concludes it was intended as fraud: “King Arthur was not designed to be played or fun, it was designed to exist.”
Other discoveries were made (like a previously unknown variant of Adventure for PolyMorphic Systems computers), meaning the entire thread is worth a read, but I’m only re-printing here the “missing” games that go up to 1982.
One other brief request before I dive into the new list: I’m having trouble running a specific game on a Nascom emulator (it’s tangentially related to a specific lost game). I’ll drop the details on this in the comments if anyone fancies themselves an expert.
Fantasy (1981, Level 9, Nascom)
I wrote about this one fairly extensively back when I introduced Level 9’s second adventure game, Colossal Adventure. It has the weird extra condition that it might exist in a “stolen” version, but I’ve never had confirmation of this. I’ll just quote the relevant section from my post:
Fantasy was an adventure (“a competitive adventure set in a gothic mansion”), and you may be wondering why we’re not starting our Level 9 journey there. Sadly, Fantasy is currently lost to the digital wastes, and one of those with few enough copies sold it may never turn up (although there have been surprises before!)
Pete Austin later described it as “like Valhalla”, a 1983 ZX Spectrum game.
Valhalla features characters that you can give orders to, and if the walkthrough above is any indication, they’d often not be cooperative about following through on the orders.
There were a lot of characters wandering around who changed according to your actions. What I did was to make it print out in proper English.
It was a game with about 30 locations. It had people wandering about and essentially it was one of the few games where the other characters were exactly the same as the player and were all after the gold as well. What made it amusing was that they had quite interesting characters, each had a table of attributes, some of them were cowardly, some of them were strong — that kind of thing and we gave them names. There was one called Ronald Reagan and one called Maggie Thatcher and so on and there was Ghengis Khan, etc so you could wipe out your least favorite person!
The description makes it sound like a world with a lot of independent-moving actors and not much coherent plot, and the gothic mansion plus the addition of people like Reagan strongly suggests it is similar to a game collection featured here before, Atom Adventures, particularly the House module. Atom Adventures was published in the tail end of 1981, later than Fantasy, so I suspect it was a direct rip-off.
Bureaucracy (1980, Med Systems, Apple II, TRS-80)
Samurai (1980, Med Systems, Apple II, TRS-80)
Star Lord (1980, Med Systems, Apple II, TRS-80)
According to research by Will Moczarski, these three games were released in 1980 before their more famous games (like Deathmaze 5000). All three are lost, although Moczarski theorizes that Star Lord is simply a game called Star Trap from 1981 that we do have. In that case, Star Lord isn’t an adventure game. Mentions for Samurai and Bureaucracy can be found in the 1981 Med Systems Catalog.
Samurai only has a small chance of being an adventure game…
…but Bureaucracy probably is. The description makes it sounds like a predecessor of the Deathmaze/Asylum line, and it doesn’t help that it shares a name with a much (much) more famous Infocom game.
Untitled Adventure in Denmark (1980, Peter Ole Frederiksen, Mainframe)
The game was placed on the IBM mainframe in Aarhus, Denmark at least around 1980-81 (possibly earlier)
The game appears to borrow from Egyptian mythology, Alice in Wonderland, the then-current political landscape and other sources.
This would represent one of the earliest adventure game we have in Danish. Unfortunately without even a name it seems extraordinarily hard to search for.
TIKVA (1982, UK101)
Gamal 81 (1981, ZX81)
Toxopholy (1980, Apple II)
Dungeons of Death (1981, Commodore PET)
The Shifting Tower (1981, Acorn Atom)
Unnamed Games by Psychosoft (1981, Nascom)
Martian Adventure (1981, TRS-80)
All of these are mentioned in a thread by Strident of random clippings of unknown games. TIKVA and Gamal 81 seem to be adventure creation kits, while the other games seem to be regular adventure games. I won’t give every ad from the page, but here’s the mention of Toxopholy, which at least has an intriuging name…
… and Martian Adventure is particularly interesting, described as an TRS=80 game with three Agents:
TRS-80 Source Book (assorted)
Starting in 1980, Tandy accepted what were essentially “classified ads” and compiled them together into TRS-80 Sourcebooks. Rob combed over them and listed the ones we seem to be missing. There’s a lot of these, so I’ll sort them all together.
Shipwreck, Teller Enterprises
Haunted Mansion, Teller Enterprises
Haunted House, Doug Eby
Action Games Pack W/Adventure Game, Alexander Crawford
Harvey II: The Lost Civilization, Chandler Data Services
Medieval Magic, Liberty Software Co.
Skid Row Adventure, Dale Dobson
The last one exists in a 25th Anniversary Edition, and if the author looks familiar, it’s because he’s the author of the blog Gaming After 40.
Testament (1982, DAI)
The DAI personal computer is Belgian (although initially designed by Texas Instruments UK), and it did have a few adventure games.
Testament appeared in a newsletter in a May 1982 newsletter (specifically, the DAI CLUB FRANCE CATALOGUE), and there might be some other candidates mentioned, although it is unclear what is an adventure.
Cave-In (1982, Apple II, PC, ZX-81, Great Games Ink, Florida)
Computerworld, October 11, 1982.
Might be a scam. Certainly an eccentric choice of ports. Advertised in Computerworld a few times in 1982 as costing $35 with a $1000 contest attached, but then they disappear.
I’d like to start today’s game by talking about something that doesn’t seem special at first but has a remarkable history behind it. Specifically, the REM statements at the start of Ship Adventure (shortened to be ‘ marks); in BASIC they don’t get interpreted as code but are used to make comments.
5 ‘COPYRIGHT(C) CLOAD 1982
30 ‘CREATED BY: JOHN R. OLSON
40 ‘ HOXIE, KANSAS 67740
Thus starts the first lines of Ship Adventure, as put in the December 1982 version of the tapemag called CLOAD (and diskmag after October ’82). This is John R. Olson from Kansas this time (see: Island Adventure) not John R. Olsen from Oregon (see: Frankenstein Adventure).
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
The game is extremely clear on the name and location of the author, and this has been true on every single adventure from CLOAD we’ve seen. From Troll’s Treasure:
1 ‘COPYRIGHT (C) CLOAD 1981
2 ‘BY RICHARD MOFFIE
3 ‘ 20121 LEADWELL ST. #3
4 ‘ CANOGA PARK, CALIFORNIA 91306
From CIA Adventure:
10040 ‘COPYRIGHT (C) CLOAD 1980
HUGH LAMPERT
110 LINDNER PL.
MALVERNE, NY 11565
From Frankenstein Adventure:
by John R. Olsen Jr.
P.O. Box 181
Newberg, Or 97132
(503) 538-3031
Compare with the Adventures of the Month (like Menagerie that I wrote about last); only some of the adventures have clear identifiers, and we still don’t know who wrote Black Hole Adventure even though we have all three ports. Survival was published in Creative Computing in their January 1982 issue with no author identifier within the code, even though it must have been there because it got restored in the 1984 reprinting.
Now, the latter case is understandable: the author is mentioned in the print article, there’s a premium on space. However, this removal from source can still mean games get detached from their sources. The most spectacular case of this was Korenvliet, a Dutch game which was a translation of Stoneville Manor, but the connection was so non-obvious that many years later Korenvliet got translated back into English with no awareness the game was in English in the first place!
As far as why CLOAD was so careful to always print author and location, it has to do with fraud from their earlier days. This story backtracks all the way to 1978, when the publication was founded in February as the first computer tapemag, with Ralph McElroy as publisher and Dick Fuller as editor. (David Lagerquist took over in 1980.)
160 REM MODIFIED BY JOHN OLSEN, BOX 181, NEWBERG, OR. 97132
…but this was derived completely from the same version of David Ahl’s 101 Computer Games. As explained by Ralph McElroy in the October 1978 issue of CLOAD, the file was clearly marked as a derivative of Ahl, but the source code only credits the author who modified the source (Oregon Olsen). Ahl saw the issue, and raised concerns, but:
After some preliminary running around, we got together and worked the situation out to everyone’s nominal satisfaction.
That was an accident, but the very same issue of CLOAD also included a copy of Othello.
As McElroy explains:
The original author (Mr. Donald L. Dilley, of Federal Way, Washington) had sent a copy to Radio Shack, to Kilobaud Magazine, and to his son in southern California. This last copy was evidently sold with his son’s computer system, thereby ending up in New York, from where it was submitted.
To summarize, someone bought a used computer with a piece of computer code that wasn’t theirs and decided to sell it.
Hence, a new policy at CLOAD was announced that “the author’s name and address” needed to be put into REM statements “in the first few lines of code”. This would “discourage” theft (or at least require thieves to have even more chutzpah), and they did not “want other people’s work, no matter how good or how cheap.” (The “first few lines of code” part of the policy must have changed, given CIA Adventure put its notice on the end of its code.)
Enough about TRS-80 REM comment drama —
— John R. Olson’s games have been mechanically simple and straightforward and this one is not an exception, although it is yet another case of shipboard directions (port, starboard, fore, aft) and I’m such a landlubber I had to double check I wasn’t mixing up port and starboard again.
The introduction asks you to find seven treasures, but I need to slow down and explain because both in a plot sense and a gameplay sense this is a slightly different Treasure Hunt than normal.
While I collected my treasures here (at the start) to keep my inventory free, they only count if you’re holding them.
In Crowther/Woods and descendants, the treasures typically serve as markers that you have solved particular puzzles. The treasures are often incidental proof you’ve reached particular rooms as well as a convenient way of making the game non-linear. Here, we are tasked with inspecting a ship that is smuggling treasure, and there is almost nothing gated off by a puzzle: rather, you need to figure out the hiding spots. It is more analogous to a collectathon from the N64 era than a standard adventure game. Sometimes the collectable items are in tricky places, but you don’t need to outwit a dragon first to get to where the Golden Foozle is buried.
This feels like a natural extension from the author who wrote Mansion Adventure; in that game, the play is almost solely in collecting clues to break open a particular lock with a few traps at the end. Here, most of the seven goal treasures are straightforward to find, with only the seventh behind a safe causing trouble. (It turned out to be a text-garbling issue likely having to do with the emulator, I’ll explain when I get there.)
The other thing the author emphasizes — and again this is a continuation of his previous work, although here it feels more systematic — is that there are plenty of objects that are there just because it is a ship and it’d be logical to have them there. There’s a rope on the deck that doesn’t get used, a lantern in a lifeboat that sees no action, a radio in a radio room that doesn’t get turned on. They don’t even feel like “red herrings” exactly; they’re things to prod at to check if there’s a treasure or a tool hiding, but don’t occupy much brain-space otherwise during gameplay.
Three above-deck rooms to demonstrate:
This is the one spot you can die, but at least there’s good forewarning. Notice the educational ship vocabulary tidbits!
There’s one chest with the word SAFE, which is solely there to hint there’s a hidden safe.
There’s a crowbar in one container that later will be useful…
…and one treasure hidden in the crow’s nest…
…but other than that it’s just atmosphere. I did find a “closed, locked hatchway” which is unopenable but it gets described as heavy steel, so I didn’t waste much time trying to open it.
There’s two floors below, let’s head to the bottom first since it is simpler.
This mainly serves to dispense a “screwdriver” in a work area, and a secret area with a diamond unlocked via a lever.
The remaining five treasures are on the middle floor.
A cargo hold contains a ruby, extractable via the crowbar.
The mate’s cabin has a bag with a flag in it that is folded. Open the flag, and out comes a sapphire.
A strongbox in a desk contained in the captain’s cabin has a jade.
Rather more trickily, the cabinet in the infirmary is described as being held by screws. Using the screwdriver from downstairs reveals yet another secret treasure.
This leaves the safe, and it was indeed helpful to have the word “SAFE” earlier since I had a notion what I was looking for. I tried MOVE on all the items I could touch until reaching the captain’s cabin again; the desk not only holds the jade but moves to show a safe.
As far as the combination for the safe goes, there’s an index card in one of the other cabins which is a straight self-contained puzzle.
Yes, the text is glitched here.
I tried 12/2/6 (thinking of the x marks as multiplication) and relatedly, 12/2/120 and 12/2/20. I eventually suspected the text was not displaying correctly and checked the source code.
1870 DATA”CAR”,”A small index Card”,”There is writing on it: 3x/4x+1/2x-1 where 3x + 2 = 20 ! ?”,0,1
Oho! So it’s just supposed to be an algebra problem (Olson was originally a college algebra teacher, remember). With 3x + 2 = 20, x has to be 6; then plug 6 in for x on the other three expressions to get 18, 25, and 11.
There was absolutely nothing sophisticated with the parser or world model, but the author kept to a mode of gameplay the parser could support and given this was supposed to be a short jaunt from a tape/diskmag, this ended up being enjoyable in the same manner as Eno. The author had a style that he ran to its conclusion (even including educational spots explaining what ship parts are) rather than trying to mimic Scott Adams entirely, making it a better game than his other two we’ve looked at so far.
Coming up: The Archive is in a good enough state I can make my second Missing Adventures post, and then we’ll finally wrap around back to the warm glow of the Apple II.
Another picture from the September 1982 cover of Softside.
After getting by the snake (which was a matter of realizing I could take an item from a room even though it doesn’t get described that way) the game was mostly straightforward; the pattern is that you have access to a whole, er, menagerie of animals, and they get used in various ways to solve puzzles. In a narrative sense, the animals are rallying together to assist in your breakout (except for the snake, and another critter you’ll see later).
To recap: I had a deadly snake blocking an intersection, and the only ways I could go were one way blocked by a metal wall, and another with the mirror (shown above) hiding a light rod farther back.
I’m generally used to the Kirsch games being explicit about items in rooms, but the mirror room is an exception. You can TAKE MIRROR, then apply it to the snake.
The “It’s getting darker” is because I didn’t have the pole-on-fire get blown out by the wind in this run. I’m still holding the light rod as shown so it counts as a bug.
I’m glad I had already made my verb list (SHOW might have otherwise still taken a little time to get to). With the snake out of the way (although we have to keep doing SHOW MIRROR passing through the center) we now have free travel of most of the ship. To the west is the bridge, which is only interesting in a narrative sense.
This helps explain why we don’t face much opposition in the events there are to come.
Headed upstairs first…
…the symmetrical arrangement has an empty cage in the middle (I suspect meant for our protagonist), a storage room with some rubber gloves, a meeting room with some keys and the notation north = Mars, south = Earth, a “control room” that clearly needs a battery…
…and a Robot Room with one of the more interesting moments in the game.
The robot is painting EARTHLING and you can come back later to see more letters painted.
This makes for a slightly unnerving timer to the events (if they finish, they catch you) but in gameplay terms the amount of time you have is fairly generous.
Heading downstairs is where all the animals are kept. And my apologies, but I misspoke last time: the animals are NEARLY all from planets other than Earth.
The rooms are pretty description-free (“YOU’RE IN A STALL”) so let’s focus on listing the menagerie. None of these animals talk:
VENUSIAN METAL EATERUS
MERCURIAN LAZY CLAM
NEPTUNIAN TERMITE
PLUTONIAN DIAMOND-HEAD WOLF
SATURNIAN PEACOCK
ELECTRIC EEL (in a water tank)
(If you were paying attention before, you might immediate spot two of them help solve puzzles, but let’s finish listing the menagerie first.)
There’s one completely empty room that will get filled later, and one which had a resident that has now left.
On top of the non-talking critters there’s GALAXIAN WISE OWL that dispenses some hints.
The other hints (picked at random) are “diamonds cut glass” and “ask the cat”. Speaking of the cat, the cat asks for a pearl.
We’ll come back to the pearl in a few; let’s get out the way the electric eel first. With the rubber gloves on you can pick it up and put it directly on the control panel (!!) and the lever will work.
This brings down a force field later. However, you don’t find out about the force field at all if you do this first, and I only learned about the force field by looking up a walkthrough after beating the game.
The METALEATER, as you might also have predicted, goes back to the mysterious wall made of metal. (Past this point, any animal you cart around has to have the chain unlocked first with the keys from the meeting room.)
Right after this wall is a wall made out of wood (bring forth the NEPTUNIAN TERMITE) and then one made out of glass (meaning we now want the PLUTONIAN DIAMOND-HEAD WOLF). The wolf doesn’t cut the glass automatically; we need to type CUT GLASS, suggesting we somehow pick up the wolf and use it as a can opener of sorts.
All this leads to a branching hallway where one way goes to a dead end with a stone wall, and I did not seem to have any creatures that could handle stone. The other way is a navigation chamber.
YOU’RE IN A NAVIGATION CHAMBER.
There’s a large compass standing on a green plush carpet. An arrow on a gauge points “N”. A dial is missing fron the navigation control.
With that route all a dead end, let’s return to the demand of the cat. It wants a pearl.
The CLAM immediately came to mind but the game didn’t understand TICKLE when I tried it (as hinted at by the owl). The game specifically says
Sorry, you can’t do that
which it normally does for actions it understands but won’t ever do, but in this case, I was simply missing the right item in inventory. I needed to go to the SATURNIAN PEACOCK and TAKE FEATHER first and then the clam would give up a pearl.
Once you deliver the pearl the cat has another demand.
This is when a Janusian mouse starts showing up at random. It runs away, but you can drop the half-eaten cheese and wait and eventually it will show up.
But wait! A twist!
You can, of course, ignore the mouse and cart it over to the cat (the mouse keeps repeating “please don’t feed me to the cat”) and eventually get laughed at.
When the cat mentions the landing on Mars, a counter starts ticking to actually arrive; a MARSIAN BULL gets scooped up at that stop and added to one of the stalls. The bull can’t talk but will help you with the stone wall.
Remember, there was a red flag attached to the flag pole at the start.
Behind the wall is a room with the missing navigation dial, so you can bring it back and fix the device.
Using the “north = mars, south = earth” guide…
…it’s almost time to go home. However, a robot is unhappy with your shenanigans (now they pay attention).
Alas, the bull doesn’t help you bust through.
I ended up needing to check Dale Dobson’s walkthrough who himself needed to check the source code. Back at the navigation room there’s a richly-described carpet (and nothing is richly-described in this game); it hides a secret exit, but you can’t just GET CARPET, you need to MOVE COMPASS first (!!).
This lets you bypass the guard robot and sneak your way out as soon as the vessel lands on Earth.
This would be the second game in a row where Kirsch gives a slightly unhappy ending. I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t swipe any artifacts, because the IRS would be after us for undeclared income.
This was simpler than the last few Kirsch games, but with him still cranking out content monthly (and not having any others jump in) it is understandable he tossed a more straightforward game in the queue. It does have his moments of plot beats (the Mars landing doesn’t happen until the cat talks about it), but the theming around animals = solutions means that most puzzles are simple to solve, even if somewhat elaborate in plot terms (I especially liked picking up a BULL and toting it around).
You’re on a pasture. Straight ahead you see a strange vehicle which appears to be a spacecraft of some sort. You are being drawn closer and closer, as if by sone magnetic force…
Through the doors you can see an eerie red light, illuminating an otherwise dark, foreboding passage. You can hear strange cries from within.
Suddenly you are rushed through the door, almost as if pushed from some outside force.
The September 1982 issue of Softside Magazine was devoted to computer graphics.
Art from the cover, scan via Atarimania.
Meanwhile, the Softside Adventure of the Month series marched on as an all-text jam (previously: The Mouse that Ate Chicago), with Peter Kirsch once again the author, as credited in the TRS-80 source code (dated June 1982). Once again, there are also Apple II and Atari versions. This time I went with Atari. I’ve already done a thorough job on what we know about Kirsch (including his first game, Magical Journey) so this was an ideal pick to go with while the Internet Archive is still down wobbly.
We’ve been scooped up by an alien spacecraft and the action immediately continues from there.
We’re immediately next to a dark room, and has matches. They’re the kind of matches they light up a room temporarily without any possible action in-between.
This appears on the screen temporarily before the game goes back to the dark description.
You can still pick up the pole while in the dark, the flag just rolls away. You can then light the pole (requiring another match) and treat it as a torch.
(It’s fascinating how there are specific rules being followed here and how different they are from other games. Here, you can walk in the dark safely but can be killed by something specific that is dangerous; you can pick up items while in the dark. There are plenty of games where dark = no manipulation of items in a room other than possibly dropping something. There’s also been plenty of games with matches, and while they usually don’t work as long as lamps or torches, only in a few games have had the mechanics like this, with the room made visible but 0 turns allowed. The ability to pick up items in darkness compensates.)
The snake here is a little farther, and I haven’t gotten past it yet. You might think the pole/torch would be good for prodding it, and that might even be the right action, but I haven’t found the right verb to express this if so.
TICKLE is the main one I wouldn’t normally think of, and it’s useful to know now there’s an emphasis on conversation and SHOWing things.
Fortunately, the snake only blocks some of the exits. Specifically the east-facing exits are all accessible. To the northeast there is a passage to a room of mirrors; you can break one of the mirrors in order to get into a windy passage which blows out your torch. At the end (in a room you can briefly light up with the matches) is a room with a “light rod”, and typing ON ROD (and no other syntax, as far as I can tell) will turn it on.
Directly to the east of the snake is a single room with a suggestive metal wall, but again, if there’s simply a parser action to do, I haven’t found it yet.
While it is not unusual for me to be stuck on a Kirsch game, usually the verbs have been reasonable to find, but given how little I have so far to work with (pole, matches, light rod, and the red flag from the pole which you find after you get some light) that seems like the only possibility. My suspicion is one of the two puzzles (snake or metal wall) will fall and then I’ll have a whole chain of events next time.
From the Winter 1982 Dynacomp catalog, via eBay. Two of the other North Star adventures upcoming (Windmere and Zodiac) are listed as “Late Arrivals” meaning Uncle Harry/Whembly came earlier.
I left off last time on a moment I felt was genuinely promising. The game had bestowed some clues where I thought I just needed to interpret them and arrive at the goal, but the only clue of any note is “DIG 1800 GOLDPIECES………”. I still don’t know what the purpose of Alice and the rabbit and so forth are.
I was sidetracked into thinking (because the rabbit had a wristwatch) that maybe 1800 referred to a time, 18:00, which on a clock would be “south”. Just to the south of the painting is a privy, and maybe I could use the rope to go in….?
AGAINST THE EAST WALL. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A PAINTING OF A YOUNG GIRL HOLDING A RABBIT. THE RABBIT IS WEARING A WRISTWATCH. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND SOUTH.
YOU SEE HERE, A NOTE
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE IN A PRIVY. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND SOUTH.
NOW WHAT? >D
YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY
No. What you can instead do (with help from Gus and Rob in the comments) is go to the random well in the northwest corner and TIE ROPE to go down. As far as I can tell no clue is related to this.
YOU ARE HANGING AT THE END OF THE ROPE.
YOU ARE AT THE END OF THE ROPE DANGLING OVER A TEN FOOT DIAMETER HOLE IN THE FLOOR OF A LARGE ROOM.
NOW WHAT? >D
YOU ARE IN THE LOWER WELL ROOM. THERE IS A 10 FT. DIAMETER HOLE HERE. THERE ARE DOORS EAST, SE, AND SOUTH.
It isn’t like “climb the well” is unreasonable but it was disappointing to think the game was going in an interesting direction only to find not much going on.
From here is when the slog begins.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF HALLS
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE AT A DEAD END
The game decided to give another maze. I sighed and started dutifully mapping. My map is a mess and incomplete so I’m not going to give the whole thing.
Early on there’s a bit of a trap: what looks like a vault door. Perhaps the gold is inside?
NOW WHAT? >OPEN DOOR
THE DOOR SWINGS OPEN WITH A CRASH. TONS OF ICY WATER POUR THROUGH THE OPENING. THE WATER LEVEL RISES RAPIDLY! YOU DROWN!!!
WELL, YOU MANAGED TO GET YOURSELF KILLED! BETTER LUCK WITH YOUR NEXT TRY. HOPE YOU REMEMBERED TO SAVE THE GAME BEFORE TRYING SOMETHING NEW!
After enough trudging I finally hit a room with something different:
YOU ARE IN A LARGE ROOM. IN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM ON A ROUND BASE IS THE STATUE OF A WOMAN. HER ARM IS RAISED AND POINTING AT YOU.
NOW WHAT? > ROTATE STATUE
ROTATE TO WHAT DIRECTION? W
A DOOR IN THE WEST WALL OPENS. THE OTHER DOOR CLOSES.
The rotating arm lets you flip between exits. There’s a switch to a water pump to the west that will drain the water, and a battery in another. Additionally, in a completely random spot in the maze, down a dead end, there is a flashlight to go with the battery. I found the flashlight first and found if you try to light it the game just wouldn’t let me, and the player is just supposed to use their imagination to guess that a battery is required.
With the water drained, you can pass through the vault-looking door to find yourself underneath a pool that marked the center of the castle.
YOU ARE IN A DAMP CHAMBER. THERE ARE PUDDLES OF WATER EVERYWHERE. HIGH ABOVE IS A LARGE CIRCULAR MESH GRATING. YOU CAN SEE THE SKY THROUGH THE GRATING. THERE IS A TUNNEL TO THE NORTH AND AN EXIT WEST.
I thought, well, finally, this is getting back on track. Maybe we’ll have to triangulate directions based on the fact we know the pool is in the middle. Going north required light (LOAD FLASHLIGHT / LIGHT FLASHLIGHT) and I moved forward to gloriously find myself…
YOU ARE AT THE BOTTOM OF A LONG FLIGHT OF STAIRS A TUNNEL LEADS SOUTH
NOW WHAT? >U
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TUNNELS
…back in another, entirely distinct maze.
The game is nice enough to maintain the rule that if room A goes to B, an exit from B goes to A. However, even given games like Acheton which went overboard with their mazes, I’ve never experienced a game with the mazes as grinding as this. Acheton tried to mix in variety, with things like a “turn-based Pac-man” maze, a hedge maze, and a gimmick maze that required an item; here, it is literally the same action over and over and over and over. Drop items, keep track of exits, repeat.
Incidentally, as part of all this I found an exit going back to the manhole near the cabin. Unfortunately, this is a one-way trip, so this bit that might be nice location continuity (and the opportunity to enter the maze via a different route) ends up being a softlock.
Eventually — after another moment of false promise climbing down a hole which seems like it might be the end, but no — the maze winds its way to the outside.
YOU ARE AT THE BASE OF A LARGE MOUNTAIN. THERE IS A MINE ENTRANCE TO THE EAST. A PATH LEADS NW. THERE ARE DENSE WOODS ON BOTH SIDES OF THE PATH.
NOW WHAT? >NW
YOU ARE ON A PATH IN THE WOODS. THE PATH TURNS NORTH AND SE HERE.
This leads to a fork in the road. On the northeast fork there is a “SMALL CLEARING” with a “WOODEN BENCH” and a “SHOVEL”. To the left are some graves and the last part of the game, so you might think: we are free of mazes, yes? We are now trying to use the clues to find the gold?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha no it’s another maze.
At least this one is interesting to look at.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
SIR JOHN WHEMBLY
1729 – 1818
KNIGHT & PIRATE
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
P. MORTON CLYDE
HUNG TILL HE DIED
HIGHWAYMAN
1632 – 1688
As I said earlier, the 1800 clue is pertinent: you’re looking for the year. However, there’s not really much reason to look hard, since it is easy to DIG in every room, and the important one is most likely going to come near the end of your mapping due to how the map is structured.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
BABY
AURUM
DIED-A-BORNIN’
1800
NOW WHAT? >DIG
YOU DIG INTO THE GRAVE.
YOUR SHOVEL HITS A COFFIN.
The coffin has a small skeleton (…sad…) but if you LIFT COFFIN you see an extra hole and the treasure.
NOW WHAT? >LIFT COFFIN
BEHIND THE SIDE OF THE COFFIN IS A HOLE IN THE SIDE OF THE GRAVE. THERE IS A CHEST IN THE HOLE.
NOW WHAT? >OPEN CHEST
THE CHEST IS FILLED WITH GOLD COINS.
A SHEET OF PAPER IN THE CHEST READS: CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE FOUND MY GOLD! NOW, LEAVE IT HERE AND SEE IF YOUR FRIENDS CAN FIND IT!!!
JOHN WHEMBLY
For my longtime readers, you know I’m willing to tolerate a lot of nonsense. I’ve played enough games from the era to be able to be “in the head” of a player from that time period and get a feeling how they’d react. I just don’t see even the most maze-crazed of fans being enthused about this. Most of the games I’ve played has kept to the unspoken rule of one (1) standard maze and if you insist on more you need to mix up the configuration somehow. So despite an absolutely standard maze in Murdac it could be one of my favorite games of 1982, and when there was a second maze (the haunted house with the flying furniture) it wasn’t really a maze at all.
But I’m mostly annoyed that the premise didn’t pay off. Uncle Harry had a genuinely good moment with home base (undercut by a bug, but still, conceptually) and I thought the follow-up might have more of that with less of the fluff of mapping an endless freeway system. The endless mazes made this game worse instead.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
HERE LIES IMA PRUDE
BORN A VIRGIN
LIVED A VIRGIN
DIED A VIRGIN
WHO SAYS YOU CANT
TAKE IT WITH YOU?
1740 – 1831
I’ve been on the hunt for R.L. Turner still, and maybe the open possibility that he or she did more games, but I’ve come up empty. However, it’s only recently these games were even unearthed, so I’m still hopeful at least more information will appear in the future.
For now, let’s return to the (fictional) future, as we get help from various animals in an alien zoo to escape a UFO.
As part of their maximalist approach, Dynacomp also did public domain distribution. Disks via eBay.
ADDENDUM: I got so caught up in the maze nonsense that I forgot to mention the resolution to the drawbridge. With the crank, you can LIFT PORTCULLIS as a direct command; the use of the crank is passive and automatic if you’re holding it, so the bit with the small hole can be ignored. With the sword you can then CUT ROPE to open the drawbridge. All this turns out to be meaningless, as there’s no point in going back outside. This seems to be due to a bug. You were supposed to leave the can with gas behind before climbing the vine, and then get it after dropping the drawbridge, then use it to start the generator. Since the generator already has gas — I assume due to a bug — none of this is necessary at all.
The essential vibe that Uncle Harry’s Will had that felt “original” wasn’t necessarily the car aspect as much as deciphering a riddle while applying it to a large landscape. Many adventures have had cryptic instructions as part of their gameplay, but they usually don’t involve what might happen in a realistic “puzzle hunt” where there’s an enormous amount of extra space, and you have to apply the riddles/poems/clues in a way that whittles down the possibilities. The MIT Puzzle Hunt — the in-person component, at least — has an entire college campus as fair game, but only a small percentage is used.
I’ve hit this moment in Whembly Castle, and I’m not sure yet how to decipher the clues. While the game doesn’t start you with a poem there are some hidden within the castle itself.
Cover of one of the Dynacomp catalogs, from Jason Scott.
But first: last time I had stopped right before getting down to the bottom of a ladder under a manhole. At the very bottom is a compass, which can be used at the foggy lake.
YOU ARE IN A SMALL CHAMBER AT THE END OF A TUNNEL. THERE IS A LADDER FASTENED TO THE SIDE OF THE WALL. A LARGE SHAFT RISES ABOVE YOU. A TUNNEL LEADS WEST.
YOU SEE HERE, A SMALL COMPASS
Going west from here leads to darkness. It may simply be a red herring or it may be the tunnel gets entered via the opposite direction later. I don’t have any obvious light sources; while I have a can of gasoline, there’s no method of lighting it. The rusty key, the iron bar, and the oars aren’t helpful; I’ve got the deck of cards, but my character isn’t Gambit.
YOU ARE IN AN EAST-WEST TUNNEL THE TUNNEL SLOPES UPWARD TO THE EAST.
NOW WHAT? >W
IT IS PITCH BLACK HERE. TO CONTINUE WITHOUT LIGHT COULD BE DANGEROUS.
Leaving this be for the moment, I went to take the compass to the lake and got hit horribly by the boat bug again: while in the boat, the game claims you can’t go west (even though you should be able to). Rob suggested dropping the oars but I found it made no difference. I went as far as restarting my game altogether in case I had some corruption. Being able to go WEST ended up just working sometimes at random. I can’t guarantee this isn’t an emulator bug.
Here’s what my playing setup looks like. North Star is being played as an emulator inside an emulator, which works better than you might expect, but there’s still the open possibility of some obscure command being performed wrong.
Finally breaking out into the lake, though, the game uses a grid of rooms:
The Castle is marked by a berm that you can row around.
YOU ARE ON THE LAKE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE CASTLE. A 5 FOOT BERM RUN EAST AND SOUTH HERE. A HUGE TOWER RISES INTO THE FOG HERE.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEAR THE BERM BY THE WEST WALL.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
Hopping out of the boat causes the boat to float away (I think this is meant to be a one-way trip). The south side of the berm has a drawbridge (not openable from the outside) and on the southwest side there’s a tower with vines that indicates you can climb.
YOU ARE ON THE BERM AT THE BASE OF THE SW TOWER.
THERE IS A THICK VINE GROWING UP THE SIDE OF THE SW TOWER. IT LOOKS LIKE YOU COULD CLIMB IT IF YOU ARE CAREFULL.
I had quite a lot of frustration here as CLIMB VINE simply told me YOU’RE UNABLE TO DO THAT with no explanation why. I finally realized this was not a “your command is not being parsed properly” scenario but rather “something is preventing the action but we’re not going to tell you what it is because transparency in error messages is for weaklings”. I tried dropping everything and the climbing finally worked:
YOU ARE HALF WAY UP THE TOWER. THE VINE HERE IS THINNER AND SEEMS TO BE A BIT LOOSE. BETTER HURRY UP.
NOW WHAT? >CLIMB VINE
YOU SCRAMBLE UP THE VINE. NEAR THE TOP THE VINE IS THINNER. YOU CAN FEEL IT BEGIN TO COME AWAY FROM THE TOWER WALL. AS YOU GRAB THE EDGE OF THE PARAPET, THE VINE TEARS AWAY AND FALLS TO THE GROUND. YOU PULL YOURSELF OVER THE TOP.
YOU ARE ON THE TOP OF THE TOWER. THERE IS A HATCH HERE.
(On a repeat test, I was able to climb holding one item. I don’t know what the limit is.)
Going through this lands the player on the second floor of the castle, so let me give the map of that first:
It’s hard to know what to focus on; there’s a lot of places that are clearly just functional but it may be we are supposed to do something vital in a nondescript room just because one of the clues (which I promise I’ll show off soon) signals it.
YOU ARE IN AN EMPTY STOREROOM. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND WEST.
NOW WHAT? >N
YOU ARE AT THE JUNCTION OF THE WEST AND SOUTH HALLWAYS. THERE ARE DOORS SOUTH AND WEST.
The northwest corner has a ornate bedroom with a button next to a mirror.
YOU ARE IN A VERY ORNATE BEDROOM. THIS IS THE MASTER BEDROOM. THERE IS A FOURPOSTER BED AND AND LARGE DRESSER HERE. ON THE NORTH WALL IS A FULL-LENGTH MIRROR. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND EAST.
NOW WHAT? >EXAMINE MIRROR
THERE IS A BUTTON ON THE EDGE OF THE MIRROR.
(PUSH isn’t normally recognized as a verb; it seems the game has PUSH BUTTON hardcoded as a thing that works.)
Going in you can find a tower with a brass key, but also a corpse and some warning about blocking the entrance. The mirror once closed can’t be opened the other way.
YOU FORGOT TO BLOCK THE DOOR WITH SOMETHING! YOU SLOWLY STARVE TO DEATH! TOO BAD!
WELL, YOU MANAGED TO GET YOURSELF KILLED! BETTER LUCK WITH YOUR NEXT TRY. HOPE YOU REMEMBERED TO SAVE THE GAME BEFORE TRYING SOMETHING NEW!
The random leather boot can be used to invoke the command BLOCK MIRROR after opening it, allowing the player to grab the key safely.
A similar “trap room” can be invoked by visiting the first floor…
…finding the power room and pulling the switch (which does not need extra gas to run, although I assume we’ll still need to fill it up later)…
NOW WHAT? >N
YOU ARE AT THE JUNCTION OF THE EAST AND NORTH HALLWAYS. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND EAST.
NOW WHAT? >N
YOU ARE IN THE POWER ROOM. THERE IS A LARGE GASOLINE GENERATOR HERE. AT ONE END IS A SMALL GAS TANK. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A SWITCH. THERE IS AN EXIT SOUTH.
NOW WHAT? >PULL SWITCH
THE GENERATOR STARTS WITH A ROAR!
…then going back to the second floor (southeast corner) with an “office” that has a button that can be pushed.
THE DOOR SLIDES CLOSED BEHIND YOU
YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM. THERE IS A TABLE AND CHAIR HERE. SEATED AT THE TABLE IS A SKELETON. SCRATCHED IN THE SURFACE OF THE TABLE IS THE FOLLOWING: LAST WILL OF SILAS FRUMP. GOT LOCKED IN THIS ROOM. HOPE THE PERSON THAT FINDS ME THINKS TO BLOCK THE DOOR WITH A CHAIR. I AM STARVING. I WILL LEAVE A CLUE I DISCOVERED. DIG 1800 GOLDPIECES………
You can block again, this time with a chair, but there’s no item as far as I can tell? This means there’s something essential in the text but it’s a fairly vague clue.
Other clues include a note randomly in one of the side rooms…
THE NOTE READS:
GOOD LUCK FRIEND, WITH YOUR ONGOING SEARCH FOR MY GOLD. LEAVE NOT A STONE UNTURNED DURING YOUR WANDERINGS AND IN TIME YOU SHALL FIND MANY NEW CLUES. SOME OF THEM WILL GUIDE YOU STRAIGHT, SOME NOT. ROAM EACH HALL, SEARCH IN ALL PLACES. SOME THINGS WILL VERY LIKELY PASS UNNOTICED, EVEN IF YOU LOOK AT THEM!
…and a secret inscription off the northeast corner, this time found by pulling a hook.
YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE NE TOWER. THERE IS A BRONZE TABLET FASTENED TO THE WALL HERE. IT READS:
I HAVE HIDDEN IT WELL.
TO FIND MY GOLD WILL
BE DIFFICULT. THE KEY
CLUE SHALL BE NAMED.
YOU SHALL SEE FOR YOURSELF
THE GOLD IF THE SCRATCHES
PLACED ON THIS TABLET
ARE READ AND MADE NOTE
OF. SIR JOHN WHEMBLY
The southwest tower similarly has a clue but is not blocked off:
YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE SW TOWER. THERE IS METAL PLAQUE FASTENED TO THE WALL HERE. THE PLAQUE READS:
“PUT FIVE TOGETHER. SHE KNOWS WAYS.”
STAIRS LEAD DOWN.
The “five together” might be referring to letters that are scattered randomly through rooms on the first floor. Samples:
YOU ARE IN THE STEWARDS OFFICE. THERE IS A DESK HERE. ON THE WALL IS PAINTED THE LETTER “I”. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH,EAST AND SW.
YOU ARE AT THE SOUTH END OF THE “GREAT HALL”. A LONG, HIGH ROOM USED FOR EATING. THERE IS A LONG TABLE DOWN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM. ON THE WEST WALL IS A MASSIVE FIREPLACE. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS PAINTED THE LETTER “L”. THERE IS A DOOR EAST.
Put all together, there are the letters, I, L, C, E, and A. They anagram to ALICE. This is clearly referring to a picture found at the note I mentioned earlier (the one that mentions “SOME THINGS WILL VERY LIKELY PASS UNNOTICED”).
YOU ARE IN THE STUDY. THERE IS A DESK AGAINST THE EAST WALL. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A PAINTING OF A YOUNG GIRL HOLDING A RABBIT. THE RABBIT IS WEARING A WRISTWATCH. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND SOUTH.
YOU SEE HERE, A NOTE
I haven’t gotten any significance out of this room otherwise and I suspect I’m missing a parser command. Doing EXAMINE or MOVE give me nothing on any noun other than the note (MOVE isn’t even recognized as a verb).
There’s still other new items lying around to play with (a sword, a rope, a horseshoe, a crank, a silver key in addition to the brass one I mentioned earlier) and there’s one more straightforward concrete puzzle: how to open the drawbridge. With a key (I’m not sure which one, they work passively!) you can get at the drawbridge controls, but I can’t get them to work.
YOU ARE IN THE DRAWBRIDGE EQUIPMENT ROOM. THERE IS A LARGE WINDLASS HERE WITH ROPES LEADING TO THE TOP OF THE DRAWBRIDGE. IN ONE CORNER IS A LARGE PULLY WITH WIRES LEADING DOWN TO THE PORTCULLIS. THERE IS A SQUARE HOLE IN THE PULLY WHEEL. ON THE FLOOR HERE ARE SOME SMALL HOLES LOOKING INTO A PASSAGE BELOW.
TURN WINDLASS is recognized but it is described as rusty. The crank is suggestive but I have not been able to get the parser to recognize any use of it. Other than bespoke commands (which includes turning the windlass) the only ones I have are CUT, DIG, CLIMB, READ, OPEN, LIGHT, UNLOCK, TIE, JUMP, EXAMINE, ENTER, and CHOP — not suggestive for fixing anything, and I’m pretty sure TIE is meant solely for tying the boat at the docks.
I will take speculation at this point on anything (although my one reader, hello Rob, who has solved it already — please hold off on hints for now).
Recently, the Internet Archive went down, and unfortunately, my next several posts were dependent in some way or another on references there. Hence, I scrapped my schedule and picked something I didn’t need extra research for: the sequel to Uncle Harry’s Will, by R. L. Turner, as written for the North Star Horizon.
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!
The previous game involved a gigantic map which tried to re-create the roadmap of an entire country, and the player had to follow the instructions of a poem in the manner similar to a gimmick road rally. It was, if nothing else, unique.
Whembly Castle is much more traditional: we’re on foot, we’ve arrived at a castle, we’re looking for treasure with no poem to guide us.
We even start adjacent to a forest! Very unexpected, I know.
YOU ARE AT THE END OF A ROAD LEADING NORTH. THERE ARE DENSE, UNPENATRABLE WOODS ON EACH SIDE. TO THE WEST IS A SMALL GATEHOUSE.
NOW WHAT? >W
YOU ARE IN A SMALL EMPTY ROOM. THERE IS A SIGN PAINTED ON THE WALL HERE. IT READS: BEWARE THE ICY WATER!
The start area is meant generally just to stall the player from trying a direct approach.
Entering a gate over a bridge leads to a lake which is a dead end.
YOU ARE AT THE SOUTH END OF A BRIDGE EXTENDING NORTH OVER A VERY FOGGY LAKE. SMALL TOWERS FLANK THE PASSAGE. THERE IS A DOOR INTO THE WEST TOWER.
NOW WHAT? >N
YOU ARE AT THE NORTH END OF A BRIDGE WHICH ENDS ABRUPLY HERE. TO THE NORTH LIES THE LAKE. MISTY WHITE FOG COVERS THE WATER. YOU CAN SEE A DARK MASS IN THE FOG TO THE NORTH.
Trying to enter the lake results in the icy doom warned about in the sign. The proper way to go is the previously mentioned west tower, which has a deck of cards. After picking up the deck of cards, the game rather unusually gives the player ACE OF DIAMONDS through KING OF DIAMONDS as individual objects.
YOU ARE IN THE WEST TOWER OF THE BARBICAN.
THERE IS A BENCH AND A TABLE HERE.
NOW WHAT? >INVENTORY
YOU ARE CARRYING:
AN ACE OF DIAMONDS
A TWO OF DIAMONDS
A THREE OF DIAMONDS
A FOUR OF DIAMONDS
A FIVE OF DIAMONDS
A SIX OF DIAMONDS
A SEVEN OF DIAMONDS
AN EIGHT OF DIAMONDS
A NINE OF DIAMONDS
A TEN OF DIAMONDS
A JACK OF DIAMONDS
A QUEEN OF DIAMONDS
A KING OF DIAMONDS
This is quite unusual and ominous, and I immediately knew this signaled a maze coming, and the objects were intended to map things out. Indeed, heading back to enter the forest, one step in reveals “YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS”.
Topologically, you can consider the map above to be in three sections.
The “main” group is an interconnected set of 11 rooms, with many of them having a “Dead End” branch room. (The idea of random dead ends scattered about dates back to Crowther’s Adventure, even pre-Woods.) In a narrative sense, if someone is stumbling around they’ll essentially go in circles although there’s no special tendencies to force the player back to the start (unlike some mazes, which include special one-way “trap” exits; see the ending maze of Sphinx Adventure for the most extreme example). This is essentially forced by the author’s insistance that if room A goes to room B, there is a path that also lets you go back from B to A. In the context of a cave, one way exits can make sense (you come from above using gravity somehow) but in a forest it doesn’t, so I appreciate the decision.
The “branch” I have marked is miss-able by someone not thorough enough: it leads to a key.
YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS
NOW WHAT? >E
YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS
YOU SEE HERE, A RUSTY IRON KEY
The “ending” section is separated from the main set, making it less likely someone will wander to the end of the maze by accident.
YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS
NOW WHAT? >NE
YOU ARE AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS. TO THE NORTH IS A CLEARING. THE LAKE LIES ALONG THE WEST EDGE OF THE CLEARING. THERE ARE WOODS SURROUNDING THE CLEARING. THERE IS A TRAIL INTO THE WOODS TO THE SOUTH. YOU CAN SEE A BUILDING TO THE NORTH.
This leads to a shack next to a dock and a boat. Just for simplicity of explanation, I’ll assume a player who has already poked ahead to the next outdoor area (a cabin) and returned with a metal prybar lying out in the open.
With the prybar you can bust through a rusty padlock into the shack and find some oars.
YOU ARE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE SHACK. THERE IS A HAND-OPERATED GASOLINE PUMP HERE. THERE IS GAS IN THE PUMP.
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE WOODEN SHACK. ON THE DOOR THERE IS A RUSTY HASP AND PADLOCK. TO THE WEST IS A BOAT DOCK. TO THE NORTH A GAS PUMP.
NOW WHAT? >OPEN DOOR
OK!
NOW WHAT? >E
YOU ARE IN A SMALL OFFICE. THERE IS A DUSTY COUNTER HERE.
THERE ARE DOORS EAST AND WEST.
NOW WHAT? >E
YOU ARE IN A DIRTY STORAGE ROOM.
YOU SEE HERE, A PAIR OF OARS
The oars let you jump in the boat and row around, although I found it quite finicky; the game insisted I not use ROW WEST but instead just type the direction, but at first just typing the direction failed. I am unclear the source of the bug.
Even after getting to the lake, it turns out to be too foggy to move around.
YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEAR THE EAST SHORE. THERE ARE ROCKS EAST.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
NOW WHAT? >W
THE LAKE IS VERY FOGGY! YOU’LL NEVER FIND YOUR WAY WITHOUT A COMPASS!
There’s another bug with the boat I’ll get to in a second, but let’s check out the final area first.
This is straightforwardly a cabin with another locked door, but rather than forcing it this time, you can use the key from the forest maze.
YOU ARE IN A LARGE ROOM. THERE ARE CHAIRS AND A TABLE HERE. A LARGE DESK SITS IN ONE CORNER NEXT TO A FIREPLACE. THERE IS A BED ALONG ONE WALL. NEXT TO THE BED IS A SMALL DRESSER.
YOU SEE HERE, A GAS CAN
(The desk, dresser, table, etc. don’t seem to be hiding anything.)
The gas can can be filled up back at the shack; I haven’t used the filled can for anything yet, but I do wonder if we get to hit the road somewhere just like the last game. There’s also off to the side a manhole that goes underground.
YOU ARE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE CLEARING.
THERE IS A MANHOLE COVER IN THE GROUND HERE.
NOW WHAT? >OPEN HATCH
THERE IS A LADDER HERE LEADING DOWN TO A CHAMBER BELOW.
NOW WHAT? >D
YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE LADDER.
THERE IS A TRAPDOOR ABOVE YOUR HEAD
(Notice how it is referred to as a “manhole cover” but you need to call it a “hatch” to get anywhere. Yes, this game retains the guess-the-noun from the previous one.)
I’ve gotten a little farther, but this seems like a good place to cut off. I did promise I’d return to the boat.
While I was able to enter the boat, I have yet to discern a good syntax for leaving the boat. Out of desparation I just tried leaving east at the docks, thinking it might have my avatar hop out of the boat automatically. Instead, the boat stayed with me.
YOU ARE AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE WOODEN SHACK. ON THE DOOR THERE IS A RUSTY HASP AND PADLOCK. TO THE WEST IS A BOAT DOCK. TO THE NORTH A GAS PUMP.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
Land boat! You can “ride” the boat all the way to the underground, but if you do that, you hit the “fog” condition and end up getting warped back to the docks.
YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE LADDER. THERE IS A TRAPDOOR ABOVE YOUR HEAD
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
NOW WHAT? >D
THE LAKE IS VERY FOGGY! YOU’LL NEVER FIND YOUR WAY WITHOUT A COMPASS!
YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEXT TO THE DOCK. THE LAKE IS COVERED WITH A DENSE FOG.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
The last game went up to roughly 200 rooms and I’ve only got 71 so far, so I expect quite a bit to go. I do find it interesting the same room-to-object ratio is still fairly large. In a road trip, it’s understandable you wouldn’t see much by the side of the road worth picking up; here, in a “classic” style adventure, the ratio feels a little more uneasy, but it is possible the game will change things up later.
I’ve finished the game; this is continued from my last post.
Via the Centre of Computing History. ftb on Discord pointed me to one of these mega-shareware discs having a copy of Raspion, but compiled for DOS.
First off, RavenWorks cleared something up for me: that SLIT message was referring to the acronym that goes with the “say Lymbar in tomb” in the book; I hadn’t been paying attention to the acronyms and I additionally had already mentally “used up” the book so had thought SLIT was referring to some other thing. Figuring out to use that phrase is honestly easier than the GIVE REGARDS puzzle so I would expect most people playing to hit the two moments out of order.
The desert was the real obstacle. I was frustrated trying to figure out something clever so I went into “brute force mode”, doing things like dropping an item and testing one exit before dying, then repeating. I thought I was honestly “spinning my wheels” a bit, like when I solved for a dark maze in Savage Island 1 too early via brute force. It turns out the game really does intend brute force:
Now, at first visual glance — and probably to the author’s eyes — this doesn’t look too bad. It’s just a grid where you’re supposed to find the right location. However, in context, with the loops there, this comes across as a maze, and I had to treat it as such. I only realized the author intended a grid (with us starting at the southwest corner) at the very end of the process. Once you look at a finalized map with a loop it can seem straightforward but from my experience it can double the mapping time.
Another case shows up right after falling into the underground river:
Heading north from the river drops the player not only in an endless loop but a softlock. I wasn’t expecting a double-loop there so it took me a while to realize what was going on. The right way to go is south to a shore.
Going west leads to a dead end, but the spade — which I had been testing absolutely everywhere — finally pays off.
The exit you dig leads back to the park near the house, so I had no new treasures to speak of, meaning I had missed something (rather, two somethings). The first is a “platinum nugget” that just washes up on the shore when you visit it the second time (I guess saying things wash up is a hint to be checking back, but a player with a different sequence of events might get very frustrated because it doesn’t feel like solving a puzzle). The second is found by going back to the water and using DIVE, which I knew to do because it was on my verb list.
The chest is described as “locked” but the keys don’t work.
The “sign” is the subway sign I had been carrying around in order to do mapping. It was genuinely useful to bump up my item count in the Caverns of Syl.
It immediately occurred to me the hammer was now useful, but I couldn’t SMASH CHEST either, and it took me some fiddling to realize the chest’s description mentions a lock, so you’re supposed to SMASH LOCK.
And that’s everything! The coins and nugget get dragged back to the start, the end, horray.
Rob in the comments compared the setting to 70s sci-fi shows like Ark II and Morpheus Kitami mentioned the concept being like a Lovecraft story.
From the third episode of the only season of Ark II. Yes, the chimpanzee is a crew member.
I personally was hoping for something like the Twilight Zone episode Time Enough at Last where there’d be a twist ending.
From Vivarium (2019), an A24 movie about a couple trapped in a mysterious labyrinth of houses. It hit most theaters right before the pandemic lockdown.
Look, this was a TRS-80 game in 10,500 bytes, I knew there wouldn’t be much, but a two-sentence twist ending which reflects on the state of the player would have been possible. Nothing about being trapped in the city is explained, nor what happens after. In a way this is like Strange Adventure which lands you trapped on a tiny island with your treasures; the “winning” is almost abstracted from the practicality of the narrative. The sarcastic narrative voice of Strange Adventure made it clear the author had awareness of the bizarre ending point, but here I’m not sure if the author intended anything more with Raspion than a straight treasure hunt.
(Here’s a related question: when the player shoots the nosy neighbor in It Takes a Thief, does the author realizes this shifts the narrative tone entirely, or is it just another puzzle?)
BONUS:
A bit of history deleted from my last post but the picture is too good not to include.
When the General Electric OARAC computer started working, they invited 6 humans in a computation contest, trying to find the square of 8,645,392,175 by hand vs. the computer. The computer time was 0.004 seconds, the average human time was 8 minutes. All six humans failed to get the correct answer. Connie Hodgson of Syracuse, New York, is shown here pointing at where she forgot to carry the one.
While General Electric (the company originating with Edison in 1878) is not much remembered for computers now, they were involved quite early. They started a relationship with the Air Force in 1948 manufacturing jet engines (only a year after that branch of the military was founded); this relationship let to the OARAC (Office of Air Research Automatic Computer) being built by GE and installed in 1953.
The military computer’s success led some in GE to push for going into computers more generally, but it didn’t happen until 1955. Bank of America did a call for bids to develop an electronic accounting method; while GE put in a bid, they fully expected to lose to IBM, but instead came out with the win at $32 million (in 1955 dollars). This led to the development of the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition system, and at the same time, GE established a computer department in Phoenix, focused on business mainframes.
Through the 1950s and 1960s they producing a long line of machines: the GE-100, 225, 312/412, 635, and 645. Mainframe manufactures, with IBM being the “old man” of the industry, were dubbed Snow White (IBM) and the Seven Dwarves (Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, General Electric and RCA). I’m going to guess GE was Grumpy. RCA was a spinoff from GE in 30s, so they were competing against their own spinoff.
GE was heavily involved in operating system development (notably the GECOS for their GE-600) and time sharing (allowing many people to use alternating cycles of mainframes). The ground zero of timesharing, Dartmouth, used GE hardware and was a joint project between the college and the company; this was the same system where Dartmouth developed the first version of BASIC.
GE eventually started losing ground to competitors and sold their computer assets to Honeywell; however, they still kept their time-sharing services, and after a number of changes, they were dubbed the General Electric Information Services (GEIS).
This remained a business-only service, but the number of unused computer cycles led GE to make a commercial spin-off in 1985 that would serve as a competitor to the dial-in services of the time, CompuServe and The Source. GE’s long-standing time-sharing infrastructure — dating back to the very invention of the concept — enabled them to charge less than their competitors.
While CompuServe had Forums, where people of common interests would gather, GEnie had RoundTables. For our story today, the important RoundTable is the Tandy RoundTable; the TRS-80 community there became the big hub for online enthusiasts. One of the sysops, Tim Sewell, uploaded his public domain and shareware library of software (keep in mind “public domain” was a vague notion in the 80s); as a second outlet he created a disk distribution group known as the File Cabinet, so that people who weren’t on GEnie could get the same access. In a survey from 1989 he found only 10 percent of the people who answered even had a modem and only a small fraction of that group even used one. (To be fair, even with GEnie’s lower prices being online via dial-in was quite expensive at the time. Note the launch article touting $35 an hour primetime — essentially, day hours. Even by the 90s when things were slightly cheaper primetime use went for $18 an hour. That’s about $41 an hour in 2024 money.)
Whilst browsing, Raspion Adventure caught my eye as something I had never seen before and was not in any of my references. That File Cabinet link seems to be the only reason the game survives today. The BASIC source was entirely devoid of an author name or year, but the distinctive name led me to find an ad in 80 Microcomputing (May 1981).
This is the only reference to RanDob (P.O. Box 1662 out of Boca Raton, Florida) I’ve been able to pull up. It lists a second adventure game (It Takes a Thief) and it is one I’ve played before! Not only that, that game gives an author name: Randy Dobkin. Previously, it was a game I only knew about via mysterious index card, and I had thought it might just have been someone’s unpublished side project, but apparently the author tried to sell it at least a little.
While it is not guaranteed Raspion has the same author as Thief, by source code similarity I’m marking it as essentially certain. It Takes a Thief placed you as a criminal robbing a home, with no preface: you just start in your getaway vehicle and get to work. It didn’t really need any explanation. Raspion, on the other hand, is cryptic even after it starts progressing:
We’re supposed to “visit the deserted city and find Syl and its treasures”. This is a treasure hunt with asterisks around the names of treasures; so far, normal. The game even has a “your house” opening (the only useful item is a spade) and there’s a storage room where the treasures go.
Going out to the door, however, leads straight to the aforementioned city.
Is this …. a horror premise? Has our house been mystically tossed into a future city? The adventure-collection aspect suggests not, but the “no escape” is striking. I haven’t finished yet so I don’t know if there’s some plot turn.
Here’s a meta-map of what I have so far:
The city part has a park where you can find a keys and a book hidden in bushes. The book requires unlocking with the keys. The book gives various “key phrases” if you TURN PAGE but only one of them is useful.
Say Lymbar in tomb is the useful one. The “stop reading books” warning is literal and if you TURN PAGE again you will die.
Also near the park is a moving walkway (WAIT will cause the player to change rooms) and there’s a computer off the side; I’ll get back to that later. Let’s check out the Tower of Lorgon next.
The tower starts with a ground floor that has spinning mirrors, and if you are in the room for more than two turns, you get dizzy and die. This means you can safely pass through and safely pass back but can’t linger (otherwise you’ll die on the way back).
The tower leads up to a roof with a vent, which you can climb to find a stair described as “mile-long”. Again I get cryptic vibes, although the path down only lets you go a hundred yards before getting stopped.
The “impassable” stone has an inscription
There is a better way. Give my regards to the keeper of the records. — Ranon of Lymbar
which will come up later. I have yet to find a use for the hammer (even though SMASH is a verb).
Moving back to the park, on the far east side is the Tomb, which is where the clue from the book gets used.
This opens a route down to a subway that has a “Yttrium capsule” you can ride.
At the end of the line there are two branches. One leads to a desert where, so far, all I’ve managed to do is get thirsty and die.
The second branch goes to the “Caverns of Syl” which is a maze, at the end of which is a *synthetic ruby*.
This is the absolutely standard “drop items to map” maze, no gimmicks.
That’s the end of the line for my exploring, except I said I’d come back to the computer. This is if you ride the walkway at the park, where there is a side room described as a “computer archive” with a “computer keyboard/screen”. I tried very hard to locate a verb that would work for interaction.
This included using LOAD which tried to load a saved game I hadn’t made, causing everything to crash. Oops.
This is meant more as a riddle: there is no “normal” verb here. I did my standard verb search and found
and the right command is off one of those. Specifically, the message back at the tower told us to give our regards to the keeper of records. This indicate we should type GIVE REGARDS, and I have no idea what that would look like physically (“press F to pay respects”?) but it works, and I’ll provide the full animation:
“SLIT”, blinking. Is that supposed to be a reference to the double-slit experiment from quantum physics? It is not possible to repeat the action.
To summarize, I have a a hammer (not yet used), spade (not yet used, I’ve tested everywhere), the book and keys, and a synthetic ruby which counts as a treasure. My only obvious obstacle is a desert where I die of thirst and the only unused clue is a mysterious flashing SLIT message; I have not tried SAY SLIT everywhere but that’s the only thing I can think of. My point score is 100 out of 450, but the entirety of those 100 points comes from dropping the ruby at the storage room.
Regarding if this is “horror” or “science fantasy” or something else, I get the vibe this aligns with the 90s Myst-clone games like Obsidian filled with bizarre future devices (and no people because that would be too hard to handle technically). The ultra-minimalist style gives it a unique flavor and the game will just throw a “control room” out with no description and you’re just supposed to imagine.
This could be a scene out of L-Zone or Rhem. If this was a real 90s game that message from Ranon of Lymbar would have been rendered as a blurry QuickTime video.
Renga in Blue 