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.
Screenshot from this video walkthrough.
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.
There’s even further description from this interview in the magazine Page 6:
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 author’s son has some notes here on CASA about a lost game:
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
- Adventure # 2 – Catal Huyuk, Computer Programs Unlimited
- Adventures 1-5 (by Role Simulations)
- Nuclear Doomsday
- Medusa’s Revenge
- Missile Submarine Warfare
- King Rex III’s Tomb
- Castle of Doom
- Advent2, T.L. Lottes
- Dragonslayer, Graham Software
- Harvey I, Chandler Data Services
- 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.
Renga in Blue 
so the game I’ve been having trouble running is Skatte Jagt
https://www.solutionarchive.com/game/id%2C2360/Skatte+Jagt.html
it is a Nascom game with no date, but given most Nascom games were written the late 70s-early 80s range, it makes a decent alternate candidate for earliest Danish adventure
you can find the program by downloading the TOSEC here and then going into Games in NAS form
https://archive.org/details/NASCOM_1_and_2_TOSEC_2012_04_23
however, I keep getting a multitude of errors trying to play it, and I haven’t been able to convert it to CAS format either (using one of the utilities here: https://github.com/nealcrook/nascom/tree/master )
I think it may have to do with the characters. Changing keyboard to Danish doesn’t help
Wow, what a strange coincidence. I’ve been playing this game a bit recently, as I developed the same idea as you that it might be the first Danish (or even Scandinavian/Nordic in general) adventure for a home system, based on what I’ve been able to learn about the small Danish Nascom games scene (most releases from around 80/81) and the early Scott Adams-esque treasure hunt style it seems to have.
I’ve had no problems so far running it on this online emulator:
https://peterjensen.github.io/virtual-nascom/virtual-nascom.html
Just select the .nas file in the “pick a .cas file” menu, hit R, wait for it to load, and then enter E1000.
Seems to work well, although I don’t think there’s any way to save a game.
I don’t think characters should be an issue, as the game seems adapted to run without a Scandinavian alphabet, ie. a “låst dør” is rendered as a “laast doer”, etc.. You just need to keep this in mind when entering commands (like “gaa oest”).
I can help out a bit with translation and whatnot if you have any trouble, as my Danish reading ability is okay-ish (I had a Swedish grandmother and have also studied Norwegian on and off for years).
Just some follow-up on Skatte Jagt here:
I’ve won the game. It seems to be nearly bug-free and is fully playable in the online Nascom emulator I linked to above. The lack of ability to save wasn’t really too bothersome.
Having played through it has only strengthened my opinion that it likely dates from around 1980 to maybe 1982 at the latest, which would indeed make it the first known Scandinavian/Nordic adventure for a home system, as far as I’m aware.
I’ll file away my map and notes, just in case you need any help when you get to it.
While I realize you’ve already finished this, maybe it’ll help someone in the future: Skatte Jagd isn’t a .nas game, it’s a mislabelled .cas game. NAS games are text files with a list of hex bytes. There’s a perl tool to convert cas to nas, after which it works in normal emulators as well.
vnascom will load it if you mount it as a tape, but it takes forever to load compared to just using the .nas, which is instantaneous.
Regarding the list itself, did you decide to not include some of the other stuff that has come up pending further research, or for some other reasons? I refer here to things like that German TRS-80 spy adventure from ’82, a number of unknown games listed in the TRS-80 Sourcebook, etc.
In any case, you should be able to scratch at least 3 others off the original list, as after you published it I was able to track a few things down. I just need to get formal permission to share a couple of them, and the other I need to get dumped. Hopefully this will all happen soon. I will say here that I’ve nearly completed my playthrough of one of them, and it’s been quite enjoyable.
Somehow sorted them w the other Tolkien trs-80 games we found, oops
I will edit tomorrow
Re: the japanese game, I am not considering that one lost
I mentioned that Japanese game mostly to point out that it was likely a 1982 release. For other lost/unknown titles I was thinking more of stuff like this:
Testament (DAI, 1982, by P. Prados, France) – First referenced in the May/June 1982 issue of the DAI Club France newsletter, and described on the Paradai website as: “Jeu d’aventures. Vous devez trouver un tresor dans un vieux manoir. (en francais)”. Possibly one of the earliest French language adventures. Most likely preserved in that archive (along with a number of other unknown adventures), but not available to the public.
Cave-In (Apple II, PC, ZX-81, 1982, by Great Games Ink, Florida) – Advertised in Computerworld (?!) a few times in the Fall of 1982, and described as: “An Adventure Game (Vol. 1) Possible $1000 prize $35”. Probably a scam, but worth noting.
Should be updated now.
I’m guessing that maybe Geheim-agent XP-05 has been found, then? I remember that you were able to dig up a walk-through in a German TRS-80 newsletter.
https://archive.org/details/computer-persoenlich-82-15/page/89/mode/1up
spiele5.dsk here:
https://oldcomputers.dyndns.org/public/pub/rechner/eaca/genie_1/software/images/spiele1/index.html
(and I didn’t do anything special… I just downloaded all the video genie 1 stuff and checked through the files since I knew what I was looking for
also found a 1981 german haunted house game – I had a copy, but it was undated, and this one has both month and year)
Ah, good finds! I poked around at those disks a little and there’s another one (but from 1983) called Abenteuer-Burg, by Rainer Schmies. Seems like it was a type-in from the July/August 1983 issue of the German “Genie Data” newsletter.
The TRS-80/Video Genie is to early adventure games what the US private press scene is to vintage psych/prog music. It’s just a bottomless well of unknown and undiscovered material…
If you need some German speaking support let me know, happy to help.
the haunted house game doesn’t seem like it’s going to be too bad in that respect
but the Agent XP-05 game seems kind of cryptic, we’ll see when we get there
A couple of updates here on two lost games:
I’ve been in touch with Bruno Vivien of the Paradai DAI computer archive, and he’s been kind enough to share some very interesting info with me. Specifically, he was able to extract and convert the game Testament for use with an emulator, and played through it to provide me with some screenshots (beginning of link removed to avoid spam filter issues):
filemail.com/d/agiboltkiyxsvrd
As you can see, it is indeed a traditional text adventure, as I suspected. Since we know this was available at least two months before Professeur Folibus was printed in Micro-Systèmes, and considering the particular circumstances of Bilingual Adventure and Mission Sècrete á Colditz, I think what we have here is the best current candidate for first adventure created and released in France. He’ll check the code when he has time to see if there’s a specific date, and he’s also looking into a few other DAI titles I enquired about.
Another game I have a small update on is the untitled Danish mainframe adventure by Peter Ole Frederiksen. I got in touch with Ernst Krogtoft of the excellent Retro365 site, and as it turns out his father, who was an IBM employee in Denmark in the 60s and 70s, most likely worked with Frederiksen there at the time, and he had heard something about this “simple adventure game” that Frederiksen had written in APL. Frederiksen went on to create the game Kaptajn Kaper i Kattegat which became quite famous in Denmark over the years. That led me to this old interview, where he briefly mentioned the adventure himself (beginning of link removed):
spiludvikling.dk/viewtopic.php?t=221
this is very encouraging, thank you!
The filemail link seems to have expired, would you be able to re-share? Thanks!
Here’s a new link:
https://app.filemail.com/d/ojwcsbtbbfplrzn
I just remembered that there are a few extra pics in there that I didn’t upload the first time, so anyone who’s interested might want to grab these again. I think I left them out the first time because they show a puzzle solution or the endgame screen, and I didn’t want to provide spoilers just in case the game itself were to become available soon, but that seems unlikely now.
I guess this kind of proves the point you made about info being scattered all over the place in the Spelunker/Stormbringer comments…
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I thought this would be a better place to comment about games that need a fix if Jason doesn’t have a post for them already. (rather than cloud up a post on different game) Case in point for today……. I believe I have created a fix for the Apple version of Zodiac Castle. I didn’t play all the way through, just up to the point where the bug noted by Alex occurs. I verified that you can now get past this point and continue. I didn’t play any further.
This was greatly aided by having the North Star version of the game that worked for the room in question. Couple that with Alex’s walkthrough, it didn’t take much time to play up to that point. I was going to post the fix on CASA, but it didn’t seem to like me attempting to create an account, at least not today. If that isn’t resolved in the next day or two I will post it under my Internet Archive account.
Well, that’s good news! Being able to use Applewin will certainly be a relief, as playing through these on the North Star emulator is a pretty miserable experience.
Same problems for me with CASA, btw. I tried to register there a couple of times, but to no avail.
Posted my fix here >>> archive.org/details/Zodiac_Castle_fixed
Let me know if it doesn’t work.
I’ll put this minor curiosity here, for lack of a better place:
Over at CASA, there’s an entry for and some forum speculation about an unarchived 1981 Apple II type-in called Pico Adventure, by Lee Mickelson, which is unrelated to the (slightly) more well-known Atari game of the same name. Well, I have scans of all the early Nibble issues, so here’s the scoop – It’s a tiny (six rooms) example adventure written with the aim of helping to learn programming in Apple Pascal. I can provide a scan of it if anyone’s interested in actually getting it running, but it’s probably not worth the bother.
I wouldn’t ordinarily put something like this here, as it’s slightly out of time-frame, but I thought this one was interesting, and there seems to be no other reference to it anywhere, so I thought it was worth mentioning for future reference:
Way Home, for TI-99/4a –
https://archive.org/details/TeleMatch.N17.Computer.Praxis.1984.12-KCz.pdf/page/n14/mode/1up?view=theater
There was also an editor program for it published in the 1/85 issue. This is the only original German adventure for the TI that I’m aware of, and seems a bit more elaborate than most type-ins of this sort.
Maybe you’ve noticed it already, but check out this recent addition on MOCAGH:
https://mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=explore
This one was advertised a couple of times (Creative Computing 12/79 p.177, Compute! 3/81 p.95), but has otherwise remained almost completely unknown until now. Charming manual, and I love the random inclusion of a tank combat game (?!) in there…
The author, Charles Perkins, also wrote an article on programming adventure games in the 7/83 issue of Compute!, where he describes writing an 8k PET adventure that probably has some relation to Explore.
Just for reference, I also found what appears to be the only review this game got (very brief, but positive) in the 7/81 issue of TORPET (p.22).
Here’s a mystery that maybe someone can help shed some light on:
In a couple of 1980 indexes of past CLOAD cassettes, there’s a game listed in the 9/79 issue called Mummy’s Tomb adventure. Looking it up on Goldklang, there’s a screenshot, and you can see that it’s probably a simple text adventure-ish treasure hunt with directional commands and “FIRE GUN” in lieu of a proper parser. But note the author: John Olsen!
So, there are a few weird things here… First, the actual 9/79 paper issue of CLOAD itself makes no mention of the game, preferring to drone on about unrelated subjects. Another is that, according to Olsen himself in his Syntax interview, his first adventure was Frankenstein Adventure, written in late 1980. I can see how he might have thought this one was too simplistic to qualify, or maybe he had simply forgotten it by then, but it still strikes me as odd. The next problem is that, in all the TRS-80 file archives I’ve searched, that issue of CLOAD is missing only Mummy’s Tomb specifically. Since it looks like Goldklang himself dumped this tape years ago, it seems that he stripped this one game out of it on purpose, for some unknown reason. His archive has many Olsen games, some of which are available for download, some of which aren’t (although you can usually find them somewhere else), so this seems to make no sense. The Wargaming Scribe even covered one of the other games from this issue, Starbase, but he also never mentioned it, as he presumably downloaded one of the same Goldklang-dumped copies that it’s missing from.
So, what’s going on here then? Maybe I’m just dense, and it might not really qualify as an adventure anyway, but this all seems rather strange…
I asked Ira. CLOAD got all released as public domain so it should be covered and he’d be able to put it up on his site.
re: Gunther’s recent comments
I do keep things people post in a spreadsheet but it’s got a lot of personal notes and is a mess — if someone wants a public spreadsheet to drop things on I made one here–
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vlP92UlWzlY27zdn_5Di2kNShaiqlMagjdQ-GCror7s/edit?usp=sharing
might split “Lost” and “Found” but for now let’s keep it all on one sheet
I’ve added in everything I’ve (failed to) encounter so far, as well as 3 found/created things.
thanks!
Could I ask more detail on what you have for Bawnded: Chitei Sekai-hen? Looks like an RPG to me (the box claims this, plus the screenshot looks like Wizardry territory).
https://auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/j1160487437
Sure: https://j-rpgs.fandom.com/wiki/Bawnded:_Chitei_Sekai-hen says it’s “predominantly a role-playing game published in Japan in 1983 for PC-8801 with interactive fiction elements. The game offers simple character management, with hit points, strength and endurance parameters, as well as equipment. It is required to type text commands to interact with the environment.”
Obviously we’d have to see it to know how much of it is parser-driven.
It’s an RPG with a text-driven command interface and some 3D dungeon displays. Interestingly, the lost “Kishi-hen” version (they were released simultaneously around 11/83) was labeled in contemporary ads as an adventure game, but the description sounds more like a combat-driven RPG. Nihon Micom Gakuin did release a (kind of) traditional graphic adventure, Parodic Momotaro, at the same time.
https://ameblo.jp/koorogiyousyoku/entry-11388693505.html
You speculated in your post on Burglar’s Adventure whether there were other Adventure System games officialy published other than a couple of third party efforts from ’84. Well, it seems that Bruce Hansen/The Alternate Source did end up releasing some earlier material that was submitted to them. From late ’82:
https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1982-12/page/n312/mode/1up?view=theater
Isles of Doom and Lost City of Gold are both listed separately on Goldklang with screenshots but no downloads.
Later on (’83, I think) they released a larger pack called TASMANIA including the following games, with versions for both TRS-80 and Coco:
Amnesia Adventure
Golden Idol
Espionage Adventure
Arabian Adventure
Shipwrecked
The Maltese Falcon
The Time Machine
Toyiabe Adventure
Adventure at Kissum Creek
They’re all listed individually on Goldklang, most with screenshots (and a scan of the ad) but no downloads,. However, Espionage, Time Machine and Kissum seem to be lost, which is odd, considering they were all sold together. The good news is that Golden Idol actually has a download, via a (presumably) privately-released version.
There might be more of these, but some of the ads may only be in Alternate Source’s own magazine/newsletter, which Goldklang has but also isn’t available for download.
re: Golden Idol, I had chatted with Jeff Bachiochi last year and got permission to release which is why it is up there.
Ah, that’s great! Was he able to give you a firm date on it? I’m guessing ’83 for that ad, but I haven’t been able to track it down yet. It might only be in the Alternate Source newsletter.
looks like I have it at 1984 with a giant question mark, but I hadn’t asked about that part
Since I’m close to the end of ’82 I’ll send him a ping soon and the context might help summon some memories or old buried documents
I poked around a bit more and found out where that ad came from: The Alternate Source Software Catalog 1985. It’s on Goldklang’s site, but isn’t available for download. So, a bit later than expected.
One other interesting thing that came up was an ad for The Adventure System on the back page of Northern Bytes newsletter, Vol.5 No.4 (spring ’84), where they were now selling TAS for 39.95 along with “five free adventures written by past customers.”
the reason I had 1984 is that the actual file is marked as 1984 (that’s starting to get late enough in the TRS-80 sometimes file stamps are actually working)
it may be that the modified version is ’85 though, given the second person who gets added to the credits? that’s the most mysterious part to me and what I need to ask
I think I might have found one of these. Check out the entry for “Old Spooky Graveyard Adventure” on Goldklang. There’s no info on it, but there’s a download link. I checked the code, and there’s the line “I’M AT KISS’EM CREEK” in there. So, it may be the same game, despite the slightly alternate spelling. Seems pretty specific, and I couldn’t get any hits online for a place name spelled in any of those ways, either real or fictional.
Since the original Adventure has come up again recently via Roberts 665, I thought I’d group these related discoveries from my recent research together for convenience. Sources are simply typed out in lieu of multiple links, so as to spare you from having to fish it out of the filter. I’ll follow this format going forward, as I’ll be posting a bunch of these over the next month or two.
First up is what I’d call a fairly major discovery, due to its extremely early date, and interesting circumstances:
ADVENTURE! (OS/M, United Software Applications, Trenton, NJ, Summer 1978) Creative Computing 11/78 p.65, 1/79 p.30-31
Students of adventure game history will be familiar with the story of Gordon Letwin’s debut showing of his Heathkit Adventure port, long thought to be the first ever released, at the Personal Computing ’78 show that took place in Philadelphia that August. But what seems to have remained completely unnoticed until now is that there was actually another port of Adventure shown there (as described in John Craig’s show report in Creative Computing), and it was almost certainly released first!
United Software Applications of nearby Trenton, NJ, seems to have existed from 1978 into early 1979, and were focused on promoting their own operating system, a variant of CP/M called OS/M, and the application software they had written for it. But they also had a few games, including “ADVENTURE!”, which they continued to market through at least the end of the year, as evidenced by it being mentioned again in the 1/79 issue (described there as “the game of Adventure(!)”). They seem to have gone under shortly after that, but then reappeared in a different form in late ’79 as Computer Design Labs, who mostly handled various Z80 items and lasted until around mid ’84.
All interesting enough as it stands, but the real kicker here comes when you consider the issue of release dates. One thing that seems to have been lost a bit over the years in the (surprisingly scant, all things considered) coverage of Letwin’s original H8 port, is that what he demonstrated at the show was not exactly the same program as what ended up getting sold. As described in the fourth quarter ’78 issue of REMark magazine, what Letwin brought to the PC ’78 show floor was a multi-user version clearly intended as a public demonstration, whereas it wasn’t actually released commercialy until a 24K single user version was made available for purchase by HUG later that year, as first announced in that same issue. However, Craig’s show floor report from August (which interestingly doesn’t even mention Letwin) clearly states that all of United Software Applications’ software was already available and “ready for shipment”. So their version of Adventure was obviously brought to the show as a finished commercial product that was available for purchase, not just an initial demonstration like Letwin’s. So it follows that this seems to firmly place it as not only the earliest known home computer port of Adventure (the third being John Eggert’s Heathkit port and 318 point version, as I described in another comment here last December), but also the second oldest currently known home computer adventure in general, after the initial “Adventure” version of Roger Chaffee’s Quest from earlier that year. Speaking of which…
In the middle of Steve North’s review of Peninsula School’s Tape No. 3 (which includes Chaffee’s Quest) in the 9/78 issue of Creative Computing (p.68) I noticed this strange aside:
“This is really a lot smaller than ADVENTURE, but still a lot of fun. (Speaking of Adventure, I saw a version in which your cavern is Hill Center at Rutgers. For treasure you can take out an IBM 370/168 or a card reader, but you have to fight off a nasty operator or an insane applications consultant.)”
So, what to make of this? Was it a heavily altered Adventure port (as he seems to indicate), an original mainframe adventure (possible Dungeon/Zork influence with the described combat?) or was he just joking around? In any case, Creative Computing was famously run out of nearby Morristown, so it would make sense that one of their writers would have had access to it.
I’ve often found it curious that most early Adventure versions (as opposed to certain originals like Haunt) didn’t include too much in the way of absurdist/juvenile humor or obscure local references and inside jokes, as young students generally find that sort of thing irresistible. But you have to figure that it’s just this sort of stuff that irritated system administrators were actively seeking out for ruthless deletion, and which probably would not have spread too far off-campus anyway, so perhaps it’s no wonder that little material of this nature has survived. Funnily enough, one of my uncles did some of his post-grad work at that very facility circa ’76-’78, so if it actually existed, he may have played it! Sadly, there’s no way he’d remember something like that now.
Finally, what may be the first commercialy released Adventure port for an S-100 based system (the Polymorphic one that Explorador dug up last year being an incomplete personal project):
Adventure (Alpha Micro, Computer Timeshare Rental, Philip Hunt, Columbus, OH, Summer/Fall 1979) Alpha Micro Users Society Newsletter Vol.2 No.8 p.4 & p.13, Vol.2 No.9 p.37
As you can see by reading these announcements/ads, this one seems quite interesting, considering the incredibly high prices, separate availability of the source code, and included instructions for editing the game to add new rooms and treasures. All this, combined with the availability of a cut-down demo version and the touting of “extra added features” makes one suspicious that Mr. Hunt may have snuck in some additional game content of his own…
Here are a couple of miscellaneous ones:
Adventure (Apple/TRS-80/Sorcerer, Century Electronics, Brea, CA, 2/79) Personal Computing 3/79 p.81
Century Electronics seemed to mostly deal in accessories and books, and existed circa 1978-1980. But they ran this ad for their “Program Library on Cassette” for various systems over a few months, with the three versions listed above including an “Adventure”. The interesting thing here is that, if this was a text adventure (which I’d guess it was), it may be the first available for Apple II. The Apple was a bit behind the PET, Heathkit and TRS-80 in the earliest days of home computer adventures, probably because it was more expensive and early adapters were more interested in testing out those fancy low-res color graphics than in making all text games. It wasn’t until late ’79 that a bunch started showing up on the platform, before Mystery House came on the scene and really set the template for the system’s adventure market going forward.
I wouldn’t ordinarily include a port (especially of so common a game) here, but I thought this next one was funny/unusual enough to tack on, since it seems to be completely undocumented otherwise. From Sym-Physis, the Sym-1 Users’ Group Newsletter, Vol.2 No.2, Summer 1981, p.39:
“JOE HOBART, Flagstaff, AZ, has sent us for review a copy of PIRATE’S ADVENTURE, adapted from the TRS-80 Level II BASIC version printed in BYTE, December 1980. As the author Scott Adams, of Adventure International (AI), points out (and we have confirmed by testing) BASIC is far too slow and requires lots of memory. Mr. Adams states that all current AI games are written in assembly language, and gave Joe authorization to distribute his BASIC version royalty-free. The game requires a FULL 32K system, really! Send Joe $15 for a cassette copy.”
Wow, Century Electronics is obscure. I tried a poke at all the various platforms and couldn’t find any matches except some for TRS-80 that may or may not be the same games
Oil Tanker, no author or company name
https://willus.com/trs80/?-a+1+-p+9885+-f+1+q=oil
Blockade, Peter Trefonas, landed in CLOAD
https://willus.com/trs80/?q=blockade
Cascade Electronics
https://archive.org/details/InterfaceAge197905/page/n17/mode/2up
seems to be a little more visible, and they have the same “G2” tapes (including Adventure)
They have a Mobygames page here
https://www.mobygames.com/company/48656/cascade-enterprises/
which itself links to another one called GRT Corporation
https://www.mobygames.com/company/39470/grt-corporation/
which seems to be the same company that Century Electronics is selling
that was enough trail to find Adventure on Goldklang, and while he has it marked as “missing” he clearly has something resembling a catalog
G/2 ADVENTURE $14.95
Is a package of games that simulate the suspense and mystery of a good mystery novel. You attempt to find hidden passages that rise
to new levels. You must elude demons, witches and other “baddies” to achieve your goal of success. A package that will keep the family
stimulated and engrossed for hours on rainy evenings.
and just for more confirmation, the “G/2” logo that’s on the Century Electronics ad can be found here
https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputing197808/page/n95/mode/2up
also found an actual confirmed game from the ad now
https://willus.com/trs80/?q=the+market
55000 CLS:PRINT@335,”FROM THE G/2 PROGRAM LIBRARY…”;:PRINT@529,”*** T H E M A R K E T ***”
55100 GOSUB400:CLS:PRINT@327,”A COMPUTER SIMULATION BY DICK AINSWORTH.”
55200 GOSUB400:CLS:PRINT@329,”WRITTEN FOR THE TRS-80 BY AL BAKER.”
55300 GOSUB400:CLS:PRINT@330,”COPYRIGHT (C) 1978 GRT CORPORATION”;:PRINT@465,”ALL RIGHTS RESERVED”
55400 GOSUB400:CLS:X=35:Y=12:GOSUB60000
Following the name Al Baker, I was then able to find a screenshot of Bullseye on Goldklang which is also from the G/2 collection
https://www.trs-80.com/images/screenshots/ss-Bullseye-(1978)(Al-Baker)%5BM1%5D.gif
also found the Ainsworth / Baker pair mentioned here with with a different company
https://www.mobygames.com/company/9370/the-image-producers-inc/
here’s another mention of them which also mentions a Leah O’Connor
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_1756607
color ad for G/2
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1978-12-rescan/page/n33/mode/2up
one more!
Creative Computing April 1980 p. 132:
G/2 Is GWTW
If you’ve been wondering what happened to those fancy four-color ads for the G/2 Program Library that GRT Corp. was running in Creative and elsewhere in 1978, it’s because G/2, GRT’s Consumer Computer
Group, no longer exists. GRT, of Sunnyvale, CA, filed Chapter XI of the federal bankruptcy laws, after losing over two million dollars up to the fall of 1978.
G/2 had several dozen cassette tapes for the Apple, Southwest, Sol, PET, Sorcerer and Level-ll TRS-80. The half-dozen for the TRS-80 included Beat The House (blackjack, craps, roulette, slot machine), Clinic (biorhythms, dieting, longevity), Personal Finance (Checkbook, Best Choice). That last program was for decision-making.
All the principles of the G/2 division left GRT in late 1978, and the software companies that had licensed GRT to manufacture and market their products, have taken back the programs. These programs will now, in some cases, be marketed by the companies that wrote them, such as Level III by Microsoft.
GRT continues with their main business, which is producing and marketing pre-recorded music tapes. Music tapes can stand a lot of dropouts and other problems before they really get bad. But I couldn’t even load the copy of Clinic that G/2 sent.
Incidentally, I heard that to make writing the G/2 tapes as easy as possible, no graphics were used at all.
So G/2 is gone with the wind, cancelling an ambitious assortment of tapes that also included Oil Tycoon, Adventure, The Market and a couple of Extended Basics.
Wow, great work! Looking at my notes, I actually had that Cascade ad listed, but I failed to note that it was a different company. I also didn’t pay much attention to that “G2” mark, as I thought it was just a stylized logo for Century Electronics! If it isn’t obvious by now, I’ll confess: My eyesight sucks.
Those descriptions are from an H&E Computronics ad, circa ’79. I haven’t been able to track this exact one down yet (it might not be available in an online scan), but he has all the game descriptions up anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. Hard to tell from that blurb if this “suite” has some form of a legit text adventure in it or not, but if it does it would be one of the earliest. All those games seem to have 1978 dates, and GRT’s weird third party distribution scheme means they had to be done well before these small companies started selling them in early ’79. Hopefully “Adventure” will pop up in some random auction lot of old TRS-80 or Apple cassettes one day and get preserved.
I came up with a bit more info on this one, but I felt like I was still missing something here. The more I thought about it, the more the name GRT Corp. started to sound vaguely familiar to me, like I had heard about it somewhere before. And what do you know, after a little more digging around, a real game history rabbit hole opened up for me…
But first, here’s the info on G/2 Adventure specifically. From the H&E Computronics, June 1979 issue’s “Catalog Notes” section:
“3. The following programs, although listed in our catalog, have not been released by GRT CORPORATION (producer of G2/LEVEL III BASIC: OIL TYCOON, OUTWIT, OUTWIT II and ADVENTURE. They are due to be released within the next 30 days.
4. GRT CORPORATION has release a new game program called BULLSEYE!
BULLSEYE is available for immediate delivery ($14.95}. BULLSEYE contains two games ”designed to test your reflexes and your imagination. (1) SHOOTING GALLERY is the classic target game. You ‘ll have hours of fun shooting at flying ducks, running mice and, of course, balloons! (2) SPACE ACE is a pilot simulation that makes you feel like you are actually flying your own space fighter. As the stars roll by, you can feel your space craft turning to zoom in on the eney ships.” We tried SPACE ACE and give it a very good rating (SHOOTING GALLERY is just OK).”
Then, from Robert Marsh’s “Level III BASIC: A Review” in the 12/79 issue of H&E Computronics:
“LEVEL III BASIC is back again. LEVEL III BASIC was orginally written by MICROSOFT (the same people that wrote the present basic for your TRS-80). MICROSOFT sold the duplicating rights of LEVEL III to GRT CORPORATION who sold it under the name G2 LEVEL III BASIC. About six months ago, G2 went out of business. Now MICROSOFT is selling the popular package. For those of you who have purchased LEVEL III BASIC under the G2 name, the new MICROSOFT package is identical so don’t buy it again.
LEVEL III BASIC is just a fantastic program for cassette owners…so why did GRT CORPORATION go out of business? Probably because it over advertised. They had a toll free number and full page ads in every computer magazine. G2 LEVEL III sold well…but their other products didn’t. By advertising in the computer magazines (such as BYTE, KILOBAUD, CREATIVE COMPUTING, and PERSONAL COMPUTING), they were reaching a large population of TRS-80 owners who had disk drives. LEVEL III BASIC is designed to supplement the BASIC of cassette owners and has no advantage to disk owners.
So…GRT wasn’t able to make it, even though they had a good product.”
First, you’ll note that Adventure still hadn’t been released as of this June ’79 issue, despite having been advertised through the various distributors carrying the G/2 line since earlier in the year (GRT seem to have quickly lost interest in directly marketing the games, prefering to focus on the more profitable Level III BASIC), and Bullseye making it out. Then, you can see that GRT itself actually went under right around that time (they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July, having over 20 million in debt according to Billboard) and these third party distributor ads all suddenly disappeared, just as they were announcing this new wave of releases (the 1978 dates in that Creative Computing article are all wrong). The others in that set, Outwit, Ouwit II and Oil Tycoon, as well as another complete unknown, Ballistics/Space Laser/Gunslinger, that I noticed in a brief piece in the 6/79 issue of Byte, may never have made it out the door, despite the fancy flip-book console-style packaging (which was a ridiculous waste of resources for a bunch of primitive text-only cassette games aimed at the barely extant late ’70s commercial software market) even being ready, as the company suddenly went under. I’m starting to think that Adventure may have also suffered this fate, unless it made it out in another form when the rights reverted back to the authors, like Oil Tycoon, which was renamed Wildcatting and eventually became a popular early Coco title.
Speaking of the original authors, it seems that the initial software from ’78 was created for GRT by Microcomputer Software Associates (mentioned in the 12/78 issue of Personal Computing and also on Goldklang), who appear to have been based out of the Hayward, CA Byte Shop store, since they shared the same address. So it’s possible that they were behind Adventure, although GRT were clearly hiring out other programmers as well.
All well and good, but that’s not the most interesting part of the story…
The first item to mention (and one of the things that must have been nagging at my memory) is more tangential, but still interesting. It’s that GRT’s role in selling Microsoft’s LEVEL III BASIC (or rather, what happened to the rights to it after they went belly up) was one of the main points of contention in the landmark UK lawsuit that revolved around Molimerx and Kansas City Systems that I believe you’ve covered here before.
But the really amazing history here is all centered around who was actually behind this bungled push into the nascent computer software market by GRT. From the October 1982 Software Merchandising magazine article “Saturday Night Fever – 1982” about record industry people entering into the video game field:
“ActiVision, for example, has a chief operating officer and president who comes from the music business, Jim Levy, one-time corporate vice president with GRT Corp. and responsible for their Music Tapes division.
In addition to ActiVision, a number of other games companies are being spawned by former record industry executives. Al Bayley, the founder of the GRT Corp., is now helming Arcadia Corp., a Santa Clara, CA-based firm making games available on audio cassettes that interface with the Atari VCS via the ‘Supercharger.’
Herb Hirschfield, one-time GRT senior vice president and Bob Rice, former sales promotion manager, are involved with new games firm Data Age, Saratoga, CA. And Telesys, Fremont, CA, has Rich Taylor, former GRT advertising and promotion manager, as president, and two other former senior GRT executives, Jack Woodman and Jay Albrent, in key posts there.”
Per my research, a couple of other key figures at GRT were well-known Silicon Valley marketer Bill Langenes and Vern Raburn, who where both also involved with the Microcomputer Industry Trade Association at the time. Raburn, in a computer industry roundtable article from the 1978 CES published in the trade magazine Merchandising, said:
“We’re trying to expand a market which today is a hobbyist market to a consumer market. What I think is perhaps the most exciting entry into the field of home entertainment since the advent of stereos is the marketing of prerecorded software with much the same potential as the stereo recording industry. Just as stereo equipment mandates stereo records and tapes, likewise consumer computers mandate consumer software.”
Additionally, from a March 1983 article in the Arizona Republic about Telesys:
“Woodman and Taylor had been with GRT, a distributor of records in Sunnyvale, and they wanted to get a start in the new computer revolution,” Jansen said. “Other former record people like Jim Levy, the president of Activision, and Bob Rice of Data Age made the same switch to video games.
The consumer market is the same and they brought the graphics over from record albums to video-game packaging. “Selling records and video software both require lots of point-of-purchase sales people who know the games, in-store play, posters. In fact, we’ve had the most success selling game cartridges at record stores.”
The Levy thing has been mentioned offhand a number of times (he joined up with the original four Activision programmers shortly after the company’s mid ’79 collapse) but seemingly without any deeper research into GRT itself. The fact that this one failed venture seems to have helped spawn so many other companies who would go on to help trigger both the huge boom and eventual crash of the early console game market seems to have remained more obscure.
The interesting thing to me is how some of the questionable stuff that GRT did ended up foreshadowing developments in the console market just a few years later: Flashy full-color ads overhyping generic, primitive games, overly elaborate packaging, vaporware announcements, etc. I guess it all makes sense now, as these were a lot of the same guys!
Anyway, sorry to write a novel here (what else is new), but I thought this was too entertaining to not share. I’d be interested to hear Kevin Bunch’s thoughts on this, as it seems right up his alley. I can’t recall if he’s gotten to it much beyond Activision, but he’ll be hitting a lot of these boom/crash era companies in his series soon, so this GRT angle is sure to come up.
And now… More obscure Adventure ports! I’ll have to split these up, as links are necessary this time, and what really seems to set the filter off is multiple links in one comment.
First up, we have this little beauty:
https://github.com/mmcgraw74/Tektronix-4051-4052-4054-Program-Files/tree/master/Games/ADV4052
You can read all the details there, but basically it’s a recently preserved Tektronix 4052 (!) port of Ben Moser’s HP3000 adaptation of Adventure from the 11/79 issue of Creative Computing (p.108). Culver has it listed as unavailable (via its recent entry on Mobygames), but here it is, sort of. Pretty much a straight port of Woods 350, but now you can play it on one of those computers from Battlestar Galactica! That’s about $50,000 in infaltion-adjusted dollars well spent, as far as I’m concerned…
He’s also got a 1979 port of Chaffee’s Quest (of course!) in that archive, as well as his own recent Adventure ports, and even that weird Swords & Sorcery multiple choice quasi-adventure type-in game from ’78.
Looks like it is missing the all-different maze (fair enough) and the endgame (?!). I will need to check sometime to see what’s going on with that.
You’re right, and some of the instructions are a little different, and maybe even the opening of the game too. I wonder what the highest score you can get is, then?
On reading Moser’s intro to the article, this all makes more sense. It’s not a port, but an attempted recreation (he had tried this previously on an HP2000 as well, but it was too buggy) from his notes and memory of playing the original on an MIT timeshare. Also, he was still just a high school student at the time, and had lost access to the HP3000, so he had to wrap it up and make this the final version. It’s quite possible then that he had never actually won it, and didn’t even know about the endgame, this being late ’78/early ’79, when the first two or three home computer ports had just come out and were unlikely to have been seen by him. Why the other maze is missing is less clear, though. In any case, you’d think that the Tektroniks guy who ported it, Chuck Smith, might have tried to add this stuff back in, but he may not have known any better himself in ’79, so he just faithfully stuck to the type-in while adapting it. It’s all for the better from a historical perspective though, as this turned out to be a distinct (although minor) variant, and now it’s been preserved on a very exotic platform, to boot.
Next up, this unusual discovery from last year:
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/four-phase-systems-iv-90.1240089/page-8#post-1389086
Scroll down the page a bit, and you’ll find the file link on Bitsavers.
Briefly: It’s a Four-Phase Systems IV/90 multi-player port of Adventure from ’78, found in Denmark at Philips. I looked at the code and it seems to be vanilla Woods 350, despite being renamed Quest for some reason. An interesting find, nonetheless.
Finally, a couple of items from the hobbyist 6800 scene of yore:
Adventure (6800/6809, Application Services Company, Jack Doremus, Wichita, KS, 1/81) 68 Micro Journal Vol.3 No.1 p.42, Vol.3 No.3 p.14
Looks like a very straight Woods 350 port, once again. Really obscure, though. The one and only online reference I could find was on the ancient Hans Persson Adventureland page, where it was misidentified as SWTPC-specific.
Bonus content! An actual original adventure, I think. Unless it was just an unofficial Adams port? About as obscure as you can get, in any case:
The Count’s Castle Adventure (6800, Leon Barker, Ogden, UT, 11/82) 68 Micro Journal Vol.4 No.12 p.40
Here are the ads that I found in the other Interact newsletters. They’re poorly photocopied and annoying to read through, so I’ll save you the time and just directly quote them:
Interaction Newsletter, June-August 1982 p.20
“ADVENTURE CLUB. After you have fully completed an adventure, it’s not much fun to go through it again. You’re ready for the next adventure . For only $25 per year, you can have 6 new adventure games. One will be mailed to you about every 60 days. Most will be in Level II BASIC but at least one per year will be full length (10K+) in machine language . Please note that these are standard non-graphic adventure games. If you have never played an adventure game before, we suggest you order Enchanted Adventure from our regular program list first . Send for a list of our other programs.
Richard Jones, Route 2, Box 191, Cole Camp, MO 65323″
NICC Newsletter, February 1983 p.6
“ADVENTURE CLUB – six new games a year with at least one in machine language. Regular $45, only $35 if you mention this ad. For more information or a list of other programs for sale, all under $8, write:
Richard Jones, RFD 2, Box 191, Cole Camp MO 65325″
Interaction Newsletter, June-August 1982 p.20
“ADVENTURE ! ! ! Not just any ADVENTURE, but now in full-color graphics. 8K Graphics BASIC is needed. First, voyage into THE FORGOTTEN CAVE, and uncover Ziliad’s most hidden secrets, but watch out for tricks, traps, and ancient monsters who keep his lair well guarded. Then, enter BLACK FOREST, where you must find the missing doctor who has the only cure for your disease, but you better be quick! You only have three days to find him before…
$5.00 for both games to:
Dan Carey, 58 Algonquin Trail, Medford Lks., NJ 08055″
Pingback: Bedlam (1982) | Renga in Blue
Yet more obscure Adventure adaptations, this time for the Compucolor II:
Colossal Adventure (Peter J. Hiner, 1981)
Hiner was the head of the UK Compucolor Users Group, and ran their “CompUKolour” newsletter. He wrote this adaptation in 1981, and released it for free distribution by the membership. It’s ostensibly a conversion of standard Woods 350, but there are quite a few differences that I’ve noticed in playing it a little and looking at the code:
A strange graphical title screen, terse descriptions with different phrasing, psychedelic multi-colored flashing effects when using “Xyzzy”, a completely different scoring system that goes to 1000 points, no endgame (I think?), etc.
Hiner was very active in the small international Compucolor scene, and there’s a profile of him in the November/December 1984 issue of the Colorcue newsletter, which I’ll quote part of here:
“I wrote a rudementary sort of Invaders game -not very thrilling- and then got hooked on the idea of writing a version of the original adventure game to fit a 16K CCII machine without repeated disk reads. This was a magnum opus, using quite sophisticated techniques. The program consisted of a small interpreter (about 2K) driven by a 4K table of data. The huge amount of text (25K) for descriptions and messages was compressed into about 10K using a mixture of dictionary and other text compression techniques. This huge task took about a year to complete, but left me with a powerful tool for writing other adventures, and I was later able to produce a version of Scott Adam’s Pirate Adventure in a few weeks.”
I noticed that his version of Pirate’s Adventure also uses the same 1000 point scoring system.
Adventure/Colossal Cave Adventure (Garry Epps, early ’80s)
Garry Epps was an Australian coder who, along with his brother Graham, wrote and marketed a number of games and programs for the Compucolor in the early ’80s while still a teenager, before moving on to other platforms like the Microbee and VZ200. You can read an interesting profile of him and his buddies/co-workers as part of the “Class of ’82” feature in the 4/83 issue of Your Computer (Australia), p.26-27. Once again, this seems to be another “made from memory” conversion, rather than a port, as I noticed many differences:
Different scoring system, that also gives you a percentage of the game explored as well as score and rank. But most uniquely, it’s on a timer! It keeps track of your time spent playing (in minutes), and there actually seems to be a limit before the game tells you that you’ve taken too long and quits you out. It also seems like there may be no endgame, and you just need to return 16 treasures (not sure what’s counting as the extra one) to the house to win. It also starts you in the forest, rather than in front of the house, and some of the text is different (it adds “Have fun!” to the description of the Hall of the Mountain King, for instance), etc. There’s also a bug where if you “GET ALL” in the house, the Treasure Chest suddenly shows up in your inventory!
Finally, there seem to also be a couple of versions from the extensive CHIP program library that may be unique. The first was on disk 20 (which would have dated from 1979-1980, I believe) described only as:
“ADVENTURE – The now classic game adapted for Compucolor. There are no instructions – you’re on your own.”
Then, on disk 59 (circa ’82) there’s this:
“ADVENTURE – Reworked with all rooms.”
Unfortunately, neither of these disks are archived on the Compucolor database.
Regarding the Compucolor adventure scene in general, aside from these, all I’ve found are TRS-80 ports (Dog Star, Lost Dutchman, Spider Mountain, etc.), but I feel there must be at least a few originals out there somewhere. The problem is that many of the newsletters are unarchived, and the software library in general is poorly documented and preserved.
Here’s one that seems to be completely unknown (not on Goldklang, no other online hits):
Enchanted Forest (TRS-80/Apple II, Benchmark Software, Pittsburgh, PA, 8/81) H&E Computronics 9/81 p.11, Personal Computing 4/82 p.120
Available on either tape or disk, in two versions: A full 71 room version for 32K or a reduced 54 room version for 16K.
No relation to the Coco graphic adventure of the same name from a year later that you’ll be covering soon, obviously.
Benchmark Software also released a wargame and an “age of sail” type simulation, running a handful of ads in H&E and PC circa late ’81/early ’82. They all seem to be lost and completely undocumented.
Enchanted Forest ad here comes with a picture which almost looks like a Rorschach test.
https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputing198204/page/n121/mode/2up
nice of them to include the opening so we can be sure we have it if there’s ever some stray nameless source
wildly obscure company though
Here are a few Australian items of interest:
Adventure in Time
Create-A-Game/Treasure Mountain (ZX81/ZX80, Gloster Software/Work Force, Melbourne/Luton, Beds., 1981/1982) Your Computer Australia 1/82 p.62, Your Computer Australia 4/82 p.74, Australian Personal Computer 11/82 p.115, Your Computer 10/82 p.102, 1/83 p.122
These were originally created and released in Australia by Gloster Software, then licensed for distribution in the UK by Work Force. Adventure in Time sounds completely weird and avant-garde both technically and gameplay-wise, almost like something Edu-Ware would have come up with, but on a way more limited system. Make sure to check out the review in YCA 4/82. Create-A-Game was a typical early adventure creation system, but included an original example adventure, Treasure Mountain, so it bears mentioning. It was retitled A.D.V.E.N.T. by Work Force.
Adventure/Castle Adventure (Hitachi Peach, Cybernetics Research, Redfern, NSW, 1982) APC 4/82 p.108, 7/82 p.109, YCA 5/82 p.66
The Hitachi Peach was the export version of the BASIC Master Level III, which had a brief period of success in the Australian market. This is the only adventure I’ve found for it so far.
G-Pascal Adventure (Apple II, Nick Gammon, Gammon & Gobbert, Ivanhoe, Victoria, 1982) YCA 8/82 p.46, APC 10/82 p.98
Gammon & Gobbert marketed their own version of Pascal for the Apple II, and sold an adventure they had written in it both separately and with the entire Pascal package itself. It was then published as a type-in in the 10/82 issue of APC. The commercial versions are lost, but the type-in should be playable if someone wants to make the effort.
African Odd (TRS-80, Gameworx Software, Daryll Reynolds, Chirnside Park, Victoria, 1982?) APC 4/83 p.117
This strangely-titled game appears to be Reynolds first adventure. He already had several available by the time this ad was published in early ’83 and it was TRS-80/Coco exclusive, so one would imagine this actually dates back to at least ’82. Was seemingly never advertised again, and is otherwise completely unknown. Reynolds commented extensively years ago about his games on the Lemon 64 forums, and nobody seemed to be aware of its existence. This ad also clears up the dating and original publisher and platform for his other early titles, including Death Star (TRS-80 versions previously undocumented) and the lost Castle Tollenkar.
Here’s the major French-language adventure discovery that I mentioned recently, pre-dating Testament by over a full year:
Atlantis (TRS-80, Daniel Martin, BCM, Louveigne, Belgium) L’ordinateur Individuel 4/81 p.46 & p.170
The Belgian company BCM ( Bureau de Calcul Mathématique) was mostly involved in the early ’80s with creating and selling hardware mods for the TRS-80, PET, and Apple II that allowed for the use of French accented characters, AZERTY keyboards, etc. But they also published this original adventure, for 32K TRS-80 on disk. They turned more towards computer book publishing as the decade moved on, and the game’s author, Daniel Martin, ended up writing a few of them, including introductory volumes on the Amstrad CPC and the MSX in the mid ’80s.
And here’s an interesting bonus item, that’s an early example of a French bedroom coder directly selling an adventure through the classifieds:
Château (ZX81, Jean Claude Jay, Lempdes, France) Echos Sinclair 12/82 p.42, L’ordinateur Individuel 1/83 p.235, Micro Systèmes 2/83 p.138, Micro Systèmes 7/83 p.189
This adventure, described as his own “création personnelle” was available first as either a cassette or listing, “avec plan”, and by its final appearance was available in either version “1 ou 2”, so it appears there was a sequel or enhanced update as well. By 1985, Monsieur Jay seems to have ditched the ZX81 for a Jupiter Ace, as there’s a final ad featuring him looking to exchange information with fellow users.
do we know anything about the content of Atlantis? (being a 32k TRS-80 game makes me worried it might just be a port of the Terry Kepner game which was in the Captain 80 book)
just for reference, the direct links
https://archive.org/details/ord-ind-s1-026/page/46/mode/2up?view=theater
https://archive.org/details/ord-ind-s1-026/page/170/mode/2up?view=theater
not totally unheard of to have more Atlantis games (Hassett had his own, Kirsch has one in 1983), but TRS-80 + 32k makes me wonder until I’ve seen more detail
Yeah, I considered that, but I think this makes it fairly clear that it was an original. From the same issue, p.170:
“La société propose également Atlantis, un programme de jeu de type «Adventure» fonctionnant sur un 32 K équipé d’une minidisquette ; ce programme a été écrit en français par D. Martin (700 FB tvapc, 90 FF htpc).”
Additionally, when you run the exchange rate and ad in the fees, it comes out to something like $45. I doubt they would have released a disk-only game at that price only for it to just be an uncredited translation of an older BASIC type-in. There’s also no real evidence that the Captain 80 book or the entire early TRS-80 adventure scene really had any impact in France or Belgium. There was some sporadic early importing of the Scott Adams games, but they seem to have attracted little notice at the time.
Both in the announcement quoted above and in the ad itself, this game’s release seems to have been tied in to their promotion of the French characters mod, so I would guess that it may have been written specifically to show it off.
I still would have a lot of caution because adventures in 32k game for TRS-80 were _very_ rare in this period. The Asylum games had 32k versions (but also 16k!) and even the Atlantis was 16k in its machine-code incarnation. Hog Jowl Mansion from 1982 was printed in 32k format but with the spaces taken out it could fit in 16k.
I’m not saying it is impossible, but I’m still hovering about 50-50 given one of the very few early 32k TRS-80 games we know about is _also_ an Atlantis game.
Well, I did some checking and the Captain 80 theory doesn’t hold. It was first announced for pre-publication in the 9/81 issue of 80 Microcomputing, then advertised as “A neat Christmas gift idea!” that would be “Available at your dealer approximately November 15th, 1981” in the 12/81 issue of Softside. The book itself says “First Printing – November 1981” right on the 2nd page, and it didn’t start getting reviewed until 1982. Meanwhile, the BCM game was advertised in the 4/81 issue of L’ordinateur, and given publishing and programming lead times would have been written no later than very early ’81, or even before.
So, for it to just be a translation, they would have had to have personally imported a recently released original copy of a fairly obscure game at cost, gone through the rigamarole of translating/re-programming it, and then deliberately misrepresented it in L’ordinateur as “ce programme a été écrit en français par D. Martin” rather than “a été traduit”, then tried to pass this off, via an expensive disk-only release, to a very small domestic audience who would have probably been the only people in French-speaking Europe hardcore enough about the TRS-80 to actually be physically modding their systems, and expect to get away with it? I mean, why? It would have been much easier to just write their own, especially as a showcase for their French language mods and peripherals. And more anecdotally, as you pointed out, “Atlantis” was just a step or two above “Haunted House” or “Castle” as a generic adventure theme/title at the time, so it’s not that strong a link to begin with.
So yeah, I’m considering this an original unless proven otherwise. The problem is that it’s probably lost forever, given the market conditions described above.
The original from 79 was BASIC. There was no need to have the book. Lost Dutchman came from the same year and the same company got the weird “remix version” in the UK.
Mind you, it does seem odd, but the coincidence — again, we only have one TRS-80 basic Adventure game from those 78-81 years that’s 32k, and it just happens to also be Atlantis — means I am not fully convinced without seeing more. Either way it would be nice to have a copy!
Further research here has proven to be very interesting. Here’s what I’ve been able to put together:
The first ad for Interpro’s Atlanian Adventure (as it was then spelled) was in the 2/81 issue of 80 Microcomputing (p.240), being sold alongside their Ultra-Mon program (which seems to have been their earliest entry into the market, first appearing in a couple of 9/80 ads). It was only for the 16K, text-only cassette original.
The next appearance is in the 6/81 issue of 80 Microcomputing (p.207), in an ad from Interpro themselves. It lists both the 48K disk-only graphical version and the 16K text-only cassette. Both are described as being in machine language.
Next, the graphical version is reviewed in the 7/81 issue of Softside, where it is clearly treated as a new release.
After this, it’s advertised a few more times through various vendors (the text-only version having already vanished), before disappearing for good in the US marketplace.
The Programmer’s Guild (who don’t show up in the magazines until around April, 1980) also released a cassette version (with the “Atlantean” spelling), but they never seemed to advertise it, and in any case it appears to be the regular machine code version with the Mark Robinson credit, so I believe this probably came out a bit later, after Interpro stopped selling it, as Kepner and Lidill were local friends. Which leads us to…
Captain 80, and the “Atlantean” spelling, which doesn’t seem to have existed until they started advertising the book. Suddenly, we have a BASIC listing (although a bit odd) and a 1979 code date to go along with it. But where did this all actually come from? Reading the game’s introductory text starts to make things more clear:
“Atlantean Odyssey was originally written as an exercise in linear programming, a prelude to learning machine language programming.”
In other words, he wrote it after Lost Dutchman’s Gold (first advertised 1/80 by The Software Exchange) and Spider Mountain (first advertised 5/80 by The Programmer’s Guild), probably in early/mid ’80, before finally being able to re-write it in machine code later in the year. It was then picked up by Interpro and released by early ’81. Over the next few months he added graphics with the help of Mark Robinson and the new version was released by around May of that year, quickly replacing the text-only original and garnering slightly more attention. The code date is most likely just based on his own original adventure “system” dating back to when he wrote Lost Dutchman circa mid/late ’79, and the switch to Atlantean a later spelling correction, otherwise one would have to believe that Interpro misspelled it on purpose! Considering all this, it seems fairly obvious that Kepner just dug up his old pre-release BASIC code from the previous year, so that his friend Lidill could have something “newer” to publish in his forthcoming book, and that’s where the myth (which I believed myself for years) that “Atlantean” Odyssey was written in late ’79 and released in early ’80, thus beating Mystery House to the punch, came from. So:
1 – There’s no evidence that I can find that Atlanian/Atlantean Odyssey was ever commercialy released in BASIC. It only appeared in that form after it was published in Captain 80, circa November, 1981.
2 – There’s no evidence that I can find that even the text-only 16K cassette release was ever released commercialy before around January, 1981.
3 – There’s no evidence that I can find that the 48K disk-based graphical version was ever released commercialy before around May, 1981.
4 – There is clear evidence that BCM’S 32K disk-only Atlantis was commercaly released by around March, 1981.
To sum up:
The Captain 80 listing of Atlantean Odyssey misled people into thinking that it had been released much earlier than it actually was, and in a form that wasn’t even its original version, leading people (myself included) to wrongly speculate that it had preceded Mystery House as the first graphic adventure.
Thus (IMHO), BCM’S Atlantis ultimately has nothing to do with any of this, and is almost certainly an original French-language adventure. I’m always open to having my mind changed, but I’ll need to see hard, period-specific textual proof at this point.
Here’s something interesting that could help place the graphical version of Atlantean Odyssey in its proper historical context, direct from the source. From Bob Liddil’s Captain 80 column in the 10/82 issue of 80-U.S., which is a kind of brief history and “state of the union” type piece about the TRS-80 adventure scene up to that point:
“Along came Med Systems. They took the maze, so carefully marketed by Automated Simulations, and the adventure, so zealously played by the masses, and combined them into one awesome, aggravating, impossible, terrific, frustrating smash hit called Deathmaze 5000. Followed by Asylum and Labrynth, in quick succession, this new generation of adventure complemented our old friends. Now we had someplace to go to when Charlie, Scott and Greg’s universes were conquered.
But the age of pictures was upon us so quickly that we didn’t see it coming. Terry Kepner’s Atlantean Odyssey went perpendicular to Med Systems. His program illustrated the adventure with static displays where Med Systems drove you relentlessly through rat’s-eye views of endless corridors and traps. Bill Demas’ Forbidden Planet and Forbidden City added talkies. The structure of adventure was intact, but it was plain to see that survival in the marketplace was going to be more and more tentative.”
So, no big claims there about his friend’s game being the “first”, but rather placing it alongside other TRS-80 adventures that started to add audio/visual elements to the genre circa late ’80 to 1981, building on the text-only origins of Adams, Hassett etc.
the other thing to bring up is Lost Dutchman / Spider Mountain ended up hanging in a shop and we have an interview talking about this and how the shop owner then wanted more games:
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/spider-mountain/?order=ASC
(Also one of them ended in the weird CLOAD distribution list just like that Mummy game where we never figured out. Still would love to figure out what happened to that other game.)
For another case of distribution in ’79 where we don’t have magazine documentation for yet we know happened, check the story on the text only versions Goblins (which sold like 30 copies?) and how it got discovered via BBS; we even have the map of the earlier version
my guess is that Atlantis game happened after the other two for the shop, which is why it got a ’79 date, but the 32k made it unpublishable (or if it did go up in a baggie, it might have sold in single digits)
the 32k also explains the lack of magazine publication, so it had to wait for the 16k port
It does seem very difficult for a copy to have made it to France under these circumstances (we’re maybe talking copies in one shop if at all?); the only reason I’m hesitant is that things _did_ get spread by tape around then informally (see Colditz author)
but the same reason it wouldn’t have been sold at 32k is the same reason the coincidence seems so weird. Based on things you’ve pulled out I’m more at like 95-5 odds and if you’re at 99.5-0.5 odds that’s fine
“(Also one of them ended in the weird CLOAD distribution list just like that Mummy game where we never figured out. Still would love to figure out what happened to that other game.)”
I was meaning to mention that, actually. When I was researching this Kepner stuff, I noticed your comment about Spider Mountain showing up in the June, 1979 CLOAD. The Goldklang link you provided back then is invalid now, but I can see where it came from. There’s one particular disk file online of that CLOAD that has Spider Mountain tacked on to it, but unless I’m missing something, that must have been done at a much later date, as it never seems to have been on the original cassette. It’s not listed on the label, it’s not in any of the other dumps of the issue, and it’s not listed in the official index (same one where that Olsen Mummy game was found):
https://archive.org/details/cload_newsletter-1980-05/page/n2/mode/1up?view=theater
One other thing that I have a strong suspicion of after combing through all this stuff is that Interpro was actually Mark Robinson. Their adress was yet another local New Hampshire one, like most of that crew, and the title screen of that version of Atlantean not only credits Robinson, but also their Ultra-Mon program for making it possible to write it in machine code. Kepner was doing this whole thing in order to try and learn machine code, according to him, and Interpro’s first and main product was Ultra-Mon. He and Robinson are then co-credited going forward several years on a few different utilities and magazine pieces, even after Interpro seems to have faded out. So while I haven’t found definitive proof yet (they didn’t seem to attach personal names to anything else), I’m semi-confident that Interpro was really just Robinson, which would fit in pretty well with the whole Atlantean release saga.
also, assuming it got distributed the same way Mummy did (which would explain why it only shows up on the one copy), why is Mummy listed on that index but not Spider Mountain? Maybe he meant to remove both of them but left one on by mistake?
The Geihemagent/Villa Neumann stuff motivated me to finally clean up this survey of German material I’d done a while back. Not a comprehensive comb-through by any means, but it’s a start.
Höhlenspiel (Videobrain/Z80 CP/M, Readysoft, Holzkirchen) Elcomp 11/81 p.93, CHIP 11/81 p.82
Based on the description, this appears to be a large, disk-only German translation of Crowther/Woods. Readysoft had been importing the Apple II versions by both Microsoft and Apple for over a year by this point, so it seems likely to be a conversion of one of those, rather than of another CP/M version.
Adventure (ZX81 16K, Frank Schott, Frankfurt) CHIP 6/82 p.77
Deutsche Abenteuerspiele – “Adventure Games!!!” (Atari 800, Norman Wagner, Frankfurt) CHIP 7/82 p.80
Adventure in deutsch (ZX81 16K, ZX-Drucker, Bonn) CHIP 9/82 p.82
Adventure Games (TRS-80/Video Genie, Heidenheim) CHIP 9/82 p.86
Grubenabenteuer (TRS-80 16K tape/disk, Deutsche Abenteuer Gruppe, Selb) CHIP 10/82 p.90
Super Adventure – “deutsche” (Atari 800, Dortmund) CHIP 11/82 p.102
Apple-Höhle (Apple II 48K disk, M. Bremme, Düsseldorf) CHIP 11/82 p.126
Okay, here’s the deal on Hullet i Kæmpeskoven:
The information that spread around about this game was all sourced from one comment on the original post about it from 2019, by Allan Christophersen:
“Opdatering om det danske Adventure
Efter at have taget kontakt til SDC har jeg nu hørt tilbage. Det er lykkedes en medarbejder ved navn Hans Munkstrøm at finde en overlevende kopi af spillet kaldet Hulen i Kæmpeskoven på en mainframe de stadigvæk havde stående. Spillet er fra 1983 og sandsynligvis oversat til dansk af Svend Baumgartner.”
The problem is that it seems whoever he had spoken to at SDC must have been a bit confused. I got in contact with Hans Michael Munkstrøm from SDC and asked:
“Jeg søger mere information om det danske mainframe-computerspil Hullet i Kæmpeskoven, programmeret af Sven Baumgartner-Taarup i PL/1 på SDC omkring 1983. Jeg har fået at vide, at du fandt en kopi af det, og tænkte på, om du stadig har det? Jeg vil gerne kunne studere koden i detaljer og hjælpe med at bevare den, hvis det er muligt.”
He kindly responded right away, with this sad news:
“Desværre har jeg ikke en kopi af programmet.
Det er gået tabt da det ikke er oprettet i SDC’s source håndtering. Og er derfor slettet pga. alder/inaktivitet.
Men jeg er sikker på at det var en oversættelse af spillet Colossal Cave Adventure.”
I then responded to him with:
“Åh, det er en skam, at den blev slettet. Men jeg spekulerer på, om dette spil stadig kunne gemmes? Jeg fandt Svend Baumgartner-Taarup på LinkedIn:
<link deleted>
Mon du kender nogen der kunne kontakte ham der og spørge om han stadig har en kopi af koden?”
To which he replied:
“Jeg har tidligere snakket med Svend om det.
Og han kunne intet huske og havde heller ikke gemt noget.
Hvis jeg ikke tager meget fejl, var det det originale program man afviklede på TSO Der var så allekeret en tekst fil med alle tekster/sætninger.
Og jeg tror at det var tekstfilen, som Svend oversatte fra engelsk til dansk.”
So there you go. Translated tldr version:
Hans never had a tape of it, as it had already been wiped long ago. He asked Svend about it, but he didn’t remember anything. However, Hans was able to figure out that it was really just a line-for-line translation of the standard Crowther/Woods program that was already on the system at the time.
So, too bad that it’s gone, but maybe not the biggest loss in the world.
The really interesting thing I gleaned from all this was that Svend started his computer career at IBM in Copenhagen in the 1960s, so it turns out that he was briefly a co-worker with both Peter Ole Frederiksen, who went on to write that other lost Danish mainframe game, and Ernst Krogtoft’s father, who was an important figure there at the time. It also explains why he used PL/1, as he had a background in it from the old IBM mainframe days.
I did a comb-through of the Toronto RCP/M archives on Bitsavers, and found two completely undocumented adventures buried in there. I was actually looking for the two Heathkit CP/M adventures advertised by Jack Valero of Nepean, Ontario (Treasure Hunt and Magic Garden) in a couple of 1980 BUSS newsletter issues that I mentioned somewhere else here last year, but unfortunately they don’t seem to be there. Instead, I found these:
The Guardian of Time (CP/M, H.A. Lautenbach, 1981)
This was inexplicably hiding in a file named TOMBS.OBJ (there’s also another file in a different archive folder called TOMBS.AQV that I’d guess is related). There’s no in-game date, but these folders are all arranged chronologically (the 1985 dates are just from when they were all gathered together later for easier distribution), and everything in this one is from 1981 (including a CP/M port of Wizard’s Castle by Lautenbach dated August 1981) with some last-minute updates from January/February ’82, so this game must have been written in ’81. It’s a fantasy treasure hunt typical of the era, but with slightly more empurpled prose and what looks to be an attempt at an extended parser. From the game intro:
“The Guardian of Time by: H.A.Lautenbach
Written and dedicated to my son Chris
As the Guardian of Time’s Servant you are to ensure that the that the forces and treasures of Time are contained in a state of tranquility. Any or all actions will affect Time. Should they ever be disturbed your eternal Life will be forfiet and you shall be locked into perpetual limbo. You must first rid yourself of the Guardian and claim the Master Keys of Time. Find all the treasures of Time, without disturbing the nature of Time itself and then join the Gods. Bring the treasures to the chamber of Future Judgements for your just rewards. Beware the Spheres of Time can trap a powerless intruder and he shall be punished and judgement shall be made against him by the Guardian of Time. Listen well to the Gods for they could control your destiny.
You may command me with the first four letters of each word and the words (and,then,to) can also be used for joining a command sequence.(mulitple command input on one line)
Remember these words servant of the Guardian.
When you are ready to face your destiny press any key”
The only reference I could find to Lautenbach was that he was the general manager of Stanley Ash Theatrical Directors of Toronto in the ’80s. Might help explain the somewhat melodramatic atmosphere and numerous mythological references that I noticed in the game text.
Adventure SAM76 (Z80 CP/M, Greg Trice, 1985)
Greg Trice, of Scarborough, was something of a technical boffin and hardware tinkerer who wrote a bunch of letters to various computer mags circa ’82-’84, and was also a SAM76 enthusiast. This adventure (which I believe would be the only one known to be written in this language other than Bilingual Adventure), was released a bit later, in June ’85 when the Toronto RCP/M had become known as Canada Remote Disk. From the archive abstract:
“ADVSAM.LBR (On G0>, Main Systems).
By Greg Trice, one of our local users.
An Adventure game written in SAM76. You do not need to know anything about SAM76 to run it, or even possess an implementation (though you’re missing something if you don’t). Simply type AD and away you go. All the files in this library must be present on the disk to run it. They are all linked together by the master file AD.COM. If you want to examine the source code (files with .SAM, .ADV or .PRO extensions) you’ll need a SAM76 interpreter with the X$UTIL utility package to list them as SAM76 program files are not directly listable with TYPE, etc.
Enjoy, enjoy! p.s. Z80 only!”
This isn’t the first SAM76 adventure covered here, apparently. As always I’m going to bug you for the link(s) if I may.
Sure, just head over to Bitsavers and download the archive in Users Groups/RCPM. TOMBS.OBJ is in folder 36-40, and the SAM76 game is in 257-260.
Just downloaded the game in 257_260 (in ADVSAM.LBR), which is the Manning/Roichel Colossal Cave, and I have been playing it through CP/M on an Amstrad CPC emulator. It’s a bit slow, but has some nice touches (like being able to choose the screen width).
Did you manage to find a download for the Greg Trice game?
ADVSAM is the Greg Trice game, as far as I can tell.
Haha… So I guess Trice just slightly modified the older Bilingual Adventure, but whoever wrote that description didn’t make clear that it wasn’t his original program. Typical CP/M scene recycling once again.
At least Guardian turned out to be the rare original in that endless swamp!
How did you manage to play “The Guardian of Time” from the OBJ file, by the way? My CP/M knowledge is a bit rusty.
I have managed to nose at the TOMBS.AQV file which contains TOMBS.ADV… the entire source code of the game… It’s in a really familiar format that I’m sure I’ve come across before.
Strident, I simply renamed the TOMBS.OBJ file to TOMBS.COM. I use cpmfs-2.00 to manipulate the disk images, so I grabbed the included one and did “cpmfs drivea.dsk w tombs.com” to get it on the disk, then simply ran it by typing “TOMBS”.
According to Gunther:
“Just renaming .OBJ to .COM makes it work in run-cpm22 too.”
Gunther also noted something about “ADVEN language” in that file, so maybe that’s what seems familiar? Is it possibly the same as the Adven-80 system, which is also on another of these disks, as I just mentioned?
It just struck me though, is it possible Trice might have added more content to the game? That was obviously a popular pastime with Crowther/Woods back in the day. IIRC, the only original content in the standard Bilingual Adventure release was something with an alligator and a raft.
I think I just fell down both a SAM76/SAM76 Inc and a “Greg Trice” rabbit-hole… I wonder if Greg ever completed his strangely and probably ill-advisedly named operating system…
Apparently it’s the same Greg Trice of the “Trice number sequence”?
*meant to type possibly (wish I could edit my comments)
If you’re interested in weird SAM76 stuff, check out the comment I made on the second Bilingual Adventure post a few weeks ago. I uncovered a very early version of the program (October ’78) that they were advertising as a sort of “write your own Adventure” thing in an Altair newsletter.
Thanks, Rob. Just renaming .OBJ to .COM makes it work in run-cpm22 too.
Can you check out TOMBS.AQV? It’s in folder 62-66. The only readable text in it is “TOMBS.ADV” at the top.
A quick search for .AQV in CP/M context brought me to “The R Lee CP/M Commercial Software Collection”, which has one SAMPADV.AQV file in a subdirectory promisingly called “ADVENTURE”, which also contains “SAMPADV.ADV” as the only legible text in its header.
There’s an UNQ.COM which “unsqueezes” the .aqv files back into .adv files, turning them into readable text.
As you probably suspected, TOMBS is The Guardian of Time.
The source for SAMPADV shows this comment:
MAKEADV is contained on the disk, MACRO80 and LINK80 are not.
There’s also an ADVENTUR.COM on the disk that asks me to enter a 3-digit code, then exits.
I’ve put the source and disk image on my github for now and will investigate further, currently on the look for MACRO80.
Ok, turns out you need to unsqueeze the adventure message file and then it runs – SCORE says it’s 350-point Adventure.
Thanks! Interesting… They really loved recycling stuff in the CP/M world, it seems.
One other thing you can check out if you’re interested is the Adven-80 system CP/M adaptation sample adventure by Bill Soon, from ’81. I found this in another CP/M archive last year and mentioned it in the original Lost Media post thread, but it looks like the version here might be more easily playable. It’s in folder 21-25.
As usual, I’m playing about with stuff and then coming back to ask questions… then when I update the page with my comments you guys have already answered them!
Ah, I wondered why the source code looked familiar. Need to dig out some of my stuff from years ago, but potentially this system? https://solutionarchive.com/list/system%2C174/
Which we discovered both the CP/M system of and some unknown games a while ago for.
Yeah, it’s definitely an ADVEN-80 game… Really cool to have discovered another one made in that system.
Minor detail, but I’d think this might push the release date of Guardian to early ’82, when the newest files in that folder date from, since the original ADVEN-80 article was in the 11/81 issue of Dr. Dobbs, and the Bill Soon CP/M adaptation and sample adventure is also dated 11/81. In any case Lautenbach must have started writing it right away, a few months after his Wizard’s Castle port, so it must be the first full-fledged game written with the system.
Stumbled on another game out of nowhere: The Search for Almazar. Found here: https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Almazar
The Liddelow version works in run-cpm22. Working on the TRS-80 disk, which shows up correctly in trstools but I’ve not yet figured out how to mount in trs80gp.
This one I’ve got (it’s listed at 1983 at the moment but I do already have the webpage flagged for confirmation when I get around to that)
TRS-80 version (auto-boots in trs80gp with no extra work) here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gp7Pi-3I8OKt6Y5DYPmDCzy74zMBWPAX/view?usp=sharing
Yeah, the versions of that one are listed on the CASA page https://solutionarchive.com/game/id%2C5561/Almazar+I.html where it’s dated 1983 for the 80 Micro release, although it’s noted the author wrote a version of the game at uni in 1981, so there’s an argument for that date too.
I just remembered: Another obscure mainframe adventure that’s been (sort of) recovered recently is “Adventure ]I[“:
https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2023/01/09/in-search-of-adventure-iii/
Follow the Github link down the page to check out the files for the rest of the story. Arthur mentioned this one to me via email, but said he had kind of forgotten to write about it further in the meantime, so I don’t think this information is widely known yet.
That blog post also reminded me: I was able to basically piece together the story behind Dor Sageth (which is pretty interesting), and feel that it may be findable if someone can get in touch with the right guy. I’ll post about it here at some point.
Possibly in response to us asking, Scott Adams has put The Inheritance back on sale for now: https://www.msadams.com/index.htm
It’s pay-what-you-want with a suggested $19.95 price tag.
Here’s a big pile of stuff from the US-based Timex Sinclair scene, which has been very poorly documented until recently, and seems to have completely escaped the notice of the usual databases and sources of information. I researched this stuff quite a while ago, but my notes were a mess and I didn’t get around to cleaning them up until now. It’s possible that one or two of these are actually RPGs, due to the low/no level of description provided in their ads, but I tried to be selective here. Note the handful that are actually available for download:
-Adventure Game (Adventure Games, Des Moines, IA, 1982) – Sync Vol. 2.5 p.90
-James Bond Adventure N.1 (Smartware, Melbourne, FL, 1982) Sync Vol. 2.5 p.47
-Detention Station Intrag
-Escape from the Dark System
-Labyrinth of the Necromancer
-Beneath the Temple of Khardam (Turner, Elcy & Com., Port Huron, MI, 1982-1983) – Sync Vol. 2.6 p.76 & Vol. 3.2 p.93 – Note that the first two of these were likely advertised in the 2.5 issue, but the appropriate page is missing in the scan.
-Star Hunter (Zebra X-Ray, Chattanooga, TN, 1982) – Sync Vol. 2.6 p.77
-Explorer I
-Explorer II
-Quest for the Staff of Light
-Deathship Sabotage (Charles White/Horizon Simulations, Lake Forest, IL, 1982-1983) – Sync Vol. 3.1 p.17 & Vol. 3.3 p.88 & Vol. 3.3 p.97 & Vol. 3.3 p.131
-Dry Gulch
-Morloc(k) Castle (Upstate Labs, Rochester, NY, 1982) – Syntax Vol. 3.8 p.24, Sync Vol. 3.1 p.101 – Note that there are several later ads for these that describe them in detail, and that the name of the latter changes from Morlock to Morloc.
-Ring of the Goddess (Haymarket Software, Jacksonville, FL, 1983) – Sync Vol 3.3 p.86 & Vol 3.3 p.104
-Shark’s Treasure
-Space Commando
-Double Feature Adventures: Quest for the Holy Grail & The Elusive Mr. Big (Softsync Inc./Ty-Soft/Richard Schulte, 1982-1983) Sync Vol. 2.6 p.18 & Vol. 3.2 p.21, Syntax Vol. 4.2 p.11, T-S Horizons N. 1 p.15 & N. 2 p.16 – Shark’s Treasure and Space Commando available for download at David Anderson’s Timex Sinclair website. Double Feature Adventures scan available at MOCAGH.
-The Wild West Adventure (Signature Software, Blanca, CO, 1982) – Sync Vol. 3.3 p.69
-Bermuda Shortz (Software Unlimited, Grandview, MO, 1982) Syntax Vol. 4.1 p.23
-Adventures of Ulysses
-Voyages of Sinbad (Zemog Scientific, San Bernardino, CA, 1982) Zemog Scientific software catalog p.1
-Lost Continent (B.M.S., Dearborn, MI, 1983) Sync Vol 3.3 p.77 & Vol. 3.4 p.45
-The Trident (Timex Sinclair, Nashua, NH/George Green, 1983) Ramblings Vol. 1.4 p.5 – Available for download at David Anderson’s Timex Sinclair website. Scans available at MOCAGH.
-Adventure in Space (Steve Dinstbier, St. John’s, MI, 1983) Sync Vol. 3.5 p.48)
-Plane Crash (Beacon Electronics, Tucson, AZ, 1983) T-S Horizons N. 2 p.21
-Harry Ho & The Disappearing Diamonds (The Wizard Works, Walkerville, MI, 1984) T-S Horizons N. 5 p.30
-Death Castle (Lon Stucky, Wagener, SC, 1985) – For the TS-2068. Available for download at David Anderson’s Timex Sinclair website. See article about Lon Stucky in the 11/84 issue of K-Power, p.16.
Hmm. The Timex Sinclair 1000 is the same machine as the ZX Spectrum.
1000 was the zx81 with double the ram (a luxurious 2 kb vs 1 kb)
followup was based on ZX Spectrum
basically they were behind the UK by a year
Yeah, and heads up here if you’re trying to play the available four:
EightyOne in TS-1000 mode works fine for Trident, Shark’s Treasure and Space Commando (aside from the inherent horrible screen-redraw thing), but the latter has a README about the code possibly needing a fix, IIRC.
However, I had problems getting Death Castle to load in 2068 mode. I didn’t try all that hard though, and David Anderson and another guy have a partial playthrough thread about it on a forum, so it must work okay with some fiddling.
I got Death Castle to work immediately using EightyOne. Didn’t change any of the default settings.
Hmm… Well, I had been fiddling around with some other games at the time, so maybe I had changed some settings or something. That emulator does tend to get really slow and weird after a while though, especially in the menus.
A bit out of time-frame for what’s being covered here, but I thought this was interesting enough to mention…
Bombscare, a completely undocumented MS-DOS adventure from 1987 that was apparently only distributed via local BBSes. Now preserved and playable:
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/seeking-info-on-obscure-text-game.1252959/
This delving back into Marooned reminded me of the lost (I think?) OSI adventure Marooned in Space by Orion Software Associates, 1980. It’s listed on CASA, so obviously known to a certain degree. But what seem to be more obscure are their two other adventures, listed in later ads:
Immortality
Volcano of Kanthor (Micro, 7/81 p.78)
They also had a series of seemingly RPG-ish games called “Epic Quests”, but the one called Codename: Barracuda sounds like it might have adventure elements (Micro (2/82 p.33).
One of those early 80s companies who advertised a lot, but where almost everything seems to be lost.
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Randomly found an adventure game from the book “Adventure in PROLOG”, which teaches the reader the language using practical applications like “Nani Search”, a small text adventure: Amzi! inc. Adventure in Prolog tutorial
That’s pretty cool! After Dag Svanæs of Studio-54 mentioned having experimented with writing adventures in Prolog, it made me wonder if anyone else had ever tried that.
I’ve discovered a fairly early Japanese adventure that’s almost completely unknown and appears to have still not been preserved:
Orient Adventure (Toshiba Pasopia/Pasopia 5, Tatsuno System Research, April, 1983)
It’s a machine language adventure with monochrome wire frame graphics a la Mystery House, released on cassette only. It was first announced as simply “Adventure game”, which would be “released soon” in the 2/83 issue of Gekkan Micom, as part of Toshiba’s “Pasocom Salon” initiative, which featured software from their lineup of third party contributors. The initial description was simply that it was an “escape from a space station” game. These ads continued until the 5/83 issue, by which time the game had been released, and now featured the real title and a screenshot, with a slightly altered “escape from a spaceship” description. They continued on into 1984, eventually featuring a longer blurb which basically described the plot as:
“You’re a young man who’s always dreamed about space, so you decide to stow away on the spaceship XX-1 and defect to the space station with some information.”
This is one of the first real Japanese adventures with a traditional science fiction setting, as well as the first of only a tiny handful of Pasopia-exclusive adventures.
Here’s a recently completed auction that features the only known copy of the game, as far as I can tell:
https://auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/n1200427173
For anyone who’s interested, I have a new article up on Dan Hallock’s blog about some major discoveries made in the recently uploaded Data General AOS and AOS/VS-based minicomputer tape archive:
https://bigdanzblog.wordpress.com/
The highlights are:
-A unique 500 point version of Adventure from 1979.
– A previously unknown port of Zork/Dungeon written in PL/I.
– A huge and completely undocumented adventure named Thissala from 1979-1981 that has some interesting history behind it.
– The original version of the infamous Ferret, that features some notable differences from the modern port, and may have historical connections to these earlier Data General adventures.
– An unknown multi-player RPG called Quest, that seems way ahead of its time.
One point I should clear up: Anyone who wants to try the 500 point version of Adventure can just use the 16-bit AOS Simh download on Novas are Forever, as it’s already pre-loaded there in one of the Games directories. However, the version of Thissala in the other Games directory (which also contains some vintage save game files that were preserved along with it) won’t work there, as someone got mixed up and put some AOS/VS programs on the 1976-1983 Games tape that was loaded in. You’ll need to load that tape into the MV simulator if you want to check those out. Otherwise, it’s better to just load in one of the NADGUG MV library tapes as detailed in the article.