One thing that’s felt unusual about the All the Adventures project compared to studying, say, short story authors, is the vast number of people in the early days “just passing through” and either writing one or two games. Even most relatively prolific authors have had their main work confined to a small span of time, so we can’t look at their works like we might cinema and compare Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) to Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Other authors who have gone into games have just touched upon adventure games briefly. Yes, normal publishing (and cinema, and art, and etc.) also have one/two-hit wonders, but the nature of the genre here seems more transient. Even the Infocom veterans really produced most of their work in the 80s and the diehards like Steve Meretzky had trouble keeping the flame alight.
In the case of Bob Blauschild, before he wrote his two games for Sirius (Escape From Rungistan — which we’ve already looked at — and today’s selection) he worked in chip design, and after he was done with his games he resumed with chip design. He has other published works but they’re all things like a chapter in the 1990s book Analog Circuit Design titled Understanding Why Things Don’t Work.
In an early attempt to build an electric light, Thomas Edison used a particular construction that glowed brilliantly for a brief moment and then blew out. An assistant made a remark about the experiment being a failure, and Edison quickly corrected him. The experiment had yielded important results, for they had learned one of the ways that wouldn’t work.
Learning through our mistakes doesn’t apply only in the areas of dealing with IRS agents or meeting “interesting” people in bars — it’s also one of the most important aspects of the creative process in engineering. A “failure” that is thoroughly investigated can often be more beneficial in the long run than success on the first try.
But let’s not be wistful and just enjoy the game, eh?
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
Critical Mass maintains the animation and sense of humor of the first game, except it adds color and an extra stakes of saving the world from nuclear annihilation.
On June 1st, the United Nations received the following message: “Good morning. Just thought I’d drop a line to let you know that precisely at 8 p.m. on June 9th, I’ll be destroying the world’s five largest cities with thermal nuclear weapons. It ought to be a real blast! Sorry, but that’s about all I can tell you. Thanks for your time and have a a nice day!”
The delegates gathered quickly. How could this demented person be found and stopped? The task would require someone who could understand how the sicko thought. Well, naturally, they thought of you! Hurry now, you’ve got just nine days to prevent this heinous crime and save 50 million lives! That is, unless you’ve got something more important to do.
I’m just trusting this one on CASA in terms of the publication date, even though the manual etc. say 1983. Likely it was right at the end of the year.
The red center animates ticking down. This is slightly less elaborate than the zoom-in of Rungistan but this may have needed to be a compromise for color.
The mushroom cloud is animated rising.
After the opening graphics the game asks you to flip over to side B. (Note if you’re playing on the WOZ version, AppleWin isn’t happy with the second side WOZ file, but the package comes with a DSK version.)
The envelope on the desk notes that a message was received at 1:00 in the morning on June 1: at 8 pm on June 5th, the five largest cities in the world will be obliterated by thermo-nuclear devices.
The call “was traced to a pay phone at the Central Park Zoo” but there were no clues, and we must “find a way to neutralize this treat”. Our first destination is a contact in London.
Just to be clear, this is not a “realistic” nuclear paranoia type game, like maybe Wasteland, but more of a James Bond setup where for some reason only one person can save the world. The scenario includes a great deal of emphasis on time, and there’s a long explanation in the manual:
Each command uses 1 minute.
Taxi Rides use 30 minutes per ride.
A boat on the Sea uses 30 minutes per direction.
A boat near Land uses 1 minute per direction.
Walking uses 1 minute per direction.
Time elapsed for city to city travel varies by type of transportation.
If you are knocked unconscious a certain block of time will pass.
If you do not enter a command within 10 seconds of your previous command, the clock will advance 1 minute.
The last sentence is highly significant: the clock advances in real time. With an emulator on max speed you can watch the clock advancing quickly to doomsday.
Yes, that’s a bit anxiety-inducing. I might be doing a lot of reloading to redo sections faster, although my general suspicion is that the real-time part is more or less insignificant but city travel time might be very important.
After reading the envelope, it vaporizes, Mission Impossible style, and then we have nothing else to do but hop in an elevator.
More anxiety-inducing than the real time aspect is having commands not get accepted and having the clock tick down as a result. You can’t just GO ELEVATOR so you need to PUSH BUTTON instead first.
The elevator says there is a “special command word” but typing GO DOWN seemingly works.
As you keep riding down, the elevator “has a nervous breakdown” and the number ticks down and lets you type more commands, but all I’ve attempted so far gets me a “you can’t stop it” response.
After some fiddling around (and trying the word LITHIUM from the opening room, which also doesn’t work) I decided to invoke a page from Rungistan and try JUMP, which works to represent you going into the air by the room-picture moving down. You need to time JUMP such that you’re in the air as the elevator hits floor 1.
A grim beginning! I enjoyed the author’s prior game quite a bit so I’m willing to give some latitude here even given the ticking clock (I have the magic of save states to smooth it over) although I suspect this might be a harder game than Rungistan.
Renga in Blue 
Finally, back to the good old Apple ][. Critical Mass was certainly an impactful game for me. I remember 9 year old me thinking that jumping to avoid an elevator crash made perfect sense. Looking forward to reading the rest.
As far as I know, this came out in the Spring of 1983. The ads and news items in the April and May ’83 issues of Softalk make it quite clear that it was a brand new release, and I wasn’t able to find mention of it in any other print source prior to that.
Yeah, I was a little puzzled looking at the CASA page since it mentions their ’83 catalog. However, there are four editors for it which usually means there was a serious discussion, so I’m trusting there’s something I’m missing that I can’t find because Internet Archive search is still down.
And if not, well, I’ll shuffle it up to ’83 when we get there.
Archive search seems to be back up, as I used it to double-check this information.
CASA is a great resource, but I find it to often be inaccurate on dates. I think when a lot of this data was entered in there, many of the large sets of magazines that we can now use to check this information relatively accurately were not yet available online, so they would tend to use a combination of in-game dating, disk/tape labels, or just whatever had been thrown up on Mobygames and the like previously, who of course had also not had access to all of these print resources themselves to begin with.
I think the gold standard for sourcing dates is the method that Kevin Bunch has used for Atari Archives, but there’s a lot of inertia, technical issues and a simple lack of free time that makes bringing all of these older databases into the modern era of historical research a real challenge.
Kevin’s a regular reader of this blog, btw (also he helped with Bally Astrocade stuff)
everyone should get his Atari Archives Vol 1 it is fantastic
Computers are really tricky (especially if it’s UK ’82) because there is always the possibility someone tosses it up on a store shelf somewhere, which really did happen, far more than cartridges which had to have a printing in volume to be worth it.
Also our magazine spread is finally quite good but we’re missing a lot of catalogues. I’d love to see some more Mad Hatter Catalogues but that’s so early I doubt they’ll come up
re: Internet Archive it wasn’t working for me yesterday, but it did when I just tested it, woot! Except sometimes the magazine doesn’t display. I’ll take what I can get. I know they’re still busy shoring everything up.
My observation about timers in adventure games, having not played any from the early days (pre-1989, let’s say), is that they more or less function as ignoreable if you don’t fret about restarting, and an absolute killer if you do. Because I’ve never seen one that was so precise as to require you to do things exactly right or die, but you had more than enough time that sometimes you even needed to advance time.
Caveat, never played King’s Quest 3, but that seems to be the exception. Every other game I’ve seen gives you more than enough time to do everything right. This is from the hard era of adventure games, but even then it seems like developers give generous enough timers so you have a shot at winning. I could be wrong though.
there are some extraordinarily tight ones (although I haven’t seen any that are tight _and_ have real time)
the Paul Shave stuff actually used the tightness to form extra puzzles
the Acheton timer isn’t _that_ tight but I was apparently suboptimal because I had to take my last steps in darkness; fortunately the game works is you have a x% chance of dying to darkness rather than “you will die after x steps” so I could step, save, and reload to get through the last bits of dark over to the end of the game
KQ3 does it in fairly tight 25-minute chunks, but I don’t think the overall limit is so bad… it’s just that you have to keep interrupting yourself to go back up to the house and hide everything, which itself steals several minutes out of each round.
Oh, drat, I forgot about D, the 3DO game, but that is a game you’re liable to forget if you haven’t played it. (which I haven’t) It’s mostly just known for having a 2 hour time limit and several controversial aspects to it.
@Jason, I think even if a turn limit is tight it isn’t as much of a problem as a real time timer. You know a turn limit is passable, since unless you’re playing a really bad game, you can win within that turn limit, even if kills you the turn after the limit. It is, as you said, a puzzle in of itself. With a real-time timer, you can’t really do that.
@arcanetrivia, not understanding the inner workings of the game but having had heard about that, isn’t this because you’re working against two timers at the same time? I think that might be the problem.
It’s more like one timer, repeatedly, but I think you get a limited number of rounds. IDK if you want to consider that an overlapping timer. There is a second timer later in the game but people usually complain about how long it is, not how restrictive, because you have to wait it out in real time. You might possibly run out of time in that area if you were really flailing around in that area, but if not, you’re in for a long wait after you complete the few actions you need to take.
As annoying as the KQ3 one is, in its defense: it’s clearly visible on the screen, and, as was said before, easy to handle once you know what you’ve done wrong. (I must get back to the house before the wizard comes home, and I can’t have any of his things in my pockets.) It’s tedious mostly before you get an object to assist in speedy travel, less tedious after.
I truly despise turn limits more, especially because many of them are not immediately obvious. Because of the medium, it was prevalent in the text adventures, and was a strict “learn from dying” mechanic, something that we rightfully complain about when it appears in a modern graphic adventure.
just an apology part 2 is taking a little while
some life/work things
promise it will be sometime this week though
Take your time! We faithful readers will be here, ready to enjoy the escapades.
I was regaling a group of friends a couple of days ago about the mammoth collective excursion that was Ferret. They said to me “when are you going to LP it” and I told them “it’s already been LP’d, it’s this blog” and shared the start of the journey with them. Who knows, maybe some more regular readers will come of that.
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The British Krishna brings back some memories. Up until the nineties it was a regular thing to see the Hare Krishna movement out on the streets of Oxford Street in Central London but they seem to have vanished these days. I can even remember an episode of “the Fall And Rise Of Reginal Perrin” lampooning them with Reggie dressed up as one in said street.