Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I have always been interested in adventure games — ever since I first played Scott Adams’ Adventureland and issued the command CLIMB TREE and I entered a whole new world.

Castle Adventure is another entry in the “early work of a person who would become notable” genre. Other examples include Temple of Disrondu, with two of the Magnetic Scrolls authors (Rob Steggles and Hugh Steers) in a team-up; Brian Fargo started his career with two adventure games including Demon’s Forge; the team for Dragon’s Keep included Al Lowe who would go on to pen the Leisure Suit Larry series.

David Malmberg was an executive by day, but would eventually become an important name in text adventures by modifying the GAGS text adventure system into the much more powerful AGT, Adventure Game Toolkit. In the late 80s and early 90s, for text adventure authors not using the older Quill or the more recent TADS, it was often the default game-writing system. It showed up in games like The Multi-Dimensional Thief (1991) and Shades of Grey (1992) which are still worth playing today.

After studying GAGS in detail, it became obvious that it was limited to very simple games with only a few verbs. I wanted to create Infocom-like games. GAGS in its current state would never make it. However, Mark had defined the essential data structures very well, e.g., ROOMs, NOUNs, and CREATUREs, but GAGS lacked flexibility in manipulating those objects. So I set about extending GAGS by adding what I called “meta-commands,” which really increased the power and flexibility of GAGS. These meta-commands allowed for an almost unlimited number of nouns, verbs, and objects (and synonyms for any of them) and the ability to manipulate them. It came close to my goal of creating games that were truly Infocom-like.

— From an interview with Stephen Granade

Malmberg’s interest in creating programming tools extended to making this LOGO/PILOT hybrid program for graphics, prior to writing Castle Adventure. Via eBay.

This impulse to extend an adventure-writing system did not come from nowhere; to make Castle Adventure, as published in the November 1982 issue of Micro, the author studied various articles by Scott Adams detailing how his own system worked.

Many of the ideas in CASTLE ADVENTURE, as well as other adventures that are widely available, owe a tremendous debt to Scott Adams. In the specific case of CASTLE, it uses a database structure and table-driven logic similar to those first described by Adams in several articles.

The articles in question are from Creative Computing (August 1979), Softside (July 1980) and BYTE (December 1980). According to this thread Malmberg took actual PET source from 1979 as a base (rather than just eyeballing the article) and Strident points out that there’s a biographical note from a year earlier that already mentions adventures…

David Malmberg is Director of Management Systems for Foremost-McKesson in San Francisco. He has a PET, as well as a VIC, and is interested in machine language utilities, strategy games, and writing his own “Adventures.” He’d like to hear from anyone who develops interesting VIC applications (with or without the light pen).

…meaning Castle Adventure may have existed in some form before 1982.

We are here to rescue a princess, somehow winning her hand in marriage in the process.

In CASTLE ADVENTURE you play the role of Godfrey de Goodheart, a bold, but impoverished knight. King Fredrick has dispatched you to rescue his only daughter, the beautiful Princess Fatima, from the dungeons of Baron von Evil’s castle. You have also been asked to capture the Baron’s treasures of gold, silver, and gems, which he enmassed by cruelly exploiting his serfs. If you can rescue the princess and return with all of the Baron’s ill-gotten treasures, King Fredrick has promised you Princess Fatima’s hand in marriage.

Oddly, despite the supposedly standard concept, princess-marriage doesn’t happen that often in early adventures. The prototypical example, Wizard and the Princess, doesn’t even give you half the kingdom. Dragon Quest at least gives the hero a pile of cash but they just get a kiss from the princess. Slaying the dragon in Treasure Hunt yields a “little black book with the addresses and phone numbers of every beautiful princess that lives in Vermont.” The princess in Program Power Adventure invites you to a banquet. Hezarin has a princess and a prince but not as the main goal, and where “only one offers their hand in marriage, but that ought to be enough for any normal Adventurer anyway. They can always marry each other if you don’t like the idea.”

What is quite standard is kicking off the proceedings in a forest.

Out of all games that start in a forest, this is one of them.

Don’t worry, though, the game gets abnormal again quite quickly.

Normally, the player starts with a knapsack containing some matches. However, the command JUMP will break your arm (!) and now you have a broken arm in inventory too. The broken arm has genuine effect; for example, you can’t CLIMB TREE with one (as suggested by Malmberg’s early moment of excitement in Adventureland)…

…nor can you go to a nearby cave, which has a torch at the entrance that can be lit by the matches.

If you hang around enough turns (15 or so?) the message YOUR ARM HAS HEALED appears and the adventure can resume as normal.

In addition to the above shenanigans, you can swim across the moat helpfully marked “NO SWIMMING — DANGER!” and hang out with some MAN-EATING PIRANHA. (In a nice detail, the matches go soggy if you’re carrying them in water.) If you’re just passing by you are safe, except past the moat is a raised drawbridge which isn’t too helpful. Hanging out with the killer fish results in YOU’VE MADE A TASTY MEAL! and a scene where you can try to pick the correct direction to resurrect yourself, early Scott Adams style.

Going the wrong direction leads to YOU ARE LOST IN THE PET ROMS and the game ending.

Weirdly, going through the death scene is how I first found the “treasure spot” of the game, as it is the landing point of a successful resurrection. Back at the cave (I showed a screenshot earlier where trying to go near is prevented by a broken arm) you can GO HILL to arrive at a new room. I’ve always hated this sort of “hidden exit” when it has happened, but at least there was an alternate method of finding the place!

Veering back to the cave, going in leads to a slight “maze” (just the author dropping some loops in), and a grappling hook with a rope right before a tall room where it gets used.

After climbing the rope, there’s a door with an angry guard. Doing battle lands the player in prison with a “horny toad”, and that seems like a good stopping point for now.

The Scott Adams influence is clearly showing up in gameplay already, with the “broken arm” scene, the matches that can go soggy, and the resurrection. As I’ve mentioned before, the “daemons” from the Scott Adams system add timing and condition elements; they tend to make games more complex than the norm, so I expect Castle Adventure to go above and beyond a typical type-in game.