Brytta, 11th King of Rohan, was not to be given a peaceful reign, despite being beloved by all and given the name Léofa. The War of the Dwarves and the Orcs had caused numerous orcs to leave their realm in the Misty Mountains to find settlement in the White Mountains just south of Rohan. Brytta went to war to remove their scourge, and by his death was thought to have destroyed them; this was not so, as they were merely in hiding.
The next king, Walda, met unfortunate circumstances 9 years into his reign. As Tolkien explains in Appendix A of Lord of the Rings:
He was slain with all his companions when they were trapped by Orcs, as they rode by mountain-paths from Dunharrow.
Walda’s son Folca took up the task of vengeance for his father, and swore to never hunt a beast until all orcs were removed from Rohan for good. This task he accomplished by the age of 60, so he followed this up with a trip to the Firienwood (or Firien Wood, or Firienholt) on the border between Rohan and Gondor. It held a mighty boar, and while Folca the orc-slayer managed to defeat the boar, he soon died after from tusk-wounds.
Today’s adventure is from another British company (MP Software) where I have only been able to scrounge out the barest of information. Their adventure Firienwood first gets mentioned in the November 1982 issue of Personal Computing Today as “coming soon”, and I’ve been able to confirm it is listed as existing by the February 1983 issue (reaching the street January 1983) and the internal copyright date says 1982, so we’ll roll with that; if it didn’t quite squeak in being published by the end of ’82 it was close enough. (Thanks to Ethan Johnson who helped with my search.)
As far as I can tell Helen Seymour and John Hudson produced all the MP Software products; this is the first of four adventure games they made (later: Crown of Mardan, Sadim Castle, Woodland Terror). They were originally for the BBC Micro, but also ported (with likely very little change) to the Electron. The address listed (even on later printings) is a clearly residential area in Bromborough, Merseyside, suggesting the pair were yet another garage-operation (well, the houses don’t have garages, but you get what I mean).
From Every Game Going.
This is harkening back to the cavalcade of Crowther/Woods clones but adds an element which makes it almost uniquely painful. It’s easier to explain in context what I mean, so let’s dive in–
Our aim is to find a golden bird of paradise, and there’s a Wizard making things difficult. We are rather unusually told up front that monster kills are worth 10 points each, which is more like RPG than adventure behavior.
Our adventure, not shockingly, starts near the title forest, and if we try to go in we get tangled in and die via thorns.
The intent seems to be to funnel the player towards a boat at the very start, where you pick three out of six items (as you can’t carry more on the boat).
I already know the hambone gets used almost immediately, and I think the sword is necessary, and I’ve found use for the keys. This is not an absolute guarantee that this represents the set that must be chosen. Philosopher’s Quest had two gimmicks, one where a bonus item could be scrounged, and one where an item that doesn’t get taken nevertheless gets found anyway. So I could see (despite me using the keys early) another set of keys somehow surfacing, or maybe a way of putting them out forward. (Having said that, the most obvious action, tossing stuff in the river hoping it gets carried somewhere helpful, doesn’t get parsed.)
Taking the boat leads to a cave with a “vicious dog”. This is where the bone comes in handy.
Specifically, the dog suddenly not only becomes happy, but brings forth a “Wizards Staff” that “has many powers”. The only power I know of so far is that it lights up automatically in darkness.
From here comes the traditional cave-in-many-directions, and I’ll give a pair of screens which might explain my struggle:
Specifically, past this point in the game, a goblin can attack at any time. The goblin will have a random chance of killing you on sight. If it doesn’t kill you, you have a chance of doing KILL GOBLIN via the sword and having success, but then the goblin can still return at any moment. “Any moment” includes actions like “check if an particular direction has an exit or not” or “check if the passage that you entered from the east lets you go back the same way to the west, or if it is one-way”. This has one of those unfortunate twisty maps wherever everything everywhere needs to be checked but this is also combined with a high probability of death at any moment.
(Oh, in addition to N/S/E/W/NE/SE/SW/NW, LEFT and RIGHT are directions too sometimes.)
The very curious thing is that the two 80s reviews I’ve run across (not intentionally, just trying to find files for the game) both mark this as a “beginner game”. Both are reviews for the Electron, though, rather than the original BBC Micro version I am playing. I may switch it up if this gets too terrible and see if the authors lightened up the RNG death in the revised version. What I can’t do is simply hack BASIC source, as this is a machine code game.
Germany got a jump start on computing early. The earliest “real computer”, arguably, was via Konrad Zuse with his Z3 in 1941; fortunately for Zuse’s modern reputation, it failed to drum up much enthusiasm with the Nazis, and while it got used for some minor aeronautical calculations, the monster application of the war — codebreaking — was left to the Allies.
After the Nazis were defeated, post-war restrictions meant aviation and nuclear research were banned. So, while Zuse met Turing in 1947 and later founded a company (Zuse KG) and IBM had a presence (their German spinoff Dehomag was redubbed IBM Deutschland GmbH in 1949) it still took a while for computing in Germany to really be established. (I’m referring now to West Germany; East Germany went to the Soviets and has its own story.)
In 1955 the Allied occupation ended and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council) was founded. Computers quickly started to occupy universities, with half of them having mainframes by 1960. Local private companies started to face off against IBM. Siemens got on board early (1954, before restrictions were lifted) and went after big industry. The radio and television company Telefunken (parent company AEG) made a mark with the TR-440, dominating the university market, but AEG’s lack of enthusiasm eventually led to their large computing operations being sold to Siemens; Siemens kept up with the industrial-scale computers, while AEG focused more on mid-range business operations. A few more companies like Triumph-Adler focused on office settings.
Ludwig Zagler posing with his chess program written with Siegfried Jahn for the TR-440: Daja (1974). It could only be run at night. Picture from Der Spiegel, April 1976.
Missing from all this is home computing. Referring to a May 1980 issue of Mikro + Kleincomputer, the Schweizer Computer Club had access to Apple, Pet, Sorcerer, Superbrain, and TRS-80: none of those are from German companies. The big locals were still focused on business and industry; Triumph-Adler, which started to try their hand at the personal market with their Alphatronic, was never a consumer hit. (According to one author, they originally tried to “sell them like typewriters” in batches.)
The foreign companies of the Trinity, then, were the dominant force in 1980, although in a different order than the US: Commodore PET, Apple II, TRS-80. Commodore would eventually creep up to be dominant all the way to Amiga, but for the time of our story there was still a pitched battle. TRS-80 had a brief moment in the sun not in its original form imported from the US, but as a cheaper clone via a company from Hong Kong.
…
Hannover Messe was an “export fair” which had been running since 1947; in 1970 the fair added the Center for Office and Information Technology (Hall 1) which included computing devices.
In 1980, Fred Trommeschläger was at Hall 1. He had previously sold electronics (interrupted in the mid-70s by a foray into aviation), but he pivoted from electronics to computers when they became more profitable, forming Trommeschläger Computer GmbH. He sold imports of TRS-80s (via the Tandy headquarters in Belgium) but tried to undercut his competition on price. He was tipped off that there was a cheaper TRS-80 alternative showing. The machine was being sold was the Video Genie by EACA, a Hong Kong-based company that had been founded in 1970 by mechanical engineer Eric Chung (previously of Fairchild, the same company that eventually released the first home console that uses cartridges).
Trommeschläger sent his employees scouting, found the machine at the fair, and got an invite to a sales meeting. Negotiations happened in Holland with multiple companies vying for rights, and Trommeschläger managed to impress the representatives from Hong Kong — landing an exclusive deal — by arriving in his own plane (remember, he briefly had went into aviation!)
Sales blew up, with volume going by by a factor of five from 1980 to 1982. Volume went up in 1983 as well, but there was a catch: EACA imploded. Eric Chung was reported fleeing with a briefcase containing 10 million USD. One issue was simply Tandy themselves, which had brought up a lawsuit in 1981 for infringement; it was settled out of court, but it must have represented a significant financial hit. Additionally, while the Video Genie was a success EACA had also gone into other products like radios that were a failure, and then also decided to compound that with speculation on property (!).
This left Trommeschläger’s company in trouble, as they had already done more hiring and had already announced future product based on the EACA’s upcoming computers (now vaporware). They tried to adapt a different computer (the Ferranti PC) and re-dub it with the now-known-in-Germany Genie name, but it wasn’t enough, and his company went down in 1984.
The reason why all this is important is that it meant the Video Genie name became more well-known in Germany than the original TRS-80; while the US had magazines like 80 Micro supporting the TRS-80, Germany had Genie Data. Also, one of the copies of today’s selection (Das Geheimnisvolle Haus, The Mysterious House) is in a directory titled genie1.
I found this game while looking for another game, Geheim-agent XP-05, the existence of which had been sleuthed out by commenter Rob; it was thought to be lost. I dug around the far corners of the Internet and managed to find the secret agent game in a public German archive by checking every disk. XP-05 was on disk 5. From disk 7 I found this:
I had a copy of HAUS.BAS already, but variations can differ, so I opened the source code and hit paydirt:
21050 GESCHRIEBEN IM OKTOBER 81 VON UWE SCHUSTER
October 1981! My other copy mentioned Uwe Schuster, but not the date. This places it as the earliest German adventure game currently found. I will not give any guarantees there isn’t older; early German computer history still needs study. I can say that when Mikro+Kleincomputer did a review of Apple Adventure in February 1982, it was written as if adventures were a new idea. It explains that you communicate using commands of two words, and that you are searching for treasure, that there are “beinahe unendliche Labyrinthe” and you should make a map.
We have some clue as to Uwe Schuster’s influences, as while one copy contains a year and month, the other contains an author statement.
Dieses Programm erhielt seine Anregung von “Haunted-House”. Es erschien mir reizvoll, dieses Thema weiter auszubauen. Da mir die Abenteuer von Scott Adams gut gefallen, habe ich versucht, dessen Schema zu übernehmen, um ein lästiges Scrollen des Bildschirms zu vermeiden. Gewiss ließe sich das Programm noch weiter ausbauen, aber ich hoffe dass es trotzdem Spaß gemacht hat.
(Uwe Schuster)
The program was inspired by the game “Haunted House” and the author wanted to expand on the same idea, following the pattern of Scott Adams that avoided screen scrolling. While we’ve had multiple game titled Haunted House only one has been for TRS-80, the very early Robert Arnstein one sold by Radio Shack.
The instruction screen I gave earlier indicates shortcuts move around (N, S, W, O) take inventory (B) or redraw the screen (R). However, there’s also a full verb list, and following my procedure with Languages I Am Not Great At, I grabbed the list from the source code directly:
NEHME -> TAKE
NIMM -> TAKE
HOLE -> TAKE
GEBE -> GIVE (functionally DROP)
LASS -> LEAVE (DROP)
STELLE -> DROP
LAUFE -> RUN
GEHE -> GO
STEIGE -> CLIMB
SAGE -> SAY
SPRICH -> SPEAK
RUFE -> CALL
SIEH -> SEE
SCHAU -> LOOK
SUCHE -> SEARCH
FINDE -> FIND
BRICH -> BREAK
SCHLAGE -> HIT
BRECHE -> BREAK
SCHNEIDE -> CUT
TRINKE -> DRINK
GIESSE -> POUR
SCHUETTE -> SHUT
SCHLAFE -> SLEEP
WARTE -> WAIT
HILF -> HELP
OEFFNE -> OPEN
SCHALTE -> SWITCH
Despite being inspired by a haunted house game, this really is more of a “mysterious” house: there are no ghosts or other spooks to battle against. There is a little magic. Our goal is to escape with all the treasures (three of them).
The description follows the minimal format of “you are in a suchandsuch” and most of the rooms have one item in them, either takable or non-takable (above, a guest room, with a bed).
You’re in a living room, with a carpet. The carpet can be taken.
Balcony with railing, which can’t be taken.
Breakfast room with endless coffee cup, which can be taken, and mysteriously doesn’t count as a treasure.
The house is mostly wide open, and the starting approach should be something like Eno: break and smash and tear stuff looking for hidden objects.
For example, there’s a television set showing the Arabian Nights, and you can smash it into pieces with a hammer. You can also smash the coffee cup (not helpful) and a mirror (helpful, I’ll show that off shortly). A knife also gets use as you tear open an upholstered chair, revealing a diamond, and a coat, revealing a wallet.
That makes for 2 out of 3 treasures, suggesting this game will go quickly, but it turns out treasure 3 (which is needed to escape) was kind of hard to find. But let’s go back to smashing the mirror first:
The mirror breaks into thousands of pieces which immediately dissolve into nothing. Behind is a bottle of acid.
With the bottle of acid, and destruction still on my mind, my eye turned to the marble floor in the room immediately adjacent.
The acid dissolves the floor reveal a magic word: KERKY. Upon then doing SAY KERKY, I was teleported to the room shown above (“secret room”, with a “hole in the ceiling”) and was told that “all good things come in threes”. What this is hinting at is that the word only works three times to take you to the secret room, after which it will teleport you to random places, including a mid-air drop killing you.
I have fallen from the 13th floor! The adventure is over.
With my eye on the hole in the ceiling, I brought over a ladder from a nursery, and was able to climb to a roof.
I climb through the ceiling and get to the roof of the house. It’s very cold.
Going in a direction seems to randomly either kill you or land you in a room back in the house. It was here, at 2 out of 3 treasures, that I was very stuck. Just to list the inventory available:
key, cup of coffee, knife, bottle opener, jug of cognac, ladder, hammer, carpet, diamond, wallet
The jug of cognac is also auto-refilling and is essentially to opposite of the cup of coffee. I hadn’t found a use for the key but it turned out that I never would: it’s a red herring. Looking at the carpet, the game just states “a vacuum cleaner wouldn’t do any harm” so it took me poking inside the source code (it’s 10k, roughly the size of Raspion Adventure) to realize it could be transformed into a flying carpet.
But how? I tried various uses of the magic word, setting the carpet on the roof, plummeting off the edge while holding the carpet, whacking at the carpet really hard, and still no magic appeared. I finally broke down studied the relevant source portion rather than just glancing:
7100 IFX>23THEN7200:ELSEW1$=”B”:W0$=”A”:GOSUB12000:IFW0=1ANDCO=1ANDW1=1THENPRINT”DER BODEN LOESST SICH AUF UND EIN SCHILD WIRD SICHTBAR”:PRINT”DARAUF STEHT: MAGISCHES WORT “:D$(2)=”SCHILD MIT MAGISCHEM WORT”:M(2)=1:S$(3)=”SCHI”:S$(4)=”MAGI”:GOTO131
7110 W0$=”H”:W1$=”F”:GOSUB12000:IFCO=8ANDW0=1ANDW1=1THENPRINT”DER TEPPICH FAENGT AN ZU SCHWEBEN”:S$(11)=”FLIE”:D$(6)=”*FLIEGENDER TEPPICH*”:SC=SC+1:GOTO131
The first line 7100 is the result of pouring acid on the marble floor. I realized 7110 must also involve pouring a liquid of some sort.
The above depicts me on top of the roof pouring the jug of cognac while the carpet is sitting their waiting to absorb its precious energies. After this is done on the next turn (no matter what you type) you’ll fly off to safety.
The carpet floats up and away with me. I’m saved and have found all the treasures.
It is possible I am missing some subtle hint in German to this, or maybe there’s some mythology involving alcohol and flying carpets? The source code is here if someone would like to try a poke.
I found it interesting that while Mr. Schuster managed to pull off a two-word parser just fine, he stuck with a fairly grid-like map like the French Colditz game by Marcel Le Jeune. Most games from the US and UK insisted quite early on with having twisty maps, yet these two early examples of non-English adventure games eschewed cavelike-maze layout altogether. This may be because in both cases the influence came primarily from Scott Adams; while Adams had some mazes they were fairly small and didn’t really dominate in the same way the Crowther/Woods mazes did.
Or it could be that figuring out a parser from scratch (which both authors had to do) was complicated enough as it was, so they decided to keep the map aspect simple to keep track of.
Unfortunately I have not be able to unearth anything more about the author. His name shows up in a 1986 German magazine, but just in asking a question to the editors. While Marcel Le Jeune knows of the first-original-adventure-game-in-French status of his work, if this really is the first adventure game in German, I’m not clear if Uwe Schuster is even aware of it.
I was stuck on multiple things, but I went for the mini-game first. This involved water skiing in Miami, while passing to the left of green buoys and to the right of red buoys.
I had trouble with the game for a while, and had almost fully justified the game was impossible. My problem turned out to be essentially one of hitboxes. (These are the little boxes that register collision in video games, and they often don’t match graphics exactly in order to be “more forgiving” for players but also for ease of calculation.) The “front” of each buoy is only at a spot near the very start of the rectangle, and then you can pass clean through the graphic without issue.
So rather than thinking of the obstacle course as dodging to the left or right of things, I switched mentality to passing through the white-colored side of each of the buoys. I suddenly had much more success, although in some cases the turns are very tight.
The graphical settings are a bit off on this recording, but you can see what the sequence looks like, courtesy of AppleAdventures.
The whole point of the sequence was to win a beach towel. (Yes, this game has “dirt quests” just like Time Zone where you meet Julius Caesar only so you can steal his ladder. We had to carry chicken soup with us all the way from New York, and we couldn’t just obtain a towel from a store with money, we had to win it. The difference here is that the game is clearly taking a comedic bent to the whole approach.)
With the beach towel I could resolve one of my other issues, that of having the explosion at the boat. After GET GAS causes a spill, a simple CLEAN GAS and we’re able to take off at San Juan without blowing up.
This leads to an open ocean map and you can steer in the wrong direction and go forever. I knew from the tip in London that I needed to find St. Thomas, and eyeballing a real-life map it’s a bit east, so I just decided to try typing EAST multiple times, and fortunately it wasn’t long before I arrived:
St. Thomas isn’t large and consists only of one beach house. (That sort of simplification happened in Time Zone all the time, but here it’s just comedic representation of geography.) There’s a door where you can KNOCK ON DOOR and they ask who you are looking for. I tried RAND or MAJOR RAND (again, based on the London tip) with no joy.
My critical issue turned out to be this is the kind of game where learning information can open things up. Uncle Harry’s Will had a moment where you had to listen to a radio broadcast about an open route before a gate would actually be open; the causality doesn’t really make sense, but it’s trying to force a certain game-plot. Here, I’m not even 100% sure what the exact conditions are. I know on the save file I was using to get the screenshot I had not met the contact in London, so at the very least, this is a case of Major Rand not showing up until you are told Major Rand is going to be there.
I’m going to loop back to the things I missed (both London and Rome) and then return to St. Vincent shortly.
First, back to London. That Telex that stopped mid-word had more information.
I thought we were supposed to infer that this is convey that missiles are going to be used rather than bombs, and the rest is just unreadable. There are games where the player really is meant to just filling in the missing information themselves, but here you’re just supposed to SHAKE TELEX.
The message goes on to indicate the contact is at the bridge (so you don’t have to hit upon him randomly after all) and also a “CODEWORD” that is intercepted. It gives the letters SNE but then the screen goes black, and then the screen goes back on showing only the letters ED and the revelation you’ve had your (not-visible-in-inventory) money stolen.
You might recall the Krishna gave over money if we gave flowers, but I was confused why we needed to do that since the player has money from the start. This scene is why. Just make sure you get the replacement money after this scene.
Outside the telex there’s also been a “blunt instrument” left behind which turns out to be a telescope. I guess you just hit people with whatever’s handy.
With the telescope in hand, we can resolve the issue at Rome. You can’t ever go through the gate — fortunately I was catching on the vibe and didn’t waste too much more time here — but if you LOOK DOOR rather than LOOK GATE you can see a note.
Trying to look while not holding the telescope.
What happens if you are holding the telescope instead.
The bizarro thing about this sequence is we get told again shortly the exact same information. I assume this “unlocks” something in the sequence to follow, but it is nearly possible to skip Rome entirely. The only reason why not is that you pick up a flashlight at Rome (needed for a cave later), but I’m pretty sure they also sell those in airports.
With those gaps filled in — and with the key from Paris still unused in our possession — it’s time to repeat the Miami sequence, followed by the boat sequence, followed by arriving at Major Rand’s door.
We’ve found Rand, so we can ask about Stupertino:
The plot is deeply confusing. How do we know Major Rand wasn’t up to anything nefarious as opposed to Count Stupertino? Why is it that the energy company mentioned in the newspaper ties everything together in the first place? I assume the informant-shorthand conversation was meant to imply all these things, and for a bounce-from-one-place-to-another plot of Rungistan it’s fine to be brief about such things, but here the player genuinely needs to be investigating in the correct direction.
Nevermind: with this info in hand we can hunt for Martinique, again using the power of real-life geography. As far as I can tell there is absolutely no way to do this other than eyeball things, realize Martinque is southeast somewhat of St. Vincent, and do some guesswork.
I ran into Antigua first, which is north of our destination. I don’t know what other places are included, but I did run into a crash once so there’s clearly some bugs in the air.
From St. Vincent, 14 steps south with the boat, followed by going east until hitting landfall will work.
Stepping off on Martinque results in landing at a “topless beach”…
…and then eventually a cave.
Inside is where the “code word” gets used, combined with the idea from way back at New York where a door might respond to a voice command. Say SNEEZER.
This is the final area. There’s a giant gun on one floor, followed by the “evil Count Stupertino” on the next. He throws a dagger at you and you need to (in real time) type DUCK.
The Count runs away and you can approach the panel. The launch countdown is already going, but you can activate the giant gun from earlier using the key from Paris.
Then it’s just a matter of strolling back to the gun, waiting for the countdown, and playing a mini-game. You have to shoot down each one of the rockets as they launch (space bar to shoot, IJKM to move the crosshairs).
Get every single rocket and you’ll be victorious.
Yes, that’s it. No idea
1. What happened to the Count
2. Why the Count was shooting missiles
3. Why the fake-out with missiles instead of bombs
4. What connection this had with the energy company
5. Why one of the directors was dead but Major Rand was fine
6. Why the Count had no personnel manning the missile area other than himself
I still enjoyed this roughly as much as Rungistan, and it was even easier — it didn’t have anything like the safe puzzle, or the weird airplane directions, or predicting an eclipse. However, I can objectively recognize the plot doesn’t even make sense as a romp, and someone who was sincerely trying to keep notes of their investigation in the hope of putting the pieces together would be disappointed.
Rather than lingering on that, I would like to discuss a bit more the unique aspect to the game: the action sequences that happen without separation from the regular world. When the bomb arrives you need to pick it up and throw it, and there is no sense that the game mode has shifted at all; the same for responding to the thrown dagger.
When people talk about the leap made by Sierra with King’s Quest 1, the third-person view with character movement is often what gets referred to. But in essence, the real innovation is making the adventure “cinematic”, by adding real-time animations to everything and having the player respond in kind. While the scenes are limited, the Bob Blauschild games are a proto-version of that. A history of adventure games that starts with King’s Quest 1 is missing quite a lot — Sierra’s earlier text-adventure work, for instance — and I think the Blauschild games also form an essential building block, and the only reason the world isn’t animated even more is due to technical limitations. King’s Quest 1 could have worked (awkwardly) in first person, but King’s Quest 1 could never have worked at all if it was missing the connectivity between commands and dynamic animation.
Up next: our first German game of the All the Adventures project.
Just as a reminder, this game involves multiple cities that are going to go nuclear, and we have to go globe-trotting to stop the mad bomber. (Or evil corporation; more on that later.)
The curious bit is that I made some progress in a manner that resembled one of the old Carmen Sandiego games, where I thought about the actual geographic location as opposed to solving a regular puzzle.
We’ll get to that, but first a quick note on the dating for this game. As I mentioned last time, I got the date from the Computer Adventure Solution Archive but didn’t know where 1982 came from. It comes from the disk label.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I found an eBay auction with an Apple II disk that also had 1982 on it. The back on the box says 1983. While this might suggest a pure typo on the disk’s part, I suspect it was a matter of delayed production, like Kabul Spy which has some 1981 dates but was published on the 16th of February, 1982. We have that specific of a date because Sirius filed it as such with the US Copyright Office. Escape From Rungistan has a “Date of Publication” of June 2nd and The Blade of Blackpoole is listed as November 24th. The last entry was filed at the start of 1983 and there are no later filings from Sirius, suggesting they stopped bothering.
Enough lingering, we have criminal(s) to catch!
From the UN Building you land at you can go east to find a shoe store and and a deli. Between the two is an “alley” that has a thermos bottle. The shoe store says it is “closed” (I don’t know if it ever opens) and the deli says it opens at 10. Going a little further is Ajax Security Systems with a sign that mentions voice activation.
The door is locked. I don’t know if this means we are supposed to break in with a voice command, or if this is just a hint that there’s a voice activated door later that uses the system.
While the shoe store and Ajax remain unresolved (and may stay that way) the deli really does open at 10 and you can wait briefly before coming in. You then find out the store is only selling soup and you have to choose what kind of soup you want.
The thermos from the alley is required. Mm, alley soup.
I chose tomato, and the game lets you pick that (and then kicks you out of the store because the health board comes and closes it down). It turns out I chose poorly but I’ll get back to that.
To the west is a taxi, and it is always the same graphic.
I don’t know what this clue means yet.
You need to tell the driver where to go, and the prompt is open ended. Theoretically, the SUBWAY or the STATUE OF LIBERTY or the MET or YANKEE STADIUM are all possible, but you instead need to suss out where the game wants you to go. You need to think back to the envelope from the UN Building. It mentioned that the threatening message came from a pay phone at the Central Zoo, so maybe there’s a clue at the ZOO.
The music cues from Rungistan are still in, by the way. This spot plays “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. There’s also an anxiety-inducing tick-tick-tick as the time goes by when you aren’t typing anything so I was not playing with the sound on.
New York. Not complete in that I don’t know if the shoe store or the security store can be entered.
If you haven’t been able to tell yet, this game doesn’t even remotely pretend to be realistic representations of the various cities, but just have some stand-in places. So while Roberta Williams might have a lot of Zoo rooms that do nothing and are meant to simulate the feeling of being there, Bob Blauschild gets straight to business.
Just to the west of the elephant is a “junk food” stand. I tried BUY ICE CREAM and the game told me I was restricted to popcorn, potato chips, and peanuts. Attempts at buying the popcorn and chips inform you the stand is out, so only the peanuts are available, and they go straight back to the elephant.
Going east there’s the seal pond, and trying to step further results in an animated bomb bouncing on screen. You need to (in a timely manner) GET BOMB and THROW BOMB to dispose of it.
Further on is a man-eating lion cage, and a paper inside. Going in the cage is fatal, but you can GET PAPER / WITH BROOM (the lion eats the broom).
A clue! We can technically take the airport straight from New York to Paris, but our “contact” is in London so let’s do that first.
Unlike most of the airports, the London one has a few extra locations to visit.
First off is a Telex — that’s a teletype, like the old-timey stock market ticker. This drops some information that not all might be as it seems.
The specifically gives the warning that there are no bombs but rather “MISSILES TO BE LA…” (messages cuts off) Adjacent to the telex is a newsstand where the newspaper gives even more mystery.
To summarize, it mentions an industrialist (Renee Renoir) found dead, and he must have died the same day as the bomb threat. He was lead of a now-dissolved energy company, International Energy Limited, and the two other people involved (Rand and Stupertino) are missing, so it’d be useful to find them (or potentially, their dead bodies).
Finally, marking the game definitely as from the 80s, there’s a Hare Krishna. They used to be common at airports in the US before they were banned from prophesizing at terminals; there was a court case about it trying to argue for 1st amendment protection (they were decided to be “not public forums under the First Amendment”).
Their appearance is marked by the tune “We’re in the Money”. They were known for having flowers so I tried GIVE FLOWERS and and received money, which is odd, since I’ve been using money (to buy plane tickets, etc.) even though I don’t have them listed in inventory. I assume this gets used for a Serious Bribe later.
You can try KILL KRISHNA to which the game responds YOU MUST BE FROM N.Y.!
Now comes the taxi and the Carmen Sandiego part, since we were given no location for the contact. I tried BIG BEN and the driver told me the traffic was bad but how about Buckingham Palace. Sure?
The main vibe to catch onto here is that despite the fact we were given no directions to the contact, by finding some place in London to go we’ll be able to find them anyway quite quickly. Just one step is away is New London Bridge, and he’s waiting for us at the north. Here’s were the word LITHIUM (randomly on the wall at the start of the game) comes into play.
Connected to the same area we can go to Paris by train. The Chunnel wasn’t finished until 1994, unless I’m missing something this otherwise wasn’t possible in 82-83?
Here’s what likely is the entire Paris map:
The train lands us by a taxi, and this time we can either use the clue and go straight to the street with the Laundry place (on the paper we found at the lion cage) or we can just say we want to go to the EIFFEL tower and of course it is connected.
Inside, we can give our slip and find out while the pants are clean yet, they found a key inside that they hand over. I have yet to figure out what the key goes to, but it managed to form some drama anyway, as while trying to get over to the taxi (to go to Rome, the next destination) it falls into some sewers.
The sewers are easier to pre-map out before this, because when you pick up the key the sewers coincidentally decide to start dramatically filling with water. This is done in real time and you have to make your way back out in time.
Unfortunately, you aren’t out of the woods yet: you start shivering from cold and die quickly from pneumonia afterwards.
The trick is to — rather than picking up TOMATO soup earlier — pick up CHICKEN NOODLE. Because that’s what’s good for health, right? (It was a thing in the 80s, at least. As was the flowers thing. As was peanuts going to elephants. There’s a lot of “unrealistic common wisdom” puzzles going on.)
OK, Rome. This time I didn’t know exactly what to tell the Taxi. The newspaper mentioned Stupertino, but that doesn’t work for a prompt. I literally Googled “rome tourist” and started running through the list, getting a hit on FORUM.
Just to the east of the Roman Forum. Weirdly, not unrealistic for these two places to be close.
These are right next to the Stupertino Villa but it is locked up and I don’t know how to get in. The key doesn’t work.
The last threatened city is Miami, which is available flying from New York. After some noodling I was able to go to the BEACH.
There’s no clues or anything pointing to a mad bomber / missile launcher, but there is a water-skiing contest, and it uses the left and right arrow keys in order to steer through some buoys. I haven’t beaten it yet so I can’t tell you what the reward is.
Miami has one more destination: San Juan.
Going back to the informant’s message, they said Rand was at St. Thomas. So if we’re looking for Rand (or their dead body) we need to get from San Juan to St. Thomas, which is why I (successfully) tried out BOAT.
Trying to GET GAS for the boat causes some of it to spill, and disasterous consequences.
I could easily still be missing a location via Carmen Sandiego method, so I should do a screen just in case the Miami taxi also can visit the Everglades. Other than that, I’ve got the security and shoe stores I haven’t entered (New York) a villa that can’t be entered (Rome), a key I have yet to use (from Paris), a mini-game I need to beat (Miami) and the boat/gas problem (San Juan). No hints yet, please; if anyone has played this before, you’re welcome to speculate.
Renga in Blue 
