Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

This is a continuation of the history started at the game Korenvliet.

Via a reference manual at the Internet Archive.

To recap, Korenvliet was a game from the Netherlands entered into the catalog of the P2000 Computer Club. Unknown to most people after, it was a translation of an English game called Stoneville Manor (up to the point someone recently re-translated the game back to English, without realizing English was the original language!) The same catalog has Piratenavontuur, Pirate Adventure, but it was a little more obviously a translation of Scott Adams. Those two are not the only adventure games in the catalog.

This early 1983 issue of their newsletter lists all their games up through the end of 1982.

Hans Pennings’s game Schatzoeken (“Treasure Hunting”, sometimes used as the term for modern Geocaching), is not a title that immediately suggests an adventure game, and might be more like a top-down arcade action game. In fact, there is an undated Spectrum ZX81 game with exactly that concept.

However, the P2000 version is an adventure games of the type seen with Gold or Explore: just walking around rooms and making a map, with essentially only movement commands available. Just for the record, since the catalog is nice enough to include dates, the ones given are

(30 June 1982) Schatzoeken
(6 September 1982) Piratenavontuur
(23 December 1982) Korenvliet

that is, the two other translations ports came later. (When I first wrote about the two ports, I had no author, but I can tell now due to this catalog they are also the work of Mr. Pennings.)

There’s a VIC-20 version of Schatzoeken; it has a title screen by an entirely different author, F. E. Leene. The internal date of 12 November 1982 indicates it was written later.

Just to keep things messy, the version I played is a revision from 1983, since I don’t have the one in the catalog from ’82. It comes from a P2000 archive where many of the games were updated within the last year, meaning there are likely un-indexed games floating around; some of the un-investigated titles sound vaguely adventure-like.

Hans Pennings was fairly active in the Dutch software scene in the 80s, producing a big list of P2000 games on top of the ones I’ve mentioned like Marco Polo Jr (a trading game akin to Taipan) and In de ban van een ring (a quasi-RPG based on Lord of the Rings).

I have not checked his entire output so it’s possible there’s another adventure lurking out in ’83 or ’84 but it looks like he mostly stuck to strategy and board games after finishing Korenvliet.

Just like Korenvliet, this turns out to be just another translation, this time going way back, to Roger Chaffee’s game Quest. There are some changes to the game logic so I’ll show the playthrough.

YOU ARE NOW OUTSIDE THE CAVE. GO SOUTH TO ENTER.

There’s a funny message up that can be found by wandering the forest and trying to go up a tree:

NOU, DAAR ZIT U DAN: BOVEN IN EEN BOOM WAT GAAT U NU DOEN? EEN EI LEGGEN?

WELL, NOW YOU ARE UP HERE IN THE TREE WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO? LAY AN EGG?

It’s worth going through the steps of the original before the new version (it’s not like most of you reading this will remember how original Quest went!). To summarize:

a.) the player goes in a cave and past a lair of a “gnome king” that is out

b.) the player finds the treasure at a “guillotine” area

c.) the player is blocked trying to get out the front because the gnome king arrives

d.) the treasure gets stolen by the pirate

e.) the player finds the treasure inside the maze, in one of the “dead ends”

f.) the gnome king still hasn’t left so the player needs to find an alternate exit; there’s a set of “labyrinth rooms” where the player eventually finds a “black hole” room; going south then leads to a lab which teleports the player, but if the player goes down instead they’ll make it to the exit.

For this game, to start, there’s no “gnome king”, but rather a troll king instead:

There’s a message that says BILBO WAS HERE that gets changed to KILROY WAS HERE, matching the meme dating back to WW2.

YOU ARE IN A DEEP GAP. HIGH ABOVE YOU SOMEONE HAS WRITTEN ON THE ROCKS

KILROY WAS HERE

The treasure is not at the guillotine but instead in a spot that used to have a “stalactite”; the room called Xanadu gets moved there instead, and the gold is right next to it.

You are in the ashram. There is a heavy smell of incense and all directions look the same.

GO SOUTH

You are in Xanadu. Below you flows the sacred river Alph through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.

YOU HAVE FOUND THE TREASURE

Are you taking it with you?

Just like the original, the exit is now blocked (but by the troll king rather than the gnome king)…

…and a pirate will eventually filch the treasure back.

Suddenly the pirate jumps out of the darkness and takes the treasure from you, he shouts “you’ve found it, I’ll hide it better now!” He takes the treasure and disappears into the darkness.

Rather than the treasure moving to the maze, it moves to the guillotine (where the treasure gets hidden at the start of the first game).

The troll still blocks the starting entrance as the first game, but it is now possible to get through over to the “labyrinth” from the original although the layout is slightly different.

Once arriving at the “black hole” room from the original if you try to go into the place where the original teleports you, here you just get ejected because you don’t have a pass.

There is no pass. You just go east (not down as in the first game), fall into a hole, and make your way to the exit.

Since the only verbs were navigation, despite the map being almost identical to the original this still took some work to beat due to the changes. I’m not sure what the logic of the author was other than simply wanting to put their own flair. My guess is Xanadu seemed like too remarkable a location to waste (it otherwise just is randomly in the path you follow, as opposed to having a treasure). However…

Remember that VIC-20 port I mentioned? That one is not a port of the Pennings version! It instead is a translation from the original, which is why the “Quest” shows up in the title screen. I don’t understand why the “Schatzoeken” would still be there; my guess is the author (Leene) saw the P2000 game, wanted a VIC-20 version, discovered some difficulties porting from P2000, so went back to the source instead. The gold is back up at the “guillotine” from the start, rather than getting moved to Xanadu. The “kabouter-king” (gnome king) is in, as opposed to the troll king.

So both authors were referring to the July 1979 issue of Byte where the original Quest source appears, but one was doing changes while the other was not.

Coming up next: some naughty games.