Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(This post contains content that may not agree with your workplace.)

While we’ve had bawdy content before at All the Adventures, it has tended to be on the free mainframe games not intended for commercial distribution; games like Library and Haunt.

The exceptions have been

Odyssey 2 (which has an “easter egg”)

City Adventure (which still explicitly advertised itself as “rated PG” and only put the naughty content “after the game”)

Sultan’s Palace and to a lesser extent Sleazy Adventure (both games published in the Atari APX catalog, back when they were absolutely desperate for content and didn’t care about quality)

Softporn Adventure (the big one, only available because Sierra On-Line had marketing muscle, when the author tried to sell it on his own he couldn’t get advertising)

The difficulty in marketing Softporn is important here; while it was not impossible to advertise (Softcore Software, a company we haven’t looked at yet, managed to pull it off) it certainly was more difficult.

Via the Internet Archive.

The Dirty Book (Vol 2., No. 1) printed some rejection letters of their attempts to advertise in mainstream computer magazines:

I regret that I must send back to you your recent insertion order for your client “The Dirty Book”. Also enclosed is your check in the amount of $233.24. Our publisher feels that at the present time, Recreational Computing magazine is in the process of expanding its audience and he would prefer to take a rather conservative attitude toward the many, many new subscribers we have taken on just within the last month.

The same book was intended as an outlet for games to advertise who were unable to make it to print otherwise (they also did reviews, and were disappointed by Sultan’s Palace). One of those ads was for Bawdy Adventure.

This is a short but cryptic game and strongly reminds me of the APX content. Strongly enough that I suspect the author must have played some of them; the APX standard is to block exits with a message

SOMETHING IS IN YOUR WAY

while this game says

YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY YET

with a similarly cryptic result.

I’d like to go on and say this was a rogue Atari employee who decided this game was too much to publish in even the APX catalog, and “Peter Constantine” could easily be a pseudonym, but it doesn’t nail quite closely enough for that.

The starting room already is cryptic, with EAST getting that “you can’t go that way yet message” and down just resulting in you “FALLING DOWN A BOTTOMLESS PIT”. The key here is to look at your inventory, and find a TALKING BANANA, which you can then DROP (“FREE ME”).

The pickaxe (described as MADE IN WAR-TI-TAE) can be applied with SWING PICKAXE to make it out of the opening room.

The next room, a “womb-like tunnel”, also has blocked exits. The only way to proceed is to pick up the “old miner’s jockstrap” in the room and wear it. It is unclear why this allows passage.

Eventually the path (with plenty of “YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY YET” in various directions) leads to a “diving platform” with a leather whip. CRACK WHIP gives the message that exits have opened, and the map finally is mostly accessible.

There’s lots of references that make the game feel bawdy (like the “well-hung stalactites”) but it really is just a random surreal cave for the most part. The most obvious is the “magic phallus” that you can pick up; in addition there’s a “cricket with fishy breath”. Some of the exits lead to a “red muff river” which appears to have no way out, although you can dive and get a $5 porno novel from the bottom.

It seems to be impossible to get out, but this is where the “magic word” reference from earlier comes into play. The pickaxe’s word WAR-TI-TAE almost counts as a magic word; upon saying it the game claims

SDARAWKCAB S’TAHT

You instead need to say EAT-IT-RAW and then you’ll get teleported over back to the diving platform (where the whip was). This allows escaping the river.

With the novel extracted, you can go over to a “vending machine” and drop it in to get an outhouse with suspenders.

The outhouse can then be worn (really!) and for some reason that’s enough to allow you to dive back at the platform.

Here I was quite puzzled, because going east heads back to the regular part of the map, so there didn’t seem to be any reason to go through all that. I started playing with all my objects, and I found if I dropped the cricket and rubbed the phallus I won the game.

Yeah, I’m baffled I managed to beat this too. Every step was absolutely cryptic and I only did something because there was nothing else to do; there’s no reason cracking a whip would open exits, just the whip seemed to be the only item available so I might as well use it? The cricket thing has to be done at the room I was at; that was absolutely pure luck that I tested it there, as NOTHING HAPPENS if you attempt the deed elsewhere.

I really have to wonder who this was targeted at; someone who was looking for an erotic game wouldn’t get very far, and by the time I puzzled my way to the end it came off as a bizarre logic problem rather than anything genuinely bawdy. I still vaguely suspect someone at Atari amusing themselves in their off-hours was involved but I don’t have any particular evidence of that at the moment.

Before checking out I should plug the historian Laine Nooney, who after 10 years managed to find Vol 2. No. 2 of the Dirty Book. I didn’t use it at all for this post, but it was still good to crosscheck (and to know they made it that far as a publication!) Also, thanks to Atarimania who pointed me to the game quite recently being found.