The IFComp has been a central fixture of the interactive fiction community since 1995, and before that, there was the AGT (Adventure Game Toolkit) contest that ran from 1989 to 1993, and even before that, a single contest in 1986 was dedicated to the predecessor of AGT, GAGS. You could consequently argue contests have been an essential fixture of the text adventure form since 1986. (Jimmy Maher has written more extensively about the contests here and here.)
However, there was a major contest which started even earlier! In 1983, 1985, 1987, and 1988, the company Falsoft, publisher of Rainbow Computer magazine (dedicated to the Tandy CoCo), had an adventure game contest culminating in the winners getting published in a book.
These were genuine contests with judging and a winner and a runner-up and so forth, but since the first contest showed up in 1983 I am going to wait on most of the details until then. Here’s an excerpt from Lawrence C. Falk (editor of the first book) just to give a sense of what was going on:
The idea for The Rainbow Book Of Adventures began before there was even a Rainbow. Thanks to Scott Adams, Byte magazine and those wonderful people who brought you the original Adventure on the big mainframes.
“Wouldn’t it be nice,” dreamed I one day, “if there could be a whole book of Adventures just for the Color Computer?”
I had just finished reading Byte’s Adventure issue of December, 1981, and seen one of Scott Adams’ famous Adventures on an Apple computer at my not-too-friendly local computer store. Just the day before I had discovered how to get by the snake in the Colossal Cave. But I wanted to play an Adventure on my CoCo.
None to be had. So I wrote one. Just to see whether I could do it. Name: Vampire! Play time: Around 30 minutes. But I did learn how to move things around, including myself.
(I know, you want to know what happened to Vampire! So do I. I let a friend market it for me and it sold, I think, about three copies. Besides, working on the thing late at night was scary, anyway.)
…
Well, yes, it would be nice if we could have a book of all Color Computer Adventures. But there weren’t many out there, so we began publishing a magazine called the Rainbow instead. (This isn’t exactly how it happened, but it is close enough.)
As the Rainbow grew, we started to get some Adventure submissions, and, pretty soon, started an Adventure contest. We decided that each winning entry would be published in a book. And here it is.
There’s some 1982 business to check in on, as a pair of articles showed up by Jorge Mir about how to write adventures for the Tandy CoCo.
July 1982 had “Rainbow Adventure”, essentially a sample game, and he expanded on the technical details for his August 1982 template he called ADVMAKER.
Aside: Mir mentions whipping together a short game using the template for gatherings.
The sample game, Rainbow Adventure, is not terribly impressive, but keep in mind the context here is like the Ken Rose articles, where the point is to explain how adventures work.
What I am going to talk about this month is writing an adventure. And, next month, we will be giving you an outline of an adventure generator that will help you write your own adventures. It is a sort of help for those who will be entering the RAINBOW Adventure Contest.
This was the era where the programming was the big roadblock; design could wait.
The player starts on a “Kentucky Street” (Rainbow was out of Prospect, Kentucky) with no real direction what to do. This is one of the sorts of games where you find out the final objective when you get there.
I incidentally had trouble finding a CoCo version so I played Jim Gerrie’s MC-10 port.
There is a very slight amount of maze-iness around the start, with two “winding road” rooms and the player starting with no inventory so not having a way to distinguish between the two (or even knowing there’s exactly two). I nabbed a “shiny object” from a dead end (turns out to be a key) and a sign at a pawn shop explaining you can sell jewelry there, and used those two items in order to confirm the map below.
The shiny object, as already mentioned, is a key, not jewelry, so you can’t sell it. Finding what you can sell is the most curious part of the game, and is interesting in a theoretical-ludic sense. Near the Pawn Shop is a Clothing Center with a mirror. The mirror informs you that you have a watch.
You don’t otherwise see the watch in inventory, and can’t READ WATCH or the like. I first thought the watch might be used to track some kind of timed puzzle, but no. Once learning you are wearing a watch by seeing it in the mirror, you can sell it.
This is one of the odder disjoints between player-knowledge and avatar-knowledge I’ve come across.
With the watch sold you have money, and you can go over to a computer store. There (using the key to help open a case) you can obtain a computer and a tape, and then use the very specific parser commands LOAD TAPE followed by RUN COMPUTER to learn about a bus.
With this powerful increase of knowledge, you can go over to a BUS STOP, hop on a bus, and end up a a post office. There you can open a mail box and find a copy of Rainbow Magazine, winning the game.
I wonder if anyone had come across the game without realizing it was meant to be a sample programming game; it feels very slight otherwise. Fortunately for posterity, we will see Jorge Mir again: he entered the first contest, with two fairly extreme programming specimens, one being an expansive adventure in 4K and the other being a one-room adventure in 32K. The latter is the first example we have of a “room escape game”.
But that will wait for 1983, which we are inching closer to! Honest! Next up: the last of the Charles Cecil games written for Artic Computing.
Renga in Blue 
This reminded me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask: Which adventure that you’ve covered so far has been coded within the tightest memory restrictions? Would you say there’s a certain minimum requirement for it to really be feasible? The main research I’ve been doing lately has me immersed in looking at some of the more obscure and exotic late 70s platforms, and I often find myself wondering “would an adventure even be possible on one of these things…?”.
2431 bytes, Fun House by Ramella
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/fun-house-ramella/?order=ASC
Now that I think of it though, wouldn’t it actually be Des cavernes dans le poquette? The PC-1211 only has 1424 “steps” available for a program, which I think was just pocket computer/programmable calculator parlance for bytes, unless I’m mistaken?
You should include the data, not just the source. I don’t know the exact number but I believe it still breaks 3k
Honestly if you are doing some sort of historical thing I’d include it, this is a case where a “winner” isn’t the right way to think of it since it is easy to arbitrarily make a bare-bones game that arbitrarily passes over the threshold of being an “adventure” while still being low byte count
OK, thanks for the clarification.
One interesting thing regarding Cavernes though: When I went back and checked the original article, I noticed that issue 2 of Trace was actually published in April of ’82 (your article says October), so it predates the issue of the French DAI club newsletter where Testament seems to have first been listed by about a month. However, since it’s not really a full-fledged adventure (and the author even says as much in the article) and Testament is, it all becomes a bit murky in the end. Like you said, no real winners here, just different ways of looking at things…
Weird! Must have been a straight typo, given the link has April right there on the bottom (every once in a while one of these magazines doesn’t want to let people know when it was published)
Anyway, fixed. No extra news on your DAI investigation, I take it?
I would guess that a programmable calculator giving listing in “steps” probably describes something larger than a byte, more akin to an opcode.
Regarding the DAI, the other titles I was curious about were Trésor Maudit, Princesse Diguet and Outdoor Adventure. Based on what Bruno Vivien said, it’s a bit of a rigamarole to get these running on the emulator, so he said he’d put up screenshots on his database when he has the time to check them all out and do a general site update.
I was able to finish combing through all the various DAI newsletters a while back though, and the only two relevant games I came up with that aren’t listed on the Paradai database were an adventure called Quest (described in Dutch, but the game text is English, and I think it’s an original adventure rather than yet another Chaffee port based on the description), and a French language RPG called La Forteresse de Zlarg which sounds quite intriguing. Both are from 1984, and may be the first Belgian games of their kind.
Some other general lost game housekeeping here, before I forget:
One more from item from the Heathkit BUSS newsletter (April 7, 1980, p. 3) that I found was an ad for a bunch of games from a company called California Data Base. The interesting sounding titles are Dungeon of Despair, Adventure Dungeon and Magic & Melee. Probably more RPG oriented, but worth noting in any case.
Another game that struck me as perhaps belonging on the Lost Media list is Hall of the Mountain King by David Lo, of Beyond the Tesseract fame. It was his first adventure, from 1982, but it seems to be missing despite there being a little bit of info out there on it.
Replying to Ross here:
Yeah, I think you’re right about that. It’s been weirdly difficult to find a straightforward description of this, but I did find a reference to the ratio on one of these systems being something like 1.5 bytes for each program step, so something like that, plus what Jason mentioned, would account for a program like Des Cavernes ultimately weighing in at over 3k.
btw, the tightest game that I actually consider a “good” game is Hospital Adventure for unexpanded VIC-20 (keeping in mind BASIC has to be loaded, that gives 3.5K)
https://bluerenga.blog/2023/08/28/bomb-threat-hospital-adventure-1982/
Thanks! Those two are really quite inventive and clever. I’d imagine that one way to jam a larger game map and more puzzles in might be to go the Temple of Apshai/Spelunker route and have all the descriptive text printed off-screen and numbered, gamebook style. It’s surprising that more type-ins didn’t use that method, actually, since it naturally fits the print medium to begin with. Although, I guess the “memory restrictions” you’d be running up against there would be the editor limiting the page count of your listing…
As far as source code length goes, when Jason hits 2010 (ha ha) we’ll have the 140-characters-plus-whitespace adventures of TWIFcomp, though those tended to rely on the libraries/compiler/etc. of Inform (or another IF-specific language) and so had much larger memory footprints.
Just to let you know, there is a 4th Rainbow Book of Adventures as well (it’s on the Color Computer Archive). And yes, there were real prizes (I had entry in the 2nd book for my game Ring Quest, for which I received a PBH Serial -> Parallel port adapter/splitter). My game was actually based on an expansion I did to Jorge Mir’s ADVMAKER that you mention; I added graphics strings to make the rooms, objects and enemies graphical.
There is a Fourth Rainbow Book of Adventures as well (available on the Color Computer Archive). And they did give out real prizes; I placed and was published in the 2nd Rainbow Adventure book for my game Ring Quest, for which I received a PBH serial -> Serial/parallel interface (worth about $90 USD at the time). My game was actually based on ADVMAKER by Jorge Mir (from the August 1982 Rainbow); I expanded it to include DRAW graphics strings, so I had (very!) crude graphics for rooms, objects and monsters.
Good to have confirmation people used the Mir source!
Thanks for the mention of my MC-10 port of “Rainbow Adventure”! I’m helping:)
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