You could point at Crowther’s participation in a Tolkien-based D&D campaign and say nearly all adventures games are spawned from Tolkien. However, for direct attempts at adapting Tolkien, we’ve so far only had
Cracks of Doom based around the Mordor area at the end of Lord of the Rings.
Firienwood is a name reference only so doesn’t count. What does count is today’s game, Arkenstone, which has the Misty Mountains, Mount Gundabad, Mirkwood, Lake Town, Wilderland, and Lonely Mountain. What’s truly perplexing is how those are represented by a grand total of eight rooms.
Map from the Lord of the Rings movies, art by Daniel Reeve. Erebor on the right side of the map is Lonely Mountain, source of the river Running, occupied by Smaug the dragon. Mount Gundabad is in the upper left; that’s a hike!
The source of our minimalism today is the unmodified VIC-20, the same type of computer Victory Software dealt with. It comes from the book ZAP! POW! BOOM! Arcade Games for the VIC-20, written by Mark Ramshaw.
It was published by Interface Publications in the UK. The book was later merged with the spectacularly named Symphony for a Melancholy Computer by a different author (Tim Hartnell) to form the US version of ZAP! POW! BOOM! Arcade Games for the VIC-20.
We’re caring about Mark Ramshaw’s book as it included a game called Adventure which got re-dubbed Arkenstone upon its US debut. (I went with the easier-to-search-for name, at least I had an option this time!) I played what was technically the original version (download here) although it appears there is no difference between the two.
The code is short and consists of only one more page.
In order to cope with the tiny memory size of the VIC-20, Ramshaw does a very unusual trick with the parser. Each word is typed on a separate line, with ENTER pressed between, and the last word needs a period. So to pick up a spear, you type
pick
up
spear.
It’s exceedingly surreal to do this. We have experienced a separate-line parser with two words before (like with Chou’s Alien Adventure) but not more than two words, and never with the period mark convention. If you hit enter nine times the game says you are being “Too verbose” so it clearly is aspiring to understand long sentences.
The commands as given in the book are go or move, catch, skewer, fill. kick, pick, swing, inventory, listen, drop, and throw. Recover is a special command for claiming the Arkenstone after rescuing it.
The last part of the source code.
You are the “intrepid hero” and start out in South Mirkwood where there are trees and a bucket.
Your job is to make your way to Lonely Mountain where the dragon sleeps and nab the Arkenstone, the long lost treasure of the dwarves.
Regarding the amusingly compressed map, there is at least a little precedent for that (see, for example Caves of Olympus); here the idea is stretched to its limit as each step takes a matter of days. At least functionally you can still treat the rooms like they were all next to each other.
You might think, given the size of the map (and the fact there is nothing blocking your way) it ought to be possible to just saunter east three times, north once, and then nab the Arkenstone for victory. I did in fact do this once.
The problem is that it was very lucky: usually what happens at the start is the dragon wakes up and then hides the treasure if you wander into the dragon’s location while awake and without any defense, you die. So let’s ignore this as a bonus ending (STEAM ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: THE DWARVES HIRED A REAL BURGLAR) and figure out how to cope with the dragon.
It’s … not much more complicated. Just to the north there is a spear. You should start by going to pick it up (even if the dragon wakes up right away, you have time).
Then defeating the dragon is just a matter of using “skewer/dragon/with/spear” when you see him.
That works if the dragon is awake or asleep! Now you can again just go in and grab the Arkenstone and use “recover”.
You can do a little bit more: you can take a “cage” over at Mount Gundabad, take it to the Misty Mountains (which is south of the Wilderland for some reason) and catch an eagle. (!!) Then it can give hints. (!?!??)
2015 Print”The eagle says:”
2020 Print “What is best axe or spear?Why not quench the worm’s thirst”
2025 Print “There is something special in Mirkwood”
The axe is where the dragon as sleeping, and you can take it to Mirkwood to SWING AXE AT TREES
That was clever — some trees fell down
but other than that message the trees do nothing. And of course it is so simple to take the spear to the target why bother with any of that? I suspect this was a text adventure in progress that got tossed into print without smoothing out the rough edges.
Regarding Mark Ramshaw, who wrote the game, and Tim Hartnell, who wrote the VIC-20 book that combined with Ramshaw’s, the most complete information I’ve found on them is from a book they co-wrote in 1983, Getting Started on Your Commodore VIC-20. Tim is described as founder of the “British National ZX Users’ Club” and its magazine Interface — that is, his club did the publishing.
But what about Ramshaw? He is literally described as a “schoolboy” with “an active interest in VIC games”. This suggests to me he was a teen-aged author like many others we have had, who knew Hartnell from his computer club activities. Ramshaw kept his publishing connection and went on be a journalist for magazines in the UK such as PC Review.
Tom Sato, also known as Toshiyuki Sato, was a Japanese national whose interest in computers started as a child:
I watched the film of men landing on the moon, and I was fascinated by the computer in the film.
He moved to London at the age of 14, eventually going to college to study physics and astronomy while teaching himself programming. He went to work for Microsoft right out of college while also writing for various magazines, focused on the MSX computer (being a Microsoft product). His writings include a 1985 article on the history of MSX Basic and technical books on the platform.
A book Sato collaborated on; the front cover uses Toshiyuki and the back cover uses Tom. From the Internet Archive.
Reversing back in time back to around when he graduated college — 1982 — he kicked off his own company, Orchestrated Computing, later renamed to Program Direct. (Orchestrated Computing seems like a better name to me. At least it’s easier to search for!) He started with no company name at all, posting a classified ad in Popular Computing Weekly 5 August 1982:
Just selling a conversion of Star Trek with “extra asteroid storm and others”.
This is before the existence of the MSX, so he was working with the BBC Micro. The second package listed has an Adventure as the main program with — as a bonus — the programs INVADERS, PONTOON, and LUNARLANDER. The last three games have been lost, but Adventure was recently found on a C90 tape stuffed with other games (Lords of Time, Castle of Riddles, Bumble Bee, Planetoids, Cruncher, Danger UXB) and rescued in 2023.
Enter the DUNGEON at your peril but you have been warned: you are likely to get killed if you don’t use your imagination. Use your weapon, magic, food and treasure efficiently or else. Don’t enter the RANDOM MAZE or you’ll be shouting for help.
Despite the name being Adventure, this is not an adventure game; this is quite directly an RPG. It took enough work to confirm this I decided to plow ahead, but there are zero puzzles: this is mainly a game about fighting enemies in the right order relative to one’s stats, and making sure to eat enough food to rejuvenate.
The game at first appears to have a parser, and it took me a while to realize it was mostly only looking at the first one or two characters of what I was typing. I ended up checking the source code to find:
N/S/E/W/U/D = Directions
F = Fight
G = Get
I = Inventory
O = Open
T = Trade
Q = Quit
EA = Eat
DR = Drop
ST = Status
So if you type G for Get, it then asks another prompt what it is exactly you are getting; if you type GET DIAMOND the game will prompt what you mean to pick up because the entire text “ET DIAMOND” got ignored.
My struggle in picking up a CERAMIC TIGER.
ST, or STATUS, provides STRENGTH, CONSTITUTION, DEXTERITY, DEFENCE, WEALTH, and EXPERIENCE.
I’m not sure what the max is for Strength and Constitution, I would guess 255. All four stats including Dexterity and Defence both can get damaged by enemies; all four stats can be brought up by food (Meat is the best, giving +2 to Strength and +1 to Constitution).
Before showing off the map, and discussing how combat works, I should mention this is a branch of a Wizard’s Castle style game. (The original is from 1980; in the 80s I played the DOS version for many hours off some random public domain disk.) I’m not going to go into intricate detail as the CRPGAddict already has, but the general idea of this small mini-genre is having a small set of mini-floors (generally 8 by 8). These games generally give a “lamp” or some other method of seeing ahead so you don’t have to fight monsters if you don’t want to, and the strategy tends to be to soak up all the treasures possible, convert them into money to buy potions/level-ups for stats, then either go on a monster rampage after or just kill the small selected set of monsters needed to win the game.
Leygref’s Castle (1986), via Mobygames.
Now, the top floor of the map (there are three of them).
Again, 8 by 8. You start in the upper left. All blue squares are treasures, all red squares are monsters (some are randomly placed, some are not). Green represents a “merchant” where you can (T)rade and either sell treasures you’ve found or buy things like food and weapons. The easiest way to buy things is to simply go to the town in the upper right corner which has shops.
You start with 50 wealth so there’s really no reason not to buy the best weapon (mace) and shield right away.
The version I downloaded, by the way, has an error in line 830 checking if the player has a shield — you need one to fight. I just replaced the line with PRINT “”, putting an extra blank line at the start of fights. It looks like the line had a corruption in the dump.
In retrospect, after studying the code, I think OSCLIOSCLI represents two bytes, and that should be =0.
In addition to the weapon and shield you can get a KEY (for opening doors, it doesn’t get used up and it is cheap, again: just buy one), a CROSS, and a WAND. The latter two are for magic; I used one of the two once in the entire game.
The main difference between this game and a regular Wizard’s Castle clone is that it tries to describe all the rooms. Some of the descriptions are minimal, sometimes Sato has added slight touches.
Dwarves are the lowest form of enemy, only giving one experience point each. This is followed by goblins at 3 experience points and centipedes at 4.
Each combat starts with a monster description which may or may not suggest some strategy. I found the descriptions a nice touch, although of the different moves possible…
…most of them aren’t really needed. I did, upon fighting a difficult scorpion, try using Backwards to change the distance to the enemy hoping to reduce damage; you can then Throw from safety assuming you have multiple weapons. (If you throw with only one weapon, you get a game over: “You silly fool! You haven’t got anything to fight with”.)
However, other than the very early fights I found no difficulty just plowing through with Hitting everything with my mace. I think there’s the vague promise of a system here but it falls apart almost immediately as the player gets experience points. Every 10 experience points gives the player a “level” (not mentioned in the text, but I poked at the source code to check) and after about four levels as long as the player keeps some food around they’ll generally be safe.
An early combat where I died. You might notice A is not on the list of commands. I was typing ATTACK without realizing how I was supposed to attack. I’m pretty sure this game came with instructions; after enough times or realizing I was causing no damage, I hit the source code in order to get the full list of valid moves.
This game has the problem a lot of Wizard’s Castle clones do: you can play it far too safe. Most enemies do not attack on sight (the scorpion, dragon, and troll do, I didn’t find any others). So you can wander and hoover vast amounts of treasure, trading it in for cash, and buying meat. You can then eat vast quantities of meat to pump your Strength and Constitution up to high levels and stomp any enemies afterwards.
There’s exactly one spot with a trap I found (a pit) and otherwise it’s just mundane mapping, with the occasional one-way exit.
Yes, there are gaps — my map is likely incomplete. I managed to win without finishing.
By “win” I mean there does not seem to be an end condition, but looking at the rankings the top is GRANDMASTER where you attain a wealth of 450 and experience points of 250. The wealth of 450 turns out to be mostly trivial (amusingly, you can get a rank of GREEDY COWARD by getting lots of treasure but killing almost nothing).
Getting 250 experience points did require trying to mop up everything I found. This includes the only “puzzle fight” against a ghost, where the text specifies physical attacks won’t work.
20 experience points is fairly substantial; killing a DRAGON only gives 10.
The dragon is only interesting as being one of the few enemies that forces a fight, rather than just letting you walk by.
The big hunt monster is to find T-Rexes. I found two of them and each gave 70 experience points. They were just as easy as any of the other enemies (by that point, I had eaten enough meat to even make a competitive eating champ turn away in disgust).
Once I was over the thresholds (which I should emphasize I only learned about by checking source code) I typed Q to quit the game and arrive at victory.
The author typing in room descriptions did give this a little more interest than your standard WizCastleLike, and the map shows “sections” with structures that pass over to multiple rooms. For example, the third floor has a “Chamber of Horrors” you can fall into (the only trap) and a one-way exit from the Chamber leads to a Library. My Library had one of the T-Rex fights in it. (I don’t know if was fixed or random.)
However, there’s enough spelling and map errors that it throws off the enjoyment. One of the treasures is a SILVER FULTE; another unfortunate typo is arrived at by dropping a letter from JEWELRY. There were many spots with a “door” that didn’t exist, or a “brick wall” that nonetheless could be walked through (and was clearly not intended as an illusion). I just had to start ignoring what the rooms said about available exits and try them.
The “random maze” the ad copy warned us about. You can get here by moving to the third floor, then going up to the second floor in a “gap” which is otherwise unreachable. Unfortunately, all this room seems to do is send you to a random spot on one of the three floors.
I enjoyed the original Wizard’s Castle near the beginning, before I realized the power-strat was to avoid monsters altogether; in that game, you are forced into fights often if you aren’t careful. In this game, the monsters are so passive it becomes blatantly obvious you aren’t supposed to fight them until you’re ready, so while the author attempted to add some “crunchy” parts like distance, it fails to sustain interest as a system.
I appreciate the attempt at adding some room flavor; it seems to have been Sato’s attempt to modify and enhance the original Wizard’s Castle just like his version of Star Trek added asteroids and a secret weapon. Given the very recent rescue off an obscure tape, I doubt it made for many sales. Just like The Desecration from last time, maybe the most lasting effect of the game was to give Tom Sato business experience; at least that’s his own claim:
That experience taught me about the process of developing a program and commercializing it.
Tom Sato (left) pictured with his long-time business partner Tetsuro Eto (right). Source.
Soon after Sato wrote the MSX book on the top of this post, he was offered a transfer to work for Microsoft Japan, and was the product manager there for Windows 2.0 and 3.0. Eventually Sato left Microsoft and found his way to Silicon Valley; he now works on connecting companies in Japan with companies in the US.
I did get a victory screen, and I am surprised because I thought the whole game was going to collapse in a mess of bugs before I got there. I had Dunmark Pykro in my inventory when I won the game.
Continuing directly from last time, I had a robot guard where I was unclear what to do. Part my of issue is that using OPEN on the PURSE gives an error, and I had already been able to nab the food from the grocery store; combining the two facts, I assumed the purse was being implicitly used somehow. No: the purse is opened by using LOOK on it, at which point you find some GOLD. You can then GIVE GOLD which is effective on the guard, and even the main character is confused that the puzzle solution worked.
This opens up a new section of the game.
To the east of the guard is a “sewer entrance” and a “thiefs lair” and as far as I can tell you never get your objects stolen so the lair is just for color.
This might genuinely just be for atmosphere.
To the north of the sewer (… not even going to bother with the forward/backwards/left/right thing anymore …) there is an armory with a robot de-activator. You can cart the de-activator back over to where the ROBOT DOUBLE was and use it to fry the robot, leaving behind a robot hand.
Behind the fried robot there is a universal communicator, which you can take over to the alien — the one that was our informant but we couldn’t understand — to get the password for the keypad.
If you go back to the start which had a side entrance with a keyboard, trying to use the password just gets you tossed into jail.
I should give some attention to jail, as it is entirely optional — you just avoid anything that gets you caught — but it does something clever. The first time you’re caught, you end up in a “low security” cell where you can CUT MATTRESS (how? don’t know) and reveal some SPRINGS, then use the springs to PICK LOCK and escape. This deposits you at the LOCKERS and you can LOOK LOCKERS to retrieve all your stuff you had in your inventory. (This includes, still in my case, a TECH GUN, ROBOT GUARDS, ALARM, and SECRETARY. This will become important later.)
If you get caught again (in addition to the door trap, typing SLEEP will get you picked up) you land in a medium-security cell. This time there are WALLS you can look at to find a BOLT, and USE BOLT will free you (it is unclear what is being done with the bolt, but I assume it’s PICK LOCK again except there’s no lock object to refer to).
If you get caught yet again you land in a high-security cell, which you can escape with the power of your mind via THINK. The text clues it pretty well (I had also made my verb list by now and I knew THINK was on it).
Get caught a fourth time and you die. The “upgraded accommodation” trick I ended up finding the best part of the game (there’s shades of a similar trick in Legend of Kyrandia 3 but it is still uncommon).
Returning back to the action: the password needs to get stored under our hat for now, and fortunately there’s still another route to go, as heading east from the sewers will reach a Urr-Beast. The Beast blocks exits to the north and east but you can still go south to find a BEAST KEEPERS ROOM.
The side room has a GROOMING KIT; taking it back north, you can GROOM BEAST and it will purr happily and go to sleep in the corner. This opens access to a data library with a MANUAL…
There’s a MAGTAPE also that can’t be referred to. This game has a nasty tendency to put objects in the room description that don’t exist with respect to the parser.
…and the manual can be read in order to learn operation of a ANTI-ASSASSIN COMPUTER and shut it down.
I never found out what grisly death this prevents.
Back at the guard which was bribed with gold, there’s an exit to the west (I had the accidental fortune of finding it after I finished all the events above). There’s a palm scanner and you can use the robot hand from the double in order to activate it.
Now comes the hardest of the three minigames, as after you cross the bridge over the spikes you get swarmed with droids. They appear on all sides, and you move with the keys right, left, A (up), Z (down), with space for shooting.
This game is genuinely original. It feels somewhat like Solar Fox as far as flying around a middle space section and avoiding things from the side, but I can’t think of an exact equivalent. You’re still getting shot at just like the previous mini-game and once again you have to defeat all the enemies twice.
This was by far the hardest of the three mini-games due to having to keep track of all four directions. If you hit a wall you bounce, so there’s no wrecking on the sides, but it is very easy to keep trapped with no way out by a rogue bullet. It was possible to be trapped in the first mini-game but only at the very start with the initial volley of bullets all coming at the same time.
You can afford to get hit twice, and there’s colorful narrative text going along with the hit. This is another fairly novel idea but it gets tiresome when you are playing the arcade game on repeat, which you will be unless you make liberal use of save states.
Moving on to the third part of the game, it goes fairly linearly. First, there’s some toxic gas (wearing the breathing apparatus works to get through).
This is followed by a uniform storage closet.
You need to wear a uniform, as well as nab the makeup kit from the lockers and use that as well, so you appear like one of the regular guards. This lets you get past a security checkpoint…
…and a secretary (which our protagonist wants to skeevily hit on, 1930s noir style).
Just walking past takes you to a transport tube, where there’s another keypad. This time you can type the password (PYKRO RULES) without getting caught.
Finally our hero reaches the Dunmark Pykro’s office, and things go very strange indeed both at the reality level and at the game-bug level.
The cut-off part of the text says he’s SURE ACTING KINDA’ KINKY. I have no idea what the evil business overlord gave us, because it never appeared in the room or in my inventory. In fact, Dunmark Pykro isn’t in the room at all. (I can at least reassure you that no WHIP object exists in the game.)
Baffled and strongly suspecting the game might be unfinishable, I tried going LEFT and found myself back at a steel door with another keypad. Trying to use the password again got me caught and tossed into jail (I hadn’t burned all three iterations on this save file) so I broke out and looked over every location I visited in case something new had happened. Indeed:
That’s back at the beast keeper place, where there was also a newly-added pile of junk. The Dunmark Pykro object somehow got teleported over here, and furthermore, I was able to TAKE him and carry him in inventory the rest of the game.
Heading back to the steel door, you can just ignore it and move on to find an intersection. Off in one direction is a SMALL ARMORY with a spacesuit…
…and in the other is a spacecraft you can escape with.
Again, Pykro was still in inventory when I did LAUNCH. I did try to KILL PYKRO but the game said
IT DIDN’T WORK FOR SOME REASON.(!?)
and no other verb from my big list had any effect at all. It doesn’t matter because launching the spacecraft leads to the third mini-game, followed by victory.
Almost identical to the first mini-game, but the two rows of ships are moving in opposite directions and you’re shooting from the bottom.
As before, the ships move faster when there are less on the screen. Unlike before, you need to beat the screen four times — that is, after everything is killed, it resets and you have to do it again — before reaching victory.
Adventurecade #2 coming soon, eh?
Let’s check out of this by asking the question: why did the company disappear? First of all, as you can probably tell, the quality was wobbly; despite some clever moments, I would take any of the Sierra On-Line games over this one. The mini-games were not fun to play and tilted annoyingly hard, especially given the screen repeats. I will give the game the benefit of the doubt as far as the bugs go; like most Apple II games, this one needed to be “cracked” to be played due to copy protection, and it is possible something broke which caused a SECRETARY to show up in the player’s inventory immediately upon finishing the first mini-game.
Still, for Apple II circa 1982, it had a fighting chance in the market, especially because the graphics genuinely hovered around “decent”; all the people were clearly of the squished-head Sierra variety, but the environmental graphics shows some genuine artistic thought.
Mind you, even Sierra was struggling to sell their graphics starting in 1983 (when The Desecration finally hit general distribution) so possibly it was a game made a little too late.
Additionally, the Mind Games duo (Greg Segall and Gil Beyda) went entirely on their own: they turned down distributors at Applefest (which was, in retrospect, a mistake). A September 1983 profile from the magazine L’Ordinateur individuel notes they have “d’entreprise bien américain” and how it was admirable that they did everything up to and including distribution to retailers. The article claims it is “un exemple à suivre” (“an example to follow”) but I suspect low sales led to their downfall. I have never seen a copy of this game for sale so it is likely quite rare.
In my comments, Rob had found a Japanese article from 1979 involving a visit to Los Angeles and their computer stores. This picture is from Computers Are Fun in central LA, where Gil Beyda was working. The article notes the store mostly specialized in Apple II products but had trouble making their rent of $400 a month. (Image assistance from eientei and ftb1979.)
Maybe it was good for the experience. While I don’t know about Greg Segall, Gil Beyda at least went on to a successful career in technology and now works as a venture capitalist.
Coming up: Some small non-sci-fi games, just for a change of pace, including another early Tolkien game.
When I wrote about Dragon’s Keep, I discussed an event called Applefest that happened in December of 1982. (If you haven’t read that post, I recommend reading it before this one.) The company Sunnyside Soft met Ken and Roberta Williams there, leading to Sierra buying them out and Al Lowe eventually going on to write the Leisure Suit Larry series.
There was another software company at Applefest I’d like to discuss today, one rather less famous: Mind Games. It’s completely understandable if you haven’t heard of them, because they only published one game.
The Softline interview indicates that Segall and Beyda had met 8 years before (aged 11) at a Los Angeles Boy Scout troop; both were up for a “promotion” to a troop rank but the two decided to share the position rather than compete for it. They consequently became friends.
They joined the Beverly Hills computer club and did pranks with the DEC-1170 system (as the interview notes, it was one of the only high schools in the country with such a computer); they followed this with computer jobs at early ages, as Beyda got a job at a computer store at 15 (leading to contacts and consulting work on educational software) while Segall got a job at 14 working for Farmers Insurance (also helping Beyda with the consulting).
From Wikipedia.
In 1981 they got the urge to write a game. They wanted something “more complex” than a two-word parser while avoiding the “rigid conventions of the traditional adventure”. Quoting Segall:
Forget this North, South, East, West stuff; I just wanna go through the door!
They wanted multiple responses to commands that have “nothing to do with the adventure” and writing “like a pulp thriller”. Then as a “hook” they decided the game should be “the first adventure to have serious arcade-game levels”. Quoting Segall directly again:
You don’t want to do the obvious rip-offs — walk into an arcade and see what’s hot and copy it — but take an idea, or several ideas, and make a twist on them. So we put arcade games inside an adventure.
It started with Segall working on plot and design and Beyda doing the programming, but they ended up sometimes swapping responsibilities. The process took 11 months working out of their garage, and then they tried shopping it around to distributors with no takers. They decided to pool the rest of their money to get a booth at Applefest.
At Applefest there’s a story which intercrosses with the Dragon’s Keep one. Mind Games had “distributors” ask for copies of the game, who supposedly were told:
You sent back the one we gave you.
Going back to Dragon’s Keep, and the quote from Hackers about Ken Williams:
Ken tried to throw himself into the spirit of the show, and took Roberta, looking chic in designer jeans, high boots, and a black beret, on a quick tour of the displays. Ken was a natural schmoozer, and at almost every booth he was recognized and greeted warmly. He asked about half a dozen young programmers to come up to Oakhurst and get rich hacking for On-Line.
The adventure-game portions of The Desecration have a strong resemblance to Sierra in visual look. Given the prominence of Sierra in California, and the fact they recruited Sunnyside because of Dragon’s Keep being close in look to Sierra products, it seems almost guaranteed Mind Games was one of the companies that Ken Williams talked to; the exact “you sent back the one we gave you” line may have been spoken directly to him.
Mind Games has been Apple-oriented up to this point, but the company is now looking into Atari and Commodore systems to “see what they can be used for.”
“Programmers are coming to us, now. We give them their freedom because we want them to have the same freedom to create that we had.”
I’m not clear what caused this ambition to unravel, but this game is the only evidence I found of Mind Games publishing anything. Ads starting showing up in 1983.
We’ve seen mini-games before, but the ones here genuinely are more extensive than previous ones; the game is fully half arcade and half adventure. (The closest we’ve seen to that is Mad Martha from the UK, created roughly the same time as The Desecration.) The adventure and arcade sections alternate.
Our job is, according to the game, INTERGALACTIC ASSASSIN. Our assignment is to go to Pykron 9, part of the Pykro Corp. Mining Empire, and kill the chairman, Dunmark Pykro, as he has been “KNOWN TO HAVE AN EYE FOR EASY EXPANSION OF HIS CORPORATE EMPIRE.” Some of his “targets” have pooled money together to hire you for “your usual fee” of 10,000 galactic sovereigns.
Action continues directly after receiving the message.
The interview was fussy about games using NORTH, SOUTH, etc. for navigation, so as exact equivalents this game uses RIGHT, LEFT, FORWARDS, BACKWARDS (abbreviated to R, L, F, B). We’ve had authors thinking “but why compass directions” all the way back to Empire of the Over-Mind and Battlestar. As this game maps them as exact equivalents — you don’t have “relative directions” where entering a room from the opposite side means “forwards” is now “backwards” and so forth — I mentally just thought of them as the usual N/S/E/W.
The TRANSPORTER ROOM mentions transporter controls but as far as I can tell there is no way to examine them or refer to them other than KICK CONTROLS. This is equivalent to activating the transporter. Not a great start.
The opening is relatively short — you can make your way over to a ship, but when you try to sneak it you get caught and tossed in a jail.
It’s a laser door, there’s a mirror, and you can USE MIRROR to get out.
There’s a cell where the main character wonders if he should free the locked-up alien. This is what happens if you try.
LAUNCH SHIP is the right action to take off, leading to the arcade game. Before going there, I should point out two things:
a.) As I already alluded to, the parser is miserable; it seems to be completely not only location-bespoke but also looking for exact phrases. That is, it isn’t using a world-model as opposed to just hand-coding each individual scene; you can, for example, go back in the cell, and the mirror is back to where it was.
b.) The authors seem to have written their room descriptions with a particular sequence in mind, as you can turn south (I mean, “backwards”) instead of going straight to the field to find the cell area, and the description implies you are in the middle of making your escape from the cell (when you haven’t been thrown in yet).
Onto the arcade game!
This is, straightforwardly, horizontal Space Invaders. (So much about avoiding taking actual games from the arcade.) The screen above shows one of the vehicles already vaporized; you drop bombs and they shoot up at you while moving left to right. The start is the hardest as the screen is completely filled with projectiles, and as more enemies die while they move faster, there are gaps that you can sneak your spacecraft between. (If you’re playing on keyboard, note you can double-press to scoot over faster. I think the original intended control was paddle.) Here’s Highretrogamelord attempting to get through:
Note that both this walkthrough and the one from AppleAdventures give up at this mini-game, and both imply they somehow give a complete walkthrough of the adventure portion.
You have to not only kill all the enemies once, but twice. It is definitely a pain but it is possible to get a rhythm in after surviving the initial volley. You can die twice and still continue before hitting a game over.
Why did both video walkthroughs cut off there assuming they had seen the entire game? Well, it starts with a menu where you can choose the three mini-games to play individually. I’m guessing they thought there were four discrete sections, adventure-arcade-arcade-arcade, and not an alternating arrangement where if you pick “adventure” you get the “full game” with the arcade games interspersed in a longer experience.
Even I originally thought this might be four separate games where the adventure game is only at the start.
So with the enemies defeated, we can move on to the Dome City wherein our target awaits.
I added the second shot here to show off more of the writing, where they were aiming for “pulp”. It has the feel and quality of written-by-teenager but I appreciate the effort in giving the main character some attitude, which was not common in 1982.
Our inventory has an I.D. card for getting into the dome, but also, weirdly, a TECH GUN, SECRETARY, ALARM, AND ROBOT PATROL. I assume that’s a bug (it may be a cracking-the-disk bug rather than an “authentic” bug).
Heading down from here leads to a STEEL DOOR with a keyboard which I don’t have a password for yet. However, ahead there are doors where the I.D. card can be used to enter the main complex.
To the left (west, whatever), there’s a person with a “purse” you can steal in order to get some food from a supermarket…
…a breathing apparatus lying about a storage room…
…and PYKRO’S ROBOT DOUBLE. I am unable to interact with it in any way.
To the right (east) is a sleeping police officer and some lockers, which are describing as holding STUFF THAT BELONGS TO THE INMATES. Again, the game’s writing assumes a particular sequence, as it says I BET MY STUFF IS IN HERE SOMEWHERE.
To become an inmate, you go back to the main doors and head forward (north). There is a INFORMANT MEETING PLACE but this person is not the correct informant, so if you try to SMILE as the message at the start of the game suggests, you get arrested.
No progress here, and no luck applying any verbs to the mattress.
If you bypass the first “informant” and head north, there’s a second one talking in an alien language. That’s the real informant, and if you SMILE you get some KEYS.
Past that is a robot guard, and it implies there’s something past the guard, but I have (again) yet to get any verb I’ve tried so far to work.
Almost nostalgic for that dodgy Dark Star parser after playing this for a while. I’ll still keep persisting, for if nothing else, two adventure-walkthrough-makers have already made an attempt and fallen.
Bomb #20: The only thing that exists is myself. Sgt. Pinback: Snap out of it, bomb. Bomb #20: In the beginning there was darkness. And the darkness was without form and void. Sgt. Pinback: Umm. What the hell is he talking about? Bomb? Bomb #20: And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness and I saw that I was alone. Sgt. Pinback: Hey…..bomb? Bomb #20: Let there be light. (Explodes.)
— From the ending of the movie Dark Star (1974)
There’s what might be a Dark Star movie reference in the game; I know have a couple of fans watching. It’s hard to tell, because it’s mashed up with the Blake’s 7 reference.
First, a theoretical side tangent. Text adventures have tended to always have diegetic and non-diegetic commands; diegetic commands are ones that translate to something the avatar does in the world, while non-diegetic commands involve affecting the game program itself: SAVE, RESTORE, QUIT, and so forth. Some games blur the difference (Quondam infamously having the save feature not work in the first part of the game because the player gets beaten up by mobsters) but the general ramification is the player does not reach across the aisle unless some alteration to the program state is needed, and furthermore, it is expected by the player there won’t be some diegetic effect to a non-diegetic command. (The big issue games from this era have is advancing time even upon saving or loading a game.)
HELP has always been an oddball between the two groups; Crowther/Woods adventure clearly is giving a non-diegetic explanation of the game’s setup…
I know of places, actions, and things. Most of my vocabulary describes places and is used to move you there. To move, try words like forest, building, downstream, enter, east, west, north, south, up, or down. I know about a few special objects, like a black rod hidden in the cave.
…but Fortress at Times-End had HELP be the necessary starting command of the game, as for some reason it caused a drawbridge to open. Between the two we’ve had the command sometimes give a piece of information that is absolutely essentially to playing the game (a parser command that is impossible to guess, for instance).
Dark Star turns out to fall in that category, because pressing the buttons at the self destruct area is wrong. The game wants the code formatted in a very specific way, one that can only be worked out via typing HELP.
ENTER GREEN/YELLOW/BLUE AS’CODE GYB’
This is slightly cheeky not only in requiring a command that might make a player feel like they were giving up any kind of personal “no hints challenge” but also the three button colors are green, yellow, and red so the combination doesn’t make sense.
There’s only six combinations so it is easy to simply guess, but there is a way of getting the information otherwise. Back at the ORAC you can type CODE.
Why the player would even know this syntax works is unknown. (I just got it later from the source code.) Also, as shown, it doesn’t actually work: if you type HELP the game lets you know ORAC needs you to be polite, so the correct command is CODE PLEASE.
The Orac was a bit messy to converse with in Blake’s 7, so this could simply be a reference to that, but the actual refusal followed by the “leave me alone” feels more along the lines of talking to Bomb 20 in Dark Star. I’m still going to say the reference is accidental, but I’m going to leave the surfing picture anyway just for fun.
With the self-destruct stopped, the game enters a new phase, the “second mission”. (That means my mucking about the planets was “virtual branching” — I got to see ahead before figuring out the “puzzle” of realizing the HELP command was being mildly abused.)
Another timer! It turns out the complication is not from the life support timer but the fact the space suit (which you need to wear during all the planetary visits) starts running out of oxygen.
Back at planet THREE, there was an ORB, a HOOK, a ROCK, and a KEY.
The ORB simply blows up if you try to teleport it away, so that’s clearly a red herring, but out of the other three items only one of them is useful. You can take the HOOK over to the “green planet” with the fishing, nab the rope and pole, and CATCH FISH. However, you just get a fish, and that’s it. It does nothing. This is a red herring on the level of Ferret, letting you actually solve a puzzle but it turns out to be completely the wrong thing to do.
I was also thinking I might need to use the shininess of the coin as a lure, but that’s not necessary.
No, the item you need is a KEY, which I’ll show off in a moment. You also need to get the box over to the cave and nab the stalactite (as I showed off before) and do the SHOOT STALACTITE (as I also showed off before). SHOOT incidentally doesn’t even bother to check what noun you use, so the only reason I knew for sure it was applying to the stalactite was the brokenness of the parser.
For whatever reason, if you step to the cliff one step to the east and do the SHOOT over there, the dissolving ice will make some vapor and get TWO CRYSTALS from the rockface. I don’t think there’s a clue to this other than it seems like the command ought to do something.
This, plus the KEY, are what’s needed to win the game. Flying back to the Dark Star, I went back to the chamber with two spots missing on a cube. There I had an epic hour-long struggle with the parser.
The two commands that work — which I eventually had to pull straight out of the source code — are REPLACE CRYSTALS and COMPLETE CUBE. For “complete”, I suppose that makes sense, but this is the first and will probably be the last time I’ve ever seen that verb in an adventure game. For “replace”, the crystals go in empty spaces — we’re not replacing anything! I tried PLACE CRYSTALS as one of my first attempts with no joy.
However, even with the right command, I was stopped by a “glass dome”. You cannot refer to either the GLASS or DOME so I tried taking over the heavy stone from the crater planet and using it for smashing purposes, but I just got gnarly default messages.
I finally realized the LOCK just outside did not correspond to the ID card door as I previously assumed, but rather was its own independent thing. Typing USE KEY (more fun with the parser!) will cause, the game reports, nothing to happen, but we’ve seen that trick already.
The key-use opened up the dome, so now it is possible to COMPLETE CUBE.
This suggests either Mexican Adventure was written earlier or the games were made together. Haunted House also references Mexican Adventure. That’s the one game from the Sharpsoft Class of ’82 that I haven’t reached yet, but it’ll have to wait for another time, because I need a breather from their particularly ornery parser…
…and possibly cope with another ornery parser, as coming up: we’re staying with science fiction and visiting an unusual Apple II graphical game, a deep enough cut it did not make my 1982 list.
I’m in the curious position of figuring out how to fuel the starfighter and visit other planets, but still with the Dark Star self-destruct timer ticking down. I don’t even know if stopping the self-destruct is the end of the game or you get missions after. There’s three structural possibilities for what’s going on:
a.) I’m “looking ahead”, like how Burglar’s Adventure lets you keep playing after setting off an alarm to see what’s coming, even though the game is already lost. This can help understand what some earlier objects in the game might be for and/or help get a notion of what kind of patterns the game follows (for example, how many items are red herrings?). This idea really could use a name. “Virtual plot branching” maybe?
b.) The timer is incredibly tight and you’re genuinely supposed to fly off to get resources before coming back and stopping the self-destruct sequence.
c.) This is a Ferret-style game, where you clearly and intentionally have to go murder your virtual selves finding out some information which will then get applied back in the “main plot”. There’s no realistic way your main character could learn that information other than referring to things learned from their doomed-to-death clones. This is like if in the game Outer Worlds, instead of there being a time loop, your character just dies over and over and you somehow happen to know the information from your dead selves; that is, it is functionally identical to a time loop, but the game-world ramifications are grislier.
I’ve been keeping an eye out for any references to the movie Dark Star (1974) but other than the name of the game I haven’t spotted any. It’s a title that easily could be made independently. The Dark Star in this game is a space station, not a ship, and I wouldn’t call the exploding a movie reference unless we start talking to a bomb. Image via a video about the Dark Star miniature work.
Continuing from last time, I was able to grab: ID CARD, CHART (mentioning “DILUS DC”), TEA STRAINER, SPACESUIT, METAL SUIT (radiation protection), GREEN SUIT, COMPASS, DETECTOR (of radiation), BOX (polystyrene, trying to open it says “it’s not that easy”), PHASER, COIN (for a pinball table).
For open problems, other than the mysterious box (the one thing I’ll resolve later), there’s an ORAC computer that might be a red herring, there’s an alien in the vent (you’d think the phaser works, but it is rigged to not be able to fire while in the space station), two suspicious “blank walls” (again the phaser would be nice to use, but alas), a crystal cube “without two blocks” in the engine room, and three buttons (yellow, red, green) that supposedly disable the self-destruct sequence. Trying to press any of the three buttons is rebuffed by the game.
PRESS YELLOW: I DON’T SEE THE POINT IN THAT!
PRESS RED: IT WON’T WORK!
PRESS GREEN: I DON’T SEE THE POINT IN THAT!
I gather, given the differing error messages, that red is the first button in the combination, but something is stopping the PRESS. Since the crystal cube is in the same room, I suspect fixing the crystal cube is the hang-up.
Returning back to the room with the starfighter, there’s a “TAP” and a “HOSEPIPE”, and turning the tap causes fuel to flow out of the hose.
The right command here is tricky to find; if you try to take off with starfighter the game says it needs REFUELING, and that word specifically needs to be used here: REFUEL STARFIGHTER. Unfortunately if you try to then take off it doesn’t work:
(I’m starting to imagine, plot-wise, that we did an “emergency long distance teleport” over to the bridge of the Dark Star when contact was lost, and it’s such a difficult/dangerous procedure only one person could be sent. That explains why we aren’t familiar with what the buttons on the bridge do, and also suggests some lore questions: What happened to the crew? Why was the fuel sabotaged? Why is the crystal cube broken? Why did the self-destruct sequence start? Where did the alien come from?)
Going back out and checking the fuel, you see it is LUMPY. The TEA STRAINER works to fix this (!!) by typing STRAIN FUEL. Doing REFUEL STARFIGHTER with the fix now allows you to take off.
The procedure (given on a note earlier, combined with information from a chart) is to set COURSE DILUS and then type DRIVE.
This changes the starfighter’s location, closes the exit “down” (to the Dark Star) and opens an exit south, to a “hold”.
The belt is a GRAVITY COMPENSATOR BELT and the bracelet allows for teleportation. You can then hop in the alcove and find five buttons corresponding to the three planets in the viewscreen. And yes, those numbers don’t match, so PRESS FOUR and PRESS FIVE result in an unfortunate demise:
As an aside, this is where Rob was getting stuck and thought the code needed changing in order to introduce the digits 1 through 5, as the buttons are described that way. PRESS 1, PRESS 2, etc. previously didn’t work at all because the game doesn’t even let you push the actual buttons. Quoting Rob:
When I originally got to that area, I naturally assumed that, since the game says “the buttons are numbered 1-5” that you had to use the numerals. When it became obvious that you couldn’t, I tried typing them out but the game kept responding “nothing happened!”. Since not being able to enter numerals was clearly a bug, I immediately reported it.
This is not the first and certainly will not be the last bit of early-80s text adventure jank that gets mistaken for a bug. (Certainly by modern standards it is a bug — why would you mismatch display and input like that?)
With fairly high efficiency (I’m off by 1 or 2) I was able to get to the alcove safely with everything worn (space suit, bracelet, belt) in 27 moves.
Given the space station explodes at 50, this does not seem like enough time to do everything and come back. For example, here’s the map upon pressing THREE:
It’s just a straightforward grid, exploring a crater.
In addition to the KEY from the center there’s a HOOK (“fishing hook”), ORB (“made out of an unknown element”), and STONE (“heavy”) lying out in the open.
Picking up all three items and returning to the start (at the “monolith” that allows teleportation) takes 17 turns. Given the 27 moves at start (let’s say 25 with perfection and no typos, and yes making a typo counts as a move) that’s 42 moves used up already on only one teleport destination. Even if it turns out one or more of the items are red herrings, I think option b (explore planets, then rush back to stop the self-destruct) it starting to seem unlikely.
Jumping over to planet ONE, it is just two rooms (so far):
The stalactite might make a tempting phaser target, but shooting it is a bad idea:
Nabbing the phaser from the Dark Star takes even more extra moves, but given it doesn’t work on the space station, it seems necessary. However, we have had plenty of games before where weapons are a red herring.
You can try to take it but the game says you need an “INSULATED CONTAINER”. This turns out to be the BOX from the Dark Star, but taking it results in yet more moves being wasted.
TWO leads to a “green planet”, which is again small.
The LONG STICK at the opening room is described as “bamboo”. The pool to the west has FISH, and if you try to CATCH FISH the game says you need a hook. If you bring the hook over from the crater it turns out you’re still missing something.
If it turns out you then also need a pole after finding tackle, the bamboo one probably qualifies.
To the north there are three “cliff” rooms with ROCKFACE objects (“crystalline”). Trying to CLIMB (even while holding the rope, or dropping it in the room) is rebuffed.
Trying to SHOOT ROCKFACE (with the phaser) gives the response
YOU DO NOT HAVE THE STALACTITE!
and bringing the stalactite along gives this screen:
As efficient as possible getting to this screen. Right after this the Dark Star explodes.
It’s hard to experiment with the planets because the background timer keeps going off quickly; while it is still very faintly possible the player is just supposed to move very fast, I can’t imagine doing all the steps to make a fishing pole and do whatever it is the stalactite needs and grabbing at least the hook from the crater and still be under fifty.
I suppose playing this game is a little like talking Bomb 20 out of exploding, but only by coincidence.
Next time I’m going to take another stab at the Dark Star itself, as I get the nagging feeling it’s the bespoke-command parser that’s really tripping me up here (am I even pressing the buttons on the self-destruct control in the right way?)
What happens if you try to skip getting the space suit before visiting planet ONE.
As the links above imply, we’ve played two of them, and have two more to go. I’m still unclear if these were listed in the order they were written or not. Having played Dark Star a little, I can say the parser feels better than Haunted House but worse than Secret Kingdom. However, that’s not really proving anything, and it could even be the case (given we’re dealing with two different authors) they were developing games in an overlapping way.
Both A.J. Josey and Geoff Clark remain mysteriously resistant to my attempts to find them even as references in computer magazines. The closest I found was that there was a person named Geoff Clark who worked as a camera supervisor on some Classic Doctor Who episodes; it would be lovely to find out it was the same person (especially as I know one of the readers of this blog also worked as a camera supervisor for Doctor Who) but there’s absolutely no evidence for that and there’s enough Geoff Clarks out there I can’t call it anything more than coincidence.
I didn’t find much else on Sharpsoft either other than a profile of Michael Opacic who wrote them word processor, spreadsheet, and database software, and “sold full rights — no royalties” with “the attitude that a bird in the hand is worth several in the bush.” A different contract paid out 15% royalties so the company was clearly giving both options; I still have no names associated with the founder or founders.
I originally had this game farther down on my list, due to a technical issue commenter Rob discovered; while you are required to type numerical digits later in the game, the program (in the MZ-700 format we have) doesn’t let you. It is literally impossible to win without modifying the source code.
What’s happening here is that the game is restricting what the player types to certain ASCII codes. The ASCII code for “0” is 48, and the code for “A” is 65. The first line restricts input to letter characters (anything less than 65 in ASCII is left out), leaving out the needed digits. By changing the value to 48, “0” through “9” are now included.
While it certainly is possible for a unfinishable game to hit in the 80s for no particular reason at all, in this case the game was originally written for MZ-80A before getting moved to the MZ-700. While this more or less just adds color, I could easily see a change like the bug above also slipping in.
The game starts with music, which I’ve dropped a video of below.
Despite the Star Wars theme, the game feels (so far) like an amalgam of Star Trek and Alien. You’re in the Dark Star ship and you are the only one aboard (except for, as you’ll see later, an alien); the closest aspect to Star Wars is a “starfighter” that’s on board, but maybe that gets later to shoot down TIE Fighters so suddenly the theme will be appropriate again.
The most interesting part of the instructions is the notice that this game has no score as it is “mission” based and “you either make it or you don’t!!”
You start in the control room of the Dark Star. There’s no options other than to SIT DOWN. That alone took a bit of time to work out. The command SIT is bespoke and only works in this room in this context (that is, somewhere it is hard-coded to check for “SIT DOWN” as a phrase rather than the command SIT being considered a verb on its own). It (and some other commands) evaded my verb list:
The evasion can be pretty bad; just typing SIT alone gives the message I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN BY THE COMMAND ‘SIT’, which suggests this is entirely the wrong thing to be typing; SIT SEAT gets equal confusion, and the parser doesn’t even let you type SIT ON SEAT (it will stop you from putting in a space after a second word — the same kind of hard enforcement that led to the bug where numerals couldn’t be typed in).
Sitting down successfully results in a blank screen, a red button and a blue button. Pressing either button just states NOTHING HAPPENS! which is slightly frustating because something happens in both cases. With the blue button, it turns the screen on and reveals the player’s mission: the ship is about to blow up and the self-destruct needs to be de-activated.
You starts with a WATCH in case you need to check how long until death. The clock is ticking even before you’ve seen the message, so my first game through I had the amusing scene of flailing wildly trying to get into a seat, baffling over buttons that do nothing, reading the destruction message, and dying shortly after.
The red button invisibly opens an exit to the north, where you can find a map which gives the overall ship layout in glorious ASCII.
Before going on to explore the ship, I want to point out how incredibly odd the opening is in a meta-sense. Surely if we’re here, and we’re the only one, we’re meant to be here — that is, the avatar ought to already know the function of the red button and blue button, so saying that nothing happens is doubly curious? In 1982, the amnesia trick still hasn’t been rolled in much yet to cure player-vs-avatar-knowledge disjoint (Ferret and El Diablero have been the only two); most games from this era seem to just pretend it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to deal with, though; Kirk in a Star Trek adventure game surely should know his own ship’s layout, yet the player needs to map it out.
Following the same order as the ship’s map:
2 is the recreation room, which has a pinball machine and a table. The table has an ID card which will be needed later, and a chart which talks about a star system DILOS DC. I have not used this information yet.
The pinball machine is described as a Captain Fantastic which is a real pinball game from the 1970s (it was the follow-up to Wizard by Bally and sold immensely well; it helped for Bally’s finances that Elton John — whose likeness was used — took his payment in pinball machines).
Moving on to 3 is the research lab, which has a radiation detector, a polystyrene box, and an Orac (a fictional computer from the show Blake’s 7). Sure, let’s toss all the sci-fi shows in there.
4 is the flight deck with a starfighter. You can hop on but the starfighter lacks gas. So much for escaping self-destruct the ignoble way.
5 is the galley (that’s far southeast on the map) which has an old tea strainer.
Stepping into the larder reveals an air vent; you can go in the air vent to find a “blank wall” and going any further results in death-by-alien.
Moving up to 6 is the cargo hold, with multiple suits: a spacesuit, a “metal suit” (which turns out to be radiation protection) and a green suit (which I don’t understand yet). Hidden within the suits are a COMPASS and a NOTE, the latter explaining that the starfighter — the one we saw earlier that needs fuel — responds to spoken commands.
With the ID card back at the recreation room you can get into 7, which is a armoury. It has a phaser (which can only be set to kill) and a coin which goes back at the pinball table.
Playing pinball has the game respond YOU’RE WELL ON THE WAY TO A HI SCORE WHEN THE MACHINE TILTS!
Finally there’s 8, which can be reached by starting at the control room and going due north. If you just do that right away you die.
The metal suit back at the storage is sufficient for protection.
The control panel has three buttons (yellow, red, and green) with the note that they disarm the self-destruct in the right combination. Why don’t we know the combination? Maybe we’re raiders and there’s a missing manual insert. Just to emphasize why the “bespoke command” feature is dodgy, here’s my attempt at reading the inscription that goes with the colored buttons:
I picked the wrong noun on READ first and it told me the command READ wasn’t understood! This very much implies to stop using READ, and I only persisted because I already observed the response was deceptive.
Once I got past the rough starting command the game became fun to explore. I’m not even “stuck” yet, but I had enough enthusiasm from people who wanted to play along I figured this was a good place to stop.
Roger M. Wilcox has now had 19 games we’ve covered on this blog. This is the 20th and the last for 1981.
As a brief reminder, they were nearly all “private games” without much a notion for publication. The only exception was The Vial of Doom which the author tried to send to Captain 80 Book of Basic Adventures but missed the deadline on. All the games eventually made it to the author’s web site. Wilcox doesn’t give much background for Derelict 2147 other than he calls it a “ho-hum treasure hunt”; his next game for TRS-80 (The Last City, #21) was designed as his grand send-off as he was transitioning to DOS.
He mentions — as a complete coincidence — Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future (1987) also being set in the year 2147. It had toys that you could use while watching to interact with the show.
Derelict 2147 is rather like the Aardvark Software Derelict in that you are raiding an alien spaceship. This time the ship has appeared past Mars, and you start from Earth and need to steal a vehicle, killing a guard in the process.
This is akin to the opening of Odyssey 2: Treasure Island, where you have to murder a pilot and steal his plane to go over to the title island. I’m going to assume we know the guard is evil somehow and the ship would otherwise be used for the Evil Empire of Evil to do Bad Things. (Or. sticking with the Captain Power theme, used by Lord Dread in a quest to destroy humanity.)
The game is genuinely straightforward but I only found it that way because I’m used to playing both old games and Wilcox games in particular. For instance, at the very start, there’s a manhole which resists attempts at opening it.
>OPEN COVER
It’s beyond your power to do that.
>GET COVER
It’s beyond your power to do that.
>ENTER MANHOLE
I don’t know how to “enter” something.
PUSH? SLIDE? Nope. I whipped out my standard verb list and tested my way through before doing anything else, resulting in:
MOVE worked on the manhole. Incidentally, I keep trying to use ENTER for the entire rest of the game (this game uses GO only as the appropriate verb).
Hopping in the manhole:
You are in an ancient sewer. Visible items:
Long dead body.
Obvious exits: Up
The body has a gun license. Why do we need a gun license?
Well, the other location at the start is a “weapons shop” which contains guns and knives. You can grab a knife just fine, but if you try to get a gun it says you need a license, and I’m pretty sure grabbing some dead person’s gun license will make everyone happy.
With the gun and knife in hand we can now murder a guard (single guard) blocking an interplanetary spaceship in order to steal it.
>SHOOT GUARD
Zzap!
Wow! That was rather impressive!
>ENTER PLANETSHIP
I don’t know how to “enter” something.
>GO PLANETSHIP
Ok
The ship has a sign indicating *treasures* go here, and a red button with a joystick. Pressing the red button is sufficient to fly all the way to mars and dock with an alien ship.
Let’s rotate our way through the map, using the docking bay as a hub, and starting with far east and rotating counterclockwise.
Upon the first LOOK, the shelves reveal a “small device” with a green button that reverses gravity temporarily. The shelves are the kind you need to LOOK at more than once — the second time around, you’ll find a “five-pound key”. The “panel” is locking the “sliding doors” and need an identity device, which we’ll return with later.
Headed counterclockwise, the next place is a “antechamber” with a cryonics chamber and a lever. Pull the lever opens the chamber, revealing an alien who will now follow you around.
Trying to kill the alien has the game respond it is your friend, so I guess we don’t need to be trigger-happy anymore. I’m curious what the lore is behind the “you’re not a mutant” line; maybe the aliens were trying to escape mutants, so since we aren’t that’s why the alien is friendly?
Moving on to “up” from the docking bay (next on my map), there’s a tunnel with a hole in the ceiling. You can use the temporary gravity shut-off to float up through the hole and retrieve an octagonal crystal (a treasure) and an electric iron rod. The iron rod has a blue button which gives an electric shock.
Keeping our rotation, heading straight north from the docking bay leads to Large Quarters with “rows” of cryonics chambers. Looking at the console:
It has a lever on it.
… with a crystal attached!
An alien voice sounds in your mind:
‘Oh? You want that, eh? Sure thing!”
He removes the gem, opens a chamber, and seals himself off.
This gives a *parasite crystal*, another one of the treasures. Rotating again, my map has the exit “down”. This leads to a strange forcefield and possibly the most interesting part of the game. If you pass through the forcefield you die because of the difference in atmospheres between the inside and outside of the ship, but you see an alien with a metal belt before you die.
That is, the main text says:
>D
Ok
>LOOK FORCEFIELD
It’s very tenuous, only strong enough to impede gasses.
>GO FORCEFIELD
Ok
Your body couldn’t take the transition to zero pressure!
You were ripped apart!
But on the death screen you can see the room description:
You’re on a destroyed platform open to space. Visible items:
Alien wearing a steel belt.
Obvious exits: West
In another room (which we’ll arrive at shortly) there’s a copper coil. If we have the electric iron rod in copper coil in inventory, the command MAKE turns them into an electromagnet. Yes, this could have been very hard to find, but I found MAKE from verb-testing, and I knew both from the game’s response to MAKE (saying you don’t have the right materials yet) and previous Wilcox games that I didn’t need to specify a target. I only needed to use the verb MAKE, and the rest would happen by magic.
The electromagnet can then serve to pull in the alien, which we can only see because of the death screen!
A charge flows through the copper wire.
It was stronger than you thought! It pulled something in.
The alien has a treasure (an *advanced communicator*) as well as an identity amulet. The amulet goes back to the far-east storage room to open the sliding doors, leading to a cabinet with yet another treasure (a vial of Californium).
One last area:
There’s that copper coil I already mentioned, and also a treasure (a *platinum cube*) made deadly by being attached to a wire. If you LOOK CUBE you’ll see the wire, and the knife serves well enough to CUT WIRE, making the cube safe to take. The wire can also be pulled, revealing the pit you’re supposed to be dying in. This lets you climb into the pit safely and retrieve one of the spikes.
The spike turns out to be a “printed-circuit spike” and counts as a treasure. It’s all over!
Again, I want to emphasize: I found this straightforward, but I’m used enough to various conventions to recognize quickly what I’m looking at (and I have my secret weapon, the verb list). It does seem Mr. Wilcox’s heart wasn’t as much in this one; it’s lacking the satire of his other 1982 game, Followers Adventure, or the creativity of the Trash Island games. However, keep in mind this was not meant to be commercial; these are still private games, it’s just Roger Wilcox was gracious enough to eventually make them available.
This game does have one bit of satire, although it might be accidental. In addition to the button and joystick, your planetship has a fuel gauge. Upon docking, the fuel gauge is empty, and we never addressed that particular concern, implying the player character is now trapped on the alien ship albeit with their treasures, making for a grisly tomb instead of triumph.
Before the grand finale, I wanted to tag something else that seems likely to have been an inspiration; not from Advanced D&D, but “Basic” D&D as published in 1977, also known as Holmes Basic.
Remember, Cornucopia starts out in a cottage in a “fungus forest”.
You find yourself in a strange forest of giant fungus growths, they create an eerie feeling. No particular direction seems to suggest itself to you here. There is a particularly huge specimen here, with what appears a dark opening in it.
I originally contextualized this in relation to Goblin Towers, the author’s previous game, with the notion it was a “ruined” version of that map, but I didn’t know the level of D&D connection at the time.
In Search of the Unknown was an extremely popular module, as it was B1, the first created for the Basic Set and was even packaged with it for a time. The actual fungi location in the dungeon crawl is just a single room, number 22 on the map, the Garden.
The floor is covered with a carpet of tufted molds that extends to all the walls and even onto parts of the ceiling, obscuring the rock surface. The molds appear in a rainbow assortment of colors, and they are mixed in their appearance, with splotches, clumps, swirls, and patches presenting a nightmarish combination of clashing colors. This is indeed a fuzzy fairyland of the most forbidding sort, although beautiful in its own mysterious way …
B1 was intended as a “beginner adventure” (not just beginner players, but beginner Dungeon Masters). The author, Mike Carr, explained for the Goodman Games reprint:
…I wracked my brain to come up with as many interesting and mysterious features as I could think of for what could be considered within the place, particularly the garden of giant fungi and the room of pools. That had to be done considering that the adventurers were going to be low-level characters, so nothing could be too deadly or too challenging to overcome — and that meant that there were limited options on the design side.
Mike Carr picked the fungus room for the cover as he felt would be “striking as well as exotic”. The art was done by David Trampier and David Sutherland III; specifically, Trampier did a version with characters that were deemed too cartoony (the art later showed up in The Polyhedron Issue #5, they almost look like something from The Smurfs) and Sutherland (art director at the time) re-did the characters in a more realistic style that matched the look of the Holmes Basic cover.
Even though the Cornucopia forest is outside, the prominence of the B1 imagery at the time makes me believe the two are connected. An old blog post at Grognardia from an author recalling that period discusses the imagery being “seared” into their imagination. There was revised art in 1981, but it too was done with fungus.
I had left off last time on being attacked by an ice devil and an ice warrior, and unable to win the battle. This leads directly to finding the Cornucopia (with one hiccup along the way as I had missed an item) so represents a climax with a denouement following (the treasures still need to all be arranged back at the cottage, and there’s one more thing that needs to be done in order to deliver the Horn of Plenty back to the gods).
Passing through the Hall of Regeneration whilst holding a mummified hand, rather spectacularly, causes it to grow back into a monster. Avoiding that fate allows you to reach the magic circle with a crystal key, but upon picking it up, you get attacked from the west by a ice devil and from the east by an ice warrior.
>GET KEY
Taken. As you lift the key an unseen panel lights up in the north wall. It says ‘UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY DETECTED GUARDS HAVE BEEN ALERTED’. As quickly as the sign appeared it disappears. You notice that two things have appeared to the east and west of you.
>W
You are at the west side of the magic hall. There is an exit to the west. In the centre of the hall is a huge magic circle. The north and south ends of the hall can be reached by going northeast and southeast. There is an ice warrior here, he is very menacing.
The ice devil guardian has followed you.
You receive a gash in the arm from the Ice warrior.
>KILL ICE WARRIOR WITH RUNE SWORD
The flat of your sword hits the ice warrior on the side knocking him over, it quickly regains its feet.
The Ice devil strikes you across the back as you attempt to run away. You get a numbing blow from the Ice warrior, you don’t feel too good.
>KILL ICE WARRIOR WITH RUNE SWORD
You strike at the ice warrior but it easily side steps.
You manage to dodge the Ice devil’s thrust. You stagger back under a hail of blows from the Ice warrior.
The variety of messages is quite good, and there are even some rare ones (once I slipped on my own blood, causing me to dodge a deadly attack). This feels like — and ends up being — the climactic battle of the game.
The “ice warrior” isn’t specifically a D&D monster, but Cotton may have been thinking of Frost Giants from the first edition of AD&D. Source.
The two monsters will follow wherever you go, so I figured quite quickly the environment mattered. Back at the door opened with the hand, you can jump back into the main underground world, so I figured there had to be some opportunity back there. (You can also use the transport box, but upon arrival at the mirror room, in another classy/frustrating touch, one of the guardians smashes the mirror instead of attacks you.)
I tried the warmth of the dragon, or even getting the dragon fire to kill one of the enemies rather than myself. I tried to see if the toxic tree would help. I tried fighting in the dark. (I found out that the “grue” stayed down in the troll area, so you can safely walk around in the dark! You get followed by the devil and warrior but they don’t attack until the lights come on again.)
I was making things too hard on myself: the key was the Hall of Regeneration. I think it occurred to me early but I thought the picture meant the devil and warrior would receive regeneration, not me.
You are in a hall the walls of which are covered in murals. The theme of the murals seems to be that of severely wounded indeed fatally wounded people recovering in a miraculous manner. The murals also contain pictures of the corpses of many hideous beings, these seem to be an interlinked part of the story. There are doorways to the south, west and northeast.
The ice devil guardian has followed you. The ice warrior guardian has followed you.
>KILL ICE DEVIL WITH RUNE SWORD
You feel so full of vitality and energy here that with a single swipe you dispatch the ice devil. The ice devil falls rigidly to the ground and disappears in a violent blue flash.
The Ice warrior guardian takes a mighty swing at you, the blow seems to have had no effect at all.
>KILL ICE WARRIOR WITH RUNE SWORD
You feel so full of vitality and energy here that with a single swipe you dispatch the ice warrior. The ice warrior falls rigidly to the ground and disappears in a violent blue flash.
Can’t regenerate if you get vaporized in one shot. (taps forehead)
With the crystal key in hand, I was almost ready to claim to the cornucopia, but I still was missing one thing: the ruby rod. This ended up being an unglamorous use of EXAMINE ALL everywhere (again) although with a particular emphasis on the multiverse worlds.
High Priests Chamber
In the centre of the east wall is a small stone alcove. A large old writing desk stands in one corner, the left hand side of the desk contains a drawer.
>EXAMINE ALL
alcove : In the centre of the east wall is a small stone alcove. Having moved the small idol you notice that the alcove has a false floor.
writing desk : The writing desk is large and ornate made from carved oak, it must have taken two men to move it. The writing desk has seen much use from the ink blots and doodles on its surface, all of which are quite unintelligible. The left hand side of the desk contains a small drawer.
drawer : The drawer is closed.
false floor : Examining the false floor reveals that a ruby rod is hidden beneath it.
Whoops! That was being hidden by a small gold idol sitting on top of it before (I think EXAMINE ALL would’ve worked anyway). With the ruby rod, the opal rod (from the pixie forest), the diamond rod (from the magi area), it was now time to go back to the three holes, and use the combination ROD.
>I
You are carrying:- transport box; battery lamp; spell book; crystal key; opal rod; diamond rod; ruby rod.
>PUT RUBY ROD IN TOP HOLE
Ok.
>PUT OPAL ROD IN MIDDLE HOLE
Ok.
>PUT DIAMOND ROD IN BOTTOM HOLE
Ok. As the last rod goes in an opening quietly appears at the south end of the passage.
This leads to a “Centre” with a crystal case.
You are in a square room made entirely from crystal. The crystal seems to be pulsating with a life of its own. In the centre of the room is a large crystal case, apparently extruded from the floor itself.
>EXAMINE ALL
crystal case : In the centre of the room is a large crystal case, apparently extruded from the floor itself. The crystal case is closed and despite being crystalline, its contents, if any, cannot be seen.
With the crystal key via the guardians, the case can be unlocked revealing the horn of plenty!
>OPEN CRYSTAL CASE
You find the crystal case locked but discover that the crystal key unlocks it.
>EXAMINE HORN
Cornucopia, the fabled horn of plenty, is something of a disappointment – it appears much like any other ram’s horn except for being much larger. How it is used though is not at all apparent and I suspect attempting to use it would not help you to live to a ripe old age.
Now, taking the corncuopia isn’t an instant win, and taking it back to the treasure storage place (the cottage) doesn’t help either. I had PRAY tagged from back when I made my verb list, but with the item in hand:
Nothing happens.
This can be worked out by process of elimination, as there’s only one multiverse world that hasn’t been used yet: the swirling mist with nothing else.
>ENTER MIRROR
You are in a swirling grey mist, all directions are the same.
>PRAY
You are in a small but luxurious room, well it would be small if you were a giant. The room has no obvious exits, but then Gods don’t really need doorways.
>WAIT
Time passes……
>I
You are carrying:- transport box; battery lamp; brown sack; horn of plenty.
All of a sudden amidst a burst of golden light one of the Gods who originally sent you on this mission appears. He sees you have the Horn and takes it. The God speaks ‘You have performed your task adequately and so we pardon you for your crimes against our Temple this time.’ With that you find yourself transported home with all the treasures you managed to salvage, you did manage to salvage some! didn’t you? You have scored a total of 670 out of 740 in 1284 moves giving you a rating of Pardoned.
I turned out to be only short one puzzle (and corresponding treasures). It turned out not to be:
The gold coins in the fountain — those don’t count as a treasure
The gems at the acid tree — those also don’t count as a treasure
The compost heap, which is just a compost heap
Anything to do with the pixie (from the walkthrough after I finished, I found out that the pixie is supposed to steal things unless you appease it with the whistle, but the code is broken)
Fake-out treasure feels more aligned to D&D than normal adventure games. The D&D module In Search of the Unknown includes a “Wizard’s Annex” with illusionary treasure.
No trap, I assume because it’s a beginner module.
The true missing puzzle in Cornucopia was back at the mould near the sleeping demon and the mirror.
You are in a small closet which is very unwholesome with rotting clothes everywhere, basically it stinks. The centre of the closet floor seems covered in what appears to be a horrible brown mould.
I had done the right thing but had a misleading parser response, so never pursued it further. BURN MOULD WITH TORCH gives a colorful exploding death, and my attempt to THROW TORCH just resulted in “Dropped.” so I didn’t think further of it.
>THROW TORCH AT MOULD
The torch seems to have been enveloped in the mould.
You can then leave, and an explosion will happen behind you. This gets rid of the mould and reveals a way down.
Reception room
There is a small explosion nearby.
>S
You are in a small closet which is very unwholesome with rotting clothes everywhere, basically it stinks. There is a flight of steps leading down into the floor. There was a trap door covering the steps but the explosion seems to have completely destroyed it. There is a torch here which is all used up.
>D
You are at the bottom of a flight of steps which leads back up to the closet you came from. An archway to the south leads in to the King’s treasure chamber. Built into the middle of the floor here is a strong iron safe. On the safe’s door is a small dial with numbers around its edge. The safe contains:- pearl; amethyst rod; tiny key.
This is modified from the original game (I’m playing the “fixed” version from CASA made by Alex, who also wrote a walkthrough). To the south is a portcullis blocking the treasure chamber, which I already lifted via using the wheel in the toxic gas room. However, something is broken in the code so you can’t move south, so the fixed version moved the safe from the treasure chamber over one step so you can get at it here. Consequently, you don’t need to dial up the safe code, which turns out to match the four-digit number on the rolled die.
Fortunately, I can still show you the vault, as further reading on the CASA forums led me to two debug commands: TVQREX and XERQVT. Those let you advance the location counter by one or subtract by one, so XERQVT from the bottom leads to:
You are in the King’s treasure vault. Unfortunately it has long since been looted and vandalised and little or nothing remains to be found. The archway you entered the treasure chamber through is to the north. Built into the middle of the floor here is a strong iron safe. On the safe’s door is a small dial with numbers around its edge. The safe contains:- pearl; amethyst rod; tiny key.
With the pearl and amethyst rod safely placed, I had all the points, and earned my final ranking.
With that you find yourself transported home with all the treasures you managed to salvage, you did manage to salvage some! didn’t you? You have scored a total of 740 out of 740 in 1336 moves giving you a rating of Demigod.
I found it an interesting mess and I always felt engaged, although some of that might be due to the meta-mystery of the game (nobody had gotten a full score before this weekend). I do think the story behind the freed demon and the “long departed” owners of the castle made for a decent amount of environment and atmosphere, even given the much more random assortment of multiverses.
I will say — despite seemingly like it might diverge into total evil — the game was essentially fair. The troll puzzle was arguably the worst (I solved it, but by accident); I also wasn’t thrilled about the glitch with the torch-throwing puzzle, or the random assorted glitches otherwise. Once when trying to wrangle the bottle to get another drink of water (you get thirsty every time you pass through the illusion-gold card route) the game responded with
water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water
etc. As LanHawk points out in the comments, this port may not be from Brian Cotton at all.
However, everything else fit together in a logical way, in a much better way than many other authors trying to aim for “difficulty”; it helped that Cotton kept track of enough conditions (even small things, like not taking a torch into an igloo) that the complexity level rose just naturally on its own; trying to parse through what was important and what could be discarded was a major part of the gameplay.
The original was a 32K disk game for Commodore PET; the 32K + disk explains why this managed to be much more ambitious than nearly any UK game that wasn’t made on a mainframe or via Level 9 (which had its own compression technology, that worked even better than Infocom’s). There wasn’t even a C64 version made of this one. It likely is very rare and it is possible the original 1982 disk is now completely lost to time. So I am thankful I did have some way of playing it, even with the glitching around the edges.
As far as historical interest goes, this was by far the most integrated-into-D&D adventure I’ve played. Dungeon Adventure had parts allegedly adapted off a real campaign, but Level 9 filed off the edges enough it isn’t clear where the points of inspiration were (except for being able to see when items are magic). Cornucopia put a water weird with a straight-from-the-manual method of destruction, as well as an actual Dungeon Masters Guide with accompanying in-joke. I found it interesting even given the elaborate combat message system, the only straight-combat was the entirely optional fight with the giant rat; the pull of adventure-gameplay is towards interesting solutions to problems and not regular combat, so the more elaborate encounters (troll, ice creatures) both required puzzle-solving instead.
Coming up: No idea. I wasn’t expecting be done with Cornucopia yet. Likely some small games; you can peek at my final stretch of 1982 list and speculate if you’d like.
By request, removing a red gem from an idol, as referenced in my last post. Via eBay.
There’s lots of new places to see in this post, but before plowing forward, I wanted to address something I’ve found puzzling: why does the writing seem both good and bad at the same time?
As has already been observed in the comments by arcanetrivia, there’s very loose control of commas. Other grammar conventions at times are followed only approximately.
You are in a room which is wider at the east end than at the west end, its length is greater than its width even at its widest point. Strangely there is a powerful draught blowing from this end of the room towards the smaller end, it is probably something to do with the rooms shape. The floor is covered in gaily coloured tiles; red, green blue and yellow ones. The walls are coloured to match and the whole makes your eyes fairly boggle.
I would love to scribble my red pen over this, but it doesn’t feel awful in the way we’ve seen with other games. It struck me finally that most of the awkward sections work fine if read out-loud. Imagine that this was originally an AD&D scenario (as it may have been!) where the Dungeon Master reads descriptions to the players. (Link here if the embed below doesn’t show on your screen.)
It seems to work, no? The phrase “its length is greater than its width even at its widest point” scans with the eye badly but given the natural pauses and emphasis of a voice, it doesn’t seem confusing. There’s a comma that doesn’t work as written (after “end” it should be a period) but if we think of it verbally, as a shorter pause than a period, it makes sense. Even if none of this text made its way into a real campaign, I suspect the author might have written things down with a spoken cadence in mind. Taking a later clip which we’ll see today:
The murals were painted by an artist who was a master of his craft. They depict the scenes of miraculous healing of beings of many kinds, some quite hideous, some enormous and others quite ordinary. No reason for the healing is shown, but it is obvious a great antipathy existed between some of these beings.
There’s nothing broken in the grammar this time, the parallelism-with-a-break parses well (“some” quite hideous, “some” enormous, “others” quite ordinary) and the final suggestion of “a great antipathy” existing between the beings (without being explicit) is genuinely vivid. Mind you, it still isn’t Emily Dickinson, or to make a fairer comparison, Brian Moriarty, but it works better than your average early-80s text adventure.
Back to the game! Last time I had mentioned a section with a gold door–
>ENTER MIRROR
You are in a small square room, the walls of which are completely blank.
There is a gold door in the south wall.
>OPEN GOLD DOOR
You open the door and a little man rushes out and says ‘Oh thank you very much, I have been stuck in there for ages’. I only came back for this, he says, waving a small box, it should have got me out of there but it seems it is not quite perfect yet. He then turns a dial, presses a button on the small box and just disappears. In his haste to depart a note slips from his pocket.
Now that I had the prototype teleport box, I could escape from this area (with the gold bar just to the south) but there turned out to be one catch: the “little man” swipes the transport box if you’re holding it.
You open the door and a little man rushes out and says ‘Oh thank you very much, I have been stuck in there for ages’. I only came back for this, he says, waving a small box, it should have got me out of there but it seems it is not quite perfect yet. He suddenly looks at something you are carrying and says ‘I lost that sometime ago, whereever did you find it?’ Without letting you answer he quickly snatches it. He then turns a dial, presses a button on the small box and just disappears. In his haste to depart a note slips from his pocket.
Fortunately, avoiding this is a matter of just taking the brown sack from the kitchen area and storing the transport box in there temporarily.
The sack has an interesting side effect.
The small box has five coloured buttons on its top side. They are coloured blue yellow, green, pink and black, there is no indication as to their use. The box has the distinct appearance of being extremely delicate, and probably the slightest bump would damage it.
Note the “slightest bump would damage it” part. Trying to drop the box results in a “sickening crunch” and it stops working. However, having the box in the sack is sufficient to protect it (assuming you need to clear your inventory).
Moving on:
The area is made of a chain of six doors: gold, silver, copper, crystal, oak, ruby. Pressing the blue button on the box advances forwards one; pressing the pink button goes back one. (After ruby, it wraps back to gold.) Green advances two and yellow advances three. The black button goes back to the mirror. This is incidentally the only area I’ve found where any button other than black works.
The “silver bar room” seems to be there for just holding a silver bar. The copper door allows a second entrance into the Magi area (bypassing the dragon puzzle!) The crystal door has some mist and a coin on the ground.
You are in a small square room, the walls of which are completely blank.
There is a crystal door in the north wall.
>OPEN DOOR
The crystal door opens.
>N
The mist in this chamber is so thick it is difficult to see where you are.
>EXAMINE ALL
mist : The mist is very thick but you notice something glinting on the floor.
large coin : The large coin is big, about two inches in diameter, with the wording ‘One Centumbro, 376 FA’ written around its edge. On one side is the face of a peculiarly ugly man, with a self important air, and on the other some kind of tree in full blossom.
The oak door leads to a “Woodland” which is a brand new area which I’ll discuss in a moment. The ruby door goes to a hall where there are three holes which suggest three rods.
You are in a short north-south passage, which is bathed in a bright light from an unseen source. The south end is blanked off. In the west wall are three holes aligned almost vertically. The top hole is just over head height. The middle hole is round about shoulder height. The bottom hole is at about knee height.
I skimmed over it last time, so let me quote the note the man from the gold door dropped.
The folded note seems somewhat cryptic, something about inserting the rod’s in ROD order from the top down. It makes no mention of what rods, but presumably this is some sort of code for them, or where they should be placed.
Including things later in this post, I have an opal rod and a diamond rod. I assume somewhere there is a ruby rod, and ruby goes on top, followed by opal, followed by diamond (ROD). That leaves out the sapphire and emerald rods from earlier in the game, but both of those count as treasures so may end up serving solely as treasures.
Regarding those Woodlands:
You arrive where a pixie is waiting, and follows you around.
You are in an enchanted wood. There are well trodden paths to the northeast and south. There is a small Pixie dancing about your legs.
The text hints the pixie is waiting for you to give something, and it takes the whistle (which I never found useful anywhere, so good riddance I suppose).
>GIVE WHISTLE TO PIXIE
The pixie grabs tiny whistle and gaily scampers off playing merrily on the whistle.
The problem is: I’m not sure why this is useful. The pixie doesn’t cause issues with entering a treehouse, nabbing the opal rod within, and taking another path which leads back to the mirror. I assume this is one of those long-pass puzzles where something you do affects another part of the map entirely.
Speaking of long-pass puzzles, a little aside on something from last time: I had tied a weight to open up a dais floor, but couldn’t jump in the resulting pit. That turned out to lift the random granite block jammed in an arch back at the Magi area.
You are in a small dark room, above you can be seen the trap door you came through and a flight of rickety stairs leading up to it. There is an arch in the east wall leading in to a deeper darkness.
>E
You are at the bottom of a pit. You are standing on a portion of the dais. There are passages to the north and south.
>S
You are in a small grubby chamber which must lie below the huge cavern. The west wall had some writing upon it, unfortunately someone seems to have completely erased it. There is a diamond rod on the floor.
There’s diamond! So I just need to find a ruby (or rhodochrosite, or rubellite) rod in order to bust into the area back at the chain-of-doors.
The last major area I made progress since last time was at the ice area. I had found an ice key, but nowhere to put it. Rather sheepishly, I found it only two rooms away; I forget an EXAMINE ALL. D’oh!
Ice cliff
There is a small keyhole in the cliff face, funny place for a keyhole.
>PUT KEY IN KEYHOLE
Ok.
>TURN KEY
The key turns clockwise and as it completes half a revolution there is a click and a strange door opens in the cliff face. At the same time the key melts away to nothing, you must have been holding it too tight. From inside a voice says ‘Enter Oh Searcher of the Key’.
This leads to an “ice palace”:
The north side includes an “ice door” with a place to put a six-fingered hand.
You are in a Hall seemingly hewn from solid ice, a fantastic feat. At the north end a small passage way disappears into the wall. At the south end two flights of stairs lead up to the southeast and southwest corners. Beside the stairs leading up to the southwest there seems to be a sign buried in the ice. Between the two stairways there is a rounded ice door.
If you remember my item stash (and it is completely understandable if you don’t) I had a mummified hand from back in the magi area, and the game customizes the description if you’re holding the hand.
The imprint looks as though it was made by the mummified hand that you are carrying. It would probably fit exactly.
>PUT HAND IN IMPRINT
As you do this a harsh blue light shines momentarily all round the doors edge, the door then slides quietly open.
The door leads back to the Throne area; that is, this is a way to escape the ice zone without using the teleport box.
The mummified hand has a very different effect if you step southwest instead, to a Hall of Regeneration.
>SW
You are in a hall the walls of which are covered in murals. The theme of the murals seems to be that of severely wounded indeed fatally wounded people recovering in a miraculous manner. The murals also contain pictures of the corpses of many hideous beings, these seem to be an interlinked part of the story. There are doorways to the south, west and northeast.
>EXAMINE MURALS
The mummified hand you are holding gives a shiver. You become so mesmerised by this unexpected movement, that you stand still watching it. The hand grows a new body, it is huge. Standing before you a twenty foot four armed hirsute monster, it finds you a tasty snack. You realise, as you are being devoured, that this is one of the beings depicted in the murals. From your sitting position you can see through a glass screen into a room that looks strangely familiar. On either side of you are further skeletons, they have a somewhat glum look on their skulls just as you do. You are dead and have become yet another trophy for the long departed owners of this place.
I don’t know if this is useful yet or just something to be avoided. The hand does count as a treasure so I suspect it must be kept that way.
Heading a bit further south there are two “stasis rooms” where things slow down followed by a “magic circle”. Inside the circle is a “crystal key”.
You are standing in the centre of a large and imposing hall, exits can be seen on all four sides. The ceiling has a small dome in it which was not visible from the sides of the hall. The floor has an intricate mosaic design which makes up a magic circle. There is a small crystal key lying on the floor here.
>GET CRYSTAL KEY
Taken. As you lift the key an unseen panel lights up in the north wall. It says ‘UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY DETECTED GUARDS HAVE BEEN ALERTED’. As quickly as the sign appeared it disappears. You notice that two things have appeared to the east and west of you.
The “things” are an ice devil and an ice warrior.
Ice devil (gelugon) from the 1970s Monster Manual. Scan from my own copy.
They follow you around and you can use the rune sword to attempt to do battle. As far as I can tell it is guaranteed to be a losing battle if you fight both of them at once; maybe there’s a way to split them? Or melt something helpful? Or trap them at the bridge to nowhere? I don’t know yet.
>KILL WARRIOR WITH RUNE SWORD
A good blow but it is much too slow.
You manage to dodge the Ice devil’s thrust. The Ice warrior completely misses.
>KILL WARRIOR WITH RUNE SWORD
The flat of your sword hits the ice warrior on the side knocking him over, it quickly regains its feet.
The Ice devil strikes you across the back as you attempt to run away. Oh boy that last attack of the Ice warrior’s was really something, what coordination. Oh! by the way it killed you.
One last piece to mention: I said in the comments I hadn’t found a use for LOOK UNDER even though I knew it worked, and Roger Durrant hinted that it gets used early. Poking around I realized the wardrobe that contained the Fabergé egg could be looked under.
Under the large wardrobe you find a plastic bag.
Messing around more, I found WEAR BAG worked in an interesting way.
Have you never been told about suffocating while wearing one of these, if you don’t take it off you will suffocate.
This does not give protection against the spores in the closet (I tried) but it does let you enter the multiverse world with poison gas in the air. You have to be quick, though, due to bag suffocation.
>ENTER MIRROR
You are in a lovely piece of countryside, although the colours are all tinged with green and things seem distorted just like looking into a pool of water. Due to the distortion of your sense of perception you cannot make out any particular direction as being distinguishable from any other.
>OPEN SPELL BOOK
Opening the spell book reveals :- detect magic spell; dispel magic spell; detect illusion spell; detect evil spell.
>CAST DISPEL MAGIC
The illusion reluctantly fades and you find….. You are in a room which is distorted by the strange effect the cyanide in the air is having, the colours are all tinged with green as well. The room has no exits or, apparently, entrances and no use, seemingly. On one wall is a large steering wheel.
This doesn’t clear up the gas. It does let you turn the wheel (and the dispel magic spell doesn’t get burned). However, the wheel must be another long-pass effect, because I have no idea what turning it does (and even, given the possibility of multiple dispel magic castings, if it should be turned more than once).
To give a full list, I need to deal with (or ignore as a red herring):
The goo at the tree in the garden
The compost heap at the garden
The fish at the garden
The ice devil and warrior
The hand regeneration, assuming it doesn’t just get ignored
Figuring out what giving a whistle to a pixie does
Figuring out what turning the wheel does
Finding something useful at the just-mist destination of the mirror
Finding a ruby rod
Handling the deadly spores in the closet
Based on nothing more than vibes I think we’ve got three posts to go before the end, which means this game isn’t quite reaching Time Zone length but it does tangle on equal ground with such monsters as Hezarin and Avon.
Renga in Blue 
