Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

The center of gravity of Canada’s computing history has always been Ontario. A group at the University of Toronto in 1945 started a committee and took a tour of the United states in 1946, visiting essentially every major computer. Planning started in 1948 on what would be dubbed the UTEC, with a functioning version assembled in 1951. The full-scale version ended up not being built, because it turned out to cost essentially the same to buy a Ferranti Mark I from Britain, but the UTEC was still essentially Canada’s first general-purpose computer.

Source, via Government of Canada Publications.

IBM’s presence in Toronto dates all the way back to the 1920s, and hence when they started in electronic computing it became their major center of research.

1968 photo taken by George Dunbar of Leslie Mezei, showing computer art made at the University of Toronto on an IBM 7094. Source.

One of the (many) candidates for “world’s first personal computer” was the MCM/70, first shown in May 1973 at the Fifth International APL Users’ Conference in Toronto.

Via vintagecomputer.ca.

In 1969, a census of existing digital computers and process controllers found the majority (1045 out of 2037) being in Ontario. However, in second place there was Quebec, at 485.

Sperry Canada, for instance, started there in 1950 (the geographical positioning being somewhat motivated by military considerations, as Quebec had closer proximity to the by-plane Greenland route over to the USSR). Concerns with French-speaking separatists led the Canadian government to have an interest in developing the Quebec economy; thus while Circuit Design Corporation put a research group in Toronto, they put their manufacturing in Quebec City aided by funding from the Canadian government.

Our unity is not secure if people in some extensive regions have to put up with opportunities and standards well below those of other Canadians…

Jean Marchand, Canadian politician

It is still true an idle listing of Canadian computing accomplishments has the word “Ontario” appear a disproportionate number of times. While what has been argued to be the first videogame came out of Toronto (Bertie the Brain, 1950)…

Photo by Bernard Hoffman for LIFE Magazine.

…and while Peter Jennings (also Toronto) made what is arguably the first commercial Canadian game (MicroChess, which did well enough that it helped fund the making of VisiCalc) and the first Canadian game company we know of is not from Toronto but still Ontario (Speakeasy Software, 1978)…

By early 1978, we had four titles ready for the Apple II — “Bulls and Bears”, “Warlords”, “Microtrivia” and “Kidstuff”. Trying to fit them into 16k and make them worth buying was certainly a challenge. This was before floppy disks! The only means of reproduction was audio tape. I found a company in Ottawa that produced educational audio tapes for doctors and talked them into replicating our tapes. The only problem was that only 50% of them worked and we didn’t know which 50% they were! So our 8 and 10 year old kids would load them one at a time on our home machine and pick out the good ones. Talk about cheesy technology.

— Brian Beniger, who founded the company with his wife Toni

…Quebec did eventually have their own accomplishments in videogaming. For us, starting specifically with the company Logidisque, founded by Louis-Philippe Hébert.

Louis-Philippe Hébert was an author with a strong interest in computers and the intersection between the two; he did a thesis while at the University of the Montreal in the 60s entitled

Application de principes mathématiques à la lecture et l’écriture de textes

that is,

Application of Mathematical Principles to the Reading and Writing of Texts.

Hébert, reading his poetry in 2011. Source.

While writer in residence at the University of Ottawa from 1977-1978 he got a Apple II and learned to program, making his own word processor. He got to meet with Steve Wozniak himself a year later while visiting California, who asked:

How come a smart guy like you writes in French?

The same year he formed a group dedicated to computers, and two years after that he registered the trademark for Logidisque. They published their first games in 1982, and they appear to be the first original games from Quebec.

I should emphasize regarding the term original games. Hugo Labrande has identified companies that sold translations, most notably Computerre, some which came before Logidisque, so they’re not quite the first company from Quebec to sell games, just “original” games.

Translations of Sierra games from their Summer 1982 catalogue.

It makes sense given Louis-Philippe Hébert’s long interest in electronic text (and rugged continuing use of French despite ribbing by the Woz) that’d his company would release the first original French-Canadian adventure game, Arsène Larcin by Éric Primeau.

From boardgamegeek.

The author Primeau joins the ranks of many, many teenaged adventure authors: he was 17. A friend of his knew someone who worked in a company located close to Logidisque; both Primeau and his unnamed friend got invited by Hébert for a visit in May of 1982. While there Hébert showed off the trading simulation game Caraïbes; Primeau was invited to try making a port, which he finished in a month.

To follow up, Primeau pitched a text adventure game. He had seen Scott Adams on a friend’s TRS-80 (specifically, Mission Impossible) and was influenced to try his own game, which he worked on starting in June, finished in time to be published nearly the same time as Logidisque (and Quebec’s) first game, Têtards. As French games were just getting started it not only is Quebec’s first adventure but one of the first adventures worldwide to appear in French. It was sold as a “roman interactif”, or interactive novel, reflecting Hébert’s literary bent (this was before Infocom started using “interactive fiction”!)

From an interview with Primeau, via Québec science, 1984, April.

As the name suggests this is a spin-off of Arsène Lupin, the gentleman-burglar created by the French author Maurice Leblanc in the early 20th century. I’m not going to go into lore, as there doesn’t seem to be any specific references in this game; just as an aside, note that the original author had Lupin face off against an “unlicensed” version of Sherlock Holmes (Herlock Sholmes) and while most his thefts were of “realistic” artifacts some of his stories involved fantasy items like the Fountain of Youth.

You, as, Arsène Lupin Larcin, have arrived at the Hotel Majestyk, and your task is to find a secret computer.

Unlike Mad Martha where you picked a name to separate yourself from the avatar, here you are picking what name to sign in with, which would no doubt be a pseudonym. So this doesn’t quite remove the player from the avatar in the same way; a player can choose to still pretend they are Larcin but sign in with their real name.

You start in your room, 303.

“OBJETS DE VALEUR VISIBLES: RIEN DE PARTICULAR…” is simply “visible valuable objects: nothing special”. The two money values represent the amount in your pocket (starting at $0) and the bill to pay for the hotel room (at $300).

Inside 303 there is a “GARDE-ROBE SECRET” (secret wardrobe). Entering the wardrobe you can find a PASSE (pass-key).

Movement is incidentally quite irregular compared to a regular adventure game. While the above was the result of using ENTRER (enter) and getting out again is a matter of using SORTIR (leave) once you leave the hotel room there are no compass directions. You are instead able to consult a map and type the name of the place you want to go.

While I’ve seen modern games go this route and it isn’t that dissimilar from, say, the “big map” view of a Lucasarts-style game where you just click on your destination instead of type it…

Return to Monkey Island map, via Mobygames.

…what is quite irregular is that you also travel between floors this way. For example, you can go straight to the restaurant on the ground floor by typing RESTAURANT.

There’s otherwise not a lot of direction as to which rooms to start poking around in; the main catch is that this is an adventure-roguelike. The location of the computer is randomly generated each game, and the various characters move around in random ways. In the interview I linked earlier, even Primeau himself admitted he couldn’t always beat the game.

Même moi qui ai conçu ce jeu, je ne suis jamais assuré de trouver l’ordinateur: je sais comment gagner, mais je ne suis pas certain d’y parvenir.

Even I, the designer of the game, am never sure of finding the computer; I know how to win, but I’m never certain I’ll succeed.

So this might get a bit fussy! There does seem to be things resembling “puzzles” (I have, for example, found a magnet, although I’m not sure what it’s for) but this might possibly fall on the side of a strategy game. (Even given the Scott Adams inspiration, this is understandable, given the author’s previous immediate job was porting the strategy game Caraïbes. The irregular movement concept likely comes from there; it is a game set in the Caribbean where you type the word of the place you want to go when you are at a port, kind of like the later game Pirates!)

A random room I’ve broken into. I’m pretty sure the “television” and “magnet” are placed at random and would be elsewhere on a different playthrough.

This means the game might be absolutely horrible to beat; while there’s nothing as confusing as Madness and the Minotaur there could be a situation with a puzzle where the only reason you can’t solve it is that the random number generator failed to go your way! There is one advantage I do have: the author was nice enough to put full command lists.

Ignoring the “location movement verbs” which are really just nouns, the game has a parser which clips the first three letters of each word, getting:

VER (verrouiller = lock)
TIR (tirer = pull)
PLO (plongée = dive)
SOR (sortir = leave)
PRE (prendre = take)
DEP (deposer = drop)
DEV (déverrouiler = unlock)
ASS (asseoir = sit)
LEV (lever = stand)
ECO (écouter = listen)
VOL (voler = fly)
ENT (entrer = enter)
NAG (nager = swim)
FUM (fumer = smoke)
BOI (boire = drink)
JOU (jouer = play)

What’s FLY there for? Are we escaping by helicopter? And it looks like you can’t be a cool French gentleman-burglar without some kind of cigarette.

I’ll try a stab at visiting every room (using the power of saving my game to not waste time) and report in next time what encounters I have.

(Thanks to Ethan Johnson and QuarterPast for help scrounging images, and Hugo Labrande for doing a great deal of research on this topic before I arrived. I also found John Vardalas’s book The Computer Revolution in Canada quite helpful.)