Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

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”.

The earliest full ad anyone’s been able to find is from Computing Today in September.

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.

STRENGTH=20
CONSTITUTION=25
DEXTERITY=100%
DEFENCE=100%
WEALTH=50 coins
EXPERIENCE=0

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…

(E)vade
(F)orward
(B)ackward
(T)hrow
(S)tab
(H)it
(M)agic

…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.