I have finished the game.
Before I get into the details, a few corrections on the history of distribution of the game.
From The Paper, an Aresco Publication, February 1980.
There was briefly some “professional” distribution via Aresco. Based on the manual’s date (December 1979) it was simply distributed throughout 1980. They put in classified ads but not what one might call full professional advertising.
The “Ask Me About Kim-Venture” distribution happened after distribution had trailed off already at the end of summer, 1980, at the Personal Computing Show in Atlantic City. (Only the West Coast event gets described as a “faire” so I was getting the events confused.) Since Leedom himself is in the comments he can check me if I have this right now!
The Apple 1 debut at the Atlantic 1976 show. The man in the picture is a friend of Steve Jobs, Daniel Kottke. Source.
So last time I was stuck due to a dragon eating my bird, and none of my other objects seemingly getting any acknowledgement. The Original Adventure involved fisticuffs, where you ATTACK DRAGON and it asks you if you mean your bare hands and you say yes; this game had no equivalent (although I did test dropping all my items and applying Use, I mean Employ; there’s just no message that appears if you have no objects, though).
I finally peeked at the map which indicated the bird worked on the dragon after all. (??) Rather confused, I tried to drop the bird rather than employ it, and this time the bird scared the dragon off. I have no idea what the difference between the two is (does the game assume “employ” means I wanted to hurl it into the dragon’s mouth? I am failing to visualize what’s happening).
The remainder of the game was relatively straightforward, as I had already resolved the hard part (figuring out where the magic gets used so you can warp at the steps — you can’t bring one of the treasures up from the steps, so warping has to be used).
Mapping was the difficult part; as you can tell above, the directions start to twist more or less on every single step. Everything funnels down to a pair of three “pits” (north, east, south) and going down at the north and the east pit leads to a “hole” where the rope is needed to escape. I think the intent was to fool the player into not also testing going down at the south pit but that leads to an entirely new location, a blue den, and going down again leads to some pearls.
You still need a rope to get out, and it is definitely possible to get softlocked here (one of the ranks in the scoring system is “you got stuck”, accounting for this).
The other element is a Gully, where going west has the game prompt you how.
There’s no description but given there aren’t many objects to play with it isn’t tough to realize the so-far unused rod has to apply here.
This leads the way to some Gold, and just like original Adventure, you can’t get the Gold back up the steps. This is where the teleportation comes into play, and so you can drop the treasures off and win.
The game lets you try for a maximum-optimal time for higher score. This is far tighter than normal but keep in mind the context of this game (it’s already enormously tricky to get the game running in the first place) so I can see trying to squeeze out every ounce of potential interest.
The source code is extremely well-annotated if you’d like to see how the game works. It comes off as shockingly normal given the conditions.
By the way, there were no assemblers, at least I didn’t own an assembler back at this time. All of this was in machine language, and hand-assembled, and I created…I had messages in there…you know, on a 7-segment LED display, you can’t make a K or a W– there’s several letters that are just too complicated to put up there. I could make an S, I can make a lowercase N.
Just to reiterate, the calculator display wasn’t able to show a K or W letter, so the way Leedom worked around that is to simply avoid using words that had either letter. There could be a red room, or blue room, or purple room, but a white room or a black room simply weren’t possible with the technology.
Renga in Blue 
I think the December, ’79 dated manual was Leedom’s own, that he sold briefly himself in early 1980. The other manual, with the humorous introductory text, was the one Aresco came up, as they thought it would be more interesting to the general player. Mr. Leedom seems to state as much in the Richard Bannister Forums when he was first trying to get the game running again a few years ago, at least. As far as I can tell, Aresco only distributed the game during a brief window in the late Spring/Summer of 1980, before they started winding their whole operation down and he briefly took over distribution again himself, then moving on to the Apple II. I know I seem to be nitpicking the chronology excessively here, even by my usual tedious standards, but I think this peculiar sequence of events might help to explain how it fell into such obscurity for so long, despite being one of the more interesting artefacts of the whole early computer gaming era.
Sorry, that should be “was the one Aresco came up with”.
Nope, I was wrong. The December dated part actually has Aresco printed on it. So what’s confusing to me is why the initial write-up in Compute from earlier in the year only mentions it as a program being sold by Leedom himself, with the Aresco announcement/ad in Personal Computing and Micro only happening a few months later. Maybe he went to Aresco initially just to have them help him “professionalize” his instructions and print them up for him, and then after a few months of self-distribution they agreed to take it on themselves? Hopefully Mr. Leedom can clarify this himself. Sorry again for getting so in the weeds here, but I just find this one particularly interesting.
The thing about avoiding certain letters reminded me of… my own case (sorry) when writing Asalto y Castigo (assault and punishment), an adventure I some time ago wrote for the Sinclair Spectrum. The adenture is written in Spanish, but the Speccy 48k didn’t have accented vowels, so I resolved to avoid using any word with an accented vowel.
This fiction was written as a prequel of El Trono de Inglaterra, which would also serve as a prequel of the well-known story of Excalibur and King Arthur.
wow! I’ve certainly seen games where they just drop the accent, but I’ve never seen literally avoiding the word
(Also, I didn’t make it explicit, but he _did_ use the W once, except it was very confusing, with HoU. I admit it took me a while to realize that was being used as a W. I think Uhite would have looked too funny.)
It takes a little of literary gymnastics in Spanish, but it is feasible, fortunately.
I guess there are other languages in which you cannot live without accents (French?).
I’ve enjoyed lipograms imposed as a voluntary constraint by experimental writers (Oulipo’s A Void, Gadsby etc., notably Christian Bok’s Eunoia) but I’ve never understood them to be imposed by technical limitations before!
You can pretty much get away with ignoring most accents in French, but the final ‘é’ often used in past tense verbs can be a problem.
In the Scandinavian languages, you really need the extra vowels, but there’s an easy replacement system in Norwegian and Danish (ø=oe, å=aa, æ=ae). However, in Swedish we don’t like such nice and logical solutions, so you’d often see total chaos in old adventure games, with various combinations of slashes, brackets, pound symbols, etc. replacing the extra vowels.
Probably the most impressive thing I’ve seen along these lines is the Icelandic game Leitin. It’s for the 48k Spectrum, and somehow has the whole Icelandic alphabet in it!
Could’ve gone with USInG?
I notice there was an authorised 2K adaptation of the game, for the SYM-1, by Matt Ganis under the title of SYM-VENTURE. https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_synerteksyHYSISIssue16_14627183/
Wow, great find! I’d be very curious to know if Mr. Leedom remembers the details of this arrangement. This just ads to my personal interest in this game, because Lebanon, NJ where Ganis was located, was where my cousins lived in the 70s/80s, and I spent many happy times in my childhood there. It was also the general area portrayed in T.E.D. Klein’s cult-classic horror novel “The Ceremonies”, which I found quite hilarious at the time…
There were no “details of this arrangement” ever mentioned to me at all. Right now is when I am first hearing about it. Possibly ARESCO went out and found the SYM group and sold the game to them. Maybe something I signed when ARESCO agreed to distribute my game for me permitted them to re-market it. But if anyone made money on the SYM version, it wasn’t me.
Bob Leedom, creator of KIM-Venture
Uh oh, sorry to hear that! The odd thing is that Aresco seems to have completely disappeared after about early 1981, and this port was first mentioned in a Summer 1983 newsletter, so that’s quite a delay. Maybe, as you indicated, something had happened behind the scenes in the interim period. It would be interesting to see the manual they mention from the Ganis port, as one would presume that the code listing section at least couldn’t have just been a straight copy of the original.
Rob, it’s been a long time, but I remember frequent visits to a small computer store in Columbia MD (“Computer Crossroads”, maybe) run by a guy named Rick, I think. When I mentioned that I had written this game, KIM-Venture, but had no resources to mass-produce the cassettes or to create packaging, he turned me over to his wife, Terri, who was in some way connected to ARESCO (and she might even have *been* ARESCO all by herself, for all I know). She offered to take the game to market for me; I probably signed stuff. Some time later, I recall a mailing from Rick saying that Terri was losing her sight, and that Computer Crossroads and ARESCO were folding. Never heard from either of them again.
And from what I can see of the post about the SYM version, they’ve used my cave map and notations, plus the “Caves of Nirdarf” story that Terri/ARESCO wrote. Would love to see their version of my code!
I did some more digging around in the historical record based on the info you provided, and here’s what I came up with:
Aresco was run by Rick Simpson and Terry Laudereau, and seems to have started up some time in the first half of 1977 in Haddonfield, NJ, near Camden, mainly to sell KIM software. They soon moved down to the Philadelphia suburbs of Norristown and Audubon, PA, expanded their range to other systems and began publishing various system-specific newsletters. In mid 1979, they moved once again, this time to Columbia, MD and presumably began running their operation out of the computer store that you remember.
So, one one hand, you were talking to the right people for handling Kim software, as they were actually one of the most well-established companies that specialized in the system, but on the other hand, you were extremely unlucky in going to them right before they shut down their businesses, apparently due to health issues. In fact, the small “announcement” they did for Kim-venture in the July, 1980 issue of Creative Computing seems to be the last thing ever heard from them. The handful of later references were essentially posthumous.
Regarding the “official” port that you were never even informed of, I would speculate that they may have ended up returning to their original western NJ/eastern PA area after closing up shop in Columbia, as Ganis was located in Lebanon, and they had previously published a Life variant by a guy from Princeton, so they had a history of dealing with authors in that general area.
Just a small addendum here: It seems that Rick and Terry may have ultimately stayed in Maryland, at least for a while, as I found record of them getting married there in August, 1982. It does seem like she ultimately went blind, and they both left the computer industry behind. She had worked in software for Commodore around when the PET was being launched, and Rick had worked on KIM stuff at MOS. There apparently had been some efforts to track her down years ago by someone studying the history of the RCA Studio II (Aresco had developed some products for it and related systems), but there seemed to be no trace left of them in the area at that point. As a final piece of trivia, Aresco actually stood for R. S. Co., as in Rick Simpson.
(ears perk up)
Computer Crossroads occupied a spot in a commercial building which is now occupied by a bicycle shop, near a deli and one of like three halal markets inexplicably on the same road. My daughter takes classes at the drama school nearby.
Would that be on Red Branch Rd? Trying to remember just where it was…
Yeah. Red Branch Road is a loop off of MD-108, about a mile west of Howard High School. The current name of the business park is “Oak Run Business Center”. I think there was a Laser Tag place there until the pandemic.
Seems like the right area, but on Google Street View that building looks fairly new. In my memory, Computer Crossroads was more of a standalone place rather than a string of business addresses (with separate entrances) in one building.
Do you remember being in there? You could actually buy computer programs (before they were called “apps”) from a rack. And that was the first place I saw a demonstration of Visi-Calc, which by itself was responsible for many sales of–and arguably for the success of–the Apple II.
In the Atariage thread where the RCA Studio II researcher who was trying to track Terry down was posting, he mentioned finding the building where Aresco had been located, but by that time it had turned into some kind of lawn-care place, and nobody in the area had any idea who Rick and Terry were anymore. That was around 11 years ago, now. Maybe what he found was the real former site of the computer store?
I didn’t move to the area till much later, but the whole loop has always been a business park. The address I found had a suite number, which suggests a multi-tenant building, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the current building is not the same one as was there 40 years ago.
Jason, I am thoroughly entertained by your game-playing description.
SPOILERS: Just a note on dealing with the dragon: in the version that I remembered, dropping the bird caused the dragon to flee (as it does here), but “give bird to dragon” caused the dragon to eat the bird. That’s what I tried to reproduce. And, in KIM-Venture as in the original–the one I’d played, anyway–you couldn’t pick up the bird unless you were holding the cage and not holding the rod, because the rod frightened the bird, but I couldn’t spare the ‘message memory’ to explain that to the player. Rather than explain that something wasn’t being done correctly or permissably, the game falls back on asking, “HOW?” (OK, on ‘screen’ it looks like “HOU” because W’s are impossible…but “HOU” can kind of sound like “HOW”, can’t it?)
It’s quite satisfying to see that you didn’t just whip through the game and dismiss it as ‘too easy’. I’m glad there were enough puzzlers in there to challenge you, especially since this was my first and only attempt at this type of game. I had been blown away by the original Adventure, and when I suddenly had my own computer at home, the idea of a nano-version of the game began brewing. [BTW, It’s impossible for people today to imagine how crazy the phrase “computer at home” was at the time: incredibly wonderful to some of us, but ridiculously useless to most.]
For me to say I had not realized what coding tricks I might have to invent to squeeze Adventure into 1188 bytes is an understatement. And I didn’t have anybody to bounce ideas off of, so I was on my own to–as one example–come up with a way of putting lots of information on the “screen” without eating up memory that I also needed for the operation of the game itself. The KIM Alphabet from The First Book of KIM was a good start, but even that was too memory-hungry, so I made messages from strings of either 4- or 8-bit pointers to either frequently- or infrequently-used characters, respectively. I think (hope!) the convoluted method saved some memory in the long run. And looking at the code now, I find it hard to see how I interleaved the longer messages into memory. Good times!
I don’t have much to add but I did want to give my appreciated you stopped by!
regarding the Super Star Trek connection, the Space Battleship Yamato variant I mentioned in my previous post is a Star Trek-derived game, so they probably were saw your code! The neat thing about ASCII’s version is they also made essentially a custom sound chip setup to add to the TK-80
I don’t believe this game has much to do with Star Trek. It’s a kind of limited space battle simulator where you counter various incoming attacks with different weapons based on what the Yamato was supposed to have available. In fact, the original article (translated in the Cosmo DNA feature) even states:
“Until now, most of the so-called “Yamato games” have been rehashes of Star Trek games. There is even a Yamato game with Klingon in it. Wouldn’t Yamato‘s crew make a face and be blown away by a Wave-Motion Gun if they heard that(?!)”
The original was published in the July, 1978 issue for the PET. The TK-80 port with “one-chip synthesizer” addition was in the August issue (most Japanese computer magazines also featured extensive coverage of analog synths in the late 70s). A minor upgrade with the adition of barrier shields was published in the February, 1979 issue. The game’s author, Miki Matsukawa (deceased), who was still a student at the time, later went on to do system BIOS work on the PC-8001 and 8801. The game has been typed-in for use on emulators at some point, as long-time Japanese computer game historian Baseman has a few screenshots up on his site.
The introduction and spread of Star Trek and its variants in Japan at the time is a complex subject, but Mr. Leedom’s famous version first seems to have appeared there when Ahl’s “Basic Computer Games” was translated to Japanese and published by Ascii in 1979.
checked w Kevin Bunch and he reported Star Trek got to Japan in ’75, based on a 1984 article:
https://archive.org/details/oh_mz_issue_28_september_1984/page/n77/mode/2up?view=theater
>according to the OH! MZ article, Haruhisa Ishida brought Star Trek back with him from the US to the Tokyo University Computer Center. He had exposure both to the SPCWR version from 101 BASIC Computer Games’ first edition and the Palo Alto Tiny BASIC version, which was based off of Super Star Trek
you can see Bob Leedom in the flow chart!
now the Yamato I was confused because there’s actually two of them — the one from the screen shot, but also a Trek one mentioned in I/O
Okay, we’re going to get way into the weeds here, but it’s an interesting subject, so why not…
So, I’m familiar with that article (I used to own original copies of all the early Oh! MZ issues many years ago, before I had to downsize my magazine collection a bit), but it contains several discrepancies. I won’t get into every detail here, but the fact is that they mixed up some dates, messed up the flow-chart, etc. Ishida (who was a major figure in early Japanese computer history) seemed particularly interested in Tiny Basic at that time, and his Trek adaptation was first published, as part of a series of instructional journals (Bit) that he wrote a number of, in early 1977. The story of him first seeing Trek at Bell Labs in ’75 and then adapting it to one of the mainframes at the University of Tokyo in ’76 was mentioned by him in another volume of that series in early ’78, but in an article called “Solid State Star Trek” that he wrote in the 3/78 issue of Ascii, he specified that he only wrote it to demonstrate the performance of the University of Tokyo’s version of Tiny Basic. Li-Chin Wang’s Tiny Basic adaptation of Trek wasn’t published until the July, 1976 issue of PCC, so some of this just doesn’t add up. In any case, to the best of my knowledge, the first proven direct introduction of Leedom’s version to Japan was in Ascii’s Ahl book translation from ’79 (not ’78 as the article and other sources state), and adaptations clearly based on it started showing up there soon afterwards. A complex subject, as I said.
As I mentioned above, and was alluded to in the Ascii Yamato article itself, there were many Yamato-flavored Trek adaptations floating around back then, but most were homebrews advertised in the computer magazine classified sections once or twice, or sold out of computer shops on a strictly local basis, and are thus largely lost to history.
we love the weeds here
let me see if Kevin has any other updates
This reminded me… When I was on Baseman’s page, I followed a link to a Hitachi Basic Master L2 type-in database that I had never seen before. I combed through it, and came up with these very obscure adventures, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen mentioned elsewhere. They’re all from 1983 except Dracula, which is from ’84 and is an MSX port:
Tiny Adventure:
https://mb-6885jr.blog.ss-blog.jp/2019-01-24
Kidnapper’s House:
https://mb-6885jr.blog.ss-blog.jp/2018-06-10
New World:
https://mb-6885jr.blog.ss-blog.jp/2018-05-21
Dracula:https://mb-6885jr.blog.ss-blog.jp/2018-09-07
haven’t checked the others, but New World is here:
https://archive.org/details/micom-basic-magazine-issue-12-july-1983/Micom%20BASIC%20Magazine%20-%20Issue%2013%20-%20July%201983/page/n53/mode/2up?view=theater
Yeah, he lists the original sources of the type-ins on each page. I just meant that I had never seen these Basic Master games referenced in any other Japanese resource or database. Dracula was also in Micom Basic, but was actually an MSX port/adaptation from a slightly earlier tutorial/type-in book that Dempa Shinbunsha had published. The other two are from very obscure Basic Master-specific resources, I believe.
yeah, Basic Master in general seems to be fairly rare! there’s a spreadsheet list somewhere with every single game listed in Micom BASIC but I this is the first I’ve seen of that one Basic Master book
By the way, you should check out this article/interview if you haven’t seen it. It’s one of the best pieces of game/computer history research I’ve seen over the last few years, but it oddly doesn’t seem to have attracted much notice:
https://www.4gamer.net/games/999/G999905/20210106082/
You can see there how Hitachi systems and guys who worked with them (and then for the company itself) were involved in the earliest, obscure origins of Japanese computer and console gaming, leading directly to the development of the Basic Master itself, and thus the whole Japanese PC scene in general. Bonus points for mentions of other stuff we were just talking about here, like Bit journal and Bell Labs. It’s a brilliant piece, really.
That’s a pragmatic solution. Back in the day, when Speccy’s were started to be imported, there government issue a law bu which you had to sell computer with a complete Spanish keyboard (‘ñ’, ‘ “‘ and accents…). I suspect that the fear was that the Spanish language could be somehow demeaned before English. Maybe there is not a simple solution about accents, but for example the ‘ñ’ letter is just the historic contraction (long time ago) of double n: “nn”. Words with “”” are actually limited to the vowel ‘u’, when it goes before ‘e’ or ‘i’ and you need to pronounce it anyways: “pingüino” (penguin), so no adventures with penguins, but that’s all about that.
Yeah. Disgusting.
Sure! You can always create the UDG (User Defined Graphics) for the corresponding missing letters in ASCII, but probably the user can get confused about how to introduce some words with those extra characters, too.
For instance, a famous Spanish adventure based in the historic story “Alice in Wonderland”, with the same title: “Alicia en el país de las maravillas”, created the UDG for those special characters… and the user even had to type them! You have to put the keyboard in graph mode and type an ‘n’ to obtain ‘ñ’. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be understood. That’s a very simple way to add up frustration on the user.
That’s very interesting! I knew you could probably get them to display in-game, but not that there was a way to actually enter them in on the keyboard. I checked the instructions for Leitin, and they specify that the game doesn’t recognize any of the special Icelandic letters, so it must just ignore all the accents (there’s lots of them in Icelandic), and use the logical substitutions of : æ=ae, ö=oe, ð=d, þ=th. One other strange thing with that game – it has to load in four separate parts, and the instructions say that it has almost 300 rooms. That seems kind of insane for a 48k Spectrum game, especially considering that it has graphics!
Really fascinating piece of history, thank you! I had never thought about the “pre-modern computers” (is there a name for them?). I had however encountered one in my reading: Chris Crawford had first coded Tanktics on a KIM-1 – it explains a lot of design choice of course. His solution to the lack of screen was of course to make the game use a map and counter.
As far as gaming is concerned, Robert Leedom (commenter TechnoBob :) ) is probably most famous for Super Star Trek. it is, alas, his only Mobygames hit.
😊 Thanks for the SST mention! Didn’t expect it to pop up in this thread…
I recall
I recall that there were some hieroglyphs for each room. I decoded their meaning, but I don’t think I have it written down anywhere, but I do recall confirming their meaning with Leedom. Basically it was showed you possible exits from each room, which is helpful in a room or two where there are hidden exits.
Yeah, he explains the whole thing in his YT interview with Codemonkey. It was a pretty genius idea, I’d say, but the entire game was, really.
@Rob: this blog is pretty much nothing but the weeds; hadn’t you noticed? ;)