Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

So far on All the Adventures we’ve seen a wide variety of “borrowings” between games both extreme and mild.

At the most egregious end are people who try to repackage someone else’s game as their own (Example 1, Example 2) but it doesn’t need to be that extreme; an author might start with someone else’s code — or at least initial layout — and remix it to be its own thing. In the case of Eldorado Gold, the remix may have been done directly on the original source code; in other cases like PLATO Adventure it is clear a total rewrite was needed. With derivatives from mainframe Adventure or Zork, the games can be clearly considered “tributes”, and even Woods himself made one of the “derivative” versions of Adventure. When the game being borrowed from is a less well-known commercial product, ethics get hazier.

Hitch-Hiker by Peter Smith, which we looked at recently, bizarrely did a partial rip-off of the Supersoft version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Some (but not all) items and puzzles were seeded from the game.

With that opening, perhaps you should sense danger. Perhaps.

Via World of Dragon.

The Romford, Essex mail order house later known as Software for All started as Syntax Software in 1981, selling ZX80/81 software and books.

Via Your Computer magazine, August 1981.

The J. Gibbons mentioned in the ad above is Jack Gibbons, and in an issue of Format Magazine he recollects his experiences with them. I’m going to quote a little longer than necessary because he gives a delightful capsule into the UK coding experience in the ZX80/81 period.

In the summer of 1980 I was attracted by this advertisement in one of the ‘dailies’ for a home computer costing less than £100 that was so powerful that it could run a power station. Well, I didn’t have a power station handy but I was suitably impressed — particularly as you had 14 days to get your money back if dissatisfied. So I thought that I could try and see if I was clever enough to be able to drive the thing, without risking a 100 notes (it was worth a lot more then!) …

Not to be put off by size as they say, I quickly powered up my new acquisition and started pressing a few keys to see what it does. I say ‘keys’ although I meant that I pressed pictures of keys on the circuit board. Having burnt the midnight oil for two weeks and managed to type in example programs and make them run, if not understand them, I was convinced I was making headway, the beast was to stay.

Gibbons gets the “16K ram pack” that expands the base unit from the miniscule 1K, noting “it was renowned for wobbling around the back of the ZX80 and now and then forgetting everything it was supposed to be storing”.

He realized, after balancing his checks (and noting how he “always makes mistakes with arithmetic”) that he wanted to write a Bank Account program, and after finishing tried to get it published.

I tried the computer groups and also a few software companies (there were only a few then). Eventually, by March 1981 I had a call from Syntax Software in Essex.

Syntax Software then went “silent” before finally throwing up the ad shown earlier, and this led to Gibbons eventually getting an invite from Mike Johnstone to the first of multiple legendary ZX Microfairs (September 1981).

Pictures of the second Microfair in winter 1982. Mike Johnston is the person in the foreground of the bottom right picture.

But back to Syntax Software! Their name change to Software for All happened a year later and they expanded their line to include BBC, Dragon, and Commodore.

That same year they absorbed Epsilon Software which had a BBC Micro line. They lasted well into the late 80s being renamed somewhere in the middle as Trybridge.

Source.

The first ad I’ve found for Danger Island is from a Your Computer dated January 1983; based on the at-least-one-month delay of print magazines, that places the game’s publication right at the end of 1982.

This game clearly takes elements from the 1981 game Pirate Island by Paul Shave in order to make a “new” Dragon 32 game. The Shave game was not on my radar originally as the premise here is simply to find a treasure chest and escape; Pirate Island has multiple treasures. Still, as soon as I took one step from the initial room, I had an uncanny feeling.

The well/ladder is meant to be a gag. “WHAT A WASTE OF A GOOD LADDER. THE WELL IS 500 FEET DEEP.”

Just south of the start.

The antidote being 2 gold coins in particular set off my memory. Here’s a shot from Pirate Island:

Just like Pirate Island, the natives throw you in a pot if you try to take the idol/statue, and just to the south there is a monolith with a magic word that helps you escape.

YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT THE MEMORIAL STONE. ENGRAVED ON THE BASE IS THE WORD ‘-SABU-‘ WHICH MEANS HELP IN THE NATIVE TONGUE.

The word in the original teleports you to the monolith (and can be used to escape from multiple situations); in Danger Island it can only be used at the pot scene, and it teleports you to the north part of the island in a Sandy Cove.

The Forest has some randomness to its exits so it isn’t fully mapped out.

There’s plenty of aspects that are different or missing, so it resembles Hitch-hiker in that style, but it is deeply odd the author felt obliged at all to do this kind of copying. Maybe they saw the Acorn Atom game and tried to recreate it on their own machine (since they didn’t have an Atom), and sometime later decided to sell it?

Moving on, in order to obtain the antidote, there are two gold coins laying about just to the west next to some quicksand (more on that shortly). Playing requires buying the antidote right away because you are constantly bitten by snakes while on the island. (As opposed to being hit by poison darts in the Shave game. One fortunate difference here is that there are unlimited applications of the antidote.)

Just past the quicksand is the treasure we need. You can cross right away as long as you don’t have any inventory. The treasure is too heavy to carry back so you need a different way across.

I like how we can see our main treasure objective almost immediately, even if we can’t take it away yet; that’s more of a modern design move.

Wandering around, it isn’t too hard to find: some cheese, a gold ring, an empty bottle, a knife, a box of matches, a lamp (in a forest), some oil (in a broken paraffin heater). The latter three can be combined together to make a light source.

I first used the light source to explore some caves to the south (again just like Pirate Island, but slightly different contents).

To the west of the second location above is “WHAT USED TO BE A PLACE OF WORSHIP” which has a plank. If you try to take the plank and get out, sometimes the thing making the noise reveals itself:

But only sometimes; once through I didn’t see it at all (bug?) If you do get confronted you need to give it the cheese (killing it is fatal because the monster screams and causes the cave to collapse).

THE MONSTER GOBBLES THE CHEESE AND GOES AWAY.

With the plank you can go back and PUT PLANK OVER QUICKSAND. By some miracle I figured this out without checking the source code, especially given a.) the parser is otherwise two-word and b.) just typing PUT PLANK merely gets the response YOU CAN’T. (This wouldn’t be the first parser to veer away from an apparent two-word parser, but still, guess-the-phrase is extraordinarily difficult.)

With the plank in place you can safely nab the TREASURE (call it TREASURE, not CHEST) although now there’s the matter of escape. Down at the beach there’s a boat just sitting there but some magic is keeping it from moving:

YOU CANNOT TAKE THE BOAT.IT IS HELD BY SOME MAGIC SPELL.

I tried some “logical” actions but had no luck (I don’t think the gold ring is used for anything):

There’s one other item back at the north of the island; a building has a “aerosol can” in a dark room (fortunately you can give the lamp a refill with the oil — another difference with Shave’s game).

THERE IS A LABLE ON THE CAN IT SAYS ‘SLEEP INDUCER’

This can be used to knock out the natives and take their golden statue. Assuming that breaks the magic, I made a beeline down to the beach but found the natives waiting.

So that solves the problem: GIVE STATUE will make it so you can GET BOAT and then LAUNCH BOAT and then (if you’re me) get horribly stuck.

Any subsequent attempt to enter the boat resulted in I CAN’T. I assume either this is a guess-the-phrase moment or a bug (would not be out of bounds, remember the non-appearing monster; also, there was a bug at the plank once where I couldn’t go west for no reason at all and had to restore a game). I went with the ultimate strategy:

That’s me manually setting the location variable to the last room of the game.

I’m going to count that as a win, although if someone wants to poke around the source and figure out what’s going on they are welcome to.

ADD: Thanks to Matt W. doing an astute analysis in the comments, we now know the missing command was GET IN. Everything works exactly as shown in my screenshots otherwise. Earlier in the game just the word IN worked to enter a building, but the game decided here to go for an extremely specific phrasing that reuses another standard verb (GET) for a different purpose.

While I’m not sure what Mr. Shave’s opinion would be, I wasn’t terribly grumpy about the re-purposing here; the puzzles ended up going in different directions, and it was especially different to have the sleep-can scene followed by returning the statue in order to break a spell. (The original involves distracting the natives with a clock from a crocodile. The statue is then one of the treasures for points. This version treats the natives a little less naively.)

What I find especially curious is the relation to Peter Smith’s Hitch-Hiker. It isn’t just that Hitch-Hiker’s also does re-purposing, but that the second 1982 game by Peter Smith was published by Software for All! This makes me wonder not only if the people involved were all part of the same friend group, but also if the game we’ll be playing next (Time Adventure) does the same schtick of adapting another game.