Daniel Kitchen published two adventure games in 1982 through Hayden Books. One of them, Crime Stopper (written with Barry Marx), I’ve already covered here. While I’ve discussed Hayden before, I haven’t really talked about Dan Kitchen himself. To do things properly I should discuss the whole trio of Kitchen brothers: Steve, Garry, and Dan. So before we start looking for caverns, let’s go back to the late 60s–
The Kitchen brothers lived in New Jersey with a father who loved electronics; enough supplies were lying around that Steve (the oldest) built a home-made computer from parts in the basement. Steve went on to work for Wickstead Design, an electronics design firm; Garry (the next oldest) followed. Garry had inclination more as an artist and
I had no engineering experience so I joined the company as low man on the totem pole, getting lunch for people, running errands and learning how to solder and build electronic prototypes.
He started attending college the same time with a major in art, but became engrossed enough in the electronics side he switched to electronics engineering in his sophomore year.
Wickstead as a company became interested in electronic games in 1977 due to the release of the mega-hit Mattel Football.
Wickstead bid on — and won — a project from Parker Brothers to develop the product Wildfire, an electronic pinball game. Wildfire was originally invented by Bob and Holly Doyle using a microcomputer but the Wickstead’s commission was to turn it into an inexpensive toy going for $7. While the Wickstead had software expertise they didn’t have hardware, so they hired a contractor for the code:
The engineers started working on the hardware while the software consultant (who had a full-time job) wrote code on paper by hand, dropping it off at our office in the evening. My task was to type his code into the microprocessor development system. As the deadline approached, we still did not have running software, though the contractor assured us that the program was almost complete. Finally, he came to our office one night announcing that he had the last hand-written sheets, which he gave them to me to type in the system. We programmed a chip with the program, plugged it into our circuit board and nothing happened. No lights, no sound, no flippers, no ball. He pronounced that he knew what was wrong (Eureka!), changed a few lines of code, and we tried again. Still nothing. This went on for hours and hours and then days and days and we began to wonder if this guy had any idea how to write software.
Garry ended up having to step in and learn how to code and Wildfire managed to be finished on schedule.
Dan followed his brothers to the company in 1979, and was also there while Garry designed his next product (Bank Shot), an electronic pool game which seemed like the next logical step after pinball.
Around this time the oldest brother (Steve) left for California, and Garry obtained an interest in the Atari 2600. He reverse-engineered the system, and using an Apple II, made the game Space Jockey as a test in 1980. (This game was eventually published in 1982, but that’s ahead of our story.)
A few months later, in the basement of Garry’s home, Dan and Garry founded a company: Imaginative Systems Software. They wanted to focus on the Apple II, but their first paying job (through Hayden) was a port of Reversal (an Othello clone) to the Atari 400. This led to a more lucrative contract after for six Apple II games, which ended up being Crystal Caverns, Crime Stopper, Laser Bounce, Bellhop, Shuttle Intercept and Kamikaze.
Dan had gotten an Apple II the same year he joined Wickstead (1979) and was able to help crank out the games in assembly language. He was a “big fan of Microsoft Adventure and all of Scott Adams’ games”, hence the text adventures. Crystal Caverns earned him $6000, and one of Garry’s friends (Barry Marx) came up with the concept and story for the follow-up game, Crime Stopper.
Crystal Caverns is more of a classical Crowther/Woods style romp. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; while the originality of Crime Stopper was refreshing, the complex series of events ended up breaking and not only was I unable to finish the game, the walkthrough I was using (via The Book of Adventure Games) only was able to trigger the ending on two out of six tries. A classical Treasure Hunt (find the valuable objects, drop them in the right room) is less likely to break.
CRYSTAL CAVERNS is an adventure game for the sleuth with an appetite for mystery, danger and buried treasure. Somewhere buried in a deserted old mansion lie treasures of priceless value. But to find them you must embark on a perilous journey riddled with pitfalls, dead ends, and deadly surprises.
In order to complete the adventure you must seek out the treasures hidden throughout the mansion and caverns below and stash them in just the right spot in the mansion.
While the Kitchen original was for Apple II a port was eventually made for Commodore 64. I am sticking with the original.
While the very original Apple II had only a very tiny amount of memory (4k) it tended to be expanded to 48k, that is, 3 times the capacity of a TRS-80. So while Dan Kitchen liked both Scott Adams and Adventure, the capabilities of the Apple meant he didn’t have to stick with super-minimalism, and in fact the start of the game has a bunch of rooms just for scenery which revels in long descriptions.
For example, heading straight north from the starting point leads to a vivid room description which could represent a hint of sorts but mostly is an opportunity to drop some long prose along the lines of the volcano room in Adventure.
It’s a nice contrast after playing a VIC-20 game! The starting outdoors map is the sort where the author is loathe to have some exits get blocked off (because why would they be blocked off outdoors?) but the general effect is a lot of confusing one-way exits:
I’m keeping my map with these in case the exits become important later (for optimizing moves, maybe) but here’s a simplified version:
The only important parts (so far) are a room with a “hard disk”, a parachute in a room with a message…
…and a path ending at an “odd shaped key”.
The stump in the screenshot looks like it might be important, but it has rebuffed my attempts to interact with it.
The key can then be taken to the front gate to unlock in, revealing the inner area by the mansion.
Most of this seems to be just meant to build atmosphere. In the environs you can scoop up a busted pair of pliers, as well as a can of oil and shovel from a shed.
The boarded up back door has a carving; I don’t know if it is intended to be busted through later (if so, probably from the other side).
The hint indicates you can knock at the front door.
From here the map gets fairly expansive so this is a good place to pause until I’ve got the lay of the land. Despite bog-standard gameplay I’m enjoying myself a little more than Crime Stoppers so far; I’m not being paranoid about a time limit or softlocking my game early and there’s no need to wait for a subway to pass. It’s less of a “regular story” but pure exploration still can hold my interest in games that put effort into their atmosphere.
Rabbit Software is another case in the UK of a computer shop having a game company as a spin-off. (Previously: Program Power, A & F.) In this case, the shop was Cream Computers from Harrow (part of London), which “started to sell games by mail order” in 1982 with VIC-20 product, having
…very basic packaging — cream colored paper with a rabbit stamped on it and hand written details.
The rabbit name and logo came from the company’s “mascot”, Roland.
Heather Lamont, company director, posing with Roland in Crash February 1984. (By this time they had started selling Spectrum software on top of Commodore.) The other founder (not pictured) was Alan Savage.
Their early software was all written in-house but they eventually took to publishing works sent by outside authors. In the article I’ve been referring to the software director (Terry Grant) refers to “several programs a week sent in”.
For today’s selection (The Colonel’s House) I’m fairly sure it was one of the out-of house games. An ad in the April 1982 issue of the bimonthly publication VIC Computing already mentions soliciting games from authors, and despite giving a “top 10” and list of new releases it doesn’t mention the existence of The Colonel’s House. The February ’84 Crash article claims the company as being “close to two years old” giving it a start month of roughly February 1982.
Thus, today’s author (Robert Davis) likely did not know the people of Rabbit Software personally. The game touts itself as being the first of the seven-part Knives of Eternity series. The follow-up, according to the game’s ending description, was supposed to be called Escape from Detra 5. It does not seem to exist.
This is not quite as super-minimal like some VIC-20 games but rather uses the 16K expansion, giving the author a “normal” memory size to work with. Still, I got the strong impression I was working with a “reduced” parser as I was playing along, and I suspect Davis had exposure to Bruce Hansen’s games which were super-minimal. Rabbit Software even republished Moon Base Alpha and Computer Adventure.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
The games above were officially from the company (Victory Software); there was allegedly some kerfuffle with faulty tapes and Alan Savage supposedly loaded a van with 4000 tapes and dumped them at Victory’s solicitor in London.
Enough stalling, let’s get on with the game! The lore has us working for FREEDOM INTERNATIONAL as Agent 371 where we need to retrieve the knife in the title from the house of an “old colonel” who as an “electronics expert”, where the house is fitted with “advanced safety equipment”. While the “year” is 1990 it is otherwise unclear what the story behind the knife is, and why there are seven special ones. Do they combine to form the Megaknife of Power, perhaps? Alas, we’ll never know.
I’ve been “normalizing” my VIC-20 screens but just this once, here’s what the original aspect ratio looks like. I find this incredibly hard to read and play with so my apologies if the giant wide text gives off any nostalgia.
You start outside the house with a hammer and ladder nearby. I find it interesting how FREEDOM INTERNATIONAL has decided to outfit the agent on supposedly a vital task with almost nothing.
The door is locked but there is no alarm that triggers if you BREAK WINDOW followed by GO WINDOW to get inside.
Each action in the game (including, it appears, invalid commands the parser doesn’t understand) eats up one minute of time, and the colonel arrives at 10:00 (giving a game over).
The house consists of two floors and is not large.
On the ground floor, right away you can access a wardrobe (with a “protective suit”) and a kitchen (with a “protective lense” and a locked cupboard). One door is closed off due to a card-reader, and another blinds you if you try to enter.
Back where the clock was there’s a “shelf” described as being high up. I admit it did not occur to me to think of a shelf as a location you can put your entire body into, but that’s the right action: GO SHELF (which only works if you’re holding the ladder).
If you examine the card, it says it has writing. If you read the writing, it informs you that you just wasted a minute.
With the card in hand you can swipe your way over to a living room that has a cassette player (which will be usable later) and a projector (which is not terribly useful). While holding the “lense” you can push a button on the projector to use it, but it just warns you about the perils of missing other games by Robert Davis.
Taking care of the blinding hall requires an item from upstairs, so let’s visit up there next:
There’s a book in a bedroom that states “Book 97 is a revealing book”, a room with strange sounds (LISTEN reveals a computer voice repeating TELL ME ACCESS), a hallway with fatal gamma radiation (which we’ll get by in a moment), and a bathroom with dark glasses (guess where they go!) and a medicine bottle which only has “medicine” in a exaggerated sense.
That’s one way to stop having to worry about diseases.
Before we go dark, let’s take out the gamma radiation puzzle. I originally had the protection suit (it gets used “passively”, there’s no WEAR command) but I was baffled at there being no effect. The issue is that while you can EXAMINE some things (like the card with the useless words) there are many items where EXAMINE just repeats the room description. This was irritating me enough it through me off my normal routine so it took me a while before I thought to use EXAMINE on the suit. There’s a dial that needs to be turned, and then the protection is active.
I don’t think that’s how this is supposed to work in real life, but we’ll see some more extreme science later so I guess it fits in with the setting.
Past the radiation room (a “science lab”) there’s a Room (just “Room”) with a china doll, and smashing the doll with the hammer reveals a key.
We’re still not done with the odd computer voice, but going back downstairs, we can use the key and the glasses. First, the key, applied to the locked cupboard in the kitchen:
Again, item use is essentially passive. You can only OPEN the cupboard and the key gets used along the way. Moments like these are what remind me of the Robinson games, that did that because they had to (they used a tiny unexpanded VIC-20) whereas The Colonel’s House required a 16K expansion meaning it ought to be a little more expansive.
Inside the cupboard is a cassette; playing it with the player reveals a voice repeating THIS IS THE COLONEL over and over. This will be useful shortly.
Donning the dark glasses (via doing absolutely nothing, just holding them implies you’re wearing them), it is now safe to enter the hall that causes blinding. To the west is a library with 100 convinently numbered books; taking number 97 reveals a lever, and pulling the lever reveals a secret room.
The secret room contains a message which has the word LOCARI on it (you have to take off, er, drop the glasses first, because it is otherwise too hard to read). If you go back up and say LOCARI at the computer voice room, you’ll be informed the safe combination is “39,4”.
Back to the blinding room, heading north requires getting past a voice recognition door; the tape recorder playing I AM THE COLONEL on loop is enough to get by and find a study with a piano and a time capsule. The piano is on wheels and can roll to reveal a safe.
The time capsule incidentally says RUB ME and if you do that before dealing with the safe, you lose the game.
While you warp back home — convenient this item’s here — the game then informs you that you should have gotten the knife first!
You need to TURN 39 followed by TURN 4 on the safe to bust it open, and get what appears to be a completely unremarkable knife with no special properties whatsoever. Now rubbing the time capsule wins the game.
Alas. I’m sure the pleasure dome would’ve been fun to visit.
The Colonel’s House wasn’t terrible to cope with — most of the difficulty was in making sure to EXAMINE absolutely everything and cope with a passive parser where items get used implicitly. (I neglected to mention another bizarre feature — no room descriptions are given on navigation. You have to LOOK in every new room.)
While this ended up with a C64 port (one that clearly is ported directly enough from the VIC-20 there are word wrap errors) I have found nothing else by this author. The name is unfortunately too common for me to gather any more information. Robert Davis might be this one in Your Sinclair selling his computer in December 1990 but that’s a stretch.
I do have a little more to say about Rabbit Software, but just a little more. While they did well for themselves in the cassette-king heyday despite odd bootleg Frogger (see below) and games like The Colonel’s House, starting 1984 with ~25 members of staff, by the end of the year they had fallen apart. Alan Savage (the co-founder) got into a car accident in May and committed suicide soon after. He had 49% of the company while Heather Lamont had 51%; Ms. Lamont “vowed” that the company “will carry on”; however, by August, Rabbit went into liquidation and was later revealed to have debts exceeding £220,000. The next year they were bought by Virgin Software, leaving two unfinished projects (Jolly Roger and The Pit) dead in progress.
Somehow I’m guessing this isn’t Konami or Sega approved art. Via The Big Gift Shop.
The main issue I ran across: what probably are serious bugs. Why “probably”: the nature of this game makes it hard to tell what is a bug or not. Let me explain in context–
Via World of Dragon.
–so I booted up difficulty 3, saved my game, and started by systematically annotating my map with the locations of enemies and items. Both can move around (the Jester, for instance, moves items) but not significantly. This let me decide on an action plan.
I tried some “clever” methods but in the end the easiest thing to do was to scrawl upon my existing map with Microsoft Paint.
I noticed, while I was going through the process above, that difficulty 3 had more traps to deal with. One room starts shrinking, one has poison darts…
…and the room that had a statue I previously thought might have some sort of secret, turned out to also be a trap; if you enter the room from below it attacks you and takes out a chunk of damage.
This turns out to be much more worrisome at difficulty 3 than 1, as the monsters … well, they don’t hit for more per hit, but they last for longer, meaning they have more time to get hits in. The overall effect of combat really is like a typing game and since you can do more damage when healthy, if you can very quickly type in many hits at the start you’ll be at an advantage.
Notice how I was in the middle of typing “BASH ORC” but got interrupted at “BA”. No, you can’t keep going and type “SH ORC”, you have to start over from the beginning. I got good at typing CYCLOPS fast.
The game features a REST mechanic, with the catch that monsters will wander while you are resting and might whale upon you if they come across you. If you go to the Sanctuary at the start, this normally isn’t a problem, with one exception: the Wizard can teleport in.
This means, theoretically, if you could kill the Wizard, you’d be safe the rest of the game. You might think that means the game has locked the means of killing the wizard behind a whole sequence of events. Certainly the unicorn hints are more lengthy to deal with this time:
(The same trick that works on Minotaur works here. When you find a unicorn, save, step east, go north X times, go west, and RUB HORN. You will get a hint. Repeat for X+1, you will get a different hint. Repeat for X+2 etc. until all hints are obtained.)
However, I realized the PISTOL and the BULLET that goes with it were pretty easy to get through the way my map was generated…
Bullet is the star on the left, pistol is the star on the right. This isn’t quite as straight a shot as it looks because the first one-way door requires having used the PLECTRUM on the ZITHER in order to open it, but it still isn’t hard to grab both items.
…so I decided to make a beeline for those items first, then try the pistol out on various enemies to see which ones I could insta-assassinate. The answer is none of them. I did between either 0 or 3 points of damage (out of 255).
The orc is the easiest enemy to fight in the game. Here I did 1 point of damage.
The fact that two items need to be united for all this to work makes the effect seem baffling and was one of the points that I suspect might be a bug. (Or maybe the pistol is only super-effective if you’re holding other item X at the same time?)
I decided to switch to the old reliable, the mace. That did work although it does somewhere 30 damage max (when you aren’t hurt) down to 10 (when you’re just a little hurt). So it requires chipping away at enemies, but all the enemies do roughly the same damage back no matter if they’re an orc or a dragon. Or a wizard.
With the wizard dead, things worked as I expected: going back to the Sanctuary and using REST let me wait out my health rising all the way back to 255 with no opposition. Based on the manual, there’s no particular limit to how often you can use REST (there’s items that protect you from enemy attack with a limit, but that’s not the same thing as just trying to use the action). The problem is, even though I could restore essentially an unlimited number of health points, I could only do it once; going back to the Sanctuary later and using REST again had my health go up 0. This feels more like a bug than intentional to me.
(Aside: going north from the Sanctuary on difficulty 3 works differently than on 1. On easy mode it teleports you back to the starting cabin; on difficulty 3 it teleports you to some random spot on the top floor. I found that the hedge maze area was not available in the route I had taken before, and the only way I could get in was via Sanctuary teleportation.)
I next tried making the JUG my initial priority. The JUG is on the list of items where you need other items first to do pickup (rope + lantern + feather); the items are in the open although it was a pain to wrangle all three and get to the right spot. Finally:
The jug has rum which heals you, but alas, it only works once; subsequent drinks are poison. Oh well.
Thinking some more, I decided to go for the DRAGONSWORD instead. Surely that’s a good weapon and will be more efficient than the mace?
tome + lantern + mask -> dragonsword
This is a more elaborate combination to get than the jug, because the mask is held by the cyclops. So I had to nab the mace, then club the cyclops, and then get the mask, tome and lantern together. Holding four inventory objects at the same time also requires some good health so I had to avail myself of the options I had (teleports still do healing, so I used one of those, plus I got zapped to the hedge maze once with a food ration and I used that). Finally:
I was excited to see at least the dragon fall before me in a flurry of blows, but no: the sword does zero damage, no matter what enemy I used it on or attack verb I tried.
Surely this is a bug?
Hence, that complicated sequence was for nothing: the best thing to do was to grab the mace which was already out in the open and use that for braining services instead. I suspect something went awry with the game’s tables.
I tried fiddling with the keys in lots of places, but never got them to do anything, sorry. I also found one of the unicorn’s hints told me objects I needed to pick up the Cyclops’s eye (which it drops upon dying) but I was able to pick it up just fine without any extra help.
I never even saw the dust.
If I had faith the game was behaving like it was supposed to I might try a little bit longer, but no, this is a good stopping point. I think I’ve extracted most of the “wisdom” anyway, so let me segue into a discussion of the adventure-roguelike.
It has been tried quite a few times now, and never with great success. In historical terms, I think the main issue was (unlike Adventure itself, or RPGs glomming onto Wizardry/Ultima) there wasn’t a good model to copy. I don’t think any of the authors even heard of each other, so they were all re-inventing their own personal wheels with their strengths and weaknesses. Mines to kick things off had very tight logic in terms of object and puzzle placement, but given that was the only real element to the game it became mechanical as a story. Lugi seemed promising, but puzzle solving was hard to do systematically. Minotaur did a good job making the map seem varied even when it was fixed but had to go a route frustrating design to even work (when Keys of the Wizard tried to tone down the frustrating design — most especially by ditching the magic system — it created a gaping hole where gameplay was supposed to go).
The Queen of Phobos got the closest I’ve seen to what might be the “ideal”, except it had too much fixed to really count as a full adventure-roguelike. Still:
a.) the game has four thieves you have to deal with
b.) each thief has a weakness that can be used to defeat it (like beer for one)
c.) alternately, there’s a grenade you can throw to take down any thief…
d.) …or even better, if two thieves are in the same room, you can take down two at the same time.
e.) If all else fails, you can cross your fingers and try your best to evade them.
I don’t think the key here is just multiple options, but multiple options which have different natures than just “solving the puzzle”. The beer option works well as long as you give it to the right enemy…
THE LOOTER IS HIGHLY INSULTED AND KILLS YOU. THEY MUST NOT DRINK BEER WHERE HE COMES FROM.
…but because the grenade can hit two enemies at once, it isn’t precisely symmetrical to using the beer (compare with solving a puzzle vs. using a wish in Wishbringer). Evading also results in a much different gameplay effect than either of the other two options.
So I’ll say a good adventure-roguelike will offer multiple solutions to puzzles but do it in such a way that the ramifications of how the solve is enacted results in different world-states. One solution to a problem might involve explosives but cause damage elsewhere (and a brand-new problem) while a subtler approach might avoid structural damage but corrupt the player’s mind with dark power which comes into play later. With enough “ramification effects” two playthroughs would end up being very different; the player themselves would be used as a source of chaos. While this isn’t the only thing needed to make such a game work, I’ve never seen it used systematically in combination with full randomization and I suspect it might make the genre a little more plausible.
I think I’ve squeezed most of the juice out of Easy difficulty level, even though I haven’t finished; I’m going to try upping to Hard and make at least one more post.
I did manage to fix the main thing that was bothering me, the empty gap on the top level map. I’ll show that off first:
There was no puzzle involved: in the room leading to that area, I simply missed an exit. The bizarre constantly-changing exit descriptions really do make it hard to keep track. The main feature to the area is a hedge maze, which is “classical” Adventure-style; that is, it is the kind of maze where I needed to drop items to map it out and a node-based representation (as above). The only extra twist is that upon going through the maze’s exit, sometimes it teleports the player back into the maze; this is just like the maze area on the middle floor.
The maze leads to three rooms representing a library, and a one-way exit back to the regular portion of the map I was at before.
I have not caused anything special to happen here. It may be just decoration.
There was one other a gap, a single-room missing chunk on the bottom floor…
…but I think I have that one accounted for as well. The top and middle floors are now all filled, and the Sanctuary — the room that you go up from the top floor to in order to drop treasures — needs to be placed somewhere amongst the three floors according to the game’s logic. So I’m fairly confident the Sanctuary is filling that gap (meaning I can stop trying to dig down, hit the adjacent walls with a mattock, etc.)
Just like Minotaur, if you’re holding too many items you can’t go up, and the game communicates this by just repeating the room description.
Other than that, the game has been mostly tedious. The problem is that most of the mechanics are ripped out. Getting hints from the unicorn, I found
you need a ROPE to get a SCROLL
you need a FOOD to get a MACHETE
you need a TOME to get the DRAGONSWORD
you need FOOD to get the DEATHRING
and I even got a screenshot of both the hint and its ramification right next to each other, by luck:
However, on Easy none of those items seem to be important. You do not need the DRAGONSWORD to kill the DRAGON. In fact, the MACE (one of the first weapons I found, just out in the open) kills everything including both the dragon and wizard in three hits.
No special item from the Wizard, the map sometimes is out on the open on the top floor.
The only enemy I left standing was the Jester, who appears, laughs a bit, and disappears before I can finish typing BASH JESTER. It sometimes randomly picks up items and moves them elsewhere but doesn’t attack. I can say I reached the same state I “won” Minotaur at last time (killing all the imminent threats) so let’s see what Hard has to offer.
The gaps in Easy really did undercut the game mechanics significantly; the whole idea of chains of objects needed from Minotaur is gone. As far as I can tell there are no magic spells either like in Minotaur (even on Hard!) It may be just the author decided the original game was too fiddly (which is, to be honest, fair) but the fiddly parts are what made the game work.
Even if I don’t have any significant difference playing on Hard (just making something up: now instead of 1 teleport spot there are 3 of them) I’ll spend one more post on Keys as I want to do wrap-up on the adventure-roguelike concept as a whole. This represents more or less the last game in the category from 1982 (barring a certain famous game from Australia, but it gets its own long discussion) and my impression is the genre starts to peter out starting in 1983. (Not completely! But enthusiasm for games like Madness and the Minotaur starts to wane.) There’s been some recent interest trying to use “AI” to generate maps but people attempting to do so run into the same problems that people in 1982 were running into, so I think it’s a useful discussion both for historical study and modern design.
L. Curtis Boyle, Rob, and Strident all helped with finding an earlier ad for the game than in my first post. From 80 Micro, May 1982.
It looks like the manual is nearly identical, except for one important difference: it lists specifically what attack verbs are:
SHOOT, STAB, HACK, BASH
The idea, again, is that you READY the weapon in question (you cannot have inventory otherwise, so any items are dropped if you ready something) and then use the appropriate verb. It does seem like some weapons are more appropriate for particular creatures than others.
My first real combat was unintentional. I had the game running in the background as I was checking the map and manual over and when I came back the wizard had arrived and done me in (this is at the very start of the game, so it appears the wizard can go everywhere except maybe the Sanctuary).
My second combat wasn’t a real one, because I ran across the dragon all I had was a dagger (which did nothing). I’ll show off the maps later; the dragon lair is quite early in rather than buried, but it can also be fairly easily avoided.
A quick extra comment on the text above: I was trying to see if ATTACK DRAGON had any effect (it doesn’t, but I didn’t have the list of four attacks from the earlier manual so I didn’t know that). I started typing the letters “AT” and was interrupted by the dragon. I’ve had cases where I’ve had a command interrupted where I just had to re-type it in, which means you’re in a literal typing match versus the computer.
Fortunately, at difficulty level 1, monsters really don’t hurt that much (unless you leave the game idling for an hour so the wizard can whomp you in the starting room). Here I am with a MACE using the BASH verb on a cyclops who barely gave me a scratch:
COND (condition) went from 255 to 239. The cyclops also left a treasure, the EYE OF THE CYCLOPS.
Later I bashed an orc which did a little more damage, but nothing to worry terribly about:
The main worry is while exploring, you sometimes meet an enemy before you are ready (given the inventory limit of the game is low just like Minotaur, I often didn’t have a weapon at hand), so need to make a prudent exit. However, it is possible to just zip by. I assume at difficulty level 3 this will all be much more of a hassle.
Notice my casual stroll by the wizard.
With the combat out of the way for now, let’s go over the map. I think I have nearly all of it, because multiple places tout the game as having “over 200” rooms and I’m at 197. This is not as large as Madness and the Minotaur; assuming I’m not missing something major, there’s only three floors, and each floor is eight by eight.
To make it easier to visualize, I’ve rendered it like an RPG map. It is no doubt incomplete (see the big gap on the top floor, for instance) and I don’t expect I’m 100% accurate (especially on one-way door locations, it was easy to walk through a corridor and miss the fact the way back was closed off).
Top floor:
S is the starting point, and the “ridges” are places you can jump over. The stair in the northwest corner also goes up to the Sanctuary where the treasures are stored.
Middle floor:
The arrows represent “landing points” for stairs which are one-way. The upper right 4×4 portion is a “maze” with a randomized stair, where the stair has a chance of sending the player back in the maze instead of going up.
Bottom floor:
The “dead end” leads to a Temple of Apollo where going south leads to a room on the second floor.
Just to illustrate the 3D-ness of the game, here’s a sample path from the start all the way to the northeast corner of the top floor (where there is an EMPTY CAVE):
The red side path leads to the dragon’s lair.
Along the way I had to jump a chasm…
…and solve a minor puzzle where a zither in a room could be played with a PLECTRUM (the use of this is given by a hint in both versions of the manual).
The route as shown otherwise relatively straightforward on the save file I was using, but I do again want to emphasize I’m at a lower difficulty and more things are supposed to potentially happen, and even at level 1 random traps can pop up. On one of my runs, a particular spot on the middle floor had a teleport trap which I was never able to disarm:
There are multiple places with boxes that suggest some kind of treasure, but I have yet to be able to open one. I might just not be holding the right key in the right place.
The spot I find most intriguing is at the SE corner of the top floor. To get there you need to jump over a chasm where it is possible to die if you are holding too much:
I don’t know what the limit is. This is being done at full health, so that isn’t an issue.
Here’s the actual room in the southeast corner:
The wood door leads “off the map” but could easily be a teleport, maybe to the empty section on level 1. However, I haven’t been able to get in the door; I assume another key is involved? Or possibly, there’s an arbitrary use of a magic item (which would be hard to test, given the chasm prevents carrying too much).
There are many other rooms which could potentially have something going on, but it’s not obvious what item I’m supposed to be using or magic I’m supposed to cast. There’s FAIRY DUST, for instance, and the verb SPRINKLE, but where should it go? Does it even get used at difficulty level 1? I also tried checking carefully every room underneath the gap in level 1 just in case there was something special, and this statue at a dead end looks suggestive…
…but given many of the rooms are just described for flavor, the statue may mean nothing at all.
This trumpet can be played, but I haven’t found anywhere where it has an effect.
To summarize, the various mysteries are
The large gap on the map of the top floor and the single room missing on the bottom floor
The reference to a “HIDDEN TEMPLE” mentioned on the OLD MAP
The contents of any of the locked boxes and how to open them
The wooden door past the deadly chasm
Plus, of course, any “ordinary” locations might randomly hold secrets.
Is there a way to read the carvings, maybe?
I think I’m ready to do a “fixed” run where I’ll save my game and notate where all the objects are (staying with difficulty 1 for now). I’ll likely need to abuse the unicorn RNG just like Madness and the Minotaur (assuming that trick still even works!) Also (again like Minotaur) I’ll need to take many trips to get objects to the right places as the inventory limit is tight. Unlike that game you don’t have to deal with a constant state of decay, no matter which difficulty level you play at. Your condition only goes down upon being hit by monsters; on difficulty 3 the monsters start to hit faster.
Our journey through adventures with significant randomization, or as I’ve termed them, adventure-roguelikes, has been seriously bumpy.
To be clear, not every randomization is “significant”; random wanderings of the dwarves and pirates in Adventure don’t affect the underlying gameplay at a fundamental level, and it is still possible to play with a traditional walkthrough. Mines, on the other hand, has the map and puzzle placement generated anew for each game, and The 6 Keys of Tangrin had a generator so out-of-control it was possible to land in a map consisting of two rooms.
Lugi is maybe the best representative for one of these games that includes map-randomization. That game also hit what I think is the big disjoint that makes RPG-roguelikes work where adventure-roguelikes struggle; RPGs tend to have multiple routes to accomplishing things, while adventures often have specific solutions in mind. It means in an adventure while puzzle X might require item A, you might just never find item A and be stuck; while futile searching for a desired item can happen in Nethack, usually there’s some kind of substitute strategy to muddle through an obstacle (if nothing else, you can hope to luck out).
Madness and the Minotaur from Spectral Associates uses the strategy of not randomizing the basic elements of the map…
It always has this 3d layout, where the grey cubes represent the maze.
…but rather making it so the monster-and-object-and-trap placement cause sufficient issues to feel like there is a random “overlay”. This is a decent strategy for an adventure, as you’re essentially playing two games at once: the specific game you’ve rolled up, and the meta-game of elements that will stay consistent between attempts. This makes every attempt feel like “progress”. Mapping in a game like The 6 Keys of Tangrin always felt particularly fruitless and robotic, far more than the random dungeon of an RPG (which you generally don’t have to put in work in map creation); by having a consistent map yet random elements this issue gets avoided.
Tom [Rosenbaum] loved to play adventure games but was disappointed in the computer adventure games that were out there because they had no replay ability. Once you solved them, playing again was exactly the same. Tom also liked board games like Civilization, and decided that a computer game with the randomness and unpredictability of games like this would be something he would enjoy playing over and over.
The first program I wrote for Spectral was Keys of the Wizard. I use the term “wrote” very loosely, because the underlying code was from Madness and the Minotaur and most of the “writing” I did was in the form of map changes, dictionary changes and room description changes. There were a few code changes and additions that changed the way battling creatures worked, and that gave a few of the creatures the ability to “catch your scent” and follow you, but it was mostly Madness code.
The earliest ad I’ve seen for the game is from an August 1982 issue of The Rainbow. I’ve never seen a copy of that ’82 version. What I have seen is the version printed by Microdeal from the UK starting in 1984. They made both a Tandy Color Computer version as well as one for the Dragon (the clone-computer from Wales). I’ll be playing the version for Dragon.
Via World of Dragon.
Despite Mr. Gabbard claiming there wasn’t much change with Minotaur, there’s one significant one off the start: this game has difficulty levels.
1 is for the “novice player” where “only a few treasures are hidden, the creatures are easy to defeat and only a few special tricks are active”. Difficulty 3 has “all the treasures” hidden with “very dangerous” creatures and “all the special tricks and traps are active”. I’m starting with difficulty 1 (as recommended by the instructions) and then I’ll ramp up to 3 later to see what changes.
The reference to hidden treasures is ominous. I remember this being one of the fiddliest parts of Minotaur, with acts as random as dropping a lantern in a particular place (which would change during the game) revealing a treasure. I am hoping this isn’t going to devolve into the sort of thing where I try every plausible action in every room just because there’s no hints where an event might happen.
Here’s two renditions of the opening room (level 1):
The room description is consistent in both cases (again, this is a fixed map). The direction descriptions randomize, and they randomize on the spot; if you look at the room again one time you may see THERE IS A TRAIL TO THE SOUTH and another time it may be A DIRT TRAIL WINDS SOUTH and on yet another it may be A TWISTING PATH LEADS SOUTH. The room description repeats if you walk in a wall but it repeats with the exit-description change listed above, so traversing the game can feel a touch surreal.
In the first variation there was a pool of water but no objects; in the second there were two treasures here right off the start (bag of pearls, small silver spoon). The treasures don’t go at the start but rather a location called the Sanctuary so it doesn’t give starting points just for lucky RNG. The goal of the game is to rescue 32 treasures and bring them to the Sanctuary (I don’t know if the game gives points for killing creatures, or if their lack of hitting the player is a reward unto itself).
The CYC-TRL-BAT-etc. along the top with 255 next to each represent the creatures of the game. It gives consistently at all times what their condition is and if it reaches 0 that creature is dead. The full list (from the manual) is
CYCLOPS, ORC, DRAGON, BAT, TROLL, WIZARD, JESTER, UNICORN
The ORC and DRAGON follow the player (see the “catch your scent” mechanic the author mentioned), the jester is a “trickster” (stealing items, maybe?) and the unicorn will give hints if you RUB HORN; I suppose the unicorn is this game’s oracle. (In Madness and the Minotaur, the way I finally started making progress was manipulating the oracle’s RNG to cycle through every possible hint.)
While I’m quoting manual things I should mention the weapons list…
QUIET pauses the game (this is in real time, so if you step away from the computer you might have a monster wander in and whomp you). UNCLE quits and allows a restart; READY is used to wield a weapon.
REST is a special mechanic for recovering strength, and it causes the monsters to “move 60 times their normal speed and recuperate at 12 times that of normal”. The “tome”, “necklace”, and “medallion” are magic items that can help wake you if a monster walks in. Of the three items one is chosen at random at the start to appear “and will be used during the entire adventure.”
I’d give the lore, too, but there doesn’t appear to be any; there’s a wizard, you need to get treasure, now go forth. Minotaur had a little lore so that makes one difference between the games, the other one being a de-emphasis on magic. There was a list of spells with lots of various effects in the original manual that don’t show up here; I don’t know if that means any magic is more item-oriented here or the manual is just being cryptic intentionally.
The game is in the same rectilinear format as before; here’s the map of the first floor without taking any down-exits:
I’m dutifully marking down the room names though it’s hard to tell how useful they’ll be with this sort of game. Can the “broken chariot” mention in the unicorn screenshot earlier be used, somehow? (If so, based on Minotaur, it’ll be an indication some random object gets used there.) At the very least the Wizard’s Hidden Temple seems like it must be significant because of a “golden box”:
The game says I can’t when trying to open the box. It might need the right key (I’ve found a DIAMONDKEY on one run but that wasn’t it) or maybe it only responds to the right sort of magic.
The upper left corner of the map lets you go up as well as down. Going up leads to the “sanctuary” which is where the treasures go; heading north from the sanctuary loops the player back to the cottage at the start.
So far on the first floor I’ve only met the jester (who just appeared and disappeared) and the unicorn, whose clues follow roughly the same format as Minotaur (“to get X you need Y”). I assume the danger starts when I go diving down, although in one case the diving was unintentional:
Even on difficulty level 1 this has traps! The triggers were rather complicated in Minotaur so I expect the same here.
An old map with a hint. I haven’t found it twice so I don’t know yet if the hint changes.
Next time, I’ll report in from level 2 and beyond. Based on the gaps I’m already seeing I expect once again I’m going to have to think of the overall geography in three dimensions.
Renga in Blue 