Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and it turned out to be much more elaborate than I expected for a tiny-space computer. I also have more history to report; this continues directly from my last post.

Via Jeux & stratégie, August 1981.

First off, a little more history. Remember that Micro Video took over from Interact once they went under, right at the end of 1979. In Micro Video’s own newsletter, I found an article from Cori Walker from 1981 supposedly giving more of an inside story on the rise and fall of the original company Interact Electronics. I say “allegedly” because right away there’s some description of Lochner that seems a bit off (I would call him more a developer on the Dartmouth time-sharing system rather than one on BASIC, even though interfacing with BASIC was involved), and it also doesn’t match with the story as told by Barnich, the engineer at the company who developed the system. Walker specifically claims development started in 1976 only to finish in 1978. Barninch gives the development date starting at 1978. Both have “receipts”, Barnich in form of the actual master board design (with dated photograph) and Walker in the form of a prototype that landed with Micro Video.

You’ll notice no keyboard! According to Walker the system originally had 4K of ram and was meant to be a “console/computer” more along the lines of the Bally Astrocade.

Post-launch, Walker blames “marketing” and “quality control” as issues leading to the company’s downfall. They provided “virtually no support for the machines once sold”; essentially, they were a hardware company with very little experience with manufacturing or marketing (speaking of the CEO, this matches with Lochner’s past experience focused on services for corporate machines).

New products were, announced when they were in little more than the “idea” stage, months before they realistically could be delivered. A user newsletter was talked about, but never produced. Customer letters, inquiries, and phone calls went unanswered, promises were made that were not kept, and Interact came to be viewed as completely unresponsive to the users needs.

(Note she’s not blaming anything about inadequacy of the hardware — trying for too much capability at too low a cost, as I mentioned last time — but she’s also with the company still trying to sell it.)

I think the two stories (development as early as ’76, or only starting in ’78) can be reconciled, given Walker’s reference to new products talked up while in the “idea” phase. My guess is Interact was in some kind of development phase during at least ’77, but spinning their wheels with “idea” meetings trying to land a perfect cost-effective product, resulting in “prototype box” shown earlier. By ’78 they were needing to get something just out the door so landed an experienced engineer (Barnich) to get what was now a “computer” done fast, keeping the same external design.

Micro Video was originally founded in June 1979 looking for ways to use the Interact for promotional displays and businesses. Interact’s slow fall led to their essentially taking over mid-stream; Walker even mentions completing “the software Interact had left unfinished”.

Dave Ross, president of Micro Video (shown above), discusses the software process in the same newsletter as the history capsule.

Some programs, like EZEDIT, were started at Interact before it went out of business, and Micro Video finished them. Some, like Earth Outpost, are patterned after popular arcade games. In this case, it’s a space war type game. Some, like STAR TRACK or our new Troll Hole Adventure, were inspired by games popular on other, larger computer systems. The best source, however, is user requests. The MONITOR, for example, was developed because many people asked to have machine language access.

Regarding Troll Hole specifically: he later mentions programs “submitted by outside programmers must meet certain criteria” so not everything was internal, but his particular phrasing from the long quote above implies Troll Hole was made internally, and there’s something from the content of the game itself (which I’ll get to later) which implies the same. So I think “Long Playing Software” was an attempt at a “company sub-name” for a particular branch of game, leveraging the common ads for adventure games that tout how many hours they take to play. If so, they only used the name once, and when published Mysterious Mansion in 1982 (made by what seems to be the same programmer) it just is given as being by Micro Video.

Heading back to the content, I really did not have many rooms left to find, but I still found the game tough to crack, as the density of object use (and re-use, and the ability to use something the wrong way) was high. I also didn’t have a conception of just how much physical modeling the game was using.

Marked rooms are new.

This is only missing the maze, which I’ll show later but turns out to be a simple grid (and manages to bump up the room count for the ads).

I’ll describe puzzles in more or less the order I solved them, although this involves jumping around the map quite a bit. To start, I had some VITAMINS that were TOO DRY to eat, and while the jug of milk was described as TOO SOUR I still thought it had to apply somehow. I realized the game lets you simply empty the milk and re-fill it back at the pond with water, making the vitamins edible.

With the increased strength I was able to pick up the “stone chair” from the living room, freeing up the Persian rug to get moved over to the treasures. Also, as I suspected, it allowed for dropping the “fragile” treasure (the orb) without it breaking.

I also incidentally realized that the jug of water used for the vitamins had a second use and could be poured at the greenhouse, but I was told that it needed nutrients. I figured (at the time) I needed to wait for an object later.

I also managed to work out the both the ELF and the “singing sword” which was giving electric shocks. The ELF, for mysterious reasons, will be happy if (while holding the cereal, the TROLL CRUNCHIES) if you FEED ELF and drop an animal call. The WELCOME MAT that was hiding the key will COVER THE FLOOR if you drop it…

…and you are safely able to pull out the sword, turning it from a SINGING SWORD into a SILENT SWORD (but still at treasure).

The mat is not described as rubber, so this requires a leap of abductive reasoning both in terms of the composition of the mat and the mechanics behind the sword (not just “magic”).

Poking at the various obstacles left, I was stuck for a while. I managed to realize I could LOOK (CEREAL) BOX again in order to find some PIECES OF GLASS (trying to eat straight out of the box is the only way in the game I’ve found to die, so at least it gets hinted) and they are described as lenses.

I had a paper tube and had been itching to find somewhere to use my BUILD command, so I tried BUILD TELESCOPE and it somehow worked.

Unfortunately, that still didn’t get anywhere on the parts I was stuck: the cobra, the nutrients, the screwed-in cover, the orc, the gold nugget that doesn’t fit through the door. I had vague suspicion perhaps I was softlocked, and in fact I was: every single puzzle I listed was now unsolvable.

Thinking in these terms (what items did I have in the past where maybe I burned something I shouldn’t have?) I realized the screw might be the kind where a dime would work just as well as a screwdriver. The dime I had spent on the pay toilet (in order to get the paper tube) but what if I used it to UNSCREW first?

Indeed this works, and it reveals a button leading to a new room, a DEN.

Now it is safe to spend the dime.

The ANIMAL CALL I had from the ELF I had tried in every single room (BLOW CALL) with no luck, but since this was a new room I tried it here.

Taking this hint back over to the piano that I couldn’t open, I tried not PLAY PIANO but PLAY MISTY. It unlocked the piano, revealing a GOLDEN FLUTE.

Already suspecting I needed a flute for the cobra, I went and played the flute and found that the COBRA DANCES.

That isn’t helpful by itself, but the game is tricky with its item use again: if you take the SILVER BASKET from back at the greenhouse and drop it before playing, the cobra will crawl inside, snake-charmer style.

The cobra can then be toted over to the ORC and released, where it will chase the orc away, sort of a sideways variant of bird-vs-snake from Crowther/Woods.

This allows grabbing the crown for another treasure ticked off, plus access to the cave. The cave only leads to one place, though, a canyon view with a BILLBOARD. I had the telescope already (trying to use it everywhere to no effect) but I instantly knew here is where it applied.

Remember the fertilizer? Now is when that part stops our progress. Using the same logic as with the dime, I realized I had dumped the milk somewhere random, but maybe sour milk could potentially be helpful in gardening? (Can anyone confirm or deny this one? Sounds suspicious.)

This causes flowers to pop up that can be thrown at the canyon rim. (By the way, if you’re keeping track, yes, this involves a fair number of game-restarts. Fortunately the whole area is small.)

The bat that takes the flowers straightforwardly drops a PEARL, one of the treasures.

That’s still not everything yet! Back by the den there was a rope with a balloon, where I found by popping the balloon I could get the rope. Having gotten this far with no use for a rope (including at the canyon) I was starting to get suspicious, and keeping my eye on my verb list, tested out UNTIE ROPE (fortunately this one didn’t need a game restart because I was already in a restart after a restart and I hadn’t bothered to deal with the balloon yet).

The rubber glove let me pick up the frog, which I had noted long back was described as being too slippery, but I had no use for it. I ended up needing to refer to a hint left by Gus Brasil in the comments (thanks!) about how there’s a secret passage from the living room. That had to refer to the picture, but the picture was highly resistant to my efforts to MOVE PICTURE and PUSH PICTURE and so forth. The description is 2 EVIL EYES STARE BACK AT YOU and that message the mirror revealed from long back said PICK 2. I guess they’re supposed to go together, because you can PUSH or POKE the eyes specifically.

This is a second-level noun. I’ve referred to this concept before (see Inca Curse), but just to recap, this is a noun that’s mentioned inside the description of another noun. When game prepares ahead for this, it makes for richer interaction (or in the case of Earthquake San Francisco 1906, a shaggy dog joke). With Troll Hole this is the only place the trick occurs, but I’ll give it a little forgiveness in that

a.) nearly every item is important, so it’s curious for the picture not to be, meaning I had an eye on it still

b.) it has the PICK 2 hint

The SOMETHING that is THERE is a new passage leading to a new room: a spider with a golden web.

Being low on resources — just the frog really — it wasn’t hard to put the two together.

While the GOLDEN WEB counts as a treasure, taking it also opens another passage to a maze. Every room in the maze allows you to go N/S/E/W/U/D and there are 16 of them, but realizing the gimmick makes things go faster:

The edges of the grid wrap around; I have not marked up/down exits as they are more irregular, but the only one that is important is the one that escapes, going down to the POND. It is in a room with a NOTE.

The note also says YOU PROBABLY THOUGHT THIS WAS A MAP BUT IT ISN’T! It’s just a “thank you for playing” type note, but it solely gives credit to MICRO VIDEO. This suggests to me it was written for Micro Video and the LONG PLAYING SOFTWARE name that shows at the start was added as an afterthought meant for marketing.

The maze route is what’s needed to get out the gold nugget (otherwise there are no treasures / useful items). And that’s all ten!

This turned out to be far more satisfying than I expected. I wasn’t originally playing with “rich object properties” in mind due to the 8K memory space, but everything is modeled properly as opposed to being faked (unlike, ahem, certain recent games we’ve seen on more capable systems). The softlocks are irritating but they are also part of what makes the difficulty of the game work; having a DIME immediately where it gets used makes it quite likely a player will use it up quickly and not even think about it for the other obstacle (unscrewing a cover). In other words, the old-school design finesse at least has a rationale, and creates a puzzle that is hard to duplicate otherwise.

The ad in a French magazine at the top of this post starting selling the game in English before it was even translated; it did get a translation in 1982, which was notable just for the sheer scarcity of adventure games translated into French available. Tilt from January 1983 calls out the shortage and mentions La caverne des lutins in a multi-page spread about the format, but because it doesn’t have enough text adventures, it talks about things like Atari 2600 Adventure and the Intellivision game Swords and Serpents.

So this game ended up being wildly obscure in the United States (rare computer, even rarer cassette, only dumped quite recently and found thanks to Gus Brasil) but still ended up being seminal elsewhere due to the happenstance of Mr. Coll’s purchase of Interact’s design. (At the Computer Adventure Solution Archive, while La caverne des lutins has had an entry since 2011, as of this writing The Troll Hole Adventure isn’t mentioned at all.)

Unfortunately, this didn’t happen with Micro Video’s 1982 game (Mysterious Mansion). I don’t know the circumstances of why, but I think it may be even more obscure than Troll Hole; I will investigate when I return to the Interact soon.