Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

This marks the fifth game I’ve played by Scott Morgan, who had all of his work published by American Software Design and Distribution (ASD&D) as run by Thomas Johnson. (Previously: 007: Aqua Base, Haunted House, Miner 49er, In Search of the Four Vedas.)

I haven’t unearthed much more on ASD&D than last time: they were short lived, mostly focused on Texas Instruments, and their downfall matched that of the TI-99/4A getting taken down by Commodore. Their game Entrapment was slated to be released by Texas Instruments themselves in July and even was shown off at the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show but it never made it out under that label, because Texas Instruments dropped support for their personal computer line first.

Source. At this same event Texas Instruments was threatening legal action against companies thinking of making cartridges for the TI-99/4A, truly putting a high note on their terrible year.

One other tidbit, though: ASD&D’s most successful game was Wizard’s Dominion, and that happened to be advertised for both the TI-99/4A and the Commodore 64. For a while it was thought the Commodore version may have never existed, until one was unearthed in Europe. The game somehow ended up with the Swedish reseller Computer Boss International.

Source.

This doesn’t have much to do with Fun House other than indicating that a random software house out of Cottage Grove, Minnesota (population in 1980, roughly 19,000) can still have some international reach. (Well, maybe a little bit of the “thought to be lost” part. I had the Fun House listed as lost until LanHawk found a copy in a file helpfully entitled SINGLEFILE.dsk.)

Via Pixelpedant.

Fun House has a perfectly normal opening where you start, with no context, in a pit with only chewing gum in your inventory. The pit also has a plastic bucket. When you climb out, there’s a clown there, and if you try to walk past the clown, it pushes you back into the pit. You need to find the shaver from the plastic bucket and shave the clown, whereupon it will become your friend.

No, really:

Past that is a slide with some matches to scoop up, with a room of mirrors on the bottom.

From here the game was highly resistant to essentially everything, so I thought it was time to check the manual. It gives a fairly normal list of sample verbs (UNLOCK, BREAK, KILL, PUSH, PULL, EAT, DIG, TIE) but also an explicit hint:

Scream and yell if you will,
when the mirrors make you nil.

SCREAM, then?

This opens the way to a carousel, a scene I don’t fully understand.

The carousel is first stopped; pushing a button gets a message about how IT TURNS, STOPS, AND TURNS AGAIN. Getting on the carousel (RIDE CAROUSEL, not GO CAROUSEL) gets a curious message:

IT TURNS, SHOVES YOU OFF, AND DISAPPEARS.

Leading to another ROOM with some MOVING STAIRS. Trying to climb the stairs gets the response that

YOU FALL TO THE LEFT, AND TO THE RIGHT, AND YOU DISCOVER THAT YOU CAN’T MAKE IT.

Typing LOOK UP shows “YOU SEE SOMETHING VERY USEFUL” and a rope hanging. While I’ve had this command occur enough times I will sometimes test it out of reflex, the reason this occurred to me here was the Scott Adams game Mystery Fun House, which has a similar situation; a merry-go-round has “hemp” falling on your head, and you can LOOK CEILING in order to see a rope. (There’s a moment you’ll see later also taken from Mystery Fun House, so it is clear Morgan had that game in mind.)

The rope doesn’t let you climb, so working my way through the logical choices I found SWING.

This leads to a new small area of three rooms.

At the landing dark room with some LICHEN you can take, there’s an exit leading up, but this is still the spinning stairs and it just knocks you off. My guess is that the path is one-way and not a puzzle you’re intended to solve, but the interesting aspect is once you knock your head, the border of the game goes permanently red.

To the east there’s a vat of water; to the west there’s a fire.

Getting through the fire is a matter of simply re-using the plastic bucket and splashing the fire with water. (Simple when finding the right parser combination. THROW WATER or EMPTY BUCKET or POUR BUCKET don’t work, you need to POUR WATER.)

Past the fire is a hedge maze.

The hedge maze has a stick you can pick up just out in the open, and a “green slime” blocking one of the exits. You can just go around a different way so I’m unclear if the green slime is meant to be a minor plot moment or some kind of puzzle.

The end of the maze has a “room” with a “closed sewer”, a “slot” and a closed door. The sewer has a card but it is out of reach.

This is the other Mystery Fun House moment. You have the gum from the start, and just obtained a stick. You can put the gum on the stick in order to extract the card (STICK GUM / TO STICK / TAKE CARD / WITH STICK — TAKE prompts you with what, which the game normally doesn’t do, so you just have to trust the command is overloaded with a special variant.) The card then goes in the slot, opening the way to a vat with acid.

I have yet to be able to do anything with the acid. FILL BUCKET just has the game respond “WHAT?” The game doesn’t even allow GO PIT:

YOU WANT TO LIVE!

I’ve gotten lucky so far, but the parser has been fairly hyper-specific so it’s going to be harder to run across a command if I’m not sure it’s the command I should be using in the first place.