Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Aardvark has been with us for a while; they started cranking out games in 1980 for the Ohio Scientific line of computers, with ports to the others made fairly straightforward by every game being in basic. The OSI computer was basic enough that there was limited memory capacity and so the parser system they used only went up to two letters each word. That is,

KILL DRAGON

and

KICK DRAGON

and

KISS DRAGON

and

KICKBOX DRIVESHAFT

are all interpreted as the exact same command, because the command is read by the computer as KI DR. Whether they really needed to do this is another matter, given the existence of games like Troll Hole Adventure with even more stringent requirements.

Unfortunately, even given we are nearly at the end of the line, there still hasn’t been advancement; today’s game even keeps the “feature” of sometimes giving a blank prompt on a action (successful or not).

Haunted House is by Bob Anderson, who we last saw with Derelict (good ideas, hampered by the parser) and Earthquake (really good ideas, almost good enough to not be hampered by the parser). This game — at least so far — doesn’t quite reach up to either. It’s a straight by-the-numbers haunted house Treasure Hunt, with a ghost, vampire bat, and werewolf.

Source.

The ad copy talks about it being “for children”…

It’s a real adventure — with ghosts and ghouls and goblins and treasures and problems but it is for kids. Designed for the 8 to 12 year old population and those who haven’t tried Adventure before and want to start out real easy.

…but while that was somewhat a stretch for Earthquake, it’s really a stretch here. I wonder if this is meant to excuse the fact the map layout seems to be fairly simple, as even the messiest of Aardvark games have had some interesting structure to their maps.

While advertised for a variety of platforms, the only version I’ve been able to find is for Tandy Color Computer.

The objective is to find the treasures and bring them back to the start before time runs out.

Already: why would the time limit be added in a game for children? There are so many games with frozen time, there’s no need for this. There could even be an in-game plot reason for an endless night while exploring a haunted house.

BONUS SIDE RANT

Look, I realize I’m perhaps getting grumpy out of proportion. The thing is, for this era, seeing an adventure marked “for children” is a good thing. I realize a random children’s product from this time might normally and rightfully be thought of as dross…

Oh boy, math drills! From a 1981 Intellivision catalog.

…but in the case of adventure games, a product normally for adults, thinking of children has so far led to innovation; Nellan is Thirsty had an automap, and Dragon’s Keep tried map navigation with menus.

Sierra later (1984) experimented with menu controls including full commands in Mickey’s Space Adventure. Designer Roberta Williams.

This was an era when user convenience was unusual, so thinking about “how do we accommodate younger players?” led to innovations that only became standard years away. In the case of Haunted House, clearly the company thought the map and/or the puzzles were simplistic in a way they didn’t want to endorse as “for adults” yet it has the same terrible parser along with the other Aardvark products and I wouldn’t dare put in front of an 8 year old. Even 8 year old me — who had already written a text adventure in BASIC — wouldn’t know what to do with it.

RANT OVER

You start at the typical house-represented-by-four-locations where going one direction loops around the faces. The south face has an extremely heavy rock; the north face has a CELLER DOOR which is locked from the inside.

Heading to the porch, OPEN DOOR gives a blank prompt and it was unclear to me until I fiddled for a while that this meant it was possible to now go EAST and inside the house.

The inside looks to be rich with objects, but a fair number of them give a blank response to LOOK. It is hard to tell if they are filler or not.

To the south is a DEN. The GUN can be taken, at least. LOOK DESK mentions a drawer, and while OPEN DRAWER gives a blank prompt, and LOOK DRAWER says nothing, if you think to UNLOCK DRAWER it says:

NO KEY

However, I’m still not sure if that’s really the problem, because that’s the response to any command of unlock on any item, even nonsensical ones.

LOOK GUN also is unhelpful and it took me trying to shoot something (and getting the response NO BULLETS) to find out for certain it was unloaded. (I am 99% sure there is a silver bullet somewhere.)

Regarding verbs, I should jump in and mention what I have found by dragging through my standard list:

DIG, READ, OPEN, DROP, EAT, LIGHT, UNLOCK, SHOOT, KILL, FEED, POUND, OF(? offer?)

Remember, only the first two letters are understood, so DIP is considered the same as DIG. I had to use some subterfuge to get all of them. PO when applied to a target in inventory says NO HAMMER, and that’s the only verb that makes sense to me (I previously had it as POUR). FEED will say NO LUNCH if you don’t have a particular food item in inventory.

I still am unclear if OF is OFFER but I’m not sure what else it would be.

The fact PO isn’t POUR was a surprise to me because of this room. I assumed I needed to get water (and WATER — or at least WA — is a recognized noun) and put out the fire, but now I’m not so sure. The painting is at least a treasure out in the open and I was able to confirm after depositing it at the start, the game’s score turns into 10 out of 100 (meaning we’re likely hunting for ten treasures total).

I remember this trick from Trek Adventure. LOOK at anything else gives no message.

To the east is a DINING ROOM with a CRYSTAL BOWL (treasure) and a TABLE AND CHAIRS; next to that is a KITCHEN.

The candle, lighter, knife, and lunch are all able to be taken. OPEN OVEN and OPEN REFRIGERATOR give blank prompts (maybe they worked and I’m doing something wrong as a follow-up?)

Going down the stairs leads into darkness. If you have the candle lit (via lighter) a gust of wind blows it out, so I don’t know yet what is down there.

Instead going up, there’s a BEDROOM (with a BED I can’t interact with) and a BATHROOM (with a SINK and TUB, likewise). Trying to go farther past these two rooms, I am blocked by a werewolf.

Trying to feed him the lunch.

The vampire bat and ghost I alluded to earlier appear at random. The vampire bat will swipe treasures and take them to the attic (which I have yet to reach) and the ghost … looks spooky?

There’s zero walkthroughs or videos I can find for this one but fortunately the source code is BASIC. I’m going to hang on a little longer for the sake of all those 8 year olds out there from the 80s that somehow found themselves trying this game.