(My previous posts on Mysterious Mansion are needed to understand this one.)
Unfortunately, not long after my last post, I reached what looks like a fatal bug in the game.
Fortunately, I was able to hack my own save file to give myself the required item. I’m glad I did, because what happens after is astonishing.
Unfortunately, I still haven’t finished the game. I am what I am certain is at the ending but I am unclear if the part I’m on is broken or not. I’m calling this my last post on the game for now.
It’s very likely the programmer of the two Interact text adventures was John Stout, shown on the left in a fall 1982 Micro Video newsletter. He is described as having “a hand in almost every piece of software in our last two catalogs” — that includes Mysterious Mansion — and he had just finished with the CRPG Mazes and Monsters. I think a comparison of coding style might help make the case solid but I’m satisfied enough for now. He’s described as having both B.A. and M.A. degrees in Composition and writing music for the University of Michigan Marching Band. He died in 2017 of cancer.
The one (1) action I still had left I could have simply figured out — although I’ll admit I don’t know how I would have figured this out — is getting the key from the crystal ball. If you have the crystal ball and play the organ, the ball shatters in such a way you can get the key (why this works and just shattering the ball by hand doesn’t, I don’t know). The small key then opens the door in the clock to reveal yet another door. We need a tiny key now.
It turned out all my problems after this point stemmed from a bug. I was unable to operate an APPARATUS in a lab. I should mention this bug wasn’t isolated; when you wear the invisibility ring, it becomes described as a RING IM WEARING even when dropped, and if the SKULL is dropped in a random place it turns into the skeleton of the summoning portal, and you can get a second skull due to inventory bugs that causes the portal to the laboratory to be summoned anywhere.
I had found that if I did PUT LIQUID after the apparatus asked for some juice, I ended up with a RING on the ground. This is true even if you are currently wearing the ring, and it is possible to pick up the second ring (except they’ll merge if you wear the second ring). I am 100% now certain this is meant to be a different object, BUBBLING LIQUID.
Unfortunately the game would normally stop from there, but I felt unusually determined yesterday so I started invoking the spirit of Hackerman. Remember, with great processing power comes great responsibility.
My first step was just seeing what I could find by plowing through the relevant file
The Mysterious Mansion Adventure (1982)(Micro Video).k7
in a text editor. The most relevant item I found was a list of objects…
BED
CANOPY BED
COLLAPSED BED
CRYSTAL BALL
STOOL
STOOL
CROSS
LARGE HOLE
2 MOUSE HOLES
A MOUSE HOLE
DAGGER
DAGGER IN BED
…which continued on sequentially for every object in the game. Notice the two STOOLs. The way object state is handled is to repeat an object multiple times, so there isn’t one RING, but rather a RING and a RING IM WEARING as two separate objects. This why you can hold two rings at once, except when you wear the second ring the rings now “merge” into one.
There are three BEAKERS. The first I believe is empty, the second is the starting one with poison, and the third has the BUBBLING LIQUID that the apparatus is supposed to produce (as opposed to making another RING).
What the parser list of the game looks like in a hex editor.
The emulator DCHector I was using does handle save files properly, although they get saved directly to the tape file (write protection needs to be turned off). I made three save files, one where I did a save from the very start of the game, one where I did LOOK ORGAN, and one where I did LOOK ORGAN followed by TAKE PIPE. I used the program HxD and its comparison feature to figure out where the changes were happening. I also for good measure made a fourth save file for right after I picked up the SKULL at the witch (my inventory had a SKULL, RING IM WEARING, CROSS, DAGGER, and PIPE).
For example, with a save file made after doing LOOK ORGAN, at byte 4010 the first six bytes in hexadecimal were
02 05 05 1c 11 11
after TAKE PIPE they changed to
02 05 05 1c 11 ff
It turns out that that sixth position is the location for the PIPE object, at what happened is it got moved from 11 (the starting room of the game, 17 in decimal) to FF, which is what the game uses to indicate an item is in the player’s inventory. This was sufficient for me to make a chart of different item locations in data.
Ultimate hacker mode, PENCIL AND PAPER.
While I also identified the player’s inventory count number, I didn’t want to fiddle with that. I ended up taking my game-in-progress and turning the CROSS and DAGGER into “00” and giving my player the BUBBLING BEAKER and TINY KEY. After some more experimentation I backtracked and just swapped the cross into the beaker, as the tiny key is only found after using the beaker (so it isn’t busted like the beaker is).
I have a modified save file here where the player is holding the bubbling beaker if anyone wants to try it out. I also have a version giving the player a tiny key as well if you want to jump straight to the end of the game.
Moving on with normal gameplay:
DRINK LIQUID results in the message I SHRINK VERY VERY SMALL.
Also, don’t drink it while you’re at the cat, who then thinks you’re a mouse, whoops!
All items are dropped. There is in fact only one item you can carry while tiny, the TINY KEY (which we’ll get later). Before getting there, I should mention the cat above is a preparation puzzle — there’s a spot on the map later where you need to go through one of the mouse holes and out the other, so the solution is to prepare yourself.
I’ve been on the record as being quite fond of preparation puzzles, but they’re very hard to do without a vicious softlock (you won’t find out about needing the pipe here until later, and you have to backtrack to before shrinking to use the pipe as shown).
Shrinking modifies the player’s ability to traverse the map. (This feels like Retelle’s game Nuclear Sub when you flood the sub; everything is irreversibly changed.) You can’t go from the master bedroom to the attic anymore; what you can do is go in the fireplace and go in the chimney that was previously too small.
This puts you on a roof. You can approach edges on the north, south, east, and west sides. I admit I was stuck for a while here; I tried jumping but it just resulted in death.
However, one of the four sides — the west side — has a balcony below and you can jump down to safety. I don’t know if there’s a way to get a hint for this, I just started testing sides when I realized object-based gameplay was now out the window so my options were low.
You can then find the tiny key, which is the whole point of going through the sequence in the first place. The tiny key can be picked up by our tiny avatar.
If you’ve put the pipe down, you can safely get by the cat; the mouse-hole passage links you down to the starting room of the game.
Then (I assume with some unmentioned climbing about) you can OPEN CLOCK at the last tiny door.
It took me a few beats to realize that the PLAQUE that says FOR EVERYTHING is meant to be combined with the book’s message of THERE IS A SEASON. That is, it is actually reconstructing text of Ecclesiastes 3, the verse that Pete Seeger derived the song There is a Season from.
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.
Unfortunately now I’m at a hard stop. Remember, we’re permanently small. The tiny key disappears upon using it. That means no inventory at all.
The maze never got used for anything, but I’ve done a pass through with the torch (in case the dim light means an object is hidden) and also while small. Because of the cat, the latter is only possible if you drink the liquid at the cubbyhole…
…and it really feels like there ought to be something to this, given how much work was put into the maze with no reward, but absolutely nothing new is revealed while small I could find. I’m wondering if the Attic was originally designed so that you couldn’t backtrack but had to pass through the maze to get out, but the author left in a “bug” allowing leaving by a simpler route.
There is the SAY verb. It will repeat what the player says as long as it is between one and six characters. So the ending could be some matter of code-word, but I’ve tried everything both reasonable and unreasonable (TURN, PEACE, LIFE, DEATH, SEASON, SPRING, SUMMER, WINTER, FALL, HEAVEN, etc.). I also went and used the actual verb TURN on everything including the clock multiple times.
I’ve checked over closely the machine code and see nothing in the plaintext that suggests a code-word. Given how many broken spots the game has I’m not inclined to push farther as the ending could be just as broken as the lab puzzle was. (Or at least, by skipping over the lab puzzle, some other element needed for the end never got triggered.) However, I feel like I’ve experienced everything the game has to offer (and the ending just shows YOU HAVE ESCAPED) so I’m satisfied with moving on. Readers are still welcome to take a whack in the comments with my fixed file, but coming up, continuing with the minimalism theme: a VIC-20 adventure game that manages with graphics somehow.
From the last of the Hector line, the MX from 1985 by Micronique. Source. This game never got translated into French. We will be returning to this computer in the future with a very nice-looking graphical adventure.
Renga in Blue 
It’s a pity, but at the same time it’s completely reasonable. A game so riddled with bugs probably hasn’t anything else to offer. Also, it’s also a pity that the sources of the game are missing, with all your reports I guess it could be fixed for posterity.
The beaker issue could be a bad dump, but it is so specifically targeted in terms of “byte corruption” I don’t think so. (Gold, on the other hand, had one single bit swap that affected a completely random statement causing a game crash.)
The other bugs can mostly be ignored so it would be nice to get this fixed. My guess is there’s somewhere that’s (in decimal) 46 that ought to be 57, or somewhere that’s (in decimal) 47 that ought to be 58. I never figured out if it was counting from 0 or 1 with the items, I’ve seen both about equal amounts in other source code.
In binary terms, the two changes would be 010110 to 111001
or 010111 to 111010
both cases involve multiple wrong bits rather than just one
Lesson learned: if a game is messing with you, then mess with it :)
Thanks so much for taking your time, with your hacked file I was able to finally finish this game.
There is definitely a solution but it is a little obtuse. I think I wouldn’t come to it if I hadn’t looked into the game file and at the very last listed noun, which puzzled me a bit. You were just a command away.
Here’s the hint:
Va gur gval ebbz, gur cyndhr fnlf “sbe rirel ghea”, juvpu pbzovarq jvgu ernqvat gur obbx pvgrf gur ovoyr guvat lbh zragvbarq pbeerpgyl, ohg lbh unir gb guvax nobhg gur fbat vafgrnq. Fb, jung qb gurl fvat nsgre “sbe rirel ghea” va gur fbat?
Also, if you look down from the roof at the west side it says you can see a balcony below, so it’s not a wild guess.
Thanks again!
You mean literally the command LOOK DOWN?
Yes
Corrected hint:
Va gur gval ebbz, gur cyndhr fnlf “sbe rirelguvat”, juvpu pbzovarq jvgu ernqvat gur obbx pvgrf gur ovoyr guvat lbh zragvbarq pbeerpgyl, ohg lbh unir gb guvax nobhg gur fbat vafgrnq. Fb, jung qb gurl fvat nsgre “sbe rirelguvat” va gur fbat?
figured it out with the other hint already
that’s *super* meta. I certainly tried to say that in numerous ways. It’s kind of like REGISTER SHORT ROPE from Warp where you’re giving a command that doesn’t really make “sense” in the world reality but you can do it anyway
Wow. I read the hint. Really surprising.
Is there anything other than these three lyrics snippets (that seem so misplaced, until they don’t) that could be seen to connect the song and the game?
I don’t think so. I remember this song being used in a puzzle from another adventure (Med-Systems’ Deathmaze 5000 or Labyrinth), so there you go. Must have been a popular song among programmers in the early 80s, I guess.
Well, that was entertaining! I still think these are quite clever, despite the sloppy coding that crept in here.
I had rejected Stout as the possible author after going through those newsletters due to timing issues (hired in ’82, Troll Hole created back in ’80), but after looking at the code and reading his bio/obit more carefully (the key here being his musical background combined with the Byrds reference), I’m reconsidering. I’d posit this as a possible scenario:
Stout gets an Interact early on, due to being local. He writes Troll Hole and submits it (as is maybe mentioned in the earlier article about how they write their software) to Micro Video, using Long Playing Software (which makes some sense as a name to promote the value of adventure games specifically) as his personal “company” name. They accept it, and it’s quite successful by the limited standards of the platform, leading to them eventually hiring him. In the meantime, he’s been working on the sequel to Troll Hole, but since he’s a Micro Video employee by the time it’s finished, the Long Playing Video “signature” ends up getting buried in the code. Of course, Matulevich could be involved here too, considering the description of his machine code proficiency and interest in music/hi-fi equipment.
I found Tom Matulevich:
https://www.chhs1973.org/mini-windows/thomas_matulevich.htm
He’s 71 and appears to still be living in the Detroit area. If anyone still remembers anything about these games, it would probably be him.
Thank you for the introduction to Kung Fury.
I would say that “Turn, Turn, Turn” was a pretty standard reference still in the early ’80s–even if my parents hadn’t had the Pete Seeger records, I heard the Byrds version a bunch on the radio. That wasn’t the part that made the Deathmaze puzzle the second most deeply inscrutable puzzle in adventure game history.
I like how the HACKERMAN logo doesn’t have a TM for trademark, but rather an HM.
Actually knowing it was a reference wasn’t terrible — actually realizing the way the game wanted you to input it was.
Yeah, that part was more directed at a couple of folks above who were remarking on the coincidence of the song appearing–it doesn’t seem like that much of a coincidence to me because it was a pretty big hit! Much less obscure than Cecil the sea serpent (if I’m remembering which game that was correctly, there was a lot of obscure pop culture stuff in there).
And agreed about the input thing. I have been reading the rot13 and my reaction is “well I know what they’re talking about but I don’t see how this gets you an actual way to solve the puzzle!” Looking forward to the final post.
(By the way, for anyone who is grinding their teeth over my “second most deeply inscrutable puzzle” claim, I was putting it behind the chimney puzzle from The Five Towers of Trafa-Zar.)
I think the bottom of the barrel is like a 60-way tie when you start to dig into the really inscrutable games
Was watching a streamer play a weirdo french adventure called Erebus. It has one puzzle where the misery exceeds nearly anything I have seen (the CPC version of the game is still beatable but only because the map has a bug)
There’s some stuff in a couple of the games on your loop-back list that, at least to me, are very much in the running for both the “most inscrutable puzzle” and “worst parser shenanigan” categories. The common theme of these and the others you mentioned (the Phoenix/Toplogika games and Deathmaze 5000) is what I would call the “boffin author syndrome”. But you’ll see for yourself soon enough, so I’ll say no more…
BTW, the worst thing about the Deathmaze calculator puzzle is really the tacking on of “.2” to mean “press two”. How in the world did he think that made any sense? Also, the crystal ball throwing thing near the end is completely unclued, unless I’m missing something. In other words, the reputed worst part is really like the third worst, at least to me!
Re: Erebus – Nice to see that even the otherwise boring/generic Titus started with an archetypal piece of ’80s French touch weirdness.
Also, regarding Matt’s comments about the song, I can confirm. Knew it very well as a kid back then, and reference to it wouldn’t have seemed too random. The ’60s were still relatively recent, and we were all kind of growing up in a general mid/late 20th century cultural continuum where this stuff was widely known. It’s the sort of thing that I’ve always felt is a noticeable difference between us (Baby Boomers and Gen Xers) and the younger generations. We’re the last real “natives” of the 20th century, whereas most of these things are just ancient history to Millennials/Gen Z.
Thanks to this rabbit hole, I now know the details of how Santa Claus gets up a chimney. Thank you!
Funny that the objective was to get out of the house, but the message “YOU HAVE ESCAPED” (present in the code) was never shown in my gameplay, only “YOU HAVE WON THE GAME”. So basically, I have won by being left in a tiny room, in a tiny state, and still inside the house. Weird.
I’m just assuming it’s like the ending of Ferret where we ascend to a different plane of existence