Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

1970: the Association for Computing Machinery held a “Special Events” conference in New York City, which they dubbed THE UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTION. It was essentially oriented towards presenting the still-relatively-new idea of computers to the public. As the co-chairmen Monty Newborn and Kenneth King wrote:

Five events are scheduled: Town Hall I and Town Hall II are open free to the public and are intended to provide the public an opportunity to question experts on computer related matters; the Cinema Computer will show a series of movies on computer related subjects, computer generated movies, and a movie and a talk on a sophisticated robot; the Computer Arts Festival is featuring the most recent work in computer art and computer music along with a one day forum involving leading figures in the art, music, and education fields; the First United States Computer Chess Championship is the first tournament of its kind.

I admit I’m very interested in the movie schedule (given on page 8 of the source I just linked). It kicks off with the Bell Labs film The Incredible Machine from 1968…

…and somehow passes through the COMPUTER COMPOSED BALLET AND SWORD FIGHT provided by the Central Office of Information in the UK, a group more known in 1970s for PSAs warning children not to play on thin ice and to stay away from electrical substations.

Via “Careers for Your Daughter“.

The relevant event for us today from the UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTION is the chess championship, which (as advertised) was the first of its kind. As these games were played on giant mainframes located scattered about the country, play was done remotely, with moves being called in.

Chess Computer Loses Game in a King‐Size Blunder. New York Times, September 02, 1970. Source.

The first exception to this remote style of play happened during the 1977 running of the championship, as a microcomputer was entered in for the first time: 8080 Chess, designed by the electrical engineer Robert Arnstein of Dallas, Texas, using a S-100 bus.

Ply logic, from the manual for the game. The easiest way to play 8080 Chess now is via the SOL-20 version.

While I don’t have any videos from that particular championship, I do have one from the World Championship that happened the same year in Toronto, so you can watch the style of play.

8080 Chess ended up 9th out of 12 entries; remember every other program was on a large mainframe. 8080 Chess was not necessarily the best microcomputer chess out there, especially given when it was entered into a microcomputer tournament a year later it scored fifth out of 11 (the famous program Sargon won); still, the moment is one that puts Robert Arnstein in the history books.

I mention this because he seems neglected otherwise. We have here the last game we’ll be playing from Robert Arnstein; we started 9 years ago with playing Haunted House (1979) and end our journey here (although Xenos came later chronologically, I’ve covered that game already).

Historically, the trail followed by Ken and Roberta Williams is well-remembered; other Apple II games like Transylvania reflected the same style. Infocom’s Zork sold so well it is perhaps the only pure text-adventure a random modern person could name. Assorted British games like Pimania at least have some recognition in Europe.

The last three Arnstein games — Raäka-Tū, Bedlam, Xenos — also have strong recognition, but for an entirely different group of people. That’s because these were first party Radio Shack games.

When I originally played the game back in 1984, it was at a friend’s house, and it was the first adventure type game I had ever played. I was immediately intrigued that you could tell the game what to do by typing in commands such as go north, go south, open door, etc. Up until that point, the only videogames I had played were the arcade types which were only based on how fast you could push the button to shoot the enemy.

— Quoting “Karen” on Xenos from Figment Fly

Radio Shack was possessive about displaying product in their stores, and because there was a lot of them, any products they sold had massive exposure.

Via a 1981 Radio Shack Catalog.

While there was a book they sold which listed sources for “indie games”, there wasn’t the massive outflow of third-party boxed product like there was with the Apple II. The Arnstein games thus formed sort of a parallel history of early adventure games, where players who just had access to a TRS-80 had their strong childhood memories form around these games as opposed to The Hobbit or Mask of the Sun. I have no doubt there were people whose first exposure to Crowther/Woods was via Pyramid 2000.

To put it another way, in the major histories of text adventures in the 21st century (Twisty Little Passages, The Digital Antiquarian, 50 Years of Text Games) Arnstein’s name doesn’t appear at all. Now, there are bazillions of authors we have covered here who don’t, but many of those people aren’t well-known by anybody; for a particular subset of players in this particular cul-de-sac of time, these games were pillars in their imagination. I think maybe out of all the games Bedlam should be better remembered universally, because wow, it does something wildly ambitious.

From Figment Fly.

This has a “you’re in an asylum, get out” premise to its plot which suggests to me Arnstein was thinking of Deathmaze 5000 and Asylum, both which would have been well known to a TRS-80 author. From the manual:

There are no hidden treasures to find, no wealth to amass, no score to beat. There is only one goal–get out, if you can. Your success depends totally upon your resourcefulness and your ability to think clearly. There is always one way out, but be warned–the exit changes each time you load the game.

The fact the “exit changes each time you load the game” suggests Arnstein may have also been thinking of Madness and the Minotaur. This is a adventure-roguelike with a “light” amount of randomization: where the nature of the characters is randomized, and linked to that there are consequently multiple endings where only particular endings might be available on a particular playthrough.

To help you escape, you can try enlisting the aid of some of the people you meet. Just remember where you are. Can a man running around painting doors on walls and claiming to be Picasso really help? Can a man who says he is Houdini get you out? What about using “X-Ray” Johnson to burn a hole in the wall to gain freedom? Perhaps the guard dog just needs a little attention. Maybe the nurse or the doctor with the hypodermic needle (if he really is a doctor) can be persuaded to help you.

Their ability to help also changes each time you load the game. Depending on the active escape route, you will either be able to escape without help from anyone, or you will need help from one or more of the people you meet. Some of the inhabitants of Bedlam are neither friendly nor cooperative. They do not get along with other inmates and some will try to stop you from leaving.

Rather than starting in a cell that requires escape, the door is open and you are free to wander.

Except, you might run across a doctor who gets upset and gives you the needle:

After the lobotomy you start “wandering” at random. I did not type the WEST, NORTH, and WEST commands from the screenshot below, the game typed them for me.

While I have trouble saying for certain at this phase of my gameplay, I think the author designed this with a compact map in mind (compared to his other games) and with an emphasis on complex character interactions / random generation. My map so far:

Everything is laid out in a hallway where the north doors are green (unlocked) and the south doors are red (locked). To the far west is an office where the doctor lurks, although the doctor can wander at random; nearby the doctor is a “dispensary” with a locked cabinet (inside I could see a red key), a blue pill, and a hook meant for opening windows. (Please keep in mind some or all of this might be placed randomly, I’ll need to do more tests.)

To the far east is an electroshock therapy room with a women dressed in a roller derby uniform in a uniform that looks like she does roller derby. There’s a green key there but I can’t take it without getting a treatment (losing the green key in the process).

Of the green doors, two of them have patients (again, in my current save-file). “Houdini” is hanging in one:

I haven’t been able to FREE HOUDINI or otherwise help him.

“Merlin” is in another and he thinks I’m a demon he has summoned.

I’ll need to do some more experimentation to see how far down the rabbit hole this game really goes. I know, at the very least, the manual isn’t lying about the multiple endings.

(And for anyone who has played it, please no hints whatsoever, I’m in the “fun toybox” phase of the game despite the lobotomies. I have suffered four so far. I am now wondering if a lobotomy is required for one or more of the endings.)