Dave Carlos is another one of our authors who transitioned from teaching to computers, like Peter Smith or the authors of Dragon’s Keep. Peter Smith went on to make educational software and Dragon’s Keep was educational software, so it isn’t a shocking transition; Dave Carlos, similarly, had a foot in educational software, culminating with a co-written book in 1985 titled Writing Educational Programs for the BBC & Electron.
This book is not meant to be for a child directly; the aim is to teach and encourage parents, teachers and other interested people to write worthwhile and appropriate educational programs. We hope the book will be appropriate to those involved in every sphere of educational enterprise, from nursery level to postgraduate, from special to public schools, and in all disciplines from arithmetic to zoology. This may seem a daunting task but we have made life a little easier by presenting a text which not only contains programs which are ready to run and may be used as they stand or adapted in any way you wish, but also contains the building blocks from which other such programs can be constructed.
Carlos first caught the computer bug in 1980, when a parent asked if he could teach his children about programming his new ZX computer; the article says ZX81, but that wasn’t out until 1981, so either the date is off or the computer is off. Either way, the result was that Carlos bought a ZX computer for himself followed by a BBC Micro, eventually taking a computer job over the weekends while still teaching at Micro Power (a company we’ve explored the history of before).
Meanwhile, he started writing articles for magazines (A&B and Home Computing Weekly), with general advice columns (“This month we consider the important – and difficult – decision of which disc drive to choose”, “How to format discs to work on 40 and 80 track disc drives”) and also printed source code, like Stupid Cupid printed in February 1984.
1984 was also the year he quit teaching altogether, being disillusioned with recent changes in education with the reforms of Margaret Thatcher.
I felt that I couldn’t be the kind of teacher I wanted to be, and I didn’t want to be the kind of teacher that turned up every day, took his pay, and went home with no further thought.
Not long after this he founded his own PR firm, Mediates Ltd, using his publishing connections to aid companies in networking; this company eventually turned into the mail-order company Special Reserve, selling games throughout the 1990s.
Dave Carlos on the left giving out an oversized novelty check as part of a contest for the company Domark.
For adventure game fans, the company is of special interest as they had the Official Secrets adventure game club, and one of the Magnetic Scrolls games was only released as a promotional to members of the club.
All this is much farther along than today’s game, which is marked on the source code as being “Version 10” and completed on “12th January 1983”; in other words, this was written when he was still a teacher, and had just started getting deeper into the computer industry.
Caveman Adventure was published by Micro Power / Program Power, the original company Carlos took a part-time job at. Similar to how the author of Eldorado Gold (Dave Elliot) neglected to include his weird early text adventure while discussing his work, Caveman Adventure doesn’t get mentioned in any of the histories including Dave Carlos; his work in publishing, PR, and advertising have been far too significant in comparison.
Via the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. For fans of the history of weird box art, there’s a blog post by an artist (Chris Payne) who worked to try to make the Program Power art less Weird.
And … I’m going to be honest, I understand the omission. This is an erratic game. I was originally going to chalk elements up to him being a teacher and trying to write something for students, and maybe that was the goal, but: this is both too simple and too hard at the same time.
You are a caveman. You have been alone, but your goal is now to find your old tribe, while gathering treasures on the way. You can drop treasures in the starting cave or carry them with you.
As a caveman, the player’s commands are quite limited: TAKE, LEAVE (drop), DESCRIBE (examine), and USE. I’m being handwavy about whether the player is “roleplaying a caveman” or “controlling a puppet that is a caveman” because the game takes things both ways at once. You are prompted for the name of your caveman (I used “Bob”) and then start in your cave.
Notice: “this is the cave you have lived in for many months” followed by “What should Bob do now?” The closest comparable game I can think of that has been featured here so far is Mad Martha, which talks about “you, as Henry Littlefellow” and then asks what you (using your own name) want to do; it’s clearly a “role-play” situation in the text. That seems to be what the author was going for here but having both “you” and “Bob” emphasizes the disjoint between player and avatar even more.
To explain what’s going on with the game (and another aspect that’s highly unusual) I’m going to start with a “reduced” map which only shows what’s accessible without solving any puzzles.
Again, very reduced verb-set: walking, picking stuff up, looking at stuff, and using. The structure is such that some rooms will have death-exits, and it made me think possibly these were exits that could never be entered; that is, the game was going to be more of a labyrinth where you avoid certain exits rather than a heavy puzzle game. This isn’t actually the case.
To the west, there’s a room with a mouse and a roof that looks like it is about to collapse. If you go west, and then back east again, the roof does indeed collapse.
Heading west says “you need something sharp”. You would think the spear would work, but USE SPEAR gets no reaction. I’ll return to this puzzle later, but I do want to observe right now that this is a game where the obstacles are in the connections between rooms, rather than in the rooms themselves. We’ve seen this before with the game Seek … and that’s pretty much it. Seek was also published by Micro Power so almost certainly was an influence. (Seek additionally had the only-USE system for objects this game does.)
To the south is a bend where there are “flying creatures” blocking the path west; to the east there is a trickling sound of water followed by death.
Turning north from the starting cave, there’s a bearskin just coming out (just treasure, but every single item in this game counts as a “treasure”), followed by a plain with a “bone”.
Try to head north and the game says you’re too thirsty. (This is the problem with the Seek-style obstacle exits; why would Bob be thirsty specifically right there? Bob can wander about with no thirsty issues otherwise.) Going west gets Bob killed in a stampede.
Heading to the east from the plain, you pass by a deadly lion…
…and then going farther you can veer north to the top of a mountain and then die of starvation, as any exit from the mountain is death.
Veering south instead, there’s a waterfall (if you have sound on, there’s a water sound) with a “woman” there. I met the woman before I knew about the restricted verb set so tried TALK WOMAN and ended up taking her instead.
DESCRIBE WOMAN gets “She seems friendly and kind.” Using TAke on her is the right thing to do as she counts as a “treasure” and you can leave her at the cave for points.
There’s one more encounter going east, where you can land in a “raging river” and get a whole “cutscene” of described actions, but I think this might be either randomized or a bug because usually Bob would get “lost” and then inevitably die. (Getting “lost” as a method of death is also fairly unique but shows up in Seek.)
I’ll discuss this more later when it’s actually supposed to happen.
One last element early in the game is that there’s a thunderstorm, and about seven moves in the player’s items will get randomly scattered around. The most effective method of handling this I found is starting the game by wandering back and forth until the storm happens so you don’t lose any items at all.
This doesn’t move the player from the room they were in, although you have to LOOK to confirm this.
With that done, I fruitlessly tried to use the spear on various things — not realizing it was a complete red herring yet — and somehow neglected to DESCRIBE the BONE, which is
A very sharp bleached old bone.
That is, this is exactly what the first puzzle in the game needed. What, exactly, we are doing with the sharp object is unclear; I assume removing undergrowth somehow? (….with a bone?)
Hard work doing… something. This screenshot was taken during an iteration where I had items scattered from the storm.
Moving on…
…there’s simply a sequence of items to scoop up: log, vine, stick, dog, and net, while avoiding the one exit that makes the player/Bob “lost”.
This opens the previous obstacles, although some brute force use of USE may still be required (I still kept trying to use the spear until near the end of the game). Via lawnmowing, while adjacent to the lion, you can USE NET:
This shares Seek’s problem of uncomfortable treatment of space. There is no lion described in the room, yet you can catch one because it is in the next room over.
With the lion caught, you can do the mighty caveman thing and TAKE LION. He’s now your buddy! You can carry the lion and the woman and the log and the burning stick all at the same time. (I know infinite inventory has long been a thing, but not in this era.)
Going back over to where you would normally get stampeded, you can pre-emptively create a stampede, Lion King style, and clear out what turn out to be buffalo.
You don’t find out they’re buffalo until this very moment.
A map update:
While also doing USE STICK to scare off some vultures, you can scoop up a carcass, a tusk, and a coconut; note that if you re-enter the buffalo area from the west you have to scare them off again with the lion.
The coconut is sufficient to quench thirst in order to head north from the plain (still a mystery while taking that route is when it triggers, and you somehow pre-emptively know about the thirst). This enables a side route up the mountain picking up a “skin”, although you still need to deal with getting hungry at top of the mountain.
Uncooked vulture-tested carcass, yum! This admittedly felt caveman-ish. The whole point of getting here is to pick up the flint.
With all that done, we can get back to that raging river. I still am not sure how I got in early (random or bug?) but you’re supposed to USE LOG while at the waterfall that the woman was at (who at this point I had stored at the cave because I needed to inventory space, along with the lion). The river is a series of messages narrating the trip, with no interactivity.
At the end you can arrive at “shallows” where you can USE VINE to get to dry land. I am unclear how this works (are you lassoing something?) but USE can work with the power of brute force.
A dense jungle after requires cutting with the flint. (What were we doing with the bone, then?)
Finally you can reach an “open area of scrub” and get speared and die.
I mean, USE TUSK, which turns into a gift to guards that you can’t see without being killed by them.
I appreciate how the game tried to do something different with Seek’s “exit obstacles”. (It even repeats Seek’s issue where you need to repeat an action every time you go through an exit, but having buffalo and vultures and lions return to their original spots didn’t feel quite as weird as murdering a whole crew of dwarves over and over.)
The one contemporary review I’ve found (Micro Adventurer, November 1983) noted a bug I didn’t spot — the item-dropping from the storm does not reset your inventory counter, so you can end up being unable to carry anything after it happens. (“CAVEMAN Adventure is intended as an introduction to adventuring, and is therefore not too arduous a trial. But it is very well presented, and pleasant enough to play.”) Otherwise the review was fairly positive and mainly gets annoyed at the number of sudden deaths.
and I am inclined to agree the whole thing felt narratively stilted and awkward, although I appreciate the attempt to do something different with the tone, setting, and somehow writing in second and third person simultaneously.
A crucial aspect of living and its enjoyment is the ability to use the senses that we find at our disposal. The ability of a computer to involve a human being in an interactive way depends upon those senses also. This tends to mean the full involvement of sight and sound in the programs we like and use.
Educational programs have a place for such considerations. We sometimes glibly say that a computer is a wonderful motivator for children, especially those who have experienced failure using traditional methods of learning and teaching. What we mean is that a computer can be a motivator if the programs being used are carefully written and involve the child totally in the experience of using the machine. Poor programs can have the opposite effect upon the child, making them as reluctant to use the computer as they may be to use other learning methods. There is nothing inherently motivational about a computer at all; in fact you could argue that a ‘QWERTY’ keyboard is a huge disincentive to use one. If we want to have a positive effect on a child, it is up to the software writers to take this into consideration at the time they plan their programs.
— From Writing Educational Programs For The BBC & Electron by Dave Carlos and Tim Harrison
While we’ve had games with excess verbs that don’t do anything in the game, this didn’t seem like the sort of game to do that. I might normally say such verbs “put space to waste”, but it isn’t necessarily a waste; Countdown to Doom at least accepted EAT and SWIM to let the player know they weren’t going to be doing this on an alien planet, and sometimes in a modern Inform game it comes off as restrictive and awkward not to be able to THROW something even if it turns out throwing isn’t useful.
Speaking of throwing, that is one verb (other than wait) that hasn’t been used yet! I had already found the axe worked last time and went through all the other objects in the game and found none of them wanted to be thrown: “I can’t throw (insert item here)”.
The message in the forest about TREES ARE RESERVED FOR COFFINS seems to be here to explain why CHOP only works on the thicket but not here.
So what could we throw an axe at? The locked door had resisted my attempts at violence with CHOP DOOR — which you think would be the right way to bust in (especially given the lack of being able to HIT / SMASH / etc. even though the player has a mallet) — but I hadn’t tried THROW AXE.
Not “moon logic” exactly but the game should have accepted some alternate hitting methods. Limited space on a 8K VIC-20, though!
The inside has a sharp stick and a spade.
We now have and mallet and a wooden cross in addition to a sharp stick, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any “stake a vampire” verb in the set; what’s going on here? You’ll see in a moment. To recap, we also have the magic word unused (OVYEZ) as well as the lamp and the gold coins.
The spade, as I suspected, goes over to the sunny field.
I was storing my items here because of the “Crusifix”.
DIG is a little hard to operate; you can’t DIG CRUSIFIX but rather need to DIG HOLE, at which point a pit will appear you can go in.
Going out requires the ladder, but be careful because the ladder follows similar rules to the rope and will collapse if you have too much in your inventory.
The tunnel leads to a “subterranean cavern” and a seeming dead-end…
…but the THROW AXE is useful again (at least this time throwing seems the most natural thing!) This opens up a cave and nearly the last part of the game.
I had the lamp lit by this point; I don’t know the exact threshold it is needed.
Nosferatu! If I hadn’t spent my time investigating my verb list beforehand, I would have spent a while here uselessly trying to stake the vampire; he’s active rather than fully asleep and if you don’t have the wooden cross, he “rises from the altar, and bites my neck!”
The stick and mallet are complete red herrings. (The presence of a red kipper earlier at least hinted at the possibility.) The right thing to do here is to use magic.
According to the author’s web page, this doesn’t kill Nosferatu, it just gets him out of the way.
We can then grab the Bloodstone and retreat (being careful to drop most everything but the Bloodstone to climb up the ladder without it breaking).
This still isn’t quite the end of the game. The gold coins come in handy, as well as the very last unused verb: wait. You can go over to the bus stop and wait for a bus, and then pay for a ride in gold (!!). I guess he didn’t need exact change.
The author seemed somewhat down on this game…
If all of this leaves you with the impression that I don’t think much of the game, I suppose that’s true. But I still regard it with affection because, well, I was fourteen. Cut me some slack.
…and yes, there were a fair number of irregularities I already pointed out. I enjoyed myself more than some of our other games marked “haunted house” just because it did feel incredibly earnest; also, the fact we were not here to defeat the big bad racked up a few points on my imaginary scoreboard. I will say I could see a player getting incredibly frustrated by the ending and the useless mallet and stake. Although it makes perfect sense to me in a narrative sense why they wouldn’t work, it still would be better a design to acknowledge attempts at using them (along with textual hints suggesting that they’ll never work). This would have made a better overarching theme — sometimes the goal shouldn’t be destruction — that would go along with what happened to the witch (who we didn’t have to beware at all).
Some questions to the author, since he’s been in the comments:
1. What was the logic behind the fake-out with the stick and mallet?
2. Which puzzles were from Myles Kelvin, in the previous co-written game? (Also, was it such that you feel like you should both be on the credits?) What elements carried over and what changed?
3. What happened to the “HIDDEN GROVE” from your original working map?
…we [Myles Kelvin and Mike Taylor] went together to a conference in Manchester organised by Terminal Software. That made us feel very grown up at the age of fourteen or fifteen! Ah, the thrill of being allowed to drink beer!
This will be the last we’ll see of Taylor for 1983. He did have another game (The Final Challenge, aka Cornucopia) but it is lost:
Unlike the other games in this series, it required a VIC-20 with not 8k but 16k expansion – and since I didn’t own a 16k board, I had to borrow one from a school-friend, Richard Monk, in order to write it. Seems strange in these days when 4M of memory is considered woefully inadequate. [Meta-note: I wrote that last sentence in 1997 or ’98. As I write now, in 2001, 4M is truly laughable – most people now consider 64M unusable. No doubt by the time you read this, people will look sniffily on any computer whose memory is so tiny as to be measured in something as piddly as megabytes. Plus ca change.]
Of all my games that have been lost to posterity, this is the one that I would most like a chance to play again. I remember it somehow being invested with a strong sense of atmosphere, and having more-interesting-than-average puzzles. I have often tried to recapture elements of the plot to Cornucopia, as it rather bizzarrely ended up being called, but I have never succeeded to my own satisfaction. I particularly remember a tricky initial portion, necessary to get into the caves where the game took place, and a huge underground cavern with trees growing in it.
He’ll return in 1985 with the ambitious multi-player adventure Causes of Chaos.
Terminal Software was started, in a sense, by accident.
RW Stevens, aka Reg Stevens, was working at ICL in Manchester (the business computer company, home of Quest). He had started writing games for the VIC-20 over Christmas 1981:
…I wrote my first game, which was a computer version of [the tabletop game] Connect 4. I wrote it in BASIC and I made it look at the board and work out every possible combination and choose the best move from the criteria I’d coded in… which meant it could take five minutes to make a single move! Any player would get fed up waiting so I did the algorithm which worked out the computer’s next move in machine code. That made it as immediate as a human opponent.
He took it to show a colleague of his at work, Andy Hieke. Hieke thought the game was good and that Stevens should sell it, but Stevens replied he couldn’t be bothered; Hieke offered to do it instead. This would become what was published as “Line-up 4”, and it had only very modest success, Stevens at first getting a check for 20 pounds. However, Hieke got interviewed for a piece that landed in The Times and as part of the interview he mentioned an upcoming version of Scramble for the VIC-20.
There was no upcoming version of Scramble for the VIC-20, or at least not yet. Hieke called Stevens and said he needed to write one. This is the first he’d heard of the game’s existence (Stevens was 40 of the time and did not frequent arcades).
I did have my little computer, though, and was finding it fun to program, so I suppose I saw it as an intellectual challenge and rose to the bait. I said I’d have a go, so I took the kids to Blackpool one day to do some research and see what the arcade game looked like.
The game was successful enough to be well-remembered after; the author wrote that
Skramble! was probably my finest moment, although Super Gridder on C64 was probably at least as addictive. The amazing thing about that VIC20 Skramble! was that it was entirely hand assembled.
I wrote it in machine language, but had no assembler or machine language monitor- so I converted the instruction codes into numbers (using the data book for a 6502 CPU) and ‘poked’ them into memory from Basic!
The game got licensed by MicroDigital out of Webster, NY…
…although I’m not seeing the company at New York’s corporation registration site and I don’t have any information how that licensing agreement worked. Stevens did write a text adventure later for Terminal (Rescue from Castle Dread) so we’ll see him again, but today’s game involves a different author, Mike Taylor, who we previously saw here with Magic Mirror.
Nosferatu was written a different process; Taylor had based it on an “unnamed and unpublished game” he’d written with a friend (Myles Kelvin) the year before. Nosferatu was written from scratch with some of the same puzzles as the previous game, and was originally, like Magic Mirror, a “private” game. Once Magic Mirror was published he offered it Terminal and it became his second published game.
He was familiar with (but had not yet played) The Count by Scott Adams, and had not heard of any of the other vampire games we’ve seen here already. The goal is much different than the usual “kill Dracula” goal, as the printed instructions just say we need to “get home from Nosferatu’s castle with the precious bloodstone.”
I made my usual verb list, and none of them suggest we are killing the vampire, although I may be missing some special case.
Kill, stab, stake, and hammer are not included. (Note, no violence at all! Although there’s an axe you can THROW.) As my ambiguity above suggests, I’m not done with the game yet, although as a VIC-20 game (using the 8k expansion) it surely can’t be too much larger than what I’ve seen?
It starts with a mysterious in medias res moment:
How did end up here? Did we somehow get smuggled into Nosferatu’s castle this way? Did we get attacked and deposited here? I thought briefly (before checking the manual’s objective) that we were playing as the vampire, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The opening areas yield up a “bottle of whisky”, a “rope”, and a “7-pound mallet”. In the same room as the rope there is a locked door. A bit farther is a Graveyard with a “newly dug grave” and a warning about needing to BEWARE THE WITCH…
I’m unclear why it turns from a grave to a cave.
…followed by a … bus stop? Hey, there was one in Haunt. Turning south, there’s a sarcophagus that is too heavy to open, although drinking the whisky will give a boost of strength and allows the player to open it.
Inside is a corpse that turns to dust if you touch it (no idea if the dust is helpful) and a wooden cross (which I haven’t used yet).
Heading east from there is a library, with an Atlas, book of Magic, and book of Games.
The book of Magic has a word that seems like it’d be helpful (see above) but I’ve tried it in every accessible room so far to no effect. The atlas mentions a cesspit near a oak forest (which you find anyway even without the atlas) and the book of Games just says:
Bored with this game already, huh?
I mean, it could have booted up Skramble? On an 16K VIC-20?
Moving on, heading north there is a rail at a balcony, and you can tie the rope to go down, finding a brass key and a red kipper. The author is sheepish that a similar puzzle shows up in The Count, and indeed two other vampire games also have this moment, but it almost doesn’t seem like a puzzle as much as a natural action; at least I didn’t feel like there was anything stale going on.
If you carry too much down the rope it snaps and you die.
With the brass key you can unlock the door back up north and open a large new area.
Up first are a “sharp axe” and a “ladder”; this is followed by a pond with a shark and I have no idea if you can do anything with the shark. I’m not even sure how to die from the shark.
What I am sure you can die from is a little farther where there is a “flimsy bridge” and it will collapse if you have too many items. Past the bridge is a hut that is locked and the brass key doesn’t work; I have yet to get in the hut.
I guess it’s implied the shark gets us?
Past that is a “sunny field” with a “crucifix” on the ground (spelled wrong) and I suspect the DIG command goes here but I don’t have any digging tool yet (which might be in the hut! which I haven’t gotten in yet!) What I can do is go around to a “cesspit” which has some gold coins, and use the ladder from earlier to climb out.
An easy softlock. This doesn’t have a save game feature.
There’s a “cliff” with a backwards sign….
…which indicates you’re supposed to use the axe to chop the thicket.
Past this are two rooms at the edge of a chasm, a “safety match”, and a “fountain of youth”. You can use the bottle from earlier (with the strength boost) to scoop up the water from the fountain of youth and take it back to the witch, trading it for a lamp.
(I kind of like how I was expecting some sort of battle confrontation but this was just a trade puzzle!) The match works to light the lamp but I haven’t found anything dark enough for it to have an effect. To recap:
a.) I’ve got a hut I can’t get in
b.) I don’t have a way of digging
c.) I don’t have a way past the chasm (if that’s even supposed to be a thing)
I’ve already visited both sides of the brick wall so I’m not sure if it’s really meant to be a puzzle.
I get the intuition this is going to be the sort of game where I just have to resolve one puzzle and then the rest will be a straightforward progression. But I have to find that one puzzle first!
I have won the game, by some relativistic value of “won” — I needed to check the walkthrough a few times due to communication issues, but also one wildly unfair spot.
I will try my best to convey first what any future potential players might need to have a better chance before getting deep into spoilers. Before any of that, a little more detail on how the game was discovered:
Specifically, this happened on the Sinclair ZX World forums. A user named “willinliv” posted about a set of his father’s collection of “about 30” ZX81 tapes, some of them commercial and some of them hand-made.
One of the tapes from the collection, “GMSave”.
Our tape of particular interest was marked “Jeux 16k” (Games 16k).
I have been trying to get a better capture of the tape ‘Jeux 16k’, which seems to be a collection of software that my Dad traded with a ‘pen pal’ from France. Some of these are pirated copies of mainstream releases but some I kind find any info about or copies online. Unfortunately there are audio drop-outs recorded into the tape, particularly on Side B, and also my expertise is minimal.
Nightmare House was on the side B and did suffer damage. As XavSnap writes…
The wav file is broken and i had to rebuild the Basic file in binary (Bits rotations, bad basic length…).
…also pointing out the source code was explicitly based on the Trevor Toms code.
All objects, conditions and moves are located in the VARs memory segment, but this part don’t match in the P file [that’s the file used by the emulator]
After some significant work after the code was reconstructed. This is important in that it is faintly possible one of the odd behaviors you are about to see was related to the reconstruction, but after thorough enough testing I don’t think so: the game is really meant to be very linear with lots of death options.
If you plan on playing the game yourself, note that:
a.) On the two occasions where there are multiple things — the buttons on the recorder and the three trains — you’re supposed to refer to them by digit. So PUSH 1 or PUSH 2 or ENTER 1 and so forth.
b.) INSERT is used for both putting a thing in another thing as well as for typing.
c.) The way to wait is NOTHING. This might seem rather cryptic from the Apple version which just says “Command?” but the original more explicitly asks “what do you do?” As a conversational response, NOTHING (RIEN) makes sense, but I’ve almost never seen this before in an adventure game, where quite typically there’s an implicit “I WANT TO…” placed before the command; this gets fiddled with on rare occasion (DON’T PANIC from Hitchhiker’s Guide, for instance). The “almost” never is because this command also shows up in Folibus, which I think makes it pretty clear the author was deriving their code directly from Brégeon’s magazine article rather than from the Trevor Toms book.
With that out of the way, here’s the entire map.
Not large, yet somehow it manages many many ways to die. From where I left off last time, I had trouble with an acid bottle (just ignore it) and some trains. As I hinted at earlier, you’re supposed to ENTER one of them; trains 1 and 3 kill you (either by explosion or electrocution). This is hinted at in the previous room, which had an unplugged speaker; if you PLUG SOCKET (not the speaker, and no, the socket isn’t in the room description, even in the French version) you’ll get a hint about “always taking the second”.
With ENTER 2 you enter into darkness and where I got stuck again:
The train here has stopped in darkness. You can’t go any of the cardinal directions, and going down kills you (falling down). This is the moment where you need to do NOTHING.
The train moves along farther and ejects you into the room seen above. There is a beam going from north to south (the little squares in a column), an “electronic eye” next to a door to the west, a “black box”, and exits otherwise to the north and south. Trying to exit either way — at least my first time through — disintegrated me. I checked the verb list and there was nothing along the lines of sliding under the beam or jumping over it (like I did recently in the German game Geheimagent XP-05).
This was the part that I wasn’t stuck on due to the parser, but just being generally unfair. At the very start, there were some tools and a laser gun; you’re not supposed to pick up the gun.
That’s the only difference! You can’t even drop the gun once you’ve arrived at the beam room, you have to have left it behind. There is no indication that the weapon is the issue.
From here, you can go north into a room that looks fairly tantalizing, which has a “hole with a riveted ladder”, and a “window overlooking the sea with a lever”.
You’re supposed to ignore both those things (unless you want to die) and instead pick up the bottle (GOURDE) and cassette (CASSETTE). The bottle can be drunk but there’s a fun death later if you don’t drink it so let’s save that, and take the cassette back to the player at the intersection.
Putting the cassette in the player and using PUSH 2 (again I had to look up the interaction mode here) causes the previously-closed door to the west to open.
Inside is a lamp and a door with a keypad.
There’s also UNE MACHINE QUI RONRONNE, where “ronronne” can be either purring or a hum. I think purring is funnier.
You can’t open the door yet, but you can grab the lamp, turn it on, and jump back on the 2nd train. You will see a code for the keypad in the darkness.
It doesn’t give an explicit number, it just says there is one.
Circling back to the intersection you can then INSERT CODE (or rather, INTRODUIRE CODE) and reach the final room of the game.
There’s a mummy, a lever, a button, and a screen; there’s also a “controller” (or as the Apple game says, “stick”) to the west. The lever, button, and screen are all tantalizing, but again, death maze: push the button and the mummy wakes up and murders you.
If you haven’t drunk the bottle before entering:
You catch the plague. You die.
If you are holding the black box from the room with the beam.
The bomb explodes. You too.
You should ignore everything except for the stick, and pull it:
x
This gives the message
UNE TRAPPE S’OURVRE
VOUS VOUS RETROUVEZ DEHORS. VOUS AVEZ GAGNE.
which translates to
A TRAPDOOR OPENS
YOU FIND YOURSELF OUTSIDE. YOU HAVE WON.
I do want to emphasize that this exact style is fairly specific; we’ve had plenty of games with multiple options to die, but the sheer overwhelming preponderance of death-options here is high enough to form its own mood, akin to a Choose Your Own Adventure where more than half the options lead to a BAD END.
Be an Interplanetary Spy: The Red Rocket, from 1985. Source.
Eventually in 1983 we’ll reach The Manor of Dr. Genius for the Oric, by a known company (Loriciels) but with the same general flavor as Folibus.
As observed in my posts on Folibus, the ZX81 had a stronger impact in France than in its country of origin (the UK); while the competition landscape was one likely factor, a major one was the French SECAM format for televisions worked with the UK’s hardware in black and white (ZX81) but was a pain for color (ZX Spectrum). (SECAM’s main difference from PAL and NTSC is that PAL and NTSC have color signals sent by amplitude modulation — how “tall” the electromagnetic waves are — whereas SECAM uses frequency modulation — the “width” of the waves.)
This ramification of this was that the French-translated version of the The ZX81 Pocket Book by Trevor Toms had more an impact than the English original, and La maison du professeur Folibus became the “origin adventure” of France even though it literally wasn’t the first.
Just like how Omotesando’s early status led to further Japanese adventures in building break-ins, the “death-maze house” design of Folibus had a little cloning. By death-maze I am not just meaning a game with lots of ways to die (like, say, Time Zone) but rather that the plot follows a restricted path where one action is right and most others lead to death.
Today’s game is such a clone, and we don’t have a year or even an author.
It was rescued by French ZX81 enthusiast XavSnap off an old tape and may have been a “private game” originally meant for family and friends. It seems extremely likely is was made somewhere within a year of Folibus but there’s no way to be certain.
Plot: the protagonist has been kidnapped by a maniac and put in a house full of traps.
The title, as shown above, is Cauchemard-House (Nightmare-House) so that’s what I’m using, but the “d” is a typo; when the good folks at Brutal Deluxe Software ported the game recently to Apple II they not only added an English version, they also changed the title to Cauchemar House.
While this is a Folibus offshoot, there’s one innovation straight away:
That’s a top down view! That’s us (the “o”) with two arms (“(” and “)”). The text just says
YOU ARE IN AN EMPTY ROOM
THERE’S ALSO:
– LASER GUN
– TOOLS
WHAT DO YOU DO?
Scooping up the items and heading north, er, NORD:
No death yet! But soon. There’s no “room description” (I suppose the image is the description.)
THERE IS AN UNPLUGGED SPEAKER
A TROLL APPEARS.
TO THE EAST THERE IS A DOOR WITH A TAPE RECORDER WITH TWO BUTTONS AND TO THE SOUTH THERE IS A RED BUTTON
THERE’S ALSO:
– SUIT
Trying to go NORD results in
UNE FLECHE VOUS TRAVERSE
that is, “an arrow goes through you”; the same result happens in any other direction (other than west, where you just get stopped). You can push the button and the game says it’s just a “projection”; push it again and then the arrows stop happening, although only east is available.
This is a mini train station with three wagons, and an acid flask. Guess what happens if you pick up the acid?
The bottle was leaking, your hands are eaten away, you immediately catch leprosy (LA LEPRE).
For a game to be a death maze it needs death with this kind of frequency. Catching leprosy somehow from a flask of acid is optional.
And … now I’m stuck because of the parser. I’ve been alternating between the French ZX81 version and the translated Apple version (both are on Github) and I haven’t been able to refer to any of the wagons, and I’m still puzzled by the room with the tape recorder (it refers to the recorder having buttons, but I haven’t been able to press either). I also can’t find a way to refer to the troll (although the troll is gone if you go in the wagon room and then come back).
There’s a walkthrough provided by the Apple version so I can certainly muscle through but I’d like to try to puzzle things out a bit longer. While I suspect this is more a parser battle than an object-based one, I’ll still take suggestions in the comments if anyone has one.
In 1974, Donald Sherman ordered a pizza on the phone, making history.
Not that it was the first delivery pizza ordered by phone — pizza delivery had been around for many years by then and Domino’s had popularized it — but Donald Sherman couldn’t talk, having a type of facial paralysis from Moebius syndrome. He used a system at Michigan State University which pronounced words for him, and we have the moment caught on camera.
His first call (Domino’s) hung up, thinking this was a prank call, but he finally got cooperation on his fifth call, this time to Mike’s Pizza, ordering a large with pepperoni and mushrooms.
For this to work, a Control Data 6500 computer nicknamed “Alexander” was paired with a Votrax synthesizer. The Votrax was originally developed by Richard Gagnon of Troy, Michigan (about an hour east of Michigan State) in 1970. He was working for Federal Screw Works at the time but had developed a talking chip in his basement, and when he showed his prototype to his bosses the put him in charge of a new Vocal Interface Division (eventually spinning off to its own company). Just like Sherman he used it for accessibility, having it dictate words from a computer monitor as his eyesight had trouble.
This all resulted in the commercial SC-01 chip unveiling by the end of the decade from the newly dubbed Votrax, and you might have heard one before if you’ve played Gorf or Q*Bert. While Gorf used the chip for taunting the player with a well-timed “got you, space cadet”…
…Q*Bert used it for its own unique language.
The SC-01 was licensed out to companies to make voice synthesis hardware in the early 80s like the Mockingboard, the Alien Group Voice Box, and — relevant for today — the Spectrum Voice Pak for TRS-80 Color Computer.
The Spectrum Voice Pak ($70 for CoCo 1 and $80 for CoCo 2) does not seem to have made much a splash as I have found very little software that’s used it, but page 16 of the catalog for Spectrum Projects — in addition to the Spectrum Adventure Generator and a bingo game — has The Final Countdown. While The Final Countdown had the same JARB Software and Dragon Data releases as S.S. Poseidon, it also had an extra one later specially designed for the Votrax.
From World of Dragon.
I unfortunately do not have a copy of the talking version of the game, nor do I have an emulator that supports the chip. Here’s one more video to give an idea what it sounded like, applying a table of 64 phonemes encompassing units like “the oa sound of board” or “the tt sound of butter”.
Hence, I’m just going to load up the Dragon version again, which like last time, has easy, medium, and hard difficulties (affecting the turn limit).
The JARB ad also credits both Bill and Debbie Cook but I do have an early 1982 version of the game with no difficulty levels that just mentions Bill Cook, and the Talking version of the game also only mentions him in the credits.
Also like last time, the game is relatively straightforward, but with two curveballs thrown in.
There is an insane general who wants to launch a nuclear missile, and your job is to stop him from destroying the world.
You start near a van with a 2-way radio and a uniform; examining the uniform also reveals a stun gun and some PAPERS.
Heading south gets you in a desert with a rattlesnake and there’s no point in going there (it doesn’t have a puzzle this time, but just like Poseidon it feels like a “side scene” rather than a typical red herring).
To get inside you go by a camera at the front gate and show the papers from the uniform.
You’d think they could detect a fake general. Maybe we’re a real general and this is our actual uniform and we’re here to slap some sense into the wayward lower-star upstart.
Once inside, if you veer left into the C.O. Office, you can have one of those “side scenes” I just mentioned but this time with a minor puzzle. There are monitors and three buttons; if you press the second one it starts showing I Love Lucy, and if you press the third it sets everything on fire.
A “fire bottle” is in the room next door but you need to have picked it up first. This essentially identical to the Poseidon scene, and there’s no reason to press any of the buttons.
I wandered around the map after that. There’s a BULLETIN BOARD warning about tripping on stairs, and a message about an evacuation being complete, and a direct phone to the White House that’s very unhelpful…
…but other than that I was unclear. To the northeast there’s a cabinet that’s locked — no key yet — and intuition struck me given the mention of stairs so I tried moving it.
I have no concrete logic here but I did ratiocinate myself into doing this rather than hitting the interaction via brute force, like I did with Time Warden.
This leads to the second (and only other) part of the game.
The passage goes through a “command center”, “radar tracking” (with wire cutters), and a “strategy room” before arriving at a “maze of hallways”.
In the meantime, THE GENERAL starts showing up, kind of like the dwarves in Crowther/Woods, and you can use a charge from your stun gun to chase him off. This is clearly on the Dr. Strangelove end of the spectrum.
It’s not really a maze, though, because going through a loop enough times eventually reveals a secret passage.
Heading west from here goes to an elevator that you can take as a one-way trip back to the first floor (this is very much like Poseidon’s structure) whereas going south leads to a LAUNCH CONTROL CENTER.
Of the three buttons, ONE does just a click, TWO is not recognized by the parser even though it gets mentioned, and THREE is described as doing nothing. It does something, just not yet. (I was expecting an accidental premature launch, but apparently not; the rocket countdown is already happening).
The way to win is slightly cryptic. To the north, where there’s the observation window, you can BREAK WINDOW using the FIRE BOTTLE (the same one that was used before in the “scene” — interesting moment of intercross there!)
For reasons I’m unclear about, if you now go south and press THREE this reveals a panel.
This reveals a wire, and while CUT WIRE doesn’t work, USE CUTTERS does and you can win the game.
I regret not being able to find out how the voice sound gets used. Does the wandering general taunt you, perhaps? I’ll get another chance to find out when I get to 1984 as that’s the release year of the Spectrum Adventure Generator which also uses the same chip.
Unfortunately that’s the last we’ll see of the Cooks; they didn’t drop off the map as Bill Cook later wrote wrote the application Write III for the CoCo 3, but this was their only experiment with adventures. They do feel like they were written from an outsider perspective, and I am especially wondering why they had the “scenes” with very light puzzles as part of their games.
By 1980 in the United States, the TRS-80 had still vastly outsold the Apple II, with 200,000 units to 35,000. The Apple II was the outlier expensive machine while TRS-80 was “for the people”. There was no strong indicator at the time that by the late-80s the Apple II would form the “Oregon Trail Generation” and become a bond gluing together an entire group of children growing up in the United States.
(Side note: Commodore, Tandy, and Apple originally all had the chance to be joined up rather than battling rivals. Tramiel of Commodore originally went to Tandy for selling the PET but he also demanded a calculator purchase on top of that which caused Tandy to balk. When Jobs of Apple was looking for initial funding — $300,000 — he went to Tramiel, who only offered $50,000; Jobs found the money he wanted elsewhere.)
Tandy’s follow-up machines — the MC-10 followed by the Color Computer series, 1 to 3 — are even more elusive in general historical memory. Tandy unfortunately never disclosed sales numbers, with only vague statements like
Each year, Christmas sales of the Color Computer break the previous year’s record.
— Ed Juge, head of Tandy marketing, 1984
to go on. Rather than making up a number, let’s go with ones we know: The Rainbow (a Tandy Color Computer magazine I’ll discuss shortly) hit their peak subscription number of “over 50,000” in 1984, the year of the quote above. I searched for a comparison number and found Antic (for Atari 8-bit machines) hit “over 100,000” readers in 1986. That Atari number comes from after Atari as a company imploded so the comparison isn’t perfect, but it still gives a ballpark proportional estimate in terms of community reach.
(ADD: From the comments, L. Curtis Boyle points out some more exact data, and to compare the same year as Antic’s number, they had 31,789 subscriptions in December 1986.)
As I’ve already mentioned in regards to the TRS-80, Tandy was fairly insular and didn’t make strong connections with other companies. You could buy mainstream games for the Color Computer — Sierra On-Line put out their AGI games, so they got the Kings Quests up through IV — but oftentimes they had an air of second-hand-ness to them.
The community was (again like the TRS-80) its own ecosystem. What I want to emphasize is that while we’ll see more Tandy Color Computer starting in 1983, and despite the machine not making lasting connections with the wider gaming community, in terms of reach and popularity it also isn’t just an obscure sidenote. In a way, because Tandy became no longer dominant, the Color Computer community was even more outsider than before; Softside, the magazine we’ve featured here many times before, eventually had monthly disks for Apple II, TRS-80, Atari, and IBM compatibles, but never Color Computer.
The magazine center of this ecosystem was The Rainbow. The founder, Lawrence “Lonnie” C. Falk, was originally a journalist who had (by 1980) switched to working public relations at the University of Louisville. When the TRS-80 Color Computer came out became fascinated with it and started printing his own newsletter, with The Rainbow Volume 1 Number 1 being marked as July 1981.
Most of us are among the first to be the proud owners of a TRS-80 Color Computer. And, if you are like we were, you were attracted to TRS-80 in the first place by all those great programs available for the Models I, II and III.
But, where did that leave us? Except for some programs in the manuals — and the e-x-p-e-n-s-i-v-e ROM Packs offered by the Shack — there just isn’t a great deal out there right now. Oh, it is coming. But the wait seems long and there are a lot of things the COLOR computer can do that its big brothers can’t.
The comparable CoCo specialist magazines were Hot CoCo and Color Computer Magazine, but The Rainbow outlived them both.
Lonnie Falk, when The Rainbow — and the company Falsoft — were a bit larger. From CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy’s Underdog Computer.
Nearly from the start — not issue 1 but issue 2 — JARB Software (Imperial Beach, California, just south of San Diego) gets a mention, in a review of JARBCODE. The review has “Joe Bennet, chief programmer” working along with H.D. Stow; the product is for code-making (cryptograms, it seems). JARB started put in advertisements and sending in source code soon after and became one of the main independent publishers for the Color Computer.
The title screens give Poseidon a date of 1982 and Final Countdown a date of 1983; we could normally use the one-month-difference rule to put both games in December of 1982 but the Rainbow’s newsletter origins makes this ambiguous; direct mail would more typically land on the month on the cover. JARB’s December 1982 ad has “COMING ATTRACTIONS” that are “all available by December 1982” but without Poseidon listed. As another example of breaking the one-month rule, Commander magazine started off sending issues on the marked month, but right when they switched to newsstand they skipped a month in order to do the usual off-by-one arrangement — that is, they had one issue marked December 1983/January 1984 even though they were a monthly.
Commander Magazine died in 1984, so the increase in demand apparently didn’t last long.
(ADD: L. Curtis Boyle confirms that printing by The Rainbow happened on the month printed until they skipped May 1983 so they could be a month off for newsstands.)
I haven’t been able to unearth anything about Bill and Debbie Cook specifically, although I should highlight something I don’t always linger on: one of the authors is a woman. That hasn’t been common; I’ve counted about 4% of the games we’ve had so far have had at least one identifiable woman. Mind you, this doesn’t account for people with initials as first names, or people who aren’t named in credits at all, or people who transitioned, but it’s still a low percentage. At least in the US, about 30% Computer Science degrees were going to women at this time, so it doesn’t match the general population.
I’m still not sure as to why. I don’t think sexism quite explains it, although computer science had/has it as a problem. Even in 1983 there was strong awareness of women getting pushed out of the field; to quote some examples from a 1983 paper:
Following a technical discussion over lunch with a faculty member. I was asked for a dinner date. I was left wondering whether the faculty member went to lunch for the intended technical discussion or for personal reasons.
When I was a teaching assistant, one of my students missed the lecture and saw me later. He said, “Will you come sit on my lap sometime and tell me what I missed?”
“Why do you need a degree for marriage?” — a male colleague.
For my question — why less women making adventure games — I’m referring here to a comparative proportion, that is, double-digits in computer science versus single-digits making games. My current suspicion is that games were not thought of as “serious” work; Veronika Megler, who we just read about with The Hobbit, only passed by games on her way to a database-focused job with IBM. That is, sexism was involved, but in a lateral way: the women getting expertise at this time leaned to more “secure” areas like business and finance and large mainframes; they felt less able to experiment in a field more likely to have companies go bankrupt.
I still feel like the story is incomplete, just because so many of the games we’ve played have been pure hobby endeavors.
Enough theorizing, let’s flip a boat:
Just like Eno/Stalag/House of Doom, the Cook games were picked up by Dragon Data to publish in the UK. Picture from World of Dragon.
S.S. Poseidon is yet another game based on the movie The Poseidon Adventure, involving a cruise ship that gets flipped upside down at sea and the attempt from survivors to escape.
I couldn’t find this game in Tandy CoCo form so I’m playing the Dragon version.
There are three difficulty levels but they seem to only affect the time limit. I picked easy because I was not interested in optimizing. The game is straightforward enough it likely doesn’t matter.
You start with a three-room vignette:
The starting ballroom (similar to the movie, but only barely) has just a singular chair; to the west there’s an entrance blocked by DEBRIS and doing LOOK DEBRIS reveals a FLASHLIGHT.
To the east there is an entrance with a sign indicating SOME OBJECTS MAY BE USED. Being that there are no other exits and the only items are a chair and flashlight, I tried USE FLASHLIGHT, revealing a CABLE.
This is wildly unusual; most flashlight use has been in explicitly dark rooms, but here the flashlight finds a hidden object in an otherwise lit room. The only other adventure I can think of offhand that does this is Espionage Island but that still explicitly has a “dark corner” in the room.
The cable is incidentally out of reach, but you can drop the chair and use it to get extra height, and then CLIMB CABLE. This exits the introduction.
Many of these rooms aren’t “useful” but they’re not all exactly “red herrings” either. For example, to the south there’s a COMMUNICATION CENTER with a broken ham radio and a message saying SOS. The player is blocked by a fire trying to escape; you can get by the fire with an EXTINGUISHER from a nearby room.
Although if you don’t have the extinguisher first this is a softlock.
Despite this seeming like a small “puzzle”, it is entirely unnecessary! It’s just a “scene” essentially.
Why is this here? Conceptually it’s interesting.
Elsewhere, there’s a hatch where if you open it, sea water blasts in. If you are wearing a life jacket (again just lying around) you can survive the encounter, so again it counts as a small puzzle, and again there is no “reason” for it other than having a colorful scene.
I never found a use for the razor.
The only item that will become important shortly (but not this very moment) is a LOCKED CABINET in a TOOL ROOM.
Otherwise, to escape further: up in the Dispensary, in addition to an upside-down picture (again just for color, no safe behind or anything) there’s a beaker with vitamins. You can drink the vitamins to get stronger, and open an otherwise stubborn metal door to get to the next level.
The third level is the last section of the game.
It kicks off with three directions leading down shafts that deposit you back in level two; going east leads to a pool of oil on fire.
There’s a rope in the room where you can TIE ROPE. It asks “TO WHAT?” and despite it not being obviously an “object”, I tried “TO LEDGE” and it worked.
The rope stays tied in the room just past; you can drop it and grab the crowbar to find a “metal plate” which is the escape spot for the ship, except it is bolted in such a way it needs a wrench, not a crowbar.
You can fortunately take the crowbar and swing back on the rope back across the flaming oil, then slide a shaft to the second level and find that LOCKED CABINET I mentioned offhand earlier. The crowbar is sufficient to bust it open and get the wrench that’s inside.
The wrench then can be carted back over to the plate at the hull of the ship and to victory.
Related to the puzzle-augmented scene style, one last novelty: there’s JEWELS in one of the rooms…
…which you are welcome to take with you, but the game never acknowledges in the end if you have them, either by rewarding or punishing you. It’s simply a personal plot choice.
The game was not substantial or difficult, so in the modern context of me simply loading up and playing it I don’t have much to complain about. I’m not sure how I would have felt spending $14.95 on a 20-minute game, though. (About $48 in 2025 money accounting for inflation.) It fits together enough with the style in Eno I do wonder if the two games influenced each other (at the very least, they were sold on the same page together).
Next up: The other game by the Cooks, The Final Countdown.
I’ve finished the game, and I was fairly close to the end. The largest jump was simply understanding what the game was even trying to convey.
I had incidentally tried to run the car into the door (thinking this would be one method of “smashing” the door) and was simply told I couldn’t; I came close to the right idea, as you’re supposed to run the car into a regular wall, getting a good effect.
THE CAR MADE A STRANGE SOUND AND DIED.
You can hop out and turn the crank again to start it; what’s new is there’s now a hammer that fell out from somewhere.
With that hammer, SMASH DOOR now works, leading to a supply of boards.
Nice contrast with Mexican Adventure, where the wood being portable is part of what led me to not realize you could build a whole cart out of it.
I still had the nails from earlier and the hammer, and I also had the BUILD verb un-used off my original list. Given how this was clearly at the end of the game, I figured now was the time.
This is followed by one of the most unfortunate parser moments in the game. You can’t TAKE the ladder because it is too heavy, but you can’t LIFT if either. It is important to note that LIFT is considered a synonym to TAKE, while RAISE is its own verb.
I had already spent enough time puzzling over the verb list I figured out this issue quickly, but I could see someone getting stumped here at nearly the very end.
I decided, despite no ceiling exit in view, to follow with CLIMB LADDER.
This is on top of the maze. I originally didn’t think that because you can still walk around the maze and looks normal as before.
What kept me from wasting enormous time here was my constant attempts to experiment with ways to die. (Adventure game deaths can be funny, sometimes! Or they can give, as you’ll about to see, a hint.) While on top of the ladder where I had raised it I tried JUMP DOWN, not even realizing yet I had made it through the ceiling.
THAT WASN’T THE RIGHT PLACE!
This suggested there was a right place, and established for me, despite the odd way the graphics hadn’t changed, that I was in fact on the roof and just needed to find the right spot to apply JUMP DOWN.
Hence:
This is followed by a long and slow animation, and I have it here below at double speed.
Then text displays (again slowly, there’s a key to speed it up but I forgot what it was):
YOU STUMBLE OUT OF THE DIMLY LIT RECESSES OF THE MAZE, INTO THE STARTLINGLY BRIGHT FORMAL OINING ROOM OF PROFESSOR LA BRYNTHE. SEATED AROUND A LARGE TABLE ARE THE MEMBERS OF YOUR FACULTY COMMITTEE, HEADS BENT TO ONE ANOTHER IN WHISPERED DISCOURSE.
The professor then states that we have had our performance assessed through a real-life version of “the maze through which you have run so many of your experimental subjects” and they are now prepared to bestow a degree based on in-game performance.
TOTAL NUMBER OF MOVES -2145
NUMBER OF TIMES YOU ‘DIED’ -11
ATTEMPTS TO KILL SOMETHING -5
INVOCATIONS OF THE MAGIC WORD -16
NUMBER OF TIMES YOU QUIT -1
NUMBER OF HELPS YOU NEEDED -30
TIMES YOU TOOK INVENTORY -88
NUMBER OF PEEKS AT THE MAP -33
(This likely is inaccurate — it seems to be including things from the previous owner of the disk.) I find it interesting that it tried to account for so many things but aside from me finding move-optimization to be generally tedious without some extra gimmick, I take umbrage at having features like “taking inventory” and “looking at the map” somehow getting a negative tally. Yes, you could restart and avoid those (probably having to delete some sort of file on the disk) but it’s just uninteresting to do so, plus the whole ideal experience of an adventure game is to see the nooks and crannies and results of say, trying to wallop the wine snob.
This was shockingly polished (“polished” in a 1981 Apple II game sense) for a random unheard-of game that may or may not have been sold in a store. It did not make any magazines I could find, although that’s not equivalent to saying it wasn’t published; this was still an era where it was possible to just hang up a disk in a baggie somewhere. My current theory is that this was a college game (especially given the expensive model of Apple II needed for development on top of the collegiate references) and it could have landed in a computer store near a campus (maybe selling 30 copies). Even if this was just a disk swapped amongst students of the University of Rhode Island for fun, I hope one day we’ll get a better idea where this came from.
To bookend all this: the first-person adventures with views in multiple directions we’ve seen have had very different styles. Deathmaze 5000 and the other games from Med Systems (like Asylum) had sparse levels where just mapping them could be a challenge. The Haunted Palace was dense but eccentric and sometimes graphics at different angles didn’t match, but it otherwise went for a “narrow” view. The Japanese Mystery House had randomization and zoomed in views of objects. The Schrag games like Toxic Dumpsite kept the room count very low and didn’t feature any “hallway” sections, and come across the closest to the 90s games like Myst. While I still think it is possible the author(s) of The Maze saw Deathmaze 5000, it is also possible every single author mentioned above was coming up with the concept independently. Because none of them became a paradigm — even with Asylum getting respectable sales, and Mystery House being the first adventure in Japanese — there never was a “genre” established in the same manner as RPG “blobber” games.
UPDATE:
Not worth a new post, but–
I was asked by P-Tux7 in the comments, about the other possible titles. Here’s the relevant code:
9040 SC=NM+10DK+20KI-20MW+20QU+5HP+5IV+10*MP
9050 IF SC<2000 THEN 9060:P$=”THIRD GRADE FAILURE”: GOTO 9200
9060 IF SC<1500 THEN 9070:P$=”HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT”: GOTO 9200
9070 IF SC<1000 THEN 9080:P$=”HIGH SCHOOL EQUIVALENCY”: GOTO 9200
9080 IF SC<600 THEN 9090:P$=”ASSOCIATE OF SCIENCE”: GOTO 9200
9090 IF SC<400 THEN 9100:P$=”BACHELOR OF SCIENCE”: GOTO 9200
9100 IF SC<300 THEN 9110:P$=”MASTER OF SCIENCE”: GOTO 9200
9110 IF SC<200 THEN 9120:P$=”DOCTOR OF MAZEOLOGY”: GOTO 9200
9120 IF SC<50 THEN 9130:P$=”FULL PROFESSOR OF MAZEOLOGY”: GOTO 9200
9130 P$=”CHARLATAN OR TOTAL FOOL”
The curious thing is that “MW” (number of magic words uses) counts to SUBTRACT from the total score. The higher the score, the worse the diploma. What this implies is that at the very end of the game, you can drop the welcome mat, SAY WELCOME over and over to be “polite”, and change your degree from utter failure to a doctorate.
If you use it too many times, the number wraps over past negative into the very high positive numbers. (Correction: it’s <50 that's CHARLATAN, 50 to 200 that's FULL PROFESSOR. It whips from positive to negative conceptually, at least.)
Last time, I had a “wine snob” blocking the path, and I had just extracted cheese from a mousetrap (see below). To make further progress I had to overcome confusion about the game’s orientation of obstacles, in a big-picture-theory-of-games sense.
In many RPGs that use grid squares, obstacles are viewed from the squares immediately adjacent to them. If there’s a pit in Eye of the Beholder, and you approach the same square from a different angle, you’re viewing the “same pit” from an entirely new position.
I originally drew my map with this paradigm in mind; thinking of the mousetrap as a “pit”, I made my world-model such that the pit actually occupied the corner square, as the player faced that square.
However, it started to become clear farther in that obstacles only become “active” in the world-universe sense if the player is directly in the appropriate square. That is, if the player is one step away from a pit on the map, they can’t see or otherwise acknowledge the existence of a pit. This is a long-winded way of saying that the trap should have been placed one square up, and I had a blank on the map that I hadn’t reached yet.
I had understood this by the time I had reached the wine slob snob but the mousetrap was the very first thing I placed on my map, and since the puzzle stumped me for a while I hadn’t stopped to reconsider the placement. Going forward once leads to a wineglass on the ground.
This can be taken back to the snob, where you will need:
the uncorked wine bottle
the wineglass
the cheese
the crackers
and…. clean shoes.
To explain that last part, on walking back from stepping over the trap, there’s a strange “dotted” room which I assume represents dirt, or rat droppings, or something else messy.
I was never able to examine the dots. I just know that before there’s no special inventory object, and after there’s “something” on the player’s shoes.
Fortunately, CLEAN SHOES works back on the welcome mat (another use other than hiding a key and teleportation! I love how often what seems initially like scenery keeps showing up again).
With unclean shoes, the wine snob will not be able to smell the wine as you are pouring and you won’t make progress. Alternately, you can just teleport past the messy spot, but that requires using the welcome mat again since SAY WELCOME teleports you to wherever it happens to be.
With the wine poured, the wine snob now demands some cheese, followed by some crackers (here’s an alternate way to work out what that strange graphic is, but this moment would likely come long after finding the object).
And he’s still complaining! Given we’re in “adventure mode” the thing that seems most natural to do might not occur to a player. We can SAY NO.
The “metallic taste” is a hint. Fortunately (?) things are quite breakable in this game and just dropping the empty wine bottle anywhere will cause it to shatter, revealing a second key (the first got used for the violin case).
The map then turns north, leading by some nails…
…and then has two branches, one to the west and one to the east (and the NE corner).
The west branch leads to trouble quite quickly as there is a sign that warns about walking…
…and if you try to proceed on anyway the passage gets sealed off.
This feels like a moment from a CRPG. Now we just need some spinners and portions of the map with permanent darkness.
Fortunately, the remedy is down the other branch. First there’s what more or less look like a garage door…
…this is followed by a “bottle” (“CHATEAU PETROS 1929”) right next to a 1928 MODEL ‘A’ ROADSTER.
The car is empty of gas, but fortunately, the bottle is not the kind you want to drink.
Driving over to the northwest part of the map (you can GO CAR and any movement drives the car by default), the only thing there is a “wood shop”. The door is locked, although BREAK DOOR indicates “you can’t do that yet” indicating we might finally get to use the power of violence.
I’m stumped from here although I haven’t tried much. The only other thing I’ve found is a “bumper jack” left behind at the car’s start point.
I suspect I am quite close to the end; maybe get into the wood shop, and then something from that will help make it to the exit?
Just to recap from last time, I had a WELCOME MAT, TUNING FORK, VIOLIN, CASE, CORKSCREW, and CRACKERS. There was a mousetrap with cheese that would snap upon taking the cheese (I’ll be solving that one, but I’ll save discussing it for later). The beast was where I first focused my efforts.
With the case/box thing resolved, after some testing I realized somehow my attempts at playing the violin were while the game assumed it was in the case (I think if you’re holding both of them at once?) When the violin is out you can successfully PLAY VIOLIN and it does a tune, albeit not necessarily a great one:
Whoops! Fortunately I had the TUNING FORK, and after some fiddling I found TUNE VIOLIN worked while holding the fork. Then playing the violin is more succesful.
You can now refer to the beast as a CAT.
Just past the cat are some eyeglasses. With the eyeglasses worn you don’t have the “dim light” message anymore when pulling up the map with the M key, although the exact system is still a little cryptic:
What appears to be the case is that there’s no real “automap” as far as keeping track of where you’ve been. Rather, the game automatically shows a region near where you are standing, plus some of the area south, with the result you might see a good chunk of map or very little.
This suggests a secret room — see the isolated 1 by 1 spot — but my attempts at HIT WALL and SMASH WALL were for naught. At least WALL is a recognized word. CLIMB WALL gets the response SO IT’S COME TO THAT, HAS IT?
The eyeglasses have an unfortunate side effect. Previously, if you run into a wall, the game just says “OUCH!” but no adverse effects happen. With the eyeglasses on, your eyes start to swim and go blind.
Moving on from there, the hall turns and briefly stops by a niche with a wine bottle…
‘STRAWTOWN CELLARS 1982’
‘WE SHALL SELL NO WINE BEFORE MONDAY’
…with the route eventually stopped by a “wine snob”.
Trying to kill the man is fatal.
You can UNCORK BOTTLE (with the corkscrew) and try to pour it but the result is wine on the floor.
Given the emphasis on politeness, I thought maybe I needed to open with some sort of conversational word via SAY before I could offer CRACKERS or CHEESE or WINE (I don’t have the cheese yet, but I will in a moment). No luck. I even tried YELLing the words given the mention of the man being somewhat deaf, but I got no helpful response there either.
WHAT SHALL I DO? YELL PLEASE
OK – PLEASE
THANK YOU
(That’s the parser responding, not the man, since this happens elsewhere too.)
I did find in the process of this that SAY WELCOME teleports you back to the location of the welcome mat. I don’t know if this is for a puzzle or just meant to be a way to make travel faster. The welcome mat can be moved so I’d expect somewhere you could toss the mat under a door to teleport in, but I haven’t seen any circumstance like that yet.
While being frustrated at the wine snob, I figured out the cheese in the trap, via the process of dropping every item in my inventory.
With this done I could get the cheese safely. After process of elimination I found that either the welcome mat alone or the violin case alone both work; the violin case seems the clear better choice given the teleportation property of the mat.
I will take any suggestions at all. I’m also happy to hear from people who have beaten or otherwise hacked the game (use ROT13 if this is the case, though).
Renga in Blue 