I’ve covered early German computing history and especially the history of the Video Genie in my post here about The Mysterious House; you may want to read that post first, as today’s game is another one for Video Genie, the TRS-80 clone that managed to be more popular in Germany than the original.
This game previously hadn’t been indexed but Rob had brought it up in a discussion on German adventure games; some 1982 classified ads mention the game is for sale. It is one of the earliest known German adventure games.
Bode + Winkler are given as the publisher but I have found no evidence of them beyond the two classified ads for this game.
At the time I found a walkthrough but no game, and only managed to find it later buried amongst some assorted Video Genie disks, specifically the one called “spiele5.dsk”.
An author doesn’t get listed in the game itself. Cross-referencing the ad leads to a “Thomas Karcher” having the same address as the classified ad but I’m sticking with Bode + Winkler as the “author name”.
The newsletter of Club-80 has Alexander Wagner given as the “author” in a software catalog, but that’s apparently because he wrote the walkthrough in Issue 3 when he starts maintaining the club’s “Adventure Corner” in Issue 3 (September 1984).
The start of the walkthrough gives an action list, so I pulled it out right away. This isn’t just because of my difficulties with German; it’s also because all bets are off as far as what verbs might be considered “standard” when hopping over to another language. For example, this game includes both SCHLEICH (SNEAK) and LAUF (RUN) as verbs which are rare in English adventures from this era. The INVENTORY command is AUSRUESTUNG (EQUIPMENT).
LADE (LOAD)
GREIF (GRAB)
SCHLIESS (CLOSE)
NIMM (TAKE)
BEOBACHTE (WATCH)
WARTE (WAIT)
KLETTER (CLIMB)
SPRING (JUMP)
GEH (GO) — NORDEN, SUDEN, OST, WESTEN
RENN (RUN)
SCHLEICH (SNEAK)
LAUF (RUN)
LIES (READ)
DRUECK (PUSH)
ISS (EAT)
LEG (PLACE)
WIRF (THROW)
OEFFNE (OPEN)
SCHAU (LOOK)
SCHIESS (SHOOT)
AUSRUESTUNG (EQUIPMENT)
Generally speaking (at least in the games I’ve played so far) this means I can just think about translating nouns. This method was foiled early by a separable prefix which I’ll explain in a moment.
Our job is to break into a hunting lodge, steal a secret microfilm, and get out. We start with nothing whilst in a dark forest near the lodge.
ICH BEFINDE MICH IN EINEM DUNKLEN WALD.
I AM IN A DARK FOREST.
You can wander north, south, east, or west; if you wander in the wrong direction for too long the game says you are lost and starts over.
You need to start by going east before reaching a hedge.
ICH STEHE AN DER WESTSEITE EINES GRUNDSTUECKS, DAS VON EINER HOHEN HECKE UMGEBEN IST. EIN DURCHLASS IST NICHT ZU ENTDECKEN.
I’M STANDING ON THE WEST SIDE OF A PROPERTY SURROUNDED BY A HIGH HEDGE. PASSAGE THROUGH IS NOT VISIBLE.
Then go south, which travels along the hedge until arriving at the entrance. There’s an agent guarding the way.
ICH STEHE HINTER EINEM BAUM VERSTECKT AN DER SUEDSEITE EINES GRUNDSTÜCKS, DASS VON EINER HECKE UMGEBEN IST. 30 METER NÖRDLICH BEFINDET SICH DER EINGANG. EIN FEINDLICHER AGENT BEWACHT DEN EINGANG. ER TRAEGT EINE PISTOLE BEI SICH.
I’M STANDING HIDDEN BEHIND A TREE ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF A PROPERTY SURROUNDED BY A HEDGE. THE ENTRANCE IS 30 METERS TO THE NORTH. AN ENEMY AGENT IS GUARDING THE ENTRANCE. HE IS CARRYING A PISTOL.
This is where the verb list ended up being both helpful for me and (specifically for me) trouble. The presence of WATCH was exceedingly odd so I paused to wait, and a moment came up where the enemy agent’s back was turned.
I then tried RUN and then GRAB and … well, I was close. The game was fishing for GREIF AN, that is, using the separable prefix AN which turns GRAB into ATTACK, and yes, the AN really has to be there.
(Brief German lesson which I’m probably going to botch up: some verbs in German have separable prefixes. In some circumstances these prefixes will stay attached to a verb, that is, “angreifen” — to attack — will maintain the “an” in front. When the verb is in a sentence as a finite verb, the prefix moves to the end of the sentence.)
I imagine for a native German that’s completely implied by the verb list but my brain was not thinking that at all. I saw ICH BIN TOT quite a few times.
Having properly pummeled the enemy agent, you can nab their pistol and go inside. The room description mentions the possibility of going east and west but those both involve DIE DETONATION DER MINE and our protagonist messily dying.
Progress for a while after this is linear, as shown above, as long as you don’t get tempted to kill yourself again. For example, the first room of the hunting lodge has a empty elevator shaft to the east where going in kills you.
IM SCHACHT IST KEINE KABINE. ICH FALLE.
THERE’S NO CAR IN THE SHAFT. I’M FALLING.
Just north there’s some “caviar”…
ICH STEHE IN EINER KLEINEN KAMMER. IM NORDEN SEHE ICH EINEN SCHMALEN GANG, IM SUEDEN EINE TREPPE. NEBEN MIR LIEGT EINE KONSERVENDOSE MIT DER AUFSCHRIFT -ECHTER KAVIAR-.
I’M STANDING IN A SMALL ROOM. I SEE A NARROW CORRIDOR TO THE NORTH, AND A STAIRWAY TO THE SOUTH. A CAN OF FOOD LABELED “REAL CAVIAR” LIES NEXT TO ME.
…but opening the can kills you with a gas that makes you fall asleep.
Along the way there is a room with ammunition where you can load the empty gun you obtained from the enemy agent (incidentally, if the gun was empty, how was the agent shooting you earlier? Grrr.)
ICH STEHE IN EINEM KLEINEN, QUADRATISCHEN RAUM AM SUEDENDE EINES LANGEN GANGES. IN EINER ECKE STEHT EINE KISTE MIT MUNITION.
I’M STANDING IN A SMALL, SQUARE ROOM AT THE SOUTH END OF A LONG CORRIDOR. IN ONE CORNER IS A CASE OF AMMUNITION.
A bit farther north there’s a side passage that leads to a “rocket”. Going in farther I assume we somehow get blasted by the rocket or fall in or die in some other horrible way because the game is not specific. Getting past my translation issues demonstrates we’ve fallen in:
“Delete me from the pensioner list. I’m f fa faaaaalling!”
Avoiding the side passage and going north normally also kills you, this time with an alarm.
ICH STEHE IM SUEDEINGANG EINES ACHTECKIGEN RAUMES. EIN WEITERER EINGANG IST IM NORDEN. IN DER LINKEN UND RECHTEN WAND BEFINDEN SICH IN KNIEHOEHE ZWEI SELTSAME OEFFNUNGEN.
I’M STANDING IN THE SOUTH ENTRANCE OF AN OCTAGONAL ROOM. ANOTHER ENTRANCE IS TO THE NORTH. IN THE LEFT AND RIGHT WALLS, AT KNEE HEIGHT, ARE TWO STRANGE OPENINGS.
After some thought and fiddling with some gum nearby (red herring) and the caviar (still just deadly) I tried to JUMP (SPRING) north and it worked, leading to the north side of the map.
You can walk around the other side of the rocket and find a small key; otherwise, the way to go is east where there’s a room with a console inside containing a red button and a green button. Pressing the green button will launch the rocket at your home base and kill everyone. Pressing the red button will cause an explosion, I assume destroying the rocket. Fun design choices, hope your minion doesn’t have their finger slip!
ICH STEHE IN DER SCHALTZENTRALE. HINTER MIR FAELLT DIE TUER INS SCHLOSS. MITTEN IM RAUM STEHT EINE KONSOLE MIT EINEM ROTEN UND EINEM GRUENEN KNOPF.
I’M STANDING IN THE CONTROL CENTER. THE DOOR CLOSES BEHIND ME. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM IS A CONSOLE WITH A RED AND A GREEN BUTTON.
Pressing either button incidentally activates the only “special effect” of the game with a rapidly moving zigzag pattern rolling down the screen.
Assuming you’ve pressed the correct button, the way out is now blocked, although there is a new room (a dungeon) that is revealed. You can go in and find a skeleton as well as a note containing a numerical combination which will get used in a moment.
ICH BEFINDE MICH IN EINEM ENGEN MUFFIGEN KERKER. UMPFFF! ICH ENTDECKE AM BODEN EIN MENSCHLICHES SKELETT. NEBEN MIR LIEGT EIN BESCHRIEBENER ZETTEL.
I’M IN A CRAMPED, MUSTY DUNGEON. UMPFFF! I DISCOVER A HUMAN SKELETON ON THE FLOOR. A NOTE LIES NEXT TO ME.
Heading south, you get attacked by three enemy agents and have a gunfight. This is just a matter of typing SHOOT AGENT (SCHIESS AGENT) over and over until the luck works in your favor.
With the agents dead, you can step over them to find a safe and use the combination at the skeleton (it was 898 for me, looking at the walkthrough it seems to be randomly generated). Inside is the microfilm.
ICH STEHE VOR DEM TRESOR. DIE TUER IST OFFEN. IM TRESOR LIEGT EIN MIKROFILM.
I’M STANDING IN FRONT OF THE SAFE. THE DOOR IS OPEN. THERE’S A MICROFILM IN THE SAFE.
Getting out I thought was the only hard part. Everything up to here was reasonable to solve, if mostly a death-trap maze where sometimes you just have to test out the red button. In the same room as the safe, you can shoot the safe door, which somehow opens a secret door. I assume I missed a hint somewhere?
IM WESTEN OEFFNET SICH EINE GEHEIMTUER, HINTER DER SICH EIN FAHRSTUHL BEFINDET.
A SECRET DOOR OPENS TO THE WEST, BEHIND WHICH LIES AN ELEVATOR.
The secret elevator leads back to the entry room of the hunting lodge, so escape is now just a matter of making a beeline south to victory.
The president says to Central: congratulations, you did it!
I don’t know if this game had any particular influences; CLUB-80 did have Scott Adams in their catalog so I’m going to assume some Secret Mission. I also liked how the gunfight with the three agents resembled the circumstance in Crowther/Woods adventure where multiple dwarves have built up, just in that game you’re using an axe and in this one you’re using a gun.
Map from the CLUB-80 newsletter showing both Alexander who wrote the walkthrough and Gunther who was the president of CLUB-80. There’s a “Walter” in either Switzerland or Austria.
Alexander did keep up the Adventure Corner column; in the issue I pulled the map from, he gives a walkthrough for the graphical adventure Atlantean Odyssey. It is possible more of interest may be pulled up in later years (I have yet to read every issue), but for now this seems a good way to end my non-English explorations of 1982.
Map from the Adventure Corner walkthrough.
Coming up: The last 1982 game of Peter Kirsch.
Renga in Blue 
Speaker of German here: No, from the Verb GREIF (GRAB) (wrongly given as BREIF in the list above) I never would have assumed there is a GREIF AN (ATTACK). The words are semantically so different that I’d hardly notice that the verb element is actually the same in both cases.
What I find quite charming about the game is the XP-05 AN ZENTRALE before each game output, where Agent XP-05, as it were, describes the surroundings to Central, and the prompt ERWARTE ANWEISUNG (WAITING FOR INSTRUCTIONS) makes clear that we as the player assume the role of Central, and instruct the otherwise quite passive protagonist.
That makes me feel much better! (especially because it means I probably won’t get tripped up by that on future German games that supposedly give a verb list, although I might still have that happen if it’s machine code and I try to yank it out since the separable prefix could be stored elsewhere)
The instructions thing is a little like CIA Adventure (“WHAT DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD DO”) which might also have been an influence.
I agree, assuming the verb list is exhaustive, it wouldn‘t occur to me to try „Greif an“ after „Greif“ not working in this situation.
Might rather have tried to jump, push, throw or – for fun – eat the enemy agent instead.
Hi Jason, interesting coverage – I couldn’t quickly find your email, so I put this in the comments, please feel free to delete it afterwards (sorry for any formatting problems):
-> The text would translate as something like: “Delete me from the pensioner list. I’m f fa faaaaalling!”
-> I‘d translate as “President [of the country, I assume] to Headquarters [of the secret service, I understand, the one you’ve been in touch with during the game]: Congratulations! You did it!”.
-> Southeast of Munich with Salzburg to its north that would be Austria (Switzerland only starts much further west). I assume the club leader had his Austrian post address, but wasn’t 100% sure where exactly to place that on his map.
Thanks! That’s still really idiomatic, is “delete me from the pensioner list” a normal thing to say?
re: the maps, it’s clipped from the whole thing but if you put Switzerland on there poor Walter? is on there too
FWIW I have never heard the pensioner list phrase in my life.
Ah, sorry, misunderstood the Austria/Switzerland thing then.
As for that phrase, I‘ve also never heard it before. Maybe it was a supposedly funny comment in some nerdy circles in the early 80s without gaining wider traction.
By its style it sounds a bit like the very free ‚translations‘ done by certain German dub actors mainly in the 70s and into the 80s (German speakers can check out the Wikipedia entry on „Schnodderdeutsch“).
I can also confirm that the mental jump from GREIF to GREIF AN is not banal. You described the weird German verb grammar thing pretty well, and it’s one of the reasons why German IF is hard to write well.
Also, “Wagner” is an extremely common name in South Germany, Austria and Switzerland, so even if two Wagner’s live in the same village, they are not necessarily closely related.
It should probably have been ATTACKIERE or SCHIESSE or ERSCHIESSE or something. GREIF is only suspicious because it’s not really a verb you’d use as-is in a game, but I don’t know if I’d have made the mental leap quickly.
Agreed Wagner might be just coincidence. It seemed worth noting, though.
Do some German games avoid particular words (as Gunther suggested) in order to get by the issue?
The way I read it, Alexander Wagner is only given as author for the article on the game, not of the game itself (the list you link, rather than a software catalogue, is a list of contents published in the club newsletter up to 31 December 1989). Which might also mean the list of verbs is based on his personal experience, but not necessarily exhaustive or precise (and could possibly account for the “greif” / “greif an” issue since it seems the former is not used separately, at least in his walkthrough).
Given the classified ads in Computer Persönlich of late July and early September 1982 are only for this game and mention “special conditions for retailers” as well as “production and distribution” being handled by Bode + Winkler, my guess is these latter ones are either the authors themselves (being mathematicians with a degree) or close to him/them – they are the ones showing up in the copyright in your screenshot.
FWIW, the game also shows up for sale in the list of products distributed by/through an apparently more ‘professional/commercial’ seller or shop called ‘Computer-Service’ (located in a different area of Germany) in the September and October issues of CHIP magazine.
The catalog index (which includes a lot of utility software, not just games) has an author column, that’s where I’m getting the author from.
It‘s an index of the newsletter content / articles as the introduction states, too. Many titles are not program names and „Verfasser“ means author of a written or oral piece, not author of a game. You can find them with their respective authors in the corresponding newsletters.
Therefore, this only shows Wagner was the author of the walkthrough. Based on his own introductory remarks there, I don‘t think he also wrote the game itself.
Yeah, that’s the impression I got too, although my Swedish/Norwegian only helps me so much when I’m squinting at a grainy typed page full of endless German compound words and complicated grammar!
I think I may have found the real author of this game: Thomas Karcher.
He’s listed at the exact same address in Vollbüttel (a small village in Lower Saxony) in the 1/85 issue of Atari-Magazin (p. 20) as one of the winners of a T-shirt in a contest they had run.
I’d guess he was only a young teenager when he wrote the game, and the Bodo & Winkler stuff was just a fake company he made up to sound more professional.
Wild! I found what you’re looking at and I’m hesitant to call that a slam dunk (could be a pair of people who wrote it, for instance, given the double-company-name) so I’ll put the company name as the author but mention Karcher. At least it gives a thread to try tracking farther.
Yeah, in that case it could have been a pair of brothers, or maybe classmates from the local school.
I don‘t want to rain on your parade, but to me that‘s still not a smoking gun. The ads don‘t give an exact address (as opposed to the Atari magazine) and the four digit ZIP code was valid for an entire area with thousands of people.
Yes, Vollbüttel probably was a village of less than 1000 people back then. Nevertheless, the winner of a prize in an Atari magazine two and a half years after someone published an adventure for the Video Genie with the same village showing up in the ad to me does not yet mean it‘s necessarily the same person.
Well, it’s true about the zipcode, but that village is very tiny. Two different people actively writing to computer/video game magazines from such a small place in a two and a half year span in the early ’80s, when the rate of adoption for that technology was still low? Not a smoking gun, but that would be a pretty big coincidence, IMHO.
The only other leads I came up with are a legal book about drivers licences (?!) first published in 1994 and written by “Bode & Winkler” (a lawyer and a law professor, it would seem) and a coder named Rudolph Riedel who, at least as of the 1990s, was living in Vollbüttel and writing Amiga software. He’s still active on Github (new program just a few weeks ago), so maybe he might know something about this?
Yes, I also looked for other promising leads and came up with a blank (not the Grosse Pointe one ;-)).
As for the village, someone I know very well spent his teenage years in the 80s in a West German village of about 1000 people. At least by the mid-80s there were dozens of kids in his age group with a computer (C64, Schneider, Atari) swapping lots of games, reading and exchanging magazines etc. and that‘s just the ones he knew / haunts out with. I‘m not saying it couldn‘t be the same, just that it‘s far from 100% to me.
Maybe asking the Rudolph Riedel you dug up about anybody active in programming in Vollbüttel in the 80s he might know about is indeed the most promising idea.
I’m checking out the contents of all those Video Genie software disks (the programs actually work on TRS-80 if you put them on another disk with TRSTools), and there are some other German text adventures I don’t know if you’ve seen yet.
The one that caught my eye the most is a copyrighted 1980 game called Villa Neumann (on disk 8), by MCG Software (apparently owned by a certain Gabriel who placed a lot of classified ads in German magazines at the time).
Wow, this one’s been hiding in plain site the whole time! It’s actually in all the big TRS-80 archives, and you can even play it online at Willus. Looks like it was dumped decades ago, too. I think the fact that MCG didn’t seem to advertise their games by name and that Goldklang mistakenly listed it as being in English ended up making it kind of impossible to search for. Quite typical for the unfathomed abyss that is the TRS-80 software library, though…
At least there won’t be any controversy over authorship here: It’s Christa and Gerhard Gabriel (a husband and wife team, you’d assume), and the “MC” in the company name appears to have just stood for Micro Computer.
The other adventures I’ve seen so far that aren’t widely known are Cruiser Adventure by David Librik I think in 1984 (disk 27), and Abenteuerburg by Rainer Schmies I think in 1983 (disk 11), the source code for which was published here (page 15):
https://oldcomputers.dyndns.org/public/pub/rechner/eaca/common/zeitschriften/genie%20data/genie-data_1983-heft-3_juli-august.pdf
Take a look at those screenshots of Testament (the French game) and compare with this game.
WTF?! I thought something seemed familiar, but I dismissed it. Now I’ve gone and looked at the code and there’s absolutely no doubt: Testament is a translation of Villa Neumann!
It’s not just the screen display, it’s all the text. Locations, items, messages, etc. The only noticeable difference seems to be that Testament changes the name from Alfred E. Neumann to Monsieur Martin. I guess MAD Magazine was more popular in Germany…
I mean, of all the bizarre stuff we’ve dug up here, this really takes the cake. What are the chances?!
The thought just struck me, though: How do we know that Villa Neumann itself isn’t just a translation of an obscure American game? The MAD reference and subject matter seem very “American teenaged coder” to me, which made up a large part of the early TRS-80 adventure scene. The platform’s library is so full of unknown, uncredited/undated stuff like this that it’s distinctly possible, even for a game this early.
From what I’ve seen, it turns out the game is the same as Korenvliet.
If it really came from the US, I think it would most likely be some kind of type-in in a book or magazine.
Bingo! These are all actually translations of Stoneville Manor. Damn, that game has almost achieved Roger Chaffee Quest-like levels of international ubiquity at this point…
This also makes the 1980 date on Villa Neumann bogus, as Stoneville first appeared as a type-in in the 8/81 issue of Creative Computing. Those Gabriels were a sneaky pair, it would seem…
You know, I should have been tipped of by the “cannot gonflable” in particular when I first got those screenshots from Bruno Vivien, but like I think Jason has mentioned before, sometimes seeing an adventure in a different language can sort of throw your whole perspective off, even if it’s in a language that you can speak!
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