Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

We’ve run through quite a bit of Peter Kirsch games now, with Magical Journey coming first chronologically, followed by Kidnapped, followed by kicking off the Softside Adventure of the Month series with Arabian Adventure. He edited the series but didn’t write them all; Crime Adventure was by Neil Bradley (age 12). David Steenson’s Windsloe Mansion Adventure (Jan. 1982) and James Bash’s Klondike Adventure (Feb. 1982) were the last of the series written by an outside party, as Kirsch started to crank out the entirety of the adventure series himself:

March: James Brand
April: Witches’ Brew
May: Dateline Titanic
June: Arrow One
July: Robin Hood
August: The Mouse That Ate Chicago
September: Menagerie
October: The Deadly Game
November: The Dalton Gang
December: Alaskan Adventure

The wild swerving between ideas means that Kirsch hit has some very early examples of adventure game genres, like conceptual-Sci-Fi-with-a-twist (Arrow One) and Western (The Dalton Gang). If I had to pick of the 1982 games, I’d say my favorite in terms of gameplay was Arrow One (with the alien language) and my favorite in terms of plot was The Mouse That Ate Chicago (which unfolded in a genuinely clever way, and with an ending “twist” that was logical and inevitable rather than just dropping from nowhere).

Frustratingly enough, I still haven’t been able to find more about Kirsch beyond what he wrote in Anatomy of an Adventure, where he stays strictly to the process of writing an adventure with no hint as to his biography otherwise.

Planning for my next adventure always begins long before the completion of my last, and it’s always different and perhaps even harder to solve.

He won’t have quite as many Kirsch games in 1983 because January 1983 is the last of the Adventures of the Month as a proper running concern; his games start to drop more irregularly.

The reason we’re playing a “bonus game” today is because in addition to their regular type-ins in the magazine proper, Softside also had a special “disk version” (see above). The disks often just had what was in the magazine (meaning the subscribers didn’t have to type in code themselves), but there was occasionally something extra. By this phase in Softside’s run games were starting to get more platform-specific; the Apple II March 1982 edition had: Hexapawn, Program Matcher, Disk Peeker/Poker, Gravity-Float Trace, and Magical Shape Machine; while all three had source code in the magazine, the latter three programs were Apple II only.

Screenshot of the Magical Shape Machine.

The Atari disk included a platform-specific adventure game from Kirsch and while it gets a mention in the magazine, there’s no source code (presumably it was considered too long, especially given the magazine was trying to be written for multiple machines at once). As far as why it didn’t simply get ported over to be used as one of the Adventures of the Month by Kirsch, that’s because it has Atari-specific graphics:

The game is odd in other ways, as there’s no regular parser.

Instead of typing a full two-word command as in most adventures, all you need to do is to type the keyword: GET or OPEN, for example, instead of GET BOX or OPEN DOOR. And, if an item is not relevant in a particular situation, you will not be able to DROP an item you are carrying. Such memory conserving devices allow the game to fit into just 16K of RAM.

I admit I tried booting up the game before seeing this instruction so I was trying to struggle and type GET FLASHLIGHT before realizing what was going on (you’re just supposed to type GET). This is made even more cryptic with the use of sound feedback; legal and illegal moves are indicated purely by sound, where a “good move” gets a “bell tone” while an “illegal move” gets a “loud buzz”. This makes it look like on the screen (other than objects moving around) there’s no response at all to actions.

The lore states that a “lone thief” entered the tomb of “Pharaoh Ickabathan”, stealing “the two rubies which had been placed as the eyes of the mummy”. The thief was confused trying to escape and dropped the rubies; the mummy, now sightless, found the thief and killed him. After, the mummy went back to its sarcophagus, but put a curse of darkness on the land that could only be broken with the restoration of the rubies.

There are two: one red and one green. The red ruby, although hidden, should be relatively easy to find. The green one is another matter altogether. In order to succeed you must find both, return them to the mummy, and exit the pyramid.

It’s sort of like the protagonist of Inca Curse messed things up and now we’re trying to fix it!

Quickly ignoring for the pyramid a moment and wandering into the desert, going east twice leads to a flashlight (which, again, you need to GET to pick up, not GET FLASHLIGHT). Heading back to the pyramid, then using CLIMB followed by LIGHT:

The hieroglyphs can be READ but the only feedback you get is a musical dirge, implying what they say by vibes. This is so deeply unusual — I can think of no other instance of reading-by-music — I clipped a video so you can listen.

Here’s a map of the rest:

There are two major points of difficulty, one partly created by the unusual verb system, one wholly created by the system. But to hit things in sequence:

East of the entrance is a four-way junction. To the north is a waterlogged room we’ll get by later (SWIM and JUMP don’t work)…

…whereas to the south there is a series of room consisting of 1.) a giant clam 2.) a bed in a dark room and 3.) a button. The button simply lowers a ladder later (and needs to be re-pressed after using the ladder since it will retract). The bed hides the first (red) ruby which can be found by using MOVE:

The clam is the first “unusual verb system” point. This is a puzzle in normal circumstances I’d be fine with but in order to test out verbs the process is VERB – WAIT FOR ANNOYING BUZZ – VERB – WAIT FOR ANNOYING BUZZ – etc. I still tried OPEN, PRY, HIT and a few other words in what amounted to literal minigame of guess-the-verb.

In my actual play I didn’t get this until later, but just to save time, the right verb is KICK, revealing a FUSE.

Going back to that junction and heading east, there’s a room with a rug and a button that doesn’t work. Doing GET will take the rug, revealing a key that you can also get.

A side passage from the same place leads up some stairs to a room with “something hanging from above”. If you’ve pushed the other button already the thing hanging (a ladder) drops to reveal further passage.

The top of the stairs have a locked door where the key straightforwardly works to unlock it, revealing the lair of the mummy.

We have the red ruby already; we’ll return shortly with the green one. Heading back out into the hall and going to the far west, there’s a FUSE BOX. While clearly this is where the FUSE goes, I had an impossible time figuring out how to put it in; REPLACE, PUT, INSERT, FIX, etc. were doing nothing.

I needed Dale Dobson walkthrough help although afterwards I realized I could have figured things out by paying more attention to the instructions. Specifically this spot:

And, if an item is not relevant in a particular situation, you will not be able to DROP an item you are carrying.

My brain just thought “no dropping” but glossed over the “relevant in a particular situation” spot — what this is meant to imply is that you can drop things, but only in puzzle-solving spots like this one. DROP is what places the fuse.

With the fuse fixed, the non-working button now drains the watery room.

This leads by a corridor with a rope, and further on a pit with a stake. TIE will tie the rope to the stake so you can go in the pit.

(Rubies technically can’t be green, but it’s part of a mummy that awakens and does curses of darkness, so I’m fine with that. Or to put things a different way, in a fictional universe adjacent to reality, the things that seem slightly off ought to be near the unreal parts.)

With both rubies in hand you can then go back and fix the mummy. Well, not FIX. DROP again. At least I knew now what to do.

It would be fun if this led to a big escape sequence with the mummy chasing us and parts of the geography modified to make puzzles act in a different way than coming in; an Aardvark game might do this. Instead we can just walk out to victory.

In context, as a game tossed on a diskmag, I would not have been disappointed; this certainly went farther graphically than I expected, and the clunky parser control at least had a logic to it even if in practice I had trouble. Circa March 1982 (assuming an older-me from that year) I likely would have filed the experience, and moved on to try to figure out Hexapawn.

The 3 by 3 board has three white pawns and three black pawns, where each pawn can either move forward one or capture diagonally, and the goal is to either advance a pawn to the other side or leave the opponent stuck with no moves. The computer opponent has black and starts at “random”, but eventually, through learning when it loses, it will always do best play. With optimal play black will always beat white.

Coming up: There’s only two games left, The Hobbit and Countdown to Doom. Anyone want to take bets?