Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Surprise!

I’ve been doing research on The Hobbit published by the Australian/British company Melbourne House. One thing I knew ahead of time is that The Hobbit was technically their second “1982” adventure, as they published a port of Crowther/Woods for ZX Spectrum by Abersoft. I was never planning on doing a stand-alone post for the game as it really is just an abbreviated Adventure; also, Melbourne House only picked it up for publication later.

Before it got snazzier art. Source.

However, I found there was another adventure game that Melbourne House did publish before The Hobbit. I’m going to save my full history for that entry, but to be brief: they were originally a book publisher (the publisher, Alfred Milgrom, had experience dating all the way back to a student newspaper at the University of Melbourne) and they branched into games, with their first “original” product being a book of type-ins for ZX80. Type-in books made a fair amount of their profits in the early days before they hit a best-seller with The Hobbit.

One of the books — advertised at least as early as October 1982 — was Over the Spectrum, edited by Philip Williams.

The last game of the book is just called Adventure. Despite it clearly having some tutorial aspects it is definitely a full game; so much so that we’ve seen it on this blog in a modified version by a different author. I’m not going to announce which until after going through the game, so you can test your knowledge of 1982 adventures and try to puzzle it out early.

The games were republished a year later in tape form so I didn’t need to worry about typing in the type-in.

Via eBay.

This is yet another “gather-the-treasures” game but at least there’s the excuse of being a tutorial of sorts. (While the text doesn’t have a “tutorial sequence”, there’s fairly detailed source explanations.)

The tutorial aspect also gives some excuse for the fussy parser, where “take” works but not “get”, and you also need to type the first part of a “noun phrase” even if that happens to be the adjective. That is, to get the lamp — I mean take the lamp — the right command is either “take brass lamp” or “take brass”.

There’s a locked trapdoor you can’t get in to start, so here’s the map of the aboveground:

You can scoop up a bottle of rum in the kitchen heading north, and be just a little startled stepping outside to find an “endless desert”. I mean, I realize people live in deserts, and it might not be the main character’s house, but usual the start area is a little more pastoral.

Also, the game doesn’t let you move anywhere, including from the starting room, unless you’re carrying the brass lamp. That means for the purposes mapping the semi-maze out via dropping objects, the only item you have to work with is the bottle.

Eventually you can find a “shovel” and “lake” at an oasis. The lake will pull you under and drown you if you try to go in, but the shovel is immediately useful: testing DIG all over the desert (the one case where it doesn’t feel weird) reveals a large key in a random spot. This key unlocks the trapdoor in the house. I guess someone had it fall out of their pocket. I hate trying to find my lost car key in an endless desert.

The lake gets taken care of later.

Here, now, is the area below:

The down-below kicks off with a troll guarding a sword. You can “kill troll” and the game will ask you what with; I fortunately paid attention to a spot in the directions that mentioned you can just hit enter to specify you mean your bare hands. That works on the troll, with the only tricky part being it’s a “mean troll” so you have to call it by that whole name or just “mean”.

You can then proceed east to find out whoever resides here (us, or weird uncle, someone else) is residing almost directly over the GATES OF HELL.

I’m going to say weird uncle.

The way is locked so you need to do a side trip down a “passage”. Along the way there’s a pirate who snatches your bottle of rum and leaves a gold coin behind…

…and a green dragon that needs to be killed by using the sword twice. Unlike Crowther/Woods bare hands don’t work here.

At the end of the passage is a “rope tied between the floor and the ceiling” and doing “cut rope” reveals an ivory key. This not only is the key for the gates of hell, but it also counts as a treasure (just like the gold coin from the pirate and Persian rug from the dragon).

Going into hell, we find a devil that says we have to go the right direction (this half-resembles death in Adventureland where you can make it out of limbo if you randomly pick the right way out).

The correct way is west; this leads to a “silver wand” which gets used almost immediately after to summon a bridge over a chasm, Crowther/Woods style.

Along the way there’s a part where you can dive directly into hell if you want…

…but otherwise the whole point is to nab the silver wand and ruby along the way and reach a passage which lands you back where the rope/ivory keys combination was. There’s also a “snorkel” along the way and this helps get the last treasure, and if you are carrying it you can safely dive into the lake in the desert.

If it hasn’t struck you yet, this is Hells Bells by Jacqueline Wright.

The desert is a forest in that game; the brass lamp is a candle. The pirate is now a witch (which is interesting since the pirate likely comes from Scott Adams, which likely comes from Crowther/Woods, so we have a fourth-generation “telephone game” copy). Hell mostly operates the same, with a “zombie” this time and the “angel of death” giving threat if you go the wrong direction.

Instead of getting a snorkel for a lake at the end, you get a gas mask for a sulfurous well, which honestly makes more sense to me than the original. (The diamond is implied to be at the bottom of the lake, right? If we’re getting “dragged down” by either bad swimming skills or some sort of local water suction, how do we get back up again?)

I’m not begrudging the author here, but it’s fascinating to see that someone took the book essentially as it was supposed to be — a model to copy in order to write new games. I doubt Melbourne House ever became aware of Hells Bells, though.

Next: Actually The Hobbit unless my research picks up something else wild I need to cover first. Includes never before seen history!