Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to do one of these; my 1981 in review was posted December 20, 2021.

The chart with plot types like Rescue, Escape, etc. just isn’t that helpful up to 1982 — too many arbitrary assignments — but I did do a chart just of Treasure Hunts, that is, games modeled essentially off the original Crowther/Woods paradigm of gathering X things together.

There’s still some fuzzy aspects — like lost games, or games that have been discovered since I passed a particular year that I haven’t returned to yet — so assume a margin of error. (On top of that, some games are hard to categorize — is Dateline Titanic, where you are rescuing passengers by bodily tossing them in boats, a “treasure hunt”?) In general, you can say while the percentage dropped dramatically at first it went flat starting in 1980 hovering around 40%.

Regarding why, some of this may be the creative version of the Eternal September effect. It used to be, when a new school year started and there was a large influx of people on the Internet, it took a while for standards to take hold so there was chaos in September. Then, with the rise of AOL and other services in the early 90s, anyone could go on the Internet at any time, hence Eternal September. The creative version of the effect is that there are still people in 1982 whose only exposure to an adventure was Crowther/Woods so they do the natural thing and copy it (like Sphinx Adventure); also note that this chart is mixing all countries together, so while US authors like Adams and Kirsch were cranking out enough games to shake off the Treasure Hunt bug, plenty of others were getting started for the first time.

Furthermore, the Treasure Hunt structure is a convenient way to branch the gameplay in a way that requires less work on the part of the author. When there’s an “escape” game, it’s possible to go super-linear, but if the same author wants the kind of branching they’d get from a Treasure Hunt they need to carefully mete out when items and locations are available. It’s easier to simply require 9 things than it is to create interdependencies that form a satisfying structure.

Before getting into 1982, here’s my “curious firsts” list from 1981:

– First use of relative direction: Mystery Mansion
– First use of landmark navigation with no compass: Empire of the Over-Mind
– First defined player character: Aldebaran III
– First use of choice-based interaction in a parser game: Stuga
– First dynamic compass interface: Spelunker
– First dynamic puzzle generation: Mines
– First free-text conversation in an adventure context: Local Call for Death
– First adventure game comedy: Mystery Fun House
– First adventure to use graphics in every room: Atlantean Odyssey by Teri Li
– First Tolkien adventure conversion: Ringen by Hansen, Pål-Kristian Engstad, and Per Arne Engstad
– First Lovecraft game of any type: Kadath by Gary Musgrave
– First graphic adventure with some action solely in the graphics: Mystery House by Roberta Williams
– First adventure written specifically for children: Nellan is Thirsty by Furman H. Smith
– First “stateless” CYOA game written for computer: Mount St. Helens by Victor Albino
– First 3D graphic adventure: Deathmaze 5000 by Frank Corr, Jr.
– First adventure game that involves traveling back through time:
Odyssey #3, Journey Through Time by Joel Mick and James Taranto OR Galactic Hitchhiker by A. Knight
– First adventure game with outside third-person character movement: Castles of Darkness by Michael Cashen
– First adventure game with conversation menus and an action mini-game: Cyborg by Michael Berlyn

Since I last made this list, I looped back to a 1980 game which is worthy of inclusion:

– First adventure game on a console: Bally’s Alley by John Collins

I’ve got deeper into non-English games since last I made the list, so here’s the first occurrence I have so far of languages other than English, not counting translations from English games:

– Stuga (Swedish, 1978)
– Ringen (Norwegian, 1979)
– Dracula Avontuur (Dutch, 1980)
– Mission secrète à Colditz (French, 1980)
– Das Geheimnisvolle Haus (German, 1981)
– Mystery House (Japanese, 1982)
– Avventura nel Castello (Italian, 1982)

I’m otherwise not adding games from 1982; we start to get into territory with many caveats. Certainly people were producing original ideas, but they’re hard to encapsulate in “first” bullet points; things like the bizarre combination shmup / adventure game Probe One: The Transmitter or the French pocket calculator game Des Cavernes dans le poquette.

Updating my recommendations, a new item proudly enters the first list:

1. Games everyone should play

Crowther and Woods Adventure, 350 points (1977)
Zork I by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling and Bruce Daniels (1980)
Deadline by Marc Blank

With the above list I truly am referring to everyone, but if you’re reading this blog you’re more likely to be interested in list 2:

2. For adventure enthusiasts

Crowther and Woods Adventure, 350 points (1977)
Voodoo Castle by Alexis Adams (1979)
Local Call For Death by Robert Lafore (1979)
Kadath by Gary Musgrave (1979)
Empire of the Over-Mind by Gary Bedrosian (1979)
Zork I by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling and Bruce Daniels (1980)
Wizard and the Princess by Ken and Roberta Williams (1980)
Gargoyle Castle by Kit Domenico (1980)
Will ‘O the Wisp by Mark Capella (1980)
Zork II by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling
Cyborg by Michael Berlyn
Palace in Thunderland by Dale Johnson and Ken Rose
Frankenstein Adventure by John R. Olsen Jr.
The Black Sanctum by Ron Krebs, Stephen O’Dea, and Bob Withers

I’m going to do one swap, taking out Deathmaze 5000 (fun for what it is, but deeply flawed) and fit in

Asylum II by William Denman

which has the cleanest design of the series while still being absolute suffering in a few places. The plastic surgeon alone makes it worth a play.

El Diablero by Ken Kalish

An absolute surprise to me, with some extremely clever magic using the narratives of Carlos Castenada as a mythical universe and having not just one but two puzzles where solving a puzzle also means “solving” the plot.

Murdac by Jonathan R. Partington

You have to expect the norms of Cambridge games (expect some of your lives to be spent just gathering information) and there’s also one old-school maze, but this otherwise is one of the most solid games I’ve played of the old school.

Starcross by Dave Lebling

The hardest of sci-fi; a game that rewards experimentation in ways that very few games from this era do.

Temple of Bast by Malcolm McMahon

(Make sure your TRS-80 is in Model 1 mode for this one!) Includes one of the most clever puzzles of 1982.

Adventure 200 by C.J. Coombs

I’d normally hesitate to recommend a game with as many mazes as this one does, but the payoff is incredible. What would happen if you had a game framed like a regular treasure hunt, but was actually a heist movie?

Zork III by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling

Might as well finish the trilogy! This isn’t quite as strong as the other two Infocom games from the year — it’s clear it is built from scattered parts — but it’s still a worthy ending.

The Queen of Phobos by William R. Crawford and Paul Berker

A group of four thieves trying to steal a mask, and you need to get to it first. Includes some Apple II vector graphics that actually make the style work.

3. Things I personally enjoyed quite a bit that didn’t make the above list

Also known as my “subjective fun” list, as I know I sometimes enjoy an experience but would have reservations recommending it generally. Previously I had

Trek Adventure by Bob Retelle (1980)
Crystal Cave by Anonymous and Kevin O’Gorman (1980)
Dracula Avontuur by Ronald van Woensel (1980)
House of Thirty Gables by Bill Miller (1980)
Odyssey #3, Journey Through Time by Joel Mick and James Taranto (1980)
Hezarin by Steve Tinney, Alex Shipp and Jon Thackray (1981)
Madness and the Minotaur by Tom Rosenbaum (1981)

To which I add

Ferret by the Ferret Authors

40 years to write, and 6 months to beat. I don’t regret my time spent at all.

Time Zone by Roberta Williams

Another monster, and this one I solved without hints. Despite the flaws I point out during my many posts, I enjoyed myself unironically and this was my favorite of the early Sierra games.

Mystery House by Tsukasa Moritani and Naoto Oyachi

The first adventure game in Japanese. I recommend specifically the FM-7 version which uses a traditional parser (rather than splitting verb and noun into separate lines). As of this writing the FM-7 version has not been translated.

Cornucopia by Brian Cotton

The idea this game could have been lost forever horrifies me. The framing world is genuinely clever and despite some issues with bugs this game had enough underlying systems going on for me to enjoy myself.

The Troll Hole Adventure by Long Playing Software (1980)

I do not know why I found this game for the rare Interact computer so compelling. Sometimes there’s just a wild card for no reason.

4. Some bonus games for historians

Also known as games I had trouble fully enjoying, but I recognize still did fascinating things.

The Count by Scott Adams (1979)
The Prisoner by David Mullich (1980)
Galactic Hitchhiker by A. Knight (1980)
The Institute by Jyym Pearson, Robyn Pearson, Norm Sailer, and Rick Incrocci (1981)

To which I am obliged to add

The Hobbit by Philip Mitchell, Veronika Megler, Alfred Milgrom and Stuart Ritchie

which influenced an entire generation of gamers, some who didn’t bother to try for the ending but just wanted to experiment. It has so many design flaws I can’t recommend the game on its face but anyone who cares about text adventure history should try this.

The Mask of the Sun by Alan Clark, Larry Franks, Christopher Anson, and Margaret Anson

The graphical quality and technology here seem from another universe than my other 1982 games. It has lots of design jank, but it also clearly signaled what the Apple II was really capable of.

My usual disclaimer: I always feel horrible about making these sort of lists because of all the games left out. There are so many clever and worthy moments but out. I can pick a game at literal random and it has something interesting going on (The Breckenridge Caper of 1798, a game trying to teach history about being a spy in the Napoleonic era; The Sands of Egypt with parallax animation coming from the developer’s arcade background; Toxic Dumpsite, a game from a Myst-like perspective for the TRS-80).

The whole point of All the Adventures is to not write reviews as much as view the entire tapestry of adventure games. I want to see the paths of where people went and try to learn why people made the choices they did. (Was there a technical limitation? Was everyone designing a certain way? Was there a specific non-obvious influence?) I want history at an explanatory level in a way that glows with the vital energy that adventure games have.

In order to do that, of course, the best things is to have — more games! Not splitting my multiple-part posts (like Misadventures 1 through 3) I’ve gone through this 434 times now.

1983, at my current list, has exactly five hundred games.

Mind you, there are still some that will likely drop off (I’m not replaying a translation of an existing game, for instance) and some that will sort into a different year (even back to 1982 or earlier) but that’s still more games than for the entire 14 years of the project. I don’t anticipate taking that long — for one thing, there were some gaps in those 14 years, and for another, I’m better at doing this, and for yet another, I’m going to do more combining together of multiple games into a single entry. (Mind you, doing that doesn’t save an enormous amount of time, but it saves some.)

Looking ahead we have
– Five Infocom games, including Planetfall and Enchanter
– Twin Kingdom Valley
– Nearly 150 ZX Spectrum games
– Four games called Haunted House
– The first big text adventure competition
– The year the Japanese adventure market starts revving, with at least 20 new games
– The first original adventure game in Spanish
and many more things, some which I don’t even know about yet!

Coming up: I’m reversing a bit to 1981, as I have a wildly obscure Apple II graphical game I am dying to share. I have other off-beat things scheduled and I’m also planning on taking a break in there somewhere. Somewhere?