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.)
Renga in Blue 
I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to move the ladder before realizing you were supposed to be on the roof. Actually pulled the wheels off the car and spent at least half an hour trying to attach them to the ladder to make some sort of rolling ladder-wagon chimera.
Ah well. A strange little game. Thanks for this bit of nostalgia.
Why does it let you pull off the wheels?!?? Such an odd choice of interaction to add.
What was the extra use of the mat you were talking about?
If you drive over something sharp (the corkscrew, the nails, broken glass from either the goblet or the wine bottle) you will get a flat tire. I assume that’s what the jack is for — you can DROP JACK, RAISE CAR, and CHANGE TIRE to get moving again. I assume letting you pull off *all* of the wheels (TAKE WHEELS) and wander around with them is just a red herring, but maybe there was some other possibility I missed? Maybe the hybrid welcome-mat-wagon was the real solution all along.
If you found yourself trying to carry too much, you might have started dropping stuff along the way, and if you tried dropping or throwing the wine bottle from the garage onto the bare floor, you would have discovered another way to die; the bottle breaks and you end up overcome by the fumes. However, if you drop the welcome mat first and *then* drop the wine bottle, it lands harmlessly on the mat and rolls away. Might have been an interesting puzzle if there was ever a real need to manage your inventory more carefully. (I thought maybe the ladder might be carry-able if I dropped everything else, which led to that amusing detour.)
Interesting to see that cribbed from the Crowther & Woods vase/pillow thing once again, but here to prevent death, rather than the standard breakable treasure puzzle as seen recently in Windmere/Zodiac.
The “sold in a baggy at a nearby software store” theory is definitely possible, along with the local users group idea I mentioned. In either case, it must have ended up on a BBS and then spread from there. It does seem like whoever wrote this underestimated its commercial potential, though. There were plenty of software companies on the Apple II scene back then who would have gladly picked this up, got it reviewed in Softalk, etc.
Yeah, despite all the mean spots, Apple II folks circa 81/82 would have dug this
Getting a real “distributor” around then was non-trivial though and maybe they just didn’t have enough to go the mail-order-ad-in-magazine route
Huh, interesting… I think you discovered a bug in the game, that walking in the ceiling theory doesn’t make sense to me. What I did was taking out the car wheels and then INSTALL WHEELS on the ladder (I think you must still have the hammer and the nails, or just the hammer, in your inventory), then get ladder while it is still sideways, cart it all the way to the right spot, drop it, remove wheels, raise ladder (I did it with the jack but I guess that wasn’t needed after all), climb ladder and finally jump down.
On a side note, I began to doubt if this game was really from 1981. First, according to the wine snob reaction, the wine bottle was meant to me a cheap wine, produced recently. It doesn’t make sense for it to be labeled 1982 (a wine from the future?) Second, by looking at a file in the disk (MAZE HELLO) a date is clearly visible – NOVEMBER 1983. I don’t know what’s the story here but these two facts together made me suspicious. It could be possible it was finished in 1981 (hence the title screen date) and published early 1982, and the 1983 reference was somehow added in the file by someone else afterwards.
at least it’s not totally glitched, you can’t JUMP DOWN from the right spot until after you’ve done CLIMB LADDER
Vintage adventure games seem particularly prone to these dating shenanigans, because the authors would often write a reusable engine of some sort à la Scott Adams (all the magazine articles of the era encouraged this) and then the game (and even future games, as I recently encountered while researching Atlantean Odyssey) would get back-dated to that, rather than to when the actual game content was finished, let alone released/published.
Any hint of a name or initials in the code, btw?
No name of authors that I could find, unfortunately.
Even that date of “November, 1983” is buried in the code, I could only see it with Copy II Plus (using view file MAZE HELLO.)
Also, found a third evidence of my suspicion: when in integer basic mode, CATALOG brings a heading that contains “C1982”
“C1982 DSR A#254”
Could DSR be the initials of the author?
Yeah, I think you got it! I’ll try to look into possible suspects, but it’ll be tough obviously.
Forget it. Found out that’s the standard Diversi-DOS catalog heading – DSR being the publisher of Diversi-DOS.
Haha.. That actually feeds right into the theory I’ve developed:
This game may have been written by Bill Basham, of DSR (Diversified Software Research). Diversi-DOS seems to have been released around September of 1982, but had clearly been in development for a while. Now, there are several other (admittedly tenuous) links that make me think this is a possibility:
-Basham/DSR went on to release a number of innovative Apple II programs throughout the decade, but his start as a programmer was in games. He released Dog Fight through Micro Lab in 1980, which was actually a pretty big hit in the early Apple II scene. He even threw it in with early copies of Diversi-DOS as a bonus.
-He was an innovator in both shareware (he distributed most of the DSR programs as free to copy “try it then buy it” software) and BBS/online chat software with D-Dial.
-He was a highly educated and sophisticated guy, with degrees in electrical engineering and medicine. He had grown up in a university milieu, as his father was a professor, and he himself had been a practicing physician before choosing to concentrate on developing software full-time.
-He was also an accomplished musician, and wrote the Diversi-Tune program.
So, if you look at all the elements (university snobs, musical references, etc.) in the game, the surprising level of polish and expensive, beefed-up system it requires, and the mysterious way it seems to have been distributed? It’s a wild swing, but I’m going to say there’s a small chance that Basham wrote this one for fun when the Hi-Res adventure craze hit the Apple II, then distributed it in some non-standard fashion a bit later on as a joke, never having attached his real name to it.
I stress that this is all just wild speculation, and is very likely to be untrue. But the spidey senses did start tingling just a bit as I continued to dig deeper…
Nice, relatively tidy, a bit mean, and short – it reminds me of old Flash games in all those ways. I can see this being on Newgrounds with Peasant’s Quest and Pico’s School.
Are you able to datamine the disk to find out the other titles you could get when you win?
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”
Huh, the “magic word” use get _subtracted_.
I wonder if you can fix a broken score by just doing that over and over at the end!
Jason, you have the scoring slightly out.
Looking at the above code: if you score from 50 to 199 inclusive you get “FULL PROFESSOR OF MAZEOLOGY”, but if you score less than 50, including negative numbers, you get “CHARLATAN OR TOTAL FOOL”. (2000 or more will give you “THIRD GRADE FAILURE”.)
oho! same concept, different numbers. I changed my wording.
Also, there is a file in the disk called ZERO FF that will reset the game statistics file (must be run in integer basic tough).
I can’t figure out how to get that done. Crtl-Breaking out of the game seems to leave me at a DOS prompt where nothing works…
Start game like normal, get to first prompt
Hit enter to go text only screen
Type Z and hit enter to quit
Interesting. The reset code leaves some garbage in the FF file.
so I made an update to the post
I also posted about the update on Bluesky
I hope the guy who played it as a kid is able to ask his mother where it came from!