Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

By 1980 in the United States, the TRS-80 had still vastly outsold the Apple II, with 200,000 units to 35,000. The Apple II was the outlier expensive machine while TRS-80 was “for the people”. There was no strong indicator at the time that by the late-80s the Apple II would form the “Oregon Trail Generation” and become a bond gluing together an entire group of children growing up in the United States.

(Side note: Commodore, Tandy, and Apple originally all had the chance to be joined up rather than battling rivals. Tramiel of Commodore originally went to Tandy for selling the PET but he also demanded a calculator purchase on top of that which caused Tandy to balk. When Jobs of Apple was looking for initial funding — $300,000 — he went to Tramiel, who only offered $50,000; Jobs found the money he wanted elsewhere.)

Tandy Color Computer 2, via Reddit.

Tandy’s follow-up machines — the MC-10 followed by the Color Computer series, 1 to 3 — are even more elusive in general historical memory. Tandy unfortunately never disclosed sales numbers, with only vague statements like

Each year, Christmas sales of the Color Computer break the previous year’s record.

— Ed Juge, head of Tandy marketing, 1984

to go on. Rather than making up a number, let’s go with ones we know: The Rainbow (a Tandy Color Computer magazine I’ll discuss shortly) hit their peak subscription number of “over 50,000” in 1984, the year of the quote above. I searched for a comparison number and found Antic (for Atari 8-bit machines) hit “over 100,000” readers in 1986. That Atari number comes from after Atari as a company imploded so the comparison isn’t perfect, but it still gives a ballpark proportional estimate in terms of community reach.

(ADD: From the comments, L. Curtis Boyle points out some more exact data, and to compare the same year as Antic’s number, they had 31,789 subscriptions in December 1986.)

As I’ve already mentioned in regards to the TRS-80, Tandy was fairly insular and didn’t make strong connections with other companies. You could buy mainstream games for the Color Computer — Sierra On-Line put out their AGI games, so they got the Kings Quests up through IV — but oftentimes they had an air of second-hand-ness to them.

Via eBay.

The community was (again like the TRS-80) its own ecosystem. What I want to emphasize is that while we’ll see more Tandy Color Computer starting in 1983, and despite the machine not making lasting connections with the wider gaming community, in terms of reach and popularity it also isn’t just an obscure sidenote. In a way, because Tandy became no longer dominant, the Color Computer community was even more outsider than before; Softside, the magazine we’ve featured here many times before, eventually had monthly disks for Apple II, TRS-80, Atari, and IBM compatibles, but never Color Computer.

The magazine center of this ecosystem was The Rainbow. The founder, Lawrence “Lonnie” C. Falk, was originally a journalist who had (by 1980) switched to working public relations at the University of Louisville. When the TRS-80 Color Computer came out became fascinated with it and started printing his own newsletter, with The Rainbow Volume 1 Number 1 being marked as July 1981.

Most of us are among the first to be the proud owners of a TRS-80 Color Computer. And, if you are like we were, you were attracted to TRS-80 in the first place by all those great programs available for the Models I, II and III.

But, where did that leave us? Except for some programs in the manuals — and the e-x-p-e-n-s-i-v-e ROM Packs offered by the Shack — there just isn’t a great deal out there right now. Oh, it is coming. But the wait seems long and there are a lot of things the COLOR computer can do that its big brothers can’t.

The comparable CoCo specialist magazines were Hot CoCo and Color Computer Magazine, but The Rainbow outlived them both.

Lonnie Falk, when The Rainbow — and the company Falsoft — were a bit larger. From CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy’s Underdog Computer.

Nearly from the start — not issue 1 but issue 2 — JARB Software (Imperial Beach, California, just south of San Diego) gets a mention, in a review of JARBCODE. The review has “Joe Bennet, chief programmer” working along with H.D. Stow; the product is for code-making (cryptograms, it seems). JARB started put in advertisements and sending in source code soon after and became one of the main independent publishers for the Color Computer.

We saw them before as they published Eno, Stalag, and Mansion of Doom by the mysterious — but local — PAL Creations out of San Diego. In the January 1983 issue of The Rainbow they offer two games by Bill and Debbie Cook.

The title screens give Poseidon a date of 1982 and Final Countdown a date of 1983; we could normally use the one-month-difference rule to put both games in December of 1982 but the Rainbow’s newsletter origins makes this ambiguous; direct mail would more typically land on the month on the cover. JARB’s December 1982 ad has “COMING ATTRACTIONS” that are “all available by December 1982” but without Poseidon listed. As another example of breaking the one-month rule, Commander magazine started off sending issues on the marked month, but right when they switched to newsstand they skipped a month in order to do the usual off-by-one arrangement — that is, they had one issue marked December 1983/January 1984 even though they were a monthly.

Commander Magazine died in 1984, so the increase in demand apparently didn’t last long.

(ADD: L. Curtis Boyle confirms that printing by The Rainbow happened on the month printed until they skipped May 1983 so they could be a month off for newsstands.)

I haven’t been able to unearth anything about Bill and Debbie Cook specifically, although I should highlight something I don’t always linger on: one of the authors is a woman. That hasn’t been common; I’ve counted about 4% of the games we’ve had so far have had at least one identifiable woman. Mind you, this doesn’t account for people with initials as first names, or people who aren’t named in credits at all, or people who transitioned, but it’s still a low percentage. At least in the US, about 30% Computer Science degrees were going to women at this time, so it doesn’t match the general population.

I’m still not sure as to why. I don’t think sexism quite explains it, although computer science had/has it as a problem. Even in 1983 there was strong awareness of women getting pushed out of the field; to quote some examples from a 1983 paper:

Following a technical discussion over lunch with a faculty member. I was asked for a dinner date. I was left wondering whether the faculty member went to lunch for the intended technical discussion or for personal reasons.

When I was a teaching assistant, one of my students missed the lecture and saw me later. He said, “Will you come sit on my lap sometime and tell me what I missed?”

“Why do you need a degree for marriage?” — a male colleague.

For my question — why less women making adventure games — I’m referring here to a comparative proportion, that is, double-digits in computer science versus single-digits making games. My current suspicion is that games were not thought of as “serious” work; Veronika Megler, who we just read about with The Hobbit, only passed by games on her way to a database-focused job with IBM. That is, sexism was involved, but in a lateral way: the women getting expertise at this time leaned to more “secure” areas like business and finance and large mainframes; they felt less able to experiment in a field more likely to have companies go bankrupt.

I still feel like the story is incomplete, just because so many of the games we’ve played have been pure hobby endeavors.

Enough theorizing, let’s flip a boat:

Just like Eno/Stalag/House of Doom, the Cook games were picked up by Dragon Data to publish in the UK. Picture from World of Dragon.

S.S. Poseidon is yet another game based on the movie The Poseidon Adventure, involving a cruise ship that gets flipped upside down at sea and the attempt from survivors to escape.

I couldn’t find this game in Tandy CoCo form so I’m playing the Dragon version.

There are three difficulty levels but they seem to only affect the time limit. I picked easy because I was not interested in optimizing. The game is straightforward enough it likely doesn’t matter.

You start with a three-room vignette:

The starting ballroom (similar to the movie, but only barely) has just a singular chair; to the west there’s an entrance blocked by DEBRIS and doing LOOK DEBRIS reveals a FLASHLIGHT.

To the east there is an entrance with a sign indicating SOME OBJECTS MAY BE USED. Being that there are no other exits and the only items are a chair and flashlight, I tried USE FLASHLIGHT, revealing a CABLE.

This is wildly unusual; most flashlight use has been in explicitly dark rooms, but here the flashlight finds a hidden object in an otherwise lit room. The only other adventure I can think of offhand that does this is Espionage Island but that still explicitly has a “dark corner” in the room.

The cable is incidentally out of reach, but you can drop the chair and use it to get extra height, and then CLIMB CABLE. This exits the introduction.

Many of these rooms aren’t “useful” but they’re not all exactly “red herrings” either. For example, to the south there’s a COMMUNICATION CENTER with a broken ham radio and a message saying SOS. The player is blocked by a fire trying to escape; you can get by the fire with an EXTINGUISHER from a nearby room.

Although if you don’t have the extinguisher first this is a softlock.

Despite this seeming like a small “puzzle”, it is entirely unnecessary! It’s just a “scene” essentially.

Why is this here? Conceptually it’s interesting.

Elsewhere, there’s a hatch where if you open it, sea water blasts in. If you are wearing a life jacket (again just lying around) you can survive the encounter, so again it counts as a small puzzle, and again there is no “reason” for it other than having a colorful scene.

I never found a use for the razor.

The only item that will become important shortly (but not this very moment) is a LOCKED CABINET in a TOOL ROOM.

Otherwise, to escape further: up in the Dispensary, in addition to an upside-down picture (again just for color, no safe behind or anything) there’s a beaker with vitamins. You can drink the vitamins to get stronger, and open an otherwise stubborn metal door to get to the next level.

The third level is the last section of the game.

It kicks off with three directions leading down shafts that deposit you back in level two; going east leads to a pool of oil on fire.

There’s a rope in the room where you can TIE ROPE. It asks “TO WHAT?” and despite it not being obviously an “object”, I tried “TO LEDGE” and it worked.

The rope stays tied in the room just past; you can drop it and grab the crowbar to find a “metal plate” which is the escape spot for the ship, except it is bolted in such a way it needs a wrench, not a crowbar.

You can fortunately take the crowbar and swing back on the rope back across the flaming oil, then slide a shaft to the second level and find that LOCKED CABINET I mentioned offhand earlier. The crowbar is sufficient to bust it open and get the wrench that’s inside.

The wrench then can be carted back over to the plate at the hull of the ship and to victory.

Related to the puzzle-augmented scene style, one last novelty: there’s JEWELS in one of the rooms…

…which you are welcome to take with you, but the game never acknowledges in the end if you have them, either by rewarding or punishing you. It’s simply a personal plot choice.

The game was not substantial or difficult, so in the modern context of me simply loading up and playing it I don’t have much to complain about. I’m not sure how I would have felt spending $14.95 on a 20-minute game, though. (About $48 in 2025 money accounting for inflation.) It fits together enough with the style in Eno I do wonder if the two games influenced each other (at the very least, they were sold on the same page together).

Next up: The other game by the Cooks, The Final Countdown.