Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(This continues, more or less, from my previous post.)

In 1974, Donald Sherman ordered a pizza on the phone, making history.

Not that it was the first delivery pizza ordered by phone — pizza delivery had been around for many years by then and Domino’s had popularized it — but Donald Sherman couldn’t talk, having a type of facial paralysis from Moebius syndrome. He used a system at Michigan State University which pronounced words for him, and we have the moment caught on camera.

His first call (Domino’s) hung up, thinking this was a prank call, but he finally got cooperation on his fifth call, this time to Mike’s Pizza, ordering a large with pepperoni and mushrooms.

For this to work, a Control Data 6500 computer nicknamed “Alexander” was paired with a Votrax synthesizer. The Votrax was originally developed by Richard Gagnon of Troy, Michigan (about an hour east of Michigan State) in 1970. He was working for Federal Screw Works at the time but had developed a talking chip in his basement, and when he showed his prototype to his bosses the put him in charge of a new Vocal Interface Division (eventually spinning off to its own company). Just like Sherman he used it for accessibility, having it dictate words from a computer monitor as his eyesight had trouble.

This all resulted in the commercial SC-01 chip unveiling by the end of the decade from the newly dubbed Votrax, and you might have heard one before if you’ve played Gorf or Q*Bert. While Gorf used the chip for taunting the player with a well-timed “got you, space cadet”…

…Q*Bert used it for its own unique language.

The SC-01 was licensed out to companies to make voice synthesis hardware in the early 80s like the Mockingboard, the Alien Group Voice Box, and — relevant for today — the Spectrum Voice Pak for TRS-80 Color Computer.

From the Spectrum Projects Catalog.

The Spectrum Voice Pak ($70 for CoCo 1 and $80 for CoCo 2) does not seem to have made much a splash as I have found very little software that’s used it, but page 16 of the catalog for Spectrum Projects — in addition to the Spectrum Adventure Generator and a bingo game — has The Final Countdown. While The Final Countdown had the same JARB Software and Dragon Data releases as S.S. Poseidon, it also had an extra one later specially designed for the Votrax.

From World of Dragon.

I unfortunately do not have a copy of the talking version of the game, nor do I have an emulator that supports the chip. Here’s one more video to give an idea what it sounded like, applying a table of 64 phonemes encompassing units like “the oa sound of board” or “the tt sound of butter”.

Hence, I’m just going to load up the Dragon version again, which like last time, has easy, medium, and hard difficulties (affecting the turn limit).

The JARB ad also credits both Bill and Debbie Cook but I do have an early 1982 version of the game with no difficulty levels that just mentions Bill Cook, and the Talking version of the game also only mentions him in the credits.

Also like last time, the game is relatively straightforward, but with two curveballs thrown in.

There is an insane general who wants to launch a nuclear missile, and your job is to stop him from destroying the world.

You start near a van with a 2-way radio and a uniform; examining the uniform also reveals a stun gun and some PAPERS.

Heading south gets you in a desert with a rattlesnake and there’s no point in going there (it doesn’t have a puzzle this time, but just like Poseidon it feels like a “side scene” rather than a typical red herring).

To get inside you go by a camera at the front gate and show the papers from the uniform.

You’d think they could detect a fake general. Maybe we’re a real general and this is our actual uniform and we’re here to slap some sense into the wayward lower-star upstart.

Once inside, if you veer left into the C.O. Office, you can have one of those “side scenes” I just mentioned but this time with a minor puzzle. There are monitors and three buttons; if you press the second one it starts showing I Love Lucy, and if you press the third it sets everything on fire.

A “fire bottle” is in the room next door but you need to have picked it up first. This essentially identical to the Poseidon scene, and there’s no reason to press any of the buttons.

I wandered around the map after that. There’s a BULLETIN BOARD warning about tripping on stairs, and a message about an evacuation being complete, and a direct phone to the White House that’s very unhelpful…

…but other than that I was unclear. To the northeast there’s a cabinet that’s locked — no key yet — and intuition struck me given the mention of stairs so I tried moving it.

I have no concrete logic here but I did ratiocinate myself into doing this rather than hitting the interaction via brute force, like I did with Time Warden.

This leads to the second (and only other) part of the game.

The passage goes through a “command center”, “radar tracking” (with wire cutters), and a “strategy room” before arriving at a “maze of hallways”.

In the meantime, THE GENERAL starts showing up, kind of like the dwarves in Crowther/Woods, and you can use a charge from your stun gun to chase him off. This is clearly on the Dr. Strangelove end of the spectrum.

It’s not really a maze, though, because going through a loop enough times eventually reveals a secret passage.

Heading west from here goes to an elevator that you can take as a one-way trip back to the first floor (this is very much like Poseidon’s structure) whereas going south leads to a LAUNCH CONTROL CENTER.

Of the three buttons, ONE does just a click, TWO is not recognized by the parser even though it gets mentioned, and THREE is described as doing nothing. It does something, just not yet. (I was expecting an accidental premature launch, but apparently not; the rocket countdown is already happening).

The way to win is slightly cryptic. To the north, where there’s the observation window, you can BREAK WINDOW using the FIRE BOTTLE (the same one that was used before in the “scene” — interesting moment of intercross there!)

For reasons I’m unclear about, if you now go south and press THREE this reveals a panel.

This reveals a wire, and while CUT WIRE doesn’t work, USE CUTTERS does and you can win the game.

I regret not being able to find out how the voice sound gets used. Does the wandering general taunt you, perhaps? I’ll get another chance to find out when I get to 1984 as that’s the release year of the Spectrum Adventure Generator which also uses the same chip.

Unfortunately that’s the last we’ll see of the Cooks; they didn’t drop off the map as Bill Cook later wrote wrote the application Write III for the CoCo 3, but this was their only experiment with adventures. They do feel like they were written from an outsider perspective, and I am especially wondering why they had the “scenes” with very light puzzles as part of their games.