Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Terminal Software was started, in a sense, by accident.

RW Stevens, aka Reg Stevens, was working at ICL in Manchester (the business computer company, home of Quest). He had started writing games for the VIC-20 over Christmas 1981:

…I wrote my first game, which was a computer version of [the tabletop game] Connect 4. I wrote it in BASIC and I made it look at the board and work out every possible combination and choose the best move from the criteria I’d coded in… which meant it could take five minutes to make a single move! Any player would get fed up waiting so I did the algorithm which worked out the computer’s next move in machine code. That made it as immediate as a human opponent.

He took it to show a colleague of his at work, Andy Hieke. Hieke thought the game was good and that Stevens should sell it, but Stevens replied he couldn’t be bothered; Hieke offered to do it instead. This would become what was published as “Line-up 4”, and it had only very modest success, Stevens at first getting a check for 20 pounds. However, Hieke got interviewed for a piece that landed in The Times and as part of the interview he mentioned an upcoming version of Scramble for the VIC-20.

There was no upcoming version of Scramble for the VIC-20, or at least not yet. Hieke called Stevens and said he needed to write one. This is the first he’d heard of the game’s existence (Stevens was 40 of the time and did not frequent arcades).

I did have my little computer, though, and was finding it fun to program, so I suppose I saw it as an intellectual challenge and rose to the bait. I said I’d have a go, so I took the kids to Blackpool one day to do some research and see what the arcade game looked like.

The game was successful enough to be well-remembered after; the author wrote that

Skramble! was probably my finest moment, although Super Gridder on C64 was probably at least as addictive. The amazing thing about that VIC20 Skramble! was that it was entirely hand assembled.

I wrote it in machine language, but had no assembler or machine language monitor- so I converted the instruction codes into numbers (using the data book for a 6502 CPU) and ‘poked’ them into memory from Basic!

The game got licensed by MicroDigital out of Webster, NY…

From Eli’s Software Encyclopedia.

…although I’m not seeing the company at New York’s corporation registration site and I don’t have any information how that licensing agreement worked. Stevens did write a text adventure later for Terminal (Rescue from Castle Dread) so we’ll see him again, but today’s game involves a different author, Mike Taylor, who we previously saw here with Magic Mirror.

Nosferatu was written a different process; Taylor had based it on an “unnamed and unpublished game” he’d written with a friend (Myles Kelvin) the year before. Nosferatu was written from scratch with some of the same puzzles as the previous game, and was originally, like Magic Mirror, a “private” game. Once Magic Mirror was published he offered it Terminal and it became his second published game.

Source.

He was familiar with (but had not yet played) The Count by Scott Adams, and had not heard of any of the other vampire games we’ve seen here already. The goal is much different than the usual “kill Dracula” goal, as the printed instructions just say we need to “get home from Nosferatu’s castle with the precious bloodstone.”

I made my usual verb list, and none of them suggest we are killing the vampire, although I may be missing some special case.

cut, dig, climb, read, open, drink, wait, light, throw, tie, say, give, leave, scream, thread, chop

Kill, stab, stake, and hammer are not included. (Note, no violence at all! Although there’s an axe you can THROW.) As my ambiguity above suggests, I’m not done with the game yet, although as a VIC-20 game (using the 8k expansion) it surely can’t be too much larger than what I’ve seen?

It starts with a mysterious in medias res moment:

How did end up here? Did we somehow get smuggled into Nosferatu’s castle this way? Did we get attacked and deposited here? I thought briefly (before checking the manual’s objective) that we were playing as the vampire, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The opening areas yield up a “bottle of whisky”, a “rope”, and a “7-pound mallet”. In the same room as the rope there is a locked door. A bit farther is a Graveyard with a “newly dug grave” and a warning about needing to BEWARE THE WITCH…

I’m unclear why it turns from a grave to a cave.

…followed by a … bus stop? Hey, there was one in Haunt. Turning south, there’s a sarcophagus that is too heavy to open, although drinking the whisky will give a boost of strength and allows the player to open it.

Inside is a corpse that turns to dust if you touch it (no idea if the dust is helpful) and a wooden cross (which I haven’t used yet).

Heading east from there is a library, with an Atlas, book of Magic, and book of Games.

The book of Magic has a word that seems like it’d be helpful (see above) but I’ve tried it in every accessible room so far to no effect. The atlas mentions a cesspit near a oak forest (which you find anyway even without the atlas) and the book of Games just says:

Bored with this game already, huh?

I mean, it could have booted up Skramble? On an 16K VIC-20?

Moving on, heading north there is a rail at a balcony, and you can tie the rope to go down, finding a brass key and a red kipper. The author is sheepish that a similar puzzle shows up in The Count, and indeed two other vampire games also have this moment, but it almost doesn’t seem like a puzzle as much as a natural action; at least I didn’t feel like there was anything stale going on.

If you carry too much down the rope it snaps and you die.

With the brass key you can unlock the door back up north and open a large new area.

Up first are a “sharp axe” and a “ladder”; this is followed by a pond with a shark and I have no idea if you can do anything with the shark. I’m not even sure how to die from the shark.

What I am sure you can die from is a little farther where there is a “flimsy bridge” and it will collapse if you have too many items. Past the bridge is a hut that is locked and the brass key doesn’t work; I have yet to get in the hut.

I guess it’s implied the shark gets us?

Past that is a “sunny field” with a “crucifix” on the ground (spelled wrong) and I suspect the DIG command goes here but I don’t have any digging tool yet (which might be in the hut! which I haven’t gotten in yet!) What I can do is go around to a “cesspit” which has some gold coins, and use the ladder from earlier to climb out.

An easy softlock. This doesn’t have a save game feature.

There’s a “cliff” with a backwards sign….

…which indicates you’re supposed to use the axe to chop the thicket.

Past this are two rooms at the edge of a chasm, a “safety match”, and a “fountain of youth”. You can use the bottle from earlier (with the strength boost) to scoop up the water from the fountain of youth and take it back to the witch, trading it for a lamp.

(I kind of like how I was expecting some sort of battle confrontation but this was just a trade puzzle!) The match works to light the lamp but I haven’t found anything dark enough for it to have an effect. To recap:

a.) I’ve got a hut I can’t get in

b.) I don’t have a way of digging

c.) I don’t have a way past the chasm (if that’s even supposed to be a thing)

I’ve already visited both sides of the brick wall so I’m not sure if it’s really meant to be a puzzle.

I get the intuition this is going to be the sort of game where I just have to resolve one puzzle and then the rest will be a straightforward progression. But I have to find that one puzzle first!