I have finished the game, and my previous post is needed for context.
Solving turned out not to be a matter of thinking about objects or puzzles or places, but thinking about verbs.
cut, dig, climb, read, open, drink, wait, light, throw, tie, say, give, leave, scream, chop
While we’ve had games with excess verbs that don’t do anything in the game, this didn’t seem like the sort of game to do that. I might normally say such verbs “put space to waste”, but it isn’t necessarily a waste; Countdown to Doom at least accepted EAT and SWIM to let the player know they weren’t going to be doing this on an alien planet, and sometimes in a modern Inform game it comes off as restrictive and awkward not to be able to THROW something even if it turns out throwing isn’t useful.
Speaking of throwing, that is one verb (other than wait) that hasn’t been used yet! I had already found the axe worked last time and went through all the other objects in the game and found none of them wanted to be thrown: “I can’t throw (insert item here)”.
The message in the forest about TREES ARE RESERVED FOR COFFINS seems to be here to explain why CHOP only works on the thicket but not here.
So what could we throw an axe at? The locked door had resisted my attempts at violence with CHOP DOOR — which you think would be the right way to bust in (especially given the lack of being able to HIT / SMASH / etc. even though the player has a mallet) — but I hadn’t tried THROW AXE.
Not “moon logic” exactly but the game should have accepted some alternate hitting methods. Limited space on a 8K VIC-20, though!
The inside has a sharp stick and a spade.
We now have and mallet and a wooden cross in addition to a sharp stick, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any “stake a vampire” verb in the set; what’s going on here? You’ll see in a moment. To recap, we also have the magic word unused (OVYEZ) as well as the lamp and the gold coins.
The spade, as I suspected, goes over to the sunny field.
I was storing my items here because of the “Crusifix”.
DIG is a little hard to operate; you can’t DIG CRUSIFIX but rather need to DIG HOLE, at which point a pit will appear you can go in.
Going out requires the ladder, but be careful because the ladder follows similar rules to the rope and will collapse if you have too much in your inventory.
The tunnel leads to a “subterranean cavern” and a seeming dead-end…
…but the THROW AXE is useful again (at least this time throwing seems the most natural thing!) This opens up a cave and nearly the last part of the game.
I had the lamp lit by this point; I don’t know the exact threshold it is needed.
Nosferatu! If I hadn’t spent my time investigating my verb list beforehand, I would have spent a while here uselessly trying to stake the vampire; he’s active rather than fully asleep and if you don’t have the wooden cross, he “rises from the altar, and bites my neck!”
The stick and mallet are complete red herrings. (The presence of a red kipper earlier at least hinted at the possibility.) The right thing to do here is to use magic.
According to the author’s web page, this doesn’t kill Nosferatu, it just gets him out of the way.
We can then grab the Bloodstone and retreat (being careful to drop most everything but the Bloodstone to climb up the ladder without it breaking).
This still isn’t quite the end of the game. The gold coins come in handy, as well as the very last unused verb: wait. You can go over to the bus stop and wait for a bus, and then pay for a ride in gold (!!). I guess he didn’t need exact change.
The author seemed somewhat down on this game…
If all of this leaves you with the impression that I don’t think much of the game, I suppose that’s true. But I still regard it with affection because, well, I was fourteen. Cut me some slack.
…and yes, there were a fair number of irregularities I already pointed out. I enjoyed myself more than some of our other games marked “haunted house” just because it did feel incredibly earnest; also, the fact we were not here to defeat the big bad racked up a few points on my imaginary scoreboard. I will say I could see a player getting incredibly frustrated by the ending and the useless mallet and stake. Although it makes perfect sense to me in a narrative sense why they wouldn’t work, it still would be better a design to acknowledge attempts at using them (along with textual hints suggesting that they’ll never work). This would have made a better overarching theme — sometimes the goal shouldn’t be destruction — that would go along with what happened to the witch (who we didn’t have to beware at all).
Some questions to the author, since he’s been in the comments:
1. What was the logic behind the fake-out with the stick and mallet?
2. Which puzzles were from Myles Kelvin, in the previous co-written game? (Also, was it such that you feel like you should both be on the credits?) What elements carried over and what changed?
3. What happened to the “HIDDEN GROVE” from your original working map?
…we [Myles Kelvin and Mike Taylor] went together to a conference in Manchester organised by Terminal Software. That made us feel very grown up at the age of fourteen or fifteen! Ah, the thrill of being allowed to drink beer!
This will be the last we’ll see of Taylor for 1983. He did have another game (The Final Challenge, aka Cornucopia) but it is lost:
Unlike the other games in this series, it required a VIC-20 with not 8k but 16k expansion – and since I didn’t own a 16k board, I had to borrow one from a school-friend, Richard Monk, in order to write it. Seems strange in these days when 4M of memory is considered woefully inadequate. [Meta-note: I wrote that last sentence in 1997 or ’98. As I write now, in 2001, 4M is truly laughable – most people now consider 64M unusable. No doubt by the time you read this, people will look sniffily on any computer whose memory is so tiny as to be measured in something as piddly as megabytes. Plus ca change.]
Of all my games that have been lost to posterity, this is the one that I would most like a chance to play again. I remember it somehow being invested with a strong sense of atmosphere, and having more-interesting-than-average puzzles. I have often tried to recapture elements of the plot to Cornucopia, as it rather bizzarrely ended up being called, but I have never succeeded to my own satisfaction. I particularly remember a tricky initial portion, necessary to get into the caves where the game took place, and a huge underground cavern with trees growing in it.
He’ll return in 1985 with the ambitious multi-player adventure Causes of Chaos.
Renga in Blue 
Thanks for this generous assessment :-)
Regarding your questions:
1. What was the logic behind the fake-out with the stick and mallet?
I know this is going to be a disappointing answer, but it was so long ago (43 years!) that I don’t remember at all. My guess would be that we originally intended to have you stake the vampire, but never got around to it. Thinking about it now, it would have been cool if, when you got on the bus, he appeared in a rage that you had stolen his bloodstone, and then you had to stake him. Oh well.
2. Which puzzles were from Myles Kelvin, in the previous co-written game? (Also, was it such that you feel like you should both be on the credits?) What elements carried over and what changed?
My recollection is that when we wrote the original unnamed Dracula adventure on Myles’s dad’s TSR-80 clone, we were really doing it together — real sort of face-to-face-with-guitars, like pre-Beatles Lennon and McCartney. So the question of who came up with which puzzles feels like one with no answer. We both co-created all of it.
I don’t remember what elements carried over and what was new, but I think most of what finished up in Nosferatu was probably in the TRS-80 original. Come to think of it, one possibility is that in that version you did kill the vampire, but I ran out of memory to implement that in the VIC-20. (The TRS-80 has at least 16 Kb, it might even have been 48 Kb, compared with the expanded VIC’s 5+8 = 13 Kb.)
Over the years I’ve thought a lot about why this went out under my own name rather than as a co-write. I think the answer is that back then it was all about the actual programming, and all the code of the VIC version was mine. I doubt I thought much about the intellectual property of the puzzles.
3. What happened to the “HIDDEN GROVE” from your original working map?
I don’t know; but from reading the BASIC source code at http://x.miketaylor.org.uk/tech/advent/mm/mm.bas it was apparently not included in the code (as opposed to included but no entrance provided).
OK! I put it as both your names on the sidebar and the All the Adventures list.
In other exciting news …
I actually wrote three other VIC-20 adventures which I got up to a standard that I tried to get them published. They were Heaven and Hell (8 Kb expansion), Stairway to the Stars (8 Kb expansion) and Cornucopia aka. The Final Challenge (16 Kb expansion).
Of these, Stairway does seem to be completely lost, but a kind soul managed to read some old tapes about ten years ago, and I now have the ability to play H&H (1984) and TFC (very early 1984).
I will try to make these available soon. But it won’t be immediately. I’ve not yet managed to play H&H past the small opening section, and need to do some investigation and writing before I can release it. And while I’ve played through TFC and have the necessary notes to write it up, there is some corruption in the tape image which I want to fix up before publishing.
(There is, still, somewhere a tape of Stairway to the Stars, but despite great efforts my contact wasn’t able to get an image off it, so I think it’s really gone for good.)
That is terrific news!
There are people with ninja skills when it comes to difficult tapes with lots of gaps, so if they’re willing to send their tape elsewhere I can try to get it over to someone who might give it a try.
If I can still find the _Stairway to the Stars_ tape, I’ll happily send it to anyone who might be able to make it work! I think it was last seen somewhere in Germany ten years ago, but I’ve put out a feeler.
“we also have the magic word unused (OVYEZ)”
Not much worthwhile to report, but I just had to note that on an initial skim, I misread that magic word as “OYVEY”, leading me down a fanciful garden path of imagining the implications of Jewish vampirism.
I know the word oyez (“listen”, “hear ye”), although I’m not sure whether that is what they were intending here either, but I was similarly confused by the “v” and also read “oy vey” at first.
Life would be tough for a Jewish vampire; consuming blood is very much not kosher.
Now I’m picturing a kosher slaughterhouse that employs a vampire to more efficiently drain the blood from the cows.
I have no idea what, if anything, OVYEZ meant. It rings no bells at all, so I think it was just a random sequence of letters. I love the idea of a Jewish vampire, though!
– most people now consider 64M unusable. No doubt by the time you read this, people will look sniffily on any computer whose memory is so tiny as to be measured in something as piddly as megabytes. Plus ca change.
People aren’t up to 64 gigabytes quite yet, are they? (Speaking of an individual PC here, not a server.) I feel like the answer is “generally no, but it’s not unthinkable.”
I am writing this comment on an individual PC with 64 GB of ram. (Though, it’s a machine used for game development, fwiw.) I do recall seeing someone indicating that they had 128 GB in a bug report on the Steam forums recently, though.
I figured they were out there but not yet typical. My own PC has 16 GB plus 8 more on the video card; I don’t generally do anything very intense with it.
Hot news, Jason! I’ve played through Heaven and Hell, and have now created a web-page about it, including a tape image that you can use to play it. It’s from 1983, not 1984 as I typoed in an earlier comment.
Help yourself at https://www.miketaylor.org.uk/tech/advent/hh
I warn you that this game is very difficult in not particularly fair ways. I included a complete solution that you probably won’t want to look at, but also a page of progressive hints, in the style of Infocom’s invisiclues. Enjoy!
Terrific, thank you!
I’ve been appreciating your (and the other authors’) insights but this is a very special gift. Thank you!
Thanks, gschmidl! It was a very strange feeling for me to play this game, solving the problems in many case by source-reading rather than in-game reasoning, and remember only so vaguely what I’d made. I am hungry to repeat this experience, if it turns out to be possible to recover Stairway to the Stars … but figuring out where the tape is (or even whether it still exists) is the first stage!
So, I have to ask – we found something called “The Fifth Challenge” by Michael Taylor “(c) 15:01:1984”. Is that the same as “The Final Challenge”?
Yes. The Final Challenge seems to be a typo — I’m not sure if it originated with me or with someone else, but the first screen that program displays clearly shows the name as The Fifth Challenge. To make the confusion complete, the game was known as Cornucopia when I was first hawking it around to potential publishers. I think I must have got far enough along with a publisher that they got me to change the name, but I don’t remember who it was, or what happened next.
The only extant version of The Final Challenge that I know about has some fatal tape-read errors. You can test this by doing GO RIVER as your first move. The game will crash. (If it doesn’t then you found a better version than the one I have, and I want to know about it!) I’m working on fixing the bugs.
It appears to be the same dump, then. But good to know you’re aware of it!
Hot news! Well, two pieces of hot news!
First, I found all the bugs in The Fifth Challenge that arose from tape mistranscriptions, and fixed them. I now have a fixed version which can be played to completion, and will publish it when I have time to do things like the visiclues.
Second, and even more exciting to me, someone managed to recover Stairway To The Stars! I played through it today (it’s much easier than Heaven and Hell) and in time I’ll publish that as well!
Which means I have (or will have) two more 1983 games to be covered (Heaven and Hell and Stairway to the Stars, in that order) and then one more from very early 1984 (The Fifth Challenge).
Fantastic news!