Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Dave Carlos is another one of our authors who transitioned from teaching to computers, like Peter Smith or the authors of Dragon’s Keep. Peter Smith went on to make educational software and Dragon’s Keep was educational software, so it isn’t a shocking transition; Dave Carlos, similarly, had a foot in educational software, culminating with a co-written book in 1985 titled Writing Educational Programs for the BBC & Electron.

This book is not meant to be for a child directly; the aim is to teach and encourage parents, teachers and other interested people to write worthwhile and appropriate educational programs. We hope the book will be appropriate to those involved in every sphere of educational enterprise, from nursery level to postgraduate, from special to public schools, and in all disciplines from arithmetic to zoology. This may seem a daunting task but we have made life a little easier by presenting a text which not only contains programs which are ready to run and may be used as they stand or adapted in any way you wish, but also contains the building blocks from which other such programs can be constructed.

Carlos first caught the computer bug in 1980, when a parent asked if he could teach his children about programming his new ZX computer; the article says ZX81, but that wasn’t out until 1981, so either the date is off or the computer is off. Either way, the result was that Carlos bought a ZX computer for himself followed by a BBC Micro, eventually taking a computer job over the weekends while still teaching at Micro Power (a company we’ve explored the history of before).

Meanwhile, he started writing articles for magazines (A&B and Home Computing Weekly), with general advice columns (“This month we consider the important – and difficult – decision of which disc drive to choose”, “How to format discs to work on 40 and 80 track disc drives”) and also printed source code, like Stupid Cupid printed in February 1984.

1984 was also the year he quit teaching altogether, being disillusioned with recent changes in education with the reforms of Margaret Thatcher.

I felt that I couldn’t be the kind of teacher I wanted to be, and I didn’t want to be the kind of teacher that turned up every day, took his pay, and went home with no further thought.

Not long after this he founded his own PR firm, Mediates Ltd, using his publishing connections to aid companies in networking; this company eventually turned into the mail-order company Special Reserve, selling games throughout the 1990s.

Dave Carlos on the left giving out an oversized novelty check as part of a contest for the company Domark.

For adventure game fans, the company is of special interest as they had the Official Secrets adventure game club, and one of the Magnetic Scrolls games was only released as a promotional to members of the club.

Although you now can play it on the official Magnetic Scrolls site.

All this is much farther along than today’s game, which is marked on the source code as being “Version 10” and completed on “12th January 1983”; in other words, this was written when he was still a teacher, and had just started getting deeper into the computer industry.

Caveman Adventure was published by Micro Power / Program Power, the original company Carlos took a part-time job at. Similar to how the author of Eldorado Gold (Dave Elliot) neglected to include his weird early text adventure while discussing his work, Caveman Adventure doesn’t get mentioned in any of the histories including Dave Carlos; his work in publishing, PR, and advertising have been far too significant in comparison.

Via the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. For fans of the history of weird box art, there’s a blog post by an artist (Chris Payne) who worked to try to make the Program Power art less Weird.

And … I’m going to be honest, I understand the omission. This is an erratic game. I was originally going to chalk elements up to him being a teacher and trying to write something for students, and maybe that was the goal, but: this is both too simple and too hard at the same time.

You are a caveman. You have been alone, but your goal is now to find your old tribe, while gathering treasures on the way. You can drop treasures in the starting cave or carry them with you.

As a caveman, the player’s commands are quite limited: TAKE, LEAVE (drop), DESCRIBE (examine), and USE. I’m being handwavy about whether the player is “roleplaying a caveman” or “controlling a puppet that is a caveman” because the game takes things both ways at once. You are prompted for the name of your caveman (I used “Bob”) and then start in your cave.

Notice: “this is the cave you have lived in for many months” followed by “What should Bob do now?” The closest comparable game I can think of that has been featured here so far is Mad Martha, which talks about “you, as Henry Littlefellow” and then asks what you (using your own name) want to do; it’s clearly a “role-play” situation in the text. That seems to be what the author was going for here but having both “you” and “Bob” emphasizes the disjoint between player and avatar even more.

To explain what’s going on with the game (and another aspect that’s highly unusual) I’m going to start with a “reduced” map which only shows what’s accessible without solving any puzzles.

Again, very reduced verb-set: walking, picking stuff up, looking at stuff, and using. The structure is such that some rooms will have death-exits, and it made me think possibly these were exits that could never be entered; that is, the game was going to be more of a labyrinth where you avoid certain exits rather than a heavy puzzle game. This isn’t actually the case.

To the west, there’s a room with a mouse and a roof that looks like it is about to collapse. If you go west, and then back east again, the roof does indeed collapse.

Heading west says “you need something sharp”. You would think the spear would work, but USE SPEAR gets no reaction. I’ll return to this puzzle later, but I do want to observe right now that this is a game where the obstacles are in the connections between rooms, rather than in the rooms themselves. We’ve seen this before with the game Seek … and that’s pretty much it. Seek was also published by Micro Power so almost certainly was an influence. (Seek additionally had the only-USE system for objects this game does.)

To the south is a bend where there are “flying creatures” blocking the path west; to the east there is a trickling sound of water followed by death.

Turning north from the starting cave, there’s a bearskin just coming out (just treasure, but every single item in this game counts as a “treasure”), followed by a plain with a “bone”.

Try to head north and the game says you’re too thirsty. (This is the problem with the Seek-style obstacle exits; why would Bob be thirsty specifically right there? Bob can wander about with no thirsty issues otherwise.) Going west gets Bob killed in a stampede.

Heading to the east from the plain, you pass by a deadly lion…

…and then going farther you can veer north to the top of a mountain and then die of starvation, as any exit from the mountain is death.

Veering south instead, there’s a waterfall (if you have sound on, there’s a water sound) with a “woman” there. I met the woman before I knew about the restricted verb set so tried TALK WOMAN and ended up taking her instead.

DESCRIBE WOMAN gets “She seems friendly and kind.” Using TAke on her is the right thing to do as she counts as a “treasure” and you can leave her at the cave for points.

There’s one more encounter going east, where you can land in a “raging river” and get a whole “cutscene” of described actions, but I think this might be either randomized or a bug because usually Bob would get “lost” and then inevitably die. (Getting “lost” as a method of death is also fairly unique but shows up in Seek.)

I’ll discuss this more later when it’s actually supposed to happen.

One last element early in the game is that there’s a thunderstorm, and about seven moves in the player’s items will get randomly scattered around. The most effective method of handling this I found is starting the game by wandering back and forth until the storm happens so you don’t lose any items at all.

This doesn’t move the player from the room they were in, although you have to LOOK to confirm this.

With that done, I fruitlessly tried to use the spear on various things — not realizing it was a complete red herring yet — and somehow neglected to DESCRIBE the BONE, which is

A very sharp bleached old bone.

That is, this is exactly what the first puzzle in the game needed. What, exactly, we are doing with the sharp object is unclear; I assume removing undergrowth somehow? (….with a bone?)

Hard work doing… something. This screenshot was taken during an iteration where I had items scattered from the storm.

Moving on…

…there’s simply a sequence of items to scoop up: log, vine, stick, dog, and net, while avoiding the one exit that makes the player/Bob “lost”.

This opens the previous obstacles, although some brute force use of USE may still be required (I still kept trying to use the spear until near the end of the game). Via lawnmowing, while adjacent to the lion, you can USE NET:

This shares Seek’s problem of uncomfortable treatment of space. There is no lion described in the room, yet you can catch one because it is in the next room over.

With the lion caught, you can do the mighty caveman thing and TAKE LION. He’s now your buddy! You can carry the lion and the woman and the log and the burning stick all at the same time. (I know infinite inventory has long been a thing, but not in this era.)

Going back over to where you would normally get stampeded, you can pre-emptively create a stampede, Lion King style, and clear out what turn out to be buffalo.

You don’t find out they’re buffalo until this very moment.

A map update:

While also doing USE STICK to scare off some vultures, you can scoop up a carcass, a tusk, and a coconut; note that if you re-enter the buffalo area from the west you have to scare them off again with the lion.

The coconut is sufficient to quench thirst in order to head north from the plain (still a mystery while taking that route is when it triggers, and you somehow pre-emptively know about the thirst). This enables a side route up the mountain picking up a “skin”, although you still need to deal with getting hungry at top of the mountain.

Uncooked vulture-tested carcass, yum! This admittedly felt caveman-ish. The whole point of getting here is to pick up the flint.

With all that done, we can get back to that raging river. I still am not sure how I got in early (random or bug?) but you’re supposed to USE LOG while at the waterfall that the woman was at (who at this point I had stored at the cave because I needed to inventory space, along with the lion). The river is a series of messages narrating the trip, with no interactivity.

At the end you can arrive at “shallows” where you can USE VINE to get to dry land. I am unclear how this works (are you lassoing something?) but USE can work with the power of brute force.

A dense jungle after requires cutting with the flint. (What were we doing with the bone, then?)

Finally you can reach an “open area of scrub” and get speared and die.

I mean, USE TUSK, which turns into a gift to guards that you can’t see without being killed by them.

I appreciate how the game tried to do something different with Seek’s “exit obstacles”. (It even repeats Seek’s issue where you need to repeat an action every time you go through an exit, but having buffalo and vultures and lions return to their original spots didn’t feel quite as weird as murdering a whole crew of dwarves over and over.)

The one contemporary review I’ve found (Micro Adventurer, November 1983) noted a bug I didn’t spot — the item-dropping from the storm does not reset your inventory counter, so you can end up being unable to carry anything after it happens. (“CAVEMAN Adventure is intended as an introduction to adventuring, and is therefore not too arduous a trial. But it is very well presented, and pleasant enough to play.”) Otherwise the review was fairly positive and mainly gets annoyed at the number of sudden deaths.

A rather more recent review by Gunness just states

What a dreadful, dull game…

and I am inclined to agree the whole thing felt narratively stilted and awkward, although I appreciate the attempt to do something different with the tone, setting, and somehow writing in second and third person simultaneously.

A crucial aspect of living and its enjoyment is the ability to use the senses that we find at our disposal. The ability of a computer to involve a human being in an interactive way depends upon those senses also. This tends to mean the full involvement of sight and sound in the programs we like and use.

Educational programs have a place for such considerations. We sometimes glibly say that a computer is a wonderful motivator for children, especially those who have experienced failure using traditional methods of learning and teaching. What we mean is that a computer can be a motivator if the programs being used are carefully written and involve the child totally in the experience of using the machine. Poor programs can have the opposite effect upon the child, making them as reluctant to use the computer as they may be to use other learning methods. There is nothing inherently motivational about a computer at all; in fact you could argue that a ‘QWERTY’ keyboard is a huge disincentive to use one. If we want to have a positive effect on a child, it is up to the software writers to take this into consideration at the time they plan their programs.

— From Writing Educational Programs For The BBC & Electron by Dave Carlos and Tim Harrison