I promised last time to create my verb list. Since it’s been a while since I’ve explained: over the years I have collected verbs that are quite common in adventure games in this era, all the way to verbs that are rare, and I made a list. I then go through each verb on the list testing to see if that verb is accepted or not.
Some games have parsers which give almost no feedback so this trick doesn’t work (like, for example, “HUH?” for anything that isn’t interpreted) but as long as you give a verb and a noun this game not only gives feedback if a verb is misunderstood it displays the word flashing.
Just like Sierra On-Line games and others at this time, hitting ENTER will turn off the graphics temporarily and just show text.
By doing this, I’m able to get an idea of what kind of commands I should be focused on. Understood words are in green:
DRAW incidentally goes with DRAW MAP but the game says you need to make your own (weirdly enough, this isn’t quite true — I’ll explain in a moment). YELL and SAY both have “open” nouns meaning you can yell or say any text and it will be repeated back, indicating some possible future code word puzzle. SMELL working is notable (and not the sort of thing I’d automatically check), BUILD and MAKE are in (meaning we likely have at least one instance of combining together things into a new thing where we have to guess the noun) and START is probably the rarest verb on there. It’s also been a while since I’ve seen CLEAN.
None of these really suggested to me what the strange item was last time, but I first need to clarify that I was confused, as CASE and BOX are treated in the game as synonyms.
So when I did OPEN BOX, the game actually dropped the violin, and that picture to the left is a smashed violin. You can pick the violin up and see it described in textual form. That means that the real mystery is the “box object” which isn’t a box.
The game does not have GET ALL or LOOK FLOOR or any of the other types of commands you might think would reveal nearby objects. I did go ahead and test all the other one-letter possibilities past L (turn left), R (turn right), F (move forward), and A (turn around) and on top of the usual I (inventory) I came across two more. Z full on quits the game, which at the very least allows LISTing the BASIC code if I ever need to go there.
M shows the map as visited so far with a message about how “the dim light really hurts my eyes”. The map only shows temporarily before disappearing, although you can see what is most likely the exit in the process:
If the same object density keeps up, filling this in could represent the entire territory of the game. Or maybe there’s a second level and this game’s going to stick around a while.
Bizarrely, using the feature again repeats drawing a map but makes it smaller.
The map keeps getting tinier and tinier, down to just being a squiggle in the corner. I guess this is meant to simulate the dim light, but also in a game sense, discourage too much use of the automap. I’m needing to make a map in order to keep a track of objects anyway, but still, it’s wildly unusual to put the effort into making a feature but also yank it away. Just as a reminder:
With that sideline done, and no helpful commands found, it was time to crack on getting that word figured out. I wanted to try some more generalized crowdsourcing, so I made posts on both Mastodon and Bluesky.
Other tries were JOURNAL, PARCEL, BRICK, SUITCASE, and INTERNET (??). One of the guessers (@ericgerhardt.com) took it upon themselves to find and download the game to try things out themselves, and they discovered that HELP is contextual.
A METALLIC VOICE ECHOES DOWN THE HALL: IT SAYS ‘REG. PENNA. DEPT. AGR.’ THINK IT THROUGH
I admit I had found HELP was acknowledged, but I wasn’t thinking of using it here as I wasn’t considering this to be a puzzle but rather a user-interface frustration. However, based on the fact that even HELP is cryptic here, the author was clearly thinking “figure out what the object is so you can pick it up” was a genuine puzzle!
The Department of Agriculture reference means this is a food. These are CRACKERS.
It’s a good example of how (as I’ve put it before) early adventure game authors didn’t fully distinguish between difficult to solve and difficult to play
That is, while realizing what you’re looking at in order to pick it up would be considered by most modern standards a bug — but what logical reason would you not be able to grab the thing otherwise — with this game the author genuinely blithely ignores the meta-narrative confusion of the whole thing and makes it a puzzle. The most comparable puzzle I can think of is The Sands of Egypt which made guess-the-verb into a puzzle and also gave a hint whilst trying to get off a camel that was slightly indirect.
The hint was “The opposite of mount is?” You’re supposed to type DISMOUNT.
More actual progress next time! I hope! The Beast doesn’t like crackers, though:
I’d guess it’s really a “giant rat” given the context and I need the cheese, but I haven’t figured out the trap yet, and none of the verbs — and I tried all of them — were helpful.
IT IS SATURDAY MIDNIGHT, AND A LATE SUMMER STORM IS BREWING OUTSIDE.
YOU HAVE BEEN STUDYING LATE, TRYING IN VAIN TO AVERT A THESIS CRISIS — IN LAST MONTH’S ISSUE OF THE RAT RUNNER’S JOURNAL (A PUBLICATION DEVOTED TO YOUR FELLOW INVESTIGATORS OF LEARNING PROCESSES), AN ACADEMIC RIVAL OF YOURS HAS JUST PUBLISHED THE RESULTS YOU’VE SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF GRADUATE STUDY STRIVING TO COMPLETE.
I’m not sure why this game slipped by me before in my 1981 sequence. It is possible I saw the title screen and skipped on by immediately.
1982’s Wayout (by Sirius, of Kabul Spy, etc.) has similar map generation but allows full 360 degree movement.
From Mobygames. I think you’re supposed to be the clown.
However, The Maze is another game along the lines of Deathmaze 5000 or Asylum, with objects and puzzles scattered throughout and plot designed in a way that places it firmly in the rare “adventure blobber” camp.
YOU BEGIN TO DRIFT OFF INTO A FITFUL DOZE, DREAMING OF RATS CAUGHT IN MAZES, WHEN SUDDENLY THE TELEPHONE STARTLES YOU FULLY AWAKE.
I know nothing about Fermented Software, the only credits given on the title screen. This particular disk landed on the Internet in 2006 when someone on Usenet named “Astrp3” listed The Maze amongst disks that were being uploaded to Asimov (a still-extant Apple II archive). There’s otherwise no information, and “Fermented Software” doesn’t ring up any hits in the usual places.
The game requires 64K (not the default) so the author(s) were using a relatively beefy computer, and Deathmaze 5000 did have an Apple II version so it is possible it was an influence. The reference to a thesis crisis suggests an academic (it’d be an odd plot for someone outside of that particular “rat race” to make up). Perhaps more will be revealed as we get in deeper.
WITH YOUR HEART POUNDING, YOU PICK UP THE RECEIVER ANO HEAR THE VOICE OF DR. LA BRYNTHE, THE NOTED PSYCHOLOGIST AND YOUR THESIS ADVISOR, ON THE OTHER END: ‘JASON, I’M AT MY LABORATORY, AND I THINK I’VE FOUND A WAY YOU CAN USE THE RESULTS FROM YOUR MAZE STUDIES TO COMPLETE YOUR THESIS AND RECEIVE YOUR DEGREE. NOW LISTEN CAREFULLY AND I’LL GIVE YOU THE…
WHO’S THERE??…
WHAT’S GOING ON… HELP! HELP!
SUDDENLY, THE LINE GOES DEAD…
You grab a raincoat and head to the laboratory, musing about the Professor’s “classified experiments” and “experiments on animals” that were rumored to be done on humans. Ominous!
The opening mat seen above can be taken; this reveals a key, which can also be taken, giving the first two items of the game.
Movement is not by arrow keys; you can type “R” and “L” to turn right and left respectively, or “F” to go forward. Just “A” flips 180 degrees but I don’t think there’s any way to walk backwards.
Only any “close” walls are shaded, any farther away get the outlined black and white treatment.
It is much more dense than Asylum, and I suspect the map is smaller overall. Here’s what I have so far.
Starting with the “trap” in the lower left corner, that’s a giant mousetrap with some cheese. Any attempt to take the cheese are step forward kills you, although you restart at the beginning with the feeling like you’ve been “drugged”.
I tried throwing the mat to trigger the trap but no luck; picking up the mat afterwards causes the same effect.
Rotating around the spaces on the map, there’s a violin case that’s locked. The key fortunately works (although it gets stuck), and inside there is a violin. The game says you can’t play it yet if you try (I suspect you need a bow).
Further along the same path you can scoop up a TUNING FORK…
…a CORKSCREW…
…and a ????.
The question marks are here because while OPEN BOX works to get a thing out of it…
…I have no idea what the thing is or how to pick it up. I have tried various permutations of LOOK and have no textual description of what’s nearby. Any guesses?
It may help to know whatever it is will possibly resolve the one other obstacle (other than the trap) I need to deal with, a “BEAST”.
I haven’t made a verb list yet, but the cryptic object flummoxed me enough — and since it is the sort of thing I can crowdsource to you, my dear readers, I decided it was time to stop for a post. I will do verb testing next time (and knowing the verbs might help figure out what some of the pictures are, if there really is no “describe all the stuff near you in text” command).
It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to do one of these; my 1981 in review was posted December 20, 2021.
The chart with plot types like Rescue, Escape, etc. just isn’t that helpful up to 1982 — too many arbitrary assignments — but I did do a chart just of Treasure Hunts, that is, games modeled essentially off the original Crowther/Woods paradigm of gathering X things together.
There’s still some fuzzy aspects — like lost games, or games that have been discovered since I passed a particular year that I haven’t returned to yet — so assume a margin of error. (On top of that, some games are hard to categorize — is Dateline Titanic, where you are rescuing passengers by bodily tossing them in boats, a “treasure hunt”?) In general, you can say while the percentage dropped dramatically at first it went flat starting in 1980 hovering around 40%.
Regarding why, some of this may be the creative version of the Eternal September effect. It used to be, when a new school year started and there was a large influx of people on the Internet, it took a while for standards to take hold so there was chaos in September. Then, with the rise of AOL and other services in the early 90s, anyone could go on the Internet at any time, hence Eternal September. The creative version of the effect is that there are still people in 1982 whose only exposure to an adventure was Crowther/Woods so they do the natural thing and copy it (like Sphinx Adventure); also note that this chart is mixing all countries together, so while US authors like Adams and Kirsch were cranking out enough games to shake off the Treasure Hunt bug, plenty of others were getting started for the first time.
Furthermore, the Treasure Hunt structure is a convenient way to branch the gameplay in a way that requires less work on the part of the author. When there’s an “escape” game, it’s possible to go super-linear, but if the same author wants the kind of branching they’d get from a Treasure Hunt they need to carefully mete out when items and locations are available. It’s easier to simply require 9 things than it is to create interdependencies that form a satisfying structure.
Before getting into 1982, here’s my “curious firsts” list from 1981:
– First use of relative direction: Mystery Mansion
– First use of landmark navigation with no compass: Empire of the Over-Mind
– First defined player character: Aldebaran III
– First use of choice-based interaction in a parser game: Stuga
– First dynamic compass interface: Spelunker
– First dynamic puzzle generation: Mines
– First free-text conversation in an adventure context: Local Call for Death
– First adventure game comedy: Mystery Fun House
– First adventure to use graphics in every room: Atlantean Odyssey by Teri Li
– First Tolkien adventure conversion: Ringen by Hansen, Pål-Kristian Engstad, and Per Arne Engstad
– First Lovecraft game of any type: Kadath by Gary Musgrave
– First graphic adventure with some action solely in the graphics: Mystery House by Roberta Williams
– First adventure written specifically for children: Nellan is Thirsty by Furman H. Smith
– First “stateless” CYOA game written for computer: Mount St. Helens by Victor Albino
– First 3D graphic adventure: Deathmaze 5000 by Frank Corr, Jr.
– First adventure game that involves traveling back through time: Odyssey #3, Journey Through Time by Joel Mick and James Taranto OR Galactic Hitchhiker by A. Knight
– First adventure game with outside third-person character movement: Castles of Darkness by Michael Cashen
– First adventure game with conversation menus and an action mini-game: Cyborg by Michael Berlyn
Since I last made this list, I looped back to a 1980 game which is worthy of inclusion:
– First adventure game on a console: Bally’s Alley by John Collins
I’ve got deeper into non-English games since last I made the list, so here’s the first occurrence I have so far of languages other than English, not counting translations from English games:
I’m otherwise not adding games from 1982; we start to get into territory with many caveats. Certainly people were producing original ideas, but they’re hard to encapsulate in “first” bullet points; things like the bizarre combination shmup / adventure game Probe One: The Transmitter or the French pocket calculator game Des Cavernes dans le poquette.
Updating my recommendations, a new item proudly enters the first list:
An absolute surprise to me, with some extremely clever magic using the narratives of Carlos Castenada as a mythical universe and having not just one but two puzzles where solving a puzzle also means “solving” the plot.
You have to expect the norms of Cambridge games (expect some of your lives to be spent just gathering information) and there’s also one old-school maze, but this otherwise is one of the most solid games I’ve played of the old school.
I’d normally hesitate to recommend a game with as many mazes as this one does, but the payoff is incredible. What would happen if you had a game framed like a regular treasure hunt, but was actually a heist movie?
Might as well finish the trilogy! This isn’t quite as strong as the other two Infocom games from the year — it’s clear it is built from scattered parts — but it’s still a worthy ending.
A group of four thieves trying to steal a mask, and you need to get to it first. Includes some Apple II vector graphics that actually make the style work.
3. Things I personally enjoyed quite a bit that didn’t make the above list
Also known as my “subjective fun” list, as I know I sometimes enjoy an experience but would have reservations recommending it generally. Previously I had
Another monster, and this one I solved without hints. Despite the flaws I point out during my many posts, I enjoyed myself unironically and this was my favorite of the early Sierra games.
The first adventure game in Japanese. I recommend specifically the FM-7 version which uses a traditional parser (rather than splitting verb and noun into separate lines). As of this writing the FM-7 version has not been translated.
The idea this game could have been lost forever horrifies me. The framing world is genuinely clever and despite some issues with bugs this game had enough underlying systems going on for me to enjoy myself.
The Hobbit by Philip Mitchell, Veronika Megler, Alfred Milgrom and Stuart Ritchie
which influenced an entire generation of gamers, some who didn’t bother to try for the ending but just wanted to experiment. It has so many design flaws I can’t recommend the game on its face but anyone who cares about text adventure history should try this.
The Mask of the Sun by Alan Clark, Larry Franks, Christopher Anson, and Margaret Anson
The graphical quality and technology here seem from another universe than my other 1982 games. It has lots of design jank, but it also clearly signaled what the Apple II was really capable of.
My usual disclaimer: I always feel horrible about making these sort of lists because of all the games left out. There are so many clever and worthy moments but out. I can pick a game at literal random and it has something interesting going on (The Breckenridge Caper of 1798, a game trying to teach history about being a spy in the Napoleonic era; The Sands of Egypt with parallax animation coming from the developer’s arcade background; Toxic Dumpsite, a game from a Myst-like perspective for the TRS-80).
The whole point of All the Adventures is to not write reviews as much as view the entire tapestry of adventure games. I want to see the paths of where people went and try to learn why people made the choices they did. (Was there a technical limitation? Was everyone designing a certain way? Was there a specific non-obvious influence?) I want history at an explanatory level in a way that glows with the vital energy that adventure games have.
In order to do that, of course, the best things is to have — more games! Not splitting my multiple-part posts (like Misadventures 1 through 3) I’ve gone through this 434 times now.
1983, at my current list, has exactly five hundred games.
Mind you, there are still some that will likely drop off (I’m not replaying a translation of an existing game, for instance) and some that will sort into a different year (even back to 1982 or earlier) but that’s still more games than for the entire 14 years of the project. I don’t anticipate taking that long — for one thing, there were some gaps in those 14 years, and for another, I’m better at doing this, and for yet another, I’m going to do more combining together of multiple games into a single entry. (Mind you, doing that doesn’t save an enormous amount of time, but it saves some.)
Looking ahead we have
– Five Infocom games, including Planetfall and Enchanter
– Twin Kingdom Valley
– Nearly 150 ZX Spectrum games
– Four games called Haunted House
– The first big text adventure competition
– The year the Japanese adventure market starts revving, with at least 20 new games
– The first original adventure game in Spanish
and many more things, some which I don’t even know about yet!
Coming up: I’m reversing a bit to 1981, as I have a wildly obscure Apple II graphical game I am dying to share. I have other off-beat things scheduled and I’m also planning on taking a break in there somewhere. Somewhere?
Last time I had left off being stuck on a volcano chimney, with a subsidiary issue of radiation sickness. Rather than obstacle-oriented thinking, the best approach was item-oriented thinking: what hasn’t been used yet? Everything had a clear purpose so far except for the space suit. That is, it was better to simply focus on: What does the space suit get used for?
Mind you, it was still tricky to work out what to do even when asking the right question. It’s an interesting enough puzzle I’m going to pause for a moment for anyone wants to try to think it out.
The very first puzzle I had solved (by accident) was going past a swamp, and if you fail to step safely, the message is…
You gingerly step out onto the swamp. There is a rich gurgling noise as the swamp gives way beneath you. In moments it is over your head
Lacking any air, you choke to death
Rather than the game outright jumping to death, it gives the condition “lacking any air”. That means if we did have air, by, say, wearing a space suit, it would be safe to go in!
You gingerly step out onto the swamp There is a rich gurgling noise as the swamp gives way beneath you. In moments it is over your head.
To your delight, the oxygen in your suit works. You drop slowly through the swamp, and then come to a stop
You’ re at the bottom of the swamp, on firm ground. You can’t see anything but swamp, of course
This is quite an unusual design finesse — a previous failure state is being leveraged for a new location. Going in any direction drops the player into darkness which is yet another maze.
What you see above is an incomplete map. This time you can drop items to map the rooms out, just it is dark so you can’t see what’s there. Fortunately, the game’s command GET (with no noun) will get whatever happens to be in the room (we saw this trick with Brand X / Philosopher’s Quest). This allows somewhat slow mapping, and after not too long I had found a life support machine, a medikit (picking it up cleanses the radiation sickness) and the exit.
I already knew offhand that finding these two items brought my total up to twelve (six repair items, six treasures) so I decided to gun it for the exit and hope I was done with the maze (I was).
There are four exits from the room with the beeping machine above. All four lead up a chimney to the surface of the volcano (in other words, the solution to that puzzle was: it’s an exit you use from the other side). However, three of the exits are deadly.
Now, given modern save states it is possible to save-reload your way to the right answer, but I started to catch on that the number of beeps counted 3, 6, 9, or 12; if you interpret the number as if on a clock, then the direction given is the “safe” one. So 6 beeps go towards 6 on a clock, or south. 9 beeps means go towards 9 on a clock, or west.
That’s the last of the treasures! I didn’t have everything in one “run” yet but it didn’t take me too long to put together a sequence (I started with a save file that made a beeline for the dome first and defeated that) and I had a decently roomy number of moves left, somewhere in the 70s. I did not make a walkthrough this time but this game was shorter than the “remix” version.
In the end, I was quite satisfied: this is in the upper tier of the Cambridge games I’ve played. Despite it having similar attributes of cruelty to Brand X and Acheton on a surface level, the game nevertheless felt more “fair” and solvable.
To be more specific, there’s violations aplenty of the venerable Bill of Player’s Rights. I’ve marked in bold the offenders.
1. Not to be killed without warning
2. Not to be given horribly unclear hints 3. To be able to win without experience of past lives 4. To be able to win without knowledge of future events 5. Not to have the game closed off without warning
6. Not to need to do unlikely things
7. Not to need to do boring things for the sake of it 8. Not to have to type exactly the right verb 9. To be allowed reasonable synonyms 10. To have a decent parser
11. To have reasonable freedom of action
12. Not to depend much on luck
13. To be able to understand a problem once it is solved
14. Not to be given too many red herrings
15. To have a good reason why something is impossible
16. Not to need to be American to understand hints
17. To know how the game is getting on
Yes, this list is getting on in years considering Graham Nelson first posted it in 1993 (more recent discussion here and here about the datedness, and the lack of accounting for a game like Outer Wilds) but what I want to focus on here is despite the strong violations of rules 1, 3, 4, and 5 (and light violations of 8 through 10) this game was much more playable than many other rules-violators.
The very first door kills you if you try to pull it. The platform that falls after five turns: there is no way to know that this will be the exact move count without experimenting. It’s fairly easy to do things in the wrong order and get your game closed off (you need the acid can before the desert if you want the diamond, and you can only go through once). Yet: I was playing in a different mode of thought, one where I knew I had many clone duplicates running around the world gathering information. Within the norms of this condition, the game played it fair; for example, the fact the floating platform gives the ghost up after a specific amount of movement is heavily implied by the text.
I think the key here is point 2 (unclear hints), which the game deftly avoided: despite minimalist text imposed by technical requirements (even highly compressed this just barely fits on the goal computer), there really is enough text to figure out everything. This wasn’t the case with Brand X, which had (for example) a moment where if you don’t get an item from the starting zone, it will show up later; there’s no reason to suspect this! Contrast also with the ningy of Acheton, which had a weird and ambiguous message if you did things wrong and made the game unwinnable; there’s no such moment on Countdown to Doom.
A hideous mocking voice sneers: “I suppose you think you’re clever, don’t you!”
(That’s all Acheton says! You can get very deep into the game before realizing this message means “you made a mistake”.)
I have heard Castle of Riddles — which Killworth wrote right before this game — is not so fair. We’ll arrive there eventually in our 1983 sequence and reassess.
I’ve managed to ride a sandworm and do some time travel.
Cover from the late-80s Topologika release of the game, via Acorn Electron World.
Out of the various obstacles I had left (desert, monster, volcano tube, blob, hover-platform, cube) the hover-platform turned out to be the simplest to resolve.
>PULL LEVER
The metal platform whines and lifts off the ground slightly. It must be an old antigrav device!
>U
The motor unit and platform follow you obediently
You’re on the burnt ground
There is a motor unit here, far too heavy to carry. It is resting on a metal platform of some kind!
On the side of the platform is a large lever
I had experimented with various methods of fiddling with the lever trying not to break it, but I eventually discovered the simple fact that the platform will run out of juice after taking six moves. If you make a beeline for the cargo hold/engine room you’ll take five moves, so this is out of parity; that is, if you try to stall by going back and forth, you’ll reach seven moves, and the platform will land in the wrong spot. You can squeeze in an extra turn by taking a detour down the one-way “slide” from the Mountain Pass to North of the Desert.
Voilà, one motor unit. I’m not sure how the installation is going to work. Just in a structural solving sense, the presence of the one-way exit in the path (which otherwise doesn’t seem to serve much purpose) indicates to me a 98% chance this is the solution.
The blob, monster and cube turned out to be dependent on working out the desert, so that needs to come next.
You are in a valley north of a desert of green sand. There is a unclimbable slide leading up, and a path going north. You feel you should be quiet around here
>S
It is rather warm
You’ re in the desert, with a sandstorm blowing, and your compass spinning like a top
A long-handled fishing net lies here
I wish I had some magical insight here, but I mainly got this via brute force. The verb list I had gotten from my previous “try all the standard verbs” procedure was
so going through the possibilities there wasn’t much to try other than to SHOUT. This summons a “giant sandworm” that takes you to a “city square”.
The mention of being quiet to the north of the desert was a lateral hint; the fact nothing happened with SHOUT was still indicating that SHOUT might do something nearby. For an extremely lateral solving method, the inspirational drugs I had obtained last time did signal a Dune-esque type of universe, so making noise in a desert could count as solving by reference (except I didn’t make that connection until after the fact).
Moving on:
You can technically head back into the desert but this just kills you so I’ve left it off the map.
The southeast just has a hint to a puzzle I’ve already solved (“say flezz to robot” which required writing the letters in a grid):
You’re at an open space in the rubble, with a path back the way you came.
The wall of one building has a square pattern of dots, five on a side, printed on it
(Is there a word to the phenomenon of finding hints to puzzles you’ve already solved? Should there be?)
To the south of town is an entirely different issue, a pit that dissolves the player.
We’ve seen a similar obstacle recently with Scott Morgan’s Fun House, but this time the science needed to solve the puzzle is less dodgy. Remember we had a can full of acid from back in the swamp; here is where we can THROW CAN.
You hurl the can into the pool. The alkali dissolves the can, and there is a violent fizzing as the acid and alkali neutralise each other
The pool has a “cubic foot of pure diamond” so that’s another treasure racked up.
Heading west from the city leads to a jungle — the same jungle as the maze — but we end up at the west side of the river, the river which had thermal goggles on the right side. There’s a vine and you can just CLIMB VINE and it will initiate swinging back over to the main part of the map.
The path here (optimizing for shortest moves, we still have 220 turns to beat the game) makes it tempting to wait on getting the thermal goggles. However, to get the can of acid (needed to get the diamond) the thermal goggles are meant to be needed to get through the swamp … unless you’re like me and lucked out at the very start of the game and didn’t need the goggles at all. Optimization by random chance, huzzah!
From the desert there was a fishing net; now is when it gets used. I figured out most of this puzzle quite quickly, except I went over to the blob falling off a cliff and did THROW NET which just gets a default response. It was only later (after pointlessly trying to outwit the monster and futilely banging on the cube) I found I was using the wrong parser command.
Fortunately, using the net on the blob about to fall off the cliff was irresistible; I thought maybe it was a timing issue, but I also inadvertently tried out a few extra verbs in the process, coming across CATCH.
There’s no deep descriptions while back in time. You’re on the same map you were before, more or less. I tested the “ancient phaser” and it’s still ancient even given we’re doing time travel:
What’s deeply weird is if you take an object from the future and drop it somewhere, it appears in that spot in the past! If I were trying to rationalize this I’d say the planet has some time-loop weirdness going on, which wouldn’t be out of character, but in truth I think the author just didn’t bother to go that far with the coding.
This did suggest a hint for what you’re actually supposed to do, which is go up to the area with the navigation box (previously described as “non-functional”) and the space suit (described as “highly decrepit”). They are both still in the same places but in rather better shape.
The time travel is on a set timer, but making a beeline for these items still leaves some time left. I decided to check out the monster nearby, and it was also affected by the time travel:
You re halfway along the crevasse
There is a handful of dilithium crystals here!
A tiny baby six-headed monster is floundering around on the ground
You’re back in time
The monster was previously gigantic and deadly. The monster is still deadly (KILL MONSTER leads to the player’s demise) but fortunately the creature is small enough now to be ignored. You can run to the west and grab some “rare spices”, and also get the dilithium crystals that are just sitting there. The crystals have their own issue, though.
With some careful timing I can get the crystals on the last turn right before moving back forwards in time (still carrying the new navigator box, functional space suit, and rare spices) and this gives enough time for you tote the crystals all the way over to the ship and drop them off without immediate death. Unfortunately future death is suggested because “you’re feeling queasy” is mentioned over and over, just without the death; I am guessing I’m missing an item to deal with that. Or maybe you can win even with the radiation sickness? (That would go well with the now-tiny escapee of Mysterious Mansion and the permanently-blue survivor of The House of Professor Folibus.)
All that’s left is the volcano tube. In addition to the various ship supplies and treasures (navigation box, portable nuclear reactor, motor unit, dilithium crystals, tiny black hole, perfect conductor, magnetic monopole generator, cubic foot of pure diamond, visionary drugs, rare spices) I still have a space suit, sword, thermal goggles, and fishing net. I have not been able to get help from any of them.
You can throw things (“something clatters down the chimney”) but none of the items I’ve tried have helped (I don’t think I’ve comprehensively tried every single one, but I know I’ve tried the tiny black hole which seemed the most suggestive). I’ve also tried using WAIT for many turns both above the chimney and inside and with no help, just the occasional “ship collapse” message.
Still, given there’s only six ship parts and six treasures, I must be very close to the end.
I’ve made enough progress for an update, although the game is still high on difficulty.
The cart format of the game, via Acorn Electron World.
I managed to clear out the “Jungle” first to the west, which turned out to be both more straightforward than I expected but also more irritating. Dropped items disappear into the undergrowth, but I figured I would try a bit of wandering anyway to see if I could get something to happen at random:
A few steps in I realized the room descriptions were different, and there are in fact four different rooms with very similar text.
Room 1: You’re in a jungle with exits in all directions
Room 2: You’re in the jungle, with exits in all directions
Room 3: You’re in the jungle. There are exits in all directions
Room 4: You’re in the jungle. Exits leave in all directions
This is intended to be another repeat of the all-different maze from Crowther/Woods; you simply use the text differences to map things out.
At the end of this you end up on the east side of a river (no swimming, remember) with some thermal goggles. I think this is meant to be the only prize.
You find yourself standing in an open patch to the west of the jungle. A wide river lies west, with more jungle beyond. Crevasses block progress along the river bank
There is a pair of infrared goggles here
I could just make grumpy noises and move on but despite this being the sort of maze designed on a spreadsheet, I wanted to test something out: is there a mathematical way to determine how difficult the maze is? I’ve mused about this before with no good result but finally came up with simply cranking the maze through a Monte Carlo Simulation. I have a program that starts the player at the Landing Area and has them wander for 100,000 turns, while keeping track of how many times the player arrived at a particular room. The results:
That means out of 100 random turns, the player reaches the goal approximately once.
A random walk is not absurd player behavior, even — sometimes I have just started typing directions randomly in frustration, and depending on the maze design, that can lead to good results. Authors did think for and account for this; even Don Woods made a “diagram of the first maze (the all-alike maze), used to check whether any simple repetitive actions would get you out.” Here, at the least, there is no connection going from Room 1 to Room 4 but plenty going the other way, so there’s at least a “trap door” effect so beloved of authors in this time period.
Alas, we still can’t just look at that percentage (“1%”) and call that an objective measure that allows comparing all mazes in adventure games. For one thing, there is a significant difference in gameplay when objects need to be dropped, and especially if the player has an object shortage and needs to shuffle objects around the maze as things get figured out (which is why I’ve sometimes had maps with rooms like “Dagger 3” and “Rope 4”). Even without that, there’s the “repetitive action” that Woods was testing for; with the Jungle if you just keep going NW you’ll get to the destination of the maze. This doesn’t get accounted for in a random walk. Tricks like the diagonal exit in the All Alike maze of Adventure (where every exit is north/south/east/west, except for the very end) don’t get calculated in either. Additionally, if the author keeps sticking to particular patterns, even if they use the “most extreme” design possible, by staying consistent to a pattern it can make it so the player has an easier time puzzling it out.
For example, the most extreme example of a maze is the “all or nothing” style, with a sequence of rooms where
a.) only the right direction makes forward progress
b.) all other directions are wrong and will always send the player back to the very start of the maze
(For an example of this in the wild, see Adventure 500.) Testing this configuration in my Monte Carlo setup using the same number of rooms as the jungle maze, I get that the player will reach the final room only 1 out of every 100,000 tries (rather than 100). However, the majority of players will catch on to what’s going on and start to just search for the forward-exit in each room and ignore the other ones; it additionally makes for an easy to chart diagram.
A (nearly) all-or-nothing maze I saw recently from Magic Mountain.
One of the issues here is how comfortable the author is with the player hitting a solution “at random”. Some seem offended by the idea of luck playing a part in puzzle-solving, while others are more relaxed about it. An author who hates wins attained at random might be more likely to pick the all or nothing structure (even though the effect in gameplay is unrealistic, on top of making the act of mapping more mundane).
Speaking of hitting solutions at random….
…I was mostly wrong about the swamp last time. I had, by sheer luck, found not only that I could step onto the swamp by going northeast, but also all steps after went to the north. This is generally not what’s supposed to happen. The thermal goggles from the jungle are meant to aid in figuring out where the safe spots are, and it isn’t always going north. Otherwise the result is the same (getting a black hole and a can of acid).
Besides that, the progress I’ve made is back at the mysterious alien dome.
Entering, again, requires dropping all items, so this section is entirely self-contained. You start by following a path eventually leading to a dead-end, getting a sequence of shapes that is randomly determined out of square, triangle, hexagon, and pentagon. Pressing one of the symbols (it doesn’t seem to matter which) drops you in a maze, where the direction you are facing is now tracked, and the only commands are AHEAD, BACK, RIGHT, and LEFT.
This time my map is not fully-made out because it seems at least the shapes have some randomization, and I confirmed after enough testing the only things to find were a.) a set of four symbols on the floor, that can be picked up and b.) a hole leading down further.
The next level has a sword and a nuclear reactor, followed by a robot (with the solution I mentioned last time still holding — it doesn’t seem to be randomized — the word is always FLEZZ). The robot is followed by a giant rat. Last time I killed it with the sword, but this time I just ignored it. This turned out to be a wise choice (I’ll explain why in a moment). Last time I also didn’t realize the symbols on the floor were portable, but this time I took them along, and after some struggle realized THROW PENTAGON (etc.) would get them in the machine. I had to follow the same sequence as earlier:
If you’ve killed the rat, you get a different message:
You have passed all the tests, earthling, save one — you killed without reason. Begone!
The intent seems to be to lampoon fantasy adventures and their tendency to kill rats with swords on sight. (SIDE NOTE: There’s a little more lampooning in the verbs. I singled out RUB and WAVE last time; apparently Killworth thinks along similar lines, as if you apply the verb to an object like the sword, the response is “This isn’t a fantasy game you know — doing that won’t help.” Rather than roaming into sci-fi as simply a different window dressing to the adventure form, Killworth specifically is trying to root things in a marginally more scientific world. Marginally.)
And that’s essentially it! Going down there’s still exits with the four symbols, but this time you can pass through safely (although again, you need to repeat the same sequence as before).
Once to the end you can go through an exit out the back, leaving the artefact behind for good.
Still remaining to reckon with: the desert which causes the compass to go haywire, the monster at the icy crevasse, the volcano tube which shoots up lava when trying to climb inside, the blob which eventually falls off a cliff, the hover-platform without an easy shutoff, and the mysterious large cube which you can enter.
You are inside a three metre cube of metal that vibrates slightly as if it only partly exists. The exit is north
(If I remember right this allows time travel somehow? The game might suddenly get much bigger. I have yet to get the cube to acknowledge my presence, though.)
Climate: varies dramatically from desert to jungle, glacier to swamp [N.B. Reason unknown; exogeologists baffled]. Atmosphere intensely volatile; explorers must guard against rapid corrosion of equipment and spaceship alike.
Dangers: Atmosphere, as above. Automatic defence system. Also the artefacts, reputed to have been the home, aeons ago, of the Ancients; none who has entered them has ever returned.
Special features: The large number of crashed spaceships littering its surface, many of which had been carrying treasure from one planet to another, make Doom a potentially lucrative source of income for that special breed of explorer known as adventurer.
[Extract from Intergalactic Times, 3,7,187/qbf.]
— From the expanded version of Countdown to Doom
There’s the 1982! Is it a typo or was the intent to have a much earlier release date? Via eBay.
Let’s take a tour! But before a tour of planet, a tour of the game’s verbs:
The pale purple verbs are ones where the game helpfully nudges that they won’t be used, even though they’re understood, like
>EAT
Nothing on this planet gives sustenance
or
>SWIM
On an alien world? No way!
There’s no absolute guarantee they won’t be used, but it’s more likely they won’t be.
RUB and SHAKE are useful to keep track of because they tend to be used in non-obvious situations (where gizmo X is used by either rubbing or shaking), SAY lets you type anything as a noun (suggesting a “spoken keyword” type puzzle”) and SWING is the only one I’d call rare, and the response suggests it is only used in a special situation, like hanging off a rope:
>SWING
I’d be interested to know how you’d do that!
Continuing from last time, I had busted through the front door of the ship to reach a clearing “under a dull copper sun”. There’s lots of directions to go in, and I’m going to start with southeast and rotate clockwise. As the quote from the start implies, we’re going through a wild variety of environments in the process.
Southeast is a mountain pass.
You can enter a “vent hole” by just going down, leading to a “narrow chimney” where “you’re dripping with sweat”. Trying to go farther down leads to death:
As you climb, a red hot spout of lava shoots upwards and engulfs you
(There’s a lot of death coming up, if you can’t tell.)
Back at the mountain pass there’s another turn you can take leading to a box canyon with the message “write steep, read flat” which will come up later, you can also veer left to land at the south route via an alternate method.
I tried to get another death here for my collection but despite the warnings about sound, SHOUT doesn’t do anything (“Thanks, I needed that!”) To the south there’s a desert, and all I have been able to do is pick up a fishing net then get lost and die (phew, was feeling deprived for a moment).
Going back to the clearing, southwest goes back in the ship we started in, and west goes into a jungle, with the same sort of getting-lost as the desert, except without a thirst timer.
You’re in the jungle with exits in all directions
If you try to drop items they get swallowed up (“Something disappears in the undergrowth”) so you can’t do standard mapping. A general pattern of the game seems to be “geographic puzzles, but no standard mapping”.
Northwest, north, and northeast all lead to a swamp, although only northeast is safe, and only if you are holding no items; otherwise you fall in and die. This has the curious effect that for most players the section wouldn’t even be a puzzle, but for someone who happened to search in those directions while holding an item, they might not even realize the reason for their failure.
The first items I picked up in the game. The can has acid and opening it kills you.
East is complicated and gets its own map.
Events start out on an “area of scorched ground” where there is a blob approaching a cliff. Wait a bit and the blob will fall off a cliff, presumably to its doom, so I’m guessing there’s some timed thing here.
The sequence here freezes in time if you just pass through, so it’s possible to go by the blob, come back through, and still save it (or whatever it is you’re supposed to do). I remember a blob from the 2000 edition of the game but I just remember it blocking a path, not approaching doom like the game Lemmings.
Let’s consider the scorched ground a new sub-nexus and get rotating again; south moves the player into a mysterious metal cube that “vibrates slightly as if it only partly exists”. Down leads to a motor unit (presumably a ship part) on a platform, and while the unit is too heavy to carry, pulling a lever will cause the platform to float and follow you.
The hard part is to get the hover-platform to stop following because the lever breaks if you try to push as opposed to nullifying the movement.
East is, straightforwardly enough, a junction leading to a dead end with a phaser. The phaser is described as ancient and will overheat and kill you if you try to use it in most circumstances:
The cooling system in the ancient phaser isn’t too good; the phaser melts in your hand, which is not good
I have found the circumstance it does work, but we’ll see that later.
Northeast is a rather elaborate section with a “grey metallic dome” which is an ancient artefact. It’s possible to go in to find a new section, but first, a side trip to a random message on a cliff nearby:
I originally thought maybe this was the decipher code for a cryptogram and tried writing the letters a through z underneath, but I ended up going past by one; there are exactly 25 letters. That led me to suspect maybe I was dealing with a grid instead, so I broke the letters into groups of five, then spotted the word “say” while reading down:
sedlr
azieo
yzstb
ftaho
lobet
Fully deciphered this is “say flezz to disable the robot”, which is a codeword that will come in handy inside the artefact. The message “write steep, read flat” clearly was meant to hint about this but I only realized the connection after I had already solved the puzzle. (It indicates writing the text vertically and reading horizontally, which will give an equivalent solution.)
Now, inside the dome:
You are required to drop all items before going in (otherwise you get stopped by a sort of force field). The game in general starts to take a more abstract style like Xenos.
There’s a sequence of four shapes at it appears to be randomly rolled; for the instance I first played, I got the sequence square, pentagon, triangle, hexagon; on the second time through I got hexagon, pentagon, square, and triangle. Pushing on one of the niches drops the player into a maze where the compass has been broken.
This is a relative-position maze, and is fortunately consistent in terms of bi-direction; that is, if you go forward from one room, going backwards will return you to where you started. The symbols (square, pentagon, triangle, hexagon) are placed in such a way that you just need to keep track of their relative position (that is, if a hexagon is “near the door to your right”, and then you go right followed by backwards”, the hexagon will now be at your feet).
Eventually — and I don’t know the pattern to this yet, and if it’s important to even work it out — you will run across a hole going down to a new area where there is a store room with a sword and a cramped cubicle with a portable nuclear reaction (again I assume a ship part).
The way north is blocked by a robot but you can use the earlier word FLEZZ to get by.
This is followed by a giant rat (which you can just kill with the sword, but that might be wrong) followed by a “weird vegetable mass which is also a computer. I don’t have anything to put in the slot so I may have needed to explore the maze more.
Going down from here leads to a “square room with four exits” and the four symbols again (pentagon, hexagon, triangle, square). All of them killed me when I tried it via the computer dropping a “heavy weight” so I assume I missed something while exploring. (I remember this whole sequence in the 2000 game but I remember the atmosphere and vibes far more than the exact solution. The vibes are excellent and feel on the right edge of alien but understandable.)
But that’s not quite everything yet! Way back at the starting clearing we have done all compass directions, but missed that going UP is another direction as well. This leads to the exogeologists just quitting in frustration as we go up to a glacier.
There are some persistent messages about being very cold (as well as a “non-functioning navigator box lying around, I haven’t fiddled with it yet). Climbing up higher leads to an ice wall and the message that “you’re freezing to death”, which would normally be a bad thing except we have the phaser from earlier.
Inside is another treasure, some visionary drugs for navigation (I’m guessing the ships work kind of like Dune?)
Finally there’s a branch off the glacier to the north, where you find it warmer and can pick up a “decrepit space suit”; further on is a “crevasse” and I’ll just give the screenshot this time:
There’s plenty for me to prod at, so I’m not in any sense “stuck”, but I figured I had enough of the layout to give an update. I remember from my last playing that there’s some options in what sequence to tackle puzzles (notice how the alien dome takes away all objects, so it has to be self-contained) but the puzzles aren’t entirely separate from each other either. Curiously enough I remember more the overall events than details about how to solve things, which I suppose makes this more like a real play-through. (Maybe it’d have helped me remember to have some sort of diary that follows along with my playing. I’ll need to get on that.)
No matter how small an Adventure you write, it will take far, far more time and effort than you thought it would.
— Peter Killworth from How to Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron
Double surprise!
You may be wondering why I am ending my 1982 sequence with what I am marking as a 1983 game. As of this writing, Mobygames, CASA Solution Archive, and IFDB all list the game as 1982. Unlike Critical Mass where I could find a physical copy with the date, there’s no rationale I can find to even get the year by mistake. Acorn User in their May 1983 issue states outright that
Acornsoft are due to release seven new packs this month — three on chemistry, a programming package called Microtext, Draughts and Reversi, Starship Command (see reviews) and another adventure — Countdown to Doom.
Ads start to appear in the second half of the year, so I am fairly certain I have already ended my 1982 sequence and am starting 1983 (however, I’m still happy to hear evidence to the contrary).
To backtrack to the history: this is another game by Peter Killworth. We haven’t seen him for a long time, not since Brand X / Philosopher’s Quest, but technically he’s been busy, because 1982 was the year he took Brand X (which he wrote for the Cambridge system with Acheton, Hezarin, Avon etc.) and turned it into a commercial product for Acornsoft.
I had a problem which revolved around using a pivot to get up a cliff. Put weight on one end, and the other goes up — but you have to be careful to get the weight right. I programmed it on the mainframe, and left it for a friend to have a look at. When I came back next morning, I was deluged with messages from people I’d never heard of, all telling me where I’d gone wrong in the program.
With the launch of the BBC Micro, Acornsoft started looking towards Cambridge University for software, with the offer of a BBC Micro to takers; a friend of Kilworth’s had a program accepted so Killworth decided to convert Brand X (which is how it became the originally-abbreviated Philosopher’s Quest).
Converting from a mainframe to a home computer means — like Infocom by necessity, and Level 9 by choice — he needed to include a text-compression algorithm in order to fit everything he needed.
I have an unofficial competition running with Pete Austin of Level 9 and various other people on text compression. We’ve got it to about fifty per cent.
Throughout 1983 — which we’re now kicking off — he wrote Castle of Riddles and Countdown to Doom as original games for the BBC Micro, and also converted Partington’s Hamil. Eventually, with all the Topologika editions that happened in the late 80s, he wrote an expanded version. Unlike Philosopher’s Quest which essentially restored the mainframe content, the new content was written specifically for Topologika. A third edition appeared in 2000 when Killworth announced conversions of his three “Doom trilogy” games for z-code (that is, the type of file Infocom used that can be run with software like Frotz, Nitfol, etc.)
Killworth in 1984.
This game is fairly special to me in that not only have I beaten the game before (in the year 2000 incarnation) it represents what I might call the first difficult adventure game I’ve ever beaten without hints. (Infocom? Always relied on the Infoclues somewhere. This makes my memory of how to solve the puzzles foggier, which is why I barely remembered Zork III’s content at all when I played through. I had beaten Lucasarts games without hints but none of them were “difficult” in the same way as a game by a Cambridge oceanographer who moonlights with adventure games.) Part of the reason I had waited until the end of “1982” to play this is I figured some extra passage of time might help with forgetting how things work. I still have the walkthrough I had to write to beat the game in the end, though.
What I haven’t beaten (or played before) is the older, shorter version, and after much waffling that’s the version I’m going with. This is partly to juke my memory of the game even further, but also because this is a case (unlike the other Cambridge games) where the extra content was truly a late-80s addition.
As implied earlier, this ended up being the first of a “Doom trilogy”, a set of games on the planet Doomawangara. The first game is a relatively traditional solo-character treasure hunt, the second involves timing out a series of events akin to a mystery like Suspect but it’s a planet-adventure instead, and the third game involves a group with multiple characters.
Our ship crash lands and we need to look for six “components”. In addition to the components there are six “treasures” which seem to be optional (I don’t remember them being optional before) although like any proper adventure we’re going to try to get them all. (It’s not an “innovation” exactly as even Acheton let you get away without having all the treasures, and on my Hezarin playthrough I skipped two, but it is interesting that the game is formally set-up to let you bypass all the treasures.)
There’s a hard time of what seems to be 220 turns; this is why I needed a walkthrough last time I beat the game, because while it isn’t a ludicrously tight time limit (like Madventure, which required solving puzzles in different ways to optimize) it also isn’t one that you can hit by natural exploration.
You start trapped in the ship you crashed in as the exit door is jammed; there’s fortunately an explosive that can help as long as you LIGHT EXPLOSIVE followed by THROW EXPLOSIVE (and clear some space). Unfortunately, just trying to open the door from that kills you, as a reminder this is still a game from the Cambridge family of authors.
Using PUSH DOOR instead gets out, and leads to many directions to explore. We’ll search around the planet next time.
(I’m still doing a “concluding 1982” post like I did with 1981, but I’m going to finish this game first. Since I’m updating my recommendation lists, feel feel to speculate what might land on them; the four categories are Games everyone should play, For adventure enthusiasts, Things I personally enjoyed quite a bit that didn’t make the above list, and Some bonus games for historians.)
This resolved, after the fact, one of the more cryptic aspects of the game.
First of all, regarding that THIS PLACE IS TOO FULL TO ENTER message — I was still so baffled about it that I checked the book which supposedly mentions it (see above) and it is indeed right there in print, as a feature of the game. Importantly, it said the message always happens from the two particular locations I had seen it at. (Why did the authors leave it in after v1.0?) It certainly was considered a bug by the time the Macintosh version came out, which fixed the issue (but it was made after the Guidebook). The important thing is that I knew the game definitely intended an alternate exit and I wasn’t just running into a random glitch (as opposed to an intentional one), so I resumed multiple whacks at what seemed to be the only method of exit, the forest with the spider.
I still was not having any luck evading the creature, and I found out after the fact it is designed such that you can never get through by going west. Fortunately, I found an alternate route in the process, as the wood elf would occasionally wander in and toss me in the elf dungeon.
I already still had the red key from the butler, so I could unlock the door right away and go out. There was one alternate exit I hadn’t used yet because it seemed a bit broken: a “magic door” just north of the room with the barrels. I was able previously to get a description of an elf coming, but I hadn’t tried the WAIT command to see if anything would happen.
I was able to then GO THROUGH MAGIC DOOR to get out.
Going west exits directly to the main nexus area so I was able to take a beeline for the exit. Thorin found me along the way so he was able to share in my victory.
Crowther/Woods adventure ending, except this time the dwarves and hobbits are joining in the cheering crowd.
There’s enough lingering questions I’m going to list them all first before I start answering:
What was the curious key all about?
Why is it that exits sometimes seemed to be missing?
What was going on with Gollum’s riddle?
What do you actually need to do to win?
Why was this game so popular?
Why did credit for the game “drift” over time?
Onward with:
What was the curious key all about?
After everything was over (this is on the way home) I got a hint from Thorin as to the utility of the key
I had seen the effect of this without even realizing the key was causing the effect. It turns out to be completely unnecessary, but here it is:
This allows a “side route” around the dragon so Bilbo can theoretically go into the lair and nab the treasure, I assume without confronting the dragon at all. It is so blatantly obvious to coax Bard into shooting the dragon (and so difficult to get the key) this really seems mis-adjusted.
To put it another way, if you have two alternate routes to solve a puzzle, and one is quite straightforward and doesn’t require any extra preparation, having a second route which is much harder to solve for and provides no benefit is unhelpful (and even provides extra danger, as the dragon can wander back in its lair and find you anyway!)
Incidentally, the golden key from the mountains — at least according to the Guide — serves no purpose whatsoever. That whole piece of geography is meaningless.
Why is it that exits sometimes seemed to be missing?
There was a game mechanic I had missed here. At the start of the game you get a curious map that nobody can read, and I had additionally taken the first NPC encountered (Elrond) and tried to get him to read it too, and he was just responding “no”. This was early on when I wasn’t understanding yet just how bad the RNG could get; the key is to simply keep asking.
This also explains my sometimes-missing-exit problem: an exit is picked at random at the start of the game to be missing from the map. If it’s the one above, it isn’t essential to the game, but sometimes the exit is quite important, like the one from the Misty Mountains going east (the one that was missing quite often in the Mac version of the game!)
Map that came with some editions of the game. Via eBay.
What was going on with Gollum’s riddle?
Petter Sjölund indicated in the comments that he got a different (very famous) riddle with his port, and sometimes the right answer would get him strangled anyway. Even if he answered the riddle correctly and survived, Gollum would just immediately ask the same riddle over again.
I think the answer probably is “dark” or “darkness” but after many attempts I never was able to deliver this answer to Gollum and live. The walkthroughs just say to kill him; you don’t even need to do that because he doesn’t toss you in the dungeon so it’s easy to simply walk on by. (The only reason killing him is helpful is his corpse serves as a marker on a map space in order to tell if you’ve gone back to a particular room.)
What do you actually need to do to win?
With everything going it may be unclear what the winning sequence is. As far as I can tell the simplest way is:
1. Get Elrond to read the map (in case of bad route)
2. Wait a beat and get the key from the trolls after they have turned to stone, then use that to get the sword (Sting), the rope can ignored; the rope can be used for an alternate route over to Lake Town but it’s fairly obtuse
3. Do a rush in the Goblin area and grab the one ring. From Inside Goblins Gate I found the route NE, N, W, SE, SW to be pretty good at evading being caught. With the ring in hand and then worn it easy going the rest of the way.
4. Get caught by a wood elf. (It’s possible for the wood elf to be dead by accident. Reset.)
5. Wait for the butler to open the red door while imprisoned, then sneak out while wearing the ring. Jump onto a barrel at the right moment to escape.
6. From Lake Town, instruct Bard to go north and SHOOT DRAGON. Grab the treasure.
7. Get caught by the wood elf again.
8. Instead of going the barrel route, go to the room with the magic door and WEAR RING, then EXAMINE MAGIC DOOR. It should show an elf approaching, at which point you can WAIT, then GO THROUGH MAGIC DOOR.
9. Walk home and put the treasure in the chest.
You don’t need Thorin if you’re simply going to avoid getting caught by the goblins (given Gandalf seems to be inclined to randomly show up).
Regarding the point with the rope, you can take the rope over to the river and snag yourself a boat. This is utterly baffling to me. “THROW ROPE ACROSS – Repeat until the rope lands in the boat on the other side of the river.”
I do wonder if it’d be possible to simply murder both the pesky dwarf and wizard at the start and still make it through, which segues somewhat into…
Why was this game so popular?
The Slovenian magazine Moj mikro had a brief profile of adventure games in 1984, when they were first starting to appear in Yugoslavia. The text of the article mentions three games: Crowther/Woods Adventure, Kontrabant (the first Slovenian adventure game) and The Hobbit. It was considered an urtext.
When The Hobbit game came out, the ZX Spectrum was still getting started with software. This is in a game that managed to be in development for longer than the lifetime of the system, and any ZX Spectrum text adventures that had come out by this point tended to be fairly weak, like The Zolan Adventure. So first mover advantage could be considered part of the explanation.
However, that doesn’t fit the absolutely huge spread to this game, far out of proportion from what seems the quality. This is a game with bugged rooms that gets left in the game just because, Gandalf stumbling about purely at random, Gollum telling a riddle where the right answer can kill the player, and highly uneven design on puzzle difficulty. However, it also — like when Grand Theft Auto 3 first came out — invites experiment. I normally have zero temptation to replay adventure games, but I truly wonder if there’s some method through that avoids picking up the One Ring at all (you’d need to get the curious key, at least). I also wonder how far I can take the “multi-command” trick with NPCs and if can have Thorin go grab the ring for me while Bilbo just hangs out in comfort. The slight train-wreck experience (including key NPCs just randomly being dead when you need them) is actually beneficial to the feel of the game as world-toolkit, where it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to win but to see if Thorin can do hobbit-tossing. Strident mentions in the comments that:
I should point out that, despite myself and my father playing this game for probably a hundred hours… and having the guidebook… I don’t think we ever actually “completed” it.
That is, if a character literally falls off the map into void taking a key item with them, that’s not contrary to the alternate goal of having a world to muck about in.
Each object had a set of characteristics, and you could perform actions on the object based on the characteristics. For example, it could be alive (an animal) or dead. It had weight associated with it. So you could pick up any object that was light enough and use it as a weapon, whether it was a “weapon” or not. If it was a dead animal, that was no different from any other heavy object. If it was a live animal, it would probably struggle or fight, depending on it’s character profile.
Each animal’s “character” was a list of actions that they could choose between. Sometimes, they would just cycle through the actions one after the other, and sometimes they would change to a different set based on what had happened before – like the friendly dwarf, who could become violent once he’d been attacked (or picked up). An action could invoke a general routine – like, choose a random direction and run, which was the same for all animals; or, it could be an action specific only to this animal, like, choose any live object and kill it.
I certainly do think something went awry nearly right when the game came out, as Mitchell started to get the lion’s share of the credit. There is for example this interview from Computer Answers May 1984…
…and there’s another mention in Crash a few years later which credits Mitchell with the Inglish system. (It mentions how, despite it having fancy affordances, people were still sticking to much simpler inputs.)
I’m going to put blame mostly on the magazines. Ian Malcolm who worked at the company pointed out to me on Bluesky that Mitchell was not a “interact with the public” type of person and “mostly wanted to be left alone”. That is, his face was being put up because the magazines wanted one, not that he was ever keen on the idea. While there was valiant effort in early articles to credit all four, there was a strong tendency then (as there still is now) to assume a single auteur behind a creative effort and leave everyone else behind. Malcolm also points out that Mitchell was the only one who stayed at Melbourne House (Megler only worked at Beam for a year while finishing her degree before going to IBM, I am not sure where Ritchie went) so interviews after 1983 would naturally gravitate towards a person the magazines could reach.
(Possibly in Megler’s case there was some sexism. She’s on record being annoyed about people thinking she wasn’t doing programming, which does seem related to gender-perception, but as far as credit goes I think the evidence is more toward it being a general issue.)
BONUS: What’s the deal with Arkenstone?
This is something I ran across rather at accident.
Back in January I wrote about a game from the book ZAP! POW! BOOM! Arcade Games for the VIC-20 by Mark Ramshaw. It was entitled “Adventure” in its UK version and “Arkenstone” in its UK version. It played like an extremely abbreviated version of The Hobbit where you could take a spear and kill the dragon yourself.
It has the same “abbreviated geography” as parts of the Melbourne House version of The Hobbit, although with everything crunched into two printed pages for an unexpanded VIC-20. The game came out before The Hobbit and could just be coincidence, except, well — let me bring up this picture I posted on Sunday —
Over the Spectrum was one of the Melbourne House books of type-ins that was still bulking up their finances, with the BASIC code produced by Neil Streeter and Clifford Ramshaw. The adventure game may or may not have been written by Clifford (he’s credited, at least, with a “Caves and Pitfalls” game in a ZX81 book); the important point is that Clifford is the brother of Mark. In other words, there is strong chance Mark saw an early version of The Hobbit (maybe even the TRS-80 version) so was inspired to make his own VIC-20 extremely-pruned-down version as a result. Rob has done more investigation here in the comments.
…
If you’re wanting to read further takes on The Hobbit in general, there’s Jimmy Maher, Data Driven Gamer (with a dissection of the internal logic, like how the goblins follow patrol patterns), Aaron Reed, and Helen Stuckey. I don’t particularly disagree with anyone’s game evaluation; Jimmy Maher points out the parser despite having fancy features is also terribly finicky in other respects (you can’t ENTER BOAT, you can only CLIMB INTO BOAT). Megler also has a long retrospective here on her webpage, including this part, which seems a good place as any to close out:
The division between inanimate object and NPC was left intentionally a little blurry, giving extra flexibility. For example, the object overrides could also be used to modify character behavior. I actually coded an override where, if the player typed “turn on the angry dwarf”, he turned into a “randy dwarf” and followed the player around propositioning him. If he was later turned off, he’d return to being the angry dwarf and start trying to kill any live character. Fred and Phil made me take that routine out.
I almost finished the game. I seem to be getting my victory stomped on from a bug, but this game is of the nature it is hard to tell what is really considered a bug, and it is also hard to tell if there’s some alternate method of getting by something or if a softlock is at hand.
Normally I would look up what’s going on and make this my finishing post, but I’m going avoid hints and do one more run from scratch (and consequently, one more post). There’s enough dense mechanics going on (and enough extra history I need to cover) it’s worth spending the time.
In 1989, The Hobbit landed in a Tolkien Trilogy collection. Via Spectrum Computing.
First, regarding Gollum’s riddle: I have no idea. I never solved it and I don’t think I need to solve it.
The format I’ve been using is SAY TO GOLLUM “WORD” and everything that’s managed to go through causes Bilbo to get strangled. The parser is such that you can’t say arbitrary things; it has to be a “recognized” word in the parser. These words work, but cause death:
space, empty, water, dark, darkness, light, wind, pause, A through Z (except X and Z), heart, food
These words aren’t recognized by the parser at all:
Gollum frankly can just be ignored. If you’re carrying (not wearing) the gold ring, he’ll snatch it from you, but otherwise you can invisible-icize your way out. Or, alternately, you can KILL GOLLUM WITH SWORD, and there doesn’t seem to be any penalty for doing so.
No penalty other than perhaps a bad end result to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but that’s a problem for a different hobbit.
Besides that, I did manage to make a more or less sensible map of the Goblin Dungeon.
Until you have the ring, you can’t just blaze through the map; there’s a fairly high chance of hitting a goblin who tosses you in Goblin Jail™. With the ring it’s still possible to get caught but the probability I have ascertained (after enough tests) to be much less. It’s possible to get out of Goblin Jail and I’ll show you how but the process is so convoluted (with an apparently useless “reward”) that on my Final Run, For Real This Time I plan to just restore my save game if it happens.
Let’s talk about that “reward”:
There’s sand you can dig, revealing a trap door which is locked. Since neither the golden key nor the large key worked on it, I experimented with getting in the forceful way, and found that a.) HIT is interpreted as attacking which only works on creatures b.) STRIKE on the other hand can be used to damage objects, and STRIKE TRAP DOOR WITH SWORD will annihilate it.
This is only a problem because it also annihilates the sword, which is additionally your light source. (It was only at this moment that I realized the sword was doubling as my light source.) However, this let me know destruction is possible, so I tried it with my fist the old-fashioned way.
This is just bad RNG! You just have to keep going. I’ve even gotten the breaking to happen in just one hit. (For more on the theoretical implications of this, see my old post on Adventure 500. I don’t think that one applies so clearly here because authors seemingly intended a situation like the one above.)
With the trap door broken by hand, there’s no exit: it simply reveals a “cache” which has a “small curious key”. As far as I have been able to find this small curious key is needed absolutely nowhere in the game (it certainly doesn’t work on the dungeon door!) So there’s no reason to deal with this room at all.
Still, since it turned out to involve all the game’s systems, let me show off how I got out of the goblin dungeon. You can either get tossed in by a goblin, or walk in yourself. If you walk in yourself, there’s a “goblins door” you need to open first, and then upon going southeast the door is shut behind you.
My first attempt at being creative was using orders to the companions. I discovered you don’t have to just give one command (SAY TO THORIN “GO EAST”) but you can give a whole list of them (SAY TO THORIN “GO EAST THEN TAKE RASPBERRY THEN THROW RASPBERRY AT GANDALF THEN GO WEST”). Given the one-way door behavior described above, I tried timing out having me enter the room while Thorin waited a turn, then having Thorin open the door after Bilbo’s been trapped, letting me head back out the room again.
That didn’t work; I tried instead having Bilbo being the one handling the door on the outside. That is, I would say THORIN, WAIT THEN GO SOUTHEAST THEN DIG SAND THEN SMASH TRAP DOOR THEN TAKE KEY THEN GO NORTH. After giving this command, I’d have Bilbo OPEN GOBLINS DOOR, then keep doing that to make sure the door stays propped open while Thorin is rummaging inside the room. I found that the digging was successful but not the smashing. The smashing RNG is so uneven it is possible this technique would eventually work, but I eventually found a much easier way.
You see, the inside of the room has a window, and to the northeast, you can find the outside of the same window. I was visualizing the window as very high because Bilbo couldn’t reach it, but Bilbo is a Hobbit. Even the dwarves are taller than him. Thorin can open the window!
See the “no”. Sometimes orders are refused for no apparent reason other than RNG, making everything even more difficult to coordinate.
Furthermore, with an open window, while Bilbo can’t walk through, Thorin (and Gandalf) can.
I was still stuck for a bit before I realized I could ask Thorin to carry Bilbo, then drop him off again once outside. With this, I was able to simply
a.) walk into the dungeon with Thorin following
b.) dig the sand, spend however much time it took to smash the trapdoor and get the key
c.) have Thorin pick Bilbo up
d.) have Thorin open the window, then go west
e.) have Thorin drop Bilbo
Without Thorin around, I managed to have Gandalf just show up once on his own, for a true escape rather than an intentional-walk-into-the-dungeon scenario.
It seems like Gandalf will eventually show up if you’ve lost Thorin somewhere (maybe).
Finally I got to use the much-touted character interaction system, but as I already mentioned, there’s no reason to go through with this setup in the first place. Argh!
With that nonsense out of the way (and my curious key which I was eager to use, but never did) I went over to the Mirkwood gate. This is the gate last time where in one iteration it was closed and in another it was open; I went with a save file version where it was open so I could go in farther. It turns out with an invisibility ring on, rather than getting thrown in elf-prison by the wood elf there you have an opportunity to use the short sword and get an elf corpse.
However, the river remained impassible, so I figured — based on the actual content of the real book — I wanted to get captured.
I had inadvertently ditched Thorin by this point. I think he would have made this section more complicated.
There’s a red door to the west and a red door to the southwest, both locked. Waiting long enough, there was a sound of a red door unlocking. I used the opportunity to toss the door open and go west (with the ring on). This leads to a small area where one direction is blocked by a “magic door” (may or may not be openable) and the other direction has a wine cellar with a butler.
Invisibility is very important here; while there’s some RNG, the butler is pretty much guaranteed to toss you back in the dungeon if you’re spotted. The goal here is to go for a ride in a barrel. He has a sequence where he drinks some wine, then when the barrel is empty he tosses the barrel down a trap door. Right when the barrel is tossed you can JUMP.
That “I SEE NOTHING TO JUMP ONTO” message is how I figured this out in the first place; I knew the context would have to be either a platform or a moving thing where Bilbo was hitching a ride.
This leads down past the portcullis and Bilbo now is in Lake Town!
A fairly important character is here: Bard. He’s the one that shoots the dragon down with an arrow.
You might think there’s some convoluted events here to get Bard in the right spot in order to kill the nearby dragon, but you can actually just give him orders until he’s with the dragon…
…then SAY TO BARD “SHOOT DRAGON” and he’ll do his thing.
The treasure is right there, and there’s a path that seems like it returns to the main nexus area (as a one way trip) but there’s a huge issue: it passes through that bugged room that said the game was FULL.
It’s still “FULL” and there’s nothing I can do with it. According to Alastair in the comments “The Place Too Full to Enter is a left over diagnostic which we used while debugging the program. We forgot to take it out after testing and it should be ignored.” That’s great, but what if the bug is preventing progress? Remember, I found in the Macintosh version the room was appropriately empty.
The reason why this might not be a softlock is that it is still possible to go back through the forest. If you go south of the lake you land at the “waterfall” to the far east of Mirkwood where a spider lurks. The problem is the spider is still doing its thing and I haven’t been able to sneak (or sprint) through without being detected.
Me trying to see if adverbs mentioned in the manual make a difference. They do not.
I fully acknowledge it is possible this is the “intended” route and is just a specific puzzle I’m supposed to nail down, but the game ought to be clear if a bug is a bug or not. The main problem with the spider is you can’t refer to it before it pounces (the eyes don’t register as something in the room); I’ve even tried murdering Bard and nabbing his bow (the version of the book where Bilbo gets affected by the One Ring real early, my precioussssssssssss) but his arrow, despite killing everything else, doesn’t work.
I think I’m due for a restart. Either victory next time or glorious defeat!
Renga in Blue 