Anyway, here’s this skinny blonde kid, around 6 feet tall, wearing silver Ray-Ban sunglasses, driving a royal blue Formula Firebird that says he’s Kim Watt! Can you believe it? Oh well, he sounds like he does on the phone, so I guess it’s him.
— From Inside Super Utility Plus
This is written seven years after my previous post on Marooned.
I got a surprise in my comments when El Explorador de RPG mentioned he got the game — previously completely non-functional — into a fully playable form. It works all the way to the end, and I have a download here. (Run ADVENTUR, then pick 2 when prompted for which adventure to play.)
Via Ira Goldklang.
Kim Watt was a pre-med student in 1978 when he got his first computer, a TRS-80, and started to build a consulting service around it. He eventually dropped out of college altogether to focus on computers. He became well-known as a “genius” and never did outlines, simply writing directly from his brain to assembly language.
While he started in Michigan (and lived there in 1980, when today’s game was likely written), he later moved to Texas and took on a look to match:
To underscore his reputation as a renegade guide through the wilderness of home computing, Watt has wholeheartedly adopted the role of Software Cowboy. It is not unusual to find him at computer shows throughout the country, dressed in a ten-gallon hat and boots, signing autographs and counseling his followers. Though he is originally from Michigan, he looks the part. He has steel-blue eyes, disheveled hair, and a serpentine tattoo on each bicep. His demeanor is also on target; the strong, silent type, he is wary about discussing his work. His comments and answers are clipped and guarded, expressed in a quiet monotone.
Kim Watt is mostly remembered in the TRS-80 community for his utility software like Super Utility, used for salvaging data off broken diskettes or even copying protected disks (Super Utility itself was protected, and refused to copy itself; it was eventually pirated anyway). Watt later wrote a book disclosing the secrets of Super Utility for an eye-popping price tag of $500; those who would buy it (including MIT, the Navy, and Radio Shack employees) would discover the secrets of Watt’s methods. Although:
Watt points to a stack of computer printouts, almost two feet high, on a bookshelf on the other side of his office. “Couldn’t fit all of it into the book,” he says.
In his early days he worked on multiple games, mostly arcade action, and even had one published by Adventure International (Scott Adams’s company) in 1980.
The curious thing about this is that the same year, Watt also wrote his “Intercept” program which essentially broke the copy protection that Scott Adams started applying to his adventure games. This seems to be before his generalized copy-program, meaning Scott Adams games were essentially a testbed for the ideas that went into Super Utility. He gave a similar treatment to Microsoft Adventure (that is, the Microsoft port of Crowther/Woods for TRS-80).
From the Super Utility 4 manual.
As part of all this, Watt wrote a game in the Scott Adams database format, Marooned. Similarly: Pyramid of Doom was written by Alvin Files who simply figured out the format himself and sent the game over to Scott Adams. Allan Moluf described the file format in 1980 and used that as a basis for an editor program; this was expanded upon by Bruce Hanson and published commercially as The Adventure System the next year.
The game starts by asking for which adventure you want to play, 1-9 (this is standard for Scott Adams interpreters 7.8 through 8.5) but by typing in 10 we can start Marooned, which describes itself as adventure 10. Less glamorously, you can type 1, because it only is taking the first character. (Also, as I already mentioned, if you’re playing the fixed version, pick adventure 2.)
This is not a game damaged from a bad tape read, like Mystery House II; rather, this is a game that had development abandoned midstream, and one of the treasures you’re required to collect didn’t even get a name (the fixed version calls it a MYSTERY TREASURE, although I haven’t gotten to it yet). It is buggy far out of proportion to other games we’ve played, and El Explorador had to manually add the commands to pick particular objects up; in an effort to make minimal changes, only items that are needed to be taken are takeable.
Before getting to any treasures, our hero(ine) needs to get past their immediate dilemma, which is a crashing airplane.
Action starts in a very restrictive 3-room area, the place I was stuck at 7 years ago.
To the south is the “tail end” of the plane with a broken cable, knapsack and toolbox. The knapsack turns out to be a parachute, but you can’t pick it up, you can only WEAR it (and while taking inventory, it has no name, you just get “being worn” message by itself). The toolbox has a wrench, screwdriver, and cutters, but you can only take the cutters.
If he had finished debugging the game, I would guess the other two items would be takeable but remain as red herrings.
For some reason, you can PULL the cable, but only while holding the cutters (?) and this reveals a knob. TURN KNOB then reveals a secret door, and you can OPEN DOOR to find some *TOP SECRET PLANS*, the first treasure of the game.
To escape, the sequence is truly bizarre. Back in the center of the plane, you can LOOK AROUND to find a RING on the ceiling. (Not LOOK UP, which we have at least had a few times. LOOK AROUND is brand-new for this game.) Then — I assume some descriptions never got done — you can CONNECT CORD/TO RING resulting in “ripcord attached to ring”. OPEN DOOR will then jerk you out of the plane; if you want to, you can DROP PARACHUTE before leaving and somehow survive anyway as long as you’ve done the ripcord action.
Neither the geese nor plane have a description, because what is supposed to happen (assuming you still have the parachute) is that this is a “timed view” room which doesn’t allow any commands, but just sends the player down to the ocean.
I was stuck for a while until El Explorador mentioned I needed another item for swimming, and I realized that for some reason TAKE SEATS back on the plane in the starting room yields the player a floatation device. (No description when looking at the seats — again, I assume the author bailed before even getting to that part. Remember, taking items doesn’t even work at all, this had to be fixed.)
With the floatation device, you can bail on the parachute and then SWIM multiple times to reach a shore.
This leads to a progression through a Forest, where every directions loops; you can climb up a tree, then LOOK AROUND (that new command again) to see a VINE, and SWING VINE reaching another forest, with one more SWING VINE reaching a new beach (I assume on the other side of the same island).
From the new beach you can dive into the ocean again and SWIM until reaching a slightly more elaborate island, and this is where I am stuck. My map so far:
The west shore has a coconut tree (top: coconuts + leaves) and palm tree (top: dates + leaves) and in both cases only the leaves are takeable, and you can take both of them, meaning Leaves. and Leaves. are both in inventory.
This doesn’t mean the coconuts and dates are useless, but whatever happens to them has to happen on the spot.
To the south is are branches to a Jungle and Cave. The Cave is dark and I have no light source, while the jungle has overgrown brush (which suggests it can be whacked away) and quicksand (which is a one way trip and quite possibly another red herring).
To the east is a lake and going in there is some floating jelly which is described as “awfully slimy” and trying to get it is fatal.
Finally, to the north is a dead man. Trained by other painful games, I used FRISK to find a STRING and used MOVE to reveal a BAG. While the bag cannot be taken, EMPTY BAG reveals some *PEARLS*.
Given the number of other issues with the code (it isn’t even a “private game” as I usually have defined it but a “work in progress”) I would normally follow this with code diving or even assuming the game can’t be finished, be El Explorador has now played all the way to the end, so I’m going to treat it as a “real game” for a bit longer and try to solve puzzles as if most of the item descriptions weren’t missing.
If anyone else wants to join in, perhaps they can have the glory of being the first person (outside El Explorador who had to modify the code) to finish the game, ever. This includes the original author! When I finish I’ll dive down into the technical layer and try to diagnose why this happened.
Renga in Blue 
Beach = Sand
Adventure game + Sand = Dig
I seem to remember other “desert island” games where you can just dig with your hands instead of needing a shovel. Tried that yet? I would guess some item(s) essential to progressing further might be hidden that way.
Needs a shovel.
I don’t know, this just smells like a game that would have misleading responses and bespoke location-specific commands. I would still try something like “use hands” or “dig with hands” just in case.
Remember too that Crowther/Woods tells you that you would need a shovel if you try to dig, but there isn’t one in the game (there’s no actual digging either, but you get my point).
This is actually a game that uses verbs related to the location and references some items that are assumed to be there even if they aren’t explicitly mentioned.
A good example is the airplane exit door, which you should assume exists in the passenger area, or the trees you can climb in the forest.
I’ll just say that some items can be examined and descriptions obtained, although they’re very few.
Regarding the parachute bug, I didn’t want to modify the code more than necessary, as it really only slightly altered the order of events (you have to drop it as soon as you hit the water anyway), but the idea is that the character would die if they weren’t wearing it when the plane door opened, and considering you have to wear it to pick it up, it’s odd to drop it just before opening the door. Later on, there’s another bug that I also didn’t fix because it wasn’t necessary to finish the game and wasn’t really a problem; you’ll find out.
What I did do was allow the player to pick up a couple of items that weren’t actually necessary to win, but that had associated actions that couldn’t be performed otherwise (the author clearly intended them to be pickable), and I didn’t want to limit the player’s options in that regard.
Oh, and as a curious fact, the author included a secret command to keep track of the game’s counters while testing it (probably his idea was to use more counters than he ended up using, but for example there is a limit of 50 turns to escape the plane before it crashes). It has no real use, so I guess it doesn’t matter to put it here: OOHH AAHH
I almost forgot, about taking the seats, that wasn’t my contribution; it was already programmed, as was the action of taking the cutters, the jellyfish, the inventory, or the knob (if you pick it up, you’ll be stuck with it and can’t open the secret door). I had to add the rest myself.
Oh, and I also fixed something that used to annoy me every time I restarted the game. The author took into account that you could connect the parachute cord whether you were wearing it or just in your inventory (two different actions), but the second action, TO RING, only worked if you weren’t wearing it, because instead of checking if the ring existed (that you had seen it), it checked if the parachute existed, and the parachute only exists as such if you’re not wearing it (wearing it counts as a separate item). So, because of that bug, I had to remove the parachute to connect it to the ring and then wear it again every time the gane started. I got tired of it.
Taking the seats for a flotation device jibes with my memories of being told, around that time, that the seat cushions would serve as a flotation device in the event of a landing on water. (Do they still tell you this? I’ve stopped absorbing that information, figuring that in the extremely unlikely event of a survivable landing on water, someone will remind me.)
It does kind of raise the question of how we wound up alone in the passenger section of an unpiloted airplane.
re: how we were left alone, I assume some sort of superspy situation given the TOP SECRET PLANS in the plane
like how James Bond gets left in some convoluted deathtrap as opposed to just, y’know, getting shot by the bad guys
given the dead guy on the island who likely came from the plane (fresh corpse) and who has pearls, this might be more of a smuggler run gone bad situation
Considering that the character doesn’t seem to know how to swim without a life preserver (although this is a contradiction later on), it wouldn’t fit with a super spy, but since the game is only half-finished, don’t expect coherent answers.
Dead guy on the island could be a smartest man in the world situation.
Given parachutes aren’t even given names while worn in inventory, an understandable confusion
Great article. Thank you!
The Capture box art looks like Among Us.
If you’re still stuck, I’d advise making the typical list of recognizable verbs in case they give you some ideas (the parser recognizes the first 4 letters).
Verbs or nouns the parser doesn’t recognize are made clear because they’re repeated in quotes, so at least you can rule out non-interactable items and unavailable verbs.
On the other hand, I’d like to point out that the list of words recognized by the game was either based on a previous game’s list, or the author had planned to implement more features but never did, because there are nouns that aren’t used in the game (while others were missing).
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Great work, Explorador, and thank you for the write-up, Jason.
Is this really interesting in the context of your mission?
I mean, this game was never finished. Someone found it, okay. Another one completed it to make it playable: good work. But I honestly don’t see the interest.
It’s more of a curiosity, more like a footnote, than anything else.
Well, my two cents.
more interesting in a historical sense than game one
with Irvin Kaputz, it was interesting because a.) the author tried to do more complex world-models than normal with water and fire but b.) flat-out ran out of memory such that one extra character goes over the trs-80 limit
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/irvin-kaputz/?order=ASC
So it’s a good historical lesson in the limits that authors were running into but we don’t see
Here, Watt definitely had 32k+ to work with so that capacity wasn’t a problem (maybe?… does Scott Adams engine have a limit?), so why was this one abandoned? If nothing else, I’m getting to see what it looks like when something _really_ has no bug-fixing involved (no published game, even the Aardvark ones, have had this many)
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