Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

The people involved with today’s game are Nick Hampshire and Carl Graham, both who have important parts to play in the history of technology.

Nick Hampshire’s early college experiences (1970-1975) bounced around a bit as he went from Zoology to Computer Science and moved between college studies in England, Sweden, and the United States. He followed this with some technology work in San Francisco; using the S-100 bus (the backbone of the Altair and many other early computers) he made his own 8-bit computer he called the System 8, then went back to the UK to try to sell it in 1977.

From Personal Computer World, August 1978.

In order to promote his new system (and other S-100 bus systems he became a dealer of), he made his own magazine he called Computabits. This ended up determining his life trajectory as the System 8 completely failed (I can’t even find it even mentioned in any of the usual “museum of obscure computers” sites) but Computabits as a magazine did quite well for itself, being swept into the early magazine Practical Computing as a “magazine within a magazine” starting in its second issue; Hampshire was later listed as “technical editor” and was set on his career as a writer. He ended up writing 9 books between 1979 and 1984, some being (relative to the market) best-sellers; Vic Revealed made it to 400,000 copies worldwide.

Feb. 1979 issue of Practical Computing.

ASIDE: Of his early Computabits articles, the most relevant for today is one he wrote on “epic games” where he discusses textual compression techniques (similar to those Infocom and Level 9 would come up with) like using single characters to represent whole words. He also theorizes about extending the “epic game” into an “electronic novel” where “no longer does the reader identify himself with the hero — he or she is now the hero.” Jack Pick read the article and inquired for further help on text compression, trying to apply this to his mainframe game Adventure II. (Also, keep in mind that February 1979 issue, as we’ll come back to it for something else later.)

Mr. Hampshire still tried his hand at hardware for the Commodore PET, but really had more success with his publishing ventures, including the launch of Commodore Computing International in 1982.

One of the employees throughout 1982-1985 was Carl Graham, listed as a “programmer”; he was a “staff writer” in the sense of being focused on writing type-in code for Commodore BASIC to be printed in each issue. Carl Graham himself was also quite hardware-minded, with earlier projects starting in the 70s including rewiring a Texas Instruments calculator in to be a digital timer (“looking at thin films of water breaking up into beads on glass using photo sensors to measure propagation speed”), making a Z80 assembler in BASIC, and and making his own plotter for his TRS-80.

Today’s game, On the Way to the Interview, is a type-in starting on page 14 of the magazine above where the article (not game) title is Anatomy of an Adventure, another one of the articles allegedly teaching how to make an adventure game. This sometimes is an excuse for a sub-par adventure game. This one is just … unusual.

It is written in Commodore BASIC and supports the line in general (PET, VIC-20, C64), although I ended up playing the BBC Micro port in the Nick Hampshire-edited book BBC Programs Volume 1.

Via the Centre for Computing History. I’m unclear if Hampshire did the conversion himself.

Your goal: make your way through streets to your scheduled interview at Slave Driver International. Your starting inventory: a CHEQUE, presumably from your last job. Perhaps winning is losing in this game.

The graphics shown are an automap. The reason the game can do this is the entire thing is oriented on a grid.

Even more unusually, the way the game’s data is stored is by roads. That is, each road is listed and the elements of that road are listed in sequence, but from the player’s perspective a road is a whole sequence of rooms.

There are nearly no puzzles. If Pythonesque and Mad Martha are British degenerate games (where one goes about an urban environment causing havoc) this is an anti-degenerate game. The goal is to be a “responsible citizen”. The route — starting at 24 on the map, winding over to the northeast — consists mainly of things you need to ignore, lest you throw off this title. For example, early on there is a shopping bag you pass by, otherwise it will kill you.

The game keeps track of minutes passing in real time. You need to make it to the interview in less than 7 minutes. With this screenshot, I had left the emulator running overnight.

Later there is a TRAMP. Simply talking to the tramp (ASK TRAMP) ends the game. (“I’ve just had a bad experience with a tramp.”)

Just a bit farther is a GUN, which has all sorts of game-ending possibilities. First off, you can simply try backtracking and shooting the tramp, but it doesn’t even let you operate the gun (“I’m not having anything to do with shooting things.”)

There’s a policewoman later that will arrest you if you’re holding the gun in the open. You can just have the gun randomly go off while holding it. There’s a bank along the way where if you step in with a gun they’ll think you’re doing an armed robbery.

The right thing to do in the bank is, responsibly, CASH CHEQUE (yet another “isolate” verb I haven’t seen yet, but I had my eye on the source code by now in my playthrough for reasons I’ll get into). This gives you MONEY, and lets you later pass through a private park.

Once through the park, it’s a straight shot to the interview, making a beeline for the northeast corner of the map.

Ending, with an exit to the operating system. You don’t even find out the result.

Here’s the full route, with the side trip to the bank marked in green:

Again, this is a “learning game” so there’s some latitude for simplicity, and the article actually does try to make the layout of the source code crystal clear. It’s still a very curious model given that most action besides movement is bad, really, and how many adventure games are on grids like this? (Very, very, few. Even Asylum and friends use “razor walls” as opposed to having a grid with blocks filled in, also known as “worm tunnels”. The only other example we’ve had here is the unfinished/unpublished game Castle Fantasy.)

I still haven’t gotten yet into the worst part of the game. Every once in a while, at random, you get run over by a bus.

It doesn’t matter if you are on a road, in a park, or in a police station: the bus will come. There is absolutely nothing you can do about the bus. This is essentially a slot machine game. Perhaps the RNG on Commodore is better, but on the BBC Micro version, I could not beat the game: I consistently got run over before reaching the park. I had to cheat by changing the source code and modifying my starting location. This admittedly enhances the feeling of being hapless (as opposed to Fighting the Machine) but is a deeply odd choice to make for a learning game.

We’ll see both authors again in 1984, as there was adventure custom-written for the BBC book (one that looks on the face of it slightly more traditional, but I know never to trust Britgames to stick to normal). As that will take some time to reach, I should mention both had distinguished careers after; Hampshire kept writing books and doing journalism, as he “contributed to magazines such as Personal Computer World, PC Magazine, Byte, Interface Age, as well as newspapers such as the Times, FT, Telegraph, and Mail”. While Graham left games for a while (making database software from 85-90) he eventually picked up a job at Argonaut.

Carl Graham, left, Pete Warner, right. Source.

You may know them better as the makers of the FX Chip for Super Nintendo games; Graham was a coder on the original Star Fox and has a long list of credits after.

Regarding the unusual grid, I do have one suspicion where it might come from. I said I would come back to the February 1979 issue of Practical Computing. Earlier in the same magazine there is an article by T. J. Radford which doesn’t present a full game, just an “idea” which spans two pages (early computer magazines sometimes had this, I assume they had trouble filling space). It involves creating a D&D-type map as part of the theorizing:

Long shot, I know, but it gives me the same crossword-grid-like feel, and I wonder if Hampshire internalized it as a possible way to make an adventure game map.

Coming up: The somewhat-related but much more substantial escape-from-British-suburbia game, Urban Upstart.