Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Apologies: after a bit of research I’m going to visit Invincible Island first and Urban Upstart second, as they represent the first two text adventures by Pete Cooke in the order he wrote them. (The latter was picked via random number generator to be my next game, rather than anything systematic.) Both were written for the ZX Spectrum.

Via eBay.

Pete Cooke is another one of our math-teachers turned programmers, although he started (after graduation) trying to make it work as a piano player in a progressive band; the band failed (he blames punk rock) so he ended up doing degree-work in order to teach math to 11-to-14-year-olds in Leicester.

While their department received a text-only RM 380Z…

A machine developed in 1977, targeted at schools in the UK. From vt100.

…where he really caught the computer bug was the ZX81, where he “sort of lunged at it” and got using one as soon as he could. He ended up making programs that he showed to his students, and:

Eventually I wrote a simple text adventure and showed it to some of the students who said it was seriously good and thought it was better than some of the stuff in the shops!

He sent it to Richard Shepherd Software (previously: Super Spy) and they offered 1000 pounds to buy it, twice his monthly salary as a teacher.

[Adventure games] were interesting, and it was the idea you could explore somewhere. Also, I didn’t have the skills then to design 3D or animated graphics, although I’d been reading about AI and language parsing. It could also have been the influence of games such as The Hobbit, or maybe just the freedom appealed to me. I wrote it from scratch with bits in BASIC and tiny bits in assembler, but essentially hand-coded.

Noteworthy to highlight in the quote is the emphasis on “freedom” and “exploration”. This game has one of those wide-open maps more closely aligned to Roberta Williams than Scott Adams; this was not converted from ZX81 but rather written directly for the ZX Spectrum, along with its increased resources. (There’s a 2022 backport to ZX81 which converts the 48K original into 16K but even with modern resources and cutting out all the graphics, part of the original game was omitted.)

The loading screen has a ripple effect through “Invincible Island” so I wasn’t able to get a shot where all the text showed at once.

We’re back to being on a Treasure Hunt. Sort of.

WELCOME TO INVINCIBLE ISLAND

In this adventure you are an explorer stranded on the remote island of the XARO.

Your only guide is a letter you received from a Dr Chumley several months ago in which he said that he believed that islanders had hidden a massive treasure somewhere on the island.

Unfortunately, Dr Chumley did not live long enough to find the islands secret.

You have arrived on the island in a small boat, your aim is to find the treasure and escape alive.

Hmm. Since they’re hiding a treasure, I guess we have the right to scarf it? (It has come up before, but I want to emphasize that “claim stuff in the name of the British Empire / your wallet” is not common amongst these games despite so many Treasure Hunts. I still think the best instance so far has been making the deal with the demon in Zork II.)

What makes this game unusual compared to regular Treasure Hunt plots is something mentioned on the packaging, about “seven parchments” regarding the treasure. I have found two of them and they give parts of a message intended to be mashed together, so there’s an extra dose of intrigue in a game-mechanical sense beyond finding some “BARS OF GOLD” or a suitcase full of cash under a big W. It still is also possible the final “treasure” isn’t a normal treasure but “the friends we made along the way”.

The island is, as I implied already, pretty wide-open, but before I show off the map, here’s the verb list:

This ends up erratic; notice no READ verb, and there are at least two bits with writing (not even counting the parchments), which gets looked at with EXAMINE instead. PUT is actually WEAR. There’s no way to SWIM, and no way to HIT objects; so there is an AXE early on which I have not puzzled out how to use. CROSS gets used to launch a boat over to a small island.

For the map, I’ll give the whole thing at once to start, then break it into pieces.

For the opening area, walking along to the east is a deep pit; going in is death.

There are at least three pits that look like this on the map, so I assume there’s some aspect I’m missing and this isn’t just a trap.

Further are some STONES, which are something of a trap, but they only kick in later. Yet farther is a hut with a necklace.

Headed the other direction, there’s a RUSTY KEY nearby a chest that the rusty key conveniently opens. Unfortunately, doing so is, you guessed it, a trap.

I realize as I type this there is a mysterious “green potion” nearby which might be the antidote. I only tested it alone and nothing happened.

Moving farther along, just lying about on the ground is some FOOD, an AXE, a TORCH, a SPADE, an ANORAK (that’s a polar coat, maybe the top of the island is really high) and a caged yellow CANARY.

Before anyone asks, I have tested DIG with the spade in every location accessible so far with no luck. Near the same area is a “native” — the only one I have run across so far — and anything I’ve tested so far with GIVE (the only character-action verb that isn’t just KILL) has been rebuffed (I have not tested every item in the game thus far, though).

Turning east, there’s multiple rooms that are a “dark forest” where there are the occasional eyes peeking out, and more than a few turns in the forest turn out to be deadly.

There’s a BOX at the end of a path, but my character isn’t strong enough to open it.

Swinging back over to where the canary was, you can light a torch and go west into a “maze” except it’s a 4×3 set of rooms.

There are two rooms where you have trouble breathing — I assume the canary is somehow important to these rooms, but I’ve been able to just pass on by so I haven’t tested this yet — and spread out you can find a SWORD and one of the pieces of parchment.

The only way out of the “maze” is to the north…

…where there is a small area of “barren plain” including a SKULL, but soon after there is a river and lake.

One point requires crossing a bridge, and this is where the stones from earlier are a trap: if you’re carrying them the bridge collapses. Other items seem to be safe.

You can wrangle up a FOOTPUMP and a DINGY over to where there is a visible island on the lake, and the CROSS over to find another piece of parchment.

I’m wondering if the inflatable boat is from Zork. Infocom was never huge in the UK (lack of disk drives) but we saw at least one case of clear influence from 1982 (Goblin Towers).

I’m assuming all the fragments combine to make a cryptogram that needs solving, but it’s hard to tell with just the two.

Finally, past the native (who does not block your way, despite appearances) there’s a path leading to a temple and altar. The altar has writing that you can’t read and a red key but otherwise I have found nothing else of note.

I still have things to test (like using GIVE on more objects, seeing what happens with the canary, and seeing if the potion is an antidote) so I’m not stuck yet, but I also am unclear where more rooms (which clearly are out there) are going to come from, as I don’t have any clear navigational blocks except for the pits. Maybe this is a “multi-level maze” where we go underground, then go back up again elsewhere? In any case, with only two out of seven fragments so far, this is looking to be a meatier game than I originally expected.