While I’ve made a fair amount of progress I’ve also hit two points that make me wonder if the game is too buggy to complete. Updates to the map are shown in red:
This doesn’t look like much compared to the overall map, but keep in mind the vast majority of the rooms are “filler” rooms like “you’re following a north-south trail” or “You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.” The southeast corner (starting to encroach onto Mordor territory) is denser than elsewhere.
Let’s start with Gollum and the riddle game. He gives the same riddles as in The Hobbit, but then kills the protagonist if a.) they don’t have the One Ring yet or b.) they try to get away. KILL GOLLUM was doable but this left me stuck in Moria. I was mostly getting thrown awry by the lack of a WEAR verb; in the spots where it is useful (and only in those spots) USE RING will work.
USE RING
You’re now wearing of One Ring of Power.
Gollum curses as he runs right past you.
Unknowingly he leads you to the eastern exit of the mines of Moria.
Towards the east you discover light, as in daylight!
Crouched in front of the exit sits Gollum, wting…
KILL GOLLUM
Gollum’s now dead.
(Bots incidentally said that any typos in the original have been left in the current version, so “wting” is authentic early 80s typing.)
I’d like to say this is the last of me dealing with Gollum, but there’s a part that made me think perhaps I was still doing this wrong. But for now, it’s possible to trek out to the Balrog, and (after some major verb-hunting) I came across HIT BRIDGE as the solution.
E
The Ring slips from your finger.
You’re standing on the bridge of Khazad-dum, facing the mountains.
A huge black shadow with a heart of fire materializes in front of you!
HIT BRIDGE
There’s a blinding flash of light.
A deep pit opens up in front of you.
With a stonesplitting cry the Balrog vanishes in the abyss.
E
You’re passing through the Dimril Dale.
It’d be nice if the ring summons ringwraiths so I could mop them up with the sword, but alas, it behaves more like the ring from The Hobbit. Keeping in mind what was seen at the Mirror of Galadriel, I next went over to Mirkwood and Dol Guldur.
While at the entrance, you can USE RING to sneak inside, and find a dead dwarf in the dungeon.
USE RING
You’re now wearing of One Ring of Power.
The guards do not see you.
ENTER
You find your way through a labyrinth of chambers and corridors.
Finally you reach the Tower’s deepest dungeon.
On the floor you see the remnants of what once was a noble Dwarf.
Among the dust and bones shimmers a golden ring.
GET RING
It’s yours now.
LEAVE
The guards do not see you.
One Dwarf-ring down, six to go. The fact at least one isn’t hidden in Moria makes me think they might be more spread out than I expected. Other than that ring, my inventory from this point has “a bow and 14 arrows”, “4 Men-rings”, “the One Ring of Power”, “the green jewel you found on the road”, “a tiny key”, “the mithril-coat from under the Mountain”, and “the sword from the Barrow-downs”. (The where-you-found feature is actually quite nice and I can’t think of other adventure games offhand that do that!)
With the Balrog taken care of it was time to explore more extensively past where I had met Treebeard. I incidentally discovered at the boat which has a long rope that you can just ignore the boat-ride aspect and take the rope (more on that later).
South of the Ent area is a corpse with a red arrow.
At your feet lies the beheaded corpse of a warrior.
The mutilated hand is still holding a red arrow.
Just southwest of the red arrow is the fortress of Rohan.
You’ve reached Dunharrow, fortress of Rohan.
The red arrow you carry is taken from you.
It’s the sign that Minas Tirith is in great danger!
The host of Rohan is prepared to follow you to the east.
(You actually want to wait on grabbing the red arrow and pass through the first time here, but we’ll come back to that.) This is another “you’ve gained a follower” type message although in this case you actually see the riders coming behind you as you go east.
You’re travelling through Anorien, north of the White Mountains.
The Rohirrim are riding with you.
E
You’ve reached Druadan forest.
S
You’re passing through the Druadan forest.
It’s inhabitants, the wild Woose, lead the host over secret paths
to Minas Tirith.
You’re on the field of Cormallen.
Here a great battle is fought.
The Riders of Rohan charge the enemy from the north.
For a moment the powers are balanced.
Then a black fleet appears on the Anduin. The Corsairs of Umbar are coming!
The Western forces are outnumbered many times.
Minas Tirith is destroyed.
Only you manage to escape the onslaught.
If you head southwest from here, you can have an unfortunate encounter with the Corsairs.
You’re at the Mouth of the Anduin.
The Black Fleet of the Corsairs has gathered here.
Fierce men suddenly jump from their hidingplace and grab you!
While the riders aren’t able to go down and take care of the Black Fleet, there is another group that can: the Oathbreakers. Now we get back to where I said it’s better to skip bringing the arrow to the fort the first time through; that’s because you can pass into a cave and find the ghosts of the Mountain-men who broke an oath to their king and were cursed. So now we’re Bilbo, Frodo, and Aragorn all at the same time!
You’re standing in front of a cave.
ENTER CAVE
After a seemingly endless journey through the whispering dark
you are out in the open again.
You’ve reached the Black Stone of Erech.
ASK HELP
From who?
SUMMON GHOSTS
A distant voice answers you:
We shall follow you until our oath is fulfilled.
As far as I can tell, the exact command SUMMON GHOSTS is the only way to make this work (possibly the most extreme moment of book knowledge needed yet — at least Tom Bombadil gives his name if you hit the scenes in the right order and think to use CALL HELP).
Movie version of the Oathbreakers.
Now it is safe to pass by the Corsairs…
You’re at the Mouth of the Anduin.
The Black Fleet of the Corsairs has gathered here.
The men flee in panic with death at their heels!
Having fulfilled their oath, the Dead vanish.
…but only once, because if you leave and come back (or even just use the LOOK command) there are people left over that grab you.
Fierce men suddenly jump from their hidingplace and grab you!
That would normally be fine (as you don’t need to hang around) but there’s no effect on the big battle with the Riders either.
Then a black fleet appears on the Anduin. The Corsairs of Umbar are coming!
This honestly feels like an outright bug? The death-message does change so maybe you need a second wave to mop up the Corsairs, but this entire section is confusing; and maybe the result of everyone dying was intended, and there’s no better result? That means there’s no point in summoning the Oathbreakers at all, then.
Official WETA figurine of Minas Morgal.
Once past the battle, you can visit the Ruins of Osgiliath and beyond; one of the ringwraiths is down at Minas Morgal…
You’ve reached the haunted city of Minas Morgul.
A tall black ringwraith materializes in front of you!
KILL
With a ghastly cry the ringwraith falls.
Among the now shapeless garments you discover a golden ring.
…and nearby is “Sheloop”. I was truly confused for a while by the spelling of Shelob.
You’re groping through a dark tunnel.
Suddenly you hear a rustling sound behind you!
KILL
In the dark there’s no escape from Sheloop.
To the north is the Black Gate; my attempts at sneaking in were rebuffed by Orcs.
You’re facing a large rampart of stone.
In it there’s a single gate of iron, and upon it’s battlement
sentinels pace unceasingly .
None can pass the Teeth of Mordor and not feel their bite,
unless they are summoned by Sauron, or know the secret passwords
that will open the Morannon, the black gate of his land.
You can head up north farther to swampland, and here is where I think perhaps I dealt with Gollum incorrectly.
You’re wandering through the Dead Marshes.
W
You’re following an east-west trail.
W
You’re lost in the gloomy hills of Emyn Muil.
The only creature that might have helped you out of here is dead.
You die from hunger and thirst.
Remembering that I could get the rope from the boat early, I rejiggered my sequence so that rather than killing Gollum at the exit I could TIE GOLLUM instead. It does get understood as a command earlier (it says he “dexterously” avoids you) but unfortunately it fails to work at all at the exit: the game says “He’s not here.” Given that KILL GOLLUM does work this strikes me as an outright bug, and makes me concerned this may have been the right action, just the game is broken.
There’s still a lot of elements to whack at so I can’t say I’m giving up yet; if nothing else I can go back and try to figure out how to communicate with those elves. Regarding the Palantir from last time, no amount of touching or gazing or rubbing has had any effect at all; I also haven’t been able to use the One Ring to avoid the patrols, nor call eagles or Ents after getting captured. However, this game does sometimes requires super-specific phrasing (see: SUMMON GHOSTS) so I can’t say anything is completely ruled out yet.
I have the One Ring to rule them all, that means the rest of this ought to be easy, right? My count otherwise is unchanged: 4 out of 9 Man-Rings, 0 out of 3 Elf-Rings, and 0 out of 7 Dwarf Rings.
The game gives some general help about the rings, noting that
a.) the Elven-rings are kept by the Elven-lords, and “will yield their treasure if you ask for it”
b.) the Dwarf-rings are hidden in Moria
c.) the Nazgul have the Man-rings (I’ve killed four, I just need to find the other five); the instructions say that they’re easy to find “by those who have read The Lord of the Rings thoroughly”
My map so far.
Before plowing ahead, I should also mention something about the specific port I’m playing: it does not, in a technical sense, have a save game feature. It has a log feature. That means it keeps track of what commands you’ve put, and you can have it store those in a log, and then recollect it to have what is functionally a save game; in practice, my gameplay has a lot of testing useless exits to find out they’re blocked so I feel strange making a log until I have “clean” progress. The end result is that “insta-testing” is a bit harder; I’ve found a Balrog, for example, but haven’t tried all the different possible ways of defeating him yet because I don’t have a log file there.
(Also — and this reflects a general characteristic of this game allowing some flexibility in pathing — I approached the Balrog from the east side of Moria. I’ll explain later.)
Remember, this game is mashing together scenes from The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. One encounter early (near where the jewel and the glowing staff are) is a tableau of trolls, already pre-frozen:
Three large Trolls are standing motionless before you!
One of them seems to have something in his pocket.
I had enormous trouble getting the thing out of the pocket. SEARCH POCKET, LOOK POCKET, LOOK IN POCKET, EXAMINE POCKET, EMPTY POCKET, TAKE POCKET, TAKE SOMETHING, OPEN TROLL’S POCKET, and EXAMINE TROLL’S POCKET were all unproductive. I finally gave up and only hit on a later pass-through PICK POCKET, and that’s the only method that works.
In the Troll’s pocket you find a tiny key.
Subsequently I went ahead and made my verb list to help with further troubles.
It’s a four letter parser, so LISTEN is interpreted as LIST which lists the inventory.
Note that some of the verbs give different messages; MAKE (which was used in MAKE FIRE) says “you’ll have to be more specific” but LEAVE says “Please use directions to move.” The latter is deceptive as (for example) the cave that had the staff wants the player to LEAVE CAVE to get out. Thus I am treating this entire list “neutrally” even if the message seems to indicate the verb won’t get used; the game says “What?” when a verb is truly not understood, like QWKAVWEE.
With the tiny key in hand, let’s take a trip back to Smaug.
You’re facing a grey wall of rock.
In it you discover a small hole.
This is where going west gets our hero spotted and killed.
USE KEY
The lock clicks open.
OPEN DOOR
Which door?
LOOK
You’re facing a grey wall of rock.
In it you discover a small hole.
ENTER HOLE
A huge pile of gold shimmers at your feet!
On top of it lies a glowing Dragon, sound asleep.
SHOOT
Your arrow whizzes and dispatches the sleeping dragon.
Trying to get the gold indicates there’s too much to take along, but there’s a “precious coat of mail” made of mithril in the hoard you can nab. (No WEAR verb, which is kind of weird in a game about rings.)
Incidentally, you don’t have to actually pass through either the snow mountain or the underground to get to Lonely Mountain; you can backtrack to a gap in the mountains and go through a bunch of rooms described as
You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.
which the author clearly intended as an explicit shortcut, even though it short-circuits the scene where you burn wood for heat.
One last observation about that “wandering aimlessly” message before we start getting into more adventures; at a certain point going west to east the message switches from “north-western Middle-Earth” to “north-eastern Middle-Earth”. Similarly, there’s a change while going from north to south where “north-western” turns into “south-western”. This marks the exact middle of the map and it helped me make sure the color grid above follows the exact layout of the game; there’s some parts (especially “foreign shores”) that wrap around and otherwise go in tangled directions so I was uncertain until I confirmed it with these messages.
For more mischief, going from Smaug and backtracking slightly, you can find Mirkwood.
You’re lost among the dark trees of Mirkwood.
SE
You’re lost among the dark trees of Mirkwood.
SW
The trees are too dense here.
This is another maze that breaks the grid (and remember, no item dropping!) and I was unable to map it out precisely, but I did find what seems to be the reason for going in.
You’re lost among the dark trees of Mirkwood.
SW
You’ve reached the black fortress of Dol Guldur.
The entrance is strongly guarded.
ENTER FORTRESS
The guards leap up as they see you.
Backtracking even farther — right before the Caradhras pass — there’s a very long path going to the south leading to a new area, at the eastern side of Moria.
Sure, the Balrog doesn’t have any reason to hang out right at the entrance, but remember this is Alternate Reality Tolkien.
W
You’re standing on the bridge of Khazad-dum, facing the mountains.
A huge black shadow with a heart of fire materializes in front of you!
KILL
The Balrog lashes out with his whip of flame.
Its ends curl around your legs and drag you into the abyss.
BECOME WHITE WIZARD hmm, I guess that method didn’t work. Now, given how easily Smaug was felled, there might be just as simple a method here, but as I already indicated earlier, I haven’t wrangled the log system to land a “save” here yet.
Less fatal is the Mirror of Galadriel, but Galadriel herself is a no-show.
Upon a low pedestal carved like a branching tree stands
a basin of silver, wide and shallow, filled with water.
This is the Mirror of Galadriel.
LOOK MIRROR
At first, all you see is your own reflection.
Then the mirror clears.
You see a dark tower, surrounded by a forest of dark trees.
You seem to come closer, passing the guards, who fail to notice you.
The mirror darkens, revealing a deep dungeon.
As you try to make out what’s shimmering among the dust and
bones, the picture fades…
I’m guessing this changes to give hints on the current situation (and assuming some continuity with 1975 HOBBIT, matches the Oracle from that game); this indicates we need the One Ring to get inside Dol Guldur.
There’s also a small scene with a boat and I am not sure why it is there given you can just walk around the path the other direction to end up at the same place.
You’re standing in a small clearing.
There’s a boat here.
In it lies a long rope.
GET BOAT
You push the boat off the shore and jump in.
You’re travelling in a boat on the river Anduin.
Just a bit south further is a very short conversation with an Ent…
You’re wandering through Fangorn forest.
Here you meet Treebeard, Master of the forest.
The Ent promises to help you against Saruman, if necessary.
…and through the forest you can get captured and stuck. I don’t know if this is a “loss” here or not.
You’re crossing the fords of the Isen.
A company of Uruk-hai bearing the White Hand of Isengard overtakes you.
Saruman takes all the rings from you.
You’re set alone on the pinnacle of Orthanc.
Let’s rewind now back to right before entering the snowy route, skip by the Moria route (again) and just try to wrap around south. This turns out not to be a great idea as you get captured by Saruman again, although there’s a slight divergence where you can make it to the Tower of Orthanc without being taken prisoner.
Tolkien’s own illustration.
You’re standing at the foot of the Tower of Orthanc.
Suddenly something heavy passes close to your head!
It appears to be a dark crystal globe.
You can’t take the globe; I’m not sure what it is for. (I realize, writing this, I never tried my verb list against it; an assignment for next time.)
One more thing to mention before tackling Moria proper: early on there’s a room that calls itself Rivendell. I use that phrasing because it seems remarkably underwhelming and I have yet to get to communicate with any elves that might be about. I’m not taking any hints from people playing along for this right now, but if someone wants to speculate “blind” based just on the books I am happy to hear suggestions.
You’ve reached Rivendell.
GO IN
You can’t do that.
IN
You can’t do that.
ENTER
You can’t do that.
CALL ELVES
Don’t be ridiculous!
(Also attempted: FIND ELROND, where the game responds “That would be too easy!” Harumph.)
Finally, it’s time to SAY FRIEND and enter.
Towards the east you see stairs hewn out of rock.
E
You’re standing in front of the Gate of Moria.
Strange runes are engraved on the smooth surface.
SAY FRIEND
Slowly the gates swing open.
As you enter the mines, the gates are closed behind you with tremendous power!
You’re lost in the dark mines of Moria.
While the game is still on a grid, it drops having every direction work to turn it into a maze (without random jumping around).
The Tomb of the Lord of Moria first:
You’re standing in a dimly lit chamber.
In the center you see a stone tomb.
On top of it lies an old, dusty book.
READ BOOK
Among many sad tales is the story of Thrain, once Lord of Moria.
After hiding the seven Dwarf-rings, he departed to seek vengeance
upon the Dark Lord.
Nothing was heard of him ever since.
GET BOOK
The book crumples to dust when you touch it.
OPEN TOMB
In it you discover the skeleton of a noble Dwarf.
I have no idea how to find the rings. I assume they lurk in the maze; maybe we need more light? Or maybe we just need to shake the poor corpse open somehow because he swallowed them all in one swig (nothing I’ve worked tried)?
The One Ring is, perhaps appropriately, easier to find: wander into the right room and simply GET RING.
You’re lost in the dark mines of Moria.
Groping through the dark you suddenly touch a golden ring.
GET RING
It’s yours now.
Gollum lurks nearby, and he wants to play his riddle game with you in the exact same manner as The Hobbit (as opposed to this being Lord of the Rings Gollum).
Deep down here by the dark water lives the old Gollum, a small slimy creature.
Gollum seems afraid of you and proposes a riddle game:
if you know the answer to his three questions, he’ll lead you
out of the mountains. If you fail however, you’ll serve him for lunch.
Do you agree?
YES
This is his first riddle:
What has roots that nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?
MOUNTAIN
You found the answer!
His second riddle is:
It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt,
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills.
It comes first and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter.
DARK
You found the answer!
Gollum has one more riddle for you:
This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.
TIME
You found the answer!
The light of Gollum’s eyes has become a green fire,
and it’s coming swiftly nearer.
NE
Your opponent does not let you pass.
In a flash Gollum grabs the One Ring from your pocket!
Suddenly Gollum vanishes from sight.
Next thing you feel are two strong, slimy hands around your neck!
He kills you even if you don’t have the ring; with the ring, you have time here to KILL GOLLUM but there isn’t any benefit from his corpse. I have some ideas on what to try; it is possible we might be able to skip Gollum altogether by entering Moria from the “wrong way” and figuring out the path.
The grey-rain curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
— Return of the King
So I haven’t made that much progress, relatively speaking, but I have played enough to get a sense of what I’m up against.
From the movie version of the Lord of the Rings map.
Last time I mentioned investigating the area west of the Shire for any places of interest. There is, at least, the tower where the Grey Havens are visible, but the area seems just to be a lot of rooms with nothing of importance to the quest.
You’re in the Grey Havens.
N
You’re standing on a foreign shore.
S
That way you’ll leave Middle-Earth.
SE
The hills here are too steep for you to climb.
E
You’re standing at the foot of a slender tower.
NW
You’re standing on a foreign shore.
N
You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.
Trying to map things out, the grid broke down; the game does not let you drop items (“That won’t help you.”) so I can’t do item-mapping to be exact about it, but I did enough to confirm the weird connectivity of one of the “foreign shore” rooms (look on the bottom):
I think the author’s intent is simply to avoid feeling like there’s a wall (when there isn’t on the real map) while subtly shoving them eastward towards adventure. The issue with this in practice is that adventures can have clues anywhere, and while I’m leaving this section for now as a map-making mess, I can’t know for sure there isn’t some odd hidden byway until I’ve beaten the game.
With that out of the way, the obstacles I had were the Willow, the Barrow-Wight, and one of the ringwraiths. I managed to get by the Willow via book knowledge:
You’re walking through the Old Forest.
Overcome by a sudden drowsiness, you rest against a huge willow-tree.
Slowly you sink away into a crack in its bark…
S
You’re stuck in the bark of Old Man Willow.
TOM BOMBADIL
As you cry out for help, a man (or so it seems) appears, singing merrily.
Indeed, it is Tom Bombadil. With his song, he makes the willow-tree let you go.
You may call upon him, if you should fall into danger while still near.
Reading this text after the fact, I found CRY HELP specifically works, but many other variants don’t so it was much faster to just go straight for the end result, so to speak. This also confirms this is definitely an outside-knowledge kind of game, but this seems completely in line with the intent of the author.
ASIDE: I don’t normally do a random call for comments, but I am morbidly curious what people think about Tom Bombadil. That section of the book always came off to me as walking into a different story, somehow (even though Bombadil helps with the next part which then gets the hobbits their weapons).
“The next part” is referring to the barrow-wight, where you can TOM BOMBADIL your way out again. I was slightly puzzled at first because Frodo technically cuts off the hand of the barrow-wight first before calling in the calvary, and trying to do that in the game just kills you.
You’re standing among misty barrowdowns.
A tall dark figure like a shadow against the stars leans over you.
You’re in the power of a Barrowwight!
You find yourself lying on a stone bed.
A sickening pale hand is holding a shining sword, ready to pierce you!
TOM BOMBADIL
With a loud crash the barrowdown bursts into rubble.
The Barrowwight wails as it vanishes in the mist.
At your feet you discover a shining sword.
GET SWORD
It’s yours now.
There are no other Hobbits; it’s just us, somehow starting with a bow and arrows (which I incidentally have yet to use — the ringwraiths laugh them off). In the events that are to follow it strikes me we’re more like Aragorn, except we start in Hobbiton? The author clearly wanted to include all the places in Lord of the Rings but wasn’t worried about playing loose with the capabilities of the characters.
You know what the ringwraiths don’t laugh off? The sword from the barrowdown.
You’re on the Weathertop.
A dark shadow is creeping up the hill!
KILL SHADOW
With a ghastly cry the ringwraith falls.
Among the now shapeless garments you discover a golden ring.
My first ring! And now with the sword you can go back and kill the riders on either side of the Brandywine bridge; rather than HIDE, type KILL.
A ghostly rider is galloping towards you!
KILL RDIER
With a ghastly cry the ringwraith falls.
Among the now shapeless garments you discover a golden ring.
All that running around and Frodo could have just stabbed them! What was he thinking!
With all that out of the way, I was able to find a jewel along the road, and a side cave with a glowing staff. A third rider guarding the path to the east fell easily to the blade.
Things still were “dense” enough in this section I thought the game would keep it up, but then the rest of my map (for my first trek farther) went like this:
While some directions were blocked, the map opens up from here to its full 36 by 36 glory (or something — the tangled exits on the foreign shores now makes me unsure). Again, the “zoomed-in” perspective now seems the wrong way to look at the game; from a practical perspective, I think trying to map the entire game in Trizbort may be a problem and I need to switch to filling in grid square colors instead.
You’re following an east-west trail.
E
You’re following a narrow trail through the hills.
E
The path splits up in two directions.
E
You’re at the fords of the river Loudwater.
E
You’re looking over the beautiful valley of Imladris.
Rivendell should be near.
E
You’re following an east-west trail.
E
The path splits up in two directions.
N
You’re following a north-south trail.
N
You’re wandering through a small forest.
There’s a lot of dead wood lying around.
The dead wood is an object that gets used just a bit later, going through the “High Pass of the Caradhras” where there is a blizzard.
You’re on the high pass of the Caradhras.
E
Snow is falling in big flakes.
E
You’re caught in a terrible blizzard.
If you don’t make fire soon, you’ll freeze!
MAKE FIRE
You burn all the wood you have.
E
Snow is falling in big flakes.
E
You’re on the high pass of the Caradhras.
This is the extreme version of the “fan fiction shortcut”, where the entire map of Middle Earth is considered more or less a given, and where the game becomes more vivid is for a player who knows the word “Caradhras” in the first place. (That’s the mountain where the Fellowship gets stalled by a blizzard, and Frodo (who gets the vote as Ring bearer) decides to take Gimli’s suggestion to pass through Moria instead.
Past the blizzard is the “old forest” where the player can have a run-in with a spider which is a lot easier to handle than the equivalent puzzle in the Melbourne House game The Hobbit:
Among the trees you discover huge cobwebs.
Suddenly you hear a rustling sound behind you!
KILL SPIDER
The hideous black spider is now dead.
Then lots of “path”, and more “path”, and even some “turn” in there…
…and the path I took ended at, somehow, Smaug.
Far to the north you can see the Lonely Mountain.
N
You’re passing through the ruins of Dale.
N
You’re following a north-south trail.
N
You’re facing a grey wall of rock.
In it you discover a small hole.
N
You bump into a wall of rock.
E
Your way is blocked by a wide river.
W
In front of you are the broken gates of the Lonely Mountain.
I’m afraid that Smaug has noticed your approach.
Wait, aren’t you supposed to be dead?
To be fair, we didn’t have the One Ring to start with, and Frodo (if that is even our main character) is able to take down ringwraiths with ease, so this is a “parallel universe” Lord of the Rings where Smaug is still around, and where all the rings need to be cast into Mount Doom, not just the One Ring.
I’m going to try using a color-grid next time and see how it goes, but I’m afraid this might be a scenario where I need to swap between big-scale view and small-scale view at a moment’s notice.
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
In my last post I wrote about an original game HOBBIT (1975) coded in FORTRAN for Hewlett-Packard mainframes that ended up having a port for TRS-80; it was also the inspiration for the 1980 game The Wizard’s Castle which itself spawned many clones.
Water, Wind, and Sand, art by J. R. R. Tolkien, 1915.
To start today (and get to Ring Quest), I need to talk about another game called HOBBIT, from 1978 or so, which may or may not be related. I think the evidence is strong that the author Steve Richardson was thinking of the original HOBBIT, but I’m not sure. For the purposes of my discussion here, I’ll call the two versions CLASSIC-HOBBIT (for the original) and NEW-HOBBIT (for the new version), which was made on a PDP-11/70 at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania.
The “1978 or so” is because Richardson graduated out of high school in New Jersey in 1978, and the author of Ring Quest (Pieter Bots) first discovered the game during his 1980-1981 academic year, so the game had to be written between the two. (Incidentally, the game that Rob mentioned in the comments as being for DEC computers — that is, ported for the type of PDP that Dickinson college had — is from April 1978, so is likely CLASSIC-HOBBIT, since Richardson was still a high school senior in New Jersey at the time.)
We do not have NEW-HOBBIT. We do have a description from the author on his blog from 2007:
When I was in college at Dickinson in Carlisle, PA, I was a bit of a computer geek, and the school’s mainframe had a text-based adventure game called, oddly enough, ADVENT. It was fun, but frustrating; there was no SAVE command, so once you started, you had to keep going until you won or died. It wasn’t exactly Myst, but it was fun! As I was a programmer, I decided to write my own text-baased adventure game based on Lord of the Rings. Since program names on this system had to be no longer than six characters, I called the program HOBBIT. Characters moved about Middle Earth collecting the Rings of Power to throw into Mount Doom. I took huge liberties with the plot, but it was fun, and I learned a lot.
NEW-HOBBIT has six rings of power to collect (and one sword for killing Ringwraiths) which more or less matches the seven treasures of HOBBIT; more importantly, NEW-HOBBIT was oriented such that the entire game is on one outdoors grid representing a large-scale map. This is highly unusual and the only other adventure I’ve played for the Project (other than HOBBIT) that does something like this is Reality Ends. The latter point (combined with the name coincidence) especially makes me suspicious that Richardson had at least seen ORIGINAL-HOBBIT.
Pieter Bots had come from The Netherlands to study chemistry in the United States at Dickinson; while there he found the university’s PDP-11/70 and discovered it had games.
One of the games was HOBBIT, that is, NEW-HOBBIT, the Richardson game, and as a longtime Tolkien fan he was interested. However, as Bots writes, Richardson “had taken such liberties with the story of Frodo’s quest” that “I felt that a more faithful interpretation was desperately needed.” He wrote his own HOBBIT (NEW-NEW-HOBBIT, I suppose), although ran afoul of his full ambitions due to 16K memory limit for BASIC programs. Then:
Having the same name as the authorized game on the system, my HOBBIT drew the attention of the system administrator, Tom Burtnett, first to my computer account (from which the file was confiscated on suspicion of being a hacked copy), and subsequently to my person, which started a principal-student relation of which I still have fond memories.
The affair brought me in contact with the maker of the genuine HOBBIT and his friends (notably Betzi Hoff and Chris Russell, and soon also Chris Leyon and Bill Biancamano) who led me into the magical world of Dungeons & Dragons and became great friends throughout my year at Dickinson and after.
Bots still wanted to make an “ultimate” Lord of the Rings game and when he came back to The Netherlands to resume his studies at the University of Leiden, he wrote Ring Quest on his Sharp MZ-80B (64K of memory) in assembly language.
While at university it stayed as a “private game”, where his friends would “stay up until 3 A.M. to get to the end”. He then tossed the tape in a shoebox and unearthed it many years later (2007) and managed to rescue the audio. He then used that copy to make a Windows port.
No paring down to six rings for simplicity/size: our goal is to find all 20 rings (3 to the elves + 7 to the dwarves + 9 to the humans + the One) and toss them in Mount Doom. The map is still a grid, but 36 by 36, that is, there are over 1,000 rooms. Just for perspective, here’s what the empty grid looks like:
Some of the rooms are blocked off; this is similar to a “worm tunnel” design like On the Way to the Interview was, but with the added condition that you can go in diagonals (NE, NW, SW, SE).
You’re in Hobbiton.
S
You’re in the southern part of the Shire.
S
You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.
S
You’re standing on a foreign shore.
SE
The trees are too dense here.
NE
You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.
Even with 64K of memory I would not expect massive room descriptions; it’s almost as if the “reading lens” that usually gets used in text adventures is getting zoomed-back a bit to consider regions; however, individual rooms are still important, and in fact in my current state trying to go east direct from Hobbiton I am blocked by three entirely different death-rooms (which I’ll show off shortly).
The two “Road w/ rider” rooms both involve death unless you HIDE:
You’re following the Great Eastern Road.
Suddenly you hear a horse coming up the road.
HIDE
As long as you don’t move, you’re hidden from sight.
You see a darkmantled figure on a black horse appear on the road.
It passes by and dwindles into the distance.
Remember, diagonals are possible, but they would make the map too messy so I’m not including them. You can avoid the darkmantled figure with the opening steps NE, SE, NE, SE but that unfortunately doesn’t avoid any of the other three deaths I’m stuck on.
You’re in Hobbiton.
NE
You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.
SE
You’re crossing the Brandywine Bridge.
In the south-east you see the rim of the Old Forest.
NE
You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.
SE
Towards the south you can see the misty contours of low hills.
E
You’re on the Weathertop.
A dark shadow is creeping up the hill!
HIDE
There’s noplace to hide here.
The ringwraith pierces you with his freezing blade.
So you’re dead.
Death #2 involves the barrow-wight:
You’re standing among misty barrowdowns.
A tall dark figure like a shadow against the stars leans over you.
You’re in the power of a Barrowwight!
You find yourself lying on a stone bed.
A sickening pale hand is holding a shining sword, ready to pierce you!
S
Your opponent does not let you pass.
With a triumphant cry the sword is thrust forward.
From the Lidless Eye set of the Middle Earth Collectible Card Game.
Death #3 involves being swallowed up by Old Man Willow:
You’re walking through the Old Forest.
Overcome by a sudden drowsiness, you rest against a huge willow-tree.
Slowly you sink away into a crack in its bark…
S
You’re stuck in the bark of Old Man Willow.
(Not technically a death, but at least a softlock for the moment; still the most promising one to muscle through.)
Now, looking back at the map, you may notice some exits going west. You can take an entirely different route, and in fact, there’s enough rooms out there I don’t have it mapped out yet. An excerpt just to give an idea:
You’re in Hobbiton.
W
You’re standing at the foot of a slender tower.
CLIMB TOWER
From the tower you can see a great harbour towards the west.
GO DOWN
You’re standing at the foot of a slender tower.
W
You’re in the Grey Havens.
W
That way you’ll leave Middle-Earth.
Too bad the ships aren’t here, otherwise we could do The Lord of the Rings: The Heavily Abridged Version.
Today, we move back in time to 1975: personal computers were only starting to become real; the Altair wasn’t out until the very end of the year. This means if you wanted to play a coin-op game like Shark Jaws you could go to an arcade…
…but for a computer game, you’d need access to a large mainframe or minicomputer, likely through a university or a remote terminal connected to one. There were still many people who had no computer access at all.
Someone on the con committee had arranged to have some remote terminals tied into some college’s time-share system upon which you could run a primitive version of Star Trek and another, very similar game with a fantasy motif (called HOBBIT). These were printing terminals, not CRTs (the ADM-3a was still about a year and a half away at that point.)
To re-iterate what ends up being a vital point, they were playing on printers, not screens. When someone (not Power) was playing HOBBIT, the game crashed, and Power subsequently got the source code by accident: he “managed to get a listing of it while trying to restart it.”
Power would eventually re-write the original FORTRAN code into his own game, first working on a TRS-80 (“a much cleaner version of the code and played roughly the same as the one I’d played”), then on a Sorcerer that was in a shop, rewriting the game from scratch and adding features based on his playing of Dungeons and Dragons. While he originally got a publishing contract to sell it “by Christmas” of 1979, that fell through, and he ended up sending the code to be printed in the July/August 1980 issue of Recreational Computing magazine.
In that magazine he mentions not only the original author of HOBBIT, but two other people who got the source code.
The article names “Chip Bestler” as the original author, who later transitioned to be Caitlin Bestler, making her the (currently) second known such person in videogame development. Bestler was deeply involved in the fantasy/sci-fi fan scene, being an editor on two zines (Effen Essef, Windyapa) and being part of Chicago’s bid for Worldcon in 1982.
ASIDE: The record is held by Ellen Kuhfeld, who wrote the University of Minnesota version of Spacewar. She wrote an article in Analog (pre-transition) back in 1971 that discusses the two versions; you can play the original MIT version here and a reconstruction of the Minnesota game here. The third known person is Jamie Fenton, who did the arcade games Amazin’ Maze and 280 ZZZap in 1976 (and helped finish work on Sea Wolf when the main developer, Tom McHugh, got sick); Fenton is most famous for the 1981 game Gorf.
Sketches for an unpublished Blackjack game by Fenton. The document dated November 24, 1974 is the same week as the convention. Source.
The excerpt earlier also mentions Kevin Williams and Dana Kaempen, who made a port for HP mainframe. Via “K. Williams” (who I’ve confirmed is Kevin), a version of original HOBBIT showed up for TRS-80 in the tape magazine CLOAD in August 1979. Based on Power’s description of the game, it hews to the original 1975 experience.
IN THIS GAME YOU BECOME A HOBBIT THIEF TRYING TO STEAL THE ORB OF ZOT FROM THE CASTLE OF THE EVIL WIZARD.
To be clear, HOBBIT is not an adventure game. However, the history ends up tying in with an adventure game (which we’ll get to in my next post) in a curious way, such that to do a complete history I needed to see what HOBBIT was like first. If anything, it feels most related to classic mainframe Star Trek mixed with some Wumpus, but let me play the game first, get into comparisons later–
The game is played on a 9 by 9 grid scattered with quite a few “warps” (that teleport the player), as well as gems, amulets, flares, demons (the enemies), and an Oracle. The rooms that don’t have any of those things just have “gems” (which can be used to bribe enemies or ask questions of the oracle). Commands are single letter directions (N/S/E/W) and (W)ait, (M)ap, (F)lare, (L)amp, (T)eleport, (K)ill, and (Q)uit. I ended up using the M key quite a bit, but you can imagine someone playing on a printer would not want the full map printed every step.
An example map. The special items are the same as in Wizard’s Castle.
The overall goal is to first find a Runestaff (which will be in a room that looks like it has a demon when looked into, but that’s a facade); the Runestaff allows teleportation, so the can then try to teleport to the right room (one of the rooms that teleports the player randomly otherwise) to find the Orb of Zot. The game’s instructions explain it like thus:
ALSO HIDDEN IN THE CASTLE ARE THE RUNESTAFF AND THE ORB OF ZOT. THE ORB IS DISGUISED AS A WARP AND THE ONLY WAY TO GET IT IS TO TELEPORT INTO ITS ROOM DIRECTLY. IF YOU TRY TO MOVE INTO ITS ROOM YOU WILL GO PAST IT IN THE SAME DIRECTION. TO TELEPORT YOU MUST USE THE RUNESTAFF WHICH IS DISGUISED AS A DEMON. BE CAREFUL WHEN YOU TELEPORT, HOWEVER, BECAUSE YOU LOSE ALL YOUR AMULETS AND GEMS (NOTE: YOU MAY ALSO DROP SOME GEMS EACH TIME YOU MOVE).
In most games of the Wizard’s Castle line the Lamp gets a lot of use — it can be used to peek in an unexplored room to see what is inside. The big catch here is that if there’s a demon, it can see you if you peek in, and charge.
This reminds me of waking up the Wumpus.
Getting charged seems common on higher difficulties especially. If you have one of the magic items it protects you, so the real reason to use a lamp would be to avoid warps, although I’ve found it better in general just to eat the teleport and resume walking from wherever the landing spot is. (This is especially because of how the Orb of Zot works, which I’ll get to later.)
(K)ill will try to do away with a demon for good, which involves simply invoking one of your items. Use an item enough times and it will run out of charge, meaning you need a different one.
The oracle will tell you — assuming you have the opal eye, or are willing to spend 20 gems — where one item is (except, unless I’m missing something, the runestaff or Orb of Zot, which aren’t given numbers). For example, on this screen I ask about the flares…
…and the map in progress below shows (in the last leg of the route) me going from the oracle to the location specified.
This is on difficulty 7 out of 9.
The flares will show all nearby numbers and are essentially the most powerful item in the game. They will not cause enemies to charge.
For the flare use above, here’s the actual result, with six of the squares revealed at once:
On lower difficulties, unless you get slammed early by a demon you’ll probably win (the lamp is worth using until you get one of the magic items to protect yourself). On higher difficulties, winning is harder, because the main obstacle is time.
This does not feel like Tolkien. It’s more like you’re facing off against Baba Yaga.
Hence why the flares are so useful: they explore the map in the fastest time possible.
As mentioned in the instructions earlier, the Runestaff and Orb of Zot have special conditions for finding them. The Runestaff will be in a room that appears to be a demon when looked at via lamp or flare (but isn’t). You don’t have to fight a demon to get the runestaff — you just walk in the right room and there it is.
The Orb of Zot is at one of the warps. At the Zot-Warp it works in a special way, by “jumping” the player over the square rather than hurtling them across the map. An example:
On the screenshot above, the Orb of Zot is at (5,2), so when you get the Runestaff you should teleport there, which essentially wins the game.
To summarize, the procedure for winning is:
a.) find at least one magic item (Ruby, Norn Stone, etc.) which can be used to resist demons
b.) trudge your way through the map and hope you find the flares; if you see the Oracle, ask about the flares (4), otherwise make sure to hit every demon and warp to check for the Runestaff and Orb of Zot
c.) as soon as you get the Runestaff, focus on entering into every warp until you find the one that has you “jump” to the next square as opposed to making a bigger warp; once you locate that, teleport to that exact square with the Runestaff.
Once you have the Orb of Zot you can still keep playing if you want to mop up more gems for points.
Regarding the Star Trek comparison — I’m not going to do a full history, but you can read through a playthrough here. While the placement on a grid could easily be coincidence, the thing that makes me fairly sure Bestler was making a reference is the flares. The Enterprise is on a large grid, and you activate a “long range scan” to see what happens to be nearby:
While I can’t confirm (Caitlin Bestler died of cancer so I can’t ask her) I get the impression that the original HOBBIT was made separate from Dungeons and Dragons as a concern and is more along the lines of trying to convert the old computer games like Star Trek and Hunt the Wumpus to have a slight bit of fantasy flair. It is only historical inertia that we always associate “fantasy setting” with RPGs; Power, of course, started molding the form to fit that of the CRPG genre.
I incidentally did not bring up HOBBIT last time I talked about Tolkien games, but that’s because the connections are very tenuous and little more than namechecks (given Cthulhu is one of the demons, it’s playing pretty loose with the lore). However (just previewing my next post), imagine someone playing the game and disappointed that the references are so light, so they make their own version which really is Tolkienesque, and then someone else comes along and adds even more and — well, let’s save all that for next time.
Special thanks to Ethan Johnson and Kate Willaert who shared their research on Jamie Fenton and Ellen Kuhfeld. Ethan blogs at History of How We Play and Kate is at A Critical Hit!
Nearly all the haunted mansions (or castles) that we’ve experienced through All the Adventure have been, at their essence, fan fiction.
Solihull, Birmingham area.
This isn’t necessarily a negative thing for the circumstances, given the tiny space most authors have had to work with. As I’ve observed before, fan fiction is a shortcut of sorts that allows an author to put Spock in their game by just writing
Spock is here.
with all the different associations and abilities Spock has already implied, without having to waste more precious memory space with explanation. Similarly, with spooky games by Morgan or O’Hare or Bassman a stereotypical monster can be implied by just mentioning its name. “Dracula is here” implies not only a visual, but what sort of puzzle elements might be used.
From Morgan’s Haunted House, after using SHOW CROSS, an action hinted at nowhere in the game, but rather applying the “fan fiction” aspect. This allows us to steal Dracula’s chocolate chip cookie. Maybe he’s Count Chocula in disguise.
The is the first of four games at CASA titled Castle Dracula, although the only one from 1983. The author, Paul T. Johnson, has the distinction of most of his games being written later (1996-2004, not counting he was a contributor to Cragne Manor in 2018). He rewrote Castle Dracula twice, first as House of the Midnight Sun and later as Dracula — Prince of Darkness. The first game includes some historical detail about Castle Dracula:
I wrote this text adventure game in 1983. The game, written in BASIC took me a year to program. For its time 1983, the verbose descriptions of the 40 locations impressed even me. “House Of The Midnight Sun” Was based on this early game. Untill recently I had thought the game was lost, however thanks to the work of Simon Hardy and Robert Boyd an early build of this game is once again available to play. The ’83 game was aimed at a younger audience. “House of the Midnight Sun” is a larger and far more complex game. It is also a far darker game.
The author’s web page gives the further detail that the game was mail-order only, sold via ads in magazines, and he “sold copies of the game all over the world including Japan.” He explains the “main problem” was a lack of computer memory (surprise!); out of the list of platforms (Spectrum, MSX, Commodore Plus/4, Atari, Dragon, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A) the TI at least meant it was restricted to 16K.
To help with the games longevity some of the puzzles were as tough as old boots. None of your – ‘need a brass lamp to explore a darkened room’ – These puzzles were mean!
It was sold by Mercury Software (Johnson’s house) out of the Birmingham area, not to be confused with the Mercury Software in Manchester (selling “arcade quality games” for the Oric).
Via World of Dragon.
The author implies the difficulty is in the puzzles, whereas I would argue it is in the highly bespoke parser. This is another of the type where everything is implemented “manually”. That is, there is no real “world model”, but rather each room has a custom listing of prompts that will move the game forward. Even dropping inventory items is not allowed!
There’s also some unconventional commands: the only directions are N, S, U and D (no E or W) and typing E is actually short for “examine”. (This is akin to how Robots on Terminus IV had to avoid all words including a Z because Z was being used for backspace.) I admit to misreading things and being confused for a while thinking maybe I was turning my character east to see something, and by coincidence the thing always happened to be the east. The other shortcut is “R” for read; according to the author the E and R notation is used to save memory. (If this was coded “normally” where all the verbs are stored centrally, this wouldn’t be a problem, but there is almost no code re-use in the logic flow at all.)
Our goal is to rescue a princess from Dracula. Isn’t the will supposed to say who our possessions go to, not explain how we’ll probably die?
You start approaching a graveyard, and E (for “examine”, remember, not “east”) will reveal a freshly dug grave.
The game is fishing for DIG EARTH specifically to make progress.
750 IF I$=”E” THEN 800
760 IF I$=”R”THEN 820
770 IF I$=”DIG EARTH”THEN 840
780 IF I$=”S” THEN 600
790 GOTO 470
800 E$=”ONE OF THE TOMBSTONES LOOKS NEW.THE EARTH HAS JUST BEEN DUG,YOU SEE SOME WRITING”
810 GOTO 70
820 E$=”THE TOMBSTONE HAS YOUR NAME ON IT!A WARNING OR A CLUE?”
830 GOTO 70
(70 gets the room description and inventory, and is the only part of code that is re-used in the program flow.)
Moving forward is a “guardian” which blocks your way.
This is honestly terrific atmosphere (in the spooky-game-written-by-enthusiastic-kid sense) and has two options: you can either hand over the stake as requested or use HIT SKELETON. (That verb specifically, of course.) Giving the stake almost seems like a softlock:
YOU NO LONGER POSE A THREAT TO MY MASTER. YOU ARE NOW HIS SUPPER THE SKELETON DISAPPEARS BACK INTO THE GROUND
However, you’ll get your items yanked away later, and it isn’t like the game is really keeping track; to remove the stake the game simply changes the string used to print inventory (IN$=”A HAMMER AND SPADE”).
Moving on…
…there’s an underwater waterfall where the game is fishing for ENTER WATERFALL, followed by a Smuggler’s Cave where there’s algae visible if you use the E command; the game specifically wants REMOVE ALGAE.
Not TAKE, SCRAPE, GET, etc. because the code is just a line that checks if I$=”REMOVE ALGAE”.
The writing says
I MUST DESTROY THE MONSTER
ITS SIGNED REV.POTS 1817
VAMPIRE KILLER
Onward is a very slight amount of exploration (everything is linear from here on out); you arrive at a “main hall”, can go north to find barred doors and a “letter”…
It’s backwards.
…and go south to find a library.
The book is meant to hint you can go into the mirror (or rather, quite specifically, ENTER MIRROR).
The right response here is IGOR. This is hinted at from the backwards text earlier, and note that you need to just type the word IGOR, not SAY IGOR or RESPOND IGOR or anything else like that, elsewise:
If you IGOR correctly you will still be left to be attacked by rats. Examining reveals a message on the wall from the helpful REV. POTS:
This is a direct letter code (1=A, 2=B, 3=C, etc.) which prompts the player to REMOVE MORTAR.
If it isn’t clear yet: the author sacrificed world model aspects (or more likely, didn’t know at the time how to code them) for the sake of “cinematic” text to describe events. We’ve had this sort of contrast with Peter Kirsch games, which more properly have a world model, but by jettisoning everything the author is laying everything down on the text.
Another timed scene, the coffins start to open. With a better parser (and some clarity that it is in fact daytime) this could have been the best moment of the game. REMOVE SHUTTERS:
One of the coffins can be entered, revealing a down-staircase to some bones. A stake lies amongst the bones but it is just a fakeout.
You then get confronted by a GUARDIAN OF LOGIC who wants you to prove you exist; now we are on literal guess-the-phrase with I THINK.
Onward more, there is a chamber of steel with a large rock; this rock gets used immediately, as the room after has a classic crushing trap you can foil with DROP ROCK.
This allows progress to a “haunted bedroom” with a hint I’ll return back to later.
Past here is none other than Reverend Pots himself, who is sleeping in a bed.
ITS POTS ALRIGHT.MAYBE YOU
SHOULD WAKE HIM.
Waking him is a bad idea.
You should instead just ignore him and move forward, whereupon a countdown timer starts.
A GHOSTLY APPARITION STANDS
BEFORE YOU.IT SPEAKS WITH THE
VOICE OF THUNDER’KILL THE
VAMPIRE BEFORE SUNSET OR HE WILL
KILL YOU!’
You now have 10 turns to beat the game.
In a bedroom that follows, there’s some wallpaper to remove opening a passage to a secret vault.
This is where the game’s bragged-about difficulty really kicks in. You have to realize the game is making a pun here and PLAY C, opening a passage to the princess.
I kind of wanted the princess to already be a vampire. It would fit with the plot of the game.
The princess gives you a note which indicates what to do, while Drama happens:
You only get one turn to act. I love the tension, although note this game doesn’t have a saved game feature so there’s a fair chance (especially given the parser) there would be a lot of restarts.
And here I admit I did not figure out the puzzle, but checked a walkthrough. This refers back to the Reverend Pots hint, and suddenly jumps the game to hyper difficulty, because these are references to the book of Genesis, specifically the King James Version. V2,14 means look at Genesis 2:1, letter 14, and I’m guessing most players in the 80s just cracked open the source code.
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
The code comes out to SAY MAGIC.
Despite this game fitting into the many haunted houses we’ve seen (and will still see), the focus on scenes with driving tension did make it come across very different and it had a janky charm; I would have just preferred a different parser, but fortunately the future version of the author has already obliged that (twice) as the remakes are written in Inform.
Via World of Dragon.
I am a realist and know it will take an awful long time to get there, so let me finish by quoting the author about his first remake, describing his overall process and using the term “interactive ghost-train ride”:
When I wrote “House of the Midnight Sun” in 2002 I use to work as a paramedic in Birmingham, England, (I have now retired.) I spent my ten hour shifts, waiting for emergency calls on my own in a Paramedic car at Sarehole Mill. There, where Tolkien grew up, and later used as a setting for his novel “Lord of the Rings,” I wrote the game on a tiny Psion Revo. (Today I’m using a Sony Vgn P11Z.) I remember sitting by the stream, next to the mill, writing the ‘nest of rats’ puzzle, a routine with a gruesome solution. I was just wondering if I had gone too far, when I looked up to see that I was being watched. I was not alone, I had been joined by a large brown rat. I took this as a sign, and the rats’ nest stayed. Since then the rat comes round from time to time to check on my progress. I must remember to take him something to eat.
First, briefly, regarding the verbs: they’re inside the machine code in plain text, but backwards. I don’t know if this is meant as a slight bit of “encryption” or if there’s some technical reason based on how input sequences are treated. It was mainly useful to find that “med” is the word to get inventory (as in “jeg har med”, “I am carrying”) and “dro” as in “drop” lets you drop stuff. (I really need to remember to test English words in foreign games, because sometimes they work.)
I also found “fjolet” and “idiot” on the list, both translating to, er, idiot; essentially this is for insulting the computer, which responds with “Det forstod jeg godt” or “I understood that!”
A book on Treasures and Treasure Hunters. One of my results while using image search for vocabulary. Via GPRIS.DK.
I needed advice from the comments (via Rob) to find one object that was tricky to get, and then the entirety of the rest involved mapping and digging in every room. I never even found the nails to build a ladder; I assume they’re somewhere because I poked at the machine code to list the nouns. The ladder points represent alternate exits from the labyrinth area but neither is needed.
For that one object, it was back in the shed:
That’s listing a shovel, an empty oil barrel (except it has a hammer if you check), a stack of boards, a garden rake, a hoe, a saw, and the door. Everything is takeable except the barrel and door, and knowing a ladder was coming I had automatically grabbed the boards and the saw. Somehow — and it doesn’t exactly make sense why this happens — you can be carting around the boards but be missing an item hidden if you examine them: a lamp. (You can find the lamp while carrying the boards, at least.)
With the lamp and matches in hand I was able to “taend lampe” (“put on the lamp”) and that vanquished the dark areas and any puzzles remaining in the game: as I said, the rest is pure map-making.
Starting with the dark place next to the kitchen, that just leads to a north/south tunnel, where the south opens out to the forest, and the north to the shed. This doesn’t really represent a shortcut, but rather just the author trying to add more connectivity to the world.
The other dark part was next to the shed, leading down to a cellar.
“Skeleton” and “matches” are marked rooms in the labyrinth after this section.
There are four marked rooms, and each has a treasure that is found by digging with the shovel (“grave”). There are five treasures total, so almost the entire rest of the game can be found without entering the labyrinth at all! (Except you are likely to enter by accident as you map things out.)
I incidentally had trouble translating “klipperum”. The pictures that I found were all editing rooms, like this one from a Danish film site…
…and the best I could find digging through dictionaries was “cloakroom” but that also doesn’t make sense to me based on the context. ADD: Petter Sjölund in the comments mentions “klippe” is stone or rock so it could be “room (carved out?) of rock”.
Leaving that behind, and heading into the labyrinth (pardon the mess, I know I’m missing a few exits)…
…it’s a fairly standard “drop items to map scenario”. One passage includes a paper at the end which suggests the treasures be dropped at the starting cottage in order to be scored. This happens to be the otherwise-inaccessible basement of the cottage; a hole is mentioned from the very start of the game, so it is a nice piece of geographic connection to mention it here.
One room also has a skull there (which serves both as decoration and a map-making marker) and another lets you dig up a skeleton of a past treasure-hunter.
The skull and skeleton are the two “sinks” of the maze (that is, random travel will more likely land in one of those two) so it makes for an interesting narrative moment to have a skeleton of a past adventurer dropped in there. However, our long expertise with Dropping Stuff makes it not hard to find the fifth and final treasure, which is right under the giant hole we found earlier outside.
(You know, I didn’t see if the treasure had the nails. I’m too exhausted to go back and check, after a while the Danish was hurting my brain.)
So all that’s left to do is make sure all the treasures are deposited followed by typing SCORE, kicking us back to the operating system prompt.
This was about the joy of exploration with an attempt at verisimilitude in environment, with the massive number of red herrings like a rake in the shed or a bottle cap buried on a random path. The “shortcuts” weren’t really needed but I’m not sure the author even thought of them in a design sense, but more in a sense that it’s logical for a realistic world to have multiple routes passing through it.
In a way this was good for a language-beginner game (that is, for me), as it didn’t in the end make horrendous demands on vocabulary. What I found most interesting was a general lack of puzzles at all; while it is essentially certain the author had experience with at least some standard adventure games, this one also harkens back to the Chaffee Quest, which when translated into Danish also was given the name Skatte Jagt.
Thanks to Mikkel Christensen who did the scans of NASCOMNYT which helped find out the year of the game.
There is allegedly another Danish game from 1983 so we’re not done with the language yet, but I’m not sure where to find it. CASA states the Christmas-themed Juleadventurespil is in the December 1983 issue of Hjemmedata magazine. This is the Norwegian issue but we don’t have the Danish one.
For now, I need to stick with English for a while anyway for a mental breather; coming up there’s one spooky game, one Tolkien game (that hasn’t been discussed here yet), and finally Urban Upstart (for real this time).
While the Sinclair ZX-80 and ZX-81 launched computing “for the people” in Denmark (and a battle with Commodore after), today’s game is from another one of those “hobbyists” separate from the mainstream: Henrik K. Jensen, writing on a Nascom kit computer. While the home origin of the Nascom was the UK (just like the ZX-80) it managed to make inroads in both Denmark and Sweden.
NASCOM kit parts, from a video by GlassTTY. This forms in the end a “proper” computer, rather than something a little more skeletal like the KIM-1.
The “kit” aspect was a definite part of the experience which is part of what allowed the launch of the Nascom 1 in the UK (January 1978) to be at more or less half the price of competitors. However, it was still cheap even for the parts; in fact, it was too cheap, as it had “inadequate profit margins” which led to the company falling into receivership two years later, leading to it being taken over by the company Lucas. A pre-assembled Nascom did not come out until very late, 1981, with the Nascom 3, which was simply the Nascom 2 but now you didn’t have to solder. By this point the industry had already moved on.
… what you got was a keyboard, a circuit board and a number of plastic bags full of resistors, capacitors and integrated circuits.
Yes! You had to build it yourself.
And you have to supply your own power supply (+5V,+12V,-5V,-12V (expensive!)), and a monitor or television for screen. Not to mention a box.
Then came the fun of finding the correct place for all the components and soldering them into place.
1839 component pins!!
I wonder if anyone ever got it to work on the first try.
Enough Danes figured it out that a club was kicked off in late 1979 with a newsletter. 18 members are listed in the second newsletter, and by 1982 the list reached hundreds (note not “thousands” like the ZX80/81 club in the UK had).
Half an “invader” graphic from the October 1980 issue.
Just like most clubs at the time, there was a “library” of software for members; March 1982 includes a mention of “Skattejagt” (“Treasure Hunt”) as entry B13:
You are hunting for treasure that a pirate has hidden in an underground cave system, where secret passages open and close during the game.
This is Chaffee’s Quest, a game we’ve now seen translated into Dutch (twice) based on source code from the July 1979 issue of Byte. It landed in Danish too and probably more languages we haven’t unearthed.
The game we’re instead concerned about is only listed in the later catalog, meaning it first appeared in 1982; prior to my research today’s game only had a date of 19xx.
The program requires 48K and is in machine code; the computer is turned into a robot that you give commands to like “go north”, “take shovel”, and “build ladder”. It “demands a lot of imagination and patience, and it can take a while to find the treasures.”
The catalog states “Adventure” but the title screen of the game itself gives Skatte Jagt, so despite the clash with Chaffee I’m sticking with the more distinctive name.
The instructions mention “tag skovl” (take shovel) and “gaa nord” (go north) but notice it does not mention “lav stige” (build ladder) like the user group catalog does. (Ladder supplies get loaded on the player quickly enough I was quite suspicious, but it’s still good to have the exact phrasing in Danish.) Nord, syd, oest, vest, op, ned are the words for north, south, east, west, up, and down.
I’m in a cottage with a hole in the floor. I can see: stairs, locked door, door, hatch, hatch. I can go: east, up.
I typed hjaelp (help) right away:
For at laase en doer/lem op skriv aaben.
Skatte I igger ofte nedgravet.
Det er en god ide at undersoege alle ting.
To open a door/hatch, put “open”.
Treasures are often buried underground.
It is a good idea to investigate everything.
Incidentally, Danish uses special characters (å, æ, ø) and there is a version of the Nascom system that allows for them, but this one flattens things, so “åben dør” is “aaben doer”. ø is still used once in the game but I think it’s just the “zero” symbol.
Based on the help messages and my experimentation the verbs I’ve found are
tag (take), gaa (go), lave (build), laeg (drop), grave (dig), undersoeg (examine), and aaben (open)
although only the first three letters are needed of each (so it’s useful to “und” all the nouns). “Aab” is particularly quirky as you’ll see in a moment. I didn’t say “I started the game by dumping the verb list, like I normally do with languages I’m not good at”, and that’s not because of being a Danish master, but because after heavy searching through the machine-code file I can’t find where the verbs are stored. I imagine they’re broken up somehow. The upshot is that I’m not done with the game yet:
Heading up via “gaa op” (up the stairs one of the two hatches, or both?) there is an attic with a “rode kasse” (red box). You might think that the verb “aaben” would come into use here, but instead the game wants you to examine the box, which contains a second smaller box. Then examining the smaller box reveals some keys (noegler, or nøgler if special characters were being used).
Jeg er paa er loft. Jeg kan se: Noegler. Lille aeske. Rode kasse. lem. Mulige udgange: ned
I am in an attic. I can see: keys, little box, red box, hatch. I can go: down.
With the keys in hand (“tag noe”) you can then go downstairs to unlock the locked door, and I struggled for a while since no variation of “unlock door” or “open door” worked. I finally hit upon “open” alone. That’s what the help is supposed to indicate, and maybe it’s clearer in Danish, but I was mentally translating that as it requiring a noun, plus it’s common for a separate verb to do the door-unlocking as opposed to the keys being passively used while held.
The unlocked door leads to a kitchen (with a kitchen cabinet that seemingly has nothing) and another door leading further on into darkness. I don’t have any way through the darkness.
This is despite just outside seemingly having a solution:
This is a “courtyard” (or maybe “farmyard”) with a stone trough. Searching the trough reveals a box of matches, but nothing I’ve tried has let me light a match, so the darkness has to be left behind for now. (Sometimes adventure games don’t let you light a match by itself; the matches are just a tool for lighting a lamp. I haven’t found one of those either, though.)
The most fun way I’ve found to do vocabulary is to search on Google Images. This 1895 picture by Fritz Syberg (“An Old Farmyard”) came up looking at the word “gaardsplads”.
To the south is a “graesmark” (meadow) but nothing seems to be there (other than “looping” exits to make it seem bigger than it is) so let’s head north instead.
There’s a branching path with a locked hatch and a shed at the end. (Or rather “udhus”, a literal “out-building”, which could be an “outhouse” except there’s enough stuff inside the game clearly is meaning a shed.)
Inside there’s a shovel, oil barrel (with hammer), stack of boards, saw, rake, and hoe. Those boards and saw and hammer make it tempting to start building a ladder right away but the game says we’re missing something (I assume nails). The shovel, though, can be taken out right away for some digging, and here the game gets interesting in a ludology sense.
Crystal Cave (1977) modified the original Adventure source to start the game with a cave that had “treasures” that were all breakable formations, and park ranger that would kick you out if you caused too much havoc; essentially, a satire of cave-delving that imagined what things really would be like for a treasure-hunter in the real world. In the real world, if you start digging at random, you might find a rusty iron or an old beer bottlecap; such is the same here.
That’s a zero, right? Also this is the beer bottlecap.
I would guess, just like Crystal Caves, we’ll eventually break down to a lower layer with the real treasures.
Digging also reveals a stump in the forest, but I haven’t been able to do anything useful with it; no treasures have revealed themselves. Other than the dig-fest, the north part of the map has a locked hatch leading down to darkness (again, no light) and also what’s just a big hole.
Jeg er ved et huli jorden. Jeg kan se: . Mulige udgange: nord
I am at a hole in the ground. I can see: . I can go: north
(I assume this is where the ladder gets used.)
If anyone wants to take a shot at the game, directions for getting and playing it are here; all I really want is a verb list, if I’m stuck on an actual puzzle I don’t want to hear about it yet.
Many of the British product samples remained at the company. We tested as hard as we could but didn’t dare sell any hardware that was obvious crap. The British were more relaxed about that kind of thing than the Danes.
In late 1980, the Danish journalist Svend Garbarsch made a fateful call to Clive Sinclair, regarding a ZX80 he had seen in a British magazine.
By that time, Denmark certainly had a tradition of computing in general dating back to Regnecentralen (funded directly via Marshall Plan money for reconstructing Europe after WWII) with the companies Christian Rovsing and Danish Data Electronics later big contenders. None really tried to enter the consumer space. Regnecentralen modified a Data General Nova mini-computer to be the RC 7000 in 1970…
…and then transformed it into the RC 3600 as a business/school computer. Christian Rovsing also focused on mini-computers; the latecomer DDE made their first computer in 1975 for “data collection, process control and monitoring”.
An ID-7000, the first computer from Danish Data Electronics.
Arguably the most interesting early stab at Danish home computing was the ICL Comet. (ICL we’ve seen before: essentially Britain’s counterpart to IBM, with the I in the name meaning International.) As their computers generally used CP-M as their operating system we won’t have any Comet-specific software in this Project’s future; the important point is that it still tended to be targeted at the higher end / hobbyist audience, along with various computer kits like the Nascom. Even the Commodore PET was considered more of an expensive business machine.
What all this means is when Svend Garbarsch made his call from Denmark to England, a “cheap” computer for the masses in Denmark had yet to be introduced. Somehow in the process of the conversation with Clive Sinclair, the salesman-CEO talked the journalist into forming a distribution outlet for ZX80s: hence the founding of ZX-Data. According to his nephew Rolf Ask Clausen, the first test computer came at Christmas 1980 through the post office, and he had to “explain to the customs officers what the ZX80 machine was, and thus how it should be cleared through customs.”
In their first ad, the Sinclair ZX80 was dubbed “Folkedatamaten” — “The People’s Computer” — and orders started streaming in. According to his nephew Rolf Ask Clausen who was there from the beginning, he “worked day and night” trying to keep up. After a month they had to increase their warehouse space and hire more people.
Note this is after the ZX81 already launched elsewhere! One might suspect leftover product being handed off, especially given the failure rate sometimes went to 10%. ZX-Data did switch to shipping out ZX-81s by November 1981; the ZX Spectrum (where the failure rate finally calmed down) filtered down to Denmark by 1983.
Now, I need to back up the story a little. Today’s game, while written by a Dane in Copenhagen, was first published (as far as we know) in February 1981, which is before the ZX-Data launch. To explain, let’s go back to a pivotal moment in 1980–
The Australian Tim Hartnell had floating through multiple jobs, including news reader for a TV station, before landing in London as a journalist working for the Australasian Express; his writing was of the “nerdier” inclination and included a mathematics column.
The photo above was taken in April 1980 outside Madame Tussaud’s. Tim was puzzling over the ZX80 which had launched two months before. He had obtained a book on BASIC programming that he is shown reading here, specifically having trouble with the chapter about For/Next loops. According to Young:
It was while he was reading this chapter that Tim realised that if he was having difficulty understanding this programming stuff, then other people probably were too. This photo virtually shows the instant that Interface Publications was born.
He swerved his journalist career towards computers, writing one of the very early books for ZX80, Making the Most of Your ZX80.
This particular book was put out by Computer Publications (later well-known for the magazine Sinclair User) but Hartnell went on to form his own publisher, Interface (co-founded with Robert Young); he also launched a ZX-80 club which quickly got “thousands” of members.
Citadel on the bottom. Labyrinth is from Hartnell’s ZX80 book and is even more marginal as an adventure game, but I’ll still visit it sometime.
Ole Noerregaard of Copenhagen was a regular contributor starting in 1980, so he somehow got a hold of a ZX80 anyway despite them not having an official distributor in Denmark. (There’s always either talking past or smuggling through customs!) With the caveat that this is only a quasi-adventure game, it’s the first of its type we know of from Denmark. It was written in English. (My next game, which involves a completely different story, will get into the first one written in Danish.)
The game did have some “professional distribution” but the word “professional” earns those quote marks.
If you think that’s bad, look at the inside:
The publisher is not Lion. The publisher is the exceedingly obscure CDS Micro Systems. Lion is the one who made the tape, and CDS flipped it over and slapped CITADEL on it and called it good. CDS does have a few other games (all ZX80) and two of them (Andromeda and Timestar) are sort-of adventure games (with Wumpus-style navigation) but they don’t seem to have any connection with Ole Noerregaard so we’ll pitch studying them for some future time.
To summarize:
a.) Tim Hartnell launched a club and publication in the UK after discovering the ZX80 as a journalist.
b.) Denmark in general didn’t get any kind of distribution until a different journalist (Svend Garbarsch) called Clive Sinclair and got talked into founding ZX-DATA, which started distributing mid-1981.
c.) Prior to that, it was still possible through other means to cart hardware between countries, and Ole Noerregaard not only expanded his computer to 16K but was an enthusiastic contributor to Hartnell’s publication Interface, getting a SUPERGAME published starting early 1981 with some extra distribution by the dodgy CDS Micro.
Commentor Rob (who clued me in on the game’s existence) sent a less-damaged picture of a later issue of Interface with a blurb.
16K SUPERGAME: Make the most of your new, expanded memory with CITADEL. In the remote land of Destaphnya; shrouded in mist at the peak of Mt. Nganra, stand the CITADEL. For a thousand years, men have sought to find the secret hidden in the citadel, to possess its power. All have been repelled by the Dark Agents of Protection. Will you succeed where the others have failed? Can you storm the CITADEL? If you have a 16K RAM pack, you need CITADEL.
The game’s lore involves the titular Citadel “existing in many dimensions”; your job is to get as much treasure as possible.
You can carry four objects at a time, and bring them back to the start in order to “place” them in your home dimension, getting points. You are given three items at the start (none of which are explicitly treasure, but any item in the game gets points when stored as a treasure). The instructions give a goal of 1200 points. Commands are all single-letter.
(As an aside, regarding the ZX80, I think it’s notable we haven’t seen attempts at parser games, Planet of Death aside. It isn’t like the expanded version is really that much different from the ZX81 in a BASIC-code sense, but rather, the screen-blinks-at-every-keypress when typing long commands gets very grating. The issue is mitigated with single letter commands. If you need to see what a parser game looks like on ZX80, this link will take you to a playable version of Planet of Death.)
Room descriptions in the citadel are randomly generated, and not in a consistent positional way. That is, the room description changes every turn, even if you stop and “look” while hanging out. While some descriptions are genuinely vivid the overall effect is to make them be ignored; there is no “exploration pleasure” in finding a vivid new scene.
Both this and the previous room are the exact same room, the second screen obtained but using Look.
The map is randomly generated each time, making a 7 by 7 map. I have one of them fully rendered here, where monster encounters are marked with a danger symbol.
Notably, the map is not just a single path, but has some merging, meaning that you could technically avoid monster encounters if you knew where they were ahead of time. Alas, with no save game feature, it’s a matter of spinning the dial at random.
There’s no running away: each encounter requires you ATTACK with your choice of inventory item (like POLE ARM) and as far as I’ve been able to find by squinting at the source code the choice of weapon does not matter: it’s random if you have anything good happen or not.
Usually combats end by the enemy running away, either delivering a blow (as shown above) or having a draw with no damage given (a good result). You have a LIFEFORCE that starts at 400 and goes down by 100 on a good hit.
The one (1) time that I managed to kill a monster was on a skeleton. One of the “weapons” was a silver cross so you might think that might give an advantage in undead-combat but no: this was with a pole arm, and there seems to be no effect to the choice of weapon.
I did eventually scrounge out by luck what I think is essentially a max score. However, the game never acknowledges such and still claims there’s more treasure in the Citadel (there wasn’t).
This hence doesn’t rise to the level of an adventure — no real exploration, object choice doesn’t matter — but it isn’t an RPG either, as there are no stats other than the overall life force going down. So it’s in that weird in-between space that happened in early games where it isn’t a recognizable genre at all. Clearly the author put a lot of effort into the map generator and had some legitimately colorful room descriptions to match, but simply rose to the level of a “slot machine game” and stopped there. This was still worth playing as it will make an interesting comparison with the other ZX80 “quasi-adventure” specimens out there; for now, we’re going to switch to Danish, and look at their first “real” adventure.
The enormous chess board is my favorite of the random descriptions.
POSTNOTE: There’s a version of Citadel called Catacombs of Morglim that was tweaked by Trevor Sharples of the ZX80 club. It was published as actual source code in the pages of the Interface, but with the map generator taken out. A follow-up article by Sharples mentions methods of tweaking the source code; weirdly, the follow-up talks about having it generate a new cave each time, putting a generator back in. And no point during either article is Citadel mentioned as the original. This still seems to be in the hacker-code-sharing mode where “ownership” was very loose. Or maybe Catacombs of Morglim was the first version (only distributed “person to person” so to speak) and Citadel was the enhanced version? Citadel started being published first, but that doesn’t mean it was written first.
Thanks to Jeremy and Matt W. in the comments nudging a bit more at the game, humanity has been saved.
Placement of backspace and space on the ZX-81 keyboard specifically for this game.
I had made my way to a computer room which needed blowing up, and already had an escape vehicle in place, but actually placing the explosive was eluding me. The magic word for step one was PRIME.
This automatically combines the detonator and explosive together, and if the explosive is now dropped, it blows up.
As I theorized, TURN DIAL does now work (previously just saying YOU CANT), but it’s still a serious pain, because it asks
TO WHICH SETTING???
and I flailed for quite here. I was in the middle of my next post (which involves the same emulator that this game is on) and inspiration occurred to me:
I had actually tried THREE SETTING first, thinking about the unused THREAD verb that Matt mentioned — it’s a four-word parser, so it could have just been THREE as a verb — but that didn’t work. I immediately followed up with swapping the order to SETTING THREE.
PLACE EXPLOSIVE will now set everything to blow up.
I booked it to the escape craft…
…then pushed (I mean, pressed) the button to indicate my mission was over, and failed.
The explosive takes too long to blow up. This explains why the dial was needed in the first place! At setting THREE it is possible to walk your way to the exit, but I had pre-emptively solved what I think may have been intended as the central puzzle: make the timer tighter (TWO) and you can still escape by intermediate ship (not by walking!) and it will blow up before the patrol robots discover it.
Without the parser issues this is a short and well-designed vignette. You’re on a mission you’re actually well equipped to start, there’s some brief visit to a city which is minimal but vivid, you find the robot fortress and need to experiment to use their elevator, there’s some robot blasting with a LASER GUN, and the final part where you need to set a quicker timer to avoid the bomb being discovered (meaning you need a quicker exit) is genuinely satisfying. The problem is the “without the parser” exception, which dragged the game out to a week.
I have an idea what the CODEWORD is referring to: it might be used for a contest when the game was released. Computer Input from November 1983 mentions a contest for one of the other Antarctic Software games…
…so I could see an entry consisting of giving the codeword.
This game did not make much an appearance outside New Zealand; the only reference I’ve seen otherwise is from a truly puzzling mention in the UK Computer and Video Games magazine, August 1984. This comes from the column (common amongst magazines at the time) with people asking for help with their adventure game troubles.
The surreal cover is due to the adventure game based on the TV show Dallas.
New Zealand reader, Colin Foster, from Levin, is playing Antarctic Computing’s Robots on Terminus IV. He says it makes Espionage Island look simple and he can’t unseal the door in the spaceship, nor go near the pub. The fruit machine doesn’t seem to do much and he’s certain he has to go down the well, but can’t. Quite a daunting list, Colin, and unfortunately about а game I have never heard of. Are there any ZХ81 users out there who can cast light on these problems?
How did the door get sealed in the first place? Why would they have trouble entering the pub? Why would you be putting the fruit machine down the well (which only served as a landmark to help with mapmaking)? How did they pick up the fruit machine in the first place? If intended as a guerilla ad of sorts, why would it be in a UK magazine (where they would not have been able to get a hold of the game in the first place)?
ADD: Combining comments from ScienceBall and Gus Brasil, it appears the letter writer is not talking about leaving the ship but the armory. If you don’t get the armory open there’s no laser gun, and in order to enter the bar safely you need the gun (I never tried this) meaning no coin so no lever from the fruit machine. The author mentions the fruit machine and the well together but they’re just two separate dilemmas. Note he mentions Espionage Island (Arctic Adventure D) but Artic Adventure C (Ship of Doom) has a very similar puzzle to the armory one (POINT to use a device).
Coming up: The curious tale of how Clive Sinclair managed to kickstart the low-cost personal computer market in Denmark by a combination of charisma and accident.
Renga in Blue 
