Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

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.

“Chicago, 1975” by Greg Wass, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This meant that at the second running of Windycon, a Chicago area fantasy/sci-fi convention…

…when they mentioned a computer installation, this was an opportunity to try something novel.

Source. One of the panels for the con, “Why is a Classic?” had “A. J. Budrys, George R. R. Martin, Lloyd Biggle, Gene Wolfe and others”.

An attendee, Joe Power, had just started as a freshman at Michigan State.

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.

Source.

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:

From Ahl’s Basic Computer Games.

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!