I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context.
I was quite close to the end last time.
Dutch paperback editions of Lord of the Rings, via Reddit.
The most comparable game I can think of on the last puzzle — and the other reference-puzzles — is the game Avon. That game was chock full of Shakespearean references and in some cases it helped to know the reference to solve a puzzle (like the Cassandra with her gift of prophecy; it is originally unclear she is trying to do prophecy if you don’t know who she is). However, there never was a case where it was absolutely required, and I speculated about a game leaning into references and not being shy about requiring book- or play- knowledge.
The fact we’re being subjected to a blizzard of Shakespeare references is given up front, and I had genuine fun learning about characters I didn’t know and scenes I didn’t remember. I think the idea of a game being intentionally past its bounds is not intrinsically terrible as long as the “educational” part is telegraphed.
Ring Quest absolutely requires book knowledge to win. It has an issue straight out the gate with failing the “is telegraphed” condition I mention above — despite the early Tom Bombadil puzzle, it was only about halfway did I realize the extent of outside knowledge the game was asking the player to use. There’s more issues, but let me explain that last puzzle first…
Orc with mithril, from the movie version of Return of the King.
…which was directly after passing through Shelob’s lair, at the tower of Cirith Ungol. The orcs fought over the mithril coat (the one obtained from Smaug) and killed each other in “the fight that follows”. However, we were unable to leave:
You’re stopped by what seems to be an invisible wall.
You’re in the tower of Cirith Ungol.
Orc corpses lie everywhere.NE
You’re stopped by what seems to be an invisible wall.Three-headed, vulture-faced statues seem to be staring at you.
SE
You’re stopped by what seems to be an invisible wall.A new regiment of Orcs arrives and takes you prisoner.
You’re doomed to the torment of the Tower!
The “vulture-faced” description means we are dealing with the Watchers from the book. Here’s Tolkien’s description:
They were like great figures seated upon thrones. Each had three joined bodies, and three heads facing outward, and inward, and across the gateway. The heads had vulture-faces, and on their great knees were laid clawlike hands. They seemed to be carved out of huge blocks of stone, immovable, and yet they were aware: some dreadful spirit of evil vigilance abode in them. They knew an enemy. Visible or invisible none could pass unheeded. They would forbid his entry, or his escape.
Sam (as I was half-remembering last time) comes into play with the phial, which he brings out, and the Watchers are warded off: “slowly he felt their will waver and crumble into fear.” What I most definitely was not remembering is that the Watchers get dealt with a second time, as Sam and Frodo leave the tower. Quoting Tolkien again:
‘Gilthoniel, A Elbereth!’ Sam cried. For, why he did not know, his thought sprang back suddenly to the Elves in the Shire, and the song that drove away the Black Rider in the trees.
‘Aiya elenion ancalima!’ cried Frodo once again behind him.
The will of the Watchers was broken with a suddenness like the snapping of a cord, and Frodo and Sam stumbled forward.
This is an invocation of first Elbereth (invoking an angelic figure), and then Eärendil (heroic). These statements are in two invented languages (Quenya, Sindarin) and Bots did not have a wiki to refer to. The game wants you to INVOKE ELBERETH.
INVOKE ELBERETH
The will of the Watchers is broken with a suddenness
like the snapping of a cord.You’ve now passed the Silent Watchers of Cirith Ungol.
A winged Nazgul dives down on you!
KILL
With a ghastly cry the ringwraith falls.
Among the now shapeless garments you discover a golden ring.
You then have a straight shot to the cracks of doom, with one more ringwraith along the way (I ended up with eight of the nine Man-rings). Before that, just for fun, if you diverge the wrong way:
Suddenly your gaze is held: wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement,
black, immeasurably strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel,
tower of adamant, you see it: Barad-dur, Fortress of Sauron.There is an eye in the Dark Tower that does not sleep.
It has become aware of you!
There’s no real puzzle here; you don’t need to resist the urge to wear the One Ring or anything like that.
Frodo at the moment he decides not to destroy the ring, from the Rankin/Bass animated version of Return of the King.
(I’ve wondered how you might render the urge in game form. Possibly as a longer term “sanity management” system like Sunless Sea or Darkest Dungeon; maybe if you keep the Sense of Will under a certain number it allows resisting this moment?)
You’re standing on top of the Orodruin.
In front of you are the cracks of Doom.
INVENTORY
At present you’re carrying the following:
a bow and 14 arrows
3 Elven-rings
1 Dwarf-ring
8 Men-rings
the One Ring of Power
a long rope
the phial of Galadriel
a tiny key
the sword from the Barrow-downs
some dead woodTHROW RINGS
As the Rings of Power plummet into the Cracks of Doom,
your quest has come to an end.The realm of Sauron is destroyed!
So far, this game has lasted 25 minutes and 50 seconds.
Out of a possible 1000 points, you scored 819.
You’ll notice I was lacking some rings, but the game is fine as long as you toss in the One Ring; you don’t need to destroy all the rings to win, just the One; the rest are for points. (Which, ok, fair.)
Focusing on the final puzzle: in Tolkien, Sam does not know Quenya; he was remembering something he heard prior in his journey, and the word Elbereth gets used as a “password” in the tower to identify it is Sam talking (with the logic no Orc would say that word). For the player of the game, from the content of the game they not only don’t have that to refer to, but they need to parse what was going on in the text into a valid statement in the parser. It honestly still took me a while and the reason I knew I was on the right track is that ELBERETH was an understood noun. (SUMMON TEXTGARBAGE gets a message about needing to be more specific, whereas SUMMON ELBERETH gets “You can’t do that.” which means the noun was understood.)
Eén Ring om allen te regeren, Eén Ring om hen te vinden,
Eén Ring die hen brengen zal en in duisternis binden,
In Mordor, waar de schimmen zijn.
Pieter Bots first read Tolkien when he was twelve. It seems likely he read it in Dutch; it was readily available translated, as the very first translation of Lord of the Rings from English was into Dutch, using the somewhat odd title “In de Ban van de Ring”; it literally translates to “Under the Spell of the Ring”. Tolkien himself approved the translation of placenames (The Letters of JRR Tolkien. Letter 190). I have prodded at various key moments but don’t see anything that would suggest some kind of different perception the author might have had due to the change in language, and of course even if he originally read the books in Dutch, by the time he wrote Ring Quest he could have read the books in English.
The most truly erratic thing, besides the book-knowledge and the giant number of sparse rooms (likely related to the 1975 HOBBIT heritage) is how the player is all the characters at once: Frodo the ring-bearer, Sam with the phial, Gandalf with moments like the staff, Bilbo with the dragon and Bard with the dragon simultaneously, even Pippin and Merry at Treebeard. (I never was able to invoke Treebeard, which I’m guessing would net me the last Man-ring, but I’m guessing it’s a reference like Elbereth rather than a “normal” adventuring action; same for obtaining the Dwarf-rings from — presumably — Moria.) The logic more or less worked; at the very least I don’t think the author “didn’t know the novel” or got confused. The biggest stretch was Galadriel and Elrond giving their rings when asked (they never gave them to any character), although I can see where the temptation to include every ring came from.
Overall this was fascinating in an “outsider art” sense in the same manner as Tiny Adventure; with Crowther/Woods being merged with a game that probably traces back to mainframe Star Trek, an unusual deviation in media history was bound to happen. Not like it was the greatest fun to play: I’ve stuck to the highlights, but the experience of trudging through had a great deal of
You’re following a north-south trail.
S
You’re following a north-south trail.S
You’re following a north-south trail.S
You’re following a north-south trail.S
You’re following a north-south trail.S
You’re following a north-south trail.S
You’re following a north-south trail.
which gets across why the gigantic grid method wasn’t duplicated as much elsewhere.
Coming up: Urban Upstart.
Renga in Blue 
I’m guessing having originally read it in Dutch could be what led to “Sheloop”?
no, that was just vintage typo (remember the author kept his typos)
Hij wuifde vaag met de hand door de lucht, maar in werkelijkheid ging hij nu naar het zuiden toen hij terugkwam bij Shelobs tunnel, niet naar het westen.
Sorry I didn’t get back to you in time for the final post. I was literally stuck out in the woods all day. Anyway, no point in ROT13 now so I’ll just pick up where I left off:
I had just solved the Orthanc puzzle, but it led to nothing but trouble, as you’ll see. At this point I suspected I was softlocked, and knowing I had to check the now blocked off Moria one last time, I edited my game log all the way back to when I first entered the Mines, and proceeded from there.
Having the Phial revealed nothing new, so I wandered over to the Tomb again. After sitting there uselessly trying variations of the same commands for a while, my mind started wandering. Suddenly I thought back to another play-along I had done here, probably because it was also a Sharp MZ-80 game, Haunted House. I suddenly remembered the ridiculous final puzzle that we didn’t figure out until the game was over, and…
GET SKULL
(paraphrasing)
“You’re now holding the skull of Durin, revealing the six Dwarf-rings hidden there!”
GET RINGS
“They’re now yours.”
Me: “NO F***ING WAY!!!” (followed by bellowing laughter waking up everyone else in the house)
Ahem… Moving on (Durin’s skull now being a permanent inventory item for some reason), I retraced the necessary steps, then hit Saruman’s ambush again. Once back atop Orthanc, where I had gone into full geek mode (thanks Tolkien Gateway!):
GWAIHIR
Who then proceeds to snatch you up and dump you in Rohan. I was a bit unsure here for a while, as the rings were still missing from inventory and my score was down to 99 points, but then I realized he had dropped me quite close to Fangorn, so I sauntered over to where I had first met Treebeard. There follows a scene where there’s a big commotion, the Ents mobilize, and you’re suddenly placed at the foot of Orthanc, where it describes something along the lines of “Saruman’s power is completely destroyed”, and then the Palantir gets thrown at you. This time, it also says:
“Among the broken stones, something is glistening.”
GET PALANTIR
“It’s now yours.”
GET RINGS
“They’re now yours.”
Now all the rings and points are back (seeing these out of sequence is a softlock, which is why the parser wouldn’t acknowledge anything before) but if you look into the Palantir Sauron kills you, so it’s just there for “lore”, I guess.
At this point, the only thing missing was the last Men-ring carrying Nazgul, but despite much wandering I could never find it. So I headed on over to Orodruin, chucked them all in, and saw the rather underwhelming ending message. Huh, so it was all just for points… Oh well.
I checked inside the game’s EXE file afterwards, and while almost all of the game text is too garbled to read, a couple of full lines did stand out:
“You’ve reached the courts of Edoras. It’s Golden Hall has been plundered by Orcs.”
This never showed up on my map, so either I missed a room connection or the author did in the code. I’m guessing the final Nazgul might be in that area. I checked again, based on where it should be on the map, but no dice.
There’s also a full verb/noun list in the file, which confirmed something I already knew from fiddling around with the parser. The names of Gandalf/Olorin (yes, seriously) Aragorn/Strider, Frodo and Bilbo are in there, and if you enter them in the game you get “What about him?”. This is probably just there for atmosphere, showing that, while they don’t directly appear in the game, they’re indeed there operating in the background. This leads to my impression that, rather than being Gandalf himself or some other specific book character, you’re really just an avatar created to drop into the ongoing action.
I think this fits into my theory of the game’s general structure, which I believe was more informed by the author’s D&D campaigning and maps than traditional computer game design (whether adventure or RPG) at the time. The huge map, with various spots of interest scattered around between snaking mountain ranges, rivers, forests and wastes, looks more like something from a later Ultima or Dragon Quest title than a traditional text adventure, and there’s even an (undocumented?) “SWITCH” command in there, that changes your “readied” weapon for battle between the sword and the bow. So, I’d speculate (based on his own words) that his only real gaming exposure had been Richardson’s Hobbit (which I’m very interested in finding out more about – I have a couple of inquiries out as we speak) a little Crowther & Woods, and the D&D he got into with Richardson and others at university. So he tried to adapt some of this into his much deeper Tolkien fandom, without an extensive knowledge of computer game mechanics (and particularly CRPGs, which weren’t really a thing in the early 80s Dutch 8-bit home computer scene), and this oddity is what resulted. Overall, a flawed but interesting experience.
Coincidentally, I also came up with another poorly documented early Tolkien-ish game with an unusual background in the course of my recent research. It didn’t fit into my game preservation articles, so I’ll post about it here separately, as it’s something you’ll probably get to soon enough.
Oh, and notice that despite having all 7 Dwarf rings and going through all these other game set pieces, my final score was barely higher than yours. The whole scoring system seems semi-broken (sometimes the same actions would increase it, sometimes not, etc.).
ha! I actually had tried prodding at individual body parts on the dwarf but never tried GET SKULL
also, that means it can’t be Balin, right? I’m so confused
It actually gives the full name and genealogy in the inventory description. It’s something like “the skull of Durin, son of whoever of the kingdom of whatever”. I can check the exact text later.
Actually, maybe it does say Balin, not Durin. I’ll post the exact line later when I can get to the computer again.
Okay:
“the skull of Balin, son of Fundin, Lord of Moria”
I think I messed up and said Durin because Durin’s axe was a major item in another game I was playing recently. Too much LOTR these past few months…
“if you look into the Palantir Sauron kills you”
Maybe you need to do something else first to make you less like Pippin and more like Aragorn.
Only REAL Tolkienheads would guess >COIFF HAIR
@gschmidl 😁 how about >REFUSE SECOND BREAKFAST ?
I’m not sure if you, Aula, were trying to give a specific hint or were just generally speculating, but do we have Anduril in this scenario? I forget…
I don’t know anything about this game beyond what I’ve read here, so definitely wasn’t trying to give a specific hint.
It would have been so cool if the game had taken the “you’re everyone” approach to its logical conclusion, refusing to let you THROW RINGS at the end, and forcing you to think of the command “FALL IN.”
>BITE MY FINGER OFF TO GET THE RING
new frontiers in videogame development
You’re not too far off the mark. “DIE” is in the verb list, and will return something like “OK, fine. You’re dead.” and quit you out of the game. It will also kill you with a lighting bolt if you swear or insult the parser (“STUPID”) three times.
One thing on the list that’s stumped me is “BERY”, which returns “What about it?”, the standard response to items. I have no idea what that’s referring to.
Bilbo and Frodo’s nearest common ancestors appear to be Balbo and Berylla Baggins but I doubt that Berylla was programmed in.
…ah, looks like the elfstone is described as a “beryl” in the book. “‘It is a beryl, an elf-stone. Whether it was set there, or let fall by chance, I cannot say; but it brings hope to me. I will take it as a sign that we may pass the Bridge; but beyond that I dare not keep to the Road, without some clearer token.’” Probably BERY is a synonym for “jewel.”
Haha… Wow. I guess nothing should surprise me with this game anymore.
One other thing: MAGIC is in the vocabulary and returns something like “I’m afraid that’s reserved for Wizards only.”. So you’re definitely not Gandalf.
As I mentioned, I think he was just imagining a blank slate hero avatar, like in his D&D campaigns. Maybe a Hobbit in this case, though.
Returning to the speculated origins of all this, I noticed one minor detail worth mentioning:
After reading Matt Barton’s Joe Power interview again, I’d suggest that Power may have slightly misremembered the timeline of the original Hobbit. He described seeing the game at the convention in late ’75, just after he had started his freshman year, and then beginning work on his TRS-80 version “that summer”, right after the TRS-80 had been released. You can see the problem here. The first TRS-80s didn’t roll out to Radio Shack stores until August, 1977. Interestingly, if you check the Windycon III program, you’ll see that they ran the exact same computer game display in late ’76, and that Bestler was heavily involved in all of these cons, even though someone else was running the computer game display. This would suggest that Power actually first saw Hobbit at the ’76 convention instead, and then did his version in the summer/fall of ’77. This must have then been passed on to Williams, who submitted his own revision of it to CLOAD a couple of years later, as Power had moved on to Wizard’s Castle. This of course doesn’t mean that Bestler’s original wasn’t from ’75, as it easily could have first been displayed at that year’s con as well.
I’m still trying to see if the April ’78 DECSYSTEM-20 Hobbit can be preserved. This would have been running in Tops 20, a very different operating system to the Tops 10 that the DEC systems Richardson ostensibly would have seen a port of the Bestler game on were using. Additionally, this tape was found in Europe, which also seems a bit odd at such an early date. I’m still leaning to it being Bestler’s, but some mystery remains here.
yeah, I considered ’76. I went with ’75 because
a.) when there’s an “anchor” it tends to be more accurate (in this case freshman year)
b.) he remembers the specific terminal coming out a year and a half later, which only makes sense out of ’75 (it actually was out in ’76 but it might be six months to see one, but saying 18 months would be downright odd)
and it isn’t that much a stretch to have an error in terms of which summer
’76 is not implausible, though
fingers crossed you get a hit on the April ’78 version!
btw, trs-80 Hobbit gets mentioned in a German publication here:
https://archive.org/details/elcomp_1980_04/page/36/mode/2up
one other thing I just noticed — you can find the English version of the A to Z book, but that one does _not_ have HOBBIT in it! It has HOTSHOT for H instead even though the games look mostly the same
https://archive.org/details/ta2zbocg/mode/2up?view=theater
Got a little more info, and it seems almost certain now that the file on that tape is indeed a port of Bestler’s original Hobbit. I think it makes it even more likely that your theory about it being the original inspiration for Richardson’s version is correct. If it made it all the way to northern Europe (on an expensive Tops 20 system to boot) by early ’78, then it was probably way more wide spread than previously thought. Strange that it’s never shown up on a US or UK archived tape then, at least to my knowledge.
Is there a way to get at that particular tape? (I mean, can we actually recover the code, or is this just based on the historical photograph you found?)
Yes, the tape still exists and seems to be in good shape. Some of the stuff on it was archived years ago, but other files (like Hobbit and Crowther & Woods) weren’t considered high priority at the time. I’m not sure the motivation is super high to go through the rigmarole of doing it now either, but I’m working on it.
‘Gilthoniel, A Elbereth!’ … ‘Aiya elenion ancalima!’
This is an invocation of first Elbereth (invoking an angelic figure), and then Eärendil (ditto). These statements are in the invented language Quenya
“Gilthoniel” and “Elbereth” are Sindarin; the Quenya equivalents are “Tintallë” and “Elentári”. They mean “star-kindler” and “star-queen” and are epithets of the being called Varda (also a Quenya name).
Eärendil isn’t exactly an angelic figure (a term better applied to the Valar, the Powers, of which Varda/Elbereth is one), more like an elevated hero. He’s one of the Half-elven and was set to sail the sky with the last Silmaril because he and his wife Elwing were forbidden to return to Middle-earth after they came to Valinor near the end of the First Age to beg the Valar for help in fighting Morgoth in Middle-earth. What Frodo is calling upon is not him as a person, but rather the power/light of the star — the Silmaril — which Galadriel said was captured in the phial. The phrase means “Hail, brightest of stars!”
kind of proving just how extreme the author was being
tweaked slightly, check if my text is ok now? (I didn’t mean to go into a lot of detail, just enough to convey the idea the author had to have some Real Tolkien Knowledge)
“Aiya elenion ancalima” is Quenya. So it ought to read something like “These statements are in the invented languages Sindarin and Quenya.”
On the theme of “teenage degeneracy” and your mention of Not The Nine O’Clock News they did a wonderfully satirical anthem fronted by the late lamented Mel Smith.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5N3q0lGi4w
Hey Roger, Dan Hallock wanted me to let you know that he now has a HP3000 version of Dungeon/Zork up and running which you had asked about on his blog a couple of months ago. You can pop on over there and leave a comment if you’d like him to send it to you.
Thanks Rob; I emailed him earlier on.