This post assumes some familiarity with the original Adventure; if you haven’t yet seen, my series on the Software Toolworks version (the only one that paid the authors Crowther and Woods) is a good place to start. Otherwise, onward–
Via Ronny Hansen, a setup for playing SVHA Adventure on ND-10 hardware.
Recently, two articles dropped on spillhistorie.no, both by Robert Robichaud (the same Rob that frequents the comments here). One was on the game Ringen, the Tolkien game in Norwegian that I’ve written about before. However, I had very little information to work with and was only able to play by going through a particular section preserved on VikingMUD, then making guesses about the game. The real Ringen (actually 1983, not 1979) has now been preserved and I am excited to play it. However, doing so requires playing in Norwegian so it will need some preparation time before I get there.
The other post was on a game written in English (later translated to Norwegian, but the translation is lost), so I can get to it right away. I’m going to summarize from the article and add some details, but you’re better off reading Rob’s article first and coming back here.
Back? Let’s reach back in time…
TX-0 computer, via MIT.
…and the late 1950s.
As a computer, the TX-0 was somewhat odd as it was built for a special purpose. It was, however, a truly programmable computer; it had a good directly driven CRT display, and – most important – its circuits were all transistorized. Moreover, it was available! I could sign up for time and then use it solely for my own purposes.
Yngvar Lundh, fresh from studies at MIT, went back to his home country of Norway to establish a computer presence there while working for the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. He led the team on Norway’s first full-fledged computer, Lydia, a classified project used to analyze the sound of Russian submarines; this was followed with SAM (Simulation for Automatic Machinery) also intended for naval applications.
A group photo uploaded by Yngvar Lundh himself to Wikimedia, with members of the SAM team in 1962. Yngvar is on the far right. Note the similarities with the TX-0.
Per Bjørge (fifth from the left in the photo) went over for a year of study at MIT and returned in August 1966; after he returned, work on SAM-2 started, with Per Bjørge on the day team and Svein Strøm on the night team.
The computer was taken on “tour” to visit the institutes of Norway, and while on tour, Per Bjørge (another engineer who had spent a year at MIT), Rolf Skår (yet another) and Lars Monrad Krohn (who did a collaborative project with MIT) talked with a former-student-turned-entrepreneur who convinced them to form their own company. Hence: the start of Norsk Data, which not long after came out with the Nord-1, essentially a direct commercial conversion of the SAM technology.
They had early financial troubles, although development of their own time-sharing system helped and their Nord-10 minicomputer had good sales to universities. (Also helpful: they landed a contract at CERN. While the leaders of CERN first were more interested in getting a computer from the MIT-affiliated DEC, Norsk Data had DEC’s price sheets so were able to undercut them by 10%.)
From Wikimedia.
The important point in the story above is the cross-pollination from MIT. When ground zero for adventures happened there, it makes sense adventure would make their way over to Norway. Compare this with Italy where their first-known adventure came from an author who saw a variation of Crowther/Woods at a trade show rather than on some local mainframe.
With all that established, our story now turns to the Norwegian Institute of Technology. A group there calling themselves Studio-54 had a hobbyist/hacker culture and access to a ND-10 (via strong connections with Norsk Data; some members did work for them). One member of the group, Svein Hansen, discovered Crowther/Woods Adventure on a PDP minicomputer. While the minicomputer was intended for “serious” work at the school, he had access via Studio-54 to a ND-10, leading Svein to convert the source code in 1979. Once the port was made, there became the irresistible urge to add things to it, hence other members of the group (Nils-Morten Nilssen, Ragnar Z. Holm, Steinar Haug) piling in with new rooms, puzzles, and treasures. From the game’s own introduction:
This ADVENTURE is based on the ADVENTURE originally written by Don Woods and Willie Crowther, later expanded by Bob Supnik and Kent Blackett, and still later expanded by Nils-Morten Nilssen and Svein Hansen. In the present version some of the added features are taken from an article by Greg Hasset in Creative Computing, which added hitherto unknown parts of the cave. Many thanks to Greg!! This version is reprogrammed by Svein Hansen, and maintenance and extensions is presently handled by him. The program is written specially for NORD computers in NORD-FORTRAN 77. As Svein Hansen is responsible for this version, any inconsistencies and non-answers that might surface are best reported to him, either directly or through RSH, Norsk Data A/S, P.O. Box 25 Bogerud, OSLO 6, Norway. Personal message from Svein Hansen: Although I am responsible for this version, some of the added features are not my own. They are the lunatic and weird outcroppings from the minds of the Studio 54 Hobbies Group at the ND.10-54 community at NIT, Trondheim, Norway. Any nervous breakdowns, downbitten fingernails and suicides etc. resulting from these ideas ARE NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY !! Blame it on that sneaking, no good group that are ever trying to write more vile computer games.
This version of Adventure eventually made its way back to Norsk Data and was sold in a “games pack” compilation as SVHA Adventure.
Now, while the game has essentially been restored (after much suffering) with 70 new rooms and 20 new items/treasures, there’s a bug that means it is “impossible to escape” with two of the treasures (I don’t know yet what that means yet other than two can’t be deposited at the starting building). I’m just hoping the endgame is traditional and not something mind-blowing that we’re missing!
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
Time to first change? A single turn. But not a major one this time.
You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring.
There is a set of keys here.
There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.
There is food here.
No bottle! That’s just outside, though. I don’t know why.
You’re at end of road again.
s
You are in a valley in the forest beside a stream tumbling along a rocky
bed.
s
At your feet all the water of the stream splashes into a 2-inch slit in the rock. Downstream the streambed is bare rock.
There is a bottle of water here.
I’m almost wondering if it was a hacker-experimenter type change rather than one meant to affect gameplay; that is, if you’re mucking about changing the code of Adventure for the first time, one of the easiest things to do is to take an object and try to move its starting room and see if it works. So there might not be a “reason” for the change in a traditional sense.
Going on in, the first change otherwise I’ve found happens at the Hall of the Mountain King, where there is a barrel with a tap.
You are in the hall of the Mountain King, with passages of in all directions.
There is a barrel with a tap standing here.
A huge green fierce snake bars the way!
In the area with the clam I found a path leading up to a knapsack, but that was otherwise just a dead end. The most significant change I found was starting at the “crossover” near the mazes (all alike, all different) where heading north is normally a dead end.
HOO-HAW!!
You are at a crossover of a high N/S passage and a low E/W one.
…ok, HOO-HAW? I don’t know.
n
This seems to be the start of a finely hewn corridor, leading northwest. A narrow corridor goes to the south.
The finely hewn corridor is new, as is everything after.
nw
You are in a corridor with finely chiseled steps. The corridor goes up
and north, and down and south.
n
You are at the southern end of a brightly lit hall. Steps lead down to the floor, which is bare and obviously designed for dancing. To your right a balcony goes round the east side of the hall. The balcony entrance is northeast, the steps go north. To the south is an opening to a corridor. On the other side of the hall another staircase goes up. On the floor a merry band of elves are dancing, forming intricate patterns. They see you and beckon for you to come and join them. An orchestra with gleaming instruments is at the balcony, playing a lively tune.
n
You go down to the dance hall floor. The elves turn suddenly out to be orcs, all of them shouting and reveling at the way they fooled you. They grab their knives and hurl them at you. You stand a fair chance of landing a job as a pin cushion.
Grisly! Unfortunately, the game lacks a save game function, so it’s been slow going checking where changes might be. I can cut-and-paste walkthrough sections, but that technique only works if the RNG is consistent (otherwise I end up getting walloped by a dwarf axe somewhere in the process). It took Rob a month to get through everything, so this might turn out more difficult than your typical Adventure expansion.
I’m especially looking forward to finding the Greg Hassett section mentioned in the instructions (apparently they just lifted the “theoretical” game from an article and turned into a real one) — hopefully next time!
Renga in Blue 
Great write-up of ND’s origins. I actually ended up reading an entire book about their spectacular rise and fall (they were the second largest company in the whole country at one point) called “Norsk Data – hva gikk galt?” by Tor Olav Steine. Highly recommend for anyone who can read Scandinavian languages and is interested in computer history.
Hopefully it won’t take you nearly as long as me to play through. We only found the backup disk with the cleaner copy like a week before publication, so I was dealing with a lot of garbled text due to disk errors, and was also trying to generate an “official” bug report and document everything exhaustively, all without having access to the source code.
Regarding the water bottle, you’re probably right. I think the fact that there’s running water described there also made it seem logical. IIRC, I’ve also seen it placed there in at least one obscure home computer port (Compucolor II?).
I’m looking forward to getting home next Monday and trying this out. The setup for the standalone emulator sounds pretty straightforward.
I think I’ll be fine solely watching this one, much as I’m a sucker for any newly-found games of this type. (Besides, maybe having two players whacking at it will make solving it easier?)
Don’t know if you’ve seen the other new variant unearthed earlier this year, Roger, but I *very* highly recommend it. Seems right up your alley given all the other old-style games you like.
Let me ask you, did it play smoothly when you went through it? I think I was the first to do a playthrough after it was first discovered, and it was a bit of a mess. Random things would crash you out of the game, save files were constantly getting corrupted, and even the max score was wrong! I ended up having to start the game over nearly as many times as SVHA. I then turned to trying to unravel and piece together all the history behind it, so I haven’t played it since. Arthur did a more detailed bug check afterwards and submitted it to Roberts, so I’m curious to know if he’s fixed it up in the meantime.
I play tested Mike Arnautov’s Adventure 770; I have also played AdventP by George Richmond; Adventure 701+ by Dave Picton; Crowther and Woods’s versions plus the Level 9 interpretation. I haven’t played David Long’s versions. I have been half-jokingly beseeching Mike to have a punt at his putative Adv880 but it’s looking unlikely now.
I think the game might’ve gotten updated in the middle of my playthrough? I definitely had a lot less crashes later on, and then think I did a second, full run once I was clear on how to get everything. I think something was still slightly off with the score given I had 655 at the end, but I was still declared a “grandmaster” so am too lazy to either confirm a bug or go easter-egg hunting. It’s definitely not a Adv430-style thing where you lose points for taking too long,, though I’d still like to see someone speedrun the thing. I mean, it was Jason here who said Adv501 was the most “interconnected” map of any of the versions he’s played, and this one is probably even moreso, so there’s probably plenty of room for turn-optimization even though it’s far from necessary here.
It’s probably my second favorite version overall. Adv770 is probably still my favorite variant except in the exceedingly unlikely event Mike comes up with more puzzles. :).
I have meant to try 501 for a long time; bucket lists and not enough time. I forgot to include Crystal Cave from Kevin O’Gorman (1977) which I found quite opaque and also Quest from 1980 which I think Jason and myself abandoned as it was very buggy; the dinosaur which can fit through cracks and climb walls but (like the Daleks) can’t walk downstairs was particularly hilarious.
Yeah, 655 is the correct score. We puzzled over the 665 issue for a while, as it conflicted with “Rawson”‘s otherwise uncannily accurate recollections of playing these versions back in the day, but it just turned out to be a bug in the modern implementation.
Since there’s obviously some interest here, I’ll try to set aside a bit of time to get the whole story together sooner rather than later. I’m not sure where to post it though, as it’s too in depth for the comments here, but I wasn’t really planning some big article on it or anything. I was just going to pass it on to Jason for whenever he decides to get to it. Any suggestions?
I made a thread in the Adventure forums at the time; maybe post it there?
That recollection is also fascinating to me because, if you look at “Rawson”‘s recollections of the intermediate version 535, there’s a whole section (about early-game stuff being rearranged) that doesn’t match with the 655. Also, based on the geography of 655, some things would’ve had to have been moved massively if they were indeed in that version, so it’s relatively less of a “straight merger” than, say, Mike’s Adv660 was, which added some new stuff but left the Adv440 and Adv550 maps practically unchanged.
Okay, I’ll just do a brief synopsis here off the top of my head:
The 535 point version is an earlier game, circa 1978-1981, orginally written by one of the history professors at Wellesley, Mark Edwards, who had come from Stanford around 1974. He was a real renaissance man, and later went on to write numerous books on history and religion, had a piece of utility software published by Brøderbund, became a college president, etc. He left Wellesley in 1980, but an MIT grad student named Mark Sylvester, who was a frequent visitor to Wellesley due to his fiancée being a student there, contributed some content to the game during the latter part of this time frame. A complete version of this game was available at Wellesley by at least 1981, per Rawson’s recollections.
Eric Roberts showed up at Wellesley to work in the computer science department in 1980, so he only overlapped with Edwards very briefly. He seems to have been in touch with David Long at some point, and began writing a version based on Long’s original 500 point game (based on the now lost “clean” code that McDonald also used later, without the ANON501 spider/fly stuff). He also incorporated content from the local Edwards/Sylvester version, and by 1984 was using it in an “Adventure competition” in his programming courses. The first winner of this competition, Kristin Powers (Wellesley class of ’85), then had her elaborate tiara puzzle incorporated into the final 655 point version that became available there shortly before Roberts left for Stanford in 1985, and which Rawson also remembered playing (thus making it obvious that he himself was either employed by or was local to Wellesley in the early/mid ’80s). Based on some stuff we found in the code, it looks like Roberts fiddled around with it at Stanford a bit circa ’86/’87, but then let it lie dormant until 2010 or so, when he revived his Adventure competition idea and started updating the game again, eventually leading to it quietly being implemented online, until Gunther here sniffed it out, and I (and then Arthur) emailed Roberts and got the code.
Roberts was never interested in answering further questions about the game’s history, so after Arthur had cleared some stuff up by a close examination of the code, I was left to hit the books, and dug most of this up via various publications and online references relating to Wellesley, MIT, Stanford, etc. I’m quite confident in the overall accuracy of what I’ve been able to put together, although some murkiness remains about the brief Edwards/Roberts overlap, and exactly when Long’s code came into the picture.
One other outstanding mystery is why none of this ever seems to have come up when Kate Willaert initially contacted Roberts and got his Mirkwood Tales D&D campaign rules, which she then passed on to Jason for his write-up on it here. Roberts was eager to pass on the Mirkwood book while explaining its link to the original Adventure to both myself and Arthur, and he had already been using (and perhaps had even put online) Adventure 655 years before she contacted him, so I find it very confusing that the game remained unknown until Gunther, myself and Arthur dug into all of this.
So there you go. Not so brief after all, I’m afraid… Sorry!
Roger, at least in my experience, if you want to try one of the Long-descended versions, I recommend either the 551 (Arthur’s Zcode port works well) or the newly-unearthed 655 (which got rid of a few 501/551 features I personally found mildly annoying). The original 501, from what I recall, had lots of rough edges throughout.
Putting this here for Roger, in case it’s easier to see in all these nested comments:
There’s good news about ICL Quest. Jason included me in a group email thread that includes a couple of guys who worked with ICL systems in the ’80s. One of them has actually found his printout of the complete original Quest code that he made back then, and when he has the free time he’ll use both that and the source extracted from the Windows port to convert the game into something that will run more smoothly on modern platforms. Not sure it will make the game any less weird, though…
Nice work Rob!!
Thanks!
Mucho credit here goes to Ronny Hansen, a true guru of Norsk Data systems, and one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet
Haha.. Went through as “Robert”. My mother would be quite pleased.
Been busy this week with workstuff but I’ll try to get an update up tomorrow.
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Regarding Adventure 770 by Mike Arnautov, I finally managed to find the hidden section on the way back from the island. There were a few issues with lit / unlit areas which I sent on to Mike and I think he has now debugged these. This version is mercifully free of a lamp timer.