The last time I wrote about a Japanese game was with The Palms, where I mentioned skipping over two games from 1982 because there were no copies available. This was one of them.
Via bsittler of Gaming Alexandria. I’ve decided to use the name from the title screen of the game rather than the tape case.
Brief history recap: Japan’s efforts in adventures kicked off with Omotesando Adventure (1982, written in English by ASCII for a special April Fools insert in their magazine); the goal was to sneak into ASCII’s own headquarters and cause sabotage (and set a precedent for games after to involve the company making them in the plot somehow). This was followed by Mystery House from Micro Cabin which introduced graphics, followed by a sequel three months later. They then published Diamond Adventure and today’s game near the end of the year, before the floodgates started to truly open (I have more than 50 Japanese games listed for 1983).
Takara Building Adventure (for early Sharp computers like the MZ-80K) was written when Akimasa Tako was in junior high (in Japan, ages 12-15) but unlike our other young authors, he didn’t send his game off to the publisher (Micro Cabin) with fingers crossed. He made the game “just for friends” but “it was released without my knowledge.”
It was hence a private game according to his own words, although it riffs off the same “corporate stealth” plot as Omotesando, Diamond Adventure, and some games we haven’t reached yet. I am somewhat confused since the goal here is to sneak into Micro Cabin’s office, yet it wasn’t written for them. The Micro Cabin influence is strong, though, so maybe it was a fan-work of sorts. Given Tako did get royalties, he must have been contacted by the company first before it hit store shelves, so it could have been retro-fitted.
It sold 2,000 copies which was respectable for the market at the time, but not enough to “get rich”: he received 50,000 yen from the proceeds. (In 2025, that’s about 71,000 yen, or $470 in US dollars.) Mystery House itself, on the other hand, sold so many copies it literally paid for the building that Micro Cabin was housed in.
The game is split into two parts, sold as separate items. Most references don’t have the two versions listed separately.
Screens from a Yahoo auction of part 2, just to demonstrate it is definitely a distinct version.
The game kicks off with an animation where a small person enters a building, then gets flung out of the Micro Cabin window and dies on the street below. Then you enter stage left: now it is your turn. Your job is to make it to the Micro Cabin offices, alive.
You start at the front door, with 1000 yen in your pocket, next to a vending machine.
Before checking out the vending machine, let’s wander briefly. South runs into the (not yet open) door, east and west don’t work, and north turns to a “garbage character” screen.
With a comment from Matt T. and consultation from some Gaming Alexandria people, this is basically “my eyes are blocked by junk”, but it’s the double joke that the screen is filled with garbage characters. The main point is the player can’t see ahead of them. It’s a little like Adventureland where you wander into a memory chip.
Head farther north and the game is over.
You stagger out into the street and get run over by an ambulance that just happened to be passing. Rest in peace.
Back to the start, you can take some of your 1000 yen and BUY JUICE (this spends ¥90), or rather, BUY (hit enter) JUICE (hit enter); you can also OPEN / DOOR and go south to get inside.
WEST will turn the player west here, facing a cigarette machine; you can BUY / CIGARETTE for ¥150.
On directions, this is designed halfway to the Mystery House System. You can’t look in a direction if there’s nothing interesting, but if there is something there, you will turn rather than walk that way. Notice how the compass changed.
Head farther south and you will be able to look in all four directions.
“Beyond here is dangerous, entry prohibited.”
Trying to beat the barricade just chastises the player with NO! (…Mystery House flashbacks…) but the Oasis is open.
The way purchases work is you pick the items (and they have limited stock, so you can’t buy, say, more than one beer) and then check out, and if you exceed what you’re holding (remember it started at 1000 yen, and you may already have bought juices/cigarettes) the police come.
This animates the police car moving to the left.
If you buy the BEER and then turn over to the person guarding the barricade, you can GIVE BEER. They will ask if you want to share some; if you say NO they will end up wandering off drunk. That’s 400 yen left (assuming you hadn’t bought anything else).
This lets you go farther, to the fire alarm on the wall. You can turn to find a stair leading up…
…where of course going up is fatal (you fall). Turning around there’s an elevator, but you get similarly stalled by a giant person inside.
If you GIVE JUICE they’ll go away and you can go inside. This wins the game, which tells you to go on to play volume 2.
To the far right that’s “Poor Mr. Tako. Only his arm is depicted.”
To summarize the plot: you buy a juice outside, and a beer inside. You do one bribe with beer, then with juice, and then you win the game. The only difficulty was in spending money wisely.
This really does feel like a private game. A great deal of work went into the rendering the scenes and telling in-jokes. There’s also no generalized parser, each room has the parser commands custom-listed:
If I was playing these for the sheer games-in-themselves, I would be a bit disappointed. As a piece of pure history, this is wonderful. This is still the “hardscrabble” phase for Japanese adventures — the very start of people making their own — and this shows the author constructing a multi-direction world piece by piece with a limited MZ-80K machine. The character-drawing set leads to some great touches, like the “Oasis” logo or the attempts at perspective drawing. Also, the early-mover aspect — the third or fourth adventure written in Japanese — means it is possible this game influenced something more serious that came out later (there’s many Japanese adventures coming, so we’ll just have to file that for later).
If nothing else, it got Akimasa Tako into the game industry. He did another game with Microcabin adventure based on Alice in Wonderland, then later worked on games like Princess Maker 2 and Shenmue.
While we don’t have part 2 available (yet) you can take a look at a walkthrough here if you’re truly curious what happens (there’s an early minigame which apparently is a serious headache).
Thanks to Video Game King on Gaming Alexandria for help with a translation, and bsittler for scanning and sharing the previously missing game. (Download is here for a package, where save state 1 starts right before the introduction, and save state 2 starts where the player can put input. Remember that verb and noun are typed separately. Also note early Sharp computers didn’t have a backspace, so “delete” is the same as backspace. A larger package here includes more scans and notes from bsittler.)
I’ve finished the game. This was far more elaborate than I expected and it might verge into a “good” game if some of the dodgier design choices were tweaked. It certainly is not the game a child would likely solve on their own (despite it being positioned as a children’s game by Molimerx).
Basic adventure mainly aimed at the kids but for all the family! Uses a scenario of nursery rhymes and fairytales within which to find the treasures.
Last time I was stuck with the palace/parlour and trying to get the pie to do something, and planting a “ruby seed”. I ended up making progress not being thinking of the goals but thinking of the verbs and objects I had available I hadn’t used yet.
Of the verbs, TIE came to mind as notably unused (and there’s no equivalent UNTIE to match). I still had a “line” from the maid which previously had laundry, and I had a and I thought where a rope might go, and I faintly remembered that at the dog/cat/moon/etc. scene when the cow appears, you can try to take it, but it give the message “it keeps escaping”. On something else (like the moon) the game just says you can’t do that; I had mentally shelved the two things together but that was a mistake. It is possible to TIE COW.
Now the cow is portable! Or at least it takes as much inventory space as a piece of toffee does. But what to do with a cow?
I admit getting distracted for a while thinking of the spiders back in the shed, and maybe somehow re-creating the curds/whey scene, but none of them are giant spiders (in fact, the spiders are entirely a red herring).
The cow instead goes to the pedlar…
…and it was only after this moment I remembered Jack in the story traded a cow for beans, rather than money. I perceived the “ruby” part of the bean earlier as just a modification of the story, but there are instead two beans, the ruby one and the regular one.
You might incidentally notice the pedlar has disappeared; he just has moved to a new place, outside the hut (where the murder of an old lady happened). So you can also give over the money to get a ruby bean too and that just counts as a treasure in itself. (There’s some maybe-softlocks here, as forewarned by Voltgloss in the comments. If you get the ruby bean first the pedlar doesn’t move, and then if you get the regular bean after he moves and the ruby bean moves. I eventually found the ruby bean back at the pedlar sign even though I had it stashed at the candy-house. Something went awry in the coding here.)
Now that I had the right seed, I almost had enough to plant the seed, but I still was missing a parser command, because straight PLANT SEED doesn’t work. You need to first DIG HOLE (a noun not appearing in the game, you just need to come up with it), followed by PLANT SEED, DROP MANURE, and POUR WATER.
Predictably, this makes a beanstalk you can climb up…
…but I’m going to wait on going inside and meeting the giant, because I solved the puzzle inside last.
Rather than puzzle-solving or verb-solving I switched to item-solving and thought about what I had left I hadn’t used. The plastic mac (“raincoat”) in particular was prominent and unused and almost certainly had to go somewhere, yet I had only found water in one place.
I maybe was deceived by playing the illustrated version of the game; this doesn’t look like the sort of waterfall with a secret cave, but it is absolutely the kind of waterfall with a secret cave. One GO CAVE while wearing the mac later:
Going west kills you from here and the game is never clear why.
MOVE ROCK opens a passage, which you can go through to find a cottage.
The honey and pliers are two other items I hadn’t used yet, which is why I was holding them at this moment.
Notice the knife! I’ll refer to it later.
Combining comments from Voltgloss and arcanetrivia helped here. Voltgloss mentioned that Saucepanman will take other gifts other than just oats (I used the sugar from candy-house in the end) and arcanetrivia suggested making porridge out of oats. It was messy to work out still, because you need to GRIND OATS first (mortal and pestle, which ground the bones last time) and then MAKE PORRIDGE while holding a saucepan with water.
Or as I’ve typed here, MAKE PORR, as the game only looks at the first three letters of each word.
Heading back west, you can POUR (PORR)IDGE and make some bears happy…
…but now Goldilocks is sad. (It’s funny how in the Red Riding Hood story you just see the aftermath, and here you instigate the whole thing.) I had been toting around the honey; dropping the honey first distracts the bears, so Goldilocks can get some of the porridge and give a GOLDEN LOCK as a prize.
Drawn here as a literal padlock.
That’s everything for that side-story (the lock goes with the treasures), but the knife is useful! I had tried to CUT PIE at one point and the game crashed, which suggests right-action-wrong-conditions. Cutting a pie with an axe might be considered a bit much, but what about a knife?
The amber claw that’s in the room description is the result, the birds aren’t useful for anything.
I was then on the last puzzle of the game, the giant.
The giant starts non-aggressive but wide awake. I puzzled out that getting the tooth was needed, and the pliers (of my unused objects) would come in handy, but it was impossible to just yank right away.
I thought this was the best puzzle of the game, but as I’ve already mentioned, I like the cross-lore puzzles. Jack deals with a sleeping giant, but in this case we need to make the giant sleeping. What have we already seen that might help cause sleepiness?
The needle that pricked Sleeping Beauty! It counts as a treasure so I had it stashed. With the giant asleep you can now PULL TOOTH (which counts as a treasure) but that wakes the giant up, who is now definitely not peaceful. You can at least run away, and can even go back down the beanstalk, but eventually the giant gets you and you die.
Again, cross-lore works here.
The axe that was used at the Battle of Grandma’s House strikes again! It took down both a Big Bad Wolf and a Giant. Get it framed.
The moment before I realized the ruby had moved from the candy-house to the place where the pedlar had been.
As I started with, this verged near to a “good” game, ruined by some unfair elements. I especially liked the items being passed around the stories, and I made a chart of the more iconic items and how they get shuffled.
That’s genuinely clever design and I’d love to try Keith Campbell’s next two games to see if he shakes off doing so many softlocks, but neither is available in any form. Stott also wrote Goblin Adventure in 1990 along with his ports but it’s an original game. So Wonderland and Dreamworld will have to wait and see if either the BBC Micro or TRS-80 versions turn up somewhere. We still have three more of his games to go: a demo game from his book published with Melbourne House (The Computer & Video Games Book Of Adventure) followed by two games in 1984, The Vespozian Incident and The Pen And The Dark.
“Toffee!” said every one in surprise, “What do you want toffee for?”
“To eat, of course,” said Moon-Face. “I just thought if you had any toffee to give me I’d let you slide down my slippery-slip — you get down to the bottom very quickly that way, you know.”
“A slide all the way down the Faraway Tree!” cried Jo, hardly believing his ears. “Good gracious! Whoever would have thought of that!”
“I thought of it!” said Moon-Face, beaming again just like a full moon. “I let people use it if they pay me toffee.”
— From The Enchanted Wood
The Folio Society version of The Enchanted Wood. That’s Moon-Face on the center bottom, a little less sinister-looking than in the original art.
Fairytale has the relatively unique condition of being not only a private game for family and friends, but one meant to be played under very particular conditions with groups; it only occurred to the author to publish later. This means that the author (who originally played Adventureland with his family) knew a reference to The Enchanted Forest would be understood and the puzzle of dealing with Moon-Face by using the exact moment from the book (see the top) was not only reasonable but a nice gesture at shared knowledge. As I already mentioned, I tried giving items to Moon-Face and he simply took each one (softlocking the game in the process) but my next step was to try every item available, and that included the candy items from outside the house (toffee, sugar barley, marzipan). So it was technically solvable but still unfortunate design; making it so giving the wrong item is a softlock combined with the book knowledge (pointed out by Matt W. in the comments) is certainly not polite.
To end on a compliment, I do find satisfying “cross-lore” type of puzzles, in this case where a piece of candy from Hansel and Gretel is used to satisfy a character from The Enchanted Wood. They’re both just stories, there’s no reason one can’t be a walk-on extra on the other.
Before plowing ahead with the next big obstacle I resolved, I should point out that one of the other items from candy-house (the marzipan) is special. If you just examine it while first encountering it the game just says “you see nothing special”, but if you examine it while the item is being held you find out it is really an emerald.
Just like how in Leopard Lord and in Crypt of Medea the mechanic that EXAMINE and SEARCH are treated differently is important to notice (and not something at all consistent between adventure games!), here, the fact you see something different when an item is being held vs. not-held is important (and again, not consistent between adventure games). The CRPG Addict recently had a post where he examined a set of standard things to look for in Ultima clones (how do secret doors work? do guards care if you steal things?) and it reminded me of that: while these adventure games are all “clones” in a sense, there are small important differences where it can be easy to be tripped up, and just like with Ultima clones you might go 5 games in a row where secret doors are either non-existent or “illusionary walls” but get tripped up by number 6 which goes back to a system where you have to hit the Search key in every suspicious tile.
By which I mean, I know I’ve played adventures where items have different results of EXAMINE when held and not-held, but it’s been a while.
Just to the east of candy-house is the empty chest: this is where the treasures go.
Once I had confirmed that GIVE ITEM really does help somewhere and doesn’t just swallow up all your inventory, I decided to try that with every inventory item on every other character. Fortunately the connections aren’t too obscure, although the first one I found was truly arbitrary.
Jo shook his head. “No, Saucepan isn’t mad. He’s just deaf. His saucepans make such a clanking all the time that the noise gets into his ears, and he can’t hear properly. So he keeps making mistakes.”
Saucepanman came from even before The Enchanted Wood, as he makes an appearance in The Book of Brownies from 1926. His main attribute is misunderstanding what people say (see above) and in Fairytale he’s on the lower level of the Faraway Tree, below Moon-Face.
He wants the oats. I just started handing over everything until I found the response above. HELP in the game (which I checked after solving the puzzle) just says that he “likes gifts”. I searched about the text and couldn’t find a connection with the character that made this work. I also searched about in adjacent rhymes/fairy tales but no luck, so I’m open to suggestions from the audience.
(The saucepan you can get from all this will be helpful later.)
Fortunately, my next discovery was a little less obtuse:
The witch wants the dead bat that was just lying around the forest. I admit I had this on my list to try before I started even rapid firing items. This opens up multiple things: a.) you can GO CAVE now while in this location; b.) you won’t get locked in the oven any more in the candy-house, so you can grab the silver key from within; c.) you can access the cauldron, although it is initially too hot and you have to take care of that first. We’ll tackle the items in that order, starting with the cave:
The book is an ad for either DRAGONQUEST ADVENTURE (if you’re playing the BBC version) or GOBLIN ADVENTURE (if you’re playing Stott’s Archimedes port). It just counts as a treasure, alas. The mortar and pestle get stored along with the saucepan for use later.
From the oven you can now grab the silver key…
…and then use it to unlock the hut to the southeast of the map, finding a grisly scene within.
I like the detail the axe is a “bloody” axe and remains that way for the rest of the game. Both get stored along with the saucepan and mortar/pestle, although I admit I haven’t found where the pliers get used yet.
The axe, on the other hand, I could use right away. To the west of the hut is an annoying prickly bush, so I immediately tried CHOP BUSH.
This opens a secret path over to a waterfall.
With the saucepan you can GET WATER while at the waterfall, then take it over to the cauldron and put it out. This lets you find some ancient bones within.
If you’re wondering about the varying inventory items, some of it is juggling to keep under the limit of 5, some of it is because I made multiple runs through the game trying to put everything together.
I made the discovery rather later (but I’ll disclose now) that you can be holding the mortar/pestle and bones and type GRIND BONES, getting “bone manure”.
The manure suggests some sort of planting-type use, so I’m going to jump over to another GIVE puzzle: the pedlar. I had him next on my list of “try GIVE on everything” people but quickly found the money (from the king in the palace and the pie) worked, and he handed over a ruby seed.
With ruby seed, garden trowel, bone manure, and some more water from the waterfall, it seems like I ought to be able to plant the seed. I even found the right place to do it: by the shed (with the spiders inside), where HELP says
Maybe the ground is too dry or infertile.
suggesting an optimal planting place. However, all my attempts at PLANT SEED or the like have failed; the game responds I can’t do that yet. I admit this might be a case where items X and Y need to be on the ground and A and B need to be held, in some confusing combination, but I haven’t tried all possibilities yet. I also may simply be using the wrong verb.
Rotating around the next character, the northeast corner has the castle with the sleeping girl at the spinning wheel. I realized even though I was actively thinking of Sleeping Beauty I hadn’t tried the Sleeping Beauty specific action:
I’m pretty sure the silver needle is just a treasure and that’s that; I can’t get anything from the spinning wheel. Given I haven’t finished the game yet anything is possible.
Finally we can rotate back to the Faraway Tree and the two “worlds” that you can visit by going UP from Moon-Face, the moon/bowl/spoon etc. scene and the palace. The choice of place is entirely a coin-flip and sometimes I went to the same place 6 or 7 times in a row (RNG strikes again); I could easily see someone simply not realizing there’s another destination there! (Maybe there’s a third place to go with some specific parameters?)
So with the scene above, I had observed you could nab nearly everything but the moon. What I hadn’t tried is simply taking the fiddle and playing it without picking up anything. The idea is to set up the whole Hey Diddle Diddle rhyme:
Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
I had played the fiddle but had already picked up the dish and spoon so they couldn’t do the “ran away” line, messing up the whole scenario. This idea of creating the conditions to re-enact the rhyme will come up again.
The whole purpose seems to be to get the “fiddle” to turn into a “Stratovarius” which is a treasure, but the cow might also be useful too.
Now on to the other destination:
I don’t have this fully worked out, but at least I got one of the really wild (in a game-design sense) parts. Let me give the entire relevant nursery rhyme, which I admit I had only partly remembered.
Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing.
Wasn’t that a dainty dish
To set before the king?
The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money.
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird
And pecked off her nose.
I kept trying to do things with the pie at the king. I admit I still have had no luck. EAT PIE lets you just consume it, no birds. OPEN PIE just says the word “open” isn’t even recognized.
My suspicion is that the birds aren’t even in the pie yet and we’re supposed to put them there. If you recall from way back at the start you can see “blackbirds” in the tree, so somehow they combine with the pie? (I tried a bunch of verbs with the pie in the location, no dice.)
Even without that there’s a secret, though. The room just says you can go OUT, but if you study the rhyme, it mentions “The queen was in the parlour”. What parlour? Well, you can just GO PARLOUR and find it.
This is outrageous at a level I don’t have much comparison with; maybe the book references of Ring Quest where you could ask an elf (who wasn’t even visible in the room) for a ring, only guessing they have to be there and making a leap of faith.
You can’t take the bread or interact with the Queen (that I could find). You can take the honey but I don’t know where that is useful.
Oh, one last thing: back at the maid, you can look at the laundry to find an “ebony clothes pin” which counts as a treasure, and you have wet trousers left over. Not sure if they’re useful for anything.
I’m still likely missing some action in the palace/parlour akin to what happened with the fiddle, although maybe the whole purpose is to take the items. I still suspect you need to make a “scene” with the pie by somehow stuffing birds into it, but while you can see the birds from the top of the opening tree I don’t know where to get at them.
I still can’t plant the ruby seed, even though it seems like I have everything I need to do so. This may just be parser-struggle.
I haven’t done anything with: pliers, the spinning wheel, or some of the treasures (like the silver needle) although of course the treasures I haven’t “used” may simply be points.
It is possible I’m still missing a one-shot secret kind of treasure like the marzipan/emerald one unrelated to the larger puzzles. I am missing 3 treasures. The ruby seed counts as one, so I suspect after using it to grow a beanstalk (probably beanstalk, right?) it will be retrievable.
Given the need to know external references I’m happy to field any suggestions to try to get this to the end. Maybe there’s a nursery rhyme I blithely skipped over without realizing it?
Keith Campbell is well-known amongst a certain circle of adventure enthusiasts as from issue 1 of the UK magazine Computer and Video Games (November 1981) he ran an Adventure column. The column ran both reviews of games and hints, with a steady influx of letters of people asking for help on particular games or just commenting about adventures in general. It became a central information hub for adventures through the 80s.
So, for the uninitiated, what is Adventure? The game consists usually of a logical network of locations which must be explored or traversed. The locations can contain objects, creatures/monsters, and/or treasures, which may be carried and manipulated in sometimes obscure ways to achieve the objective of the game.
He has some later work which ties directly into his magazine writing, so I’m not going to linger on the history there, but rather, take the scene slightly earlier—
Keith Campbell had been an electrical engineer working in southeast England with the Central Electricity Board for a long time (starting in 1961); in 1980, he obtained his first computer, a TRS-80, and his career was about to change. He took the TRS-80 with him to show to some “colleagues” in Kent (this was when computers were still novelty items) and one of them happened to have a tape of Adventureland to try out:
None of us had heard of it before, and had no idea how to play it. However, we were all so intrigued at the apparent intelligence of the game, that I ordered a copy almost immediately. It arrived the next day (a Saturday) and the whole family sat down and played it.
A later (May 1984) version of the header of Keith’s column, when it included a Helpline section for game hints.
A year later, when he had changed jobs to the Engineering Computer Applications section of the Board, he then got the idea (with three colleagues who all owned TRS-80s or Video Genies) to have an “adventure competition” at the Social Club for the company. He bought a copy of Ghost Town (Scott Adams), played it through taking notes to prepare, then held a race with four teams (four of five each) all playing at the same time.
We provided aids like a large sheet of paper to draw the map, stick on stars to mark where treasure was to be found, and I walked around half answering questions, and giving cryptic clues to those who were lagging. A forerunner of the Helpline! The result was that three people who were playing went out and bought a TRS-80 the very next week, just on the basis of playing that game!
He needed more competition games so rather than spending money he decided to write them himself, in the end getting a trilogy of games: Fairytale (today’s game), Wonderland, and Dreamworld.
It was while the first of these was being played during a competition evening, and bugs were being thrown up, that I suddenly realised I had an excellent play testing system here, and decided to see if I could get the game published.
He had published a game already with Molimerx, a strategy game called Creole Lobstercatcher…
The theme of this interesting new program is that the player is a fisherman in the Caribbean and when he commmences play he owns one boat, six lobster pots and no cash. He may fish inshore or offshore and in the case of the former. he can earn £2 per pot per day and in the case of the latter.
…so sent the trilogy over to them, which advertised it as “aimed at family participation”. Notably, that means while at least the first game ended up in the classroom (more on that in a moment) it was designed for children and adults simultaneously working together, rather than just “for children”.
The catalog entry is long-rambling and the proprietor A. John Harding clearly was thinking of the Mysterious Adventures and Temple of Bast they published the same year being in machine code.
When one comes to think of it there really is no reason why an adventure should not be written in Basic … We elected to publish this Basic adventure because it was written with the hindsight of the machine language program and indeed, it follows the general layout of them quite closely.
He points out that speed and security are the two general problems, but that Fairytale is reasonably fast (“there is some delay after an instruction is entered before the computer complies, but it can only really be called a hesitancy”) and the Break key is disabled to avoid snooping in the source code.
None of the three original TRS-80 games are available. However, likely keeping in mind the “child friendly” aspect, and the ease of porting BASIC, the trilogy got ported to BBC Micro (the overwhelming choice of machine for British classrooms in the 80s) when Molimerx expanded into the market in the middle of 1983. The only three of the BBC Micro games we have is Fairytale, which was rescued from a dodgy WAV file posted to Facebook.
Still, that means we have a file close to the original of this game! And we have it in a different way, because William Stott (the teacher who had his class write Dragon Adventure) also did a port. Just like Dragon Adventure it was originally for Acorn Archimedes; he later made a z-code port but that one seems to have been lost (the original web site is nuked, the Internet Archive only saved the Archimedes ports, and the file never got put on the if-archive).
Before diving into the content, I should also mention Fairytale is based on a children’s book series, the Faraway Tree series by Enid Blyton, which kicked off with The Enchanted Wood in 1939. It involves three children (Jo, Bessie, and Fanny) who move to the country and find the Enchanted Wood near their house, with creatures in the branches like Dame Washalot and Moon-Face, where “if you climb to the very top you can walk into a different world almost every day.”
From the 1949 7th edition, illustrated by D. M. Wheeler. Fair warning, one of the later images in the book is “problematic”.
The goal of the game, while ambiguous from the starting room, is simply to collect all the treasures, Adventureland-style.
At the start, we’re not at the faraway tree, but we can climb it to see things far away. (I was initially quite confused because the first item is listed as “candy” but you can’t take it. You see candy in the distance. Surely this confused some of the beginners who were playing.)
The actual faraway tree is instead just to the east.
The game doesn’t say why you can’t get the saucepan.
If you just step up one level on the tree, you can safely go back down again, but if you go up to a higher branch, you’re now in danger.
That’s the moon-faced man from the book; if you try to go down the game will kill you, tossing you in a death scene that is clearly derived off of Adventureland.
This is a “friendly death” (ignore the fire and brimstone) insofar that you have unlimited turns to get out. Going up brings you back to the moon-faced man, going down brings you safely to a “one-way street” which leads back to the regular map.
The problem here is this scatters your items. Theoretically, it means you need to get down into safety, which can be done by going in the “slippery slip” that Moon-Face guards. However, nothing I’ve tried has worked on him, and GIVE ITEM will just have him take it (…and the item disappear forever? Are softlocks really that easy?)
Going up from Moon-Face activates the Faraway mechanism and you can be sent to one of two places. (If more, I haven’t figured out how yet.)
Here, despite the game being picky about your inventory earlier, you can grab the “cat”, “dish & spoon”, “dog”, and “fiddle”. The only thing you can’t grab is the moon (nor can you GO MOON to get to a new location; it was worth a try). PLAY FIDDLE just gives “lovely tune” but no effect I can find yet.
The other location is a palace.
You can nab the line and laundry (the maid doesn’t care, and I haven’t found any way to even interact); you can go into the palace for another scene.
The “book of accounts” is a “micro-computer” in the BBC Micro version (which can’t be taken, again, no explanation); you can safely grab the money and pie.
Unfortunately, none of these objects will work to bribe Moonface — he’ll just take them and then they are lost. Trying to GO SLIP gives the message (in the Archimedes port) that Moon face won’t let you yet. With the BBC Micro version the situation is even worse: I don’t have a way of communicating trying to get by. (My guess is if you solve the puzzle an exit east or west will open up. The Archimedes port simply added a message to clarify things. I was baffled enough as an adult that I worry what will happen here with a child playing.) I’m starting to wonder if there’s book knowledge that would make the puzzle easier; typing HELP mentions that Moonface has a weakness, but there’s such minimal text here it isn’t conveyed what that weakness might be (and I haven’t read any of the Blythe books).
Looking at the rest of the map, there’s a “dead bat” to the forest of the west before arriving at a shed, with “oats”, “spiders”, a “garden trowel”, and a “plastic mac”.
Just like Dragon Adventure, inventory items being held are displayed graphically.
Heading back to the start point and going north instead, you pass by a witch…
…with a food-based house to the north.
Inside you can find some chocolate money (marked with the “treasure” indicator) and an oven. You are unable to take the money and I’m unclear why.
You can enter the oven (which has oven trays and a silver key) but the door gets shut behind you and you die, so obviously just plowing right in isn’t the best approach.
Moving past the candy-house, there’s an empty chest, followed by a “pedlar” hanging out at a room with a “no pedlars” sign. I tried giving the pedlar some items but he simply took them without anything being traded or anything good happening.
This appears to be a dead end, but that’s because it’s possible to enter from the other side. Looping back to the start and heading due east past the Faraway Tree to the last section, there’s a thorny bush that scratches you as you go by (no death or other ill effects) followed by a hut which is locked. Continuing even farther, there’s a “Fairytale Castle”.
The castle can be passed through to reach the place where the pedlar is, or you can go upstairs and find a “dusty spinning wheel” and a “sleeping girl”.
That’s a lot of content and essentially no puzzle-solving! Very curious for a game based on a children’s book. Unlike Deliver the Cake which had very clear messages about what to do, this one is aiming for the regular Adventureland experience, except everything seems quite unresponsive. None of the characters talk, and the only “effect” I’ve had is the generic one where they accept an item you give them; this makes it distressing to test giving items as a solution.
I’ll keep cranking at it, I still don’t expect this to go for long. Has anyone read the books and have a notion what at least Moon-Face is up to?
This is a sequel to a game that I covered 6 years ago, so let’s take things fresh–
The People’s Computer Company is an organization important to the history of early computing and adventure games. They were established as a non-profit center where everyone — especially even young children — could come use computers and learn. Given their launch in 1972 was before personal computers (mostly) this was a strong deviation from the norm, and indeed they talked about their mission as one of empowering the people and taking technology from the hands of the government.
Children at the PCC with an Odyssey game console in the May 1973 issue of the newsletter.
They had one of the earliest computer newsletters/magazines that went through multiple names: first simply named after themselves, People’s Computer Company, turning into People’s Computers when it became more magazine-like (1977) and transforming into Recreational Computing by 1979.
A Spanish translation of the classic game Kingdom, found in the Feb. 1979 issue of Recreational Computing.
In their very early years, they printed both Caves and Wumpus, hence their connection with early adventures. July/August 1980 was a particularly important issue as it was “Fantasy Games” themed and included Wizard’s Castle (as recently covered here discussing HOBBIT), an article by Donald Brown on the Eamon series, and a speculative article by Dennis Allison on future fantasy games. It also contains the adventure game Nellan is Thirsty, by the mathematician Dr. Furman H. Smith.
Dr. Smith, as shown in the article.
The article describes a system he calls “The Enchanted House” for writing a “CFS” or “computerized fantasy simulation” intended for children. I won’t go through Nellan is Thirsty again (you can read my previous post here) but to summarize: it has extremely friendly and clear text in terms of what items are needed to get by certain obstacles, and it includes a mini-map (enabled by the game being oriented on a grid). The mini-map in particular is quite unusual for the time and essentially an addition specifically because of the child-oriented nature of the system. In a writeup made much later, Dr. Furman explains the map was the suggestion of a colleague, Craig Wood.
There was a magic map — magic because it had the magic feature of updating itself as we explored; that is, a room appeared on the map if and only if we had visited that room. The program had graphics both for the Tandy Radio Shack and the Zenith/Heath computer — when using computer system X you could comment out the graphics code (all contained in one place) for computer Y.
Furman writes in his 1980 article that drawing a map was “beyond the capabilities of many children who would otherwise be able to enjoy and benefit from the game.” That is, the now-quite-standard innovation came directly from trying to accommodate children.
The same article promised a follow-up which appeared in the July/August 1981 issue of Recreational Computing. I do not have this magazine, although I do know what the cover looks like…
…and I also have the game itself, because Geoff Draper (who did the modern port of Nellan is Thirsty) made a version of the 1981 game, Deliver the Cake. As Draper explains, this was more an attempt at a straight port to DOS, and by inspection it looks like there are minimal changes in order to have the game playable.
You are about to be placed (let’s pretend) in an Enchanted House.
It is always raining in one of the rooms in this house (the Rain Room). You cannot enter the Rain Room without an UMBRELLA, but you have to find the UMBRELLA first.
You should use short messages to tell me what you want to do. Typical messages are: TIPTOE NORTH, GET UMBRELLA, TAKE THE OLD BRASS KEY, UNLOCK THE DOOR, GO EAST, DROP THE MAP, W (‘W’ is the same as ‘GO WEST’ or ‘WEST’)
Your mission is to find the CAKE and deliver it to the Party Room.
When you are in the house, you can type <help> for more information.
You are about to be placed in a room called the Foyer.
Some interesting details with the instructions:
The “let’s pretend” line is there to emphasize it is not really “you” but rather you are pretending to be in the place.
An immediate hint is given about the main obstacle. (If the rain wasn’t there, you could immediately win in 4 moves; it’s still a short game.
The sample commands include “THE” which often is removed. Likely it was considered more natural for beginners, but it also may be given that way to reinforce good grammar.
The task given is very explicit about an item and destination, rather than speaking generally of treasures, or defeating a particular enemy without specifics.
Before gameplay starts it announces the player starts in the Foyer (rather than just having the initial room immediately appear).
There’s sometimes language for adults in this direction, especially in the very early articles explaining what an adventure was (“I did not lie down on the cavern floor and go to sleep. I merely turned off my home computer.”) but this is leaning very heavily to make sure the player knows they are “pretending” they are elsewhere, then announcing where that elsewhere will be.
You are in a room called the Foyer. There is a small doorway to the EAST and a large doorway to the NORTH.
The game is even simpler than Nellan, with the entirety of the action in a 3 by 3 grid where the player starts in the lower left. To the east it is dark…
This room is so dark that it is called the Dark Room. You can see light coming from the WEST doorway.
It is too dark to see anything else in here.
…and to the north is the cake of the title.
You are in the Seating Room of an auditorium. You can see the Stage to the NORTH, a doorway to the SOUTH, and a doorway to the EAST. You notice that it is raining in the room to the EAST.
Ah, here is the CAKE which you are to deliver to the Party Room.
The game already mentioned requiring an umbrella to get into the rainy room, but in case you forgot, going east gets the explicit response:
No one can enter the Rain Room without an open UMBRELLA.
This means north is the only option.
You are now on the Stage. The Seating Room is to the SOUTH. There is a door to the EAST.
There is a GLOBE in the center of the room and it is softly glowing.
The door is locked (and rather than leaving it to chance, the text says you need a KEY to get through the locked DOOR) so picking up the globe is the only option. With the globe in hand you can go back to the dark room to find a closed UMBRELLA.
This room is so dark that it is called the Dark Room. You can see light coming from the WEST doorway.
There is a closed UMBRELLA in the corner.
Now you can open the umbrella, but unfortunately you can’t bring the cake through the Rain Room (even with the umbrella) because it will get soggy. So the player will need to remember to come back.
The ceiling of this room really needs fixing. Rain is falling through the ceiling and running through a tiny hole in the floor. There are doorways to the EAST and WEST.
You can close the umbrella while in the room with no ill consequence. East is the Party Room, the end goal of the game.
Welcome to the Party Room. There are doorways to the NORTH and WEST. The east wall has a giant picture of an elephant. The south wall has a small curtain made out of bright green beads.
There is an old gum WRAPPER in this room.
North and the west is a Pantry, and finally, the MAP.
The “magic” aspect doesn’t seem to happen; if you haven’t gone into the southeast corner it still shows on the map. However, you can’t find the map until you’ve already visited almost every room anyway, so it’s just a one-room difference. (I likely would, playing armchair designer, just move the MAP near to right the beginning, with or without the magic part. It seems roughly pointless at the end.)
To get to that office you need to go south of the party room (the “small curtain made out of bright green beads” which violates the condition that the room exit is specified in ALL CAPS). No hint is obtained by moving the beads around:
What do you intend to do now? pull beads
The beads is hard to pull.
What do you intend to do now? move beads
The beads is hard to move.
What do you intend to do now? push beads
The beads is hard to push.
Instead, you just plow ahead with SOUTH.
Crouching low, you push your way through the curtain of beads…
…And find yourself in an old dusty Office!
There is an old brass KEY on the floor.
With the key, you can unlock the locked door from earlier, and take the cake through, bypassing the rain room. After DROP CAKE:
Ok; done.
Y O U W O N ! Congratulations.
I did appreciate the subtle touches for simplicity; this is a game intended genuinely for very young children who would not be able to make a map yet. Furman had it tested on his daughter’s fourth grade class:
It took my daughter’s fourth grade class about twenty minutes to solve this CFS.
Furman was intended to return with a third game, Deposit the Chair, but the magazine was liquidated before it could reach the next year’s issue.
I still think a more compelling story might be possible with the same game-feel though? We’ve already had here the more action-packed Dragon Adventure and in my next post I will return with another children’s game to see a different take on the genre.
Last time I had reached but was stuck at a ravine (see screenshot above). I had available a flask, a breathing apparatus, a shovel, and glass from the glass case where I got the breathing apparatus from. I also was unable to pick up a dog head (due to germs) and in a “Testing Room” there was a rope from a ceiling I couldn’t get and two buttons that awakened a figure in a tank (with a key inside)
You can use the piece of glass to cut the rope. (This is a slight bit of visualization — I imagined the glass piece would be a little less jagged and cut-worthy, but we did cut it with a diamond.) You can then take the rope and THROW ROPE to get it attached to the ceiling at the ravine…
…followed by SWING ROPE.
The inventory limit switches from 6 to 3. (Note: dropping the glass while inventory juggling will cause it to break.) On the other side of the ravine is a room with a locked door to the south (the key is still back at the tank) and a “mutant” blocking the way north.
The being has a dog head so I went back and tried to get the other dog head but it still kept killing me with germs. I experimented with the electricity some more (it turns out the white/black buttons are red herrings, but it’s impossible to know that until the end of the game). I finally went back and tried THROW on random things, and found that the mutant caught them and gobbled them up. I tried everything I had (ferrying over items in small loads over the ravine) but nothing had an effect.
Perhaps you’ve already spotted it: it’s something I even consciously thought about as soon as I noticed the game was heavy on softlocks. Specifically, while puzzle-solving you need to check not only the items that are currently accessible, but the items that were accessible in the past.
I had forgotten I had broken the glass but I didn’t have to!
With that out of the way, it’s possible to go north and find a magnet. It was immediately clear to me what the magnet was for.
With the key, a new area opens up.
Things kick off with … more blood! Blood! It’s horror, it needs buckets of blood, or at least a vat in this case.
To the west are some surgical gloves, and to the south is a progression of rooms leading to a room that is so mossy any items you drop are swallowed up. The room has a GREEN SCUM and I don’t know what it is other than an amorphous blob.
Tiny evil Christmas tree, perhaps?
Using the same strategy as before, I tried throwing things at the “scum” and seeing if anything would cause indigestion. While nothing worked, I realized as I was going that the gloves might help with picking up the dog with the germs, and indeed they did, so I got to type one of the oddest parser commands that I’ve used in a while.
>THROW DOG AT SCUM
Okay, you throw a dog corpse at a green scum.
He rips open the dog and begins to gorge on the entrails. He dies from eating the infected body of the dog.
This clears out the scum but with no obvious result. I kept throwing out various “search” command possibilities until I hit EXAMINE MOSS, revealing a valve.
Turning the valve results in a “gurgling sound from the west wall” so I went back to the vat and found it empty. EXAMINE VAT mentions a drain opens a new exit going down (for a while I was trying GO DRAIN and didn’t notice the change) and down in the resulting hole is a hypodermic needle.
That eliminated everything in the area, so I was stuck considering anything left unsolved on the west side of the ravine. I still had the tank with the electro-buttons but I was starting to guess (correctly) those should just be ignored; I realized there was still a “jellied mass” in one of the rooms that previously just served as a trap.
The end result is a trapdoor you can pull open.
Going down is a one-way trip (remember, the game is not shy about softlocks) and you end up needing to take five specific items (and there’s no way of knowing ahead of time). I managed to guess reasonably well and got four out of five.
Creating a save game where I consolidate all the items at the top of the trapdoor.
You need the candle, flask, butterknife, shovel, and gloves. The flask and butterknife have still not been used; the gloves were used to pick up the dog but they are needed again for another purpose. The first time through I missed the gloves.
This lands you on a railway track system. At the landing point is a bunsen burner, to the west are some timbers and a blocked-off passage, and to the east is a torch and a giant dirt pile. The dirt pile is supposed to signal the use of the shovel.
I didn’t use any logic here. I just had been trying to dig in every room since the start of the game.
The passage leads down to a small area where there’s a barrel (with gunpowder) and a deathly high scream that kills you. We’ll come back here later.
The tracks also have an old switch. Pulling them causes a door to open to the west (where the timbers were) and you have to immediately plunge ahead to go inside before the door closes. On top of all this, a gust of wind blows out your candle if that’s what you are still using, so you need to have done LIGHT TORCH and swapped to that as a light source.
Or as I found out later, drop the candle somewhere safe and do all this in the dark. Except you have to know what’s here first!
This traps the player in a very small area with a fuse (the item that’s the reason to go in) and no apparent way out, although there’s a button that electrocutes you. You’re supposed to be wearing the surgical gloves to survive the electricity, and I admit I had to look that up. (Apparently surgical gloves can resist electricity but it is not entirely safe. However, it isn’t like anything else in the crypt has been safety approved!)
Heading back to the railway, and going south where the junction switch was, there’s a curious scene involving a “lard cake” and a dial. The dial is rusted and won’t move. The lard cake can’t be picked up.
I know this has been continuous through the whole game in terms of resources (and is so normal for adventures it’s like fretting over the realism of moments people start singing in a musical) but I was thrown for a “there’s no way that would have been just left there” moment with the lard cake. This might actually be a “it’s really a test” plot kind of like Zork III but let’s save discussing that for the ending.
Short on items, I eventually landed on CUT CAKE WITH KNIFE (the butterknife) resulting in a SLICE OF LARD CAKE. I then lit the bunsen burner lying around randomly on the tracks, put the slice of lard in the flask, and melted the slice. The parser struggled a bit but at least the steps came intuitively.
This finally results in the flask being filled with GREASE, and after struggling with PUT GREASE ON DIAL, POUR GREASE ON DIAL, etc. I came across GREASE DIAL as what the parser was fishing for. This causes the dial to spin and opens the passage up to the last part of the game.
Ahead and to the south there is a “trench”.
YOU ARE AT THE NORTH END OF A LONG DIRT ROOM. AN EVIL-SMELLING MUD TRENCH LIES IN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM. PUDDLES OF BLOOD LIE ON THE GROUND HERE.
Weirdly, the game doesn’t let you try to jump the trench or enter the mud, I was expecting a colorful death. It just doesn’t recognize any of the words used in the description as nouns for the parser. With this condition (and my eye on a verb list from the manual) I realized while holding the timbers I could BUILD BRIDGE.
This leads to a dead-end with a dead mole and earplugs. I don’t know why the mole is there other than for gross-out factor; it almost feels like the authors were running out of ways to describe blood and gore so they just tossed it in there.
The earplugs go to the screaming room, so you can get the barrel of gunpowder. There’s also an inscription but examining it kills you.
Note the comment about being not “worthy”.
Trying to get the fuse and barrel together was again a bit of a struggle but MAKE BOMB works; to repeat a point I’ve made whenever a lot of BUILD commands come up, it is always tricky to come up with a noun that doesn’t get mentioned in the text. (Maybe you’ll think of it as an “explosive”? I personally never thought of it as “making” something, just rigging the gunpowder barrel to explode without dying immediately, I didn’t have a name for that until the parser forced me to.)
Going back to where the bridge was, and heading west, there’s an axe. North there’s a steel door.
BODIES OF MEN ARE SMEARED PAPER-THIN AGAINST THE WALLS.
The problem is the bomb kept exploding right when I lit it, but I couldn’t find any way to extend the fuse, so I had to check for hints again. It turns out this section happens in real time (nothing else in the game does). So you LIGHT BOMB, DROP BOMB, GO SOUTH as fast as you can with the emulator speed set on “normal” rather than “maximum”.
There’s a wooden door after, but given the axe nearby is the only unused item, CHOP DOOR USE AXE came to me quickly.
And we can escape! Kind of. Finally we meet Medea in person.
If you say no, “Medea kills you for your stupidity.” If you say yes, you “have successfully escaped. Your game is now over.”
Weirdly, you’re still in the shallow grave, but I think this is an error along the lines of Mission: Asteroid having the asteroid still crash after you destroy it.
— so we escaped? By giving up our soul? Is that really escape?
I suppose if you’re cool with the “murdering her children because of her cheating husband” thing. And also all the dead people and deathtraps. 1887 painting of Medea by Germán Hernández Amores.
It does make for a twist I appreciated more than just battling Medea in combat. Perhaps horror as a genre lends itself to the “ambiguous ending” which makes it easier to have something that feels satisfyingly narrative-appropriate without having to do a denouement sequence like A Mind Forever Voyaging.
Despite the wobbly parser, I enjoyed myself in general. The structure lent itself to focus on one or two puzzles at a time without feeling too linear. The “horror” aspect was over the top in a teenager-writes-gore sense, none of the prose approached the kind from a serious author, and the art was mid-range for an Apple II game, but the whole package still felt satisfyingly “professional” in a way that many games of this time fumbled.
Two missing points to cover:
1.) This game has sound, which I haven’t discussed: especially unusual is it supports the Mockingboard hardware and you can flip an option to have the game read all text out loud. This video demonstrates the feature in action:
As far as I know this is the first adventure we’ve reached with an option to have this done with the text in general. (As opposed to having small voice clips in assorted spots.)
2.) Arthur Britto has a credit on Wizardry III: Legacy of Llylgamyn.
Title Page Digitized by: Arthur Britto.
It came out the same year as Crypt of Medea. While he does not have credits for Sir-Tech in years after, I do wonder if he did some more of their copy protection. (I can confirm that the broken aspect to early Crypt of Medea dumps was purely due to a faulty break of copy protection. 4am’s version is correct.) It probably would be possible to compare the Medea protection with other Sir-Tech games and see if there’s any similarity in code, indicating Britto was still working for them as an independent contractor, just uncredited (which would not be unusual for this kind of work).
Coming up: two games for children — seems like a good contrast from gore — followed by a game that I’d previously marked as “lost” which I now have a copy of.
Before getting into today’s bout with puzzles and mayhem, a brief comparison of two pictures, one from the Wizardry 1 manual and one from the Crypt of Medea manual.
The image above is from the cartoonist Will McLean, famous for drawing cartoons in the Dragon Master’s Guide of Dungeons and Dragons; his art in the Wizardry manual gave it a general aura of D&D. Rick Austin, as I mentioned in my last post, did the iconic dragon cover, which is even used in the modern Steam port.
Now, an image from the Crypt of Medea manual (this represents the starting room, and what I assume is the player character):
The manual art was done by Rick Austin, not McLean. Austin clearly has a different approach to the character, but the way the background wall line meanders clearly invokes the cartoony style of McLean. So it’s as if McLean established a “house style” connecting D&D to Wizardry that was subsequently used here. (I might follow with “even though it doesn’t have anything to do with D&D”, but the game’s score is given as “experience points”. While I’ve played adventures with experience points before I’ve never played one that was a traditional adventure that just used it as a substitute for “score”.)
Getting back into the gameplay…
The lab we left off on, with an empty vial and table.
…I’ve got a strong feel at least the general pattern, which isn’t exactly a “deathtrap maze” like Cauchemard-House but pretty close. You have access to a small set of rooms with lots of ways to die, but one of the ways to die has a solution, opening up a new place / getting a new item that will allow reckoning with another place that normally is fatal, and so on. I’m not far enough in to know if the pattern holds the whole game.
From here, you can allegedly exit west (back to the mausoleum with the glass case we still haven’t opened), south, or east. East is an arbitrary deathtrap:
Spikes pop out of the walls of the room you have entered. The walls begin to squeeze shut…
The spikes begin to pierce your body. They penetrate the temples of your head and enter your brain. You are dead.
There’s no warning: the whole idea is to spring the trap first, then use that foreknowledge on your next life. For now, let’s go south instead.
That’s a “corpse”, a “severed head”, and also an “orange button” which we’ll get to shortly. I ran here into an issue I neatly evaded recently with Leopard Lord but faceplanted into here. Namely: EXAMINE and SEARCH are considered different verbs. If you “examine” the corpse you find out it “has been badly mangled”; if you do the same on the head you’ll find it is skewered through a steel rod and there’s an ID card underneath.
Remember, the game is still updating graphics every time something changes; by finding the ID card it is now listed in the room and you can pick it up.
It was rather a bit later I tried to see if SEARCH was different and I found the body had something too, a vial with a sweet smell.
The passage continues south but first let me show off a side room you can open by pressing the orange button.
It has a light from above (which will later be important), a blue button, and a violet button. The blue button does nothing (for now) and the violet button fills the room with blood and you choke and die.
The wall slides closed behind you and warm blood spurts from small holes in the floor. The blood travels slowly up your body.
You choke to death on warm blood!
Going back to the land of the living (relatively speaking) and heading south, there’s a tape player and a dead dog…
…and the dead dog has germs that will leap up and kill you if you approach; you can take the tape player safely, though.
East then is a web blocking further passage:
Trying to cut the web (with that butterknife from earlier) predictably kills you. I was stumped a while until I fixed my SEARCH problem earlier at the corpse and found the vial. This is where the vial goes:
Moving farther east is a dead end with a “tape” and a “jellied mass”. Do I even need to explain what happens if you touch the mass?
If you put the tape player and tape together and play:
A click is heard in a distance room… then another click.
This is a softlock. You need to rewind to play the tape again, but the rewind button breaks when you try to push it. You need to find the right room to use the player in, and there’s no logic; you’re just supposed to SAVE/RESTORE and try every room. Not so onerous on an emulator, probably a pain on real hardware.
The room it’s supposed to go in is the lab. Playing the tape opens a small slot. You can then put the ID in the slot, which opens a “small cache” revealing a diamond.
Diamonds have a pretty standard use in adventures (especially when there’s no treasure-tracking): cutting things. You can go back to the glass case at the start and cut it open, revealing a “breathing apparatus”.
I immediately remembered the blood choking and tried it out in the “warm blood” room. It turns out you want to leave the candle in the room adjacent; the blood puts out the candle, and while the box of matches appears like you ought to be able to use more, the remaining matches are duds (so when the candle goes out, the game softlocks).
If you press the violet button and survive, you can go east, swimming through blood, and find a new room.
There’s a long rod, a yellow button, and an orange button. The yellow button makes a noise as if something distant opened; the orange button opens the “blood elevator” back up. You can use the previously non-working blue button to return to the top, with a very nasty dry cleaning budget.
The yellow button opens up a “testing room” next to the lab. There’s a tank with a humanoid figure, black and white buttons, and a rope attached to the ceiling. Pulling the rope, predictably, brings the ceiling down on you; I can’t cut the rope either (the butterknife is too dull, and that’s not really a diamond-cutting job).
The interior of the tank has a key, and trying to get the key gives a hint you need to USE XXXX; I assume it’s the rope, just I need to get it first. In the meantime, you can get yourself killed by pushing either the black or white button twice (in any combination).
That long rod from the bloody room also helps with the spikes, and will automatically jam up the trap if you’re holding it.
Further east is a ravine, although I’m stopped here for now. I figured it was a good moment to report in.
I’ll take creative ideas from the peanut gallery on the figure with the electricity, although that may just be a trap that needs to be ignored. Otherwise I’m still fine without hints (the manual comes with some, anyway, should I truly get stuck).
But as far as I was concerned, computers were business machines. They weren’t fun machines. You do things with them that you need. I certainly did not realize that there is such a relatively large segment of the population that has the computer only or mostly for pleasure.
Sir-Tech’s story is now well covered in many sources; I recommend Jimmy Maher’s essay or the transcript of They Create Worlds Episode 114 for anyone who wants the details going back to the Sirotecks fleeing from Communist Czechoslovakia. I’m going to give a briefer version as I have a focus different from the usual (the Wizardry series which would revolutionize gaming in both the US and Japan).
By the 1970s, Fred Sirotek was in multiple businesses in Canada, including manufacturing collectible spoons; he ended up investing with Janice Woodhead in New York, who had a resin company (the main components of said spoons).
Janice had a son (Robert Woodhead) who had a fascination with programming kicked off by a chance copy of Ahl’s 101 Basic Computer Games, but he had no computer at the time (nor access to time-sharing) so did “paper programming” using a device called the CARDIAC.
He eventually got access to the Dartmouth Time Sharing system, and finally went to college at Cornell which had access to the PLATO system, allowing him to leap from text-only games into graphics. The PLATO system was addicting enough he spent many more hours playing than studying, to the detriment of his grades. Simultaneously, he was working at a Computer Land to help pay tuition, which sold Apple IIs which he admired but were far past his price point.
That was when they were 4K. I remember a customer who had 12K in his machine and we all thought he was nuts. He could actually run hi-res graphics. We looked at them and said, ‘Enh, so what, good grief, lo-res is much better; more colors.’ We couldn’t see what you could do with hi-res. We weren’t ready for the potential of the machine.
He ended up going to a Radio Shack to obtain a TRS-80 instead, which directly led to him being fired by the Computer Land (as now he was using the hardware of a “competitor”).
Fred Sirotek and Janice Woodhead had the issue that the price for the raw materials involved kept changing price every week and constantly needed recalculation. Robert was asked to make a program to help; Fred bought one of the very expensive Apple IIs that Robert had been pining after to do production on. The program was eventually polished into Info-Tree and first showcased at the Trenton Computer Festival, April 1979.
Norman Sirotek drove Robert up to the event, and ended up interested enough in the computers at the show that he suggested working together as business partners. They founded a new company, Siro-tech, with capital provided by Fred. Norman at first worked on the weekends before becoming the director of finance and administration full-time. Norman’s brother, Robert Sirotek, joined not long after with a focus on marketing.
Robert Woodhead started work in 1979 on Galactic Attack, copying ideas from the PLATO game Empire. Empire has a lot of name-clashes, so to be clear, this one is a multi-player game by John Daleske and Silas Warner involving Romulans, Kazari, Federation, and Orions doing battle in a manner similar to the mainframe game Star Trek; the first version was from 1973, and multiple variations through the 70s added features, so it was up to Empire IV by the time Woodhead started work.
There was the catch that Woodhead wrote the game in Apple Pascal, and by the time Robert finished the game in 1980 a promised method (via Apple) of running Pascal on standard 48K Apple IIs had not yet surfaced; an extra memory expansion would have been needed, meaning it needed temporarily to be put on ice. Robert embarked then on another game called Paladin (also in Pascal) based again on a PLATO system game, this time the first-person RPG Oubliette.
At the same time as this, another Cornell student, Andrew Greenberg, was working on his own Apple II game. Greenberg was an administrator for the PLATO system, so had the job of booting pesky students off the system who were playing games when they were supposed to be using it for serious purposes (but had experience playing said games himself). Greenberg had been playing (in-person) D&D but was getting tired of playing with the group and ended up starting work on his own first-person game, Wizardry; his initial versions were in BASIC.
The pair of Robert and Andrew were connected up where they joined forces (settling on Pascal, Robert’s computer language, and Wizardry, Andrew’s title). They sold a “release beta” at the Boston Computer Society conference in 1981, followed by the full release of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord in the same year.
As I’ve already indicated, Wizardry has had its story well-told elsewhere, so I want to jump to 1982, when Wizardry was wildly successful, and the sequel Knight of Diamonds had just finished and was being shown off at the same conference in Boston.
In addition to Galactic Attack (their first game product) and Starmaze (designed by Robert Woodhead, programmed by Gordon Eastman over ten months on weekends) the company was now soliciting games from outside authors.
Authors … looking for recognition? We are eager to explain job opportunities and/or market your software masterpiece. For details, please ask for Robert Sirotek.
This resulted in new games, the first being Police Artist by Elizabeth Levin. She worked with Sesame Workshop and a year later released her own file system for children under the name Lizzycorp, so had no affiliation with Sir-Tech otherwise. This was the start of Sir-Tech as a pure publisher; despite the early “internal” work by Woodhead, they started to rely on outside developers.
In the November 1983 of Softalk, a whole page of Softalk was dedicated to Sir-Tech’s “other games”:
Rescue Raiders is notable: it has credits of Arthur Britto II and Gregory Hale and was played by both The Wargaming Scribe and Data-Driven Gamer; it’s one of the contenders for “first real-time strategy game”. (It’s Choplifter-esque where you can summon units by spending resources.) However, this is All the Adventures, so we’re instead focused on Crypt of Medea, with Arthur Britto II (again) and Allan Lamb.
Allan Lamb is the less famous of the two, so let’s do him first. Other than this program he’s credited with programming for a much later adventure game, Questmaster 1 (see here and here); that was meant to be the first of a series where experience points from the main character carry on to later iterations (kind of like Quest for Glory) but only one of the games came out. He contributed a Nibble article once but I otherwise haven’t been able to find any other instances that are definitely the same person.
Arthur Britto II is famous enough that some people probably arrived at this post looking for him. Out of the various cryptocurrencies, the most popular is Bitcoin, followed by Ethereum, followed by XRP. The three founders of XRP — starting from a 2011 forum discussion about “Bitcoin without mining” — are David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto. It was a (successful) attempt to make a more-energy efficient version of Bitcoin without the need for power-guzzling mining sites. Arthur Britto famously is reclusive (like Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of Bitcoin) and there has been speculation he isn’t even real, although he recently tweeted a single emoji on an account that had been around since 2011 with no messages. The upshot for a historian is that there have been crypto-enthusiasts combing the Internet already for his presence and the very real possibility some information was intentionally scrubbed.
For our purposes: through the 80s, at least, he remained an Apple tech maven, producing the Apple II version of Strategic Conquest and being one of the independent contractors producing software copy protection for companies.
Did you have any interaction (e.g. to compare methods, share code, etc) with other people (e.g. Mark Duchaineau from Sierra On-line) who were developing protections? What can you tell us about this?
Nope, it seems that copy protection was very secretive back then. I didn’t even know who else did copy protection, I was on my own! Only later did I talk to others who produced copy protection, mainly a guy by the name of Arthur Britto. If I’m not mistaken, he was the one that gave me some ideas regarding how to better control the stepper motor for the drive head.
A later patent he is named on (2007) entitled “Storing chunks within a file system” has some resemblance to file-protection methods, and while this isn’t the venue to do it in, it looks like XRP itself may have drawn some inspiration from old-school Apple II programming.
From Mobygames.
The pair produced an Apple II horror-themed adventure which Sir-Tech published in 1983, using the Penguin Software graphical tools. I am incidentally playing 4am’s dump as is usual, but I need to be alert to the fact that the game may be broken as-is as one of the earlier dumped copies was unfinishable; there’s a patch based on that version. I’m not clear if the bug was due to buggy copy protection removal or something “authentic” to the game, but I’m going to assume the former for the moment and stay ready to swap if something goes awry.
As you drive along the narrow and tortuous road, you feel an eerie sense of uneasiness. There is something about this night that just does not seem right, but you find it hard to put your finger on it. The sky is clear and cloudless, stars upon stars fill the sky, the moon glows with a mysterious aura, yet strangely enough, it is very, very dark. As a matter of fact, it’s so dark you find it increasingly difficult to see the road.
The plot, as the manual narrates, has you driving a car where “something terrible, shimmering grotesquely” appears in the road. You crash the car, go unconscious, and find yourself awake in a “crypt or mausoleum”.
WELCOME TO THE CRYPT OF MEDEA …
WE’VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU .. .
Your goal is escape.
This takes a different tack than our other graphical adventures so far; even our games with a graphical screen/text screen split like Saigon: The Final Days and Caves of Olympus have had some text on the graphical screens, but this seems to be a complete split. Graphics screens only have graphics on them, and you can press CTRL-P at any time to turn the graphics on or off. If the graphic screen changes you’ll get an update. For instance, the starting room has “six tombstones”, a “glass case”, and a “candle”; if you GET CANDLE the graphics will re-display with the candle removed:
You can try to OPEN TOMBSTONE and the game will tell you to try PULL; PULL TOMBSTONE will reveal a “crypt”.
>LOOK CRYPT
THOUSANDS OF MAGGOTS FEAST UPON THE REMAINS OF A BODY INSIDE THE CRYPT.
YOU FIND SOME MATCHES!
With the matches I tried lighting the candle and looking at the case — no dice — the item inside was “dark”. OPEN CASE doesn’t work, and for good measure I tried PULL CASE:
TRY PUSH….
Fine, PUSH:
MOVING IT REVEALS A PASSAGE DOWN!
The passage leads down to a “dirt tunnel”, dead-ending where there is a “severed hand” and a “shovel”.
Getting the hand is fatal.
THE HAND GRABS YOUR WRIST AND SLOWLY CLIMBS YOUR ARM. IT REACHES YOUR NECK AND RIPS A LARGE PIECE OF YOUR THROAT AWAY. YOU ARE DEAD.
The same thing happens if you try to get the shovel instead.
>BURN HAND
WITH WHAT? (TRY BURN XXXX WITH XXXX)
>BURN HAND WITH CANDLE
THE HAND BEGINS TO BUBBLE AND BLISTER.
THE HAND BURNS AND DISINTEGRATES!
This lets you grab the shovel and DIG. While digging underground does nothing, going back to the starting room and digging reveals a secret knob (how is it we know where in the entire room to dig?!?) Pulling the knob then opens a new passageway, with a BUTTERKNIFE along the way (that must be referred to as a KNIFE) followed by a secret laboratory.
YOU ARE IN A BLOODY LABORATORY. A TRAIL OF FRESH BLOOD LEADS SOUTH. SOUNDS EMANATE FROM BEHIND THE WALLS.
VISIBLE OBJECTS: A LAB TABLE, A FLASK
VISIBLE EXITS: SOUTH, EAST, WEST
This seems like a good place to stop, as this passes through an area which is explained in the manual complete with a map.
To explain today’s game we need to go back to 1982 and a company from the London area, Rabbit Software, which I’ve written about before. To recap: they were a mail order company that spun off from a computer shop early in 1982, quite quickly filling their catalog with solicited content. They had some drama trying to distribute the games of Bruce Robinson culminating in Alan Savage (one of the founders) dumping 4000 faulty tapes on a street, and even more drama in 1984 when Alan Savage died. The other co-founder, Heather Lamont, “vowed” the company would continue but it ended up being liquidated the same year, bought by Virgin Software.
Box art and gameplay screen of a Rabbit Software game, via Mobygames.
… his interest in games software soon grew as did his frustration with the products on the market at that time and his disillusion with his employers.
This led to his leaving the company, planning to launch his own (Romik Software) at the Personal Computer World Show in September, along with friend (and business expert) Gerry Rose and a programmer, Steve Clark.
From June 1982 Personal Computer World.
The trio spent several weeks preparing by creating some programs to sell along with literature and packaging. They decided — unlike many UK companies stepping into the field — to go directly to having a dealership network at stores as opposed to using mail-order.
Source. Brind was an “assistant” described as “busy putting inlays into cassette boxes and packing the boxes into cardboard cases.”
Barton emphasized an “honest” approach to software, which extended to drawing the pictures on tapes based on actual graphics in the game rather than having an artist do a more fanciful rendition.
For their adventure games, which came out starting somewhere in the last half of 1983 (compare this ad with this ad) there was a little more difficulty in selling an all-text screen; the cover still makes very clear that the buyer is looking at an artist’s rendition.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. Note this is for expanded VIC but still only 8K, so half a TRS-80.
Before getting into the game itself, I should mention that other than setting a firm price of 9.99 pounds on all products and insisting that they be written in machine code, the company emphasized having tapes that work.
Romik insists on no more than a 0.01 per cent failure rate from the tape duplicating company it uses: “with the state of the country at the moment, if you demand something, you’ll get it”. The key to good quality reproduction, Mike says, is to produce a good master tape in the first place; the master for their programs is made at the tape manufacturers’, under strictly controlled conditions.
I emphasize this because it sounds like Barton had familiarity with the disaster of the Robinson tapes, and hence had familiarity with that author’s adventure style. This is written in machine code rather than BASIC but at least cribs off those games (like Jack and the Beanstalk) in a conceptual way. (Incidentally, the “honest approach” led to an acrimonious split between the lead founders where Gerry Rose went off to form his own company only a year later, but we’ll save all that for another time.)
There are three authors listed: Simon Clark, Richard Sleep, and Chris Whitehouse. The only one who has a second credit is Richard Sleep, who has another VIC-20 adventure to his name (Animal Magic, 1984); otherwise none of three have made their mark elsewhere I can find.
The rock has some writing that says a poison and its cure are opposites.
The map is extremely tiny, in a way that we’ve only really seen with Robinson games.
The golden apples are visible right away, if you go east with a “tall apple tree”, “GOLDEN APPLES”, and a “large dog” (as depicted on the cover). The first order of business is getting some herbs in the glade to the west, which cause “madness”.
This just makes all the text display backwards; to cure this, go to a forest to the south (which has an axe you can nab along the way)), then climb a tree.
Now heading north, there is a field where a man is putting sowing “salt” and needs to be cured; the herb works in reverse and cures him:
With the staff, you can move the rock at the start, revealing a trapdoor. You cannot go through the trapdoor or open it (it is unclear why) but with the axe from the forest you can CHOP DOOR.
Going in the hole left behind gets the response that you need to wait until the next adventure (which might give a hint which Romik game is next in sequence, at the moment I don’t know).
With the hint from ENDYMION it is now possible to get the apples, although one more caveat: you need to get rid of the dog first. Since the dog does not have madness, giving the herb induces madness:
SAY ZEUS and then SHAKE TREE win the game.
I’m not sure how I would have felt had I spent 10 pounds. It was certainly “polished”. There are lengthy instructions where almost none of them even apply. This was genuinely tight for a “tiny game” in a modern sense — I could see giving it a positive review without caveats — but was so short I likely would have felt like I’d get more my money’s worth with a couple budget titles instead. On the other hand, this gives promise that the other Romik titles we have for 1983 (Fool’s Gold, Quest for the Ancient Tome of Aliard, Sword of Hrakel, Tombs of Xeiops) won’t be as dodgy as their VIC-20 origins might suggest.
Coming up: Finally, Apple II. No more hints other than I have a theme going.
The creatures here all very standard-issue (troll, dragon, minotaur) and the author even has in the title (“Odysseys” plural) the implication that this is a mash-up of sorts, but at the very least I think we can pin him on thinking of Clash of the Titans (1981).
Medusa lining up a shot, from Clash of the Titans.
Continuing from last time, I had a flying horse, minotaur, dragon, and zombie horde to deal with. All were linked to the same thing: I had neglected to try climbing the tree the horse was tied to.
Not sure why I missed this. I almost always immediately try climbing every tree. Probably I got distracted by there being both writing and a flying horse tied to it.
While that was extremely easy (“easy”) to find, much harder is that the sword itself hides a secret, but I didn’t discover that until later. For now, I used it to kill the minotaur…
…and the dragon (which I had put to sleep, but couldn’t sneak by).
Killing the minotaur allows grabbing the *PERSAIN RUG* and that’s that. Killing the dragon allows going south by it, reaching a lair with a chest of coins…
…and a whole new area.
Down the stairs (I like the description, even with no change in action it makes it more vivid) you can go east, arriving under the chasm that required waving the sword to jump over (regular jumping didn’t work because it was too big a gap). Eventually this leads to a magma river, which is small enough to jump over.
We’ll get to the LEMON WALL hint in a moment.
This is followed by a locked brass door (key from near the zombies works) and the lair of Medusa.
The crossbow is very unusual and not from anywhere other than the author’s imagination; the idea of Medusa having a bow isn’t unprecedented but it doesn’t show up in any other adventure I’ve seen. It does show up in Clash of the Titans which only came out two years before, hence my suspicion.
The original Medusa model at a museum, via Reddit.
It immediately occurred to me the chalice that is very shiny at the zombies would be helpful, but I hadn’t taken down the zombies yet. It’s possible you’d have the item before seeing the Medusa, but it isn’t likely, because the LEMON WALL hint is needed. Dramatically, it’s much better for the player to wander into the lair early and only have the resolution later (otherwise she ends rather quickly!)
Armed with the cryptic GO LEMON ROCK! DIG LEMON WALL! message and the shovel I still had from digging up the flintrock, I wandered about looking for an appropriate room, and came across limestone. Lime is kind of related to lemon, it was worth a try?
With the silver cross, the zombies could be driven back. Prior to D&D I want to say crosses only worked on vampires, demons, and the like, but D&D made it so they worked on all undead.
The shiny chalice works predictably with Medusa.
This is everything from the cave; the only thing unused is a “cloth rag” that’s just sitting out in the open. Only the flying horse remains.
Pegasus from the movie.
This is where I was horribly stuck; I tried HELP in every room fishing for information, and found, while at the top of the tree (with the magic sword) the message:
WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH THE SWORD? (AS IN MOTION)
IT’S MAGIC, YOU KNOW!
Just like a wand, you can WAVE SWORD; this reveals a pair of spurs. Then you can SPUR HORSE while riding:
The falling down while wrangling is reminiscent of the movie, where Pegasus takes some work to capture. The bridle doesn’t appear until after you’ve tried the spurs.
The bridle that appears can be tied to the horse so that you can actually hang on the second time around.
This is where a third, possibly non-existent game in the Herrick Venture series gets mentioned.
The temple has an Oracle guarding a golden idol.
Keeping in mind the author is modifying details (bow to crossbow, Pegasus starts tied up) this may be from another Harryhausen movie, referencing the Oracle of All Knowledge from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.
From the official comic of the movie.
This is still a very different circumstance and a simply delightful puzzle; if it wasn’t for the fact I was reduced to essentially one item, maybe not so delightful, but all that was left was the cloth.
Now the golden idol can be taken without complaint.
I delivered everything to the temple (including the MAGIC WAND and MAGIC SWORD which count as treasures) but I was short one treasure. I correctly guessed I missed another dig location, and went on a shovel rampage before finding back at the desert you can dig up a crown.
And that’s it for the works of Richard Herrick, Jr., unless the GHOSTTOWNS game was actually finished and somehow surfaces.
Despite this being a retro-step for the author (old school treasure hunt vs. the first game’s escape) it did come off as more skillfully crafted, with a relatively open map yet where the player still gets nudged into backtracking (like the key from the zombie area to get to Medusa, and then the hint from that area to get a secret SILVER CROSS item, and then the SILVER CROSS to get the chalice from the zombies, and then the chalice to defeat Medusa). The spelling errors were sloppy but the writing at least attempted to be more vivid than your standard Scott Adams game (enabled by having more memory space). There were no moments like where sleeping on a bed or running a sink causes a completely random item to appear.
The magic words had random effects but the reference to WORDS OF TRAVEL AND MANIPULATION and the fact there were four of them all contained together made them feel using them like “experiment” rather than “frustratingly testing everything everywhere”. The quicksand clearly needed a magic word, and there’s no reason PRESTO would be the one, but it wasn’t hard to just run through the list and test them. The original D&D campaign that Crowther played in had magical experimentation; it works on tabletop because of the flexibility of the player trying just about anything they can think in order to draw out what an item’s properties are. When this was translated into the rod of Crowther’s Adventure the concept became more obscure; other authors have tried to reproduce the technique with varying levels of success. Somehow the balance held here, perhaps by leaning heavily on prior reference (Alice, Sinbad, having a magic wand used to get over a chasm just like Adventure) but also by having the magic words apply to specific obvious dilemmas (unlike some other games where magic words could be used in entirely random places).
I suspect Richard Herrick was a spirited teenager with commercial ambitions who could never pull them off. It’s always possible some magazine or fan club publication will surface in the future with more information. For now: one more random British game, with more drama to the backstory than you’d expect VIC-20 software to have, followed by an obscure Apple II game by a famous company.
Renga in Blue 
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