Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

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.

From the author’s first column.

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?