Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

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.”

Akisma Tako from a 2017 panel in Tokyo about Micro Cabin.

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:

4060 IF(IN$=”PUSH”)*(R=0)THENGOSUB120:IFIN$=”BUTTON”THENR=1:GOTO4170
4070 IF(IN$=”GIVE”)*(S=0)THENGOSUB120:IF(IN$=”JUICE”)*(JU>0)THEN4150
4080 IF(IN$=”S”)*(R=1)*(S=1)THEN5010
4090 IF(IN$=”S”)*(R=1)*(S=0)THEN4210
4100 IFIN$=”W”THENS=0:R=0:GOTO3710
4110 IFIN$=”N”THENS=0:R=0:GOTO3810
4120 IFIN$=”E”THENS=0:R=0:GOTO3010

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.)