An adventure is an undertaking that carries risk, surprise, and sometimes danger with it. There is no danger in these games. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I dislike computer games in which a player must pretend to pay the death penalty just because of a wrong choice at the fork of a path.
The reason three games can all fit together is that they are all from Richard Ramella of Chico, California, who we saw last year with Fun House. He wrote small games for children, games intentionally designed small and straightforward enough to make them tempting to modify.
I’m going to admit only three kinds of people into Fun House: Kids, adults who have friends who are kids, and people who haven’t lost the sense of playfulness that kids have as standard equipment. Fun House is more about fun than houses.
…and followed this after with his Fun House column in the September issue of 80 Microcomputing; the column ran until the April 1984 issue (as 80 Micro started cutting back on their games coverage). He followed with two books that combine “fiction and computer programs to form one giant fantasy for young readers” (Rainbow Quest and Lightyear Excuse). He was active enough that I might be missing something; there’s also the issue that books for children tend not to be preserved in libraries as well as other materials (paperbacks get beaten up and disposed of, and serious academic libraries tend not to collect them as a focus). If you want to see the hybrid fiction/type-in style of Lightyear Excuse, Ramella’s brief-lived column with Color Computing Magazine that started after Fun House should give you an idea.
The March 1983 column is titled Adventure Secrets, although — given the tiny-game restriction — it’s a fairly loose definition of “adventure”. Treasure Trove in particular counts even though it’s unusual in a way I’ve seen before.
Starting with The Gingerbread Caper, it’s a choice-based game where all the choices are “fake”, so to speak; Ramella calls it “linear” and marks the game as being for children seven and up. I want to emphasize that the age of seven guidance is not just reading or playing the game, but inputting and/or modifying it.
100 ‘ * THE GINGERBREAD CAPER * 4K BASIC LEVEL II
110 CLS
120 A$=STRING$(10,”*”)
130 INPUT”What is your name”;B$
140 PRINTB$;”, you are in the woods with Hansel and Gretel.”
150 PRINT”Hansel says: Leave a breadcrumb trail (1)”
160 PRINT”Gretel says: No, eat the bread (2).”
170 INPUT”Your choice”;X
180 PRINTA$
190 IFX=1THENPRINT”Birds eat the crumbs. You’re lost.”
200 IFX=2THENPRINT” You’re lost but not hungry.”
210 PRINT”You come to a fork in the path.”
220 PRINT”Hansel says Go left (1), Gretel says Go right (2)”
230 INPUT”What is your vote”;X
Maybe your seven-year-old novice doesn’t know what every element means, but they can still modify text strings, which is one way to start being a developer. (The legendary Tales of Maj’Eyal started as just a text-string hack of Angband to make it Tales of Middle Earth.) The actual choice turns out not to matter or make the player lose; the crumbs get eaten if a bread-trail is left. The remainder of the story is similarly low-stakes choices. You may want to pause and try the game yourself online (click “emulate edited program” and you’re good to go).
The column’s version of the game is all-caps. Whoever typed this version started putting in lowercase and then dropped halfway through.
The only “bad” choice is nibbling the gingerbread house at the end, which has an ELDERLY WOMAN come out to chase you and you get reset back to the start (not dead, just lost in the forest again where you can make choices again — something like the old Time Machine gamebooks). If you wait, the woman invites you inside and you can call your parents and stay over the night.
620 PRINT”THE HOUSE BELONGS TO RED RIDING HOOD’S GRANDMA.”
630 PRINT”GRANDMA INVITES YOU ALL TO VISIT.”
640 PRINT”YOU CALL YOUR PARENTS ON GRANDMA’S PHONE.”
650 PRINT”THEY SAY YOU MAY SPEND THE NIGHT.”
660 PRINT”AND EVERYONE LIVES HAPPILY EVER AFTER.”
670 END
This sort of bespoke-coding might be a bad idea in an adult game, especially when a parser is involved (see Johnson’s Castle Dracula for one I wrote about recently) but works fine for the context and low-stakes here.
The second game in the column, Treasure Trove, is the first one I came across. It was entirely without context. I have a collection of unsorted-by-year-or-author games and I found this one before realizing it connected with Ramella.
It is cryptic and I first wondered if something was broken or if the game was incomplete.
Treasure Trove is shorter than Gingerbread, but it does a lot more. You are put into a scene, told your location, given a tool, and told its use.
There’s no obvious goal on the start screen.
You go through a series of “tools” and try to use all of them in sequence. I first tried typing “W” to move and got the message “What, W a box with a feather? Impossible !!!”
Trying it again gets the message:
B-O-N-K !
which based on the article, is supposed to mean you went in a direction you couldn’t do. So I was briefly thrown for a loop by it seeming that: a.) you start by having a command to go west be misunderstood followed by b.) having the command to go west be understood, but have it run into a wall.
What’s really going on is that the game has two prompts, “action” followed by “direction”. It asks for an action even if you’re somewhere you aren’t supposed to be doing the action. So while the screen above has the player start at a box with a feather, “tickle” just lets you know the action is impossible; you might think you’d want to just specify a direction then, but you’ve got to go through the hoop of handling the “action” prompt first.
What, tickle a box with a feather?
Impossible !!!
I finally realized that the way to get from “action mode” to “direction mode” without an error message is to hit “enter”, that is, send a blank prompt.
550 INPUT “ACTION”; E$
560 IF E$=”” THEN RETURN
Once the game is in “direction mode”, it doesn’t exit it until you’ve successfully landed a direction (rather than just getting “B-O-N-K” to come out).
This would all be more troublesome with a larger map, but the entirety is a 2 by 2 grid.
The feather thus goes up to the dragon (who I wouldn’t assume is ticklish, but the only thing where the action “tickle” even makes sense).
The “key” then goes over to the box.
Good Move
The box produces a ladder
This is your new tool
Its purpose: climb
The ladder works on the beach tree:
Good Move
The tree produces a shovel
This is your new tool
Its purpose: dig
Finally, the shovel works on the beach.
Commands need to be typed in lowercase for the version I played; the original is all uppercase and doesn’t need to account for that.
While Treasure Trove technically counts as an adventure, it mainly held interest in watching someone reconstruct the concept of a parser from first principles in an effort to simplify things for children; unfortunately it made things more confusing for children instead.
Now on to the last game, Wonderland, which won’t have the same lower-case/upper-case issue as the other two, because it doesn’t seem to be archived at all. I had to type it in myself. You can find the code here.
Again the rules are irregular, but it isn’t as anti-intuitive as Treasure Trove.
This program borrows 10 characters and 10 items or scenes from the Lewis Carroll stories Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Each is assigned a different place on a 5-by-5 grid.
Note the regular grid this time only uses cardinal directions, as opposed to Treasure Trove which tried to hard-code in NE/NW/SE/SW into the program.
At the start, one of the characters is secretly made the mystery character. Your goal is to identify that character and then find its location.
The grid is set up at random. Some rooms are “locations”, some are “characters”. Some (independent of if they are a location or a character) have “clues”.
You might notice the count of 10 locations and 10 characters means that not all 25 squares are covered; some duplicates are included. Below is a complete map of one playthrough.
Clue-spots are marked in the corner, although I’m unclear their exact system; some spaces have more than one clue (that is, if you gather a clue and revisit, you’ll get another clue). To gather a clue, you need to solve an addition problem that briefly flashes on the screen. (For this age, it is testing both addition and paying attention; it’s fast enough — and the time even has randomness applied — that I sometimes missed seeing both numbers.)
Getting a clue right adds a “letter” to a list. The letter is simply a random letter chosen from the “mystery character” you’re supposed to be guessing.
If you reach a character, you’ll get prompted if you want to guess at the mystery character. You don’t have to guess at the character that is physically present; it just wants any guess typed in, and if you get it correct then the game says you need to find that character to win.
Although you are also welcome to guess the right place with the answer.
I found this oddly compelling, moreso than Treasure Trove at least. The main “parser” is just movement and getting interrupted by questions doesn’t feel too unnatural. The addition-problem aspect seems more of a vision quiz than a math puzzle so feels appropriate to the setting, and even though everything is just spread out references, the game benefits from the “fan fiction boost” of familiarity.
Two Queen’s Throne rooms. I guess she has a backup.
Despite these only barely qualifying as adventures (and I wouldn’t count Wonderland at all) I still found it interesting to see an approach to writing something intended as “adventure gaming” but not following the standard rules. This likely won’t be the last time we see this approach, despite “guides” starting to become common.
Even if his books never come up, Richard Ramella will come up again with a type-in in 1985; I also suspect once the Amiga steps in we’ll have a return performance as for many years he published the first Amiga diskmag, called Jumpdisk.
September 1986 issue, via eBay. Includes “Where’s Tom”, an “electronic time map” game of Tom Sawyer.
Coming up: assuming I can get over the technical hurdles (being more a pain than normal) our next game is from Japan, and it bears some resemblance to Wonderland.
Three months after Time-Line started being offered, Tim Gilberts attended one of the legendary ZX Microfairs with his parents (Number 7, Alexandria Palace in London, June 4th).
As mentioned last time, his parents were quite supportive of his efforts to start a company; his father Howard was a telephone engineer who was always into electronics (building a TV Tennis game for his son as a birthday present) and he always had a “sideline” job (that is, he supported entrepreneurship).
The younger Tim’s experience with computers in school was originally quite minimal, with no access to hardware. Coding was done in the language CESIL (Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language) and sent to a central location for processing (most likely being returned later to the student with an error).
Students didn’t even use punch cards, they wrote on a “Coding Sheet” to be passed on to an operator. Reproduction from Ian Dunmore.
He had two maths teachers interested enough in computing (and displeased with the paper situation) that they wrangled not only a desktop…
…but a terminal that connected directly to the school’s mainframe.
CESIL was still being used in the classroom — it was part of the O-Levels — and Tim Gilberts was tasked with one of the teachers (Mr Danks) to make a CESIL interpreter, lending a TRS-80 for the purpose.
This was probably my first commission for software – unpaid of course.
This is why one of Gilsoft’s earliest products was not a game at all, but a CESIL interpreter.
From Spectrum Computing.
He was able to buy a ZX81 with money he saved, and being supportive of what looked to be a budding career, his father purchased him a ZX Spectrum right when it came out. (Tim was still in school at the time working on his A Levels.)
But back to that Microfair in June–
Tim with his mother Pam and his father Howard. Source.
This was actually their second public sales event, after a small one in Bristol (where they made “a small quantity of mail order sales”). Gilsoft was positioned at stand E2, right next to the company Bytewell (one local to Barry that Gilberts had written a game for). Unfortunately, sales did not pick up in London; while they made money, this was because they had their Spectrum hooked up to a DK’Tronics keyboard that attracted attention, so they walked across the hall to where DK’Tronics was selling the keyboards and bought a set in bulk at vendor-cost to resell at their own stand.
The total turnover on the day when we counted the cash in our caravan in the Alexandra Palace carpark was some £1200 pounds with only a very small percentage from the sale of software. Disappointing as this was the production costs were low, the artwork for the cassette inlays being the most expensive items” but, they were not very advanced at the start.
This would change by their next Microfair, around Christmas, when it would be Gilsoft’s software attracting attention.
For now, we aren’t quite that far, as while Yeandle had made an adventure, Tim Gilberts wanted to try his hand at one too. He used the same database setup that Yeandle had made. This wasn’t just based on his interest but also on marketing savvy.
You must remember from the early industry people just wrote anything and threw it at the wall. [We] commonly called the magazines in advertising [to] see what sold. Adventure games seemed to be selling so I wrote one.
His game was called Diamond Trail.
Just before its long awaited premiere, the priceless Sinclive Diamond was stolen from the Jewel room of Spectraisia’s Capital, Microdrivia.
You must restore it in as short a time as possible, before the public begins to doubt its existence. Also bring the fake back to headquarters.
Unlike Time-Line, there are multiple ports, as after the initial Spectrum-only game it was moved to the actual Quill system, and from there taken to other machines. In fact, I was unable to find a non-Quill version of the game (I tried eight different versions) so I just went with it.
From the Commodore Plus/4 version.
This game takes multiple cues from Time-Line, both in a technical and design sense, but I think it came out stronger in the end just from having a more coherent setting (with some clearer British-urban-satire applied with a dose of Wales).
Our base of operations is an apparently abandoned secret police base. It is so secret that nobody is around and it’s possible (likely even, given a few circumstances) to be arrested for stealing. Maybe we’re one of the Slow Horses.
The secret police HQ also has an “armoury” with a long knife and an “office” with a bag. Neither seem to be helpful at first (the bag I never found helpful at all; maybe it increases inventory capacity somehow but I didn’t get it to work). Where the knife’s failure as an armoury-tool becomes clearly apparent is going east from the HQ, where you get immediately ambushed by a man with a gun. Once this starts, the man keeps shooting at you until you die.
I am in a seedy back road which goes SOUTH. Doors open to the EAST and WEST.
A man appears and takes a shot at me, he missed!
I was puzzled trying to USE KNIFE and KILL MAN with no effect, but I finally came across THROW KNIFE.
>throw knife
The Knife skims past his head & falls to the ground.
I’m hungry!
A man appears and takes a shot at me, he missed!
Done Crowther/Woods style this might just involve throwing the knife enough times and getting lucky with RNG, but the knife will never hit. You instead need to use a different weapon instead entirely.
You might also notice the “I’m hungry!” Just like Time-Line, there’s an almost immediate and deadly hunger timer. It took me a while before I could resolve it, for reasons I’ll go into shortly.
Heading west from HQ thankfully is bullet-free, as you are described as on the east side of a busy road. Trying to enter the road was deadly.
The death does the word cut-off just like both Reed’s article and Time-Line.
Avoiding that for the moment, heading north leads to a “large junk shop” with a “small purse” where you can open it and find a one-pound note. I do not know why taking it doesn’t count as stealing.
I am inside a large junk shop.
The exit is SOUTH.
I can also see:-
A small purse.
>get purse
OK.
>open purse
I am inside a large junk shop.
The exit is SOUTH.
I can also see:-
A £1.00 NOTE.
Just south there is a cathedral with a ladder outside, and a collection plate inside with a 50p coin. If you take the 50p coin and just walk off your game is over.
You need to instead drop the note first, and then you are safe. The police are watching that closely (but can’t help with a bloke shooting at you, apparently, or do anything other than flail their arms around when it comes to a stolen jewel).
The ladder incidentally feels a bit like the one from Time-Line; in that game, you could try CLIMB LADDER but the game would say you check and there’s nothing up there. In this case, CLIMB LADDER is the actual right thing to do, as in the same area as an entrance to an Underground Tube Station there’s a ledge described as up high.
Try to go down into the station and you will be asked for a ticket. We’ll get that later.
The key is useful for when you go a bit farther south to a “small museum”. The museum has an old lamp and a locked door. You can go around a back alley to CLIMB DUSTBINS and find a back room with a “laser cutter”, then use the key from the ledge to get back into the small museum via the back way. The reason to do this (other than snagging the cutter) is that if you try to take the old lamp away you’ll get busted for stealing again.
So after getting the lamp you just go back out the back window and then you’ll be safe. (Maybe it’s all those surveillance cameras London is known for … except they weren’t known for that yet in 1983. Thatcher something something?)
All this time there’s been “you’re hungry” messages and I admit being stuck a while. I also tried running past the shooting man to explore past a little; there’s a travel office with a ticket (but no way to pay for it, neither the note nor 50p coin work) and a closed/sealed manhole going the other way.
Exploring while cheerfully ignoring impending doom. The number of turns it takes to die is entirely random. The shooter can appear anywhere on the map. I originally thought maybe there was a way to get him run over by traffic.
What broke the case was my thinking, oddly enough, of a hint given in the prior game.
The hint here is complete nonsense in Time-Line, but of course maybe LOOKing both ways is the right way to approach the road?
sigh
This is one of those makes-sense-in-the-text-universe only puzzles, since of course normally you’d see the crossing. CROSS CROSSING will safely move to the west side of the road.
This alleviates the hunger issue as there is a deli with a vending machine that accepts the 50p coin from the cathedral; you can get a hamburger and then not worry about hunger thereafter.
Also about is the tower with the missing jewel (there’s a fake one you need to take back to HQ, as per the instructions) and while trying to go back there’s a fire hydrant that sprays acidic water on you which is a problem unless you’re wearing a mackintosh that happens to be lying around near the tower.
This seems to be random rather than timed so I think you could get lucky rather than wearing the raincoat.
Finally — and I admit I missed an exit for a while so it took me a moment to find it — you can go west from the hydrant to find a library which has a book (logical) and a gun (???).
The book gives directions on using the laser cutter from back at the museum (“twiddle” the knobs). With the gun, you can shoot down the person who has been after you…
…leaving the way open to bust open the drain cover with the laser cutter.
>twiddle knobs
I am in a Cul-de-Sac, The exit is NORTH.
There are some NEW WEEDS here.
I can also see:-
A drain cover with a neat round
hole cut in it.
This leads down to a maze, again invoking the spirit (and some of the literal code-base) of Time-Line.
One of the rooms has the sound of water falling which indicates this is the one spot in the maze you should use “down” (as opposed to N/S/E/W) — this is exactly analogous to the “draft” in the Time-Line maze which indicated it was possible to go up.
Going down reveals a “credit card” in the sewer; moving along farther reveals the secret hideout of the jewel thieves, although they’ve already left.
You don’t ever apprehend them; you’re just trying to get the diamond back.
From the hideout you can go into the tower the “back way”; this will be handy later. For now, let’s use the credit card and try the train ticket.
Random cheeky red herring, just like Time-Line.
The trick here is to simply WAIT TRAIN again and get on the second train, not the first one.
The inside of the “lost property office” has a crate. If you have the knife from the start of the game (the one useless as a weapon) you can use it to open the crate and get the diamond.
I am in a lost property office.
It seems deserted. The platform is to the WEST.
I can also see:-
A real diamond.
Some splintered wood.
Now winning is just a matter of returning the real diamond to the tower, although if you try to do it from the front, you get arrested for stealing! (…..??…..) You need to instead sneak through the sewers and drop it off where the fake diamond was.
I am in the Jewel Room, a spiral staircase leads DOWN.
I can also see:-
A real diamond.
I’m ready for your instructions.
>d
I am inside a room at the base of the tower. A spiral staircase goes UP, and an open door leads to the NORTH.
I can also see:-
A sign which says;
“Tower closed to PUBLIC”
Now you can walk back to the HQ and victory.
I have no interest in optimizing.
The action to Time-Line boiled down to eating food, finding pliers and a key, cutting a fence, using the key, and using a battery to get home; in a story-sense, not terribly exciting. The action here was a bit cryptic (why does nobody care someone is shooting at us all over London? why all the arrests for stealing even when we are returning a diamond?) but still more compelling to deal with, and even though the puzzles were straightforward the game was still substantial enough to get through I didn’t feel like it was cut short.
Via Spectrum Computing.
I’m curious how many of the design elements from the first two games keep holding in later Quill ones. I’ll be pausing the Quill story for now; we’ll eventually return to the first game that was actually written directly with the Quill (rather than ported). For now: Some rare adventures or at least adventure-adjacent games, including one that isn’t archived anywhere and I had to type up.
This was definitely in the “gonzo” style of design, with red herrings dropped wherever the author felt like, and only a vague gesture at some kind of consistent plot/universe. Why is the time machine locked where it is? Why is the key needed to win stuck in a particular spot in a maze? Why does an ordinary battery that happens to be nearby work for the last step?
We’ll need this later.
To continue from last time, I had four places (ditch, river, chasm, fence) I was unable to pass by, as well as a sleeping bull and a spider to deal with. The main overarching issue was the game starts with a hunger timer; while it was possible to pick up a “toadstool” and reset the timer, eating the toadstool eventually turns the player into a fungus so it’s game over as well. Keep the toadstool in mind for later, though.
I had a ladder I had been trying places (including USE LADDER while down below) but I apparently hadn’t tried USE LADDER yet in the starting room.
The mushroom in the greenhouse is safe to eat, alleviating the hunger puzzle. The ladder is now fixed in place so can’t be used again.
From here the game is mostly straightforward. I had already suspected the PLIERS from the Phone Booth might go to cut the fence (and while I didn’t learn this until after finishing the game, DIAL 999 at the phone both explicitly gives the hint “use the pliers on the fence”).
The inside has a “grandfather clock” that it describes as needing winding.
USE KEY from the maze (the one where you go UP at the draft to find) will cause you to enter the clock.
I am inside the clock which is really a time machine, but there is no source of power to operate it.
Once again the command USE comes in handy, which is good, because I really don’t know what we’re actually doing with the battery. Does the TARDIS come with D cell plug-in slots?
The number of red herrings was colossal, and at least some of them (maybe all of them) were intentional (rather than the author deciding to bail on a puzzle but leaving the items in for fun). For example, with the “sleeping bull” and “sword” at the start, you can go as far as killing the sleeping bull, and then trying to eat it.
The sword is otherwise useless and doesn’t do anything helpful at the spider. The whole gas mask / poison message is an additional red herring and is cheeky enough that the walkthrough at CASA gets genuinely upset about it:
This game depends of some random elements, but it is possible to give an exact step by step solution anyway. Here will be given two solutions. The first one is the most logical solution.
The “logical” solution includes wearing the gas mask as part of the gameplay and remembering to remove it to consume the mushroom at an appropriate moment. The second, allegedly illogical solution skips the mask entirely. I’m unclear why there would be so many red herrings but it would be considered outrageous for the gas mask to also be one?
The was even a red herring in the instructions:
Perhaps if I was British in the 80s I would have spotted this faster, but the GREEN CROSS CODE is simply referring to remembering to look both ways before crossing the street. The British made things rather more elaborate with the acronym SPLINK, which you can hear explained in 1976 by Jon Pertwee of Dr. Who fame:
(I defy you to find a 30 second public service announcement that’s any more British than that.)
The end screen did suggest that the player try to optimize their turns. You can completely drop having a light source and do everything in the dark.
You can still feel the maze’s draft in the dark. Nice coding!
What I failed to do, sadly, was optimize even further. Remember the toadstool? It does technically work to extend your life, sometimes.
Trying to do a no-mushroom run.
I got all the way back to the fence but I needed three more turns in order to win. According to Exemptus there’s some randomization in the timers so it may be with a best-possible-scenario on both the hunger timer and the toadstool timer (which can kill you after as little as 1 turn, if you’re unlucky) you can a.) run to underground and pick up the toadstool and battery b.) grab the key from the maze c.) grab the pliers, at which point the player should be starving d.) eat the toadstool e.) use the pliers, key, and battery to win. I was unable to get it to happen, but if it somehow could happen it’d be like The City of Alzan where you escape and win but have a deadly disease anyway (cured off camera? maybe?).
Via Spectrum Computing.
Speaking of City of Alzan, you might wonder — given the death-timer feels very similar between the two games — if Mr. Yeandle had exposure to the Trevor Toms system in addition to the 1980 Reed article. However, that’s not really necessary, as the Reed article includes a vampire bite, and in the text even has the “cutting off the language” trick that happens with Time-Line:
“I Think I’m dy…”
I know death-timers in Quill games tend to be more a Thing than average text adventures from this era; I think you can trace this to the source code above.
Coming up: the second part of the Quill story, as Tim Gilberts writes a game. Then we’ll go to the United States for two very unusual adventures from a magazine column, followed by a journey back to Japan.
Graeme Yeandle first encountered computers while visiting a university in 1972, although he decided against university and went straight to work for British Telecom. Starting in 1979 he switched departments to work with a mainframe computer and became a Systems Analyst.
In 1980 he saw an article in Practical Computing which would eventually change his life.
While Graeme Yeandle’s day job was with a mainframe, he bought into the Spectrum line to get into home computing, and had trouble finding good software.
It all began with me playing an adventure game. I can’t remember when (1981 or 1982) and I can’t remember whether it was on a Sinclair ZX81 or on a Sinclair Spectrum but I think it was produced by Artic Computing.
I was aware of an article by Ken Reed in the August 1980 issue of Practical Computing that described an adventure creating program. It appeared, to me, that the Artic adventure was based on Ken’s article. I thought, “I can write an adventure at least as good as this” and wrote to Artic offering my services. They didn’t reply.
While Yeandle was searching, he found an advertisement for Gilsoft. Gilsoft happened to be located in Barry, Wales, which was quite close to where Yeandle lived (Cardiff). He decided to come to their “office” in person to look at the programs before buying, although their office turned out to be Tim Gilberts’s personal home.
Barry (in red) just southwest of Cardiff.
I’ll write more about Tim Gilberts when I get to his first game, but in brief, he was a teenager well-supported by his parents who clearly saw him as talented in programming, and helped to finance the start of his company Gilsoft. He had a handful of games (two arcade-style, one 3D maze game, plus Poker Dice and Reversi) to start.
From Spectrum Computing.
When Yeandle came to visit, the conversation turned to adventure games, and with Reed’s article (and Artic’s rejection) in mind, he agreed to write one for Gilsoft. NOTE: Gilberts has an interview that differs slightly: “He [Yeandle] was impressed enough to buy a copy of 3D Maze Of Gold, and mentioned he’d written an adventure game called Time-Line.” According to Graeme the adventure wasn’t written yet. It could be that he had a concept of a game developed enough for Gilberts to remember, but just hadn’t started yet.
The Interpreter was written in Z80 assembler, based on Ken’s article, the database was also written in assembler and the result was called Timeline. This was all done on the cassette based Spectrum and it took quite a time just to make a small change to the database.
Time-Line became part of Gilsoft’s “Games Tape 3”, packaging Yeandle’s Time-Line with an arcade game called Tasks (by Gilberts).
This is still nine months before the release of The Quill (the Gilsoft toolkit — again using Reed’s article as a basis — that will spawn hundreds of text adventures).
Via Spectrum Computing. The cover gives the title as both Timeline and Time Line so I’m using the game’s title screen instead (“Time-Line”).
Tasks involves collecting treasures from a maze and avoiding thorn bushes, while a TASKMASTER sometimes gives a problem to solve. I’ve linked a video below with Gilberts himself playing:
In Time-Line, you have “become separated from your Time Machine”, not knowing if you’re lost in the future or past. Your task is to find the machine and return to the present.
The instructions are standard “VERB NOUN” information except for this last part about not talking to strange men and being sure to use the GREEN CROSS CODE.
There’s a spot of intrigue in the setup with “you don’t know whether you are in the future or the past.” This ends up being a parallel mystery of sorts; sure, you start in a place with sheep and a “sword in a stone”, but that could technically still be in the future.
There’s also quite early on a gas mask so we’re not talking medieval, but perhaps this is “1983” which is the past of the protagonist’s present (since real time machines weren’t around in 1983).
Aboveground you’re at a barn/farm house/stable setup, starting with a sword in a stone (see initial screenshot) and a sleeping bull.
Note the river described to the south. Try to JUMP and the game responds it is too wide. There’s also a ditch to the east of the starting room. I’ve marked them both on the map and I don’t know if they’re obstacles to later be passed or just meant for flavor. Based on where I’m stuck later I’m guessing the former.
Also just lying around are a ladder, a horseshoe, and a lamp. You might think the ladder would help with the ditch, but PUT LADDER merely sets it down and no other verb I’ve tried is helpful.
I am in an old farm house. A shopping list is pinned to the wall. Exits are North, East & Down.
I can also see:
A lamp.
What should I do now?
>LOOK LIST
It says only one match left in basement.
The “list” indicates an important norm that sometimes interactable items are in the room description, rather than everything being items you can pick up.
The match is needed because going down finds the room immediately dark, and you can’t light the lamp without the match. You just need to GET MATCH while in the dark and the player will find it (nevermind one might assume the room is large enough you need to feel around for a while to find it).
To the east is an air raid shelter with a gas mask; I’ve tried both putting it on and not putting it on and there doesn’t seem to be any of the alleged poison gas to worry about yet.
What there is a problem with quite quickly is hunger. A hunger daemon triggers for no particular reason, and the only food around is the toadstool from the basement.
This might be fine — the toadstool (“Ugh! It tasted horrible.”) indeed prevents hunger from killing you — but you also turn into a fungus eventually instead, and faster than starvation takes.
I don’t think I should have eaten that toadstool. I’m turning into a fungu…
You have taken 18 turns.
Would you like another go?
You can still eat the toadstool close to when you are about to starve which buys a little extra time; this suggests the gameplay might be tight enough on move count that you’re supposed to toss yourself from one dire situation into another and then try to fix the second one in time (perhaps tossing yourself in a third dire situation which needs yet another cure).
The starvation / fungusifying means everything past here is the result of “designated death-clone” exploration, especially the maze you’ll see in a moment where I kept reloading my game in order to finish the map.
Below the toadstool room is a “damp chamber” with a boot-lace…
…and a “small chamber” with a battery.
Notice also the high fence and the chasm, both obstacles which again foil any movement. (And again, you might think the ladder might be helpful, and maybe it is, but not with any verbs I’ve tried yet.)
Heading west instead leads to the maze.
It’s fortunately not the kind of maze where the sides turn (going north and then south returns you to the same place you started); instead it drops describing exits so you have to test all six (N/S/E/W/U/D) in every room.
I am in a network of passages!
I am hungry!
What should I do now?
>U
I can’t go in that direction.
I am hungry!
What next?
>D
I can’t go in that direction.
I am hungry!
What should I do now?
There are three points of interest. One is a “phone booth” which I think it meant as a Dr. Who reference but not the actual time machine (and seems to be mainly there to dispense some pliers).
I am in a phone box. The exit is North.
I can also see:
A pliers.
A beeline straight west leads to a giant spider. I did try KILL SPIDER, SWING SWORD, etc. with no result.
Right before the spider the room is described as having a “draft” which is supposed to be a hint you can go up and find a key (I tried going up and down in every room anyway).
From here I am stuck. To recap, I have a sword, horseshoe, ladder, lamp, match (used), gas mask, toadstool, boot-lace, battery, pair of pliers, and key. I’m facing a giant spider and sleeping bull (neither are aggressive, but I haven’t gotten anything useful either); active obstacles are a ditch, river, tall fence, and chasm. I may simply be using the wrong words with the ladder, or I may be missing something more fundamental.
If anyone wants to try the game, there’s the ZX Spectrum original but Graeme himself also made a port for DOS which I’ve found easier to play. (The ZX Spectrum version of the game drops keystrokes, so GET LADDER sometimes comes off as GET LDDER. It may simply be assuming you’re on a slow membrane keyboard.) I haven’t made my verb list yet so I’m not horribly stuck, but I’m stuck enough I’m happy to take suggestions even from people who peeked at the walkthrough (ROT13 if this is the case, though).
I’ve finished (previous post here), and the game ended relatively strong, although there’s a “plot bug” of sorts (like The Deadly Game, one that can interfere with game-solving); I was not expecting a minimally-described game to even have such an issue.
Last time I had Zorgians that refused to interact with me, and my weapons (knife / revolver) did not seem to work, so I thought perhaps everyone was dead. This is not the case. Rather, the parser was doing something rather unusual behind the scenes.
This isn’t a two-letter parser, three-letter parser, four-letter parser, or a six-letter parser; that’s where all words get cut off at a certain point and that’s what gets used to check against a data list. You can type just one letter and have it fill the rest of a word:
F
FILL
YOU CAN’T F
I was misunderstanding what was going on when forming my verb list, and missed the fact that FIRE does in fact get recognized. You have to go past FI and type at least FIR so the word becomes FIRE. This lets you FIRE REVOLVER. (It’s still confusing not specifying a target, and the one place you can use the knife requires you specify a target rather than just saying USE KNIFE or the like; more on that in a moment.
You can’t pick up the COAL at all and it is irrelevant for the lantern. You can SEARCH it to find a BOX which contains a FLARE. (Just to recap, that gets added to the REVOLVER, FLINT & STEEL, the LANTERN, a RUBY RING, and a KNIFE.)
The Zorgian out on the deck next to the lifeboat doesn’t give anything up other than a BODY showing in the room, and in fact you don’t have to kill it at all. The revolver is limited to six shots so this turns out to be useful.
Zorgians marked with stars, the “SAILOR” is marked with a triangle.
After that, I kept running in circles, still unable to light the lantern. I finally went back to the SAILOR which was not marked as a Zorgian, and by default I would think they were just a human that managed to survive, but they refused any kind of conversation / trading or other interaction. I finally gave up and tried death:
The only time the knife works, saving another bullet.
This leaves behind a JEMMY (crowbar) and a BOTTLE OF OIL, which is what is needed for the lantern. I guess/hope that was a Zorgian?
The oil finally allows the lantern to be lit, opening up the bottom part of the ship.
Things kick off with using the revolver again (opening passages to the east and west)…
…although the passage farther to the west is blocked by a CRESTED ZORGIAN where the revolver does not work.
Going to the right instead is a chest with a WIRE; just as a reminder, here’s the instruction I ran across last time for making things explody:
TO MAKE A BOMB YOU NEED A WIRE AND SOME DYNAMITE AND A FLINT. TO DESTROY AN ENTIRE SHIP IT MUST BE PLACED IN THE POWDER ROOM.
I had the flint already from trading a fish with the cat, so I just needed the dynamite. The dynamite turns out to be right at the chest although I didn’t find it until later; you’re supposed to EXAMINE CHEST to find an extra secret button.
The WIRE is revealed by just opening the chest, so it seems like it’s examined implicitly, but I’d call this puzzle fair.
Further east is another Zorgian (BAM!) guarding a locker, which is “jammed” and requires the crowbar from the sailor (who I totally swear was a fish-man, honest). It has clothing, and searching the clothing reveals a paper with a code on it.
The code is 1864.
From here I was stuck (even having made the dynamite) although it was clear I just needed to get by the Crested Zorgian somehow. The FLARE from earlier is the key:
I don’t normally think of a flare as a weapon, but I guess if you visualize this as a double-sized fishman this scene makes sense.
This opens a passage with more Zorgians and a combination lock along the way (just use the code from the locker).
Finally at the end of the line is the POWDER ROOM with yet another Zorgian. (If you have tried to kill every Zorgian plus the sailor with the revolver, by this point you are out of ammo. Whoops! You can either avoid killing the one at the rowboat or kill the sailor with the knife to give you enough leeway.) With the three items held (FLINT, WIRE, DYNAMITE) I was able to MAKE BOMB, then LIGHT BOMB.
Escape is pretty straightforward, and you can go to the boat that was at the cat if you want rather than at the Zorgian.
However, there’s a major plot issue: if you try to LAUNCH early, you are told you are lacking oars and the game ends (this is true with either lifeboat). However, if you blow up the ship, somehow you win anyway, even though you still lack oars? There’s no oars in the game.
You could technically “patch” this plot hole by saying the explosion attracts another ship which rescues you, but there’s no such item in the text. I decided to just go for it on the rowboat even lacking oars just to see what would happen, but I could easily see someone be stuck here at the end due to the plot hole, flailing while trying to MAKE OARS out of something. (Maybe holding the KNIFE while at the CHEST, or something like that.)
I’m also not clear why blowing up the ship saves the world to begin with. I would surmise (again filling in the blanks) the Zorgians are trying to figure out how to operate the vessel, and then once they do the Army of the Deep will flood the shores.
Even with the glitches (game-wise and plot-wise) this didn’t come off as terrible; I did like Leopard Lord marginally more but I hadn’t gotten stuck on the verb list in that game. I’d say normally this is a promising second effort from the author and I’d be looking forward to the other games in the series (3 exist, 2 are mentioned in ads and may not exist) but according to Exemptus things go downhill from here. We’ll find out, I suppose, although I’m punting the rest of the series for a future time.
Coming up: The Quill, source of 800+ text adventures and one of the most important game-creation tools of the 1980s.
This is the follow-up game to Leopard Lord, which I played recently; you can find the historical introduction there (specifically how Kayde took a piece of software in a magazine not written by themselves and tried to sell it). Leopard Lord felt like an askew D&D level with combat determined by checking if the player is holding the right weapons/armors against a particular enemy. It was better than I expected.
Terror From the Deep takes a different tack.
Via Spectrum Computing. I don’t want to get more into Kayde Software yet. I should discuss sometime their support of the ultra-obscure Grundy NewBrain computer. Probably for their next game (Ace in the H.O.L.E.).
The year is 1864. A storm has hit our ship and we’ve gone overboard. We’ve managed to survive by clinging onto debris, and come across the SS Celestial mid-ocean.
Then you saw the sail…
Frantic paddling brought you nearer to the becalmed vessel. your shouts have brought no response from the ship and now you are drifting very close…
This is (so far, I haven’t finished yet) a “arrived at a boat where everyone is dead” type story. Hence, no fights like Leopard Lord; FIGHT isn’t even an understood verb (STAB is, which may or may not have anything to do with battle).
I’m reminded a bit of Death Dreadnaught except that the rooms don’t have any descriptions, so the game has a tougher time building up the same sort of atmosphere of dread.
which isn’t a lot to work with, and resembles Leopard Lord in length (but not in composition; no GIVE command, for instance). The one similarity is that EXAMINE and SEARCH are treated differently and both need to be done on everything you find. For example, early on there’s a BODY where EXAMINE reveals a message in blood…
The FISH can be taken, the body can’t.
…but later there’s another BODY with a key, which requires SEARCH to be used.
Here’s the first part of the map, before going down belowdecks:
There’s no obstacles in the way: it’s just a matter of wandering around decks and finding a bloody footprint and bodies. Curiously, not all the bodies are human.
I assume I’m supposed to visualize the Zorgian as a smaller version of what’s on the tape cover.
I was originally quite baffled here (before I realized the game jettisoned at least early combat) and thought this would be a confrontation, but as far as I can tell this is a dead Zorgian, not a live one. You can LAUNCH LIFEBOAT without interference, although it still doesn’t end well yet:
YOU HAVE LOST YOUR OARS. YOU WILL WANDER AIMLESSLY UNTIL YOU DIE.
From the bloody footprint to the south there’s another lifeboat and a CAT. I admit I was unsure if the cat was alive (or at least, it was both alive and dead for me simultaneously); hence it took me a while before I came back to test FEED CAT whilst holding the fish from earlier.
Other than the cat scene, the attempted atmosphere, and the KEY I found earlier on a body, the only other thing above-deck was a RUBY RING.
The stern has what the game just describes as a SAILOR. I thought briefly (since it isn’t a BODY) the sailor might be alive, but I can’t interact in any way. I’ve never had a “horror” styled text game where it is unclear at first if the character you’re dealing with is dead.
Moving on to the downstairs…
…a quick turn to the south reveals a Coal Hold with a dead (?) Zorgian. I am unable to get any coal. I’ve hacked at this room for a while for reasons you’ll see in a moment.
Further on is a LANTERN and a KNIFE (hence the stabbing in the previous screen), and even further is a stair down and yet another body.
Going down leads to darkness, and logically the lantern should be helpful, but it is described as empty. I tried to FILL LANTERN at the coal but this isn’t understood; I’m otherwise not sure how to get a light source.
That’s not quite the end of the line, though, so moving on, next is a mess room with a MAP.
The room after has a PARCHMENT with an ad for the next game in the series…
…with the final end of the passage being a huge cabin. The cabin has a LOCKER and a BOOK, the book explaining more about the bomb we’re supposed to make…
Do we need to blow up the ship to escape, or is this optional?
…and the locker has a box which itself has a REVOLVER. (I believe the key gets used here but I never tested exactly which moment.)
And with that, I’m stumped. I’ve got FLINT & STEEL, a REVOLVER, a LANTERN, and a RUBY RING and a KNIFE as “practical” items; the MAP, PARCHMENT, and BOOK all also count as items but likely just were there to dispense information. It’s strange to be stuck on something so small as the oil (or other fuel) for a light source; it “normal” playing circumstances I might be reaching for the hints right now, but I feel obligated to at least make a blog post first in case I discover something I’ve missed in the process. (Or get a helpful comment from the peanut gallery; please feel free to guess things I haven’t tried, but no hints from anyone who has looked up the solution yet, please.) I still keep wondering if one of the Zorgians is alive, just very passive; even the REVOLVER can’t be used to bring violence in any way I can find, though.
From the script of A Boy’s Life by Melissa Mathison, named before release as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.
Last time I was stuck on
a botanist and a geranium that was withered so they didn’t want it
the director John Carpenter (not an obstacle or anything, but he was clearly there for a trade)
a few assorted locked doors (no puzzle here, just waiting for the right key)
a guard (having already taken down one with a rocket)
On the guard, I had a contact mine that seemed like it might work on the second but it exploded just a little too well.
Guard #2.
Gus Brasil dropped some rot13 hints but just the topic alone was enough to help; he picked getting by the guard as the goal which let me know where to focus. What eventually broke the case open was looking again at the verb list and keeping in mind something could be a little broken (that is, a native German speaker might treat something in English a little unusually), just like CHOP was used with a truncheon.
The key turned out to be knock, which in the format “knock noun” means something like knocking on a door, but is used here for “knock guard” (without the “out” you’d normally want in English) or more specifically “knock guard with truncheon”.
This leads through another set of doors (locked and requiring random keys to open, nothing behind them) and a third guard guarding a third hall in the same manner as the first two …
… except not exactly in the same manner. This guard was more aggressive and trying to give him something or interact causes him to “tear you apart”.
I remembered back at the beginning of the game, there was a guard described as cruel that knocks you out and drags you into the second (dark) cell. The guard is triggered by yelling. Since this guard was more trigger-happy then the last two, I tried the contact mine method again: THROW MINE so it is right in front of the guard, heading back to the protective steel doors, and once they are up, using the command YELL.
I found this the most satisfying puzzle of the game.
Using their aggression as a weakness.
After the guard was dead I could check the third row of doors, and at the final one I met E.T.
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was a 1982 movie involving a friendly alien landing and a boy helping him go home. He causes bicycles to fly. He works out how to say things with a Speak and Spell.
A Speak and Spell, of course, I had in my inventory! Giving it over didn’t do anything, and I had to go back and look over the relevant section in the movie for a bit before I realized revivifying the flower is part of it too. If you’re holding the geranium and you hand over the Speak and Spell, he’ll repair the flower.
You know how I gave some latitude for Fairytale given the conditions it was written in, and even the baseball puzzle in Zork II gets a pass due to an alternate solution? Yeah, no such defense here.
The flower can then go back to the botanist, who will be pleased enough to give you a Rubik’s Cube.
I checked, and the Rubik’s Cube was first shown outside of Hungary at a German toy fair in 1979, and they had their own craze and familiarity with the toy. What I could not find is how it was linked to director John Carpenter. Maybe he mentioned it in some interview? At the very least we’re out of puzzles so this wasn’t hard to find.
Carpenter leaves behind a passkey, letting you unlock nearly every door in the game (you can dump the green, silver, gold and red). Back at the E.T. level there’s some more that needed to be mapped, and two doors that require the passkey.
It’s absolutely pure mapping with zero tricks, and perhaps a little odd for the very end of the game; using the passkey you can get the blue key behind one of the doors. The blue key then goes to a final locked door near the director door and you can walk out to victory.
The bottle doesn’t get used, except I think the implication is that the gunpowder was in the bottle to begin with, so you just get the empty one back?
Weirdly — and I know from the outside it might not seem that way — I enjoyed myself. It helped that I understood the context here of a game the author clearly liked and wanted to push the boundaries of and make their own. (I’m going with the assumption that Eberhard Mattes is the author of the toolkit as well as the game, although it is of course possible it was a team effort or a friend of his.) The “HAHAHA” part of the map which would have annoyed me in a professional case (Bard’s Tale 1, say) came across as somewhat charming knowing this was a way of conveying the joke.
The best troll setups are those which violate the player’s expectations. In order to do that, a setup needs to make the player think they know what they need to do, have them fail in a humorous way when they do it, and then let them know what it was that they were supposed to do instead. If any of these components is missing, a troll setup will fall flat. If a player doesn’t think they know what to do, they will not have an expectation to violate. If they don’t fail or there’s no humor, then they’ll wonder what the troll was. And if they don’t have an idea of what to do right the next time, they’ll just end up confused rather than amused. Make sure that each setup has all three components.
I still don’t think the setup-joke aspect always works as expected, but the fact we’re talking 1983 or so it’s fantastic that it works sometimes. The “nothing with a button on it” made me genuinely laugh; while I was slightly annoyed at the time with how the silver key was hidden leveraging the properties of the engine, looking backwards in an intellectual sense I find it fascinating that the trick was even possible. Anti-design for games prods at established wisdom; what’s odd is that there’s so little established wisdom in 1983 I wasn’t expecting to see much like it yet.
Despite an enormous amount of text adventures being produced by “toolkits” (especially once the Quill enters the scene) the toolkits are generally intended more in the way of a word processor trying to present things in the smoothest way possible; that is, doing something that “makes fun of” a property of The Quill is going to fall mostly flat because the players are just going to think of it as another text adventure, as opposed to the norms established by the Frank Corr-style game.
Frank Corr himself incidentally did have plans for Deathmaze 7000 in the works after Asylum II but just like his “octagonal” based space-game the new Deathmaze never surfaced. I’m not sure what happened and I hope to have the full story someday. If nothing else, I’d like his opinion on Madhouse, which until I started posting on last week was completely forgotten.
Coming up: A random Britgame, followed by the start of The Quill (sort of, it’s complicated).
I’m likely not far from the end, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy to get there.
Via an Asylum II ad in 80 Microcomputing Magazine, May 1982.
Last time I left off on the very simple problem of being able to press a button on a wall. (LOOK BUTTON says there is no button here, so I wasn’t even sure if it was a button.)
PRESS BUTTON and PUSH BUTTON did not work. I did discover while fiddling that VOCABULARY works just like Asylum so you can get a full list of verbs and nouns.
Even with this list I was having no luck (I went as far as guessing it was a HOLE instead of a button and trying things like INSERT GREEN KEY IN HOLE). Fortunately, Gus Brasil, who seemingly gravitates to the really obscure stuff I play, picked up the game and played all the way to the end. He let me know the right syntax is PUSH BUTTON ON WALL. Argh!
The syntax becomes relevant again shortly.
I was thus able to enact my plan: light a rocket, drop it at the guard, run to the steel walls, survive the explosion, and get past the guard to a new area.
The box the guard leaves behind has a rubber truncheon. You can also go all the way to the end of the four doors and use the green key to find a purse with some gold coins.
I already suspected the truncheon went to the mined area (either smashing a glass wall or a mirror) but I’ll save that for later and deal with the gold coins first, which directly go to an inmate near the start who wanted to trade them for a fuse.
Again, every character that isn’t a guard can be referred to as an INMATE.
With this, I was able to go to the transporter and … still not operate it. It was described as having a button on it, it had a fuse in a “fuseholder”, and it was too heavy to cart around (you can pick it up, but you have to drop it in place). The key turned out to be the highly (highly) unusual syntax which has you PUSH BUTTON ON TRANSPORTER.
Doing this fries the fuse, which is why we needed the New Fuse in the first place (I had originally thought the lack of working was the fuse, not the parser being finicky). This was followed by an incredibly long struggle with the parser to try to take the “Blown Fuse” out, and put the “New Fuse” in. GET BLOWN FUSE doesn’t work, nor did most of the variants I tried. (“GET BLOWN FUSE FROM TRANSPORTER”: “You can’t do that”.) The big issue on top of everything else is that the parser has a character limit so you can’t type in anything you want. If you try to TAKE BLOWN FUSE FROM TRANSPORTER you get stuck by not being able to type in the “R”. Trying to use REMOVE (off the verb list) is even worse:
This is the first time I’ve ever had difficulty with a parser because it refuses to type all the characters I need for a command. Gus Brasil mentioned (based on the Vocab list) that TRANS works as an abbreviation, and indeed it does: REMOVE BLOWN FUSE FROM TRANS gets the much desired Blown Fuse.
But things aren’t over yet because now I needed to put in the new one, which was another saga in itself, and I actually took a break from the puzzle and went exploring a little in case I missed stuff. Gus also incidentally pointed out that the teleport-to-nowhere I found which kept repeating had a clear message if you do the map-upside down:
This is exactly like troll levels in Mario Maker.
Finally being satisfied that I had everything resolved (except the truncheon, which I’m saving) I went back to the grind:
put new fuse
put new fuse in trans
insert new fuse in trans
put new fuse in fuseholder
insert new fuse in fuseholder
This wasn’t a problem with guess the verb or even guess the noun, but guess the preposition. The game needs “into”: INSERT NEW FUSE INTO TRANS.
There was one small benefit from all that fiddling. At one point I typed OPEN BOX rather than my usual command (I had PUT NEW FUSE which seemingly worked, but only set the item down). I discovered that the square also contained a silver key.
You can’t move off the square without dropping the transporter (again, too heavy, so it always would look like there is a box there no matter what). The silver key is being hidden by the property of the game always displaying a single box for any item being in a spot, no matter how many items there are. If anything in this game is a troll at the level of what a fangame normally does (rather than a professional game) this is it: this is the kind of glitch in reality that most authors try to hide (and as far as I remember, never got used by Corr/Denman) but the exact conditions here (you have to drop an item on the square to turn around and look at it, you can’t see a box in the square you are standing) are being exploited by a superfan to their limit. Compare with Super Mario romhacks that require using glitches to beat:
Moving on, as we still haven’t explored the area the transporter lands on:
It’s fairly straightforward except for yet another troll, which is somewhat dependent on the player’s keyboarding. They have to wind their way out a “wormy” passage, followed by a very long passage where one step before the end you need to turn left. This means you are hitting the “up” key a lot, and if you accidentally hit “up” one too many times you plunge into a pit. I didn’t have this happen since I was moving slow to make a map, but since I could tell what the author was aiming for, I made an animation demonstrating the fall:
The bottom of the pit has infinite hallways in any direction. You have to reload. (Again: The original Corr games did have some softlocks, but not of the kind where you realize you are in an impossible room or area.)
Turning correctly, you can make it over to pick up a magic map, which is the only other item here. Normally then this would be a jump back to where you started, followed by a trip up to the mined floor, but…
…it doesn’t land you back at the same place you started! (I marked the landing point as the swirly wormhole.) I’ve also simplified the map a bit here, as there’s some teleporters that loop you around (and I didn’t feel the need to find the exact positioning for each one) and I’ve also left off marking most of the doors, some which use a gold key (which we haven’t found yet); just note you need to come back here once you have the gold key in order to pick up the red key.
After some major map-fiddling I found the “escape” door (a door seen from the other side, but requiring a silver key to open) so finally made it back to the elevator and the mined level, with the truncheon and magic map in hand. I already knew the magic map was relevant because when examining it at first, it gives the same grid as before. Once you actually arrive there, a path is drawn out like this:
Clearly my own map was turned from the “real” compass the game was using (I hate not knowing how to orient things, grr) so I did some magic with Microsoft Paint in order to redraw the route on my original map.
To get through to the route in the first place involves busting the mirror. I had some difficulty because the typical HIT and SMASH and ATTACK weren’t in the list, so I had to go with CHOP. Chopping with a truncheon?
The path then follows mostly uneventfully as long as you don’t typo your keypress. There’s also a “big blue nothing with a button on the rear side” but that’s again just trolling, and to get through the last step you should look in the box as it contains a contact mine which needs to be picked up (don’t step on it!). In the end you can reach the corner box which has a gold key.
The route is changed on the way back, so you need to refer to the magic map (or do a lot of saving and loading) to make it to safety.
In the end I wasn’t too annoyed by the fact I mapped it first before finding a relevant item, as knowing the boundaries helped make sure I did the path correctly.
With the gold key in hand you can head back and get the red key, and then go on a spree of opening doors. This yields a Speak and Spell, a geranium, a botanist (who doesn’t want a shriveled geranium and kicks you out if you try to give it over), and John Carpenter, the director (in a room marked “Director”). Seriously:
This would be after he made The Thing, but I don’t know what that means for the game. I tried GIVE for every item I had and got no reaction.
The only other open area I have is back where I blew up the guard; there’s a second guard blocking the way further, and it seems like they need to be removed out of the way as well. You can step back and throw the contact mine, then throw an item at the contact mine to blow it up, but that blows you up as well.
Guard #2.
After throwing the contact mine to be next to the guard.
After THROW TRUNCHEON. You can’t throw farther.
So that leaves the botanist (and maybe getting a non-withered version of the plant over), the director, and the guard to deal with. I still have an empty wine bottle (the flower can’t go in it) and a Speak and Spell but I’m otherwise out of options.
Gus, you’re welcome to drop hints but ROT13 only please. Based on the vocabulary list there isn’t much left to find. Anyone else is welcome to speculate about wacky stuff to try and I’ll test it out.
No cereal boxes in the vocabulary, unfortunately. COME BACK ALI. COME BACK ALI’S SISTER.
One of the disadvantages to a write-as-I-play style is that I don’t get to plunge into the hex machine code until I’m done (or at least I get really, really, stuck); Rob in the comments searched through and found a copyright notice which explains quite a bit and also makes the whole experience even more terrifying. Previously I theorized this could be a “hacked” game but special tools were needed that didn’t exist at this time to do the kind of work required here. It appears a madlad from Germany custom-made his own.
ADVLIB Copyright (c) 1982/83 Eberhard Mattes
Eberhard Mattes was a Video Genie enthusiast and has his name linked to some “monitor software” which tracks what’s going on in machine code and a bios to use CP/M on Video Genie. The copyright statement above implies he made his own fangame program to modify the machine code of the Frank Corr engine. Without any other name attached I’m going to guess this game is likely by Mattes himself. (It could even be the tool ADVLIB never got released, just the game made with it.) I’m not clear yet which game was the “base” but the verb FART is included and only showed up in the first two (Deathmaze 5000 and Labyrinth) and the screen layout is closer to those games; the inmate graphics and some other elements only show up starting in Asylum.
Fangames often are harder and less fair than the originals of a game; the enthusiasts who have played through a game multiple times really want a challenge and/or to torment their friends. For example, the “troll levels” so now well-refined through the Super Mario Maker games are their own ecosystem far from the ethos of Nintendo-designed levels.
You might ask, how could a Deathmaze 5000 style game be less fair than the original? You’ll see.
Continuing from last time…
…I had traded some gun powder for a bottle and a firework rocket (the rocket indicates it has a cord if you LOOK at it). I also had in my inventory a green key (used everywhere I could manage), lighter fluid, and a golden lighter (which I had filled with the aforementioned fluid). On the obstacle side of things, there was an inmate who wanted five gold coins for a fuse, a “transporter” that seems to need aforementioned fuse, a guard that stops me on level 1, a place where steel “protective” doors fall on level 1, and (still unexplored as of my last post) I had a teleporter square to get through and a mine-laden level 3.
I’m going to do the teleporter first (which will be short), then the mine area (which will be frustrating), and finally the guard and the steel doors (which are connected).
After stepping into the teleporter and turning “south”.
I don’t have much to say about the teleporter area; it drops you in a region which “loops” the west to the east side and seems intended to just make you walk forever if you don’t notice what’s going on. I dropped items (which left behind boxes) to confirm the area is endless. Mind you, Deathmaze had something trigger with particular turn numbers in a static room, so there may be something to this area still, but I have no clues pointing here yet.
There is also the possibility there is something on one of the random walls (I have yet to face each and every one to check); there’s a wall with a special object on level 3 (the mined floor) as you’ll see next.
Arriving in the elevator to level 3 and turning “north”.
The level is mostly divided into a grid pattern, where the outermost circle is mine-free, but there are many dangerous squares that will blow you up if you step inside the grid.
The mines are hopefully self-explanatory (they’re invisible, I had to step on every single one to map them); some other points on the map above:
1. There are many doors marked “elevator”. Only the door you came in on is a real elevator; walking into any of the other “elevator” rooms lets you know the room is fake, and it drops you down into a 1 by 1 room with no apparent means of escape. This seems to be a softlock.
None of the Corr games had this kind of softlock; one reason why this one is more unfair.
2. In the upper right corner there’s a visible box, but it is blocked by glass walls to the west and south. I have been unable to break through the wall, even when using FART from all the way across the map, flying towards it, and ramming. (Before anyone asks, it doesn’t work to bypass mines either.) Animation below:
3. There are two squares marked “NOTHING”. Those are boxes, and when you open them, the game describes that you have found nothing. You are unable to take nothing. They are pure trolling. (Again, a few steps past anything Corr did, although he did have red herrings in Deathmaze.)
4. There’s one wall (the only place where the grid breaks) with a mirror. I haven’t been able to get anything useful to happen here but it does indicate looking at particular walls might be needed (meaning I need to comb over every area very carefully).
The map is no doubt incomplete since I haven’t made it to the inner area yet. My guess is I’ll bust past the glass wall (somehow) which will then give access, and I also guess that the box in the upper right corner has NOTHING just like the others. You might think the firework rocket would be helpful for the glass. Unfortunately, it’s a little too explosive; you can light the cord, drop it, and run away, but it always makes a big enough explosion to (presumably) smash the glass but also kill the player.
Now, the level with the guards. There’s not much to it at the start other than the guard telling you to go back to your cell…
…and the steel wall…
…but notice how it is protective. And we have a very powerful rocket. There’s enough time while the cord burns to drop the rocket next to the guard and make a beeline for the wall.
The wall that dropped has what looks like a button.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to press it! I might need to do some serious noun-hunting (again, this is a little more unfair than what Corr did). It could even be a “hole” rather than a button or some such nonsense. If there was a way to look at the wall that might help but the obvious candidates (LOOK WALL, LOOK STEEL WALL, LOOK AROUND) give no joy, and plain LOOK BUTTON says “I see no button.”
Enough events have happened this seemed like a good time to report in, at least. I don’t think this is going to go as long as the Asylum games but we’ll see.
Consolidating the information from Will Moczarski, Ernst Krogtoft, and a 1981 interview, Frank Corr was an 18-year-old student at MIT when he used his TRS-80 to make the game Rat’s Revenge in BASIC. Denman saw a copy and offered to publish it. While Corr didn’t originally write the game to sell, he agreed to a deal, as long as he was able to “learn machine language first.” (He managed to parley writing a research paper for English into one about machine language.)
During MIT’s summer break, Corr went back to make a machine code version of Rat’s Revenge, and followed up by adding enough content it went from straightforward maze game to an adventure game: Deathmaze 5000. (This started as a true outsider whim: he had never played an adventure until he was halfway through making Deathmaze.) This same engine was used (with collaboration by William Denman himself) for a follow-up, Labyrinth. All three were out by October.
In January 1981, he made improvements to a routine “that allows graphics to be stored as data”, leading to the more elaborate game Asylum (out by the release of their Spring 1981 catalog). Corr also claimed (post-Asylum) that he was going to write one more game with “octagonal rooms” and “use a space station or similar setting.” Corr is only credited on Asylum II with the “graphics”, so he apparently either relaxed on game development to focus on MIT or switched to working on the space station game (which never came out).
There are three other lost Med Systems we know about from the 1981 catalog, which all seem to be from Denman in 1980: Samurai, Starlord, and Bureaucracy (out at least by September). The first two may not be adventures, but the last one describes itself directly as such:
Bureaucracy, the adventure of government agencies, places you in the role of an amateur mechanic who has devised a way to get 80 mpg from your old Cadillac. Your mission is to bring this cheap technology to the attention of the Department of Energy Assistance (DOEA). You must get past hordes of secretaries, muddle through myriad forms, and mix with middle management. But don’t lose yourself in DOEA’s great office building, the Octagon, and be sure to get finished before 4:30. In addition to the standard adventure features, Bureaucracy offers soft-keys for short conversations with the various personalities you will encounter and a “mini” 3-D graphics display.
All this establishes a picture of a company whose history is settled, even though it has a couple lost games (that will hopefully turn up one day). Today’s game throws that for a loop. It is not listed in any advertisement or catalog for Med Systems, yet it clearly uses the Frank Corr engine and I am fairly certain it is by Frank Corr himself (with or without Denman helping). It is a lost game that we didn’t even know was lost.
I found it while searching the same German archive I found Geheimagent XP-05. For the most part, the games there I recognized, although there are some German translations that I hadn’t seen (like one of Assignment 45). On disk 15 I found a file called MADHOUSE.CMD. There is a known Mad House game from 1983 but that’s a regular text adventure by Peter Kirsch written in BASIC. The CMD suggested the file on disk 15 was machine code so I gave it a load and was shocked by what I saw.
Above is the starting screen when you boot the game; there’s no mention of Med Systems. It has the inventory to the right like Deathmaze 5000 and Labyrinth and feels like an intermediate game between Labyrinth and Asylum. Was it a test game of some sort? That suggests it was written perhaps starting in October 1980, and for some reason shelved before Asylum came out. (Maybe the routine Frank Corr found in January made him want to start over?)
If that’s the case, then how did it get out? (I also considered if it was possible this was a third-party hack. While people made their own games with the Scott Adams database format, Madhouse is pure machine code and doesn’t lend itself to getting modified without modern tools.)
I have played a fair amount and nothing matches either Asylum game. It could be the Asylum material will creep in or it could all be brand new. Either way I don’t understand how the Germans have a copy. Perhaps some content in the game itself will help (Denman appears in Asylum II, so cameos aren’t impossible).
You start in a 1×1 cell with no bed or items. The only thing I could find that worked was to YELL. This causes an elevator sound, and a “sadistic guard” to approach.
He drops a “green key” but it does not open the door. The only thing to do is to YELL again whereupon you get “hit by a rubber truncheon” and end up in another cell, in the dark.
The dark cell is a 2 by 1 room so you need to move slightly before finding the right wall where OPEN DOOR acknowledges there is a door there.
Now UNLOCK DOOR WITH GREEN KEY will work (just like Asylum 1 & 2 the game is fussy about complete sentences). This opens the map up wide:
Every door that has been passed through will unlock with the green key from the start of the game (except the elevator, which is already unlocked). Every other door either requires a different key (or lockpick, or grenade pin, or whatnot).
Facing “east” after leaving the starting room.
Near the start (to the “west” after passing through some locked doors, note there’s no compass so my directions are arbitrary) are two people in rooms. One of them wants to sell you a fuse for “5 gold coins”…
…and the other describes themselves as a “pyrotechnician” with no further clarification.
Past that is a section which can be confusing to map.
The Xes are placed so that in particular positions it looks the same in every direction. As long as you’re careful mapping it’s fine, but it does give the effect of a spinner or teleporter Wizardry-style without resorting to actually moving the player around.
That is, it is easy to lose track if you’re facing north, south, east, or west while passing through this “same visual in every direction” type of intersection.
Mind you, the game is perfectly happy to resort to teleporters like with Labyrinth; stepping on the northwest tile sends the player elsewhere, although I haven’t fully mapped out the result yet.
Out in the open to the south are some boxes (in the standard Med System style) with a variety of explode-y objects: gun powder, lighter fluid, and golden lighter. You can take the gun powder back to the “pyrotechnician” and they are willing to trade for a firework rocket and a bottle.
Fortunately you can use the word INMATE (like the Asylum games). The game runs out of characters if you attempt to type GIVE GUN POWDER TO PYROTECHNICIAN.
Finally, in addition to the teleport square in the corner (which I’m ignoring for now), there’s an elevator and a “transporter” device. The transporter is an item you can pick up but it is too heavy to move, and it has a button. It doesn’t work yet but there’s a “fuseholder with a fuse” that is suggestive.
Unfortunately, PRESS RED BUTTON gets the message “Bad construction” which might mean some kind of bug. My guess is the fuse needs to be replaced first, via the inmate who wants 5 gold coins.
The elevator works normally without issues as long as you close the door behind you.
Level one has a guard that says to go back to your cell.
You can also get yourself trapped by a “protective steel wall”. Nothing else is accessible (for now).
Level two is where the player starts, and level three represents another large map, although some squares have mines (the screen turns white, you die).
Clearly the next step is to work on the third floor and the area reached by the teleporter, but teleporting and death squares tend to make mapping take a long time, so I thought this would be a good place to report in.
If you want the game for yourself, I have a download link here. There are no hints or clues anywhere because there is no documentation that this game ever even existed.
Renga in Blue 
