Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

We have — or at least had — the early timeline of Med Systems well-understood.

They were founded by William Denman out of North Carolina, and they were the ones responsible for

Reality Ends (1980)
Deathmaze 5000 (1980)
Labyrinth (1980)
Asylum (1981)
Asylum II (1982)

the latter four being first-person “blobber adventure” style games with an engine by Frank Corr, Jr.

Via eBay.

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.