Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Origin, the company based in Texas formed by Richard and Robert Garriott, is now mostly known for publishing the Ultima games and Wing Commander; it was founded due to Richard’s issues publishing Ultima 1 and Ultima 2 with other companies. Origin did keep a steady outflow of other products, including their first non-Ultima game, Caverns of Callisto (1983). It was written by Chuck Bueche, aka “Chuckles” (famous for appearing as a jester in some of the Ultima games).

One of those non-Ultima games — published a year before Wing Commander — was OMEGA.

Via Mobygames.

OMEGA was a game with a long gestation; Stuart B. Marks first had the concept in 1984, wanting to make a military robot game with vehicles controlled by the player’s programming. (An Apple II buff, he likely was influenced by Robot War.) Quoting Stuart himself:

I was so fascinated by the idea, that I continued refining the design and by late 1986 was calling it “Tank Battle”.

The design kept evolving, and Marks, who was living in Austin local to Origin already, eventually got the company interested enough by the summer of 1987 to publish the project. It still went through many rounds of modifications from there…

The idea of making the player an employee of the Organization for Strategic Intelligence, grew from a conversation with friends during a round of beers at a local tavern. Later, Richard Garriott, the author of the Ultima series, contributed a workable method of including manual control of the cybertanks, and Paul Neurath, the author of Space Rogue, came up with the idea for team play.

…with the product finally landing in 1989, after the publication of Ultima V (which Marks is credited on as a designer).

Stuart B. Marks posing with his game. Source.

The game is truly a product of the 80s, with a 270 page manual titled CYBERTANK ENGINEER’S HANDBOOK with programming instructions, a free BBS people could log in on to share creations, and an official tournament sponsored by Computer Gaming World:

It was exciting to see all of the tanks duking it out trying to make it to the final round of six tanks, and even more exciting to actually see the final round. Glued to the computer screen I tried to decipher how each tank was working.

I was having trouble finding a video of the game playing it “seriously” (with programming / commentary) but I picked one that at least gives an idea of what the combat is like.

All this, you may notice, is way past 1982, and according to at least the manual nothing Stuart wrote was published that year. After first going into his “professional” level play in tennis and golf:

Stuart attended the University of Texas, studying accounting to learn new methods of depreciating his Apple II computer. Ostensibly purchased to “help with homework”, the computer soon became a tool for dealing with his lifelong fascination with games… and VisiCalc was replaced by Pong. Fortunately, there weren’t many games that really captured Stuart’s attention, and he began developing his own entertainment ideas.

Since 1981, Stuart has created eight different games for the personal computer. The first to be published is OMEGA. As long as Stuart has to take time away from sports to have his rackets restrung and his golf clubs regripped, you can bet he’ll continue his pursuit of the software side of gaming.

We’ve seen this sort of “early adventure amnesia” before (like with Eldorado Gold); what this biography leaves out is a game Marks co-wrote with Richard A. Bliss titled Pillage Village. It was published by “R & S Software Marketing Services”.

I have not found the name of this company elsewhere and the “R” and “S” (I assume standing for Richard and Stuart respectively) mean this was probably a self-published game, and one with not very much reach at all because the only copy I’ve been able to find is one with a long “cracker” message in the intro.

It isn’t listed on Mobygames or any of the other regular sites; I only learned about it when Adam L. (who comments regularly on my Apple II posts) found a copy while digging through his files. (It’s also on the ASIMOV Apple II archive.)

I assume there was a title screen but I don’t know if it can be rescued off the disk. The copyright / author / company information I just pulled straight from the disk’s files, they don’t show anywhere on the opening screens.

This scrolls up over the Ghostbusters logo.

I think the second author Richard A. Bliss is the same one who worked on software interfaces for the Army — basically the real life version of OMEGA — but I don’t have certainty so let’s segue into the game itself.

The game opens with you standing on the streets of a town village called Jollyville, with only a hat mentioned in your inventory. There are various stores, some of which have items with little asterisks around them (like *stamps*) indicating they are treasures. The goal is nab the treasures except in this case you are quite explicitly committing crime. That is, you must pillage the village.

The treasures go into the truck you start the game at (which has an empty gas can and peanuts to start with). Even the main character of It Takes a Thief was a little more subtle.

Despite us having many, many treasure hunts now…

…they aren’t actually that common on the Apple II! (Or at least, the Apple II game with Sierra-graphics style.) The big exception, Cranston Manor, was a port. Otherwise, the big looming influence has been the Roberta Williams games which didn’t use the Crowther/Woods/Scott Adams formula. Even games you might expect lean into the treasure aspect like Mummy’s Curse tended to focus on one treasure item rather than many.

Just carting away valuable items is a good way to get caught by the omnipresent invisible police, who hover nearby at all times like Urban Upstart.

For example, just to the south of the start is an art gallery. Go in and you’ll find a *Picasso*…

…and if you try to take it, you’ll be “SHOT ON THE SPOT FOR THINKING ABOUT STEALING A PAINTING IN HERE”. With a non-lethal bullet apparently, since this lands you in the jail.

Along the same street to the south is a toy store, and a sporting goods store, and both appear to be empty.

If there was some manual text (or info on the first disk erased by the crackers) I might expect some context about the village being abandoned for some reason. Most shops are either empty or they contain one treasure (with the alert police ready to spring if you take it). The overall feeling is more like post-apocalyptic rather than just urban sleaze.

I’ve divided the map into three regions, starting with the one above (the southwest side). In addition to the art gallery that somehow has a Picasso, and the empty toy and sporting stores, there’s a City Dump (smelly), a boarded up jewelry store, and a pawn shop with the only visible person in town. The pawn shop’s only available item is a sledgehammer.

Moving on to the southeast side of town…

…there’s a lone telephone booth, just like Urban Upstart, but unlike in that game you can’t use it because the phone has simply been ripped out.

There’s a kennel and a hardware store at the same corner. The hardware store apparently has nothing although there’s a sign about wire cutters in aisle 2. I have not been able to find any but I might be missing some kind of search verb. (Although knowing this game, it might be just adding some extra dose of dystopia.)

The kennel has a guard dog. I haven’t tried to interact with it yet.

There are two other places in this area of note, one being a giant auto lot, which apparently managed to sustain whatever … happened to Jollyville.

There’s a *Corvette* here.

The Jollyville Post Office is abandoned because the workers are on strike. There are *stamps* here and you can take them without the police doing anything.

On to the northeast side, which is almost just as chipper as the other two sections!

There’s a bank with a sign about how TELLERS HELP IN ALL TRANSACTIONS but no teller. Here’s where I really suspect I’m missing a verb of some sort.

There’s also an antique shop with an inaccessible showcase…

…a gas station (with gas at $8.69 per gallon, which is meant to be comically ludicrous)…

…and a hi-fi center with a stereo that the police are watching like a hawk.

I should also mention there’s a “gutter” (which can’t seem to be entered, pried at, etc. at least for now) and a place “behind” an electric company but no way to get in.

All this leads to a curious atmosphere where I’m not sure where I should be prodding. The only logical thing is the sledge hammer, where the pawn shop owner won’t let you take it but he will let you “borrow” it for ten minutes for what I assume is a smash-a-thon. There’s a brick out in a random spot but I haven’t been able to do any smashing with that, nor have I experimented much yet with the other items; I figured I needed the layout of the map first.

This is the sort of game where I need to work out what the norms are. Just how violent is our character being? Is this like Williamsburg Adventure where anything goes, including rolling an entire cannon to a shop and shooting someone dead with it? When do the police care about something and when do they not care? Will the game be sad if I steal from the pawn store owner (or attack him) or is that entirely within the fair bounds of what the game expects? I think the most clear example of this being a problem is how in It Takes a Thief we could shoot a person dead but not a dog. I can’t make any assumptions about where the game’s moral limits are.