House Adventure first appeared in the “tape magazine” Chromasette, the January 1983 issue. We’ve seen Chromasette before with games like Williamsburg Adventure that were republished by Microdeal in the UK for the Dragon; this game was not given a similar treatment.
The Chromasette team, on the back page of the January 1983 letter.
What’s unusual about the distribution history of this game is that it is now better-known for its port to the Tandy 100, the “first commercially successful notebook computer”.
CASA has the game but does not mention the origins in Chromasette; the year is listed as “unknown” because the version in archives (from “Club 100”) has no date. Jim Gerrie then ported the game to TRS-80 MC-10, meaning he essentially took a game for Tandy CoCo that was ported to Tandy 100 and ported it back to Tandy CoCo without realizing that was the original platform. (The MC-10 technically predates the CoCo, but: close enough.) Gerrie included a number of bug fixes which is worrying but I started out by playing the original and hoping these aforementioned bugs slipped into the portable version of the game.
From the newsletter:
“Remember, the imposter is last”. Yes, that is a clue to solving House Adventure. And no, won’t tell you anymore. It took us a few times to figure out what the clue meant (we still haven’t solved the adventure, though). For you new adventurers, you are searching for 20 items located in the house.
“20 items” literally just means everything you can pick up. There are no “treasures” specifically (even though some items are valuable); your goal is: grab everything that isn’t nailed down.
The “we still haven’t solved the adventure” implies both a.) this was not done in-house, but via outside submission and b.) they were willing to publish the game without bug-testing all the way through. (Again, worrying!)
I do like the enigmatic aura of “the imposter is last” being given without further instructions, though.
Despite the game previously having no author — the Model 100 copy took out the credit — it exists in the CoCo version. The game is by Drew Haines of Brooksville, Florida. He has another adventure coming for 1983 (also published in Chromosette) with over 1500 rooms. This game is not nearly as large.
Could a Tandy CoCo maven explain how this is done? If you start listing from 1 you won’t see the credit.
You start inside the house, in a foyer at a “locked door”. (In a haunted house game it’d typically start you on the porch and then have the door slam locked as you walk in; this isn’t really a haunted house as much as a fantasy-adjacent one.) Since the objective is to get objects out of the house you need to unlock the door first before getting any points.
In addition to the placement and wording of screens being a “signature” of sorts, the parser itself can be distinctive. In this case, if you type SEARCH BOX you’ll get the message YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY! Any verb that starts with N, S, E, W, U, or D is counted as a direction. I’ve never seen this exact behavior before, and it certainly can be deceptive in practice.
This is really trying to go EAST.
At first glance, the house of the adventure is divided into four floors, that you can hop between via an elevator. (You might notice a phone booth on the map. There’s a booth on some of the floors, and they’ll be important later. Additionally the “at first glance” is there because there’s a secret fifth floor.)
Rooms are otherwise straightforward (YOU ARE IN A DINING ROOM, YOU ARE IN A FAMILY ROOM, YOU ARE IN A BEDROOM)…
This does have the advantage of giving the right amount of text for a Model 100 screen.
…with only a few items “in the open” to grab right away. Floor 1 you can get a wooden box and a flashlight, but you cannot get the carving knife on the same floor due to a pesky vampire.
In general, the other floors are similar. While the second floor has some diamonds out in the open…
…as well as a hairbrush and a banjo, those are the only items you can take easily, as the ming vase that you undoubtedly need is being guarded by an insane monk.
The monk is unimpressed by banjo music. The blank link response is because the feedback response to PLAY BANJO is audio.
There are also “100’s” [sic] of gold coins, which is too many to take unless you are holding the wooden box from the starting room.
For the top floor…
…there’s even less to look at, as a sorcerer’s handbook is guarded by a leopard, and a room just to the south of the leopard has batteries and another hairbrush. In case you are wondering why there’s a second hairbrush, that’s the “imposter”:
Finally there’s the basement. You need both the flashlight from the starting floor and the batteries from the top floor to explore; while holding both you can then use the syntax LIGHT ON or LIGHT OFF. (I tried INSERT BATTERIES, FIX BATTERIES, etc. first; they just need to be held along with the flashlight.)
The dirt floor east of the freezer will come into play later.
While there’s a BAG OF GOLD down at a TORTURE ROOM with a SET OF STOCKS, the other two objects (wrinkled parchment, can of bug spray) are both guarded.
to summarize, we have…
- A vampire guarding a knife
- An insane monk guarding a ming vase
- A leopard guarding a sorcerer’s handbook
- A protoplasmic blob guarding a parchment
- A savage beast guarding a can of bug spray
…with a banjo, a flashlight with batteries, and a hairbrush as our only real tools. All three of them have pairings with the foes listed. Two of the pairings kind of make sense, one of them ramps up to nonsense.
The book left behind provides some magic words.
We’ll worry about those momentarily. For the second pairing, the banjo is enough to calm the “savage beast” (which at least is explicitly described that way to get the cliche phrase; I’m not used to thinking at the level of individual word choice with a tapemag game, that’d be more expected in something pun-heavy like Quondam).
That bug spray you get from the beast then goes to the protoplasmic blob. The parchment then left behind is the second part of the book (letting you know the magic words get used in the telephone booth, living room, and dining room).
Again, we’ll save dealing with the magic words for a little bit later, as let’s take out the last obstacles (the vampire and monk). The vampire takedown is the one that doesn’t make sense.
I guess it’s a sunlight-providing flashlight? Or maybe the vampire has some alternate lore? (The problem with using the “fan fiction shortcut” as I’ve called it is that there’s enough fan fiction universes it can be hard to tell which one the game is in.) You can then KILL MONK while holding the knife at the monk.
The monk reappeared for me in the basement elevator. It’s random, and it’s only a problem if he reappears somewhere where there’s an item, and then like ADV.CAVES — which had a kitten that scared a dragon — you have to re-do a puzzle solve.
Now it’s time for the magic! The words were ABRACADABRA, SHAZAAM, SEERSUCKER, and UGABOON, and the locations were TELEPHONE BOOTH, LIVING ROOM, and DINING ROOM. There is no particular logic which goes where; if you get one wrong you will be “disoriented” and get teleported to a different room, but it won’t end the game or anything like that.
There might be some random assignment, but for me, SEERSUCKER in the living room gave me a dime…
…and from there I was not able to get anything else to happen in any of the telephone booths or in the dining room. I started to get worried enough to check the walkthrough by Dale Dobson in case the bugs were not just in the Tandy 100 port.
The walkthrough mentions getting a leather glove in the basement phone booth somehow. I tried on a different save state and it worked (SEERSUCKER again); it seems to work and not work at random. Dale’s next step is to hack the inventory to give himself a shovel, and after enough fiddling I am able to report that the folks at Chromasette really should have tested the game to the end before publishing it. Dale’s playthrough is pure chaos and arguably is the buggiest I’ve ever seen in a published game. For example, holding the dime is supposed to cause teleportation with the telephone booths (I think I got it to happen once by accident, but otherwise I never got anything to trigger). Letting Dale take over:
What’s going on with the telephone booth rooms? They seem a lot more stable since I restarted. Do they react to having the dime in inventory? Yes! Now they start teleporting us randomly around again. But while the design intends for it to be possible to reach a “secret” fourth telephone booth in a separate section of the third floor we can’t otherwise reach, it’s nearly impossible for this to happen given the random number algorithm used in line 7. This can be patched imperfectly by changing the code to randomly pick a number between 0 and 5, instead of 0 and 4; the odds of it being greater than or equal to 4 are much better now. (After the fact, I realize that multiplying the random number by 4.999 would prevent a bad value of 5 from coming up without substantially altering the odds of it being 4.)
The whole thing is worth a read, but for my purposes I swerved over to Jim Gerrie’s version of the game. I also swapped my screen colors to be white on black just to change things up (and to be able to tell the two versions of the game apart).
I proceeded to try to speedrun up to the point I was, although I got foiled a little by a.) the map being slightly different (Gerrie removed some of the “wraparound” exits) and b.) the presence of the glove on the first floor, the one I previously got via magic word.
This is how I found out “the imposter” can be something other than a hairbrush. The idea is that some item in the house chosen at random has a duplicate somewhere, and that item is the imposter; since I already had the game mapped out I could simply note down if an item was in a place where it wasn’t supposed to be, but that wouldn’t have been as doable the first time around. (That is, I could map everything and find the duplicate, but as far as I can tell there’s no intrinsic way to tell which one of the duplicates isn’t real!)
On a reboot I found the wooden box here, when the regular wooden box is in the starting room with the locked door.
Proceeding through again, I got the dime, and tried taking it to the telephone booth, where this time I was teleported to a new area. (This is dark, so you need the flashlight again.)
The dry ice needs the glove (the one appearing from magic word, not the imposter-glove that kills you); a werewolf guards a pillow…
The werewolf really needs that 800 thread count.
…and you can nab a shovel in a room with a mainframe.
The mainframe is oddly specific and possibly a clue about the author’s background; I haven’t found anything more than the name and address.
I wasn’t sure how to deal with the werewolf, but I figured the shovel needed to go back to the basement and the dirt floor.
You have to dig twice (as is the grand old tradition), unearthing a rusty key and some garlic. This took care of my last two obstacles, the front door of the house and the werewolf. (I mean, I normally would use garlic on the vampire, but the vampire already was driven away by a flashlight.)
It’s not quite trivial to get to the end; the logistics are irritating, and there’s enough random aspects it’s not hard to end up having your flashlight run out of power. (This is true even though Jim Gerrie bumped up the number of turns it lasted!) I mentioned earlier how the monk moved around; I later found myself wanting to get the leather glove (magic word in the basement phonebooth, same as before, but a random magic word) and found two of the house’s critters now had moved in.
I had to get the banjo and the hairbrush in order to get the glove. What makes this even “better” is that if you drop an item outside, it disappears, so it is quite easy to have your game softlocked at this point.
While dealing with these annoyances, I had taken what I thought were all the objects, but I guess not, because I grabbed the “imposter” box and died!
I gave it all one more try from the top, this time trying to avoid disturbing any of the enemies until I absolutely had to (you can use the magic words without finding the book/parchment first) but still found myself teleporting from a lit telephone booth into a dark one and–
I’m out. I’m pretty sure I got the full experience, and again, both Dale’s account and Jim’s bugfix post are worth reading.
Now the 3rd floor phone booth will always transfer you to another phone booth, even without having the dime, so you can’t get trapped on the 3rd floor before getting the dime. This can happen if you get there by discovering and testing out the magical words, which can zap you to random rooms. Text adventures shouldn’t just be about meticulously recreating movement patterns learned after continuous arbitrary failures. They should be about figuring out clues and solving puzzles while exploring.
Coming up: what is hopefully a less buggy CoCo game. At least this one the editor didn’t make the grand announcement they didn’t beat the game before publishing it.
Renga in Blue 
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