Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

We’ve had semi-famous adventure game writer Brian J. Betts featured here already with The Secret of Flagstone Manor, but today we feature the other semi-famous bedroom coder from Australia, Darryll D. Reynolds.

Just like Brian, Darryl started with the TRS-80 before switching to Commodore 64, although he went through Tandy Color Computer and Vic-20 on the way. He started with self-publishing and later worked through agents, first under the name Gameworx and later under the name SoftGold (meaning an example credit might be “from Gameworx, published by Computer Classics”). Commenting in a thread about his work from 2012:

Thanks for all the comments (good or otherwise) and it pleases me to see there is still an interest in this style of game. Back then when I saw an opportunity to write my own games I was playing with a Tandy TRS 80 until the Commodore Vic 20 appeared – what a lot of fun, hardly any memory, rudimentary graphics, tape storage. At the time, use of keyboard graphics for an adventure game was a real novelty but it added more to a plain text adventure. When the c64 appeared it was paradise !

For TRS-80 (and CoCo) he had three games advertised. We don’t have any of them in either format.

Australian Personal Computer, April 1983.

“AFRICAN ODD” is the most obscure of the set. It might be a mis-spelled attempt to write “African Odyssey” but with an abbreviation applied. It may be the same game as King Solomon’s Mines (not to be confused with the Betts game King Solomon’s Mines; the double-naming ended up creating a copyright dispute between Reynolds and Betts). Castle Tollenkar and Death Star both got versions for VIC-20; unfortunately, while we have the box art, we currently don’t have a copy of Castle Tollenkar in VIC-20 format either.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.

Castle Tollenkar incidentally shares a made-up-fantasy-proper-name with a 1980 TTRPG campaign from the United States: Tollenkar’s Lair published by Metagaming, design by none other than Steve Jackson (of later GURPS and Munchkin fame). While Tollenkar’s Lair involves a labyrinth underneath a forest there is a faint chance the naming is not coincidence based on the bizarre plot description of Castle:

You stand on a windswept crag overlooking an eerie castle. Below you is the Black Forest, dark and menacing. You must gain entry to the castle, find any items needed and recover Castle Tollenkar’s treasure, but watch out for the occupants – any traps set by them.
Can you find the treasure?
Better still, can you find the castle?

We are overlooking a castle and a forest at the same time, and the castle is hard to find? A Commodore newsletter’s attempt at a review just says

We couldn’t even get into the castle in this one, very frustrating! Even with a cheater’s peek at the listing we were still stumped, any ideas?

This suggests something more like the hidden labyrinth of the Steve Jackson campaign, but it really may just be a coincidence. If/when a copy of the game is rescued we’ll have to test this theory further.

(My guess is “when”, for if nothing else, there’s a Darryll Reynolds collection at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, which is far more preservation than most our adventure authors get.)

Tollenkar himself from the front cover of the “Adventure Supplement”, with a system far more obscure than D&D (Fantasy Trip) and far less likely to make it over the globe from Texas. Still, it’s possible.

Hence I’m going to start with Death Star (even though it seems to be one of the later VIC-20 conversions, based on the ad, it technically was written first); it has the added bonus attribute that it didn’t get remade later in the familiar C64 format most people remember (along with other platforms like Plus/4) so VIC-20 is the only way we can experience it now.

The Rim War of 2685 has reached its final stage. The Jillyan super weapon “DEATH STAR” approaches Terra on the final mission of destruction. You have been secretly teleported aboard with instructions to destroy it at all costs. Your escape is of secondary importance. Can you set your demolition charges and escape before the deadline is reached? Good luck. You are Terra’s last chance!

— From the game instructions, via the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

It was written for a regular TRS-80 (16K of memory) but runs for VIC-20 on an unexpanded VIC, that is, about a quarter of the same amount. There’s some precedent for this, as Brian Howarth cut down his TRS-80 version of The Golden Baton into 8K for a conversation, but that’s still not the same amount of reduction! This game manages the reduction via splitting the game into six parts and as you transition from one to the other you wait for the next tape load to happen.

From the original 1977 Star Wars.

Tape load number one is just the introduction, including music.

We are to be teleported into the enemy base, so it isn’t exactly like Star Wars.

Having this done in a “slide sequence” rather than one text sequence is another go at trying to make the VIC-20 “cinematic” like Secret Mission.

The first loading screen (there already was one tape load to get here).

You land at a SMALL CABIN where, conveniently, a locker has a LASER and a CHARGE, as long as you remember to do LOOK not once but twice. I’m used to it but I’m really starting to get grumpy at this convention (examine a container multiple times to unearth more things).

The VIC-20 only has 3.5 KB of space for BASIC programs, so here’s the entire chunk the starts the game:

Despite the simplicity — you can just walk to the “exit” to the next tape load — this area turned out to be a bear, mainly because of verb issues. In fact, the very start you need an “isolate verb”, a verb I have never seen before in an adventure game and quite possibly never will see again. With the LASER and the CHARGE, you are supposed to ARM LASER to put the two together. Trying to INSERT CHARGE crashes the game.

UNDEF’D STATEMENT
ERROR IN 58

Trying to LIST 58 gets a blank response; the game is using tricks to keep the source code from being easily visible, which only works well when you don’t have a crash bug to worry about.

It doesn’t prevent LIST altogether, but it causes lines to get drawn on top of each other and line numbers to be jumbled.

To the south of the start there’s a CASE.

I AM IN A STORE DEPOT

I SEE CASE.

Typing OPEN CASE gets the response

I CAN’T TRANSLATE

which is the game’s “I don’t understand” message. I really had no idea what to visualize here; the game neglected to mention this is a “locked” container (or at least sealed) so we are supposed to SHOOT it. (Please remember the verb SHOOT, it will come up again momentarily.)

Shooting the case reveals a prism; LOOK PRISM indicates it is green and glows. That’s all the direction you get, and like a fantasy game, you’re supposed to RUB it.

While the prism will roll over in inventory to the next tape load, RUB will not work on it anymore; you’ll get the I CAN’T TRANSLATE response instead. Every time the tape loads the verb set of the game changes. This gets very nasty soon, but first, let’s show off going east from the start.

If you press the button right now, you’ll get ejected into space and die. Also, if you go east…

…and go east again, you’ll get caught by a stormtroopers Jillyan marines and die.

The only way forward is up the ladder, which is the next tape load (63 seconds!)

Now we get to the astonishing part:

The verb SHOOT no longer works. If you SHOOT TROOPER you will die. Furthermore, it isn’t clear that this is a wrong-verb issue; the game just says “THE TROOPER CHARGES” if you try to shoot. Despite SHOOT being the verb used already, now the game wants BLAST, and by this point I had reached for a walkthrough by Garry Francis.

I also read the walkthrough’s general advice, and some excerpts:

If you GO ELEVATOR in part 2, that bypasses a part. As you can’t return to a previous part, this makes the game unwinnable, so don’t GO ELEVATOR. If you get killed, you are given the opportunity to restart, but it only restarts that part. In most cases, this won’t help, so you’ll have to restart from scratch.

Each part has its own vocabulary with just a handful of verbs and they aren’t the same verbs in each part. For example, GET and DROP don’t work in part 3.

All verbs are identified by the first two letters, so there is no distinction between PUSH and PULL for example. Despite this, the parser assumes a verb length when parsing the noun, so LO LOCKER will not work, but LOOK LOCKER, LOCK LOCKER, LOVE LOCKER and LOZZ LOCKER will all assume you want to look at the locker.

The walkthrough includes a list of verbs for all the parts, but the whole sequence above already exhausted me enough so I’m going to pause for the moment and hope the verb list gets me to the end next time.