Last time, I mentioned three books published at the incorporation of Shinkigensha. One of them was an NEC PC “yearbook”, essentially an encyclopedia of software.
Looking at the inside front cover, you can see publication info.
This includes a publication date (March 10, 1983, noting it is a first printing), the creator (The Micro Communication Editorial Department), the publisher (Shinkigensha Co., Ltd.), the company responsible for the cover and layout (Palm House), the companies responsible for production (Bunkasha and Fukuda Kogei), the companies doing printing and binding (Live Printing and AN Offset), and finally the company doing advertising (Micro House).
There’s also the line
発行人 桐野敏博
indicating the individual publisher representative is Toshihiro Kirino. This is out of a staff of 10, and Bunji Yonekura was the President at this time.
Referring back to Toshihiro Kirino: later in life he became chairman of the education software company LINES (the website is education dot jp, just to give you an idea of their prominence) but he also has some history prior to Shinkigensha.
Most directly clear is a reference in a 1980 book (about a handmade newspaper from Japanese Prisoners of War on Leyte Island). The book cites Mr. Toshihiro Kirino of Live Printing (along with Mr. Atsuo Takeuchi of Saikosha, another printing company) as helping with restoring the old handwritten text. Note how Kirino is associated with a company that worked with Shinkigensha but not the company itself. (This might be another situation where the two were informally affiliated in some way, like it is possible Micro House and Shinkigensha were.)
Less clear to me is if he’s the same person associated with the Japanese New Left (specifically the “Kyoto University All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee”) and an incident of alleged attempted bombing at the residence of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner General. None of this is implausible, but given that this Toshihiro Kirino was indicted (and then acquitted) under the Explosives Control Act, I’d prefer some absolute confirmation before getting more into the story. (Also adding plausibility is the president of Shinkigensha in ’83 came from the same academic leftist circles; he authored various articles in socialist magazines in the late 60s.) This will likely all end up as a future standalone post. I’ll link something I wrote four years ago in relation to the movie Akira as compensation for now.
July 1972 cover of The Situation. The top article by Toshihiro Kirino is specifically about the incident.
Returning to the game, I suspected I was missing some mechanical aspect to how it worked. Indeed I was. It turns out that objects only exist in a room if you’ve applied LOOK (that is, miru or miwatsu) to the room. Doors are an exception but they aren’t treated as normal objects; they are hard-coded into particular rooms.
Entering the deck with a cannon, trying to examine the cannon and being rebuffed, looking at the room, then trying to examine the cannon again. We are then told it can fire 32-pound cannonballs.
This is extraordinary behavior and we’ve only seen this in one other game: Omotesando Adventure. I was a little faster to pick up on the issue in Omotesando because you can’t even open doors without looking; here it seemed like everything was normal, and I was doing LOOK during my exploration process just to keep oriented (since the game by default only gives room descriptions). It meant for a little while I could refer to objects, but on my pass where I was trying to search things or do other actions (but I didn’t use LOOK because I already knew what was there) I was failing because the game was pretending the noun I was using didn’t exist in the room.
With that figured out, I set about systematically examining things and searching things, for real this time. The various masts explain what they are (the mizzenmast is the one at the back of the ship, according to the game). The barrels are still ordinary (I think I examined them right the first time) as are the desks (sadly, still didn’t find anything, ugh). I also tried various random verbs that seemed appropriate, like using SLEEP on the hammock.
“Rest as long as you like.” (Real time delay.) “It’s time to wake up and get moving.”
I found out that I made a translation error in the armory and what I had down as a cannon was actually a cannonball (this may have been more a note-reading error than a translation error, since it went as cannonball in my notes but cannon on the map). I found I could take the cannonball, but I haven’t been able to do anything with it yet. (Before anyone asks, I did try to put it in the cannon, with the caveat that none of the verbs seem particularly appropriate for that. No luck, but the cannon would need more in it to work than just a cannonball normally anyway. I also tried all four of the “destroy” related verbs on the hatch while holding the cannonball, and also trying to throw it while I was standing there.)
Most interesting were the skeletons / skulls, who seethe with “angry spirits”. Searching them does not go well.
The sorrowful cries of the sailors echo through the ship.
“Grant us peaceful slumber!” they plead.
Pray for them… “Amen.”
Unfortunately, while SPEAK AMEN and SAY AMEN both are recognized (or rather, “amen speak” and “amen say”, in the order needed) the only response I’ve gotten is nothing happened. This perhaps needs to be done somewhere special.
Even after feeling I’ve got the hang of the parser, I’m terribly stuck. I’ll give things a little more time but I’m probably going to break open the rest of the source code (I’ve only just looked at the verb / noun data). Any more suggestions on what to try are welcome.
I haven’t made as much progress as I’d like — it’s still The Phantom Ship except in the sense of being a ship where searching reveals nothing — but I’ll give a report anyway.
Before starting on gameplay, I have a piece of history to cover. (Rather, I have three pieces of history, but I’m just doing one for now to spread it all out.) Technically speaking, the creator of Yuureisen was not Shinkigensha but Micro House.
From the ad above — selling the game on tape, prior to PC Magazine launching — the publisher of the upcoming magazine is listed as Shinkigensha and the creator is listed as The Micro Communication, with a different address than Shinkigensha’s listed on the bottom. This doesn’t mean they were actually fully separate; they may have been essentially an informal spinoff that got pulled into the fold once the incorporation became official (exactly the month of the ad).
Three books are also listed as being newly published, and they aren’t the sort of thing that would have been created on the spot; this seems like a setup that was some time in the making (at least overlapping the exact publishing date of the original Phantom Ship type-in that Rob came up with, November 20 of 1982).
An ad the month before (see picture) doesn’t mention the Shinkigensha deal at all, but it does mention selling VHS copies of PC Sunday, 15,000 yen each!
Back to the game: I have, at least, what I think is an accurate map.
As a reminder, there are some exits where after going in a particular direction, the game will give a prompt (either up/down or left/right) so some paths actually split (even though walking back the other direction may not have a prompt at all). Entering what I’m considering the three “floors” requires going west to a stairway, choosing up/down, and then having the game move you to the floor. That is, there is no real stairway room, but I put them on my map because otherwise I was getting befuddled.
Also, while I’ve been thorough, there’s a slight chance I still have a translation that’s off (especially as far as ship terms go) and any item that’s singular may actually be plural (“hammock” seems more likely “hammocks” in the lower decks, for instance).
Some of the doors can be opened right away and some of them are locked. I do not have a key.
On the map below of the upper-back area there are four doors, two each lead to officer quarters (identical with a desk and skeleton) and two are locked. Here I am entering the Officer Quarters 2, trying to search the desk (“tsukue”, possibly “table”), and finding nothing:
More on the specific search verb later.
The bottom section seems like it ought to have something:
At the far south, a hatch I can’t do anything aside from the locked door; there’s also hammocks, barrels, cannons, and another desk/table just to the north of that.
At the center of the lower deck, searching all the items including the desk, with nothing found each time.
More locked doors are to the north: an armory with cannons, and a storage room with a mound of trash. You might think I’d find something searching the mound, but no luck. Finally, to the far north, is a pile of skeletons, which do nothing spooky other than hang out. This is like if Return of the Obra Dinn didn’t have the time-viewing mechanism and just had the bodies.
One last observation, this time on the main deck: there’s a boat in the center. One could presumably try to enter it and escape, and I tried to do that, but the game asked where I was going. Poking around the source code, there seems to be a map somewhere, so my suspicion is I need the map in hand first before escaping.
The next most obvious thing for me to do (which I do in my English playthroughs but also most especially in languages I’m not fluent in) was to make a verb list. The verb list is decently long on this one.
Fortunately, there’s no obfuscation, you can just do a LIST command.
Thinking about English for a moment: text adventures seem to have a very natural set of commands, but some of them are very much a product of standardization rather than what someone developing from scratch might come up with (or what an amateur playing might try to type). INVENTORY is a prominent adventure-specific example, being an odd word that Poker Night at the Inventory is clearly making a reference to adventure games. The very early game Mystery Mansion used LIST instead of INVENTORY.
Similarly, Journey uses DESCRIBE instead of EXAMINE or LOOK. It’s just cultural osmosis that EXAMINE LAMP seems more natural than DESCRIBE LAMP to an adventure gamer, and if Journey was the very first adventure, maybe the games that followed would use DESCRIBE instead.
EXAMINE also managed to get an early split in English with SEARCH, but in an inconsistent way. I’ve seen games with EXAMINE and SEARCH behave the same way but also ones where examine is “give a visual description” and SEARCH is “use your hands and check more thoroughly for something secret. SEARCH also may or may not imply opening a thing as you search it.
Every language stepping into adventures for the first time gets its own chance to interpret verb usage; Geheimagent XP-05 used AUSRUESTUNG (or “equipment”) for inventory, and put RUN as a command that was differentiated from other movement commands (it happens in English, but it’s still non-standard).
Back to The Phantom Ship: the act of examining something has four verbs associated with it:
I looked up all four on Jisho to get a sense of different shades of meaning…
(miru) to see; to look; to watch; to view; to observe
(miwatsu) to look out over; to survey (scene); to take an extensive view of
(sagasu) to search for; to look for; to hunt for; to seek
(shiraberu) to examine; to look up; to investigate; to check up; to sense; to study; to inquire; to search
…but this still doesn’t necessarily translate directly into the meaning of the actions! “Miru” and “miwatsu” both can serve the function of being given alone and giving a room description, but the other two words do not.
Applying miru and miwatsu to the start of the game.
When applied to a noun instead, miru and miwatsu seem to function like EXAMINE, and sagasu and shiraberu seem to function like SEARCH (assuming a parser with a split where SEARCH involves a more active looking process). The screenshot below involves checking a desk four times; miru and miwatsu call it “ordinary”, while sagasu and shiraberu state that nothing is found, implying a search by hand.
I’m still not fully confident I have all the details worked out, because I’ve applied search to a great deal of the ship and still haven’t found anything!
It turns out in practice the opens and closes are equivalent, but I still had to test this because it was non-obvious to me when eye-balling the definitions.
(akeru) to open (a door, etc.); to unwrap (e.g. parcel, package); to unlock
(hiraku) to open; to undo; to unseal; to unpack
There are four “destroy” type verbs (kowasu, tsubusu, hakaisuru, tataki) and while I can presume they all mean the same thing, I can’t even assume HIT and ATTACK refer to the same thing in an English game (I’ve seen ATTACK only apply to live enemies but hit get used on inanimate objects).
Other than that, there are versions of move, listen, eat, drink, pray, speak, and throw. Pray is notable for potentially being a “for fun” style verb that’s in there to let the player mess around (like accounting for swearing). (Or maybe there’s an altar where we really do have to pray, like Epic Hero 2!) At the moment pray just responds “nothing happens.”
I could just keep plowing through the source code but I’m fairly certain I haven’t quite done sagasu on absolutely every item, nor have I really tried destroying things in earnest. My guess is once I get past my current roadblock the rest of the game should go smoothly, but I may still be missing some fundamental aspect about how the game works.
1940 was a curious year to be starting a publishing company, but especially one in Tokyo.
This was in the midst of WW2, and the same year Italy, Germany, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact. Censorship was ongoing and total by 1941; The Japan Publishing Distribution Company (日本出版配給株式會社) was started to oversee all content, consolidating over 240 companies. There were essentially no notable literary works from 1941 until the end of the war; while The Makioka Sisters (considered Junichirō Tanizaki’s masterpiece) started serialization in 1943, it was stopped by the government and publication was only finished after the war.
August 1940 — a month before the Tripartite Pact — marked the founding of our company today, Shinkigensha. As you might expect, they came out from the very start with propaganda, like Showa Chronicles by Iwao Mitsuda (a year later the same author released a biography of Hitler with a different publisher) and A Guide to the New Order; the New Order refers to both the proposed “New Order in East Asia” (trying to cast Japan’s colonial project as a way of breaking from Western powers) and New Order as a movement, interested in imposing a state mass party and boosting nationalism.
In 1942, Shinkigensha published a book by a military celebrity: If You Go to War by Sakurai Tadayoshi.
Sakurai Tadayoshi was a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War; he suffered so many bullet and sword wounds that he was mistaken for a corpse and was discovered alive while being transported for cremation. He wrote a memoir in 1906 (Human Bullets); the concept of the title was “using one’s own body as a bullet”, essentially fierce close-quarters combat.
Suddenly a tremendous shout arose throughout our whole line; all the officers, with drawn swords and bloodshot eyes, rushed into the enemy’s forts, shouting and yelling and encouraging their men to follow. A hell-like struggle ensued, in which bayonet clashed against bayonet, fierce shooting was answered by fierce shooting, shouts and yells were mingled with the groans of the wounded and dying. The battle soon became ours, for, in spite of their desperate resistance, the enemy took to their heels, leaving behind them many mementos of their defeat. Banzai was shouted two or three times; joy and congratulation resounded on the heights of Kenzan, which was now virtually ours. The Flag of the Rising Sun was hoisted high at the top of the hill. This stronghold once in our hands, shall we ever give it back to the enemy?
The new book starts with an author note asking “why did the war break out?”, blaming Chiang Kai-shek of China “looking down” on Japan and Britain and the US “pulling the strings from behind”.
Unless we defeat the United States and Britain, the war with China will never be finished; we must cut off their hands as they attempt to take hold of China.
A year later, the same publisher printed Returning to the Homeland by Goro Nakano. Nakano was a reporter with the newspaper Asahi Shimbun who was in New York at the outbreak of war and was detained; the book is “the Pacific War as seen from America”.
Only a miracle might delay the outbreak of war. With Secretary of State Hull’s outrageous response to Japan on November 26, the U.S. government had already trampled upon Japan’s restraint and peaceful efforts.
(This is the “Hull Note” that demanded that Japan withdraw from China and French Indochina.)
Post-war involved a rapid reverse, including the eight volumes of Dr. Sakuzo Yoshino’s Collected Works on Democracy (published in 1946) as well as literature by Matsutaro Kawaguchi and Osamu Dazai the same year.
This reversal could be a.) starting as a true believer in fascism, but changing course for survival during the US occupation or b.) the founder being reluctant with the propaganda to begin with, and they’d really rather be doing something else. Despite the founding date being a puzzle, there’s good reason to think the latter, because the founder appears to be the erotic literature scholar Kenbun Matsukawa.
From the back pages of If You Go To War. The text along the top edge mentions The Japan Publishing Distribution Company.
松川健文 (Kenbun Matsukawa) is given as the publisher.
In a 1997 book, the scholar Toshio Takahashi calls Matsukawa “no mere purveyor of erotica, but instead a man of refined sensibilities”; in the early 1950s he published a series of booklets titled Curiosa through the “Tokyo Limited Edition Club” with essays (“Eroticism in Detective Fiction”, “Edo period sideshows”) and translations (with high-literary choices like Casanova, Henry Miller, and the ancient Greek play Lysistrata).
He also published A Study of Erotic Literature in 1948 (using the publisher name Logos), and it includes the important essay “On Obscenity”; despite the name of the author being different (Fumio Natsukawa) it likely was just Matsukawa using a pen name. This essay uses Havelock Ellis’s book The Psychology of Sex (in English) as a reference; instead of some absolute natural law, he calls the obscene an “emotional response under certain circumstances” and that it is simply a “violation of social etiquette” that is subjectively dependent on each individual person.
This was when it was possible to go to jail for publishing erotic material, and indeed he was sentenced to two months in 1950 for “selling obscene literature”; another scholar writing in 1969 called him a “nihilist” (in the same sense as Dazai Osamu) who made “significant” contributions in advancing the study of erotic literature.
These works were all in “alternative” presses; while all this was going on, Shinkigensha was busy with churning out “proper” work, including straight textbooks like “Stable Value Accounting: A Study of Inflation Accounting in Various Countries” (1949) and “Public Debt Economics” (1955). They also in the 60s published a “Collection of Literary Works by Junior High School Students” (for multiple years, for an annual prize) and in 1970 published “A Middle Schooler’s Guide to Daily Life”.
They switched gears starting in the 1980s, still with an underlying mission of conveying historical and technical information, but now aimed squarely at hobbyists. (Right before this, in 1979, they published the Comprehensive Research Study on Zainichi Koreans. It’s fair to guess this would not interest people playing with tabletop miniatures.) As far as why, it likely is because while they were founded a long time before, they only became incorporated on March 4, 1982. (Very loosely, it went from “family business” to “corporation”, allowing things like government contracts and limited liability.)
Their biggest niche after that became the Truth in Fantasy books.
From Shinkigensha’s Facebook page.
They’re a bridge between textbook and fantasy: they’re meant to be guides pulling elements from history and mythology to help with TTRPG games. Truth in Fantasy 4, Residents of a Fantasy World, tries to show what kind of characters one might meet in a campaign. Truth in Fantasy 10 is a guide to the deities of Taoism.
The company has guides outside the series of a similar flavor. The artist Mitsuhiro Arita (mostly known for Pokémon cards) did some work with Shinkigensha; his art in the stand-alone Arms & Armor Encyclopedia impressed Kenichi Iwao of Square Enix enough that he was offered a job. He made Final Fantasy XI content for ten years.
Other than that Shinkigensha became after known for
For the story today, the technology is our focus; in late 1981 they started a tabloid newspaper about personal computing, and in 1982 they helped create the program Pasokon Sunday (lasting until 1989); I’ve embedded below an episode from late in the run (1988):
The tabloid newspaper was eventually turned into a monthly newspaper, PC Magazine. (Not to be confused with the American magazine of the exact same title.) Here’s a page from their September 1983 issue:
Included during the newspaper phase was one marked January 1982 (published one or two months before).
The very last line has our game: Yuureisen, or The Phantom Ship, by Yasuhiro Kume. It was for PC-8001, the same machine Omotesando was on. This gets listed in archives as Yuureisen, but I’m giving it in translation for English audiences. I could have used Ghost Ship as the translation of the title, but there’s the faint possibility that some inspiration came from the 1950s animated short, or the 1960s manga and anime, and in both cases they include Phantom in their official English translation.
I unfortunately don’t have a copy of the original printing, and as far as I can tell nobody else does either. Tabloid newspaper format does not lend itself to preservation unless done actively. The Game Preservation Society in Japan has copies of all the magazines and none of the newspapers.
The game was reprinted in one of the magazines (June, by the time they went monthly), but the reprint is for a machine we haven’t had on this blog yet, the PC-8201. The one-digit difference hides that this is a much different system. The PC-8201 is a portable computer, NEC’s answer to the Tandy 100.
The game was actually published by Shinkigensha on tape before the June issue came out (price 3500 yen, shipping 240 yen), and the BASIC source code had bugs! In addition to the PC-8201 version, the June article has fixes for the tape release, and tells the readers to retype the BASIC lines with the fixed versions.
When I made this joke a few days ago, I didn’t realize it applied to this game.
In case you are curious, here are the two changes:
Correct: 2220 IF NN<>5 THEN PRINT “* アシヲ イタメマスヨ！”:PLAY “o7c4”:GOTO 1130
Incorrect: 2220 IF NN<>5 THEN PRINT “* アシヲ イタメマスヨ！”:BEEP:GOTO 1130
Correct: 2740 IFPC(P2,J)>10000 THEN D1$=D$(8-INT(PC(P2,J)/10000))+”ニ ススメル”
Incorrect: 2740 IFPC(P2,J)>10000 THEN D1$=D$(8-PC(P2,J)/10000)+”ニ ススメル”
(The missing INT rounds to a whole number; this sounds like a bug that could crash the game.)
The image shows a branching chart of Japanese game history, subdivided into various genres. The middle blue timeline shows adventure games, starting with Omotesando Adventure, branching up to Mystery House and various other games on top. Branching down from Omotesando is one game, the only other text-only game listed: 幽霊船 (The Phantom Ship).
This is the first text-only adventure game in Japanese, and it was considered notable enough to be listed in a magazine 10 years later as one of the foundational games of the adventure genre as a whole.
Cover of packaged version.
There was an accident on your ship, and as you drift in the Pacific Ocean, an old sailing ship appears before you. You “manage to climb up to the figurehead at the bow of the ship”, and this is where the game begins.
The function keys are enabled (the game also lets you change their assignment). By default they’re look, north, east, south, west, open, left, right, up, and down in order.
The instructions (see above) include a general map (the black point on the right is the figurehead) but also helpfully specify how to parser works: noun, followed by a space, followed by a verb.
Moving on, I did LOOK to find that the game mentioned the exit was to the south, to a stair that goes up or down. Going south, the game prompts you (rather than having a stairs “room”) which of the two ways you wish to go. Up leads to a forecastle, which has exits to the north and south to stairs, and a barrel (タル) by the foremast. (Or maybe barrels. Japanese needs more context; for example you could put the equivalent of “many barrels”. Just “barrel” on its own could mean one or many. This is non-trivial in an adventurer sense, for a single container you might expect to open, but a whole pile of them is more likely to be scenery.)
At the opening stair, picking “down” instead leads to the north upper deck, including this text.
* There is a staircase to the north that leads upward.
* There are cannons (or is a cannon) and skeletons (or a skeleton) here.
You can go to the north or the south.
Later the game uses “pile of skeletons” so I think it’s skeleton singular, but cannon is ambiguous; generally speaking I’d expect there to be multiple cannons in a section of ship. Parsing the line タイホウ,ガイコツ ガ アリマス literally you get
cannon(s), skeleton(s) exist here
There’s even more trouble in just this room (and the forecastle room) in that it was entered via an up/down stair, but to get back to the stair (and the figurehead) you just go back north.
It feels like there’s a room you pass through while going south (even though it exists via simply an up-or-down prompt), but the room doesn’t exist and doesn’t get mentioned when going back the other way. This turned out to be non-trivial for mapping, especially because there are also directions that lead to left-or-right forks. Expanding the map a little:
Going south along either the up-stairs or down-stair paths eventually re-merges at the center upper deck, and then going north has the game prompt you for if you mean left or right. I was baffled for a full hour with multiple connections like this I originally had going the wrong way.
This is all compounded by the fact that I’m not good with ship terminology. For example, at one point I came across a “mizzenmast” (or rather “mizzen masuto”), which I could read off the katakana (having run across masts already I knew what “masuto” was) but I did not know I was looking at an actual English word so I wasted time translating a “mizzenmast” into “mizzenmast”.
It’s this one. I’m a landlubber, ok? Image source.
All this is to say I’m going to leave off here and continue with having everything mapped out next time (and maybe the game finished, if it’s straightforward enough). I can say this is not a game about obvious threats; there’s skeletons but none of them have risen up attacking with swords. There’s obvious locked doors at the back, er, stern of the ship, so I assume any rising action comes from there. This may end up like Death Dreadnaught where exploration and atmosphere are largely the point.
Special thanks to f_t_b (for scanning assistance) and the Game Preservation Society (especially Joseph who helped locate the June article).
This one was from a while ago, and while I’m not replaying (I beat the game, just not with a full score) I did check a walkthrough that was posted last year (after I had finished) because I was still bothered by the mazes.
It was a game on the Sol-20 that was clearly heavily inspired by both D&D in general and Tomb of Horrors in particular. It has the finale with the demi-lich that’s only a skull. As it now has come up in two adventure games (Skull Cave and Epic Hero #2), I think it’s worth it to go into a brief aside on the history of Tomb of Horrors itself, then I’ll return to the new(-ish) discovery about the mazes. This combines information from Playing at the World by Peterson, Gygax’s foreword to Return to the Tomb of Horrors, and Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History.
Alan Lucien was part of the same wargaming circles as Gary Gygax, joining the International Federation of Wargaming in 1969 and serving as one of their Senators in 1970. He also wrote an article in the same year about the board game Jetan, invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs for his John Carter series. (Excerpt below from The Chessmen of Mars.)
Gygax ran a play-by-mail game space-combat game (originally by Tullio Proni, revised by Gygax) called The War of the Empires. It ran for two years starting in 1969; Lucien tried to restart the game after it lapsed. Lucien was clearly known to Gygax as he gets mentioned in a letter by Gygax as potentially having interest in the newly-designed Dungeons & Dragons.
Lucien was indeed interested, and ran a Dungeons & Dragons campaign in California. In 1975 he sent to Gygax a new dungeon (handwritten on four pages, not including the map on graph paper): Tomb of Ra-Hotep. It was themed around an Egyptian tomb with many traps.
Passage turns into crawl space, and 6 [the end] contains 5-20 cobras! Can’t turn or run — crawl backwards away. Treasure is Ring of 3 wishes / Delusion (very hard to guess this one!) and Scroll of 7 cleric spells.
The final enemy, Ra-Hotep the lich, has a “jackal stick” with a Sphere of Annihilation at the end.
The sphere later got moved to a devil face at the end of the starting hallway. Source. The sphere causes instant annihilation to anything that touches it.
Gygax got back to Lucien (February 1975) that he had “reorganize[d] your excellent tomb area” and ran it through a trial. Quoting Gygax:
From his basis I developed the material that was to become the Tomb of Horrors, and I admit to chuckling evilly as I did so … Specifically I had in mind foiling Rob Kuntz’s PC, Robilar, and Ernie Gygax’s PC, Tenser. To make a pair of long tales truncated, Rob, by expending a lot of ore servants, managed to get through to the final encounter, and as the skull of the demilich rose to assail the one daring violation of his sanctum, Robilar swept all immediately visible treasure into his bag of holding and escaped. Ernie likewise managed to attain the ultimate, destroyed Acererak, and likewise left laden with loot.
All this eventually resulted in a “competition game” at the first Origins convention in the summer, where players were given two hours to get as far as they could through the Tomb of Horrors. The rules reflect the set in 1975, including mention of the later-scrapped character classes Divine and Mystic. The final enemy was now an unnamed lich that was merely a skull (that would become Acererak in the published version of 1978). Illustrations were included to be used during gameplay, made by a local 14-year-old, Tracy Lesch.
Lesch’s illustration of the lich at the end.
The illustrations were a genuinely novel element, but for my purposes I’d like to emphasize: so was the gameplay style. This was a game not about combat so much as puzzles. (I’ve run Tomb of Horrors before as a Dungeon Master, and one of the players was clearly getting irritated at the lack of combat rolls.) So much of the dungeon feels oriented around methods of survival while working out traps and magical items that it comes off more as an “adventure game” (in the computer-genre sense) than a “RPG” (again in the computer sense). The final battle against Acererak involves such an overpowered set of abilities that to win a player needs to do something clever rather than just attack.
If touched (or struck) the lich targets the strongest character and sucks their soul.
This was true in the competition as well; one team took a cursed crown/scepter pair meant to trap players, and put the set on the demi-lich, vaporizing it. (The problem with having your villain lair full of deathtraps is they can be used against you!)
When D&D became popular, while some adventures tried to embrace it as much as possible (see: Cornucopia) others struggled because combat in adventure games just isn’t that interesting except for small segments. (Zork I has memorable combat, but it uses the combat system for the troll and the thief and nothing else. Not a standard dungeon crawler!) Adventure games lean so hard into the player being more of a “trickster” than a “warrior” that it became routine in this era for weapons to be red herrings. The one famous D&D campaign whose gameplay matched this sense was Tomb of Horrors, so it doesn’t surprise me to see two explicit references (there may have been more general inspiration elsewhere).
Let’s get back to that Sol-20 game.
Map from impomatic.
The map is divided into a north area and a south area; the north area has a maze of passages “all different” and the south area has a maze of passages “all alike” (where a thief resides, and likely is meant to be the Zork thief). The problem is both mazes are, as I stated in my previous post, literally unmappable.
You cannot drop items (they get teleported away), and there are no sound clues or other messages. You might ask: how did the walkthrough (by benkid77) manage? By hacking the binary code of the game.
Each maze is a single room. There’s a series of five bytes giving the answer to maze 1 and six giving an answer to maze 2. There’s no representation of movement; the game simply checks the last five (or six) directions taken, and if they match the answer, the player is moved to the exit.
The part of impomatic’s map with the link to Maze 2, with the thief. There is no map of the maze because a.) there aren’t even any “rooms” in the normal sense and b.) benkid99 hadn’t done his hacking yet when this map was made.
Letting benkid77 take over:
There are three routes out of the first maze and two out of the second maze.
Four out of the five have been shown in the walkthrough above. For completeness, the fifth is from maze 1:- U, W, D, S, S -> Low east-west passage. But this was surplus to requirements.
The 32 maze route and destination bytes are found at game file offset (and therefore memory location) 0BA0:
Maze 1, the “all different” maze:-
0BA0:
02 02 02 02 02 16
S, S, S, S, S -> Witt’s End
0BA6:
01 03 06 02 0A 13
N, E, D, S, SW -> Big Junction
0BAC:
05 04 06 02 02 0A
U, W, D, S, S -> Low east-west passage
Maze 2, the “all alike” maze:-
0BB2:
02 03 02 03 02 03 2A
S, E, S, E, S, E -> Passage (to the east of Flame Room)
0BB9:
07 05 04 01 06 04 26
NE, U, W, N, D, W -> Thief’s Lair
He goes on to ask “how the player would find these routes without disassembling the game.”
The odds are astronomically unlikely to stumble upon the correct sequences and usual mapping methods do not work here. I wonder if there may have been some additional documentation or hints accompanying the game, or some other clues I might have missed?
The “some other clues” is the kicker here: does anyone want to give it a try? You’ll likely need to play the game or at least watch the video of the complete walkthrough (meaning this is not something I expect people to solve in five minutes in the comments, but you never know). Even if there really is no answer (maybe the author had a plan but never finished; keep in mind this is an “unpublished” game) I still thought this was worth highlighting for how outrageous the setup is.
Coming up: a story that begins in the depths of WW2.
For reasons I’ll get into, I believe some inspiration came from here. Source.
First of all: it was a short hop to defeating the vampire master (and both John Myers and Rob guessed the answer more or less). I was thinking in particular about how there’s no pause (RNG or otherwise) like there was for the regular vampire: you open the coffin, you’re dead. This suggested a “preparation puzzle” as opposed to some particular action that’s needed, and based on all the items of the game, the only one that seemed like it might beat an enemy “passively” was the Mirror of Neo-Madness. Hence:
It didn’t occur to me immediately — I would have thought of vampires as already insane — but at least I could see the logic. Searching in the coffin reveals “Galdimus”; even without looking I knew I had a sword, so I knew what to do next.
Well, somewhat. Even with the shield and the sword you can lose! It’s just RNG, but given my antics with the wandering vampire that could kill you between 0 and 99 turns I figured that might be the case.
In a game without a save game facility (like Seiko’s Adventure) having an RNG-dependent death at the very end of a game is automatically a bad move; here at least you can save. (I wasn’t thrilled about it, but it wasn’t catastrophic to either the gameplay or my mood.)
Once you actually kill the guard (see below)…
…you get some red dust, which then converts into a red orb (“a diameter of about two inches”) when you look at it.
Last time we had put a glass ball (“about two inches in diameter”) into a hole to get an item. This is just re-using the same hole. (Item re-use is always satisfying, even when it’s simple, and the size is a good indicator that the magic is being used in parallel.)
Now we can unlock Final Judgement and win, right?
The game says “Surprise!” and a “Grinning Skeleton” appears in the room description. After KILL SKELETON:
You move in to attack
with your sword ….
The skeleton chops down with his saber ….
…. you shatter its sword with a deflection from GALIDIMUS!
It shoots a fire ball at you ….
and kills you!
This is the part that I think might be derived from Tomb of Horrors. Amongst the traps of the game is a room with three chests: gold, silver, and wood. The wood one has a skeleton.
It’s not exactly the same; it uses scimitars rather than a saber, but it is resistant to bladed attack (like this game implied), and holy water is useful in both incarnations (as you’ll see in a moment). For this game’s version, you need a set of objects to fend off a series of attacks: saber, fireball, curse, and finally death gaze. It’s a little like the Babel Fish puzzle of Hitchhiker’s but with everything done in one shot. This has the downside it is easy to beat by accident, but the inventory limit means you probably dropped one of the important items before arriving here.
Holding the sword, shield, vial of holy water, and mirror: victory! In the chest is the Jewel of Derojhen, which now can be taken to King Brion.
This might be the most I’ve enjoyed myself on an experimentalism-based game where magic is at play. My main frustration with magic has been a fundamental lack of logic; you wave some items at an arbitrary point to cause an arbitrary action. Even though you couldn’t find out the sequence of the Final Judgement skeleton without dying to it (unless you get lucky) the response to a particular attack wasn’t unreasonable; I got cursed, thought about the items I had laying about, and immediately latched onto the holy vial as useful. (This is using the “fan fiction shortcut” to be fair, knowing that holy water and the undead don’t mix.) Similarly, the death gaze made me think of re-using the mirror for “bouncing” even though it already got used once for the madness quality. The effects of various colors was completely unclued, but not unclued in a way that required checking across the map (like The Hermit’s Secret requiring magic words at unexpected points). The experimentation was self-contained.
If I was playing this on a computer that had slow save/reload I might be a bit more annoyed about all the above.
This compares quite favorably to the Howarth games (I think Arrow of Death Part 2 was a little better due to clever geography design, and it’s on par with The Time Machine). Scott Adams still inches above with clever use of daemons which doesn’t happen here; there are no persistent effects (like rooms that change over time) to deal with or coordinate. However, given this is still only game number 2 from Leduc we may still see something like that in the future.
Coming up: some unfinished business, followed by Japan and then Ireland. This will be the first time Ireland has featured on this blog.
Renga in Blue 