This returns to the Tandy CoCo adventure contest from Rainbow magazine, culminating in thirteen games printed in The Rainbow Book of Adventures; I’ve played Polynesian Adventure and Search for the Ruby Chalice so far. I wanted to get a few more of the set taken care of. Even though I’m not following strict chronology by month, the book was released in January and I’d feel awkward being near the end of my 1983 sequence and still pulling games to play from the book.
Just as a reminder, this contest was run before both Scott Adams and Infocom were available on Tandy CoCo; there wasn’t many adventures to pick from at all. The authors of the contest tended to be enthusiasts rather than gaming professionals and most of the entries seem to be the only published game from each particular author or authors.
Today’s selection involves a pair of authors, just like Polynesian Adventure, although Rainbow magazine made a mistake and just credited Rick Townsend, leading to a correction letter.
I was very pleased to learn when I arrived home from vacation that my program Escape From Sparta was selected as a winner in your First Annual Adventure Contest. The following day I bought a copy of January’s issue and was excited to see that it had won Best Science Fiction Trophy. I was, however, extremely disappointed to see that the name of Thomas Hollerback, co-writer of this adventure did not appear with my own. Without his help I could not have written Escape From Sparta. Escape From Sparta was a joint effort and intended to be a joint entry. Apparently, I may have misled you when I enclosed a separate letter in reference to the game signed only by myself. Tom’s name appears along with my own in the program heading. Please give Tom the credit which he also deserves.
Rick Townsend
Bettendorf, IA
The book has things printed properly and biographical notes for both authors.
Rick Townsend is a self-taught computer enthusiast who works as a computer operator for United Totalisator International. Thomas Hollerback, co-author, is a 1983 graduate of Central Michigan University and a perspective CPA. Both men enjoy video and Adventure games.
Thomas Hollerback did indeed become a CPA and became quite successful in the profession, serving as chairman for various boards of directors and becoming named president & CEO of Yeo & Yeo in 2013.
Rick Townsend I’ve been getting too many nameclashes to be sure on, but United Totalisator is a curious company indeed to be located at the far east of Iowa (on the Mississippi River) in 1982/1983. Totalisator equipment is intended for handling betting (horse racing, dog racing, etc.) and while Bettendorf did become a center of gambling, it only happened after 1989 when Iowa legalized riverboat gambling. (Iowa was the first state to do so; I’ve written more about that here.) However, it was still possible to bet directly at horse tracks at this time, so it isn’t absurd as placement for a gambling company; Arlington track in particular was not far away in Illinois and had just recently had the first million dollar horse race.
The important point here is that programmers were spread out all across the country, not just hovering around Silicon Valley/California and MIT, and in a contest meant to encourage amateurs it’d drag some of the less-commonly-associated-with-game-development places out of the woodwork.
As the book’s plot intro indicates, we are part of a “superior race of robots” and our creator is a “highly regarded” person who is an “epitome of virtue.” (I guess the polar opposite of Davros from Dr. Who.)
You are a Combutron X robot, one of the most advanced and most loyal of his races, and your assignment is to defend the good side of the universe. Recently, the warlord, master of the evil alliance, has developed a secret plan to control all the planets. To succeed, he must capture and kill your creator. Then, the robot race will not be properly maintained, and the robots will expire — eliminating any resistance to the warlord’s evil clutches.
Our goal is to rescue Light Davros our creator.
The game starts with an “instructions file” with a title screen (see above) and a bit more information about what’s going on.
YOUR MISSION: FIND THE CREATOR ABOARD THE SPACE STATION SPARTA AND ESCAPE.
PLEASE STANDBY TO BE BEAMED ABOARD SPARTA. GOOD LUCK!ENTER ‘POKE 25,6:POKE 26,1:NEW’ BEFORE LOADING WITH CLOAD
The instructions given here with the POKEs and the NEW command clear out the BASIC memory for maximum space. (This includes the program that just ran, which is why the player needs to type it in after the starting program is done.)
The game then puts you right in the action, and there’s a semi real-time component. If you are being attacked by a HUMAN or ROBOT (as you are at the landing spot here) you’ll get a rotation of the human/robot attacking over and over if you don’t press any keys. You need to press ENTER, which will then let you type a response (SHOOT ROBOT). The game does not require the actual typing to be done in real time (unlike Keys of the Wizard, which was willing to interrupt your typing mid-line).
It’s also possible to miss many times in a row. I discovered later after the first SHOOT ROBOT/HUMAN it was possible to just type SHOOT, but you have to be more specific the first time around.
Once combat is done, you can search the corpse/rubble, and find either a GREENCHIP (from a human) or a REDCHIP (from a robot).
Other than that, the only thing to pay attention to is consoles. For example, if you go up from the starting room, you arrive at a console.
For the security clearance, you need to insert a chip. Redchips are the lowest level clearance, followed by greenchips, followed by a single silverchip (held by the captain). As far as I could tell there is nothing special about silverchips vs. greenchips, but for escape pods (which you need to use at the end) you have to have a greenchip rather than a redchip.
After inserting the chosen chip, you can start the console with $ and then enter commands to it. In the room above, the door to the east is locked, so if you UNLOCK DOOR it will take care of the problem.
Here’s the rest of the upper-section map, although I believe there is some randomization in robot/human placement (there definitely is in finding the Creator):
There are some environmental aspects, and when I first started playing I was dutifully mapping them, and even trying to interact with them, but for the most part only the enemies and the consoles are important (with one exception).
Hence, this ends up being a little more like a strategy game (akin to the Apex Trading Haunted House with the odd bonus attribute that I didn’t know I was until I had finished the game. You certainly can’t visit everywhere, because your robot has a certain amount of energy and will eventually run out; not just from fights…
…but from the fact that walking around also drains energy.
Hence, it’s better to skip certain fights if you know you don’t need the chips you get out of them. You need at least one red or green chip for opening doors, and at least one green or silver chip for taking an escape pod away.
For my game, the best approach was to a.) shoot the robot at the start b.) use the red chip to go down to the “bottom access chamber” and unlock the door c.) head west and fight the human in the kitchen, taking the greenchip and d.) going north to the lab and fighting the robot.
You don’t need the robot’s chip.
You can then take the creator…
…and blast out the exit, using a greenchip to activate the pod.
The last command here is being typed in the “console” rather than being given to the robot.
There’s one more entirely optional thing you can do, and it’s interesting that the game doesn’t mention it as a “bad ending” if you skip doing the thing: you can blow up the space ship. At the nuclear reactor (see NE corner of the bottom part of the map) there is a lever you can pull.
The four minutes here pass in real time. If you haven’t won by then, you blow up with the spaceship. Winning with the explosion coming doesn’t give a different winning message.
I ran past some robots rather than fight them, meaning my energy was lower than my other win.
While the random attacking is the same mundane thing seen in many of our games, the fact you can utterly bypass the enemies — yet also get a useful (and predictable) resource from killing them — makes this have a slight bit of interest as a strategy game. The game is too short and simple in the end to hold up historically, but it does suggest an maneuver that could be done in an adventure-roguelike format.
Thanks to gschmidl for technical assistance (the POKE/CLOAD setup seemingly doesn’t work when you load the game from menus in xRoar, I was only able to run the game using the command line).
Renga in Blue 