Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

It was remembered as a “joke” computer, with its 22 by 23 character screen and 3.5Kb of RAM. Revisionists forgot that at the time there was nothing else, and that within the confines of that 3.5Kb of RAM (sometimes more) we made magic happen.

Brendan Jones (quoted above) we’ve seen before with three VIC-20 games from 1982, the most memorable being Fatman: Crime and Vice which invokes gritty American ultracrime stories despite being written by a teen-aged Australian. He was friends with Nigel Dunk (mentioned here and here) and Nigel used Brendan’s Adventure Compiler to write three games of his own: Deathship, Werewolf, and Crown Castle. The third game (described as “coming soon” in a text file from many years ago) seems to have never been dumped and since we’re talking about private games here, likely was genuinely lost, but we can still play the first two.

I do want to emphasize the “private games” part; despite the moniker of the project being All the Adventures, we can’t take it literally. Not only is there lost commercial work, but there’s also the vast supply of games that were written on personal computers for fun and only played by family/friends. We’re reliant on the few people who uploaded their games to the Internet many years later and maybe a random disk or two surviving to get a window into what things were like historically.

From eBay Australia.

The private-game aspect is good to keep in mind here because both games are straightforward and short. That’s not necessarily a bad thing! Certainly for a modern player they’re used to “game poems” and the like which might last five minutes and most, but with a commercial product from this time it would be considered too insubstantial, and even as a type-in there would need to be special circumstances for an adventure to be so simple (although it did happen). In the context of VIC-20 games, there’s also the matter of low memory capacity to consider, although these games were written for the 16k expansion memory.

In Deathship, you “awake on a ship”, no exact context of what your function was (passenger? sailor?); everyone else is dead. (Not to be confused with the Ohio Scientific game by Aardvark with the horrible parser. This game’s parser isn’t great but the game is short and straightforward enough it doesn’t matter.)

You start in a cabin that “reeks of salt” with a watch and a cupboard. In the cupboard you can find a hammer if you LOOK (OPEN isn’t understood here) and if you LOOK at the watch (not READ) you are mysteriously told the number of turns until sunset. So mysterious, I wonder what kind of game this is?

The rest of the map is very small and not exactly reflecting a ship, but I’ll be forgiving. In the small span there’s some nice moments of atmosphere.

The atmosphere here would be better if you could do something with the locker, but you can’t LOOK or do anything else useful I could find.

Just laying about the map, in addition to the hammer/watch from the start area, and the warning note from a different cabin, you can find a lantern, some food, a key, some wood, some garlic, some spaghetti, and some pizza.

If it isn’t blatantly obvious yet, what we need are the hammer, wood, key, lantern. The garlic isn’t useful!

To the east there’s a room that’s dark and you’ll die if you aren’t carrying the lantern.

With the lantern, you’ll find a coffin. You need to open it and apply the wood/hammer promptly on the vampire sleeping inside.

You need to HAMMER WOOD.

Even with mapping things out and taking screenshots this was a five-minute game, but I’m not complaining; other than the parser struggle at the end it didn’t pad out its gameplay with tedious mazes or the like.

Next game! Rather than hunting down a vampire you are hunting down a werewolf.

You start in a Large Square with a poster announcing a reward for killing a werewolf menacing the village, and a monument with a “gun” inside which is the “fabled gun Wolfsmane”.

Unlike Deathship there are characters to talk to. A blacksmith mentions they can do melting including “firearm accessories”…

…a clerk wants proof there is a werewolf before allowing access to the gun in the monument (via a key)…

…a baker can’t sleep (this scene is purely for “color”, you can take the cake but it does nothing)…

…a necromancer wants some wolfsbane to make a werewolf repellant (you can nab the potion right there)…

…and a priest announces (with slurring I assume meaning they’re drunk) that they’re not a nice person.

I’m unclear what the deal is with the priest. If you take the potion from the necromancer and drop it, the priest will eagerly drink it and then die, but past him is a shovel which does nothing (DIG is not understood, it is unnecessary for the game). What you do need is a CRUCIFIX you can see by LOOKing at the altar. The cross is made of gold, but the crucifix is made of silver, which is (using the “fan fiction shortcut”) the sort of thing you want vs. werewolves. Since you can take the cross/crucifix while the priest is alive without getting stopped there’s no reason to kill the priest, who is simply trying to stop you from entering the graveyard.

While I’m talking about it, let’s get that crucifix swiped from the altar melted down into a silver bullet, although we still need the gun:

To the far north (just past some matches which you can pick up) there is a “Dense Wood” with wolfsbane, but it is attached to a tree. To cut it you need a knife which is conveniently nearby. What is less convenient is if you try to take the knife and leave a werewolf will kill you.

I was very confused here because I thought this was a timed event. It is not. The idea here is if the body is left behind the werewolf will get you because … smell or something? I don’t know, but if you BURN BODY before leaving, you won’t get killed when leaving the cabin.

With the knife you can take the wolfsbane, leave it for the necromancer, and get the repellant. For the gun, at least in my version of the game, I was just able to OPEN MONUMENT and GET GUN with no fuss at all. I didn’t need to bother with the clerk. I assume this is buggy, and what you’re supposed to do is use the head from the house with the body (why the smell of the head didn’t matter if the smell of the body didn’t matter I don’t know).

This lets you go south into a records room and pick up a key. It will let you then UNLOCK MONUMENT but this isn’t required to OPEN MONUMENT.

With the repellant, gun, and bullet, you have almost everything ready; there’s a bear in front of the werewolf cave, but you can nab some honey from a dock and bribe the bear to go away.

Plot twist at the end, though!

The solution here was more difficult to wrangle than Deathship, especially the cryptic part about burning the body and the priest who can be killed with a random potion drop (but for no apparent reason). Comparing with Brendan Jones (using the same engine): his games were much more linear. Crime and Vice in particular was quite scene-oriented, and likely designed imagining what each scene would be like in order; both of Dunk’s games were non-linear and based around collecting resources for killing a supernatural creature (meaning there was more flexibility in the order). I don’t think either approach is “bad”, necessarily, but based on the weak parser, I think the open world worked better; despite it being sometimes arbitrary if you needed to “drop” something or “give” it, by not locking the actions in a particular order it was less painful to hit a spot of parser difficulty (even though I generally persisted each time until I made it through parser trouble, having the option to go elsewhere made the overall experience less grating). Jones still has two games left in 1983 we have to play, so I’ll return to that comparison when I get to those games.

One last thing to note is that, based on the CASA solution, the C64 version of the game is less buggy than the VIC-20 version I played. Unfortunately, the file has seemingly been purged at every C64 site I’ve visited; I played the VIC-20 version not because I wanted to but because I had to. (The VIC-20 version also has some unfortunate text vandalism.) A current link to the C64 version would be lovely if someone has one (it’s freeware, so there’s no reason the file should be secret, I think?)