In 1980, Commodore got their first factory in Germany (in Braunschweig). The CEO Jack Tramiel came to give a speech and was warned “don’t tell them you’re Jewish”. He handled it in typical Tramiel fashion:
So what did I do? I made a speech to them and told them all I was Jewish and that I was a survivor of the concentration camps. And then I said that I wanted everyone who was an SS officer in my office in the next two days. Over twenty of them came in and about six walked out, saying they will never work for a Jew. The others apologized, it wasn’t their fault, and all that. I saw it as honesty and that they were looking for forgiveness and I gave it to them. You see, at first, after the war, I had feelings of revenge, but that changed when a priest said to me: “If you are going to treat the Germans the same way they treated you, what’s the difference between you and them?” The way he said it just totally changed my outlook.
Commodore generally owned the German market all the way through the Amiga. Hence it’s not technically surprising we have a C64 game today, although the circumstances still have a wrinkle–
This is one of the rare cases of a game I had in hand during my 1982 run, but skipped anyway due to technical difficulties. The downloads I could find of Citadel Adventure have a “case reverse” that I could not resolve no matter what settings I switched things around to.
i’M IN A lONDON APARTMENT. aCROSS THE ROOM A FLIGHT OF STAIRS.
oBVIOUS EXITS:
vISIBLE ITEMS:
rug. telephone. book.
cOMMAND?
That’s after pressing the “character swap” key combo (shift + the Commodore button); if you don’t use the swap it looks even more nonsense.
I recently approached the Mystery House II Rescue Team (including gschmidl, bsittler, and f_t_b) and after some noodling bsittler managed to create a “case fix” version of the game that has the capitalization swapped. The file here should work directly in a standard emulator without any tweaks.
10 rem*******************************
20 rem ‘citadel adventure’
30 rem*******************************
40 rem (c) ihlenfeldt 1982
50 rem*******************************
60 rem all rights reserved
70 rem*******************************
71 rem nicht listen, selber knacken
72 rem*******************************
The author only gives their name as Ihlenfeldt; there’s enough German text in the comments of the BASIC file that it’s pretty clear we are dealing with a German speaker, although it is unknown if the author was located in Germany in 1982 (or Austria, or Switzerland…); maybe they were in an English-speaking country when they wrote this but German is the author’s first language. Either way, the game text is in English. We’ll soon have a game from Sweden with a similar situation.
(The “nicht listen, selber knacken” is “don’t list, crack it yourself”, which means don’t try to solve the game by listing the BASIC code. This mirrors a directive in Valley of Cesis. Perhaps with public domain the temptation to “solve by source code” was stronger.)
Early issue (August 1984) of 64’er Magazine, a popular C64 magazine from Germany. Source.
Assuming the author was physically in Germany in 1982, it’s early for the C64; they were officially available only starting in 1983. They did have the ill-fated Ultimax in October 1982 — a C64 stripped down to more like VIC-20 specs — but it had a low amount of memory, lower than the size of Citadel.
“A very low price portable color microcomputer for the home market” according to the 1982 Commodore Annual Report. Image by Thomas Conté, CC BY-SA 2.0. Source.
It is of course possible to get an computer imported (see the backstory behind the completely different game called Citadel); it could be the game was written on a different system but ported with the year maintained (maybe it was ported from Commodore PET and the caps-issue happened upon transfer).
The opening screen gives no background on what the goal is. It does give some verbs (“GO, TAKE, LEAVE, OPEN, DRIVE, SIPP, DIG”; note that there’s no DROP, you can LEAVE or PUT items) and it also warns “there are a lot of possibilities to commit suicide” and mentions a “Play Time” of 60 minutes. That 60 minutes is not meant to estimate how long it will take to solve, but rather you have a hard time limit of 60 minutes real time, and if you exceed that the game is over.
This is after leaving the emulator running overnight.
I was able to discover fairly quickly this was a spy story of some sort as the “book” is a codebook and there’s a “picklock” right underneath the rug. I was struggling to get more happening so I tried HELP which suggested OPEN BOOK (given you have to open the book to read the codes inside, I have no idea what that means in-reality) which gave a note that mentioned “Phone PERFUME”.
Regarding the “moskow”, the German exonym for Moscow is Moskva, so the “k” must have snuck in there via that route.
More on that in a moment; I took a brief step outside, tried to go north, and got run over by a car. Going east again, there was a SPORTSCAR in a garage, where trying to DRIVE it led to an immediate crash.
You also have to be standing outside the car to drive the car.
Baffled by both the inability to drive a car and the need to be standing outside the car to drive it, I went back to tackle the PERFUME clue some more; the weirdness with the car made me suspect I was missing something with the parser, so I peeked at the first line of the walkthrough (by Alex Dijkstra). It mentioned to PUT (drop) the cigarettes in inventory as the first action of the game; I guess those are red herrings. It also says to DIAL (not “call”, agh) the number 4711.
Now, I might normally plow ahead right here, but I really don’t want to just lean on the walkthrough the whole game, so a pause to make a post here helps me do a mental reset. But more importantly, I don’t understand the puzzle: why 4711? If you apply the “generic” phone code to the word PERFUME you get 7373863; I would assume the code book is what you really use but I can’t see any combination where diamond-wheat-moskow-moskow or diamond-wheat-tank has any connection with the word PERFUME. Anyone have some thoughts?
I thought this was going to be a quick one to solve but I’m starting to suspect it bears closer resemblance to Intercept (cryptic, difficult-to-handle game conventions) moreso than CIA Adventure (straightforward).
For the bookkeeping, one thing I didn’t linger on is: what should I be calling this game? On the side of the box, on the front of the tape, and on two of the title screens, the game is just
幻魔大戦
but on the front of the box, and on the third title screen, a subtitle gets added, using English text.
幻魔大戦: Harmagedon
Even the colon is questionable! There’s also no good way to convey the mixture of languages. The original film often just gets called Harmagedon but that also isn’t consistent.
From the press package which is absolutely worth a look if you’re a fan of the franchise.
On top of that, the film title either gets translated as “Genma Taisen” or “Genma Wars” depending on your source. I try to prioritize what English title gets used from Japanese sources, but I’ve seen that mixed too. I eventually just gave up and used the title given by Mobygames which seems to be the most common one.
On the meta-discussion: as I’ve emphasized in the past, this isn’t really a “review” blog, even though you could interpret things that way. I’m trying to approach with a “why did this happen” perspective; while I’ll still point out when something is painful, what’s more interesting to me is that a game got made in the first place, especially a game like this connected to a movie with both a high budget and high earnings (it was the top-earning animated film of 1983 in Japan). I’m trying to build a contextual history.
This game really stretched my patience, though. There is one person (the proprietor of the AVG walkthrough site) who liked the game, so I gave it the best shot I could.
Even if we buy into Takahashi’s idea for this game (or maybe it was the producer Kadokawa’s idea), which is to pick particular scenes from the movie and dramatize them (with essentially choice-based gameplay), the concept is erratic. It skips past the airplane being destroyed and Luna being recruited as a “psychic warrior” — fine, maybe that’s just a “cutscene” — but then it also skips by one of the earliest “dynamic” scenes where Luna talks the cyborg warrior Vega into arising from his slumber and joining the cause, invoking his past love for the psychic Arietta (which sustained him for thousands of years).
It skips a lot more besides, but I’ll get to the exact timestamp in a moment. One last detail before diving in: I played the PC-8001 (text-only) version of the game first and then went over to PC-98; I will share from both simultaneously and explain places where they diverge.
So Jo Azuma, Princess Luna, and Vega are already together, and Jo encounters what he thinks is his girlfriend Junko. You (the player) are then prompted to pick a fighter. This indicates which of the trio is going to do an action.
I tried 3, Vega, and got the following:
Could it be that you still think she’s a Genma?
If your guess is correct, this is going to be a big problem!
Should I attack her? (y/n)
If you pick “yes” the response is…
Oh no! She really is human…!
…and the game ends. This would seem to resolve that we are supposed to pick Jo, and everything should be fine … you might think.
You can do so, and she’ll request kisses, in repeated y/n prompts; you can keep doing y over and over again until eventually get:
You fool! I am Zambida!
Wahahahaha!
(The actual line is “ワッハッハッハッハ”.)
The enemy will then reduce Jo’s strength to 0.
The “optimal” sequence seems to be:
a.) use Luna, who will sense Junko wants a “farewell kiss” from Jo
b.) do one kiss from Jo after
c.) decline to do another, after which you’ll get the reveal; Jo can then attack and win; if you don’t go through this process, Jo’s power level will be too low to win the fight and you’ll lose
Notice this is 100% inconsistent with what happens when you just attack with Vega. I’m also not clear why Luna wouldn’t sense the subterfuge.
This marks the end of “scene 1” in the game. Scene 1 matches with a scene fifty-three minutes into the movie. I have it cued with the timestamp below.
It works a little differently (Jo is alone, and senses the ruse from “Junko” having an odd smell). I couldn’t find the exact pose from the game’s art in the movie (although I didn’t check frame-by-frame). I did find a match in the artbook by the character artist Katsuhiro Otomo.
Source. Compare the game art with the sketch in the lower left. It’s close enough I suspect Takahashi had access and traced it to make the image.
The next scene moves the action to New York (without any prompting what’s going on, although to be fair it’s sudden in the movie too) where Luna wants to recruit the psychic warrior Sonny.
In the movie, Sonny gets captured by the “police” while running away on roller skates and phasing through walls before being put in a cage by one of the Genmas. The way the sequence works in the game is first:
a.) You get asked if you should bring Jo along, who is weak; you should decline
b.) You find Sonny trapped in a “cage” by Zamedi, and are told attacking would be a bad idea because the “power gap” is too large. You then get asked if you should attack (say no).
c.) Then you get asked if you (Luna and Vega) should attack together; again say no otherwise it’s game over.
d.) The game asks about “taking another look” at the enemy’s true form (say yes)
e.) The game mentions an eye and asks if you want to attack it; surely now we can do something? … no, you need to decline again
f.) The game concludes that you have to now summon your allies; pick Luna (who in the movie does a lot of networking with the psychics) and you’ll suddenly have more characters appear, including Jo who had been left behind before but somehow is stronger for going through this process
g.) You’ll then get a prompt for which character to pick now; pick Jo and have the game crash
OK, that’s on PC-8001 only, and maybe just my emulator settings. But I had to change the line in order to go farther, changing
5280 FORI=1TOJJ*1000:NEXT:JJ=3:RETURN
into
5280 FORI=1TO1000:NEXT:JJ=3:RETURN
and then typing RUN to restart.
(The loop seems to be just a “dramatic delay”; the JJ value must have been too large making it break with JJ times 1000.)
The PC-98 version reduces this part down a little — there isn’t quite the long interrogation where you need to refuse to attack even after looking at the eye. I suspect the PC-8001 was made first and some edits were put in after the graphics, but no changes were backported while doing so.
Going back to the action, Jo says he’s going to target the eye, but the game then asks what the power level of the enemy is (which is no longer on the screen, and was randomized; on that PC-98 screenshot it was 233). I was stuck for a while on the PC-8001 version before I realized you can’t type the number on the top-line number keys otherwise the game will end; you have to type the power level number on the numpad for it to be recognized. (Fortunately, the number pad issue doesn’t happen on PC-98.)
You then get power from other psychics and manage to win the battle…
Zamedi and Vega scene from the movie.
…and scene 3 begins. First you are interrogated about the power level of one of your characters from the previous scene (chosen at random) and if you get the number wrong, the game is over.
Then, Jo is overcome with rage about his sister being killed (not in the game, a scene you don’t see but you have to fill in from watching the movie, we were busy answering memory trivia instead). The PC-8001 version asks about resting and you’re supposed to say yes; the PC-98 version instead asks about if it is possible to fight alone (yes or no).
You’re supposed to say “no”.
Then you get sort of a character trivia quiz. Which of these characters are allies? Say “yes” to the allies and “no” to the enemies.
Tao, a literal child who is fighting with us.
This one’s Doctor Kafu, the bad guy.
Asanshi, a stereotypical Middle Eastern character.
It’s sequenced slightly different in the PC-8001 version, where they come in a different order (the Doctor at the end), and it’s more along the lines of them responding to Princess Luna’s psychic call and them responding; it makes slightly more narrative-ludic sense, not like this game is really trying for that much anyway.
Then you need to face off against the Doctor, with your three fighters in tow. You can’t choose Tao right away (game over, how dare you pick a child before the adults) so you can have Jo and Asanshi attack; they both get turned into stone, and the game then prompts if Tao should be attacking; you’re supposed to say “no” (logical, the other two just got vaporized).
Face-off against the Doctor in the movie. Jo actually takes out the Doctor while he’s turned into stone.
Tao is able to summon help so everyone comes…
Before that last scene, you’re asked if you are having fun. If you say “no”, the game immediately ends.
…and you’re able to use the power of love to de-stone the two other fighters to get your full set of 8.
Notice the 5 damage on Jo. More on that in a moment.
You can then say you want to attack, but it turns out if you have any damage on any of the characters you will lose. You can accumulate damage from wrong choices, but you can also accumulate damage over time. In the PC-98 version I never was actually able to get away with Jo having a damage of 0, but since I was able to beat the PC-8001 version I was able to answer that, yes, it is love that saves the Earth, thus winning the game.
Congratulations! Thanks to your love, the Earth has been saved! Never forget your love!
I will let the reader decide what level of kusoge all that was. Kazuma Satou points out in the comments that “You can at least see the end of this one with a lot of patience.” The heroic author at the AVG walkthrough site seems to have treated it as a bizarre computer-artifact to be reckoned with rather than worrying overly much about it making narrative sense.
I am mainly interested in: how did it happen?
It’s certainly tempting to blame the producer Haruki Kadokawa, who was on a hyperkinetic mission to merge all forms of media, fueled by cocaine. (Not a joke, he did some time in jail for cocaine smuggling in the 90s.) Takahashi additionally confirms in his Technopolis interview that the proposal “didn’t originate from me”. He felt it was “rushed” and was simply trying to make the deadline of matching the release of the movie. Computer games were still so new that this sort of anomaly was still possible.
At least it sold well; he estimated to have passed 10 million yen in earnings for the year (~$900,000 in 2026 USD), including his other adaptation game based on the movie Antarctica.
Clearly he had more passion for his own work; he talks in the interview about wanting to work on a sequel to Mission: Impossible (which never surfaced).
This is one of the most infamous computer games from Japan ever made. You can mostly blame the 1967 film The Graduate. I’ll explain along the way–
From the first issue of Genma Taisen, the original manga.
Genma Taisen, the manga, was first serialized in Weekly Shōnen Magazine starting in 1967, with writing by Kazumasa Hirai and art by Shotaro Ishinomori. By then both men had established careers, with Hirai writing the 8 Man series (1963 – 1966) and Ishinomori launching Cyborg 009 in 1964; both are early important works of the Japanese superhero genre, and Ishinomori would not only later be called “the Stan Lee of Japan” but would be honored with an entire museum dedicated to his work.
Genma Taisen opens with Princess Luna (an actual princess from Transylvania who can see the future) in an airplane that gets smashed from space.
This is the first volley in a war waged by the demon Genma who seeks to destroy the Earth, as he has done on many worlds before. Luna and the alien cyborg Vega (whose own world was destroyed) gather together a team of psychics (starting with the main series protagonist Jo Azuma) in order to stop Genma.
They fail; or at least, the last issue ends mid-story on an ambiguity (that might imply Genma wins). There’s theories about either interpersonal conflict or conflict with the publisher.
The Eye of Genma, watching from the sky.
The concept was still popular, so there were later spin-offs: another manga series, a novel, and an eventual TV series, all that take different story routes.
One series is post-apocalyptic (after Genma wins) where Princess Luna is still alive and able to use time travel to try to foil Armageddon (but Jo doesn’t exist, which means it’s really a different timeline than the original?); another alternate timeline has Jo discover his psychic abilities and the coming of Genma on his own. The more recent (2002) TV show also involves a time portal after the apocalypse but without Princess Luna involved. There’s a whole chart on Japanese Wikipedia dedicated to the multiple family structures depending on which version of the plot is happening.
The movie Genma Taisen: Harmagedon came out in 1983, and it bases its plot more on earlier books of the original story timeline, but this time ending with Genma’s defeat.
The movie was made at the instigation of the publishing/movie mogul Haruki Kadokawa. When Kadokawa took over the book-publishing company Kadokawa Shoten from his father in 1975 he said to the board (allegedly) “I am the Godfather” and had ambitions to expand into multiple medias from what was previously a print-only business. The essential idea was to take books and have movies that would go with them, which could then synergize into merchandising and music. He explained in a later interview the idea for this came from the movie The Graduate (1967) and how the movie caused the book and soundtrack to both be best-sellers.
For Genma Taisen, Kadokawa was a fan of the director Rintaro (being hot off the success of the movie Galaxy Express 999) and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse; from an interview:
One day, the president of the company Kadokawa, Haruki Kadokawa, who was considered the enfant terrible of the publishing world, wrote me some kind of a love letter telling me that he wanted to meet me. I came to see him, and he made me an offer to make something very different from what I had previously done, for example, at Toei.
I was excited to be able to make new things with that project, and I thought I could go to the top of my ambitions regarding creative freedom. I accepted his proposition with great pleasure. Haruki Kadokawa was an extraordinary man, and he told me I had total freedom for this movie and that he would never intervene in the content. He gave me 250 million yen to use freely for that film. It made me want to run away with the money [laughs]. It was just our first meeting,
The movie was released simultaneously in March 1983 with a computer game. An arcade game was announced at the same time and released a few months later; it was on laserdisc (one of the earliest such games, it came out before Dragon’s Lair) using clips from the film.
Sierra tried to hit similar synergy with The Dark Crystal but their deadline slipped; here, 7 different computer versions came out produced in a matter of 2 months, all by the same programmer: Yoshinobu Takahashi.
Our author, shown with “3 million yen” worth of computer equipment. Technopolis December 1983, with an interview that I’m pulling the biographical details from.
Yoshinobu Takahashi’s interest in electronics started in junior high school when he joined his school’s amateur radio club; he got a license in high school and chatted with a friend over radio while studying for exams. He hadn’t gotten interested in computers yet, but there wasn’t really an opportunity until the TK-80 kit came out. He had a friend that used an expanded version (COMPO-BS/80) in order to play Space Invaders. This was the first time he realized the world of computers and the world of games combined.
From NEC Retro. The original TK-80 was a loose-motherboard kit (like the KIM-1); the COMPO-BS/80 made it more of a regular computer.
After leaving high school he went to the Chiyoda Institute of Technology and Art to study computers, starting with hardware. Not long after he got a Sharp MZ, learning BASIC by typing in programs from magazines. His first game project was a (physical) slot machine; he soon found himself liking software more than hardware, although he didn’t start writing computer games until after graduating.
The standard Japanese route is to then take employment exams to get into companies (like his fellow graduates did, jobs were easy to get); the only exam he took was for ASCII Magazine to be an editor (he was rejected). What he really was aiming for was to be an independent programmer. He knew there were programming “stars” from the US (like Nasir) so he figured the same thing would happen in Japan, even if it hadn’t happened yet.
He took up part-time work with a company that managed inventory control terminals for supermarkets (and would go to supermarkets to fix their hardware personally); while doing this, he aimed to go professional and started making games on a PC-6001. He started with a version of Star Trek and sent it to Image Soft, and they agreed to publish it in July, only a few months after he graduated.
This gave him enough motivation to start programming full-time, and develop his first serious original game, スパイ大作戦 (Mission: Impossible). This is the official title given both in the game itself and on the packaging; it nearly always gets translated as “Spy Daisakusen” (Spy Mission) but since スパイ大作戦 is the name of the actual show (you can see it in the video below from The Dubbing Database), I think Mission: Impossible would be the more appropriate translation?
He described it as a “Role-Playing Adventure Game” but it isn’t really in a modern sense an RPG or an Adventure game; it’s more of a strategy game. You pick supplies to start and then infiltrate an enemy headquarters, while moving around in a 3d view while stealing classified documents. Aspects like the player’s starting stats are randomized.
He got the concept from watching the TV show. I studied the documentation and didn’t see any mention of official licensing. The reason the publisher may have gone through the effort is we aren’t talking about Image Soft any more; but Ponyca (or Pony Canyon). Their official company history traces all the way back to 1955 with the establishment of the Nippon Broadcasting System, which later launched a music tape business in 1966 and Canyon Records in 1970. Like Xtal Soft they made the natural transition in 1982 from putting music on tapes to putting software on tapes. They also started with anime video in the late 70s and ended up having licensing agreements with big companies; in short, they’re more likely to both have the ability and desire to do things through official channels.
It did sell well; Takahashi cites it as being the first hit for the distributor Ponyca, selling over 10,000 copies when accounting for all the different versions (PC-8001, PC-8801, MZ-1200, MZ-2000, MZ-600; all the ports except PC-8801 were his).
Official tie-in or not, the game associated him with tie-in games, and this is how he got to working on Genma Taisen which was official. Unlike Dark Crystal (where Roberta Williams explicitly talks about the game working without having seen the movie first) this game is deeply integrated; it literally doesn’t make sense without the extra plot context, starting with a scene a fair ways in the movie.
I have the PC-8001 version of the game and the PC-98 version of the game; the PC-8001 version is text only! For the most part I’ll be showing off the PC-98 version (people generally played the game with graphics). However, let me start with PC-8001, which manages some impressive starting screens anyway:
Notice the mention of Haruki Kadokawa (the publishing/film mogul) as a producer.
The last screen there is where the weirdness starts. The PC-98 version to compare:
The layout pretends this is like an RPG, although it really isn’t. The characters in the upper left are Jo Azuma, Luna, and Vega. The scene starts here at Jo’s girlfriend; it seems to be about 23 minutes in the movie. And somehow Luna helps with the situation? Everything is baffling enough I’m going to separate out the gameplay in part 2, so stay tuned, and find out if this really does deserve legendary kusoge status.
(Also, thanks to f_t_b and gschmidl for file assistance.)
People are going to buy these things and then after six weeks or so they’re going to put them up on a shelf in their closet and ignore them … we saw that there was a need for something that helped people to both socialize with other people and get practical life use out of these really significant investments.
Before getting to our author today, I need to revisit one of the prior games from this blog, Max’s Adventure. Max’s Adventure (or just Adventure) was given by the author Max Manowski to a shop in Seattle, and from there it distributed far enough across the US Northwest to catch the attention of the Atari Computer Enthusiasts club in Oregon. The club helped distribute the game farther before it eventually got the attention of Atari and was packaged as Wizard’s Revenge as part of their APX program; it became the only text adventure that Atari published made by someone outside the company.
The same issue that talks about Max’s Adventure (April 1981) also discusses a San Francisco event where ACE members visited Atari, with pictures, so it’s possible the game was handed to Atari directly.
There was an effect beyond just getting Atari’s attention, as ACE had an unusual distribution plan, which they describe as a contest.
The offer was: send a disk to ACE (with some programs if you have some, blank if you don’t) and you’ll get a copy of Max’s Adventure. Write your own adventure based on it and send it back (prizes to be announced later, John Bell of Crystalware was interested). Even given the loose nature of the “contest” and their explicit mention “this is for fun” this does beat (in terms of being earliest) the Falk contest for Tandy CoCo. However, the contest does not get mentioned in later issues, so I think it ended up as vaporware.
At least one person picked up the challenge of modifying Max’s Adventure into a new game, even if it didn’t end up in the “contest”: George Schultz of New Jersey.
Schultz helpfully included his address in the source code as well so I was able to cross check on a few sources (1, 2, 3, 4) to get his biography. He was born in 1941 and after a stint with the Navy he went to Rutgers to get a degree, graduating in 1973. He moved to New Jersey as a journalist with the Newark Star Ledger before switching to being editor of Fuel Oil News in 1982; he stayed with oil business journalism until his death in 2002 from a heart attack.
This means he was in his 40s when he wrote Sherlock Holmes, which is the first fully Sherlock-Holmes branded text adventure for this blog. (Two Heads of the Coin from 1979 was clearly meant to be Holmes, but doesn’t mention his name, nor does it get into any lore — it’s a pure conversation with one person.)
As far as why it took this long to get a straight “you are Holmes” game, with text adventures of this era it has been rare to have major characterization at all. Usually “you” has been “you” in some sense, maybe with some extra conditions (like in Cyborg being merged with a robot) but not with a background that might justify a full 30 pages in a LARP session. Exceptions have included The Hobbit, Robin Hood Adventure, Sherwood Forest, and Aldebaran III; so while we have had developed characters, relative to the large number of adventures up to now it’s a short list.
Roughly when Schultz was working on his game there was all sorts of Holmes media being made, like this BBC adaptation of Hound of the Baskervilles. There was also a Soviet adaptation from 1981 and animated films from 1983.
The reason I know the code is derived from the ACE game is that it says so; I’ve pulled out both pairs of source code alongside and can definitely say it uses the same unusual system where you can edit the game from within the game. These lines of code are identical amongst the two, even with the same line numbering:
3220 IF INPUT$(1,3)=”NEW” THEN 3400
3225 IF INPUT$(1,4)=”GOTO” THEN 7600
3228 IF INPUT$(1,4)=”LIST” THEN 8000
3230 IF INPUT$(1,5)=”PRINT” THEN 3800
3240 IF INPUT$(1,6)=”CHANGE” THEN 3600
3250 IF INPUT$(1,6)=”EXTEND” THEN 4000
The only comparable game that’s been on this blog is ZOSC based on the GROW system, and that was just repurposing a system intended more for learning applications. I theorize that having a system that emphasizes adding text content on the fly rather than programming might appeal to someone with an English/journalism background. Unfortunately, the parser is miserable in the way you might expect from a GROW-style game, as you’ll see in a moment.
You are casually hanging about your study at Baker Street when Mrs. Hudson brings in a letter. You determine quite quickly it must be a forgery and Dr. Watson is in trouble.
At this point you can try running off to at least Scotland Yard, but let’s hang out in the study for a while.
The various investigatory tools suggest you might be able to do something to trace the note, but unfortunately, I immediately ran into a stumbling block here trying to get anything to happen. Keep in mind this is a GROW-style game where it doesn’t really keep track of “world state” in a normal way; it’s jumping between nodes and fishing for particular prompts. In this case, it wants you to EXAMINE DESK, and then immediately use something from the desk on the note; if you examine the rest of the room first, the desk ceases to exist (this is roughly the behavior of The Phantom Ship, but this game has it even worse). There’s no world model storing the fact there’s a desk and a bookcase, just some central place where EXAMINE DESK and EXAMINE BOOKCASE work, and I found myself sometimes just in a labyrinth of “YOU FIND NOTHING TO HELP YOU” responses.
You also need to jump to this being a multi-word parser here.
The note reveals a watermark which you can investigate further with the books; remember there was a book about trademarks. Well, actually, just remembering it is bad, you need to EXAMINE BOOKCASE immediately before using something on it.
You can also follow this up with EXAMINE IMPORTS to find out that inks coming in from China are imported by Dihn Imports, in Limehouse.
Finally, you can EXAMINE WEAPONS mentioned on the bookcase. Somehow that gets interpreted as opening the bookcase and finding a secret revolver, which you’ll need for the end of the game. (It’s faintly possible the game keeps so little track of state you could skip taking the revolver and you’d still be able to use it at the end, but I haven’t tested that.)
I’ll pause and say in a conceptual way this is an impressive segment; we have an item that we apply both detection tools and research to in order to learn more. The parser simply isn’t able to sustain what’s going on (again, this seems to be a combination of the node system with the author’s perspective, thinking like writing from an author’s perspective rather than modeling a world).
The game is afoot; you can nab your famous outfit on the way out, and then hail a cab. As seems to be the standard for investigation games, you need to tell the cab-driver where to go, so this is a matter of hunting down key-words. So far other than 211 BAKER STREET (no “B”) we can do SCOTLAND YARD, PICADILLY (with that exact spelling), and LIMEHOUSE. Let’s try Scotland Yard first, since the visit is short.
The “La Strade” spelling suggests to me the author was watching the stories recently on TV/film as opposed to reading them.
Regarding Pic(c)adilly, hinted at from Imperial Paper…
…it’s not clear at all this is the way to do it, but EXAMINE IMPERIAL PAPER will let you enter the closed building. There you can find some files about the Savoy Hotel. This is entirely an optional section; I actually went over to the Hotel first and didn’t find out about this area until beating the game.
Leaving the hotel and going “LEFT” you can find the hotel (no north/south/east/west).
I’d like the in-character chastising more if it matched the character of Sherlock Holmes.
Going ahead, Holmes notices a hat (Watson’s) left behind on a couch; going forward and examining the desk reveals a guest register, which the clerk refuses to let you look at.
I ended up needing the walkthrough for this one. Trying to TALK TO CLERK didn’t work. While Holmes is not described as holding money, I tried BRIBE CLERK anyway and got “HUH?” The right command is to PAYOFF CLERK, shooting the puzzle to being at least in the top 5 Hardest Adventure Game Verbs to Figure Out Ever.
This process lets you go upstairs and find the room Watson was allegedly in, unearthing a key.
Again notice the stumbling parser. I tried to EXAMINE CLOSET but the node here just assumed I was examining the bed further and found the key. I’ll take a parser issue making the game easier over one making the game harder.
You can then take the key back to Baker Street to study it and find out what’s on it… maybe. I really had immense trouble here; there must be something exceedingly specific in how the nodes are implemented.
Even with checking the walkthrough it took me two tries to get something out of the key.
Back here in a moment: time to visit Limehouse.
Files indicate a dinghy on a pier. With a little bit of parser struggle I arrived there. The pier also has Dr. Watson’s medical bag (his items are being left suspiciously out in the open); you can row the dinghy over to the main boat, and find some matches with writing in Chinese.
West End represents the last destination, but we should probably translate that matchbook text first. Back in Baker Street there’s a dictionary on the pile of research items which reveals a set of directions.
I again want to emphasize, in a conceptual way doing research on clues is extremely neat; in practice it was extremely painful to get anything to work.
Time for the West End…
…and a serious… bug?
GO REAR reaches the next part of the game, but often it doesn’t work. It doesn’t seem to be a “random” flip; when it isn’t working, you have to leave and come back and try again. I tried various phrasings of GO and ENTER and IN and OUT and so forth to see if that would make any difference. I don’t know if it does; the walkthrough doesn’t know either.
There’s a wine rack you can PUSH to find a secret entrance to some sewers.
The sewers are where you apply the directions from the matchbook.
Following them properly leads to a crack in the wall where you can INSERT KEY.
Driving off Moriarty is a simple matter of trying to SHOOT him with your revolver; however, he’s left a trap for you if you try to just go in afterwards. You’ll fall into a trap door and die.
You need to JUMP OVER TRAP DOOR to get by.
Twist ending with the fish and chips! If this was “canon” I’d be more annoyed.
The artificial set of obstacles works as a set of challenges by Moriarty; it gets taken up by at least one author later. The presence of the hat and the medical bag especially felt like a trail-of-Moriarty plot element. The moment-to-moment action held at least some interest, and the research aspect was genuinely a good idea. Unfortunately, the parser was miserable all the way through. The author tried his best to implement his ideas with the system; honestly, it’s impressive how far he got, but there still wasn’t enough world model support and parser implementation to make the game work. In a big-picture sense, this reflects the technical barriers for making adventure games at this time, and why so many toolkits like The Quill became popular.
Coming up: back to Japan, and a famous anime movie.
Renga in Blue 
