Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

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.

— From Against All Odds

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).