The early 1970s were some of the most tumultuous years in Australian politics. The Australian Labor Party, defeated since 1949, finally regained power in 1972. Gough Whitlam took the spot of Prime Minister, running on an agenda of progressive reforms and a slogan of It’s Time.
In that span, amongst other things:
The last Australians returned from the Vietnam War in December 1972, the same month Whitlam took office
The Health Insurance Bill was proposed in 1973 and passed in 1974, giving universal health insurance
An Aboriginal Land Fund was created
There was a significant increase in the education budget, and college school fees were abolished in 1974 (this one didn’t last, University fees came back in 1989)
The “White Australia” policy favoring Europeans for immigration was ended
Due to complex reasons including budgetary stalemate, in December of 1975 Governor-General Sir John Kerr terminated Gough Whitlam’s appointment, explaining that he has the power to do so under section 64 of the Constitution. (This is as wildly abnormal as it sounds, and constitutional scholars are unclear if the move was even legal.) Labor lost the election that followed, and while Whitlam maintained party leadership, he eventually lost that too in 1977 and resigned.
In the middle of these progressive years, 1973, Outback Press was founded.
There would be whole years when no one would publish a single Australian novel … No one was publishing, so we decided, in the pub, there were four of us.
The quartet above formed the leadership aiming for a young market. Quoting the writer Colin Talbot from a contemporary account:
The books we plan to publish will rely heavily on fiction, on poetry, on large format graphic and photographic works, sociojournalistic studies, that higher consciousness stuff, but not ecology. We will be relying on offset printing, eye-grabbing graphics and unconventional typography. The new journalism is one of our strong things.
They set up offices in what Morry Schwartz calls a “barn of place” that was “previously a junk shop for used plumbing fitments”. Three of the four — excluding Milgrom — moved in and “in between incessant debate, chess play-offs and live rock practice, some publishing actually happened.” It helped that they started the same time as the Whitman government was in full swing, as part of their educational push they established grants in literature, giving Outback Press $5000.
They managed to get some significant poetry, plays, and art photography books, although rather infamously the print quality was low and the books now are known to fall apart; however, keep in mind this was a time when Australian publishing was still being built from very little.
Part of the issue was the Traditional Market Agreement, which essentially gave Britain stewardship of the Australian market. If a British publisher got rights from an American publisher they immediately got the Australian rights by default. This understandably upset Australian publishers who in 1976 — via an anti-trust case in the United States — forced the agreement to be abandoned.
Outback saw this as an opportunity to get American authors, and while they had luck with some titles, on a trip of Milgrom’s he found that the publishers were still reluctant to sell to an Australian market without a British market attached; the Traditional Market Agreement, no longer law, held in spirit.
This led him to decide, if what publishers wanted was a British publishing company, he needed to make one; that way he could get American rights for both markets. Once finishing his work for Outback he moved with to London his wife Naomi Besen to form Melbourne House.
Speaking of Naomi Besen, now known as Naomi Milgrom (current job, billionaire philanthropist), despite being brought up in a rich family she always had a progressive bent, studying language and education in college and spending the three years before moving to London teaching language to autistic and schizophrenic children. Prior to the 70s, education to disabled children in Australia was not considered a right, and it wasn’t until ’73-’74 (Whitlam administration, again) that government funds started to be put towards precisely this issue. This means both directors of Melbourne House were involved in cutting-edge progressive causes immediately before founding their new company.
The selection of Melbourne House varied widely, with everything from the The Complete Book of Walking (by exercise expert Dr. Charles Kuntzleman) to the Commies-in-the-Vatican novel The Last Conclave (by the exorcist Malachi Martin).
The co-directors had interest in computers — Alfred even had supercomputer and mainframe experience from his college days — and they formed an offshoot company, Beam Software, in 1979. This is contrary to a date of 1980 you may have seen elsewhere but 1980 is when they were founded in Australia; the initial Beam Software was London-based, and you can see some of their catalog from this August 1980 ad:
Note their sales of “Adventure”: specifically, they offered the Scott Adams games up through Pyramid of Doom, selling for TRS-80, Apple II, Commodore Pet, and Exidy Sorcerer.
ADVENTURE by Scott Adams is incredibly complex, detailed and fascinating. It is like no other program you have ever seen! Defeat exotic wild animals to get treasures, or work out how to get out of a quicksand bog. You can communicate through two-word commands such as ‘go south’, ‘climb tree’, ‘throw ax’, ‘look around’, etc.
Unlike most available games ADVENTURE is full of surprises. It may take you more than an hour to ‘find a treasure’ and will probably take days or weeks of playing to get a good ‘score’.
This same ad also contains, importantly, their first original product. Milgrom had read an article in the Australian newspaper Financial Review mentioning a need for books for home computers users, so Milgrom went on to write 30 Programs for the Sinclair ZX80. The launch of the book coincided with him and his wife moving back from London, starting the (always planned) Australian versions of their two companies.
I should emphasize — for anyone thinking of Milgrom as “just” a publisher — that the ZX80 book has some very technical stunts, like a version of Gomoku that manages to wrangle 1k of memory by using the screen itself as memory storage and requiring the user to POKE memory locations outside of the regular type-in. Programming technical proficiency became a signature of Melbourne House and it was only years later that they hired a “designer” that was a non-programmer.
Speaking of hiring programmers, Milgrom made his first hire in December 1980, William Tang. They had no office at the time and the ZX80 was so low on capability their first program was sketched out on paper.
ZX80 doesn’t even do machine language by default so hacky methods (detailed in the ZX80 book) had to be used in order to do input. The first Melbourne House tape — a ZX80 version of Space Invaders — came out in February 1981, just in time for the ZX81 to drop and make all the retailers want to wipe the slate clean.
Melbourne House incidentally ran into some difficulty with the Beam Software name as well, clashing with another company. From Personal Computer World, December 1980:
As you may be aware, we advertised in the August issue of PCW, offering software and books under the name Beam Software.
Our advertisement attracted not only useful business but an objection from Beam Office Equipment who have established extensive trademarks and other rights in the Beam name.
As you know, we have discontinued use of the name Beam Software, and apologised to Beam Office Equipment for the inadvertent infringement of their right.
We will be continuing our business in software and books under our registered name, Melbourne House Publishers.
This was eventually smoothed over as Beam Software started to be used in Melbourne House products, but one certainly gets the impression there was hardscrabble chaos and Melbourne House made their finances work purely with their book sales. Even that aspect was in danger at the transition from ZX80 to ZX81 in early 1981 as the ZX80 book suffered the same fate as the ZX80 tape, and the only reason the company hung on is that the US version of the ZX81 wasn’t out yet; Melbourne House kept selling the US version of their book, giving enough time for Melbourne House to produce a ZX81 edition.
The Hobbit was always the project I wanted to do. I think it is the premier fantasy adventure in British literature and that’s why we went for it. We had some contingency plans if the Tolkien Estate could not give us permission to do it, but luckily they were delighted with the idea.
Space Invaders obviously isn’t The Hobbit, but it was clearly what was in mind when Melbourne House started advertising for a programmer at the University of Melbourne. Veronika Megler, a computer science student in her last year, responded and brought her friend Philip Mitchell on board; they became hires number 2 and 3 after Tang.
Alfred’s dream was to provide a natural language interface, and he hired Stuart, who was a language expert, to figure out how to do that.
That’s a team of four, and that’s what gets stated in the 1984 book titled Guide to Playing the Hobbit…
The program was written as a group effort by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler, with Alfred Milgrom and Stuart Ritchie over a period of 18 months.
…as well as an interview with Milgrom made right at the game’s release, where he refers to the “four of us” making the game. I’m emphasizing this point clearly because I have seen elsewhere a.) just crediting Philip Mitchell as “writing the Hobbit” b.) just crediting Megler and Mitchell.
Milgrom’s directive was to write the best text adventure ever.
We looked at ordinary adventure games and decided that we wanted to do something that would gо further and really stretch micros to the limit.
The micro in question they were using was a TRS-80 (the ZX81 clearly not being up to the task at hand, and the TRS-80 being the original home of the Scott Adams games that Beam Software briefly was a reseller of). It was written entirely in machine code — remember, all four of them were quite technical — and as Mitchell notes, by the time the ZX Spectrum came out (early 1982) they had done enough development to have a “basic TRS-80 version”; since both machines were Z80 based it was possible to port machine code from one to the other.
Megler designed the overarching structure of the game, selecting locations and designing the characters as well as the underlying artificial intelligence engine behind them. Philip worked on the overall engine as well as screen interface, while Ritchie worked on the parser.
We were very fortunate to have the services of Stuart Ritchie who developed what he calls his Inglish program. Stuart did a dual major in English Linguistics and Computer Science so he was really the ideal person to do it.
(I’m curious if the other language expert of the company — co-director Naomi Besen with experience in teaching language to autistic people — had any input into this, but she isn’t mentioned in any of the materials.)
There’s other materials out there on the history, and I haven’t gotten into the bizarro existence of Arkenstone, but I’m going to leave that behind all for now and get into the game itself. It launched to a spectacular reception, spreading from the original ZX Spectrum version to many other computers, and sold copies in the hundreds of thousands. There are numerous testimonials about this game forming core memories, so I was looking forward to finally popping it open, but the question arose: which version to play with?
I could use version 1.0, as the Data Driven Gamer did, but that version is allegedly quite buggy; a version 1.2 works a bit better, and if I go far enough along there’s Apple II and Macintosh versions with lengthier text. A shot from the admittedly lovely Macintosh port:
Original text: “You are in a comfortable tunnel like hall”. I’m keeping this version as a backup.
The other issue, other than bugs and changing text, is that of graphics. The early ZX Spectrum versions have art — part of the whole point of switching from TRS-80 — although the art was re-worked later.
Something about the ZX Spectrum version made me quite uncomfortable to play, and as I’ve written about before with Demon’s Forge, I don’t always feel obliged to play the earliest version of a game. Especially here, based on the timeline, many people played one of the later ports (either 1.2 ZX Spectrum or a different platform). I did worry the augmented text may have been a step too far, but I found a port that had both the original text and the new art: the MSX version.
Mind you, I was still a bit uncomfortable playing, and you’ll see why in a moment. The premise has us as Bilbo Baggins, where Gandalf the wizard and the dwarf Thorin accompanying us on a quest whilst following a “curious map”, on the way to get the dwarf treasure from the dragon Smaug. Notice: only one (1) dwarf. Understandable.
The opening room has a wooden chest. Trying to open it, examine it, or search it reveals nothing. I have no idea what the chest is about. The curious map is similarly unrevealing, where trying to read it just shows curious symbols. Trying to talk to either Gandalf or Thorin generally leads to no response or “No.” Gandalf in particular starts wandering on his own with on apparent rhyme or reason, and while Thorin follows me, I have yet to get him to do anything helpful. The closest I was able to do in terms of interaction was (following the manual) give the command SAY TO GANDALF (or THORIN) “READ MAP” but neither one has anything useful to say, as they can’t read the symbols either.
The manual comes with a verb list…
…but none of them seem specific to character conversation. I admit perhaps being a bit spoiled by the setup of Deadline, with a host of autonomous characters that you can talk to and will react to most every normal action. Here the characters seem a little more abstract, kind of like mobs in a MUD, but the intent seems to be to have characters that respond to commands but not to conversation. Deadline’s characters tended to the opposite, responding to conversation but not commands.
The map has the same “geographic jumping” as Arkenstone, but is more mixed:
That is, the spans are unequal between jumps; getting to Rivendell (see above) is just a matter of going EAST and then SOUTHEAST, but other times a single “step” is more like a traditional adventure. I also don’t understand how (on the map above) NORTH and EAST from the Lonelands lead to the troll clearing while NORTHEAST leads to a new area. (If nothing else, if you’re planning to have raw beginners play the game as Helen Stucky did with a museum exhibit, this aspect is bound to be confusing.)
Inevitably, with either route, you start by coming by a troll which has a key you need:
If you linger here, or head back in while the troll is still around, the troll will kill you. The idea here is — following the book — noting that this game has time pass (you’ll see the sun rise/set) so if you leave and come back not long after the trolls will now be stone.
Fortunately the key itself does not turn to stone, and you can head north over to a troll lair and unlock it.
The lair has a “strong short sword” and a “rope” that seem like they’ll be useful. With the troll area done we can go back past the troll to Rivendell, where Elrond hands over some lunch but I’m otherwise unable to make conversation.
Surely there’s some actions that work? Otherwise he feels like a prop here.
Past this the game suddenly switches to traditionalist mode with what is more or less a regular maze. I had to drop items to map it out properly.
There’s a “narrow path” that eventually leads to a “steep zig-zag” where at the end there’s a “deep misty valley” with a golden key, but the only exit I could find goes back to the narrow path.
I assume I’m missing an exit although I’ve combed over twice already. Maybe there’s some character that needs to be at a particular spot at a particular time. Gandalf still acts erratically; here he is grabbing the large key I had (which unlocked the troll lair) and asking “what’s this?”, a question I have no way of answering.
I have a feeling I’m dealing with very different norms than traditional adventure gameplay and I’ll need to puzzle out things like a.) are there hidden secrets in random spots? b.) do the characters give mention of these spots? c.) even though it seems like the characters act at random, is there anything useful they can do?
For now, please no hints whatsoever! Two more Mac pictures to close things out for now:
Not every room in the ZX Spectrum (and the corresponding room in the MSX version) is illustrated, but the Macintosh version has pictures everywhere.
The extra text may serve to make the game harder, not easier; there’s no reference to a Homely House in the MSX game, and it can’t be referred to in either version.
I’ve been doing research on The Hobbit published by the Australian/British company Melbourne House. One thing I knew ahead of time is that The Hobbit was technically their second “1982” adventure, as they published a port of Crowther/Woods for ZX Spectrum by Abersoft. I was never planning on doing a stand-alone post for the game as it really is just an abbreviated Adventure; also, Melbourne House only picked it up for publication later.
However, I found there was another adventure game that Melbourne House did publish before The Hobbit. I’m going to save my full history for that entry, but to be brief: they were originally a book publisher (the publisher, Alfred Milgrom, had experience dating all the way back to a student newspaper at the University of Melbourne) and they branched into games, with their first “original” product being a book of type-ins for ZX80. Type-in books made a fair amount of their profits in the early days before they hit a best-seller with The Hobbit.
The last game of the book is just called Adventure. Despite it clearly having some tutorial aspects it is definitely a full game; so much so that we’ve seen it on this blog in a modified version by a different author. I’m not going to announce which until after going through the game, so you can test your knowledge of 1982 adventures and try to puzzle it out early.
The games were republished a year later in tape form so I didn’t need to worry about typing in the type-in.
This is yet another “gather-the-treasures” game but at least there’s the excuse of being a tutorial of sorts. (While the text doesn’t have a “tutorial sequence”, there’s fairly detailed source explanations.)
The tutorial aspect also gives some excuse for the fussy parser, where “take” works but not “get”, and you also need to type the first part of a “noun phrase” even if that happens to be the adjective. That is, to get the lamp — I mean take the lamp — the right command is either “take brass lamp” or “take brass”.
There’s a locked trapdoor you can’t get in to start, so here’s the map of the aboveground:
You can scoop up a bottle of rum in the kitchen heading north, and be just a little startled stepping outside to find an “endless desert”. I mean, I realize people live in deserts, and it might not be the main character’s house, but usual the start area is a little more pastoral.
Also, the game doesn’t let you move anywhere, including from the starting room, unless you’re carrying the brass lamp. That means for the purposes mapping the semi-maze out via dropping objects, the only item you have to work with is the bottle.
Eventually you can find a “shovel” and “lake” at an oasis. The lake will pull you under and drown you if you try to go in, but the shovel is immediately useful: testing DIG all over the desert (the one case where it doesn’t feel weird) reveals a large key in a random spot. This key unlocks the trapdoor in the house. I guess someone had it fall out of their pocket. I hate trying to find my lost car key in an endless desert.
The lake gets taken care of later.
Here, now, is the area below:
The down-below kicks off with a troll guarding a sword. You can “kill troll” and the game will ask you what with; I fortunately paid attention to a spot in the directions that mentioned you can just hit enter to specify you mean your bare hands. That works on the troll, with the only tricky part being it’s a “mean troll” so you have to call it by that whole name or just “mean”.
You can then proceed east to find out whoever resides here (us, or weird uncle, someone else) is residing almost directly over the GATES OF HELL.
I’m going to say weird uncle.
The way is locked so you need to do a side trip down a “passage”. Along the way there’s a pirate who snatches your bottle of rum and leaves a gold coin behind…
…and a green dragon that needs to be killed by using the sword twice. Unlike Crowther/Woods bare hands don’t work here.
At the end of the passage is a “rope tied between the floor and the ceiling” and doing “cut rope” reveals an ivory key. This not only is the key for the gates of hell, but it also counts as a treasure (just like the gold coin from the pirate and Persian rug from the dragon).
Going into hell, we find a devil that says we have to go the right direction (this half-resembles death in Adventureland where you can make it out of limbo if you randomly pick the right way out).
The correct way is west; this leads to a “silver wand” which gets used almost immediately after to summon a bridge over a chasm, Crowther/Woods style.
Along the way there’s a part where you can dive directly into hell if you want…
…but otherwise the whole point is to nab the silver wand and ruby along the way and reach a passage which lands you back where the rope/ivory keys combination was. There’s also a “snorkel” along the way and this helps get the last treasure, and if you are carrying it you can safely dive into the lake in the desert.
If it hasn’t struck you yet, this is Hells Bells by Jacqueline Wright.
The desert is a forest in that game; the brass lamp is a candle. The pirate is now a witch (which is interesting since the pirate likely comes from Scott Adams, which likely comes from Crowther/Woods, so we have a fourth-generation “telephone game” copy). Hell mostly operates the same, with a “zombie” this time and the “angel of death” giving threat if you go the wrong direction.
Instead of getting a snorkel for a lake at the end, you get a gas mask for a sulfurous well, which honestly makes more sense to me than the original. (The diamond is implied to be at the bottom of the lake, right? If we’re getting “dragged down” by either bad swimming skills or some sort of local water suction, how do we get back up again?)
I’m not begrudging the author here, but it’s fascinating to see that someone took the book essentially as it was supposed to be — a model to copy in order to write new games. I doubt Melbourne House ever became aware of Hells Bells, though.
Next: Actually The Hobbit unless my research picks up something else wild I need to cover first. Includes never before seen history!
We’ve run through quite a bit of Peter Kirsch games now, with Magical Journey coming first chronologically, followed by Kidnapped, followed by kicking off the Softside Adventure of the Month series with Arabian Adventure. He edited the series but didn’t write them all; Crime Adventure was by Neil Bradley (age 12). David Steenson’s Windsloe Mansion Adventure (Jan. 1982) and James Bash’s Klondike Adventure (Feb. 1982) were the last of the series written by an outside party, as Kirsch started to crank out the entirety of the adventure series himself:
The wild swerving between ideas means that Kirsch hit has some very early examples of adventure game genres, like conceptual-Sci-Fi-with-a-twist (Arrow One) and Western (The Dalton Gang). If I had to pick of the 1982 games, I’d say my favorite in terms of gameplay was Arrow One (with the alien language) and my favorite in terms of plot was The Mouse That Ate Chicago (which unfolded in a genuinely clever way, and with an ending “twist” that was logical and inevitable rather than just dropping from nowhere).
Frustratingly enough, I still haven’t been able to find more about Kirsch beyond what he wrote in Anatomy of an Adventure, where he stays strictly to the process of writing an adventure with no hint as to his biography otherwise.
Planning for my next adventure always begins long before the completion of my last, and it’s always different and perhaps even harder to solve.
He won’t have quite as many Kirsch games in 1983 because January 1983 is the last of the Adventures of the Month as a proper running concern; his games start to drop more irregularly.
The reason we’re playing a “bonus game” today is because in addition to their regular type-ins in the magazine proper, Softside also had a special “disk version” (see above). The disks often just had what was in the magazine (meaning the subscribers didn’t have to type in code themselves), but there was occasionally something extra. By this phase in Softside’s run games were starting to get more platform-specific; the Apple II March 1982 edition had: Hexapawn, Program Matcher, Disk Peeker/Poker, Gravity-Float Trace, and Magical Shape Machine; while all three had source code in the magazine, the latter three programs were Apple II only.
Screenshot of the Magical Shape Machine.
The Atari disk included a platform-specific adventure game from Kirsch and while it gets a mention in the magazine, there’s no source code (presumably it was considered too long, especially given the magazine was trying to be written for multiple machines at once). As far as why it didn’t simply get ported over to be used as one of the Adventures of the Month by Kirsch, that’s because it has Atari-specific graphics:
The game is odd in other ways, as there’s no regular parser.
Instead of typing a full two-word command as in most adventures, all you need to do is to type the keyword: GET or OPEN, for example, instead of GET BOX or OPEN DOOR. And, if an item is not relevant in a particular situation, you will not be able to DROP an item you are carrying. Such memory conserving devices allow the game to fit into just 16K of RAM.
I admit I tried booting up the game before seeing this instruction so I was trying to struggle and type GET FLASHLIGHT before realizing what was going on (you’re just supposed to type GET). This is made even more cryptic with the use of sound feedback; legal and illegal moves are indicated purely by sound, where a “good move” gets a “bell tone” while an “illegal move” gets a “loud buzz”. This makes it look like on the screen (other than objects moving around) there’s no response at all to actions.
The lore states that a “lone thief” entered the tomb of “Pharaoh Ickabathan”, stealing “the two rubies which had been placed as the eyes of the mummy”. The thief was confused trying to escape and dropped the rubies; the mummy, now sightless, found the thief and killed him. After, the mummy went back to its sarcophagus, but put a curse of darkness on the land that could only be broken with the restoration of the rubies.
There are two: one red and one green. The red ruby, although hidden, should be relatively easy to find. The green one is another matter altogether. In order to succeed you must find both, return them to the mummy, and exit the pyramid.
It’s sort of like the protagonist of Inca Curse messed things up and now we’re trying to fix it!
Quickly ignoring for the pyramid a moment and wandering into the desert, going east twice leads to a flashlight (which, again, you need to GET to pick up, not GET FLASHLIGHT). Heading back to the pyramid, then using CLIMB followed by LIGHT:
The hieroglyphs can be READ but the only feedback you get is a musical dirge, implying what they say by vibes. This is so deeply unusual — I can think of no other instance of reading-by-music — I clipped a video so you can listen.
Here’s a map of the rest:
There are two major points of difficulty, one partly created by the unusual verb system, one wholly created by the system. But to hit things in sequence:
East of the entrance is a four-way junction. To the north is a waterlogged room we’ll get by later (SWIM and JUMP don’t work)…
…whereas to the south there is a series of room consisting of 1.) a giant clam 2.) a bed in a dark room and 3.) a button. The button simply lowers a ladder later (and needs to be re-pressed after using the ladder since it will retract). The bed hides the first (red) ruby which can be found by using MOVE:
The clam is the first “unusual verb system” point. This is a puzzle in normal circumstances I’d be fine with but in order to test out verbs the process is VERB – WAIT FOR ANNOYING BUZZ – VERB – WAIT FOR ANNOYING BUZZ – etc. I still tried OPEN, PRY, HIT and a few other words in what amounted to literal minigame of guess-the-verb.
In my actual play I didn’t get this until later, but just to save time, the right verb is KICK, revealing a FUSE.
Going back to that junction and heading east, there’s a room with a rug and a button that doesn’t work. Doing GET will take the rug, revealing a key that you can also get.
A side passage from the same place leads up some stairs to a room with “something hanging from above”. If you’ve pushed the other button already the thing hanging (a ladder) drops to reveal further passage.
The top of the stairs have a locked door where the key straightforwardly works to unlock it, revealing the lair of the mummy.
We have the red ruby already; we’ll return shortly with the green one. Heading back out into the hall and going to the far west, there’s a FUSE BOX. While clearly this is where the FUSE goes, I had an impossible time figuring out how to put it in; REPLACE, PUT, INSERT, FIX, etc. were doing nothing.
I needed Dale Dobson walkthrough help although afterwards I realized I could have figured things out by paying more attention to the instructions. Specifically this spot:
And, if an item is not relevant in a particular situation, you will not be able to DROP an item you are carrying.
My brain just thought “no dropping” but glossed over the “relevant in a particular situation” spot — what this is meant to imply is that you can drop things, but only in puzzle-solving spots like this one. DROP is what places the fuse.
With the fuse fixed, the non-working button now drains the watery room.
This leads by a corridor with a rope, and further on a pit with a stake. TIE will tie the rope to the stake so you can go in the pit.
(Rubies technically can’t be green, but it’s part of a mummy that awakens and does curses of darkness, so I’m fine with that. Or to put things a different way, in a fictional universe adjacent to reality, the things that seem slightly off ought to be near the unreal parts.)
With both rubies in hand you can then go back and fix the mummy. Well, not FIX. DROP again. At least I knew now what to do.
It would be fun if this led to a big escape sequence with the mummy chasing us and parts of the geography modified to make puzzles act in a different way than coming in; an Aardvark game might do this. Instead we can just walk out to victory.
In context, as a game tossed on a diskmag, I would not have been disappointed; this certainly went farther graphically than I expected, and the clunky parser control at least had a logic to it even if in practice I had trouble. Circa March 1982 (assuming an older-me from that year) I likely would have filed the experience, and moved on to try to figure out Hexapawn.
The 3 by 3 board has three white pawns and three black pawns, where each pawn can either move forward one or capture diagonally, and the goal is to either advance a pawn to the other side or leave the opponent stuck with no moves. The computer opponent has black and starts at “random”, but eventually, through learning when it loses, it will always do best play. With optimal play black will always beat white.
Coming up: There’s only two games left, The Hobbit and Countdown to Doom. Anyone want to take bets?
I’ve covered early German computing history and especially the history of the Video Genie in my post here about The Mysterious House; you may want to read that post first, as today’s game is another one for Video Genie, the TRS-80 clone that managed to be more popular in Germany than the original.
This game previously hadn’t been indexed but Rob had brought it up in a discussion on German adventure games; some 1982 classified ads mention the game is for sale. It is one of the earliest known German adventure games.
Bode + Winkler are given as the publisher but I have found no evidence of them beyond the two classified ads for this game.
An author doesn’t get listed in the game itself. Cross-referencing the ad leads to a “Thomas Karcher” having the same address as the classified ad but I’m sticking with Bode + Winkler as the “author name”.
The start of the walkthrough gives an action list, so I pulled it out right away. This isn’t just because of my difficulties with German; it’s also because all bets are off as far as what verbs might be considered “standard” when hopping over to another language. For example, this game includes both SCHLEICH (SNEAK) and LAUF (RUN) as verbs which are rare in English adventures from this era. The INVENTORY command is AUSRUESTUNG (EQUIPMENT).
LADE (LOAD)
GREIF (GRAB)
SCHLIESS (CLOSE)
NIMM (TAKE)
BEOBACHTE (WATCH)
WARTE (WAIT)
KLETTER (CLIMB)
SPRING (JUMP)
GEH (GO) — NORDEN, SUDEN, OST, WESTEN
RENN (RUN)
SCHLEICH (SNEAK)
LAUF (RUN)
LIES (READ)
DRUECK (PUSH)
ISS (EAT)
LEG (PLACE)
WIRF (THROW)
OEFFNE (OPEN)
SCHAU (LOOK)
SCHIESS (SHOOT)
AUSRUESTUNG (EQUIPMENT)
Generally speaking (at least in the games I’ve played so far) this means I can just think about translating nouns. This method was foiled early by a separable prefix which I’ll explain in a moment.
Our job is to break into a hunting lodge, steal a secret microfilm, and get out. We start with nothing whilst in a dark forest near the lodge.
ICH BEFINDE MICH IN EINEM DUNKLEN WALD.
I AM IN A DARK FOREST.
You can wander north, south, east, or west; if you wander in the wrong direction for too long the game says you are lost and starts over.
You need to start by going east before reaching a hedge.
ICH STEHE AN DER WESTSEITE EINES GRUNDSTUECKS, DAS VON EINER HOHEN HECKE UMGEBEN IST. EIN DURCHLASS IST NICHT ZU ENTDECKEN.
I’M STANDING ON THE WEST SIDE OF A PROPERTY SURROUNDED BY A HIGH HEDGE. PASSAGE THROUGH IS NOT VISIBLE.
Then go south, which travels along the hedge until arriving at the entrance. There’s an agent guarding the way.
ICH STEHE HINTER EINEM BAUM VERSTECKT AN DER SUEDSEITE EINES GRUNDSTÜCKS, DASS VON EINER HECKE UMGEBEN IST. 30 METER NÖRDLICH BEFINDET SICH DER EINGANG. EIN FEINDLICHER AGENT BEWACHT DEN EINGANG. ER TRAEGT EINE PISTOLE BEI SICH.
I’M STANDING HIDDEN BEHIND A TREE ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF A PROPERTY SURROUNDED BY A HEDGE. THE ENTRANCE IS 30 METERS TO THE NORTH. AN ENEMY AGENT IS GUARDING THE ENTRANCE. HE IS CARRYING A PISTOL.
This is where the verb list ended up being both helpful for me and (specifically for me) trouble. The presence of WATCH was exceedingly odd so I paused to wait, and a moment came up where the enemy agent’s back was turned.
I then tried RUN and then GRAB and … well, I was close. The game was fishing for GREIF AN, that is, using the separable prefix AN which turns GRAB into ATTACK, and yes, the AN really has to be there.
(Brief German lesson which I’m probably going to botch up: some verbs in German have separable prefixes. In some circumstances these prefixes will stay attached to a verb, that is, “angreifen” — to attack — will maintain the “an” in front. When the verb is in a sentence as a finite verb, the prefix moves to the end of the sentence.)
I imagine for a native German that’s completely implied by the verb list but my brain was not thinking that at all. I saw ICH BIN TOT quite a few times.
Having properly pummeled the enemy agent, you can nab their pistol and go inside. The room description mentions the possibility of going east and west but those both involve DIE DETONATION DER MINE and our protagonist messily dying.
Progress for a while after this is linear, as shown above, as long as you don’t get tempted to kill yourself again. For example, the first room of the hunting lodge has a empty elevator shaft to the east where going in kills you.
IM SCHACHT IST KEINE KABINE. ICH FALLE.
THERE’S NO CAR IN THE SHAFT. I’M FALLING.
Just north there’s some “caviar”…
ICH STEHE IN EINER KLEINEN KAMMER. IM NORDEN SEHE ICH EINEN SCHMALEN GANG, IM SUEDEN EINE TREPPE. NEBEN MIR LIEGT EINE KONSERVENDOSE MIT DER AUFSCHRIFT -ECHTER KAVIAR-.
I’M STANDING IN A SMALL ROOM. I SEE A NARROW CORRIDOR TO THE NORTH, AND A STAIRWAY TO THE SOUTH. A CAN OF FOOD LABELED “REAL CAVIAR” LIES NEXT TO ME.
…but opening the can kills you with a gas that makes you fall asleep.
Along the way there is a room with ammunition where you can load the empty gun you obtained from the enemy agent (incidentally, if the gun was empty, how was the agent shooting you earlier? Grrr.)
ICH STEHE IN EINEM KLEINEN, QUADRATISCHEN RAUM AM SUEDENDE EINES LANGEN GANGES. IN EINER ECKE STEHT EINE KISTE MIT MUNITION.
I’M STANDING IN A SMALL, SQUARE ROOM AT THE SOUTH END OF A LONG CORRIDOR. IN ONE CORNER IS A CASE OF AMMUNITION.
A bit farther north there’s a side passage that leads to a “rocket”. Going in farther I assume we somehow get blasted by the rocket or fall in or die in some other horrible way because the game is not specific. Getting past my translation issues demonstrates we’ve fallen in:
“Delete me from the pensioner list. I’m f fa faaaaalling!”
Avoiding the side passage and going north normally also kills you, this time with an alarm.
ICH STEHE IM SUEDEINGANG EINES ACHTECKIGEN RAUMES. EIN WEITERER EINGANG IST IM NORDEN. IN DER LINKEN UND RECHTEN WAND BEFINDEN SICH IN KNIEHOEHE ZWEI SELTSAME OEFFNUNGEN.
I’M STANDING IN THE SOUTH ENTRANCE OF AN OCTAGONAL ROOM. ANOTHER ENTRANCE IS TO THE NORTH. IN THE LEFT AND RIGHT WALLS, AT KNEE HEIGHT, ARE TWO STRANGE OPENINGS.
After some thought and fiddling with some gum nearby (red herring) and the caviar (still just deadly) I tried to JUMP (SPRING) north and it worked, leading to the north side of the map.
You can walk around the other side of the rocket and find a small key; otherwise, the way to go is east where there’s a room with a console inside containing a red button and a green button. Pressing the green button will launch the rocket at your home base and kill everyone. Pressing the red button will cause an explosion, I assume destroying the rocket. Fun design choices, hope your minion doesn’t have their finger slip!
ICH STEHE IN DER SCHALTZENTRALE. HINTER MIR FAELLT DIE TUER INS SCHLOSS. MITTEN IM RAUM STEHT EINE KONSOLE MIT EINEM ROTEN UND EINEM GRUENEN KNOPF.
I’M STANDING IN THE CONTROL CENTER. THE DOOR CLOSES BEHIND ME. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM IS A CONSOLE WITH A RED AND A GREEN BUTTON.
Pressing either button incidentally activates the only “special effect” of the game with a rapidly moving zigzag pattern rolling down the screen.
Assuming you’ve pressed the correct button, the way out is now blocked, although there is a new room (a dungeon) that is revealed. You can go in and find a skeleton as well as a note containing a numerical combination which will get used in a moment.
ICH BEFINDE MICH IN EINEM ENGEN MUFFIGEN KERKER. UMPFFF! ICH ENTDECKE AM BODEN EIN MENSCHLICHES SKELETT. NEBEN MIR LIEGT EIN BESCHRIEBENER ZETTEL.
I’M IN A CRAMPED, MUSTY DUNGEON. UMPFFF! I DISCOVER A HUMAN SKELETON ON THE FLOOR. A NOTE LIES NEXT TO ME.
Heading south, you get attacked by three enemy agents and have a gunfight. This is just a matter of typing SHOOT AGENT (SCHIESS AGENT) over and over until the luck works in your favor.
With the agents dead, you can step over them to find a safe and use the combination at the skeleton (it was 898 for me, looking at the walkthrough it seems to be randomly generated). Inside is the microfilm.
ICH STEHE VOR DEM TRESOR. DIE TUER IST OFFEN. IM TRESOR LIEGT EIN MIKROFILM.
I’M STANDING IN FRONT OF THE SAFE. THE DOOR IS OPEN. THERE’S A MICROFILM IN THE SAFE.
Getting out I thought was the only hard part. Everything up to here was reasonable to solve, if mostly a death-trap maze where sometimes you just have to test out the red button. In the same room as the safe, you can shoot the safe door, which somehow opens a secret door. I assume I missed a hint somewhere?
IM WESTEN OEFFNET SICH EINE GEHEIMTUER, HINTER DER SICH EIN FAHRSTUHL BEFINDET.
A SECRET DOOR OPENS TO THE WEST, BEHIND WHICH LIES AN ELEVATOR.
The secret elevator leads back to the entry room of the hunting lodge, so escape is now just a matter of making a beeline south to victory.
The president says to Central: congratulations, you did it!
I don’t know if this game had any particular influences; CLUB-80 did have Scott Adams in their catalog so I’m going to assume some Secret Mission. I also liked how the gunfight with the three agents resembled the circumstance in Crowther/Woods adventure where multiple dwarves have built up, just in that game you’re using an axe and in this one you’re using a gun.
Map from the CLUB-80 newsletter showing both Alexander who wrote the walkthrough and Gunther who was the president of CLUB-80. There’s a “Walter” in either Switzerland or Austria.
Alexander did keep up the Adventure Corner column; in the issue I pulled the map from, he gives a walkthrough for the graphical adventure Atlantean Odyssey. It is possible more of interest may be pulled up in later years (I have yet to read every issue), but for now this seems a good way to end my non-English explorations of 1982.
It turns out — despite multi-line issues to an extent it’s still puzzling what happened — Gus Brasil had already busted through with the power of editing the BASIC lines directly, so was able to put a “fixed” version of the game. This fixed version still crashes at a critical point but it was enough for me to get through to the end of the game. (EVEN MORE EXTRA: Stay tuned to the end — there’s a specific reason all the issues happened.)
I’m still not entirely sure about two of the puzzles, but let’s continue from where I crashed last time…
…which was at the trunk shown, where the game just breaks with a syntax error. The fixed version goes past this, revealing that inside the trunk there is a small chest.
Unfortunately, trying to OPEN CHEST brings up the EXPLOSIONS which got us at the troll cave last time.
The chest-in-trunk is a trap, and one we’ll get back to, as I was able to (with the fix) use the ASK command. The reason the original broke is it set a variable marked ASK, which nameclashed a protected word in Color Computer BASIC (ASC). The exact circumstances here are important not only to fixing the problem (just change the variable name to something else) but also because it seems impossible this would happen with some kind of bad dump error. Yet, how was this game able to run then? There was a review in the Rainbow only two months after the game’s release which didn’t mention any fatal bugs, although the reviewer did have the same problem as I did in figuring out what the graphics were supposed to depict.
Yes. Nice green grass. Pretty green trees. Purple tree frogs. And, oh no. We’ve broken a rule and told you something about the adventure. Yes. that thing is a tree frog.
Well, we weren’t sure what it was. We tried a bunch of things and didn’t get it right. Finally, we went a-hunting in the list of variables (one reason I like Basic Adventures — when I get stuck I can cheat) and figured out it was a tree frog. And, while I still have not found out what to do with the tree frog, at least I know what it is.
The review does, importantly, indicate that the reviewer did not finish the game. Maybe they didn’t try using the ASK command at all?
Oh, by the way, the tree frog is used for nothing. I think. We’ll get back to that later.
With the ASK command working properly, I was able to ASK ORACLE — the wandering old man with the staff and ASK SHINVA, the tree dryad. In both cases they gave cryptic hints.
Speaking of cryptic hints, I’ll mention I knew RUB was a verb that worked (both from using my verb-testing list, but also plowing through the BASIC code later trying to diagnose crashes) and found it applies to the URN.
This technically gives four clues: TRANSLATION OF FIVE WILL GET YOU CASH, U REPLACES K, YKG / KYA (on the urn), and CIRCLE THRICE IF TRAPPED (as “said” by the urn). I have no idea what what the first three clues mean; I’ve finished the game and circling thrice is the only one I “used”.
I spent a long time trying to get literal translations of the word “five” (like “cinq”) to work out to something, but without luck; to be honest I was still leery about the possibility there might be some broken code, so I poked around until I found curious reference to a noun “BOT”. This was in the OPEN section, so I tried OPEN BOTTOM while holding the chest, and it worked, revealing gold coins.
Now, do the unused clues point to this directly somehow? Or maybe the clue about five points was meant to apply to something in one of the items that I never used in the game (to disclose right now I never used: hip boots, mushrooms, stump, lake, fishing net, tree frog) and from that item I would get a second clue suggesting I could have opened the chest from the bottom safely. Or maybe — and this is very very possible — the author(s) had some elements in mind but never bothered implementing them due to running out of space / time / mental willpower.
Fortunately, I had already done ASK TROLL (“MONEY FOR SAFE PASSAGE”) so I knew where the coins needed to go.
That is, while you can kill the troll with a sword, the cave is then trapped with an explosive and you die. All three items carried at the start (sword, food, rope) are red herrings.
This led to a new area…
…and a new background graphic. Finally not the same three trees over and over.
Just this graphic over and over instead.
An offshoot branch leads to a rock blocking the way which I was unable to move. You can try to JUMP ROCK but you hit your head on the ceiling and die.
What’s important to start is an axe to the far west of the cave. With the axe in hand, it is now possible to go back to the ogre and the princess and KILL OGRE (sword wasn’t able to get through the tough skin, I guess).
With the ogre dead you can now ASK PRINCESS and crash the game.
Using video capture I still wasn’t able to get right up to the crash so this is missing a word.
I think the message is about using the nymph’s “name” but after multiple repeats it kept zipping by so I’m not sure. Either way the word SHINVA isn’t useful, but I knew (again from needing to extract the verb list during debugging) that VAN was a verb, so maybe VANISH which is an anagram?
Yes! This let me get down to a small 2 by 2 area of caves with apparently nothing in them.
Going back through the clues I had not used yet (which was all of them at this point) I decided Circle Thrice could apply here so I tried going E, S, W, N repeatedly, doing a circle and seeing if something would happen. On the third time while going west there was mist described visually by giving the word “MIST”.
Then going north led to the key, which landed in my inventory without having to even pick it up.
Thus I was able to get back to the cage, OPEN CAGE, GET PRINCESS, and walk my way to victory (go back to the castle at the start and GO CASTLE).
To the best of our knowledge, the majority of the software companies you mention went out of business years ago and are no longer marketing software for the Color Computer.
I’ve found other Genesis Softwares, including one in Missouri founded in the 90s, but that’s a fairly popular company name so I don’t think they’re any relation; the trail goes cold for now.
Thanks to everyone in the last thread who helped with prying open this game’s secrets. I am still Secret Agent-ing in German so we’ll get back over to the normal TRS-80 next time.
EXTRA: Gunther has the extra issue worked out (one of the lines was too long) and has a download here. This version of the game works with no crashes.
In order to fix that issue, he modified the princess dialogue line to cut the apostrophe-S from the word “NYMPH”:
Also, all the spare clues have now been resolved. Gus Brasil found that if you LOOK CHEST you get an additional picture with helpful information:
These letters shifted (translated) by five will get the command OPEN BOTTOM as needed to open the chest safely.
Regarding the urn’s text, as noted by John N…
…applying the “U for K” clue gets ?U? U?? which is close enough to RUB URN that it seems like the game is meaning the player to jump the rest of the way (the similarity to OPEN BOTTOM helps). I had skipped needing this information as I had solved the puzzle by simply knowing RUB worked and it ought to be tried on things that looks magic.
EXTRA EXTRA: As BB Durall observes in the comments, ASC is not a protected word while loading from tape rather than disk. Gunther tried extracting the BASIC and using that to be in no-disk mode and was able to get the game to run without modifications. Download the BASIC here, then run with xroar -m coco -no-machine-cart -run ENCHANT.BAS which will load the file “off tape”.
Genesis Software — at least the version of the company we’re talking about here, not the business software company from Washington — started advertising in The Rainbow in October 1982.
The magazine was, essentially, the central information outlet for the TRS-80 Color Computer all the way up to 1993. Nearly everything for Color Computer went through its pages. The only evidence of Genesis Software’s existence outside of its games is from its ads in the Rainbow. They were based in Manchester, Missouri, and since they used a PO Box and no other identification in their source code that’s all I can say. In addition to Enchanted Forest which we’re playing today, they also published two more adventure games in 1983 (Bigfoot, Secret of the Crypt) but neither is currently available on any archive.
While we’ve had adventure games dating back to Mystery House that imply objects solely through their pictures, there’s still text scattered throughout. This game has the unique aspect of wanting to show all the action solely through pictures.
This might be completely fine with a high-end enough system (or even an Apple II with a skilled enough artist) but let me give an example of what I was dealing with in Enchanted Forest:
Is it a jellyfish? Tiny yoda? An alien blob? This is a TREE FROG. Fortunately the game gives an extra command (WHAT) to let you know what’s nearby, but the fact an extra step is required suggests the author genuinely hoped it’d be unnecessary.
So if the TREE FROG is there, where are the lake, stump, and mushrooms in the picture? This game also features directionality, akin to The Haunted Palace: you can LOOK NORTH, LOOK SOUTH, LOOK EAST, and LOOK WEST. Most directions just have the three trees; in the location above typing LOOK EAST shows a different scene.
If you walk a direction (north, south, east, west) you will automatically be facing that way when you enter a new location. In the place you start, where there is a castle in the distance, you start facing south; you only see the castle if you re-enter the same room going from south to north or LOOK NORTH while standing there.
Here’s the overall map I was able to reach:
My particular phrasing of “was able to reach” usually indicates this is going to be a part 1 of x post. Unfortunately, I was stopped because the game — at least the copy of it available — is very broken. There are numerous crashes at essential points and it is clear there’s something corrupted in the lines preventing progress. An picture to illustrate, where the game crashes in the middle of drawing a graphic of an open trunk:
This is followed by
SN ERROR IN 1255
which is just a long list of drawing commands.
I can at least give a general idea of the gameplay. You start with a rope, sword, and food; your inventory limit is 3 so you can’t pick anything up without dropping something off first.
The Enchanted Forest of the title is very open; available just from walking around are a lantern, old urn, fishing net, and hip boots. One room has Shinva the Wood Nymph (where I would love to ASK SHINVA but that command crashes the game)…
…and a troll guarding a cave (which is easy to KILL while holding the sword from the start of the game).
Unfortunately, entering the cave kills you with EXPLOSIONS.
The princess we’re looking for is out in the open, past a sign that says BEAST IS EAST.
Because of the directional views, if you approach this room from the south (and don’t LOOK EAST) you won’t see the sign.
The tree frog I mentioned earlier is a wandering creature, as is an ORACLE who can appear in any the normally empty rooms.
ASK seems especially pertinent here, but again, game crash.
I tested this with all the different CoCo versions and multiple emulators but no dice; the crashes feel “authentic” to me in that I think the emulator is reacting appropriately to the code that’s in the file. That is, something went wrong in the process of dumping the disk. It might even be possible to repair the damage but it isn’t just a single line causing the crashes, so this goes back on the technical issues pile for now.
I did want to document this game, because directionality-graphics are quite rare for this time and it seems like everyone who used them came up with idea on their own (the only game in the category that because famous was Asylum II; however, that was designed around an RPG-style maze so isn’t quite the same gimmick as Haunted Palace and this game). Rather than the graphics being like pages of a book giving a full view of a location, they resemble more the actual perspective of the avatar in the world.
Coming up: Geheimagent XP-05 — Abenteuer-Spiel in deutscher.
Dobbs was too much occupied with other thoughts to take any account of how he was sitting. Just then he was looking for a solution to that age-old problem which makes so many people forget all other thoughts and things. He worked his mind to answer the question: How can I get some money right now?
I like what this game was aiming for conceptually but the technology (that is, a late-70s or early-80s computer) didn’t hold up with the goal. The basic idea here was to use the MAKE command to build a number of things — far more than any prior game I’ve seen in this chronology — turning combinatorial object creation into a regular mechanic rather than a one-off novelty. The idea works in games like Return to Mysterious Island but that game has pictures of the objects and a UI that clarifies what’s going on. Let’s return to the issue in context and go back to a chunk of map I missed —
Right where I bribed the guard and got a FILE, I used it to nab a CHAIN, get a BAR out of a skylight, and escape. I did not think about the fact the DOOR is also now described as OPEN.
Implicitly I think I was imagining there’d just be guards back there; I was half-right but the half-wrong part was vital.
If you don’t GO WEST as shown above, you can nab some keys, then break into an office and two cells. The office has a map showing the town as well as a FULL CANTEEN (don’t drink it, it isn’t water).
One cell has a hanging body with a paper that has TRANSLUCENT PARTS. You can also use the file on the rope to get it (I did not figure this out straight away and had to loop back long after, but I’m saving time in the narrative). Across of the same cell, reflective of the general prison standards, there is a man who isn’t dead yet but drops over a turn after he gives you a message.
Searching the second man reveals some SPECTACLES. I’m going to condense my prolonged narrative and mention that USE SPECTACLES will cause them to light the paper on fire, revealing a message.
(I have never ever seen any spectacles with this effect, and this won’t be the last bit of dodgy science you’re going to see.ADD: OK, I checked and there are extreme enough reading glasses to make it work. Mea culpa.) This code ends up being useful at the bank — and I even knew immediately it must go to the bank — but I had to check a walkthrough (via Strident) to know how to phrase it. I’m guessing the Spectrum version (which he played) was more helpful about this?
Dark Star gave the syntax out when asking for HELP, but this game does not give any. As far as I can tell the only way to know this syntax is to imagine the same thing carries over between games, because the assertion doesn’t follow a verb-noun pattern.
This gives a SAFE DEPOSIT BOX. The box contains a passport but the passport is in need of a photo. I already had the bottle of developer, tray, photo sheet, and room that could be made dark, but the game let me know about a lack of CAMERA. It turns out — and I had to look this one up too — the safety deposit box and a SKEWER from a house can be used to MAKE CAMERA.
Could a skewer poke a hole in that? Is that even the right shape for a camera? Is a pinhole camera really enough to make a passport photo? (Indeed the author could have been visualizing the box “correctly” but just saying IT’S EMPTY upon examining it is not sufficient to avoid disjoint visualization.)
At least the game is very specific about the verb FIX here which is not being used in the “repair” sense like it normally is.
Before hitting the cavalcade where things getting even wilder, here’s the remaining object list: BLANKET, SOME WOOD, EMPTY CONTAINER, WIRE, METAL STRIP, IRON BAR, WHEELS, CANTEEN. There’s also a HORSE in a stable, petrol pump and an ENGINE that is too big to carry, the GOLD INGOTS equally too big to carry, and a JEEP that is stuck in QUICKSAND.
The container is used at the petrol pump to get some gas over to the jeep and fill it. I got that far, at least. I also got part of the way to figuring out the WINCH; there’s a pulley that can be mended as long as you’re holding the IRON BAR (shown above) and then MAKE WINCH while holding the chain. Except:
It turns out you can ENTER JEEP … except for the quicksand, which you can cross by USE BLANKET. Why THROW BLANKET does not work is beyond me (leaving the jeep, you don’t use the blanket again, so you ought to get stopped by the quicksand; best just not to think about it to much).
Here, you have to put together the fact the CANTEEN is in fact holding acid, the wire, and the metal strip to MAKE BATTERY. This does not sound safe or even like it would work.
However, you also need the ENGINE. Going back to the HORSE, the only unused items are the WOOD, the ROPE, and the WHEELS, which is sufficient — without nails, a hammer, or any supplies really — to MAKE CART.
MAKE is such a risky verb when any noun in the universe is technically possible, especially if the author is fishing for something specific. This was way too specific for me. I did not visualize the wood as being of the volume for this kind of thing, or the wheels as the kind of thing that would somehow attach without any extra bolts or assistance. Again, I get where the author was going, but with minimal descriptions or no descriptions at all this requires abductive reasoning of colossal size.
The cart allows picking up the ENGINE and delivering it to the JEEP. You can move the GOLD closer while you’re at it if you want. With that done you can START IGNITION, LEAVE JEEP, and MAKE WINCH, finally pulling the jeep out.
The gold fits into the jeep, and apparently we are just getting waved through because it’s the 80s.
Flashing so I couldn’t quite get the whole word “ANOTHER”.
In a narrative sense this had a theme of greed rarely seen in an adventure game from this time. That might seem like a bizarre statement given the number of Treasure Hunts we’ve experienced, but the emphasis has very rarely been on Getting Rich; the treasures are treated as a generalized mechanic for sending the player in all directions. (In some games, the treasures are being moved inside the dungeon/pyramid/complex rather than “liberated”.) Here, there’s no reason we have to take the risk to also get the gold; the passport would normally be enough for an escape, but the protagonist is suffering from That Age-Old Problem. Hence I got more interesting narrative out of this game than the same author’s Haunted House (which is pure treasure hunt) but the leaps of disjoint visualization required to MAKE the objects required left me feeling sour.
Via MZ Sharp Archive.
Still not a terrible game to end the Sharpsoft saga (for now) on. Five 1982 games to go!
Strident in the comments pointed out that a download for this game also exists in MZ-700 format, with color. I have tested the two versions and the major difference is that the first line is missing in the MZ-700 edition. It has two POKE commands followed by REM BY GEOFF CLARK JULY 82. I think it likely whatever shenanigans caused by POKE wasn’t needed and the removal of the author name was an unintended side effect — especially given the name stayed on Secret Kingdom — but swapping back and forth they’re essentially the same just with the addition of color.
From the Sharp MZ Archive.
To recap, I was in a cell with a blanket on a bed but otherwise no apparent resources. The guard was noted as bribable but I didn’t have anything to bribe with.
Now with color! Here I was trying to GET a BRICK. TAKE BRICK properly mentions a BRICK rather than a RICK. I assume the game trims the first five characters (“T”, “A”, “K”, “E”, “ ”) but the author forgot the synonym was shorter, causing the effect.
I had already tested verbs thoroughly, so maybe the problem was nouns. I thought I had tested those thoroughly too, trying LOOK FLOOR, LOOK WALL, LOOK CEILING, LOOK BAR, and LOOK CHAIN. The latter two give YOU CANNOT SEE IT HERE rather than the “doesn’t exist” kind of feedback which is important information, but doesn’t quite help set off the chain of events.
I had a problem of visualization. The skylight is BARRED AND AT GROUND LEVEL, but I assumed this was just to indicate it was a funny kind of skylight that wasn’t strictly aimed at the sky. What didn’t occur to me was that this also indicates GROUND is a recognized noun, and that I should be visualizing the cell as not having a FLOOR but rather just being GROUND.
FEEL at least was on my verb list although I think SEARCH should map to the same action (I would visualize someone searching a floor after seeing a glint as using their hands). The glint is a GOLD COIN. You can then SHOW COIN to the guard, followed by GIVE COIN.
GUARD TAKES IT AND DROPS SOMETHING
The something is a FILE. Since I already had the two nouns mentally stored, FILE CHAIN and FILE BAR came to me right after (both give a CHAIN and a BAR respectively), and I was further able to ENTER SKYLIGHT to escape.
Now the game puts up a hilarious contrast with the opening constrained section, as there’s a lot of rooms. I’m going to give the whole map at once (at least as I have it so far), then explain it in pieces.
To start with, there’s a giant 7 by 10 plain. There’s no thirst meter or concern about timing; you can map out at your leisure a series of rooms which are mostly all the same.
This reminds me of Dark Star having the giant 8 by 8 crater with random items tossed in. This is not typical for adventures of this period; even Time Zone wasn’t quite so blatant. This essentially encourages CRPG-like “lawnmowering” checking each square. This game has the fortunate interface addition of being able to move around with the arrow keys so this isn’t as bad as it sounds.
One thing I do find fascinating in a historical-analysis sense is that Dark Star was by the other Sharpsoft author. The authors essentially formed a miniature “school of design” with common patterns, just like artists from the same Renaissance workshop have the same affectations. We’ve also seen that with the multiple authors from Aardvark who tended to use interesting geography tricks — also the same bad parser, but the geography tricks are not something determined by a common codebase as much as overarching choices in design.
Returning to the game at hand…
…just a bit northwest from the start is a stuck jeep and a large rock. The jeep is described as having a PULLEY IN THE FRONT. There’s also an ENGINE nearby — which I presume goes in the jeep — but it is TOO HEAVY AND YOU NEED SOME TYPE OF TRANSPORT.
I’ll just skip ahead and mention there’s a town with a whole slew of items, including a SHOVEL. With the shovel I tested each and every room in the big plain using DIG before hitting literal paydirt.
We’ll visit the town in a moment; two more stops. To the north is a garage with a petrol pump, and the garage itself has SOME WHEELS. I assume these also go to the jeep.
Farther north still is the US-Mexico border where you need your papers to cross.
The overall quest seems to be thus: a.) put together the Jeep with various parts b.) pick up the gold with it c.) get a passport somehow d.) escape with profit assuming they don’t ask too many questions at the border. It’s sort of the plot of Three Kings without the war in the background. I assume we don’t get to shoot a bazooka either.
As far as “various parts” for the jeep go, let’s hit the town.
Most of the locations are empty of people and serve to deliver items. This includes a SKEWER, METAL STRIP, WIRE, SHOVEL (as already used), PLASTIC TRAY, EMPTY CONTAINER, SOME WOOD, a PHOTOGRAPHIC SHEET, and a BOTTLE with some developer fluid. The latter two are in the same building and there’s additionally some curtains that can be “DRAWN” to make the room dark.
I assume the plastic tray also gets used in this procedure. I do not have a CAMERA yet but the game recognizes it (there’s no I DO NOT THINK THERE IS A AMERA message upon trying to GET one).
Of special note is the stables which in addition to having the EMPTY CONTAINER also has a HORSE. You can GET HORSE like a regular object and I assume do something with it hauling the jeep out of the quicksand but I haven’t tested this far yet.
There’s also a bank (BANK’S ARE SMALL if you try to enter with a horse) and I’m not sure what I should be doing. I am unable to GET CASH or GET LOAN or anything like that but none of the shops have shopkeepers to take money anyway.
That’s everything so far! I’m definitely just stopping to report in rather than stuck, as I have to try to build something to pull a jeep. I accidentally hit MAKE WINDOW while in the cell and found the command was recognized (YOU DO NOT HAVE EVERYTHING YOU NEED) although my guess is the “WIN” in the three-letter parser is standing in for WINCH instead.
Here is the last of the Sharpsoft set of games from 1982, the series that included Secret Kingdom, Haunted House, and Dark Star.
I’ve got historical background here from writing about Secret Kingdom and here writing about Sharpsoft’s 1981 game Escape from Colditz. Like Secret Kingdom, this one didn’t have A.J. Josey involved, but was solely the work of Geoff Clark.
You have just come to from concussion, you have lost your memory. You find yourself in a Mexican prison, your aim is to escape from prison and return to Texas a rich man.
Often our protagonists start in jail for crimes they didn’t commit; this time I’m wondering if the player is jail for a crime they did commit. In a gameplay sense, we’ve seen approaches all over the map for opening prison escapes, it being something like a mini one-room game to start proceedings. They sometimes involve breaking out a window (Escape from Rungistan) or out the front (Devil’s Island, which memorably involved having to start by waiting 2 minutes in real time before killing a guard).
From doing LOOK BED you can find a BLANKET. LOOK DOOR reveals THERE IS A GUARD OUTSIDE and LOOK GUARD notes
GUARD LOOKS GREEDY
and I’m not sure what this means, but this is clearly signaling some kind of bribe to start (which I think is new!) BRIBE GUARD gets the response
SHOW IT TO HIM FIRST
but there’s the slight problem that you don’t start with anything valuable.
The SKYLIGHT is BARRED AND AT GROUND LEVEL but doesn’t seem to respond to commands otherwise.
And … that’s as far as I’ve gotten. This is another kick opening where it’s hard to do anything. I did manage to crash the game by typing GET without an object
but I have made no progress past this point. Here’s my verb list attempt:
STA gets NOT YET so I don’t know if that verb is STAND, STAB, or START.
The verbs at least have distinct failure messages. DRINK responds I THINK YOU HAD TOO MUCH TO DRINK ALREADY (not sure our memory issues are just from a concussion!), BURN chides the player with YOU ARSONIST!, DIG responds YOU DO NOT HAVE A SHOVEL, and CONNECT cryptically responds THINK.
I could of course prod open the source code (it’s BASIC) but I feel awkward doing so on the very first puzzle. Having a “kick opening” (start of the game with a tough puzzle) is extremely risky and makes it seem to the player like something might be broken; Wizard and the Princess starting putting cards in packages explaining how to solve the first puzzle. I’m wondering if Sharpsoft received any grumpy letters or anyone who bought this game just coped.
I’ll take speculation from anyone who hasn’t played, but if someone has managed to get farther on their own, I don’t want any “real” hints yet.
(For those who were anticipating the Misadventures rather than this game, there were technical issues severe enough I’m kicking the games to my loop-back list. This means once Mexican Adventure is done I’ll have five games left to go for 1982.)
From the North Star Catalog, January 1978, via Bitsavers. I tested the North Star version of this game some and the only major difference I found was that the oil for the lamp was placed one room over.
I was originally going to title this post “Outsmarting the Parser” but one puzzle near the end (the last treasure I couldn’t get) dropped me with a pile driver from the top rope.
Continuing from last time, I started prodding at various elements in the environment trying to get them to be recognized. I came across some luck with a suit of armor in the entry hall.
ARMOR MAKES SENSE–BUT TOUCH??
This is different than the usual message which would be TOUCH ARMOR??, so I ended up just jamming through the various possibilities on my verb list.
OPEN turned out to get a different reaction, meaning it was possible for OPEN ARMOR to do something useful, but what item was I missing? I had a piece of cheese still which didn’t seem right, but maybe the hammer?
I would not have gotten that without some of the parser juking there. The whole sequence gave me pause, though, because even in some circumstances with an item I knew was usable, (like the lamp I was holding) I wasn’t getting the “MAKES SENSE” message. I played around some more and realized not only was the parser cutting at five letters, to get the “MAKES SENSE” message on an noun that can be used it needs to be typed in at exactly five letters: no more, no less. That is, the command “TOUCH LAMP” gets
TOUCH LAMP???
but “TOUCH LAMP ” with the extra space at the end gets
LAMP MAKES SENSE-BUT TOUCH??
This turns out to be a vitally important fact which helped me break most of the rest of the game. Going back to the drawbridge puzzle from last time:
The screen above shows the state of the drawbridge room before having applied the oil to the gears. If you do any verb followed by GEARS, the game will recognize the noun GEARS. Even a non-real-verb works; after Z GEARS:
GEARS MAKES SENSE-BUT Z??
Getting this important message means that the gears is a recognized noun in the state of the room at this exact moment. After doing OIL GEARS, gears no longer is recognized, so Z GEARS gets the regular message of
Z GEARS???
and you’re instead supposed to refer to the TEETH, so that noun gets activated. Then, after PULL TEETH, the game reaches the horribly stuck condition I was in last time.
I had already rammed through a verb list (ROTATE, TURN, MOVE, LOWER, OPEN, OPERATE, USE, PUSH, PULL, SPIN) with the DRAWBRIDGE, MECHANISM, GEARS, and TEETH. Rather than futilely testing the whole set on every noun in the universe, I could now check to see what noun was actually recognized through the “MAKES SENSE” trick! I did Z on every plausible and non-plausible object that might be referred to in the room before finally hitting paydirt on … the noun BRIDGE. Not DRAWBRIDGE, but BRIDGE. Sigh.
Doing this unleashes some RATS. I was able to give the rats the cheese I had been hanging on to (turning them into FAT, LAZY RATS) and then I could take the rats whilst holding the sack. They’ll be useful later.
I was then able to use the MAKES SENSE trick to figure out the heraldry room. (I want to emphasize I would not have found the trick at all except the word ARMOR had exactly five letters in it. This feels a bit like when a speedrunner finds a glitch that allows skipping a level just because the exit was made 80 pixels high rather than 78 pixels high.)
Mind you, no noun in the entire room description succumbed to the trick: I did Z LARGE, Z COAT (with that crucial extra space after), Z ARMS (ditto), Z HOLE (ditto again), Z VOLUM, Z BOOKC, Z SHELV. This meant I could say with confidence that the solution was not “verb + some noun in the room”. This of course assumes that there is a solution, but the hole in the volume was screaming for something to happen.
Excluding the magic words (which I tried) this left “verb + some noun I was carrying”. I remembered (or rather, noticed from my map) that the SIGNET RING started in the room, so I took that item over and crawled through every verb on my standard verb list, hitting paydirt with INSERT.
Does this feel like “adventure gaming”? Not in the slightest. But at this point I’m satisfied with beating the computer.
The passage leads to the last area of the game, where things mostly went smoother.
The area is mostly dark which means the dragon is in play. I ended up having to get the bow/arrow setup just in case; just note that the dragon can come back any time after being shot, even the exact same turn it gets shot! A much better solution — which I found out when I was done with the game — is to carry the “friendly dog” around which scares the dragon, kind of like the kitten in ADV.CAVES. (The dog is needed anyway because it counts as a treasure.)
The “through happiness” hint applied soon after, as there’s a wine room with a wine bottle (treasure) in a rack.
With some intuition I tried Z RACKS and hit paydirt (that is, it gave the MAKES SENSE message so I knew the noun was recognized), so I just needed to roll through a (very long) verb list before finally reaching SLIDE RACKS.
Those treasures I could cart back “by hand” to the start if I wanted. Moving on, there’s a guard room with a key (useful in a second), a dungeon with bones (not useful at all) and a torture room which looked like it held a secret.
Again using the noun-reference trick, I found that the GRATE did not count as a noun as far as the parser was concerned so any method of opening it required referring to something else. Going through my very small inventory (barring the whole pile of treasures, none which seemed applicable) I came across dropping the rats.
The passage this opens leads through a “bottomless room” (door which needs a key) up to a “meditation room” with a chair. The chair again can’t be referred to, but I decided to try SIT with no noun.
The dragon remained annoying through all this.
Once I managed to coordinate sitting in the chair with no dragon, I tried various meditation-adjacent verbs until I hit THINK, which teleported me to a “round room”. Going in a random direction led to a THRONE ROOM with more treasure.
The round room otherwise teleports back into the castle somewhere random, so after a bit of dragon juggling (and some issues with randomness because I had to take a second loop; the round room’s destination is purely random, rather than always landing you in the throne room first) I was able to get out with nearly every treasure in the game. The dog and book with the spells also count as treasures and were non-obvious at first; however, even with those I was short some points.
I needed the walkthrough from this, via Alex, and I’m going to take a guess Alex looked at source code. I don’t know how anyone was supposed to solve this.
Back in the study — which to be fair was on my strong suspicion list — I had found via The Trick that no nouns were recognized. The picture of Merlin made me think of magic, so tried bringing over the various magic gizmos like the ring that had previously summoned a genie to see if I could get an effect: no dice. I finally — and fortunately — gave up, to find the right command is USE MAGIC.
…
…
…
Look, your guess is as good as mine. That’s one of the worst parser abuses I’ve ever seen, including the entire 40 years I’ve been playing adventure games.
Taking the pouch of rubies over (and the book which I hadn’t dropped yet) triggered an endgame, which is tricky as well but at least it’s a different kind of tricky.
There’s a SORCERER’S ROOM, a MAGIC ROOM and a STAR ROOM. Between the rooms there’s a sorcerer’s hat, a book of black magic, a rod, and a star. After some experimentation I realized you could not carry the book the same time as the hat; I started sensing the kind of logic used in Chinese Puzzle with an arbitrary set of object flags that need to be set. I was also suspicious that this was the sort of puzzle where the meta-command HINT was necessary to get anywhere.
MOST MAGIC IS MERELY ILLUSION, BUT YOU DO NEED THE RIGHT PROPS.
Needing the right props suggested to me I needed to make a thing; the only thing that seemed reasonable was putting together the star and rod to get a wand. Some parser struggle followed as MAKE WAND and PUT STAR don’t work at all. The right conditions are:
a.) you’re in the MAGIC ROOM
b.) you’re holding the STAR and ROD, and only those two items
c.) you type ATTACH STAR
Going back to the STAR ROOM and waving the wand, I was clearly on the right track.
After some fiddling I finally got HOKUS POKUS out again and got an ending, but not the right ending.
All the points, though! Maybe we can call this a real alternate ending because our protagonist deserved it.
I finally succumbed to the walkthrough … which told me to do exactly the same thing I was doing. It said
HOKUS POKUS (you must carry the hat or else the wand explodes).
and I was, in fact, carrying the hat. I finally got a success and I think it simply involves making sure the black magic book doesn’t get touched ever at all, but I’m still unclear on this. At least I got a win.
Windmere Estate, despite having the same parser system, was a much better game; it had mostly reasonable actions, it had better pacing, and it had a map that was memorably interconnected with multiple routes. This game’s emphasis on magic was its downfall for the same reason fantasy has had issues in other early text adventures: the lack of rules makes it tempting for authors to make arbitrary puzzles.
Mind you, it’s possible to make carefully crafted rules that elevate fantasy game puzzles to a high level, like Enchanter (1983) did, but we have to get there first. Lurching ever closer! Coming up: Misadventures 5 and 6. Mexican Adventure. (Change of plans, technical issues plus one of them looks to be a bad dump.)
Renga in Blue 