The IFComp has been a central fixture of the interactive fiction community since 1995, and before that, there was the AGT (Adventure Game Toolkit) contest that ran from 1989 to 1993, and even before that, a single contest in 1986 was dedicated to the predecessor of AGT, GAGS. You could consequently argue contests have been an essential fixture of the text adventure form since 1986. (Jimmy Maher has written more extensively about the contests here and here.)
However, there was a major contest which started even earlier! In 1983, 1985, 1987, and 1988, the company Falsoft, publisher of Rainbow Computer magazine (dedicated to the Tandy CoCo), had an adventure game contest culminating in the winners getting published in a book.
These were genuine contests with judging and a winner and a runner-up and so forth, but since the first contest showed up in 1983 I am going to wait on most of the details until then. Here’s an excerpt from Lawrence C. Falk (editor of the first book) just to give a sense of what was going on:
The idea for The Rainbow Book Of Adventures began before there was even a Rainbow. Thanks to Scott Adams, Byte magazine and those wonderful people who brought you the original Adventure on the big mainframes.
“Wouldn’t it be nice,” dreamed I one day, “if there could be a whole book of Adventures just for the Color Computer?”
I had just finished reading Byte’s Adventure issue of December, 1981, and seen one of Scott Adams’ famous Adventures on an Apple computer at my not-too-friendly local computer store. Just the day before I had discovered how to get by the snake in the Colossal Cave. But I wanted to play an Adventure on my CoCo.
None to be had. So I wrote one. Just to see whether I could do it. Name: Vampire! Play time: Around 30 minutes. But I did learn how to move things around, including myself.
(I know, you want to know what happened to Vampire! So do I. I let a friend market it for me and it sold, I think, about three copies. Besides, working on the thing late at night was scary, anyway.)
…
Well, yes, it would be nice if we could have a book of all Color Computer Adventures. But there weren’t many out there, so we began publishing a magazine called the Rainbow instead. (This isn’t exactly how it happened, but it is close enough.)
As the Rainbow grew, we started to get some Adventure submissions, and, pretty soon, started an Adventure contest. We decided that each winning entry would be published in a book. And here it is.
There’s some 1982 business to check in on, as a pair of articles showed up by Jorge Mir about how to write adventures for the Tandy CoCo.
July 1982 had “Rainbow Adventure”, essentially a sample game, and he expanded on the technical details for his August 1982 template he called ADVMAKER.
Aside: Mir mentions whipping together a short game using the template for gatherings.
The sample game, Rainbow Adventure, is not terribly impressive, but keep in mind the context here is like the Ken Rose articles, where the point is to explain how adventures work.
What I am going to talk about this month is writing an adventure. And, next month, we will be giving you an outline of an adventure generator that will help you write your own adventures. It is a sort of help for those who will be entering the RAINBOW Adventure Contest.
This was the era where the programming was the big roadblock; design could wait.
The player starts on a “Kentucky Street” (Rainbow was out of Prospect, Kentucky) with no real direction what to do. This is one of the sorts of games where you find out the final objective when you get there.
There is a very slight amount of maze-iness around the start, with two “winding road” rooms and the player starting with no inventory so not having a way to distinguish between the two (or even knowing there’s exactly two). I nabbed a “shiny object” from a dead end (turns out to be a key) and a sign at a pawn shop explaining you can sell jewelry there, and used those two items in order to confirm the map below.
The shiny object, as already mentioned, is a key, not jewelry, so you can’t sell it. Finding what you can sell is the most curious part of the game, and is interesting in a theoretical-ludic sense. Near the Pawn Shop is a Clothing Center with a mirror. The mirror informs you that you have a watch.
You don’t otherwise see the watch in inventory, and can’t READ WATCH or the like. I first thought the watch might be used to track some kind of timed puzzle, but no. Once learning you are wearing a watch by seeing it in the mirror, you can sell it.
This is one of the odder disjoints between player-knowledge and avatar-knowledge I’ve come across.
With the watch sold you have money, and you can go over to a computer store. There (using the key to help open a case) you can obtain a computer and a tape, and then use the very specific parser commands LOAD TAPE followed by RUN COMPUTER to learn about a bus.
With this powerful increase of knowledge, you can go over to a BUS STOP, hop on a bus, and end up a a post office. There you can open a mail box and find a copy of Rainbow Magazine, winning the game.
I wonder if anyone had come across the game without realizing it was meant to be a sample programming game; it feels very slight otherwise. Fortunately for posterity, we will see Jorge Mir again: he entered the first contest, with two fairly extreme programming specimens, one being an expansive adventure in 4K and the other being a one-room adventure in 32K. The latter is the first example we have of a “room escape game”.
But that will wait for 1983, which we are inching closer to! Honest! Next up: the last of the Charles Cecil games written for Artic Computing.
As I suspected from last time, my initial issue was simply a missing exit. At least the author was trying to be actively deceptive and it wasn’t just me overlooking a simple chunk of text. At the far east of the maze, you can go UP.
Given the giant is peaceful and I had a limited number of verbs to work from, I quickly narrowed down to GIVE probably being the most useful thing. Except: the game did not seem to understand my commands like GIVE WAND. After fussing for long enough I eventually realized I needed the syntax GIVE WAND TO GIANT. (This is not the death-by-grammar moment but it gives a clue of the issue.)
As I was using a save that hadn’t tangled with the goblin yet, I had the lunch in inventory, and it turned out to be the correct use.
Hmm, so my fortification with calories was not the right way to defeat the goblin. Let’s put a pin in that, and nab the rope, as it clearly went to the hook.
Note that TIE isn’t even recognized as a word by itself — this is grabbing the whole phrase TIE ROPE TO HOOK here and the command isn’t otherwise comprehended by the parser. Clearly the author’s Zork influence is coming into play, but with a negative effect (since TIE ROPE ought to be understood, and even the Infocom parser would have taken it! but the author wants to include the feeling of full-parser commands).
The section after straightforwardly allows you to scoop up two treasures; the trip is one way since you have to drop down from the rope, but the other side of the grating is available. You just need to make sure to bring the iron key, otherwise you’re softlocked.
Now, the iron key is past the goblin, so that second screenshot means I got by the goblin somehow without eating the lunch first.
I did, and this is the spot of the game that is horrifying. In fact, we may have a new grand champion for most deceptive parser message ever, and honestly, I don’t think anyone is ever going to beat it.
You see, despite the response indicating you are trying to “stab” the goblin, KILL GOBLIN is interpreted an entirely different way than KILL GOBLIN WITH SWORD. If you just KILL GOBLIN, you’re trying to stab it with … your hands, somehow? KILL GOBLIN WITH SWORD is the way to specify you’re using the sword, and if you do that then the battle runs along cleanly and you can win.
Primal screaming isn’t enough to represent how infuriating this is. I can see how it happened: the author, enamored with a multi-word parser, wanted to have the two commands be different, but forgot to convey to the player that the two commands might be, in any sense, different.
Just like Catacombs, there’s no game-cut-off victory message if you win.
To be clear, this isn’t somehow conveying the superiority of two-word parsers: it just means that as layers get added, the author needs to start being more and more careful about the potential for deceptive responses.
I did promise a look at the Classic Quests version of the game, and strangely enough, it matches this one almost exactly! You start in the cottage rather than inside it, and the description is written differently. There’s also a loft, and I have no idea why the author added it.
Screenshot of the Amstrad version.
There’s a little more text added, like instead of just stating you’re lost in a forest, the game says:
You are lost in a forest of pine trees, the ground is covered in thick undergrowth making movement difficult.
There’s not nearly as many textual changes as you might think, given the improved DOS capacity. It’s quite possible that Classic Quest Catacombs is closer to the original than I first suspected.
Note that structurally, everything is the same! There is one other very, very important difference.
You are in a small side passage leading north-south. The walls are very pitted here as if somebody had been hacking at them with an axe or something. There is an extremely fierce Goblin here, he is brandishing an evil looking axe.
The goblin sees an opening in your defence and strikes you in the chest. You have fully recovered from your wounds.
>KILL GOBLIN
(with sword) You nick the goblin’s arm with your sword. The goblin lands a blow leaving a gash in your sword arm.
>KILL GOBLIN
(with sword) You nick the goblin’s arm with your sword. The goblin launches a fierce attack and you stagger back under a hail of blows.
Yes, the game automatically applies the sword if you type KILL GOBLIN, and even lets you know if you are doing so. At least Brian Cotton was learning!
This is the second game of Brian Cotton, after Catacombs (1981). Maybe.
I say maybe, because this game is quite a bit simpler; while we’ve had authors write a “beginner game” after their initial stab (see: Pirate Adventure, Mission: Asteroid) this feels simple in a learning-how-to-make-games way. That is, while Catacombs was published first, Goblin Towers may have been written first. While I’m not done yet, unless there’s a major turn of events this will be finished in two posts rather than four.
TO RECAP the story so far: Supersoft, a company founded by Pearl Wellard and Peter Calver in 1978, published one of the first professionally distributed text adventures in the UK, Catacombs; maybe the first. (Since writing that article more missing 1980 games have come up. Some might be vaporware — that is, they may have never truly existed — and the ads for them make them all look like amateur-garage companies, meaning the “professional” moniker still gives Catacombs some distinction. Of course, “professional” is a loose word to be using for the UK market in 1981, so there’s some hand-waving here.)
Goblin Towers was published after Catacombs, still in 1981. The original version was for Commodore PET, which we don’t have, but a C64 follow-up came after which we do have. This is unlike the situation with Catacombs, where no copies of earlier variants are available and we only have the 1986 “Classic Quests” re-issue, which likely added content and text.
The 1983 copy shown above (cover via Lemon 64) has a fair chance of being similar to or even identical to the PET version of the game. This is the version I’m playing, although I also compared a little with the Classic Quests version. To simplify my narrative, I’ll save talking about changes in the re-write for when I’m done with the original.
The premise is that there’s a castle with rumored treasure, and we need to go fetch it all and bring it back to the starting building, getting points for each treasure placed.
Unlike most the games of this sort, I don’t think the most direct inspiration is Crowther/Woods Adventure, or even Scott Adams Adventureland. I think the author was inspired from Zork.
Now, this is a much spicier assertion than it seems because this was written in the UK. Infocom was not common in the country, and in the land of expensive disk drives it was never terribly popular through the 80s. However, in addition to the newspaper giving the same vibe as the leaflet from Zork, and the lunch, there’s combat with a goblin you’ll see shortly which resembles the fight with the troll. There’s not that many forward ramifications — they’re all still pulling from the same original source, after all — but even when looking at the US market, there haven’t been many people inspired by Infocom yet. I’m guessing Cotton’s exposure was to mainframe Zork, not commercial Zork; this game likely was written in 1980 when I don’t think any commercial copies of Infocom had made it over the pond yet.
Another point of resemblance: Crowther/Woods Adventure kicks things off with a grating, and Zork has an early grating but changes it so it must be unlocked from the other side. The same thing happens here; there’s a grating, but even with a key (found later) you can’t open it. The game says it must be unlocked from the other side.
The starting way to enter is instead at a large inviting castle:
Quite early on is a side passage with a goblin combat (which, again, feels a lot like the Zork troll fight).
I died a fair number of times and I thought perhaps I was meant to come back later with a special object or at least more “experience points” helping, but I gave it one more go after eating the packed lunch and was victorious. I guess our hero was just a bit peckish. It’s hard to murder on an empty stomach.
Past the goblin are some stairs going up and down, with two relatively straightforward puzzles associated with both directions.
On the down side, there’s an iron key (I haven’t used it yet) followed by a cell with an emerald (treasure) and a loose block. You’re simply supposed to push the block. This opens a passage to a diamond, and a route to go outside (you’re not trapped, this is just an alternate route out, like Zork).
On the up side, there’s a locked chest, and a room with a message: “Cassim forgot about it but Ali Baba didn’t.” This indicates that to open the chest you need to say the words OPEN SESAME. (Cassim is Ali Baba’s brother who tries to steal the treasure, who forgets the literal words OPEN SESAME to get out of the cave.)
Reversing back to the goblin fight, and heading east instead, first there’s a crystal wand (haven’t used yet, but it does count as a treasure) followed by a straightforward maze, the kind of maze where going east from A to B usually means you can reverse your steps by going west.
With just a few exceptions.
The maze has a pearl necklace (treasure) and leads to a ledge which has a “hook”. I have been unable to get the hook to do anything. It feels like the sort of place where a rope would go, but I haven’t seen a rope and the verb TIE doesn’t work.
To recap: Out of the treasures, I’ve found an emerald, sapphire, diamond, and pearl necklace. I’ve found a key which hasn’t gone to any locks yet, a wand where waving it everywhere does nothing, and a hook I have had no luck with. Unless I’m missing a map exit (not implausible) I’ve otherwise explored all the accessible areas. The high score is 160 with score coming in chunks of 5 so we’re not talking an excessively long game, but it is possible Mr. Cotton has ramped things up later.
IT IS WITH GREAT REGRET THAT I MUST INFORM YOU OF THE MOST UNFORTUNATE PASSING OF YOUR UNCLE, SIR HENRY VANDERBILT. IT IS ALSO MY DUTY TO INFORM YOU AT THIS TIME THAT THERE WILL BE A READING OF THE WILL OF YOUR UNCLE’S ESTATE IN THE ISLAND PROVINCE OF BURMESIA A WEEK FROM TODAY AND IT IS REQUESTED THAT YOU BE THERE.
We return now to Peter Kirsch and the Adventure of the Month series through Softside (see previously: Menagerie). By October he has essentially taken over, having no outside submissions for a while. Even when these games have had issues they’ve always had premises far outside the norm for 1982, and I find it exciting to see early stabs at various genres.
This is arguably Kirsch’s most ambitious game yet, with multiple plot twists.
The Deadly Game invokes not even just a genre but a sub-genre of the thriller/horror movie: the house where you have to stay the night to get (some amount of money) but (your relatives/spooky ghosts/traps left by the antagonist) are trying to kill you. See, for example, Bring Me the Vampire (1963) and No Place Like Homicide (also 1961), although the latter is a comedy. (There are also two movies called The Deadly Game but they seem to have no relationship to the genre overall or this particular game.)
Probably the most famous variant is House on Haunted Hill (1959) with Vincent Price, where people can earn $10,000 by staying one night in the titular house.
I have all three versions this time (TRS-80, Apple II, Atari) but I went with Apple purely because my last game was on Atari. (Foreshadowing: I should have picked TRS-80 instead, but I’ll get to why later. For someone looking for the download, it’s on SoftSide Magazine Adventure Superdisk 5.)
1 ‘ THE DEADLY GAME
BY PETER F. KIRSCH ** VERSION 14.4.1.3 **
SEPTEMBER 1982
We are informed our super-rich uncle has passed, and you arrive at the reading of the will to an “ENSEMBLE OF RELATIVES THAT YOU NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D SEE AGAIN AND WISH YOU HADN’T”.
The will, then, is read: a sum of ONE MILLION DOLLARS to be divided equally amongst the relatives, except everyone must spend one night first, and the money will be divided — the will says this explicitly — “AMONG THE SURVIVORS”.
ALL OF YOU ARE GREEDY AND UNDESERVING OF ANY OF MY MONEY. WE SHALL SEE WHO CAN PASS THE TEST OF SURVIVAL TONIGHT.
You then land in a bedroom and immediately someone is trying to kill you via gas.
Here is where we reach one of the first things rather different about this game compared to prior Kirsch output: there’s a stronger emphasis on having indirect objects be included in the game. The right commands are to LOOK BED and notice a PILLOW and BLANKET, and then to PUT BLANKET; the game asks IN WHAT? and you need to respond IN CRACK, referring to the crack that the gas is escaping from.
This scene is followed by a persistent “PSSST!” message which only clears up when you LOOK WINDOW and find a woman underneath, after which you keep hearing the phrase DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND.
This is trying to simply hint that a diamond goes to the woman, but is bizarre in an environmental sense. Also, in addition to lacking a diamond the window is completely sealed off so we can’t get to her yet.
The room is still locked up, and it took a fair amount of time for me (maybe 20-30 minutes?) to get out, giving the impression this was almost a single-room game. Extra details are included by the game also allowing LOOK UNDER and LOOK BEHIND as commands (mentioned by the HELP command but not by the main game’s instructions); you can LOOK UNDER the chair and find some gum, and LOOK UNDER the bed and find a key made of bronze. To reach the key you need to use the portrait off the wall (it’s described as “long”); behind the portrait is a safe but you can’t open it yet.
Weirdly, LOOK UNDER does not note the death underneath the pillow. I discovered early you can SMASH PILLOW / WITH CHAIR in order to make the pillow safe to pick up.
The bronze key can then go to the top drawer of the dresser, which has a “BOBBY PIN” and a “KEY MADE FROM ZINC”. The key doesn’t go to the lock but you can PICK LOCK which will allow the bobby pin to work on the door leading out from the guest room.
That sounds fast narrated out, so let me be fully clear it took a while to get to this point; the LOOK UNDER mechanic wasn’t originally clear, the zinc key seemed like it ought to go somewhere (it didn’t yet), trying to use the bobby pin to pick locks of the dresser (there’s a middle and bottom too) makes it seems like it can’t be used to pick locks at all, the woman under the window messages are bizarre and I spent a long time trying to communicate or at least get her to stop from saying the same words over and over again, and I also spent a while noodling with the safe behind the portrait in case it was possible to be opened early. (It isn’t — you need to get three combination numbers from elsewhere in the house.)
Getting back to the action, we can now explore the house somewhat more freely, although a quick check through the open guest rooms on the floor we’re at reveals various cousins have already expired.
You need to get the power working later to turn the light on.
Getting the gold key requires stopping the walls from closing in, but that will require an item from a different floor.
That’s three out of five cousins dead already. The other two guest rooms are locked so we are unable as to inquire as to their health.
From this floor you can go downstairs or upstairs. I started by going upstairs. (Well, to be honest: I started by being horribly stuck, as GO UP, CLIMB STAIRCASE, UP, TAKE STAIRCASE and many more variants failed to be understood. I ended up needing to check Dale Dobson’s walkthrough for GO STAIRS, and it has to be phrased exactly that way.)
I’ll be hopping in the elevator in a moment, but first a mention on the maid’s room: you can LOOK UNDER / UNDER BED and find out THERE’S NOTHING UNDER THERE NOW, BUT IT LOOKS LIKE A GOOD HIDING PLACE. The broom goes over to those closing-in-walls although I took the route jumping into the elevator first:
Just like Critical Mass! But you don’t have to time it.
The ground floor consists of a living room (divided into a 3 by 3 grid), some side rooms including a kitchen, a front door that’s locked and that is a concern later, and a cellar door that requires the zinc key from back at the start.
Heading by the kitchen, you can find an “axe” and “nails” in a cabinet (LOOK CABINET, it gives confused parser messages if you try to OPEN it) and then the killer seems to be repeatedly trying to throw something sharp.
In reality the above scene is meant to be “do the right action to defend yourself” but the author decided here not to make it “right action or die”, but simply to pause the moment while you figure out what that right action is. You can grab the pot lid and it gets used as a shield. You then get the message DEFLECTED BY THE POT LID and the invisible killer leaves you alone after that. The thing being thrown was a rock, which happens to have part of the safe combination on it.
Heading down to the cellar, there’s a fuse box that can be fixed by the gum (from way back at the starting room, when you LOOK UNDER / UNDER CHAIR), along with some acid, turpentine, and a garden hose.
Before being able to escape upstairs to test the light switch now (and apply the broom which still hasn’t been used yet) there’s a rattlesnake blocking the way.
I can understand improv-throwing a rock from the shadows, but where did the snake come from?
With the snake out of the way via garden hose impersonation, we can first block the closing walls with the broom, nabbing the gold key. The gold key can be used back at the dresser to a second key, and that key unlocks a door to find yet another unfortunately expired cousin, and a paper with a second part of the safe combination.
If you’ve been counting, that’s four out of five cousins. That means the fifth must be the murderer, right? Well, no. Applying the axe to the last locked door:
The smashing leaves some boards which will be useful shortly, and there’s a saw inside the room.
So rather than the cousins fighting each other in a Battle Royale (as the expired Uncle may have expected) they’re all dead via someone else’s hand. Even more intriguingly, working out what’s going on can actually help a little with a soon-upcoming puzzle; a golden situation where solving a puzzle is equivalent to “solving” a plot that doesn’t happen often in this era (it came up earlier this year twice when playing El Diablero). Unfortunately, The Deadly Game doesn’t stick the landing quite as securely, but let’s fiddle with some last lingering elements first —
Once you have visited all the dead cousins, any attempt to go downstairs is fatal, as the unseen killer finally decides on a more efficient killing method than a rock (“A lone shot kills you”). So we’re now stuck on the second floor and top floor until we can figure out how to survive getting shot.
Given the fusebox has been fixed, now is the time to try to turn on the light switch (in the same room as one of the bodies). This is deadly: you get electrocuted. You need some gloves.
To get them, you have to
a.) throw acid at the window that was unable to be opened; it gets dissolved
b.) pour turpentine on the portrait, then do the most absurd action in the game, WIPE PORTRAIT, using the pillow; this reveals the third safe combo number
c.) enter the numbers into the safe; as is typical for these games, trying to figure out the right syntax is a pain in the neck (you have to specifically type DIAL 31R76L33R; that is, you concatenate one long string and use it as the noun)
d.) with all that done, you can throw the diamond down to the woman who has been singing about diamonds this entire time, she’ll toss back a key which coincidentally opens the last locked drawer of the dresser
e.) the dresser has the gloves
Now the light switch can be turned on safely. This reveals a hammer in the room. Yes, all that was to get a hammer.
So we’ve collected a saw, some nails, a hammer, and have some boards. Why do we need all these things? Well, if you try to go back upstairs, there’s been some sabotage done:
We can SAW BOARDS and with the other items in hand the player now has a STEP, and then FIX STAIRS works while holding this step. This amount of item-fiddling can feel correct in a tomb searching for ancient treasure, but a building project whilst a murderer is roaming around feels a bit off-kilter.
Now, the whole point of going back upstairs — do you remember the hiding place under the bed? There’s a gun there now.
Now things get very strange from here. You might think to take the gun with you to have a showdown, but the Uncle’s Lawyer magically appears to stop you.
The key thing to realize, or at least look up and rationalize on behalf of the author (it’s not very rational) is that the maid doesn’t count as one of the five dead cousins so is the murderer, and the gun is hers, so we can LOOK GUN, find there’s a bullet, and take the bullet out, making the gun now be safe. But somehow– then with this task down, when we go downstairs, the maid has teleported past us to pick up the now-unloaded gun, and then teleported in front of us to try to fire the shot on the first floor.
There was a much better version of this in Jack the Ripper (same author). In that game, there’s a part where you discover the killer’s medical bag and his murder weapon, and you can swap his murder weapon with a fake one, but you have to be careful to close the bag (otherwise you’ll have given away something weird has happened). Later in the night you have a confrontation and the previously dangerous weapon is now inert because of your prior preparation. That seems to have been the goal here but the teleporting maid just makes so little sense I stared baffled at the screen a couple minutes after having this scene.
The curious thing is that in a way the bullet trick is much more “fair” in a gameplay sense — the ramification happens right after the action so failure on the player’s part is more immediate (unlike Jack the Ripper, where you have multiple scenes in between when you make the setup and the punchline). Yet the long-term planning is what gives the action both its story punch and its, well, being an actual logical plot beat. This is an instance where optimal gameplay practice and optimal story practice clash.
You can drag the maid over to a phone and CALL POLICE (look, I was just checking the walkthrough by this point, I thought we were supposed to hang out the entire night you know the whole premise of the game?) and then we can meet them at the front door and then there’s not only one twist, but two of them.
However, if you’re referring to Dale Dobson’s version of the story, the game is already over.
The game loads a totally different file for the ending! I imagine Mr. Dobson (calling it just a “coda”) thought it would be just some text congratulating us on our riches, but the game isn’t over yet. The only platform I could find the ending portion is TRS-80, so we’re swapping over to there.
For those counting, this is a second plot twist: the police are here to kill us. (This admittedly patches one issue these plots sometimes have, which is why law enforcement seems apathetic to the game of death going on, or the very public ad about “surviving a night” in a house and people mysteriously dying.)
The game removes our inventory and we can’t run, so this isn’t a terribly hard puzzle since resources are low. The red carpet mentioned in the description is our savior.
We can then nab the revolver, and the policeman starts to pull a backup weapon, so the inevitable results:
What is not predictable at the end is the third plot twist right after, which makes no sense whatsoever.
Keep in mind, the opening of the game had the main character clearly shocked and surprised at receiving an invite to the reading of a will.
a.) so that whole opening section was the player lying to themselves somehow?
b.) also how did the player know things would play out the way they did, given they didn’t come to the event armed?
c.) what was with the lawyer magically appearing when we were holding the gun?
d.) what. I mean what
Curiously, we haven’t run into that many broken story moments in All the Adventures. There generally just hasn’t been coherent enough story for that to happen! Even Kirsch’s games have had a by-the-moment sort of plotting; while there’s Arrow One, which had the biggest plot wrapper (and the “Adam and Eve” ending), the Kirsch games mostly have had self-contained moments (like Robin Hood being a series of vignettes, or the individual passengers rescues on Titanic). Around the World in Eighty Days managed to be coherent by sheer dint of plot simplicity: the whole thing that connects the various episodes is that “time passes compared to the last scene”.
The Deadly Game proves that to strive for the full span of genres, authors really needed to start mastering traditional story beats in addition to juggling gaming norms. Just: this game came out more as a negative example.
Coming up: what will likely be the last game of 2024, as we return to Brian Cotton, one of the first authors to be commercially published in the UK.
(This post contains content that may not agree with your workplace.)
While we’ve had bawdy content before at All the Adventures, it has tended to be on the free mainframe games not intended for commercial distribution; games like Library and Haunt.
City Adventure (which still explicitly advertised itself as “rated PG” and only put the naughty content “after the game”)
Sultan’s Palace and to a lesser extent Sleazy Adventure (both games published in the Atari APX catalog, back when they were absolutely desperate for content and didn’t care about quality)
Softporn Adventure (the big one, only available because Sierra On-Line had marketing muscle, when the author tried to sell it on his own he couldn’t get advertising)
The difficulty in marketing Softporn is important here; while it was not impossible to advertise (Softcore Software, a company we haven’t looked at yet, managed to pull it off) it certainly was more difficult.
The Dirty Book (Vol 2., No. 1) printed some rejection letters of their attempts to advertise in mainstream computer magazines:
I regret that I must send back to you your recent insertion order for your client “The Dirty Book”. Also enclosed is your check in the amount of $233.24. Our publisher feels that at the present time, Recreational Computing magazine is in the process of expanding its audience and he would prefer to take a rather conservative attitude toward the many, many new subscribers we have taken on just within the last month.
The same book was intended as an outlet for games to advertise who were unable to make it to print otherwise (they also did reviews, and were disappointed by Sultan’s Palace). One of those ads was for Bawdy Adventure.
This is a short but cryptic game and strongly reminds me of the APX content. Strongly enough that I suspect the author must have played some of them; the APX standard is to block exits with a message
SOMETHING IS IN YOUR WAY
while this game says
YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY YET
with a similarly cryptic result.
I’d like to go on and say this was a rogue Atari employee who decided this game was too much to publish in even the APX catalog, and “Peter Constantine” could easily be a pseudonym, but it doesn’t nail quite closely enough for that.
The starting room already is cryptic, with EAST getting that “you can’t go that way yet message” and down just resulting in you “FALLING DOWN A BOTTOMLESS PIT”. The key here is to look at your inventory, and find a TALKING BANANA, which you can then DROP (“FREE ME”).
The pickaxe (described as MADE IN WAR-TI-TAE) can be applied with SWING PICKAXE to make it out of the opening room.
The next room, a “womb-like tunnel”, also has blocked exits. The only way to proceed is to pick up the “old miner’s jockstrap” in the room and wear it. It is unclear why this allows passage.
Eventually the path (with plenty of “YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY YET” in various directions) leads to a “diving platform” with a leather whip. CRACK WHIP gives the message that exits have opened, and the map finally is mostly accessible.
There’s lots of references that make the game feel bawdy (like the “well-hung stalactites”) but it really is just a random surreal cave for the most part. The most obvious is the “magic phallus” that you can pick up; in addition there’s a “cricket with fishy breath”. Some of the exits lead to a “red muff river” which appears to have no way out, although you can dive and get a $5 porno novel from the bottom.
It seems to be impossible to get out, but this is where the “magic word” reference from earlier comes into play. The pickaxe’s word WAR-TI-TAE almost counts as a magic word; upon saying it the game claims
SDARAWKCAB S’TAHT
You instead need to say EAT-IT-RAW and then you’ll get teleported over back to the diving platform (where the whip was). This allows escaping the river.
With the novel extracted, you can go over to a “vending machine” and drop it in to get an outhouse with suspenders.
The outhouse can then be worn (really!) and for some reason that’s enough to allow you to dive back at the platform.
Here I was quite puzzled, because going east heads back to the regular part of the map, so there didn’t seem to be any reason to go through all that. I started playing with all my objects, and I found if I dropped the cricket and rubbed the phallus I won the game.
Yeah, I’m baffled I managed to beat this too. Every step was absolutely cryptic and I only did something because there was nothing else to do; there’s no reason cracking a whip would open exits, just the whip seemed to be the only item available so I might as well use it? The cricket thing has to be done at the room I was at; that was absolutely pure luck that I tested it there, as NOTHING HAPPENS if you attempt the deed elsewhere.
I really have to wonder who this was targeted at; someone who was looking for an erotic game wouldn’t get very far, and by the time I puzzled my way to the end it came off as a bizarre logic problem rather than anything genuinely bawdy. I still vaguely suspect someone at Atari amusing themselves in their off-hours was involved but I don’t have any particular evidence of that at the moment.
Before checking out I should plug the historian Laine Nooney, who after 10 years managed to find Vol 2. No. 2 of the Dirty Book. I didn’t use it at all for this post, but it was still good to crosscheck (and to know they made it that far as a publication!) Also, thanks to Atarimania who pointed me to the game quite recently being found.
To recap, Korenvliet was a game from the Netherlands entered into the catalog of the P2000 Computer Club. Unknown to most people after, it was a translation of an English game called Stoneville Manor (up to the point someone recently re-translated the game back to English, without realizing English was the original language!) The same catalog has Piratenavontuur, Pirate Adventure, but it was a little more obviously a translation of Scott Adams. Those two are not the only adventure games in the catalog.
Hans Pennings’s game Schatzoeken (“Treasure Hunting”, sometimes used as the term for modern Geocaching), is not a title that immediately suggests an adventure game, and might be more like a top-down arcade action game. In fact, there is an undated Spectrum ZX81 game with exactly that concept.
However, the P2000 version is an adventure games of the type seen with Gold or Explore: just walking around rooms and making a map, with essentially only movement commands available. Just for the record, since the catalog is nice enough to include dates, the ones given are
(30 June 1982) Schatzoeken
(6 September 1982) Piratenavontuur
(23 December 1982) Korenvliet
that is, the two other translations ports came later. (When I first wrote about the two ports, I had no author, but I can tell now due to this catalog they are also the work of Mr. Pennings.)
There’s a VIC-20 version of Schatzoeken; it has a title screen by an entirely different author, F. E. Leene. The internal date of 12 November 1982 indicates it was written later.
Just to keep things messy, the version I played is a revision from 1983, since I don’t have the one in the catalog from ’82. It comes from a P2000 archive where many of the games were updated within the last year, meaning there are likely un-indexed games floating around; some of the un-investigated titles sound vaguely adventure-like.
Hans Pennings was fairly active in the Dutch software scene in the 80s, producing a big list of P2000 games on top of the ones I’ve mentioned like Marco Polo Jr (a trading game akin to Taipan) and In de ban van een ring (a quasi-RPG based on Lord of the Rings).
I have not checked his entire output so it’s possible there’s another adventure lurking out in ’83 or ’84 but it looks like he mostly stuck to strategy and board games after finishing Korenvliet.
Just like Korenvliet, this turns out to be just another translation, this time going way back, to Roger Chaffee’s game Quest. There are some changes to the game logic so I’ll show the playthrough.
YOU ARE NOW OUTSIDE THE CAVE. GO SOUTH TO ENTER.
There’s a funny message up that can be found by wandering the forest and trying to go up a tree:
NOU, DAAR ZIT U DAN: BOVEN IN EEN BOOM WAT GAAT U NU DOEN? EEN EI LEGGEN?
WELL, NOW YOU ARE UP HERE IN THE TREE WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO? LAY AN EGG?
It’s worth going through the steps of the original before the new version (it’s not like most of you reading this will remember how original Quest went!). To summarize:
a.) the player goes in a cave and past a lair of a “gnome king” that is out
b.) the player finds the treasure at a “guillotine” area
c.) the player is blocked trying to get out the front because the gnome king arrives
d.) the treasure gets stolen by the pirate
e.) the player finds the treasure inside the maze, in one of the “dead ends”
f.) the gnome king still hasn’t left so the player needs to find an alternate exit; there’s a set of “labyrinth rooms” where the player eventually finds a “black hole” room; going south then leads to a lab which teleports the player, but if the player goes down instead they’ll make it to the exit.
For this game, to start, there’s no “gnome king”, but rather a troll king instead:
There’s a message that says BILBO WAS HERE that gets changed to KILROY WAS HERE, matching the meme dating back to WW2.
YOU ARE IN A DEEP GAP. HIGH ABOVE YOU SOMEONE HAS WRITTEN ON THE ROCKS
KILROY WAS HERE
The treasure is not at the guillotine but instead in a spot that used to have a “stalactite”; the room called Xanadu gets moved there instead, and the gold is right next to it.
You are in the ashram. There is a heavy smell of incense and all directions look the same.
GO SOUTH
You are in Xanadu. Below you flows the sacred river Alph through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.
YOU HAVE FOUND THE TREASURE
Are you taking it with you?
Just like the original, the exit is now blocked (but by the troll king rather than the gnome king)…
…and a pirate will eventually filch the treasure back.
Suddenly the pirate jumps out of the darkness and takes the treasure from you, he shouts “you’ve found it, I’ll hide it better now!” He takes the treasure and disappears into the darkness.
Rather than the treasure moving to the maze, it moves to the guillotine (where the treasure gets hidden at the start of the first game).
The troll still blocks the starting entrance as the first game, but it is now possible to get through over to the “labyrinth” from the original although the layout is slightly different.
Once arriving at the “black hole” room from the original if you try to go into the place where the original teleports you, here you just get ejected because you don’t have a pass.
There is no pass. You just go east (not down as in the first game), fall into a hole, and make your way to the exit.
Since the only verbs were navigation, despite the map being almost identical to the original this still took some work to beat due to the changes. I’m not sure what the logic of the author was other than simply wanting to put their own flair. My guess is Xanadu seemed like too remarkable a location to waste (it otherwise just is randomly in the path you follow, as opposed to having a treasure). However…
Remember that VIC-20 port I mentioned? That one is not a port of the Pennings version! It instead is a translation from the original, which is why the “Quest” shows up in the title screen. I don’t understand why the “Schatzoeken” would still be there; my guess is the author (Leene) saw the P2000 game, wanted a VIC-20 version, discovered some difficulties porting from P2000, so went back to the source instead. The gold is back up at the “guillotine” from the start, rather than getting moved to Xanadu. The “kabouter-king” (gnome king) is in, as opposed to the troll king.
(This continues from my previous post, which is needed to understand this one.)
With help from ItsMe in my last post who found a hint guide, I was able to get to the end of the game. Before I get to that, I want to drop by another document found by commenter Rob, in the August 19, 1981 version of the newsletter Buss, for Heathkit computers (which Software Toolkit Adventure runs on).
Specifically, Walt Bilofsky wrote an essay about Adventure; one of his points being that it teachers players how to use their computer (the control of a parser being close to the metal, akin to the command prompt on the CP/M operating system). Relevantly for us, he goes on to write a small manifesto explaining what good adventure game interactions look like.
Adventure has been extended and imitated, sometimes well, sometimes poorly. It has been done best when the following rules were followed:
Be consistent. Similar commands should produce similar responses unless there’s a good reason. Similar phrases in messages and descriptions should mean similar things.
Be informative. Especially, make sure that when the user types a meaningless or incorrect command, he gets a message that makes sense, and perhaps gives some hint as to the proper command.
Be rewarding. When the user figures out how to do something, make sure he is rewarded with smooth, reasonable, productive behavior on the part of the program.
I always appreciate when authors this early try to reach for some sort of guiding principles, even if they don’t quite hit their ambitions (see Clardy with Probe One: The Transmitter for another example). I will first play through the rest of Adventure 375 and then compare after to see how close Bilofsky got to his ideal.
Let’s get to the sword first, because that’s quicker to explain:
You are in a large room with medieval furnishings. Two bleached skeletons are hanging on the wall in iron cuffs. The room is dominated by a huge white boulder near the west wall. A tunnel in the east wall turns quickly out of sight. A dark hole in the floor was apparently once covered by a grating or trap door.
A very rusty sword with a ruby-studded hilt is embedded in the boulder!
This puzzle is also, I’ll admit, mostly fair. The idea behind the mechanism is that the sword goes into the boulder, and holds open some kind of latch that holds open the door and allows escape. The sword is described as a treasure, but the rusty blade does not seem to be contributing to the treasure-aspect, so if you could just take along the ruby hilt you’d still have a treasure. It is as simple as BREAK SWORD:
Weakened by rust, the blade gives way and the hilt breaks off in your hand.
When on the ground:
There is a ruby-studded sword hilt here!
There’s still some meta-concern here with the puzzle. While the rusty part does not seem to be contributing to the item being a treasure, as anyone who has watched the horrified look of a Antiques Roadshow host knows, sometimes “cleaning up” a historical item causes it to lose rather than gain value. There’s also the uncertain aspect of transforming a (!) marked treasure into another (!) marked treasure; while we’ve seen non-treasures turn into treasures, this is the first time a state change has happened between two treasures. This is at the very least a puzzle using abductive reasoning rather than iron-clan logic, but it is a good example of the form since it doesn’t take that long to experiment with BREAK SWORD.
The other secret portion I missed is much fussier. It was implied by the magazine that there was something under the troll bridge, but I could not get the game to acknowledge my commands.
You’re on SW side of chasm.
A rickety wooden bridge extends across the chasm, vanishing into the mist. There is a large rusty hook on the bridge’s handrail. Lying on the bridge is a sign which reads “Stop! Pay Troll!”
Step one is taking the sign. Mind you, in all other cases, items that can be taken are separated from the main paragraph, so knowing to do this violates one of the game’s established norms.
You take hold of the sign, but the wood is old and full of splinters. You drop it in the middle of the bridge and spend a moment picking wood out of your fingertips.
Now we’ve got an empty hook: what to do? Normally a kind of rope would be in order, but there is no rope in Original Adventure nor this game. Something that I have long-visualized in one way should be (according to the authors of this game) visualized another way. (See, analogously, my experiences with a bean bag in Asylum II.) The chain that is a treasure and is used to lead the bear is meant to be long, long enough to substitute in for a rope:
HANG CHAIN
The chain is now dangling from the hook down into the chasm.
That’s also not the easiest parser command to find! Hang on to your hats, everyone, it gets worse.
At the bottom of the chasm, there’s no apparent exit, but you can now JUMP to the other side even though a jump was impossible from the top.
You are on a narrow ledge near the bottom of a chasm running SE/NW. Above you the chasm is filled with mist. A rushing stream completely fills the bottom of the chasm. Across the stream is a dark opening in the chasm wall.
I can see why the chasm would be shaped differently farther down making a jump now possible, but the description doesn’t reflect that!
Moving in further is a room with a desk, which can be opened with the keys.
You are in a squarish, dusty room with a good passage SE as its only exit.
There is an ancient roll-top desk in the room.
OPEN DESK
The desk opens, revealing an old, dusty glass inkwell, and a bundle of old yellow papers, tied with a faded velvet ribbon. The inkwell is half full of dust and old dried-up ink. The papers teeter and fall out of the desk, raising a fearful cloud of dust. Sneezing, you read through tearing eyes that these are early certificates of Colossal Gold Mines, 333 Ltd., now one of the giants in the field! The spaces on each share marked “Shareholder’s Name” are all blank.
Again, the norms are no longer being followed here: the inkwell is particularly important. You’re supposed to get the inkwell going again (POUR WATER toted in via the bottle), then use it to sign the documents (although SIGN isn’t understood, you need to use WRITE). But sign with what?
The cheerful bird that chased away the snake has a second purpose.
The bird flutters to a higher perch, letting out an outraged squawk in buzzard dialect (I didn’t know he spoke buzzard)! Translation: “You’ll have to catch me first, pinion plucker!”
Feathers are not described as an object that can be referred to separately on the bird, you just have to take the leap they’d be there. The bird needs to be caught (or re-caught) in the cage before feather extraction happens, and then the feather can be used as a quill. Additionally, there’s some steps omitted going from feather to quill.
POUR WATER
The water splashes into the inkwell, turning the dried-up residue in the bottom into ink.
DIP FEATHER
The tip of the feather is full of ink.
SIGN CERTIFICATES
I see no sign here.
WRITE
Your name is now written as the owner on each stock certificate.
This sequence hit a whole bunch of design issues in a row:
a.) having an object picked up mentioned in the main text rather than a separate line, breaking norms
b.) using the chain in a way that can easily run counter to previous visualizations
c.) being able to jump what seems like it ought to be the same distance, and the description doesn’t make clear the distance is shorter
d.) needing to refer again to an item in the main text, rather than one mentioned separately
e.) needing to extract a non-described feather back at the bird, and somehow immediately it is usable as a quill
f.) tough parser commands along the way like DIP and WRITE
I think, arguably, you could say it meets the “rewarding” and “informative” conditions, but fails on “consistent” with points a and d — it might be consistent in the “author’s bubble” of puzzles, but it isn’t consistent with the game as a whole.
The larger issue is that the points don’t really encompass all the advice needed: parser commands should have reasonable synonyms, the text should not leave anything ambiguous in term of visualization, and there certainly shouldn’t be a brand new noun (feathers on the bird) that the player needs to guess at. In a big-picture sense, the authors were trying for a puzzle more ambitious than the parser was able to handle.
With the two treasures the ending is more or less identical, except you get prompted for the desired name on the certificate and get a password to go with it. I imagine this is to prevent sharing, but someone could have a save very close to the end and just generate another name.
As you release the hat, a cloud of sandalwood-scented smoke appears, out of which steps the Grandmaster of the Colossal Cave Lodge 437 of the Wizard’s Guild. He is wearing a long blue velvet robe, a long, pointed bejewelled hat made of solid platinum, and love beads. He carries a three foot long rod with a star on the end, all of solid gold. His eyes twinkle behind thick gold-rimmed spectacles, and he smiles benevolently as he says,
“Congratulations, young Adventurer. By your ordeals in the Cave you have proven yourself worthy of admission to the rank of Journeyman Wizard in the Wizard’s Guild.” He places the gold Wizard’s Hat on your head and, bending, asks,
“How do you want your name spelled on your Certificate of Wizardness?”
….
Jason Dyer
“All right, young Wizard, your personal Wizard Password is ‘Wyktut’!”
The Wizard waves his wand, and the cave bear and little bird appear in a puff of orange smoke, grunting and twittering their congratulations. You leap onto the bear’s back, and, with the bird fluttering in a circle overhead, you ride out of the building, through a crowd of cheering elves, and into the sunset.
You scored 375 out of a possible 375 using 442 turns.
All of Adventuredom gives tribute to you, Journeyman Wizard and Adventurer Grandmaster!
There is no higher rating! Congratulations!!
Software Toolworks went on to make this “Golden Oldies” collection which has normal 350-point Adventure. My own picture. This was the first commercial adventure game I ever owned.
As mentioned in my last post, Don Woods started editing Crowther’s game in March 1977. He was not working entirely solo; he got ideas from when people at Stanford were trying things out (“oh yeah, I could put a message in for that”), and from his friends. Bob Paraiso, Don’s roommate for part of that period, had what Don calls a “twisted sense of humor” and came up with the clam/pearl and narrow passage puzzles.
I’m relying solely on memory which tends to be fallible (see above: the dwarf ‘vanishes’, not ‘disappears’) but my best recollection is that ADVENT.EXE first appeared on the PDP-10s at ADP (the old First Data in Waltham, Mass.) in 1977. It was an incomplete version which only had about 250 points worth of treasure. I seem to recall that there was nothing past the troll bridge but an ‘under construction’ sign or some such. I believe our copy came from WPI, but word at the time was it was developed at Stanford. Two or three months later we got the full 350 point game.
— John Everett
I was uncertain of this account until I encountered Dave Lebling’s map of Adventure, the one he made prior to starting Zork. It has the exact signature described by Everett of having “under construction” at where ought to be the troll bridge. There also is no notation for an end game.
The content is otherwise nearly identical.
By mid-1977, Woods had added the portion past the troll cave and the endgame, leading to the “canonical” version of Adventure at 350 points, finished by June 3rd, 1977. (Zork already started development by then, but remember they were looking at the 250-point version!) The first “altered” version, Adventure 366, was out by the 15th of July. It added a small area outdoors and a “palantir” which allows teleportation:
You are in the gazebo. The dust is deep here, indicating long disuse. Ancient elvish runes here describe this as a place where one may see many things. Another, more ancient inscription reads “PKIHMN”.
There is a palantir(orb) here.
Relevantly for today’s game, Don Woods had discussions early about the potential for commercializing the software. From Lester Earnest, manager of the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) he was at, in June 1977 (that is, the same month the game was “finished”):
One general rule that you should beware of is that Stanford facilities (including this computer) may not be used in support of private business transactions. Under certain circumstances, is IS possible for Stanford to sell software, even if it was developed under a research contract. It is conceivable that a sale could be arranged in which contract you might share, but it sounds a bit hairy.
(There’s another fun message from Les being upset about someone managing to sneak on and play Adventure past the server capacity limit. These systems all were expensive to run and time was valuable! The messages all come from the SAIL message system and credit goes to Ethan Johnson for finding the material a few years ago.)
The general perception of software up to this point was often it was not something “intended for sale”, but the mid-70s this was starting to change, so it is a mistake to think at least Woods felt comfortable just having his work be “freeware”. However, the fact it was created on a massively expensive Stanford computer essentially precluded any direct commercialization. Certainly people treated it as public domain, and in an interview with Jason Scott, Don Woods alludes to the fact the people who got the source from him for the game were selling it; when he created a 430-point version which could be thought of as the “master quest” edition of the game (where only recently has anyone been able to manage to get a full 430 points!) he was much cagier about distributing it.
In the same interview, Don Woods discusses Software Toolworks, which came around in 1982; the company wanted them to endorse the game as the “official version”:
Don Woods mentions in the interview that he tested the program over at Will Crowther’s house; they found that there were additional treasures added, so they could not do the endorsement of saying it was exactly the original. Eventually, this was smoothed over, and you can read their “certification letter”.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
It was also possible to get a letter signed from them if you beat the game (similar to the certificate upon beating Wizardry 4), but none have surfaced. (We incidentally do know what the Wizardry 4 certificate looks like, thanks to Carl Muckenhoupt managing to beat the game when it was new.)
Today, I’m playing the CP/M version from February 1982, the one with the extra treasures that kept Crowther and Woods from saying it matched the original. I have some more detail here about Jim Gillogly and Will Bilofsky, whose names are on the port. Importantly, Walter Bilofsky (of Software Toolworks) was scrupulous about his first product, a C compiler, and tried to contact the original author so he could charge $80 and split with the author 50-50; the author was not interested due to having the early hacker ethic of just wanting to spread the Gospel of C, so Bilofsky just cut the price in half instead. It makes sense he would look for a way to eventually get some royalties over to Crowther and Woods for their game (unlike Microsoft or anyone else who was selling it).
A detail you might not know about classic Adventure:
Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?
NO
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
SCORE
If you were to quit now, you would score 5 out of a possible 375.
Where did the 5 points come from? Well, you start the game with them. If you request instructions (that is, type YES at the start) your score goes down by 5.
For my playthrough, given this is now something like the 142nd time I’ve played Adventure, I just referred to a walkthrough early in order to snag all the standard game treasures, keeping an eye out for anything unusual. There was only one obvious difference. Y2 contained a dictionary:
Baggins’ New Dwarvish-English Dictionary
Publ. TA 3005, Imladris
Reformed Spellings
-%&-^~~& (v.t.): to excavate a new side
passage through soft rock
-%!”! (n., fem): small warm granite stone
… These words are hurting my throat. I quit!!
There’s a “magazine” that gets used for the “Last Lousy Point” of the game — it gets dropped at Witt’s End. Importantly, the magazine has always stated (when you attempt to read it) that it is written in Dwarvish. With the dictionary in hand, it comes off different:
Most of these have been damaged by water, but here’s one I can read:
Spelunker Today
Vol. 1 Number 3
We regret to announce that our associate editor was lost while taking two consultants on a tour of Colossal Cave. One consultant returned, his hair and eyebrows turned white from the ordeal, and was able to mumble only “The Dark-room … the Dark-room…”
…
One of our contributing correspondents reports the Troll to be in exceptional good humor; snickering sounds have been heard issuing from beneath the troll bridge.
…
(Advertisment)
CERTIFICATE OF WIZARDNESS
… serially numbered and suitable for framing, may be obtained absolutely free by writing to The Software Toolworks, 14478 Glorietta Drive, Sherman Oaks, CA 91423. Only available to Journeyman Wizards. You must include the Wizard Password which is revealed to a new Journeyman Wizard when he/she has earned the maximum number of points.
…
The rest of this magazine is too damaged to read.
I went through the entire map and found no new passages. Generally speaking modifications to Adventures have fallen into two categories:
a.) adding a random set of rooms “in the open”
b.) trying to secretly hide the new rooms and keep things otherwise consistent
This game goes with (b.). Eventually I turned to the magazine which was the only different material to look at, and took a whack at the dark room that gets mentioned:
You’re in Dark-room.
A massive stone tablet imbedded in the wall reads: “Congratulations on bringing light into the Dark-room!”
This is the place where you have to say PLOVER to get in while also holding a lamp (a puzzle I wrote about when I first played 350-point adventure; it required a lateral leap of faith). Without much else to mess with, I tried PUSH TABLET, and hit new content:
The tablet silently swings open to reveal a small opening to the north.
N
You are in a large room with medieval furnishings. Two bleached skeletons are hanging on the wall in iron cuffs. The room is dominated by a huge white boulder near the west wall. A tunnel in the east wall turns quickly out of sight. A dark hole in the floor was apparently once covered by a grating or trap door.
A very rusty sword with a ruby-studded hilt is embedded in the boulder!
GET SKELETON
I’d really rather not desecrate the remains of these two intrepid adventurers.
DOWN
You are in a very tight foul-smelling hole with damp walls. There is a room above you.
It is not a large section; here the entirety of the map:
The sword in the boulder can be pulled quite easy; this isn’t the “Excalibur” scenario we’ve seen before. The catch is that pulling the sword causes the tablet to shut behind the player, locking the secret room.
You heave on the sword with all your might. Little by little it scrapes out, until finally it comes free.
There is a muffled crash in the distance.
Dropping the sword causes it to return to the boulder and the passage to re-open. Dropping the sword in the room below the Medieval Room will cause the sword to “bounce once” and then return to the boulder, again re-opening the passage. There doesn’t seem to be a way to keep the passage open while holding the sword, and I’ve tried dropping in substitutes and jamming the entrance with no luck.
There is a way out: while the cave-closing countdown will not start if the player has all the “standard treasures” from the original game, the sword is sufficient to put things over the top, and there will be standard closing message followed by a teleport after waiting enough turns:
The sepulchral voice intones, “The cave is now closed.” As the echoes fade, there is a blinding flash of light (and a small puff of orange smoke). . . . As your eyes refocus, you look around and find…
You are at the northeast end of an immense room, even larger than the Giant Room. It appears to be a repository for the “Adventure” program. Massive torches far overhead bathe the room with smoky yellow light. Scattered about you can be seen a pile of bottles (all of them empty), a nursery of young beanstalks murmuring quietly, a bed of oysters, a bundle of black rods with rusty stars on their ends, and a collection of brass lanterns. Off to one side a great many dwarves are sleeping on the floor, snoring loudly. A sign nearby reads: “DO NOT DISTURB THE DWARVES!” An immense mirror is hanging against one wall, and stretches to the other end of the room, where various other sundry objects can be glimpsed dimly in the distance.
However, the sword does not come with the player, and it doesn’t get registered back at the building as one! I can still report the gameplay to the end, though.
In the original, there are two endgame rooms; the second has some special rods, and if you drop one in the NE room, drop it, move to an adjacent room, and type BLAST, it will blow open an entrance to cheering elves. This time things go a little differently:
BLAST
There is a loud explosion, and a twenty-foot hole appears in the far wall, burying the dwarves in the debris.
You are at the SW end of the repository. Debris and broken pieces of mirror are strewn everywhere, burying everything that was stored here. At your feet, partly visible through the rubble, is a large steel grate, next to which is a corroded brass plaque, half obscured, reading “Treasure Vau… Keys in Mai…”
The grate is locked.
A whole has blown open to a “Main Office” which is a new room.
You are in the Main Office of the cave. A large jagged hole in the north wall opens into the Repository. Along a side wall is a large glass display case containing magic rods belonging to great wizards of the past. Another wall is covered with yellowed autographed glossy photos of well-known dragons and trolls. On a bulletin board are many charts and notices, marked “Dragon Duty Roster”, “NOTICE: Workdwarves’ Compensation Rules”, and the like. Through an archway in the south wall daylight can be seen.
Lying to one side is a ring with two large identical keys on it.
The keyring can go over to the treasure vault.
You are in a narrow vault with heavy walls constructed of large stone blocks. Dim yellow illumination glows through a square grate overhead.
A tall pointed wizard’s hat, made of solid gold, and inlaid with moons and stars carved from precious jewels, shimmers in midair!
Suspended a few feet off the ground is a wizard’s robe of blue velvet.
The grate is open.
The hat straightforwardly counts as a treasure, and the robe magically follows you around.
The robe rises gently, swirls about you, and settles around your shoulders. Evidently you have earned admission as a Probationary Apprentice in the Wizard’s Guild.
You can then head outside through the Main Office, walk over to the building, deposit the golden hat, and win.
As you release the hat, a cloud of sandalwood-scented smoke appears, out of which steps the Grandmaster of the Colossal Cave Lodge 437 of the Wizard’s Guild. He is wearing a long blue velvet robe, a long, pointed bejewelled hat made of solid platinum, and love beads. He carries a three foot long rod with a star on the end, all of solid gold. His eyes twinkle behind thick gold-rimmed spectacles, and he smiles benevolently as he says,
“Congratulations, young Adventurer. By your ordeals in the Cave you have proven yourself worthy of admission to the Wizard’s Guild in the rank of Apprentice Wizard. If you divine the remaining mysteries of the cave, you shall be rewarded with the rank of Journeyman Wizard.”
The Wizard waves his wand, and the cave bear and little bird appear in a puff of orange smoke, grunting and twittering their congratulations. You leap onto the bear’s back, and, with the bird fluttering in a circle overhead, you ride out of the building, through a crowd of cheering elves, and into the sunset.
You scored 345 out of a possible 375 using 448 turns.
Your score puts you in Master Adventurer Class A. To achieve the next higher rating, you need 1 more point.
Hence I’ve “won” but I’m still quite curious about the sword treasure and if there’s yet another hidden treasure somewhere. The only hint I can think of is about the reference to the troll being amused in the magazine, but prodding at both the troll and troll bridge have revealed no new actions I can find. It is possible the sword is really the only thing left to bring the score to maximum.
I’d normally try prodding at the source but there’s encryption going on (like the Dian Gerard games). I realize some of y’all are keen on that sort of thing, so I have files here to make the game easy to play. Run the RUN.BAT file, type B: to switch to the Adventure disk, and type ADVENT to run. I left my save files you can look at with DIR, and typing ADVENT SAVENAME will boot a saved game.
As an example, suppose that the referee decides to build a story around the Glittering Caves with their unknown treasures and dangers. The referee must then decide when the story takes place, draw maps of the caves, and build the entire setting for the story. Finally, the referee must invent a beginning for a tale that sets forth some problem for the expeditionary force that will soon make its way into the imaginary realm. Perhaps there are tales of a great storehouse of gold to find or a dragon to be slain. Here, the referee decides that a large party of dwarves has been lost in a previously unexplored region of the Glittering Caves for whom the new expedition must search, discovering treasure and fighting against danger along the way.
— Eric S. Roberts, Mirkwood Tales
Back when I started the All the Adventures project in 2011, I embarked on what I understood at the time to be the first adventure game, Will Crowther’s version of Adventure. Will Crowther had abandoned his unfinished game in 1976 — eventually launching the form known as text adventures — while working at the computing firm Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. Don Woods took up the source the next year making the “canonical” 350 point version of the game which spread across the world. Source for the original (pre-Woods) game was only made public by Dennis Jerz in 2007.
Members of BBN in 1961 when the company went public: Leo Beranek, Jordan Baruch, Dick Bolt, Samuel Labate, and Robert Newman. This is 8 years before the initial demonstration of the ARPANET (leading to the Internet) and more than a decade before Will Crowther started working there. Source.
Before Jerz’s article, it wasn’t known what the original looked like: fantasy or not? How much was a “game” vs. “simulation”? The discovery included puzzles, magic, a maze, and a hint system, resolving this speculation. Still, most writing (including my own) focused more on the simulation-aspect than the magic-aspect of the game, but there was an enormous amount of material about Crowther’s caving experiences and not much about any other possible influences. Off and on Dungeons and Dragons had been mentioned, but even I didn’t make much with the connection, because Crowther didn’t talk about it in interviews and the evidence was light. However:
When a collection of BBNers learned about Dungeons and Dragons, the dungeon master created a game that was particularly detailed, went on for a year, and concluded with a 100-page “final report;” Will Crowther, a participant in Mirkwood Tales, soon after created the first computer adventure game.
That’s quoted from A Culture of Innovation: Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN. Another participant in the campaign (not necessarily the same group) was Dave Lebling, future co-author of Zork and founder of Infocom. The nature of Mirkwood Tales remained murky, and given the lack of the “report” (which is more like a rules description), nobody had opportunity to pull that thread.
You can find the Mirkwood Tales report here. It has not been generally available prior to today (December 5, 2024). (Thanks to Kate Willaert, historian, and Eric Roberts, who ran the campaign and wrote the report. Note that file that Willaert received has had corrections and reformatting, meaning it is no longer 100 pages, but that might have been a round-number estimate anyway.)
I’m going to re-do the entire Adventure story, then replay the game, comparing the virtual cave with the actual cave (as done by Dennis Jerz) and comparing elements of the game with the Dungeons and Dragons campaign that Crowther and Lebling played in (which has never been done before).
…
In the middle of 1975, Will Crowther got a divorce.
He was married to Patricia Crowther, who had met Will while working on a Physics degree at MIT in the 50s, and they had two children. Even without the connection Patricia would have been famous for her caving prowess, as she was part of the 1972 expedition that discovered a link between the Flint Ridge Cave System and Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky, proving they were the same cave and hence the longest in the world.
As a result, Will started making his new game, combining his caving interests with fantasy:
Suddenly, I got involved in a divorce, and that left me a bit pulled apart in various ways. In particular I was missing my kids.
Also the caving had stopped, because that had become awkward, so I decided I would fool around and write a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing.
My idea was that it would be a computer game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that was one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the game with natural language input, instead of more standardized commands. My kids thought it was a lot of fun.
The timeline, as clarified by Jerz, has Crowther’s sister (Betty Bloom) taking a sabbatical during the development of the game, which we know to be the 1975-1976 academic year; she play-tested the game regularly, and it was her that ended up being the reason for the first magic word:
I was bored having to go through all the steps every time, and I said, “I want to go directly into the game.” [Dramatic pause.] “Ecks-why-zee-zee-why!”
This is referring to XYZZY, a magic word early in the cave, which is usable from the start to warp directly there. It’s a little odd in that it only bypasses what is barely a puzzle (finding keys to unlock the way in) but it makes sense as a vestigial “developer code”. Magic word as a system mechanic get utilized multiple times later by Woods.
The evidence shows the game being developed up from ’75 before progress stops in early ’76, whereupon it was released to Crowther’s system at BBN and seen by the public more generally. (My dating system for mainframe games gives the original Adventure a date of 1976, where it first started being distributed beyond the author’s inner circle.) Enough copies spread that one landed at Stanford, where Don Woods in 1977 saw it and decided he wanted to expand it. It wasn’t clear how to get into contact with Crowther (who was no longer at BBN by that point) so he sent a message to every single domain on the Internet with crowther@ at the front, getting a hit at Xerox.
This was in March 1977; we have a very exact month for this because files retrieved from Woods’s account include time stamps. The source code is here and a compiled version for Windows is here and will be the version I’m playing.
The plot, in this version, is looking for TREASURE AND GOLD. (In original D&D, finding treasure meant getting experience points. This is part of why the player is able to square off against the thief in Zork only after grabbing some treasure.) The “I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS” perspective imagines that the avatar in the universe and the computer narrator are one and the same. This is exactly analogus to how the “referee” of Mirkwood is described:
As the expedition wanders through the passages beyond the great Door, the referee acts as the party’s eyes and ears and describes each new scene.
The starting building has no analogue in Mirkwood…
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.
…but it does in the real cave, with one brick building that is now rubble, and also the historic Bransford Spring Pumphouse built in the 1930s.
Via Wikipedia.
Crowther’s building has keys, lamp, food, and a bottle of water that would be standard in all versions.
YOU ARE INSIDE A BUILDING, A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING.
THERE ARE SOME KEYS ON THE GROUND HERE.
THERE IS A SHINY BRASS LAMP NEARBY.
THERE IS FOOD HERE.
THERE IS A BOTTLE OF WATER HERE.
The outdoors are otherwise very small, and this is reflected by the Mirkwood notes:
Most of the action of the Mirkwood Tales occurs in underground caverns or inside large buildings rather than in open terrain. There are two principal reasons for restricting the setting in this way. First, the geography of a subterranean fortress or dungeon is much easier to define than that of an open area above ground. Rooms and passages may be described in relatively simple terms, and it is much easier to work with right angles and measurable distances than with general topographic descriptions. Furthermore, by restricting the world to a smaller area, it is possible to make the passage of time more meaningful. When large distances are involved, the time required to move from one region to another must be taken into account.
In order to achieve the effect of feeling like a forest where the player can move in any direction, Crowther includes “loops” which became quite standard, but also included “random” exits; sometimes a particular exit would do something different, making the act of mapping feel a little uncertain. This legacy caused some clone-games based on Adventure to have random exits (like The Phantom’s Revenge) and it has generally been awful every time. The reason it works here is that the design clearly is nudging the player away from the outdoors to the underground.
The most nightmarish version of random exits I’ve encountered is Dr. Livingston, where I needed to test every exit 10 times just in case there was a random trigger that caused the exit to do something else.
Exits marked with a color go to the “Forest”. Going north from the Forest will sometimes lead to a second, distinct Forest.
YOU ARE IN A 20 FOOT DEPRESSION FLOORED WITH BARE DIRT. SET INTO THE DIRT IS A STRONG STEEL GRATE MOUNTED IN CONCRETE. A DRY STREAMBED LEADS INTO THE DEPRESSION.
THE GRATE IS LOCKED
The Mirkwood campaign book describes a campaign session which kicks off with a cave with a long-forgotten door having old dwarven lettering.
Behold the Door to the Vault of Khazin, Lord of the Caves. Seek not to force this Door, for it is sealed with the power of the sun and the moon.
The riddle indicates a full moon followed by a sun must pass through the sky before the door opens. The Crowther grate rather just succumbs to the keys from the building, feeling a bit more like the simulation, but the results come across the same:
The Door stands open. Beyond the Door, there is a narrow dark passage that leads straight back into the earth.
Crowther’s tries to be a touch more realistic…
YOU ARE IN A SMALL CHAMBER BENEATH A 3X3 STEEL GRATE TO THE SURFACE. A LOW CRAWL OVER COBBLES LEADS INWARD TO THE WEST.
THE GRATE IS OPEN.
west
YOU ARE CRAWLING OVER COBBLES IN A LOW PASSAGE. THERE IS A DIM LIGHT AT THE EAST END OF THE PASSAGE.
THERE IS A SMALL WICKER CAGE DISCARDED NEARBY.
…and Jerz is able to start matching one-to-one pictures from the real cave with Crowther’s map.
The cage is followed by a “debris room” described akin to a real cave, but with Betty Bloom’s testing magic word, and the iconic three foot black rod with a rusty rod.
YOU ARE IN A DEBRIS ROOM, FILLED WITH STUFF WASHED IN FROM THE SURFACE. A LOW WIDE PASSAGE WITH COBBLES BECOMES PLUGGED WITH MUD AND DEBRIS HERE, BUT AN AWKWARD CANYON LEADS UPWARD AND WEST.
A NOTE ON THE WALL SAYS ‘MAGIC WORD XYZZY’.
IT IS NOW PITCH BLACK. IF YOU PROCEED YOU WILL LIKELY FALL INTO A PIT.
A THREE FOOT BLACK ROD WITH A RUSTY STAR ON AN END LIES NEARBY
The black rod represents the serious magic item that Crowther added, and it curiously enough, has two effects:
a.) a bird that comes shortly after cannot be caught while holding the rod
b.) a gap can only be filled with the rod, forming a crystal bridge
Original D&D does not have an generalized identify spell. Items are meant to be identified by experiment. Zenopus Archives mentions an example from the third OD&D book involving testing on some boots and identifying them as elven. Mirkwood also discusses the identification of magic, and again, the emphasis is on experimentation:
In addition to spells, magic appears in the Mirkwood Tales in the form of magical artifacts and equipment. More often than not, the magical effect of some object will not be clear from simple examination of the object, and it may require experimentation or searching for further clues to its nature.
This means the experience of fiddling with the rod — and finding two effects, both positive and negative — are similar to OD&D campaigns. In fact, it is rare in adventures (up to at least 1982) to have this type of dual-effect paradigm, and is more likely to be happened upon by someone creating a “campaign object”.
THE BIRD WAS UNAFRAID WHEN YOU ENTERED, BUT AS YOU APPROACH IT BECOMES DISTURBED AND YOU CANNOT CATCH IT.
Some more cave-matching rooms happen, and then the Hall of the Mountain King.
YOU ARE IN THE HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING, WITH PASSAGES OFF IN ALL DIRECTIONS.
A HUGE GREEN FIERCE SNAKE BARS THE WAY!
drop bird
THE LITTLE BIRD ATTACKS THE GREEN SNAKE, AND IN AN ASTOUNDING FLURRY DRIVES THE SNAKE AWAY.
The Mirkwood campaign mentions “orcs and trolls”; with the snake Crowther is likely thinking more on the simulation end, as the Park at least does have venomous snakes (copperheads and rattlesnakes). That’s not the only enemy, as dwarves do appear and throw an axe at first, followed by knives.
THERE IS A THREATENING LITTLE DWARF IN THE ROOM WITH YOU!
In Crowther/Woods, you can pick up the axe and throw it, but that doesn’t work here, as Crowther was seemlingly worried about parser ambiguity in a way almost nobody working with a two-word parser was concerned with afterwards.
I HAVE TROUBLE WITH THE WORD ‘THROW’ BECAUSE YOU CAN THROW A THING OR THROW AT A THING. PLEASE USE DROP OR ATTACK INSTEAD.
Oddly, while you can ATTACK as suggested, the word ATTACK does not take a noun. You have to type ATTACK on its own, without DWARF following.
attack
YOU ATTACK A LITTLE DWARF, BUT HE DODGES OUT OF THE WAY.
The mechanic is clearly fully fleshed out, but Woods obviously did a little fixing here. The other oddity with the Crowther version of the game is that the axe doesn’t need to be held.
THERE ARE 2 THREATENING LITTLE DWARVES IN THE ROOM WITH YOU.
2 OF THEM THROW KNIVES AT YOU!
HE GETS YOU!
Switching back to Mirkwood, the dwarves in the Mirkwood campaign are dead…
The body is clearly that of a dwarf, but you do not recognize it immediately. All of the mail and weapons have been taken from the body, and the middle finger on the right hand has been cut off. Narvi remembers that Darzi wore a ring of gold and sapphire on his middle finger, and believes that this is Darzi’s body, mutilated by a band of orcs.
…but it is not hard to imagine them being alive and hostile. Maybe we’re the orc?
North of the Hall of the Mountain King are bars of silver, and farther north still is a room marked Y2. The Y2 is an actual survey station name in the actual cave. Enough turns in the room will have a hollow voice saying the word “PLUGH”, which this is activated so the player has another method of warping back to the building.
YOU ARE IN A LOW N/S PASSAGE AT A HOLE IN THE FLOOR. THE HOLE GOES DOWN TO AN E/W PASSAGE.
THERE ARE BARS OF SILVER HERE!
get bars
OK
n
YOU’RE AT Y2
A HOLLOW VOICE SAYS ‘PLUGH’
plugh
YOU ARE INSIDE A BUILDING, A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING.
“Jewelry” and “many coins” are off to the south and west of the Hall of the Mountain King and are just lying there (exactly like they are in the Woods version). “Diamonds” are also just lying about to be scooped up.
YOU ARE AT THE EAST END OF A VERY LONG HALL APPARENTLY WITHOUT SIDE CHAMBERS. TO THE EAST A LOW WIDE CRAWL SLANTS UP. TO THE NORTH A ROUND TWO FOOT HOLE SLANTS DOWN.
e
YOU ARE AT THE WEST END OF HALL OF MISTS. A LOW WIDE CRAWL CONTINUES WEST AND ANOTHER GOES NORTH. TO THE SOUTH IS A LITTLE PASSAGE 6 FEET OFF THE FLOOR.
e
YOU ARE ON THE WEST SIDE OF THE FISSURE IN THE HALL OF MISTS.
THERE ARE DIAMONDS HERE!
The only other treasure-puzzle is the “sparkling nugget of gold” which is too large to get up steps, and needs to be teleported via the aforementioned “plugh” method.
THIS IS A LOW ROOM WITH A CRUDE NOTE ON THE WALL.
IT SAYS ‘YOU WON’T GET IT UP THE STEPS’.
THERE IS A LARGE SPARKLING NUGGET OF GOLD HERE!
Crowther clearly intended to expand farther. To the north and down from the Hall of the Mountain King is an area leading to some “messy” rooms which go in random directions, but also one direction that crashes the game…
…and most importantly, an “under construction” sign. This is clearly meant as literal as Crowther was in the middle of “constructing the cave”.
YOU ARE AT A COMPLEX JUNCTION. A LOW HANDS AND KNEES PASSAGE FROM THE NORTH JOINS A HIGHER CRAWL FROM THE EAST TO MAKE A WALKING PASSAGE GOING WEST THERE IS ALSO A LARGE ROOM ABOVE. THE AIR IS DAMP HERE. A SIGN IN MIDAIR HERE SAYS ‘CAVE UNDER CONSTRUCTION BEYOND THIS POINT. PROCEED AT OWN RISK.’
There are exits described that don’t actually exist.
YOU ARE IN SECRET CANYON AT A JUNCTION OF THREE CANYONS, BEARING NORTH, SOUTH, AND SE. THE NORTH ONE IS AS TALL AS THE OTHER TWO COMBINED.
n
THERE IS NO WAY TO GO THAT DIRECTION.
The “crash” on the map incidentally sends the player back to the building at the start, and then immediately quits the game.
The last aspect of note — which has no treasures and is also clearly meant as a stub — is a maze, the “all alike” maze. It has different design than the Woods version, as it is far more regular and there’s no pirate nor pirate treasure.
Mirkwood Tales likely cannot be blamed at all for the maze; the word “maze” does not even appear anywhere in the text.
Crowther’s Adventure has a similar perspective on resurrection as Mirkwood Tales: if you die (via dwarf knife or by trying to walking around in dwarkness) the game simply ends with a PAUSE, unlike the Woods version of the game which offers resurrection for a price. Since Mirkwood is quite directly based on Tolkien, and the player isn’t Gandalf, if they’re dead, they’re dead.
In all games designed along the lines of Dungeons and Dragons, there is a strong temptation to make death somewhat less fatal by allowing resurrection or reincarnation. In Tolkien’s world, the ordinary character has no power over death, and only Gandalf is able to return to the world of the living. As such, resurrection does not play a part in the Mirkwood Tales, and death truly represents the final moment of a character’s existence.
However, the system itself does offer the possibility of resuming the game. Typing “go” will resume a paused program. The overall impression is a “cheater” version of resurrection like the one found later in Orb.
YOU FELL INTO A PIT AND BROKE EVERY BONE IN YOUR BODY!
PAUSE GAME IS OVER statement executed
To resume execution, type go. Other input will terminate the job.
go
Execution resumes after PAUSE.
light lamp
YOUR LAMP IS NOW ON.
It isn’t like Crowther was trying to “adapt Dungeons and Dragons” entirely — this is not an RPG, and nearly every room has an analogue in the real cave — but there’s still clearly some flavor of Crowther’s world found in the campaign he participated in, with the treatment of magic, direct reference to the computer as the “eyes” of the player, and heavy emphasis on dwarves (if a bit more aggressive in this game).
The key to Dungeons and Dragons is that the spirit behind the dragon is not a player in the game. The players all stand together as they come to grips with the forces of the universe. The dragon is part of that universe, and like all things within that universe, good and bad, the dragon is controlled by the designer of the world who acts not as a player, but as a referee in a game of imagination and adventure. The referee sets forth the beginning of each legend, gives out all the new information as the epic unfolds, controls the characters in the story that the players encounter, and manages the workings of the world. And yet, the referee is not the actor in the story. The referee sets the scene, but the players independently determine the course that events will take.
There’s some new material we have when Woods picks up the story, so what I’m going to do next is write about the Software Toolworks version of Adventure (the only one that paid Crowther and Woods) and continue the history at the same time.
Map to the Mirkwood sample adventure given in the document.
Before explaining, I should mention something about my job.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I work for a company in Europe. We have both European and US clients. I quite routinely will work on two projects in one day, meaning midstream I need to swap my spelling conventions, so instead of analyzing someone’s work I am now analysing it. I have gotten decently good at swapping continents at will.
With Circus, I had received a snorkel from a seal lion, and had surmised there was some petrol hiding the generator but I just needed to get it out. I mentioned, in passing in my last post, the possibility of siphoning some petrol.
I have never, in any of my business dealings, had to spell the word “siphon”.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
That was it. That was the only puzzle. The game wanted “syphon”. Unless you count having yet another parser struggle spot right after as a puzzle.
The rest is straightforward: short the circuits as I mentioned before (you need to be holding the spanner/wrench, though) and book it for the car, taking off while everything explodes.
You might ask: what about the hacksaw and the cannon and the net? Those were, according to Dale Dobson, part of alternate solutions, but I’m honestly confused about them. To place the net you need to ERECT NET (more parser loveliness) and you can then fall off the tightrope safely, but why fall off the tightrope? Why break into the maintenance shed for a hacksaw? (It can’t be the chest — you have to get into the chest to get the tool to break into the maintenance shed, unless I’m missing something.) The cannon is especially baffling as there really is plenty of time to just walk out, flip on your cool shades, and let the cursed circus explode behind you.
it’s amazing when an adventure game makes you feel like Indiana Jones
too bad it was Indiana Jones trying to spell “Jehovah”
— Voltgloss in the comments to my last post
Unfortunately there was no extra dose of Evil tangling up the plot, unless you count the major parser issues (at least six of them). There was a lot of potential that just never had a pay-off; it’s like if Something Wicked This Way Comes didn’t have Mr. Dark.
Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark, who was also in Brazil as Sam Lowry and recently was David Cartwright in Slow Horses.
This game does seem to be remembered fondly by children, so I should add of all the Howarth games so far it was the most fun to “noodle around” in; it’s a place to explore without too many stopping points like Avventura nel Castello. Even though the enigmatic feel might dissipate in the end, your average 6 year old might have never beat it, meaning the game holds onto its mystery.
Coming up: returning to Crowther’s Adventure, the very original before Woods, as history has been found since I last wrote about it, including a 48-page document that has only recently been unearthed.
Renga in Blue 