From the Winter 1982 Dynacomp catalog, via eBay. Two of the other North Star adventures upcoming (Windmere and Zodiac) are listed as “Late Arrivals” meaning Uncle Harry/Whembly came earlier.
I left off last time on a moment I felt was genuinely promising. The game had bestowed some clues where I thought I just needed to interpret them and arrive at the goal, but the only clue of any note is “DIG 1800 GOLDPIECES………”. I still don’t know what the purpose of Alice and the rabbit and so forth are.
I was sidetracked into thinking (because the rabbit had a wristwatch) that maybe 1800 referred to a time, 18:00, which on a clock would be “south”. Just to the south of the painting is a privy, and maybe I could use the rope to go in….?
AGAINST THE EAST WALL. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A PAINTING OF A YOUNG GIRL HOLDING A RABBIT. THE RABBIT IS WEARING A WRISTWATCH. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND SOUTH.
YOU SEE HERE, A NOTE
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE IN A PRIVY. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND SOUTH.
NOW WHAT? >D
YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY
No. What you can instead do (with help from Gus and Rob in the comments) is go to the random well in the northwest corner and TIE ROPE to go down. As far as I can tell no clue is related to this.
YOU ARE HANGING AT THE END OF THE ROPE.
YOU ARE AT THE END OF THE ROPE DANGLING OVER A TEN FOOT DIAMETER HOLE IN THE FLOOR OF A LARGE ROOM.
NOW WHAT? >D
YOU ARE IN THE LOWER WELL ROOM. THERE IS A 10 FT. DIAMETER HOLE HERE. THERE ARE DOORS EAST, SE, AND SOUTH.
It isn’t like “climb the well” is unreasonable but it was disappointing to think the game was going in an interesting direction only to find not much going on.
From here is when the slog begins.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF HALLS
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE AT A DEAD END
The game decided to give another maze. I sighed and started dutifully mapping. My map is a mess and incomplete so I’m not going to give the whole thing.
Early on there’s a bit of a trap: what looks like a vault door. Perhaps the gold is inside?
NOW WHAT? >OPEN DOOR
THE DOOR SWINGS OPEN WITH A CRASH. TONS OF ICY WATER POUR THROUGH THE OPENING. THE WATER LEVEL RISES RAPIDLY! YOU DROWN!!!
WELL, YOU MANAGED TO GET YOURSELF KILLED! BETTER LUCK WITH YOUR NEXT TRY. HOPE YOU REMEMBERED TO SAVE THE GAME BEFORE TRYING SOMETHING NEW!
After enough trudging I finally hit a room with something different:
YOU ARE IN A LARGE ROOM. IN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM ON A ROUND BASE IS THE STATUE OF A WOMAN. HER ARM IS RAISED AND POINTING AT YOU.
NOW WHAT? > ROTATE STATUE
ROTATE TO WHAT DIRECTION? W
A DOOR IN THE WEST WALL OPENS. THE OTHER DOOR CLOSES.
The rotating arm lets you flip between exits. There’s a switch to a water pump to the west that will drain the water, and a battery in another. Additionally, in a completely random spot in the maze, down a dead end, there is a flashlight to go with the battery. I found the flashlight first and found if you try to light it the game just wouldn’t let me, and the player is just supposed to use their imagination to guess that a battery is required.
With the water drained, you can pass through the vault-looking door to find yourself underneath a pool that marked the center of the castle.
YOU ARE IN A DAMP CHAMBER. THERE ARE PUDDLES OF WATER EVERYWHERE. HIGH ABOVE IS A LARGE CIRCULAR MESH GRATING. YOU CAN SEE THE SKY THROUGH THE GRATING. THERE IS A TUNNEL TO THE NORTH AND AN EXIT WEST.
I thought, well, finally, this is getting back on track. Maybe we’ll have to triangulate directions based on the fact we know the pool is in the middle. Going north required light (LOAD FLASHLIGHT / LIGHT FLASHLIGHT) and I moved forward to gloriously find myself…
YOU ARE AT THE BOTTOM OF A LONG FLIGHT OF STAIRS A TUNNEL LEADS SOUTH
NOW WHAT? >U
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TUNNELS
…back in another, entirely distinct maze.
The game is nice enough to maintain the rule that if room A goes to B, an exit from B goes to A. However, even given games like Acheton which went overboard with their mazes, I’ve never experienced a game with the mazes as grinding as this. Acheton tried to mix in variety, with things like a “turn-based Pac-man” maze, a hedge maze, and a gimmick maze that required an item; here, it is literally the same action over and over and over and over. Drop items, keep track of exits, repeat.
Incidentally, as part of all this I found an exit going back to the manhole near the cabin. Unfortunately, this is a one-way trip, so this bit that might be nice location continuity (and the opportunity to enter the maze via a different route) ends up being a softlock.
Eventually — after another moment of false promise climbing down a hole which seems like it might be the end, but no — the maze winds its way to the outside.
YOU ARE AT THE BASE OF A LARGE MOUNTAIN. THERE IS A MINE ENTRANCE TO THE EAST. A PATH LEADS NW. THERE ARE DENSE WOODS ON BOTH SIDES OF THE PATH.
NOW WHAT? >NW
YOU ARE ON A PATH IN THE WOODS. THE PATH TURNS NORTH AND SE HERE.
This leads to a fork in the road. On the northeast fork there is a “SMALL CLEARING” with a “WOODEN BENCH” and a “SHOVEL”. To the left are some graves and the last part of the game, so you might think: we are free of mazes, yes? We are now trying to use the clues to find the gold?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha no it’s another maze.
At least this one is interesting to look at.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
SIR JOHN WHEMBLY
1729 – 1818
KNIGHT & PIRATE
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
P. MORTON CLYDE
HUNG TILL HE DIED
HIGHWAYMAN
1632 – 1688
As I said earlier, the 1800 clue is pertinent: you’re looking for the year. However, there’s not really much reason to look hard, since it is easy to DIG in every room, and the important one is most likely going to come near the end of your mapping due to how the map is structured.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
BABY
AURUM
DIED-A-BORNIN’
1800
NOW WHAT? >DIG
YOU DIG INTO THE GRAVE.
YOUR SHOVEL HITS A COFFIN.
The coffin has a small skeleton (…sad…) but if you LIFT COFFIN you see an extra hole and the treasure.
NOW WHAT? >LIFT COFFIN
BEHIND THE SIDE OF THE COFFIN IS A HOLE IN THE SIDE OF THE GRAVE. THERE IS A CHEST IN THE HOLE.
NOW WHAT? >OPEN CHEST
THE CHEST IS FILLED WITH GOLD COINS.
A SHEET OF PAPER IN THE CHEST READS: CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE FOUND MY GOLD! NOW, LEAVE IT HERE AND SEE IF YOUR FRIENDS CAN FIND IT!!!
JOHN WHEMBLY
For my longtime readers, you know I’m willing to tolerate a lot of nonsense. I’ve played enough games from the era to be able to be “in the head” of a player from that time period and get a feeling how they’d react. I just don’t see even the most maze-crazed of fans being enthused about this. Most of the games I’ve played has kept to the unspoken rule of one (1) standard maze and if you insist on more you need to mix up the configuration somehow. So despite an absolutely standard maze in Murdac it could be one of my favorite games of 1982, and when there was a second maze (the haunted house with the flying furniture) it wasn’t really a maze at all.
But I’m mostly annoyed that the premise didn’t pay off. Uncle Harry had a genuinely good moment with home base (undercut by a bug, but still, conceptually) and I thought the follow-up might have more of that with less of the fluff of mapping an endless freeway system. The endless mazes made this game worse instead.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
HERE LIES IMA PRUDE
BORN A VIRGIN
LIVED A VIRGIN
DIED A VIRGIN
WHO SAYS YOU CANT
TAKE IT WITH YOU?
1740 – 1831
I’ve been on the hunt for R.L. Turner still, and maybe the open possibility that he or she did more games, but I’ve come up empty. However, it’s only recently these games were even unearthed, so I’m still hopeful at least more information will appear in the future.
For now, let’s return to the (fictional) future, as we get help from various animals in an alien zoo to escape a UFO.
As part of their maximalist approach, Dynacomp also did public domain distribution. Disks via eBay.
ADDENDUM: I got so caught up in the maze nonsense that I forgot to mention the resolution to the drawbridge. With the crank, you can LIFT PORTCULLIS as a direct command; the use of the crank is passive and automatic if you’re holding it, so the bit with the small hole can be ignored. With the sword you can then CUT ROPE to open the drawbridge. All this turns out to be meaningless, as there’s no point in going back outside. This seems to be due to a bug. You were supposed to leave the can with gas behind before climbing the vine, and then get it after dropping the drawbridge, then use it to start the generator. Since the generator already has gas — I assume due to a bug — none of this is necessary at all.
The essential vibe that Uncle Harry’s Will had that felt “original” wasn’t necessarily the car aspect as much as deciphering a riddle while applying it to a large landscape. Many adventures have had cryptic instructions as part of their gameplay, but they usually don’t involve what might happen in a realistic “puzzle hunt” where there’s an enormous amount of extra space, and you have to apply the riddles/poems/clues in a way that whittles down the possibilities. The MIT Puzzle Hunt — the in-person component, at least — has an entire college campus as fair game, but only a small percentage is used.
I’ve hit this moment in Whembly Castle, and I’m not sure yet how to decipher the clues. While the game doesn’t start you with a poem there are some hidden within the castle itself.
Cover of one of the Dynacomp catalogs, from Jason Scott.
But first: last time I had stopped right before getting down to the bottom of a ladder under a manhole. At the very bottom is a compass, which can be used at the foggy lake.
YOU ARE IN A SMALL CHAMBER AT THE END OF A TUNNEL. THERE IS A LADDER FASTENED TO THE SIDE OF THE WALL. A LARGE SHAFT RISES ABOVE YOU. A TUNNEL LEADS WEST.
YOU SEE HERE, A SMALL COMPASS
Going west from here leads to darkness. It may simply be a red herring or it may be the tunnel gets entered via the opposite direction later. I don’t have any obvious light sources; while I have a can of gasoline, there’s no method of lighting it. The rusty key, the iron bar, and the oars aren’t helpful; I’ve got the deck of cards, but my character isn’t Gambit.
YOU ARE IN AN EAST-WEST TUNNEL THE TUNNEL SLOPES UPWARD TO THE EAST.
NOW WHAT? >W
IT IS PITCH BLACK HERE. TO CONTINUE WITHOUT LIGHT COULD BE DANGEROUS.
Leaving this be for the moment, I went to take the compass to the lake and got hit horribly by the boat bug again: while in the boat, the game claims you can’t go west (even though you should be able to). Rob suggested dropping the oars but I found it made no difference. I went as far as restarting my game altogether in case I had some corruption. Being able to go WEST ended up just working sometimes at random. I can’t guarantee this isn’t an emulator bug.
Here’s what my playing setup looks like. North Star is being played as an emulator inside an emulator, which works better than you might expect, but there’s still the open possibility of some obscure command being performed wrong.
Finally breaking out into the lake, though, the game uses a grid of rooms:
The Castle is marked by a berm that you can row around.
YOU ARE ON THE LAKE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE CASTLE. A 5 FOOT BERM RUN EAST AND SOUTH HERE. A HUGE TOWER RISES INTO THE FOG HERE.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEAR THE BERM BY THE WEST WALL.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
Hopping out of the boat causes the boat to float away (I think this is meant to be a one-way trip). The south side of the berm has a drawbridge (not openable from the outside) and on the southwest side there’s a tower with vines that indicates you can climb.
YOU ARE ON THE BERM AT THE BASE OF THE SW TOWER.
THERE IS A THICK VINE GROWING UP THE SIDE OF THE SW TOWER. IT LOOKS LIKE YOU COULD CLIMB IT IF YOU ARE CAREFULL.
I had quite a lot of frustration here as CLIMB VINE simply told me YOU’RE UNABLE TO DO THAT with no explanation why. I finally realized this was not a “your command is not being parsed properly” scenario but rather “something is preventing the action but we’re not going to tell you what it is because transparency in error messages is for weaklings”. I tried dropping everything and the climbing finally worked:
YOU ARE HALF WAY UP THE TOWER. THE VINE HERE IS THINNER AND SEEMS TO BE A BIT LOOSE. BETTER HURRY UP.
NOW WHAT? >CLIMB VINE
YOU SCRAMBLE UP THE VINE. NEAR THE TOP THE VINE IS THINNER. YOU CAN FEEL IT BEGIN TO COME AWAY FROM THE TOWER WALL. AS YOU GRAB THE EDGE OF THE PARAPET, THE VINE TEARS AWAY AND FALLS TO THE GROUND. YOU PULL YOURSELF OVER THE TOP.
YOU ARE ON THE TOP OF THE TOWER. THERE IS A HATCH HERE.
(On a repeat test, I was able to climb holding one item. I don’t know what the limit is.)
Going through this lands the player on the second floor of the castle, so let me give the map of that first:
It’s hard to know what to focus on; there’s a lot of places that are clearly just functional but it may be we are supposed to do something vital in a nondescript room just because one of the clues (which I promise I’ll show off soon) signals it.
YOU ARE IN AN EMPTY STOREROOM. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND WEST.
NOW WHAT? >N
YOU ARE AT THE JUNCTION OF THE WEST AND SOUTH HALLWAYS. THERE ARE DOORS SOUTH AND WEST.
The northwest corner has a ornate bedroom with a button next to a mirror.
YOU ARE IN A VERY ORNATE BEDROOM. THIS IS THE MASTER BEDROOM. THERE IS A FOURPOSTER BED AND AND LARGE DRESSER HERE. ON THE NORTH WALL IS A FULL-LENGTH MIRROR. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND EAST.
NOW WHAT? >EXAMINE MIRROR
THERE IS A BUTTON ON THE EDGE OF THE MIRROR.
(PUSH isn’t normally recognized as a verb; it seems the game has PUSH BUTTON hardcoded as a thing that works.)
Going in you can find a tower with a brass key, but also a corpse and some warning about blocking the entrance. The mirror once closed can’t be opened the other way.
YOU FORGOT TO BLOCK THE DOOR WITH SOMETHING! YOU SLOWLY STARVE TO DEATH! TOO BAD!
WELL, YOU MANAGED TO GET YOURSELF KILLED! BETTER LUCK WITH YOUR NEXT TRY. HOPE YOU REMEMBERED TO SAVE THE GAME BEFORE TRYING SOMETHING NEW!
The random leather boot can be used to invoke the command BLOCK MIRROR after opening it, allowing the player to grab the key safely.
A similar “trap room” can be invoked by visiting the first floor…
…finding the power room and pulling the switch (which does not need extra gas to run, although I assume we’ll still need to fill it up later)…
NOW WHAT? >N
YOU ARE AT THE JUNCTION OF THE EAST AND NORTH HALLWAYS. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND EAST.
NOW WHAT? >N
YOU ARE IN THE POWER ROOM. THERE IS A LARGE GASOLINE GENERATOR HERE. AT ONE END IS A SMALL GAS TANK. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A SWITCH. THERE IS AN EXIT SOUTH.
NOW WHAT? >PULL SWITCH
THE GENERATOR STARTS WITH A ROAR!
…then going back to the second floor (southeast corner) with an “office” that has a button that can be pushed.
THE DOOR SLIDES CLOSED BEHIND YOU
YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM. THERE IS A TABLE AND CHAIR HERE. SEATED AT THE TABLE IS A SKELETON. SCRATCHED IN THE SURFACE OF THE TABLE IS THE FOLLOWING: LAST WILL OF SILAS FRUMP. GOT LOCKED IN THIS ROOM. HOPE THE PERSON THAT FINDS ME THINKS TO BLOCK THE DOOR WITH A CHAIR. I AM STARVING. I WILL LEAVE A CLUE I DISCOVERED. DIG 1800 GOLDPIECES………
You can block again, this time with a chair, but there’s no item as far as I can tell? This means there’s something essential in the text but it’s a fairly vague clue.
Other clues include a note randomly in one of the side rooms…
THE NOTE READS:
GOOD LUCK FRIEND, WITH YOUR ONGOING SEARCH FOR MY GOLD. LEAVE NOT A STONE UNTURNED DURING YOUR WANDERINGS AND IN TIME YOU SHALL FIND MANY NEW CLUES. SOME OF THEM WILL GUIDE YOU STRAIGHT, SOME NOT. ROAM EACH HALL, SEARCH IN ALL PLACES. SOME THINGS WILL VERY LIKELY PASS UNNOTICED, EVEN IF YOU LOOK AT THEM!
…and a secret inscription off the northeast corner, this time found by pulling a hook.
YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE NE TOWER. THERE IS A BRONZE TABLET FASTENED TO THE WALL HERE. IT READS:
I HAVE HIDDEN IT WELL.
TO FIND MY GOLD WILL
BE DIFFICULT. THE KEY
CLUE SHALL BE NAMED.
YOU SHALL SEE FOR YOURSELF
THE GOLD IF THE SCRATCHES
PLACED ON THIS TABLET
ARE READ AND MADE NOTE
OF. SIR JOHN WHEMBLY
The southwest tower similarly has a clue but is not blocked off:
YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE SW TOWER. THERE IS METAL PLAQUE FASTENED TO THE WALL HERE. THE PLAQUE READS:
“PUT FIVE TOGETHER. SHE KNOWS WAYS.”
STAIRS LEAD DOWN.
The “five together” might be referring to letters that are scattered randomly through rooms on the first floor. Samples:
YOU ARE IN THE STEWARDS OFFICE. THERE IS A DESK HERE. ON THE WALL IS PAINTED THE LETTER “I”. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH,EAST AND SW.
YOU ARE AT THE SOUTH END OF THE “GREAT HALL”. A LONG, HIGH ROOM USED FOR EATING. THERE IS A LONG TABLE DOWN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM. ON THE WEST WALL IS A MASSIVE FIREPLACE. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS PAINTED THE LETTER “L”. THERE IS A DOOR EAST.
Put all together, there are the letters, I, L, C, E, and A. They anagram to ALICE. This is clearly referring to a picture found at the note I mentioned earlier (the one that mentions “SOME THINGS WILL VERY LIKELY PASS UNNOTICED”).
YOU ARE IN THE STUDY. THERE IS A DESK AGAINST THE EAST WALL. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A PAINTING OF A YOUNG GIRL HOLDING A RABBIT. THE RABBIT IS WEARING A WRISTWATCH. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND SOUTH.
YOU SEE HERE, A NOTE
I haven’t gotten any significance out of this room otherwise and I suspect I’m missing a parser command. Doing EXAMINE or MOVE give me nothing on any noun other than the note (MOVE isn’t even recognized as a verb).
There’s still other new items lying around to play with (a sword, a rope, a horseshoe, a crank, a silver key in addition to the brass one I mentioned earlier) and there’s one more straightforward concrete puzzle: how to open the drawbridge. With a key (I’m not sure which one, they work passively!) you can get at the drawbridge controls, but I can’t get them to work.
YOU ARE IN THE DRAWBRIDGE EQUIPMENT ROOM. THERE IS A LARGE WINDLASS HERE WITH ROPES LEADING TO THE TOP OF THE DRAWBRIDGE. IN ONE CORNER IS A LARGE PULLY WITH WIRES LEADING DOWN TO THE PORTCULLIS. THERE IS A SQUARE HOLE IN THE PULLY WHEEL. ON THE FLOOR HERE ARE SOME SMALL HOLES LOOKING INTO A PASSAGE BELOW.
TURN WINDLASS is recognized but it is described as rusty. The crank is suggestive but I have not been able to get the parser to recognize any use of it. Other than bespoke commands (which includes turning the windlass) the only ones I have are CUT, DIG, CLIMB, READ, OPEN, LIGHT, UNLOCK, TIE, JUMP, EXAMINE, ENTER, and CHOP — not suggestive for fixing anything, and I’m pretty sure TIE is meant solely for tying the boat at the docks.
I will take speculation at this point on anything (although my one reader, hello Rob, who has solved it already — please hold off on hints for now).
Recently, the Internet Archive went down, and unfortunately, my next several posts were dependent in some way or another on references there. Hence, I scrapped my schedule and picked something I didn’t need extra research for: the sequel to Uncle Harry’s Will, by R. L. Turner, as written for the North Star Horizon.
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE PERSERVERED TO THE END OF THE SEARCH! THE MONEY YOU HAVE FOUND IN MY CHEST WILL PAY YOUR WAY TO ENGLAND THERE, YOU’LL FIND YOUR NEXT ADVENTURE. SOMEWHERE IN WHEMBLY CASTLE LIES HIDDEN A HUGE TREASURE OF JEWELS AND GOLD. HIDDEN THERE BY YOUR GREAT, GREAT, GRANDFATHER ALMOST TWOHUNDRED YEARS AGO. MANY HAVE SEARCHED, BUT NO ONE HAS FOUND IT. WITH YOUR LOGIC AND INTELIGENCE I KNOW YOU WILL BE ABLE TO FIND IT! GOOD LUCK!
The previous game involved a gigantic map which tried to re-create the roadmap of an entire country, and the player had to follow the instructions of a poem in the manner similar to a gimmick road rally. It was, if nothing else, unique.
Whembly Castle is much more traditional: we’re on foot, we’ve arrived at a castle, we’re looking for treasure with no poem to guide us.
We even start adjacent to a forest! Very unexpected, I know.
YOU ARE AT THE END OF A ROAD LEADING NORTH. THERE ARE DENSE, UNPENATRABLE WOODS ON EACH SIDE. TO THE WEST IS A SMALL GATEHOUSE.
NOW WHAT? >W
YOU ARE IN A SMALL EMPTY ROOM. THERE IS A SIGN PAINTED ON THE WALL HERE. IT READS: BEWARE THE ICY WATER!
The start area is meant generally just to stall the player from trying a direct approach.
Entering a gate over a bridge leads to a lake which is a dead end.
YOU ARE AT THE SOUTH END OF A BRIDGE EXTENDING NORTH OVER A VERY FOGGY LAKE. SMALL TOWERS FLANK THE PASSAGE. THERE IS A DOOR INTO THE WEST TOWER.
NOW WHAT? >N
YOU ARE AT THE NORTH END OF A BRIDGE WHICH ENDS ABRUPLY HERE. TO THE NORTH LIES THE LAKE. MISTY WHITE FOG COVERS THE WATER. YOU CAN SEE A DARK MASS IN THE FOG TO THE NORTH.
Trying to enter the lake results in the icy doom warned about in the sign. The proper way to go is the previously mentioned west tower, which has a deck of cards. After picking up the deck of cards, the game rather unusually gives the player ACE OF DIAMONDS through KING OF DIAMONDS as individual objects.
YOU ARE IN THE WEST TOWER OF THE BARBICAN.
THERE IS A BENCH AND A TABLE HERE.
NOW WHAT? >INVENTORY
YOU ARE CARRYING:
AN ACE OF DIAMONDS
A TWO OF DIAMONDS
A THREE OF DIAMONDS
A FOUR OF DIAMONDS
A FIVE OF DIAMONDS
A SIX OF DIAMONDS
A SEVEN OF DIAMONDS
AN EIGHT OF DIAMONDS
A NINE OF DIAMONDS
A TEN OF DIAMONDS
A JACK OF DIAMONDS
A QUEEN OF DIAMONDS
A KING OF DIAMONDS
This is quite unusual and ominous, and I immediately knew this signaled a maze coming, and the objects were intended to map things out. Indeed, heading back to enter the forest, one step in reveals “YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS”.
Topologically, you can consider the map above to be in three sections.
The “main” group is an interconnected set of 11 rooms, with many of them having a “Dead End” branch room. (The idea of random dead ends scattered about dates back to Crowther’s Adventure, even pre-Woods.) In a narrative sense, if someone is stumbling around they’ll essentially go in circles although there’s no special tendencies to force the player back to the start (unlike some mazes, which include special one-way “trap” exits; see the ending maze of Sphinx Adventure for the most extreme example). This is essentially forced by the author’s insistance that if room A goes to room B, there is a path that also lets you go back from B to A. In the context of a cave, one way exits can make sense (you come from above using gravity somehow) but in a forest it doesn’t, so I appreciate the decision.
The “branch” I have marked is miss-able by someone not thorough enough: it leads to a key.
YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS
NOW WHAT? >E
YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS
YOU SEE HERE, A RUSTY IRON KEY
The “ending” section is separated from the main set, making it less likely someone will wander to the end of the maze by accident.
YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS
NOW WHAT? >NE
YOU ARE AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS. TO THE NORTH IS A CLEARING. THE LAKE LIES ALONG THE WEST EDGE OF THE CLEARING. THERE ARE WOODS SURROUNDING THE CLEARING. THERE IS A TRAIL INTO THE WOODS TO THE SOUTH. YOU CAN SEE A BUILDING TO THE NORTH.
This leads to a shack next to a dock and a boat. Just for simplicity of explanation, I’ll assume a player who has already poked ahead to the next outdoor area (a cabin) and returned with a metal prybar lying out in the open.
With the prybar you can bust through a rusty padlock into the shack and find some oars.
YOU ARE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE SHACK. THERE IS A HAND-OPERATED GASOLINE PUMP HERE. THERE IS GAS IN THE PUMP.
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE WOODEN SHACK. ON THE DOOR THERE IS A RUSTY HASP AND PADLOCK. TO THE WEST IS A BOAT DOCK. TO THE NORTH A GAS PUMP.
NOW WHAT? >OPEN DOOR
OK!
NOW WHAT? >E
YOU ARE IN A SMALL OFFICE. THERE IS A DUSTY COUNTER HERE.
THERE ARE DOORS EAST AND WEST.
NOW WHAT? >E
YOU ARE IN A DIRTY STORAGE ROOM.
YOU SEE HERE, A PAIR OF OARS
The oars let you jump in the boat and row around, although I found it quite finicky; the game insisted I not use ROW WEST but instead just type the direction, but at first just typing the direction failed. I am unclear the source of the bug.
Even after getting to the lake, it turns out to be too foggy to move around.
YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEAR THE EAST SHORE. THERE ARE ROCKS EAST.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
NOW WHAT? >W
THE LAKE IS VERY FOGGY! YOU’LL NEVER FIND YOUR WAY WITHOUT A COMPASS!
There’s another bug with the boat I’ll get to in a second, but let’s check out the final area first.
This is straightforwardly a cabin with another locked door, but rather than forcing it this time, you can use the key from the forest maze.
YOU ARE IN A LARGE ROOM. THERE ARE CHAIRS AND A TABLE HERE. A LARGE DESK SITS IN ONE CORNER NEXT TO A FIREPLACE. THERE IS A BED ALONG ONE WALL. NEXT TO THE BED IS A SMALL DRESSER.
YOU SEE HERE, A GAS CAN
(The desk, dresser, table, etc. don’t seem to be hiding anything.)
The gas can can be filled up back at the shack; I haven’t used the filled can for anything yet, but I do wonder if we get to hit the road somewhere just like the last game. There’s also off to the side a manhole that goes underground.
YOU ARE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE CLEARING.
THERE IS A MANHOLE COVER IN THE GROUND HERE.
NOW WHAT? >OPEN HATCH
THERE IS A LADDER HERE LEADING DOWN TO A CHAMBER BELOW.
NOW WHAT? >D
YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE LADDER.
THERE IS A TRAPDOOR ABOVE YOUR HEAD
(Notice how it is referred to as a “manhole cover” but you need to call it a “hatch” to get anywhere. Yes, this game retains the guess-the-noun from the previous one.)
I’ve gotten a little farther, but this seems like a good place to cut off. I did promise I’d return to the boat.
While I was able to enter the boat, I have yet to discern a good syntax for leaving the boat. Out of desparation I just tried leaving east at the docks, thinking it might have my avatar hop out of the boat automatically. Instead, the boat stayed with me.
YOU ARE AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE WOODEN SHACK. ON THE DOOR THERE IS A RUSTY HASP AND PADLOCK. TO THE WEST IS A BOAT DOCK. TO THE NORTH A GAS PUMP.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
Land boat! You can “ride” the boat all the way to the underground, but if you do that, you hit the “fog” condition and end up getting warped back to the docks.
YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE LADDER. THERE IS A TRAPDOOR ABOVE YOUR HEAD
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
NOW WHAT? >D
THE LAKE IS VERY FOGGY! YOU’LL NEVER FIND YOUR WAY WITHOUT A COMPASS!
YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEXT TO THE DOCK. THE LAKE IS COVERED WITH A DENSE FOG.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
The last game went up to roughly 200 rooms and I’ve only got 71 so far, so I expect quite a bit to go. I do find it interesting the same room-to-object ratio is still fairly large. In a road trip, it’s understandable you wouldn’t see much by the side of the road worth picking up; here, in a “classic” style adventure, the ratio feels a little more uneasy, but it is possible the game will change things up later.
I’ve finished the game; this is continued from my last post.
Via the Centre of Computing History. ftb on Discord pointed me to one of these mega-shareware discs having a copy of Raspion, but compiled for DOS.
First off, RavenWorks cleared something up for me: that SLIT message was referring to the acronym that goes with the “say Lymbar in tomb” in the book; I hadn’t been paying attention to the acronyms and I additionally had already mentally “used up” the book so had thought SLIT was referring to some other thing. Figuring out to use that phrase is honestly easier than the GIVE REGARDS puzzle so I would expect most people playing to hit the two moments out of order.
The desert was the real obstacle. I was frustrated trying to figure out something clever so I went into “brute force mode”, doing things like dropping an item and testing one exit before dying, then repeating. I thought I was honestly “spinning my wheels” a bit, like when I solved for a dark maze in Savage Island 1 too early via brute force. It turns out the game really does intend brute force:
Now, at first visual glance — and probably to the author’s eyes — this doesn’t look too bad. It’s just a grid where you’re supposed to find the right location. However, in context, with the loops there, this comes across as a maze, and I had to treat it as such. I only realized the author intended a grid (with us starting at the southwest corner) at the very end of the process. Once you look at a finalized map with a loop it can seem straightforward but from my experience it can double the mapping time.
Another case shows up right after falling into the underground river:
Heading north from the river drops the player not only in an endless loop but a softlock. I wasn’t expecting a double-loop there so it took me a while to realize what was going on. The right way to go is south to a shore.
Going west leads to a dead end, but the spade — which I had been testing absolutely everywhere — finally pays off.
The exit you dig leads back to the park near the house, so I had no new treasures to speak of, meaning I had missed something (rather, two somethings). The first is a “platinum nugget” that just washes up on the shore when you visit it the second time (I guess saying things wash up is a hint to be checking back, but a player with a different sequence of events might get very frustrated because it doesn’t feel like solving a puzzle). The second is found by going back to the water and using DIVE, which I knew to do because it was on my verb list.
The chest is described as “locked” but the keys don’t work.
The “sign” is the subway sign I had been carrying around in order to do mapping. It was genuinely useful to bump up my item count in the Caverns of Syl.
It immediately occurred to me the hammer was now useful, but I couldn’t SMASH CHEST either, and it took me some fiddling to realize the chest’s description mentions a lock, so you’re supposed to SMASH LOCK.
And that’s everything! The coins and nugget get dragged back to the start, the end, horray.
Rob in the comments compared the setting to 70s sci-fi shows like Ark II and Morpheus Kitami mentioned the concept being like a Lovecraft story.
From the third episode of the only season of Ark II. Yes, the chimpanzee is a crew member.
I personally was hoping for something like the Twilight Zone episode Time Enough at Last where there’d be a twist ending.
From Vivarium (2019), an A24 movie about a couple trapped in a mysterious labyrinth of houses. It hit most theaters right before the pandemic lockdown.
Look, this was a TRS-80 game in 10,500 bytes, I knew there wouldn’t be much, but a two-sentence twist ending which reflects on the state of the player would have been possible. Nothing about being trapped in the city is explained, nor what happens after. In a way this is like Strange Adventure which lands you trapped on a tiny island with your treasures; the “winning” is almost abstracted from the practicality of the narrative. The sarcastic narrative voice of Strange Adventure made it clear the author had awareness of the bizarre ending point, but here I’m not sure if the author intended anything more with Raspion than a straight treasure hunt.
(Here’s a related question: when the player shoots the nosy neighbor in It Takes a Thief, does the author realizes this shifts the narrative tone entirely, or is it just another puzzle?)
BONUS:
A bit of history deleted from my last post but the picture is too good not to include.
When the General Electric OARAC computer started working, they invited 6 humans in a computation contest, trying to find the square of 8,645,392,175 by hand vs. the computer. The computer time was 0.004 seconds, the average human time was 8 minutes. All six humans failed to get the correct answer. Connie Hodgson of Syracuse, New York, is shown here pointing at where she forgot to carry the one.
While General Electric (the company originating with Edison in 1878) is not much remembered for computers now, they were involved quite early. They started a relationship with the Air Force in 1948 manufacturing jet engines (only a year after that branch of the military was founded); this relationship let to the OARAC (Office of Air Research Automatic Computer) being built by GE and installed in 1953.
The military computer’s success led some in GE to push for going into computers more generally, but it didn’t happen until 1955. Bank of America did a call for bids to develop an electronic accounting method; while GE put in a bid, they fully expected to lose to IBM, but instead came out with the win at $32 million (in 1955 dollars). This led to the development of the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition system, and at the same time, GE established a computer department in Phoenix, focused on business mainframes.
Through the 1950s and 1960s they producing a long line of machines: the GE-100, 225, 312/412, 635, and 645. Mainframe manufactures, with IBM being the “old man” of the industry, were dubbed Snow White (IBM) and the Seven Dwarves (Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, General Electric and RCA). I’m going to guess GE was Grumpy. RCA was a spinoff from GE in 30s, so they were competing against their own spinoff.
GE was heavily involved in operating system development (notably the GECOS for their GE-600) and time sharing (allowing many people to use alternating cycles of mainframes). The ground zero of timesharing, Dartmouth, used GE hardware and was a joint project between the college and the company; this was the same system where Dartmouth developed the first version of BASIC.
GE eventually started losing ground to competitors and sold their computer assets to Honeywell; however, they still kept their time-sharing services, and after a number of changes, they were dubbed the General Electric Information Services (GEIS).
This remained a business-only service, but the number of unused computer cycles led GE to make a commercial spin-off in 1985 that would serve as a competitor to the dial-in services of the time, CompuServe and The Source. GE’s long-standing time-sharing infrastructure — dating back to the very invention of the concept — enabled them to charge less than their competitors.
While CompuServe had Forums, where people of common interests would gather, GEnie had RoundTables. For our story today, the important RoundTable is the Tandy RoundTable; the TRS-80 community there became the big hub for online enthusiasts. One of the sysops, Tim Sewell, uploaded his public domain and shareware library of software (keep in mind “public domain” was a vague notion in the 80s); as a second outlet he created a disk distribution group known as the File Cabinet, so that people who weren’t on GEnie could get the same access. In a survey from 1989 he found only 10 percent of the people who answered even had a modem and only a small fraction of that group even used one. (To be fair, even with GEnie’s lower prices being online via dial-in was quite expensive at the time. Note the launch article touting $35 an hour primetime — essentially, day hours. Even by the 90s when things were slightly cheaper primetime use went for $18 an hour. That’s about $41 an hour in 2024 money.)
Whilst browsing, Raspion Adventure caught my eye as something I had never seen before and was not in any of my references. That File Cabinet link seems to be the only reason the game survives today. The BASIC source was entirely devoid of an author name or year, but the distinctive name led me to find an ad in 80 Microcomputing (May 1981).
This is the only reference to RanDob (P.O. Box 1662 out of Boca Raton, Florida) I’ve been able to pull up. It lists a second adventure game (It Takes a Thief) and it is one I’ve played before! Not only that, that game gives an author name: Randy Dobkin. Previously, it was a game I only knew about via mysterious index card, and I had thought it might just have been someone’s unpublished side project, but apparently the author tried to sell it at least a little.
While it is not guaranteed Raspion has the same author as Thief, by source code similarity I’m marking it as essentially certain. It Takes a Thief placed you as a criminal robbing a home, with no preface: you just start in your getaway vehicle and get to work. It didn’t really need any explanation. Raspion, on the other hand, is cryptic even after it starts progressing:
We’re supposed to “visit the deserted city and find Syl and its treasures”. This is a treasure hunt with asterisks around the names of treasures; so far, normal. The game even has a “your house” opening (the only useful item is a spade) and there’s a storage room where the treasures go.
Going out to the door, however, leads straight to the aforementioned city.
Is this …. a horror premise? Has our house been mystically tossed into a future city? The adventure-collection aspect suggests not, but the “no escape” is striking. I haven’t finished yet so I don’t know if there’s some plot turn.
Here’s a meta-map of what I have so far:
The city part has a park where you can find a keys and a book hidden in bushes. The book requires unlocking with the keys. The book gives various “key phrases” if you TURN PAGE but only one of them is useful.
Say Lymbar in tomb is the useful one. The “stop reading books” warning is literal and if you TURN PAGE again you will die.
Also near the park is a moving walkway (WAIT will cause the player to change rooms) and there’s a computer off the side; I’ll get back to that later. Let’s check out the Tower of Lorgon next.
The tower starts with a ground floor that has spinning mirrors, and if you are in the room for more than two turns, you get dizzy and die. This means you can safely pass through and safely pass back but can’t linger (otherwise you’ll die on the way back).
The tower leads up to a roof with a vent, which you can climb to find a stair described as “mile-long”. Again I get cryptic vibes, although the path down only lets you go a hundred yards before getting stopped.
The “impassable” stone has an inscription
There is a better way. Give my regards to the keeper of the records. — Ranon of Lymbar
which will come up later. I have yet to find a use for the hammer (even though SMASH is a verb).
Moving back to the park, on the far east side is the Tomb, which is where the clue from the book gets used.
This opens a route down to a subway that has a “Yttrium capsule” you can ride.
At the end of the line there are two branches. One leads to a desert where, so far, all I’ve managed to do is get thirsty and die.
The second branch goes to the “Caverns of Syl” which is a maze, at the end of which is a *synthetic ruby*.
This is the absolutely standard “drop items to map” maze, no gimmicks.
That’s the end of the line for my exploring, except I said I’d come back to the computer. This is if you ride the walkway at the park, where there is a side room described as a “computer archive” with a “computer keyboard/screen”. I tried very hard to locate a verb that would work for interaction.
This included using LOAD which tried to load a saved game I hadn’t made, causing everything to crash. Oops.
This is meant more as a riddle: there is no “normal” verb here. I did my standard verb search and found
and the right command is off one of those. Specifically, the message back at the tower told us to give our regards to the keeper of records. This indicate we should type GIVE REGARDS, and I have no idea what that would look like physically (“press F to pay respects”?) but it works, and I’ll provide the full animation:
“SLIT”, blinking. Is that supposed to be a reference to the double-slit experiment from quantum physics? It is not possible to repeat the action.
To summarize, I have a a hammer (not yet used), spade (not yet used, I’ve tested everywhere), the book and keys, and a synthetic ruby which counts as a treasure. My only obvious obstacle is a desert where I die of thirst and the only unused clue is a mysterious flashing SLIT message; I have not tried SAY SLIT everywhere but that’s the only thing I can think of. My point score is 100 out of 450, but the entirety of those 100 points comes from dropping the ruby at the storage room.
Regarding if this is “horror” or “science fantasy” or something else, I get the vibe this aligns with the 90s Myst-clone games like Obsidian filled with bizarre future devices (and no people because that would be too hard to handle technically). The ultra-minimalist style gives it a unique flavor and the game will just throw a “control room” out with no description and you’re just supposed to imagine.
This could be a scene out of L-Zone or Rhem. If this was a real 90s game that message from Ranon of Lymbar would have been rendered as a blurry QuickTime video.
I’ve finished the game. Just like Dungeon Adventure was an anti-Zork of sorts, this can be thought of as an anti-Starcross, both in a negative and a positive way.
Voltgloss and Rob helpfully dropped some hints in the comments. The big piece I missed was the shortage of oxygen, but before getting into that, some small pieces to wrap up:
1.) the silver wire is … simply there as silver, and counts as a treasure
2.) the box which a knob gave the messages BEAM ON and BEAM OFF allowed me to mess with the main tractor beam for the ship; I was originally quite confused because it seems like there’s a literal beam coming out of the box, but no, that’s supposed to be a voice message or psychic impression or something; it also is a source of a bug at the end
3.) the oven is ignorable (Rob’s hint indicated a “fish”)
4.) the flashlight is also ignorable
5.) the shielding is safe to get before you’ve started the power, and as predicted, it does turn into gold with the lead-to-gold machine
6.) as mentioned by The Larch in the comments, the color code is just the official resistor code; there are some transistors that otherwise are a “red herring” but they’re intended as a hint; this also really puts even more into question the “alien ship” thing
With all that taken care of, I technically had found all my treasures, but couldn’t get them back to the ship in time, even with strategic teleports. The cutting torch comes with a tank (and it needs the tank to work, and the tank will eventually run out of gas if you leave it on).
Gas for welding/cutting uses a small amount of oxygen but is generally other gases, and I already knew it was being actively used in the cutter, so it never occurred to me it’d be safe to hook up to a spacesuit. However, Voltgloss’s first two hints…
You already have another oxygen source available already.
But didn’t recognize it as such.
…led me to go…. wait….
The metallic spacesuit can hook up to the tank and it works as oxygen. I think I may have audibly yelled at the screen. Look, you can buy oxygen canisters as separate things, and apply them in the mix, but it’s not oxygen alone, it’s called oxy-acetylene for a reason!
(As KarbonKitty points out in the comments, it’s technically different gas for cutters and welders, even though the canister is labeled as for welding but gets used on a cutter; also, you’d have different composition for a helium environment.)
And yes, some future-spacesuit-thing could just extract the oxygen and filter out the rest somehow, but that’s getting into the realm of fantasy-physics. This is part of why I said it’s sort of an anti-Starcross; it sets up as if science helps (even tossing in the resistor code, which I didn’t know) yet undermines the science at a crucial moment. It’s not terrible but — you know Lebling would never put a puzzle like that.
There’s another reason why this is the anti-Starcross (the “positive” way I alluded to). In that story, originally titled The Gift from the Stars, the aliens set up a task as a way of intentionally giving away advanced technology. Here, we are just wholesale swiping stuff, up to sabotaging the engine room just for some lead. It could have the same title with quote marks applied: The “Gift” from the Stars. I don’t normally think of the fate of our protagonists after their stories, but I can’t imagine our unhinged protagonist with an immortality serum ready to sell is going to land at a healthy ending.
While I have a full score, I was undermined by a final bug. There’s a message along the lines of “BUT YOU’RE STILL STUCK HERE” if you haven’t turned off the tractor beam (using the knob) but somehow my game got confused and even with the tractor beam off it still thinks it is on. I confirmed with checking Dale Dobson’s final screen that I had done everything correctly, the game just decided to collapse in a pile of bad parity settings.
Yet again, Aardvark tries some astounding ideas in a crumbling technical framework. They still stuck around through at through 1984, when higher-memory-capacity computers were becoming commonplace; I wish they had taken the opportunity to revamp some of their games to be slightly less reliant on super-tight programming (like Bruce Robinson did). Of course, Rodger Olson wasn’t even willing to fix regular bugs, so it isn’t a surprise we’re stuck with what we have. For Bob Retelle, who I quoted earlier, this behavior caused him to leave and make his own company entirely.
The “sloppiness” was another reason I spun off and started up my own software company. I had a real problem with releasing buggy games, which meant my own productivity was far lower than a lot of what was available from Aardvark. After 15 revisions of my “Time Trek” game, Rodger took to tossing the cassettes with the new revisions in the trash, rather than fix the production “masters” to quash the bugs.
As far as Bob Anderson (the co-author of today’s game with Olson) goes, I’m not sure what happened. We have one more game of his to play (another Haunted House) and his Mobygames credits cut off.
From the July 1983 Aardvark catalog, via the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
We’ll have to save that for another time, as coming up next: two utterly obscure TRS-80 games, including one resulting from the recent “missing adventures” thread. Part 2 of the missing adventures list will likely show up next week, and then we’ll finally be getting back to Apple II, as Bob Blauschild tries his hand at a game in color.
I’ve now utilized the teleportation booths, visiting both an asteroid and an alien city. I haven’t found any way to extend my oxygen (or swap the helium that’s currently in the ship’s air with oxygen); with teleportation it may just be possible to go fast enough, but given I still have some puzzles to go I have my doubts.
All amidst a flurry of bugs, alas.
A preliminary NASA design for a 12-man module from ’69-’70. It normally is in zero-G but allows for rotation to test artificial gravity. This is smaller than the Derelict ship but with the same concept, connecting floors via a central shaft.
My first breakthrough was simply figuring out how to work the glass booths everywhere on the map. Saying both LOOK GLASS and LOOK BOOTH let to the game declaring they weren’t there, but for whatever reason GO BOOTH is special-cased to allow entering. Please note that this is different from every other object in the game; MAGNETIC BOOTS must be referred to as MAGNETIC (or just MA), not BOOTS; it’s using the initial part of the string, with no notion of which part is the verb and what’s the adjective.
Leaving is just a matter of GO OUT, but that’s not safe with the droid (who seems to always miss their first shot, but shots later have a random chance to hit). Trying to PUSH KEYBOARD leads to the game asking for a number from 1 to 99. Trying out “1” since there seemed to be no logical way to do better, as “YOU MOLECULES ARE SCATTERED”:
2 and 3 similarly lead to inadvertent exploration of the known universe; locations start at 4. I ended up just brute forcing all 99 options, although most led to death.
There’s a way to avoid at least some of the brute force (kind of, I’ll get back to that) and three of the locations — as marked in boldface — go to new areas, which I’ll also get back to. I originally didn’t have the colors on my chart but I teleported myself to SECURITY (23) to try to pop open the safe, now that the power was on. Remember, I had determined the safe was
SAFE: BLACK/PURPLE – BLACK/YELLOW – BLACK/PURPLE
but typing in PURPLE-YELLOW-PURPLE didn’t work, and I realized quickly the safe really wanted a numeric code. I realized I could triangulate the room colors with the teleport locations, leading me to find the base-10-using aliens had the code
black = 0
brown = 1
red = 2
orange = 3
yellow = 4
green = 5
blue = 6
purple = 7
gray = 8
white = 9
that is, the same order that’s on the chart from the communications room. So BLACK/PURPLE is 07 or just 7, BLACK/YELLOW is 04 or just 4, and BLACK/PURPLE is 7 again. The combination for the safe is 747.
Popping open the safe reveals a ring of keys, a phaser, and some coins. The coins are just a treasure, the keys go to the locked cabinet in the sick bay (which you’ll see shortly), and the phaser can be used to smite droids, specifically with the verb BLAST.
The two-letter parser means there’s a lot of nonsense here: the green verbs are real, blue verbs map elsewhere. I found out from the response to PLAY that PLACE has to be a verb, not on my standard list (but I added it), and BLAST (not listed) I figured out while playing around with the phaser.
Blasting droids is quite satisfying and since they seem to always miss their first shot the droid rooms are now completely safe.
Above, I’ve used the keys on the cabinet, with the debris of a destroyed droid close by. This reveals
a gray box with a knob (this creates a beam, I haven’t done anything useful with it)
a silver wire (I also haven’t done anything useful with it)
and immortality serum (!!). I tried every verb I had extracted to see if it was possible to take the serum and thus survive the oncoming lack of oxygen, but had no luck. I tested out DRINK with a response of O.K. but that just mapped to DROP.
I finally realized (by testing it at back at the ship) the serum is simply intended as a treasure and we can’t use it. I admit I was looking forward to some even-more-terrible ending message by testing out the teleport-your-molecules device whilst immortal, but alas the technical requirements of this game remain extreme (it uses 12k rather than 8k, at least) and I don’t think the authors would have wanted to custom handle that.
Returning to those new locations: one is supposed to be clued by the projector in the library, which shows a brown and black alien city so the teleportation code 10 matches.
I suspect most people who played got this already by brute force. The thing is: at least some death-testing is required to understand the code, the asteroid has no similar clue, and there’s no reason why the authors couldn’t have dropped yet another hidden teleport somewhere in the 80s or whatnot.
The puzzle is rescued by the fact that the safe really needs the player to have understood the code. I’m not sure if changing the puzzle to remove the brute force (by adding more digits, say) would have made it stronger.
The new locations are above; I marked the teleport destinations. The shaft is the buggy one, as there’s no glass booth in the room, and when you leave the booth to enter the room the booth disappears. There’s also no corresponding color (it’d be black/yellow, 04). That buggy room — which a player is most likely to come across first — is another reason why the brute force can only sort-of be avoided — even if someone spots the pattern early they get dealt a room that breaks the pattern! But it’s the only one.
The asteroid just has a titanium pickax (treasure) and some lumps of coal (not treasure, yet).
The city is more interesting; it has a “press” that you can PLACE the lumps in (…thanks goodness I randomly learned about that verb…) and convert them into diamonds, as long the power is going.
While I now can easily open the bay doors and drop the tractor beam for escape, there’s still the matter of getting the treasures. Things I have yet to puzzle out are:
The box that shoots a beam
The silver wire
A flashlight near where the diamond press is (you can turn it on, but why? there’s no darkness)
An oven with a bottle of cooking oil
A metallic suit, which can’t be worn at the same time as the oxygen is attached
Some “shielding” near the radiation sign
More details on the last point: the shielding is at the hyperspace drive, and I’ve successfully lit up a welding torch and managed to CUT SHIELDING. Unfortunately this simply kills the player.
(By the way, CUT on anything else has the game claim you don’t have a torch, even when you do. I have to keep alert with any parser message to determine if it’s saying something real or if it’s just a bug.)
The reason why you’d want the shielding is back at the lab: there’s a machine that indicates (via cryptogram) it is for turning lead into gold. So I imagine you can get gold shielding if you can just survive ripping it off from the engine.
I suspect I’m closing in on the ending, and I also even suspect I have all the verbs. I’m still probably getting stuck via some cryptic parser response without realizing it. If someone wants to check Dale Dobson’s playthrough, I’d appreciate any ROT13 hints (especially if it turns out I’m missing something outrageous).
I’ve got the layout now, and this is very similar to Starcross in that a complete layout of the ship is really needed before puzzle-solving can begin in earnest.
Just like Starcross, Derelict is set in a rotating cylinder with artificial gravity (given the same author made a Rimworld game the same year, this is not a shock). The directions are up, down, forward, aft, spinward, and antispinward. There’s a central shaft that links to multiple layers of the cylinder, and when inside the cylinder, travel “wraps around” going spinward or antispinward.
Although smaller than this; in two of the layers only two GO SPINWARD or GO ANTISPINWARD actions are enough to loop, and in the middle layer, only three steps are needed.
I’ve divided the central shaft into four layers…
…and I’ll give the map in four parts. My coloring is arbitrary and most rooms have a unique color combo that I’m sure is important (they also all have the mysterious glass booth). In the landing bay, the floor is red and the walls are green; all combos are unique.
That’s everything for the start. Note on the map I have a corner marked; I’m using that to indicate where all the droids are (there are droids #1 through #6). I also have north mapped to forward, south mapped to aft, east mapped to spinward, and west mapped to counterspinward.
(As simple as the above looks, it took me a little while to figure out because I didn’t have an item and the loop going down at the Central Shaft was counterintuitive. Dropping the magnetic boots gets you stuck in zero gravity, and of course dropping your suit or oxygen are similarly fatal. I eventually found out that the sign at the start of the game which tells you DROP TREASURE HERE is takeable so I used it for mapping purposes.)
Moving on to the next floor, the one I’m calling “Technical”:
Past the starting floor all names of rooms are given in cryptograms. I suppose this is meant to represent an alien language but if it’s just a cryptogram, doesn’t it mean they use English? If I keep the thought process going I’d imagine we’re looking at a human ship that’s been tossed back in time, but in all honesty this is almost certainly meant like “Hollywood English” in a movie set in a non-English country; we’re just supposed to get the feeling of translating an alien language without having to do it.
The yellow sign says IZWRZGRLM, or RADIATION. I have a feeling I’m going to need the “metallic suit” that’s in the storage room on the same level, although just passing through isn’t fatal. Also noteworthy is a CUTTING TORCH with a TANK (with a cryptogram on it that says WELDING GAS) as well as a transmitter with a ruby crystal in it (my first treasure) and a chart with more cryptograms.
…let’s just ignore the two bathrooms (is this really an alien ship?) and note the locked cabinet in the sick bay…
…a “library” next to a “rec room” where there’s some playing cards (aliens?!), some jeweled gaming pieces (treasure number 2), a platinum globe (treasure 3), a projector that needs power…
…and in the XZKGRZMH XZYRM (CAPTAINS CABIN) there’s a log book giving an encoded safe combination.
Using the crypto-translated chart from the communications room, that comes out to be
BLACK/PURPLE – BLACK/YELLOW – BLACK/PURPLE
or maybe just PURPLE-YELLOW-PURPLE if we’re ignoring the initial #.
(I should also highlight, referring back to the screenshot, one of the major annoyances of the game. Aardvark games always have had a tendency to give no response at all to particular commands, and this is true for many of the things you want to look at or read. In this case, READing a log book shows nothing, and you have to LOOK!)
Moving to the top:
The safe is right there (HVXFIRGB, or SECURITY) but it needs power; an oven has cooking gas, and a lab has a “large machine” which needs power as well.
Finally the very top is the control deck, where a CRT indicates there is no power, and there are three colored buttons.
That’s POWER, TRACTOR BEAM, AND BAY DOORS. Rather like Dog Star Adventure, it’s clear the beam and doors need to be operated before we get out. Pressing either one indicates there is no power, so that must be the right press?
The exit down gets cut off, and the droid (and I assume all the other droids) wake up.
Other than running out of oxygen (the oxygen is really tight but I don’t know yet if we get a refill) there hasn’t been any hazards in the game yet. The ship is waiting for us! This might end up being a “preparation puzzle”, one of my favorite kinds, where we have to pre-create a safe route before lighting things up. It’s too bad the Aardvark parser makes everything three times harder to deal with.
Aardvark is a company I’d never heard of before starting the project, but we’ve spent an awful lot of time with now. They originally wrote their games targeted at the ludicrously small-memory requirements of the Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P computer, and made some odd parser sacrifices to get there (like only understanding the first two letters of each word). Despite this they’ve been rather clever in terms of geography, with (for example) Bob Anderson’s Circle World having a fair number of locations only reachable by teleport, but having all areas united together by the end. Earthquake, the game we most recently looked at, had an almost completely wide-open map, but led to puzzles where the thought process sometimes went “what store would have a solution to this” and not simply thinking about items.
Derelict is another Bob Anderson game from 1982, where he is again listed as co-author with Rodger Olson (founder of Aardvark). I’d be cautious about saying this was an equal collaboration; quoting Bob Retelle (of Trek Adventure):
Credits often resulted from “Hey why don’t you write an adventure based on xxxx” and it became “By Rodger Olsen and (whoever)”. At least I got paid (sometimes).
(Regarding getting paid, Retelle points out how ports were considered “owned by the company” so the original author did not make money off them. In one case a store told him about how the TI-99 port of his RPG Quest II was popular, except this was the first he even heard of a TI-99 port existing. Also, there is no Quest I and calling it II was a marketing stunt.)
Our goal is to raid a 1000-year old alien vessel for treasures. This is kind of like Queen of Phobos if we were one of the thieves. The catalog says it is “the new winner in the ‘Toughest Adventure at Aardvark sweepstakes'” and notes there are “no irrational traps and suddenly senseless deaths”.
This ship was designed to be perfectly safe for its builders. It just happens to be deadly to alien invaders like you!
This description made me hesitant. Earthquake was genuinely good (almost recommendable) but still had the miserable Aardvark parser. Any game designed as “easy” can get away with a less robust parser, not just because the player will have less moments of stuck-ness in order to test the boundaries, but because easy games tend to ask the player to communicate fairly straightforward actions.
The two versions of Derelict I’ve been able to find are for the Commodore PET and C64. I went with the Commodore PET this time. There’s a short series of messages about being pulled in a ship by an alien tractor beam, and then:
My first problem was just trying to pick anything up: GET BOOTS says “IT’S NOT IN SIGHT”. This is another instance of a parser’s try-not-to-reveal-too-much attitude is hurting, those boots are clearly right there! The default message is trying to avoid noun-hunting but it ends up leading to a bit of nonsense right at the start.
You’re instead supposed to TAKE MAGNETIC (or TA MA, this is a two letter parser) and you can do that for the other items. The sign indicates the treasures go in the room for points; yes, it’s one of those games. (Oddly enough, not common for Aardvark! They’ve been cranking out escape games, not Treasure Hunts.) Moving on with all three things (boots, spacesuit, oxygen):
Here is the usual airlock setup where you close one door to open the other one, go outside, and then:
I… what? Didn’t you say I was wearing the oxygen, game?
READ OXYGEN gives the message ATTACH/DETACH OXYGEN. Ok, fine, but it seems weird to make this essentially a puzzle. (And give the oxygen a response to reading! The magnetic boots give a blank message when you try to read them.)
Finally, through with that, I went outside again, did LOOK #1 DROID, and got the response
WHAT?
(EXAMINE doesn’t work at all, READ gives a blank prompt.)
Hmm, maybe try the booth instead? LOOK BOOTH:
THAT’S NOT HERE
Oh that’s right, it needs the noun from the start, it needs to be called “glass” instead. LOOK GLASS:
THAT’S NOT HERE
Game. Excuse me. You literally have the text “THERE IS A GLASS BOOTH HERE”.
Ye flask indeed. I don’t remember having anywhere near this trouble with Earthquake, but keep in mind this game has already tried to having both items being worn and things attached, and I have no doubt there’s something weird and complicated going on in the landing bay, but I’m still unclear what that thing is. Maybe it is best to just move on and explore.
This one’s going to be a headache to map out, isn’t it? And likely buggy.
I remember discovering some of the bugs of other games in early testing (it was pretty common for Rodger to hand out tapes of new games before they were put in the catalog), but it was like pulling teeth to get him to fix any of them.
In “Mars Adventure” (or was it “Pyramid”.. hmm.. I forget exactly), there was a stairway with exits that didn’t line up with the next locations. That is, you’d exit to the East, say, and end up in a room with exits to the North and South. Going south would take you back to the first room (it should have said West). Made it really tough on people who liked to map the advanture. Rodger’s response was something like “tough”.
Another one let you eat the key that was absolutely essential for escaping (maybe that was the Pyramid bug). Again the answer was “well, then don’t eat the key”.
Let me get a bit farther and report back next time. Aardvark games always stayed in tight constraints so there’s no way this goes out long, but if the parser difficulties stay this could still require multiple parts.
This is, as far as I can find, the only game or article of any kind by Stewart F. Rush. It comes from a BASIC type-in listing printed in the January 1982 edition of Creative Computing (the same one that had that rollercoaster game that used a laserdisc); it is for computers that use a S-100 bus (like the North Star Horizon) but includes conversion instructions for TRS-80 and Apple II. It was later re-printed in a slightly larger form in David Ahl’s Big Computer Games (1984), which gives the lines:
5 REM MOON SURVIVAL PROGRAM
6 REM WRITTEN BY STUART RUSH 3/12/81
These lines are not present in the original magazine article. We’ve had plenty of instances of people removing comment lines of this sort but never retroactively adding them (people might add themselves in the credits, but David Ahl was the editor, not Rush). I think what this indicates is that the 1984 form of the game is the original and the one printed in the magazine is pruned down for memory-saving purposes.
Here’s the intro of the 1984 version:
*****************************************
* CURRENT STATUS & LOCATION INFORMATION *
*****************************************
ELAPSED TIME: 0 MINUTES
POWER UNIT: 225 UNITS
OXYGEN REMAINING: 180 MINUTES
LOCATION: You are at Mare Serenitatis. Long eerie shadows from distant mountains and craters cast themselves across the barren landscape.
Compare with, simply: “YOU ARE AT MARE SERENITATIS.”
I’m fairly certain the intent was to put both versions in the January 1982 magazine, but something got messed up in the printing! The end data section has two versions, with Listing 2 being an “Option for Shortened Text”. The two are exactly the same.
Being in the vague “implied public domain” (not really public domain but people played fast and loose with BASIC source code in the 80s) there were multiple versions later, some based on the ’82 code, some based on the ’84 code. If you’re an avid follower of this blog I’m betting you already know one of them.
Via eBay. OK, I know the cover is depicting Quest for Gold, not Moon Survival, but is that a prospector posing for a picture with werewolves in the background?
I pored through many versions trying to find one that matched the ’84 code (including checking a port for the wildly obscure Microbee, an Australian computer — it turns out the DROP command is broken) and the best I could come up with was this copy which has “enhancements” by G. M. Bright. I didn’t know what these “enhancements” were (cue ominous foreshadowing) but it’s the closest version I could find that I could get to run.
From the 1982 article.
It is THE FUTURE, the year 1991, and our craft has crash landed on the moon and our goal is to escape. I admit I was originally excited to see how things would go because the author mentions
Each location described corresponds to an actual moon location taken from a National Geographic map of the moon.
making me wonder if this was going to be set in “true” hard science fiction — that is, we’d be dealing with a real spacecraft and scenario as much as possible. This turned out not to be the case, alas. Surely someone in the early 80s was nerdy enough to do an adventure with a realistic spaceship model, and not just randomly guess what it might look like?
*****************************************
* CURRENT STATUS & LOCATION INFORMATION *
*****************************************
ELAPSED TIME: 5 MINUTES
POWER UNIT: 220 UNITS
OXYGEN REMAINING: 175 MINUTES
LOCATION: You are on a promontary point on the rim of the crater Posidonius, only half visible when seen from below. There is total darkness to the East.
As the screen indicates, there is a constant check over “power” and “oxygen” and the magazine article even mentions
The emphasis is on determining optimum move scenarios, resulting in minimum times and resource use.
That is, the actions you need to do (barring parser annoyance) are easy to figure out, and the hard part is making sure you don’t run out of oxygen whilst escaping. You have an inventory capacity of four, and you start with a power pack and an oxygen tank, both you need while exposed to space.
The “dead” on the right shows the player hitting a dark place, and any step after is death.
The green-marked part is your ship, and has oxygen, so you can simply drop your oxygen to stop using it. (I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works in a real space suit; it took me a while to realize this and was the only “tough puzzle” of the game for me.) Oxygen is tight enough that you do need to optimize both steps while on the moon and make sure you drop your oxygen every time you’re indoors.
LOCATION: You are at Mare Vaporum. The Apennines Mountains rise ominously to the North and West.
##
There is an ILLUMINATOR here.
Quite randomly on the surface of the moon there is an ILLUMINATOR in one place and a SHOVEL in another. Both can wait for later; what we really need to start with are a SEALANT and a KEY from the ship.
LOCATION: You are in the control room, the ships console is before you.
##
There is an ELECTRONIC KEY here.
Starting from the Base of Crater of Plato and heading west has our suit get hit by a meteor shower, and we need to USE SEALANT otherwise we’ll die.
LOCATION: You are at the base of the crater of Plato. A shiney object is seen to the West.
? w
There is a meteor shower. Your space suit has developed a leak!!
? use sealant
Proceeding to seal suit…….
LOCATION: You are standing before a small metal shed. A sign reads ventillator shaft number 2.
There’s a peculiarity of the source code worth highlighting here.
3080 PRINT “There is a meteor shower. Your space suit has developed a leak!!”
3100 GOSUB 4890
3110 IF I2 THEN 2980
3120 PRINT “Proceeding to seal suit…….”:FOR CX=1 TO 1500: NEXT CX
Specifically, GOSUB 4890 is asking for a one-shot command. Either “try” or “use” is accepted, otherwise whatever the player does (even if it is something reasonable like APPLY SEALANT) fails.
4890 INPUT B$
4900 C$=LEFT$(B$,3)
4910 IF C$=”try” THEN 4950
4920 IF C$=”use” THEN 4950
4930 I=-1
4940 RETURN
Then, the player goes through a routine to check the player specified the right item (sealant, in this case) and that they have it in their inventory. This is all bypassing the regular command parser; we’re in a “faked” mini-parser level. This isn’t so apparent with the sealant, but it gave me issues at the next step.
?w
The shed is locked
I first encountered this without the key (I had the illuminator and the sealant) so I went back for the key, returned, and tried many different methods of typing UNLOCK DOOR. I finally realized that the game is treating the locked door with the fake parser again. That is, you need to first try to enter the locked door to trigger the section starting at 4890, then type USE KEY (it won’t work outside of the routine) and this will allow the player to move on.
The next part is all in green so is generally safe without oxygen (except a red-marked exit — if you go straight from the corridor to the hanger, there’s no oxygen, you need to go through the side “air lock chamber” first, and no, the game isn’t clear about that at all).
LOCATION: You are in a lighted space station corridor.
##
?n
LOCATION: You are in the storage room and supply area.
##
There is a CODED BADGE here.
?
The coded badge is incidentally so that a nearby robot won’t think you’re a security threat and shoot you, but given the robot is in a side room anyway, there’s absolutely no reason to worry about the badge. What you do need to worry about is going to the upper floor and finding the nuclear bomb in the hanger (with the oxygen caveat I already mentioned).
LOCATION: You are in the hangar area. The launch area
is located to the South of here.
##
There is a NUCLEAR BOMB here.
Why is there a nuclear bomb about to go off? Where are the people who set it? One could imagine a convoluted situation like Lost but the author has not filled in the gaps.
You can use a “transporter” to a room that gives information about a defuser to the east of where you started. You can’t find the defuser until you’ve seen the message. Where going east from the start point twice previously led to death, now it leads to a new room with the defuser.
LOCATION: You are in the space station’s control center.
##
There is a TRANSPORTER UNIT here.
There is a COMPUTER MESSAGE here.
? read message
Bomb de-activator located somewhere east of Mare Serenitatis on moon’s surface.
You need to coordinate picking up the de-activator while not burning too much oxygen; additionally, there’s some dilithium crystals you need as fuel (…realistic space ship…) that you can dig up with a shovel.
LOCATION: You are at the top of a rocky arete on Burg crater. To the North the center of the crater is thousands of feet below you. To the West, the huge crater of Eudoxus can be seen between crags on a ridge bordering Lacus Mortis.
##
There is a SHOVEL here.
? get shovel
Okay
? d
LOCATION: You are at the base of the Burg crater in Lacus Mortis. The surface is very soft here.
##
? dig
There is DILITHIUM CRYSTALS here.
Incidentally, there’s a walkthrough over at CASA that optimizes things even more by picking up the bomb and bringing it to the defuser rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, in the version I played, the bomb was too heavy to pick up.
This turns out to be a serious issue. I did very careful step counting: the game gives 180 minutes of oxygen, and each step takes 5 minutes. That turns out to be 36 non-oxygen steps.
8 steps are needed at start to grab the illuminator and head to the crash site. You can technically do this part just a little later but it doesn’t save any steps.
For the crash site you can grab the sealant and key. You need to go to where the meteor shower happens, get hit, drop the sealant, and return for the illuminator. Doing all that and making it to the shed (where you can drop the oxygen) takes 13 steps.
14 steps are needed to leave, pick up the defuser (and just that), and return for the defusal, for 22 steps.
That’s 35 steps out of 36, and doesn’t even account for getting the dilithium crystals for the ship to blast off. (You might wonder why you can’t ignore the bomb, get the fuel, and blast off — it says your ship isn’t fixed yet if you do that. I guess there’s some kind of auto-repair function?) If you’re allowed to take the bomb with you, the step count becomes manageable at 17 to both get to the defusal room and retrieve the fuel.
Since the original source does let you take the bomb, and the step count seems impossible otherwise, I’m pretty sure it was intended by the author, and G. M. Bright in an effort to make the game more “realistic” made the game impossible to win.
I decided to change the appropriate lines to make the behavior match the original, went through all the steps, got to the last room where I could blast off, and…
You have no power left, or you have no power source.
You have frozen to death.
You have failed to survive.
Do you wish to try again?
Agh! There’s not just oxygen going down, but also power. This wouldn’t normally be a problem but the “enhancement” also added the bit with a shovel. The original intent was for the player to just dig with their hands. You can even see this in the sample play in the 1984 book:
The steps it takes to pick up the shovel are just enough to exceed the player’s power pack. Unlike oxygen, which has no means of restoration, there is a spare power pack in the moon base, but just retrieving it and walking it to the entrance burns up power (even though the power isn’t needed indoors!) However, maybe there’s just enough to make things work?
Well, no. It has 50 power, and uses 5 power per step. It takes 10 steps to get outside, so you use the power pack entirely just retrieving it!
So not only did adding the “realism” of the nuclear bomb that couldn’t be picked up cause the game to be unwinnable, but adding the two extra steps to pick up a shovel did too.
You know what, if the game is going to be that broken, I’m just going to cheat, since I got to the end anyway:
GOTO 4165
Congratulations, you have just blasted off and are on your way to earth. Your escape time was 355 minutes.
I bet if you try hard enough you can win the game in negative moves!
In all seriousness, putting aside my mishap with the bad version — which says something about even when something is preserved with lots of versions, the act of playing can be difficult — the emphasis on super-exact timing is interesting; we haven’t seen it much before (but have a little; for example, with the games of Paul Shave). However, the timing being this tight removes any real sense of verisimilitude — we can’t pretend we’re just a lucky protagonist when we already know so much to ignore any misstep at all. Somehow this didn’t feel awkward with Atom Adventure, which clearly was an exercise in step-counting, but the initial framing here being couched in realism — up to at least including the real map of the moon — made the slow destruction of the facade a touch more grating.
By the way, if you linger and try to play with the robot or whatnot the moon gets destroyed by an asteroid anyway. Wouldn’t that be more of a problem than the bomb is?
ELAPSED TIME: 405 MINUTES
The moon base has just been destroyed by a large asteroid.
You have failed to survive.
Do you wish to try again?
Renga in Blue 
