I’m not breaking open the envelope on Krakit just yet — let’s say, in a few days? — but we had some industrious commenters at least make plausible stabs at Clues 6 and 11, and I have my own half-way plausible guess on 12. That makes at least a non-random guess on every single answer.
The general theme for all three possible answers is assuming something about the answer, which plausibly resolves into country-town-number, and waving over the fact some of the clue never got used.
For Clue 6, I was trying to decipher the text that was there, assuming hexadecimal (from “Curse” and the fact the letters go up only to F). Adam Sampson suggested to look at the digits that were not given.
Namely, read directly in order, the missing digits are 49BCE, a year which very strongly associated with a particular event: Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The modern day city this was thought to be at is Savignano, Italy.
Could this really be the solve? What does the “half” part mean? What’s going on with the blacked-out squares? The “half” could refer to the blacked-out half, so does that mean the missing part of the text has the digits 4, 9, B, C, E in some amount of repetitions and order? If so, where does the hex code as a whole comes from?
I will say it seems like a major coincidence to have the left-out digits spell out a coherent date which leads to a clear answer.
(I very vaguely suspected it has to do with the code of the Krakit software itself, making for a super-meta puzzle which leverages the medium and makes it not quite a glorified slideshow, but I don’t have a good way of checking how it gets stored in ZX81 memory — it isn’t equivalent to the modern emulator tape file.)
Clue 11 (above) had another “skip”, this time from redhighlander:
HEAR GREEN BALLAD is an anagram for Ballaghaderreen, where William Partridge died. He was part of the Easter Rebellion, which took place in 1916.
So, I would say Ireland (country), Ballaghaderreen (city), 1916 (number).
That’s one serious anagram-coincidence, there, so I’m willing to call this one definite except for the number. We’ve skipped the MU/SL/IN/REST bit entirely, as well as “That is 3”.
For 12, I’ve spent the last couple days tormenting myself in various ways.
My initial assumptions were:
a.) the stars are the only asymmetrical part, so they are important
b.) they likely indicate, in some indirect way, letters/numbers that we can decipher
This wasn’t going anywhere, so I decided to go for the skip. Let’s assume instead
a.) the “packed area” contains letters that we are supposed to anagram (some indicator I haven’t figured out narrowing down which letters, but let’s just try with all of them)
b.) as Carl Muckenhoupt observed, the character repeated in the middle might not be a zero, but a letter ø
c.) the LANDICEHAIL on the top is not meant as a deception, but is rather a clue.
d.) the stars are just “snow” and can be ignored
Putting all these things together, I managed to get Tromsø, Norway, and the number thirteen.
I don’t feel the slightest bit confident in my answer, but it is true the clues that have “spelled out” the answer (1, 8) have included both country and city, so the letters need to include both. Is there some pattern involving the numbers along the top/bottom that makes this all make sense? Since I can technically switch THIRTEEN out for ZERO and have all the letters for it even if my skip is correct I have to coin flip which one of those is right.
At least I have something I can fill out the entire contest entry form with, so we’ll at least have a chance (however small) of “winning”. Please post any extra feedback or alternate solves, and if something is better I’ll adjust accordingly.
One quick general plea: can someone figure out exactly how many bridges Budapest had between Buda and Pest in 1982? Just a naive Wikipedia check gets 6, but that’s a list of “most famous” bridges.
I have fended off the ogres from last time, and it turned out to be more straightforward yet also more clever than I expected.
Just as a reminder, you pass a wall two ogres are building, smash it via musical instrument, then try to go down into the main area of Murdac when:
Your lamp has just switched itself on.
A furious ogre enters. “Take that for wrecking our wall!” he says, and bashes you with his trowel. He then storms out. You are rather injured.
The fact a second ogre eventually comes to finish you off is not intended to “give you time” or the like — if you’re here, you’ve already lost. (As you’ll see, there seems to be a running theme in the game of traps that trigger later than expected.) The question I asked was — how did the ogre arrive in the first place? I was assuming they had a secret passage or some such in order to even make it to the bottom in time, but what if they really were just coming right behind me?
> close door
OK.
Your lamp has just switched itself on.
> lock door
OK.
> d
You are in a large quadrangular cellar. There is a flight of stairs up in the centre and passages in various directions.
Keys are used so often as methods of getting through gated areas that it sometimes can be easy to forget they work as tools even after they’ve been used.
Safely in the clear, I set to work exploring the underground. It is fairly wide open and I expect that (like early stages of Hamil) I’ve already seen roughly 65% of the map. Unlike Hamil, I don’t think this has a strong emphasis on self-contained puzzles; I get the structural vibe that we’re going to have a more traditional “puzzle X is dependent on Y and Z being solved” setup, although I’m too early to be sure.
For ease of discussion I have subdivided the main map into Central, Beach (west), Manticore (south), Dungeons (east) and Maze (northeast). These are vague designations and the elements of each region don’t necessarily go together.
Starting with Central:
This includes the room you start out in, but also, nearby, a Cobwebbed Passage with a blonde wig, and access to a hill where a wizard awaits.
> u
Your lamp has just switched itself off.
You are at the foot of a steep hill on a twisting path.
There is a tunnel down into darkness at this point.
> u
At the top of the hill there is an aged man, whom, from his dress, you observe to be a wizard. “My daughter!” he says. “Where is she? Find her and I will richly reward you.” He then vanishes into thin air leaving just his staff.
Looking round you, you see that…
You are at the top of the hill, which falls away steeply on three sides. In the distance you can see various curious scenes, including a bridge over a chasm, a garden from which giant rocs are taking off, a large cornfield, a giant spider’s web and a distant bungalow by the seaside. The path leads back downwards from these awe-inspiring sights.
There is a wooden staff here.
Incidentally, trying to just leave and come back is deadly; I don’t think I’ve seen a quest-giver so violent before:
“You have failed in your quest?” moans the wizard, who is waiting for you at the top of the hill. He then casts a strange spell, whereby lightning flashes from his nostrils, striking you and causing you to suspend breathing.
The daughter isn’t hard to find (she’s in the Dungeon region) which I’ll be getting to.
A bit farther north there’s a hollow with a geyser that shoots out wet steam — no puzzle here yet, but I could see it being used for something — and a bit farther north still is a “keep” where the Keeper of Murdac awaits and asks you to leave your posessions.
> n
The passage widens into a vast chamber which is full of soldiers some armed with long bows, others with halberds, maces or swords. Their lord is a venerable man who is sitting in a very expensively upholstered armchair.
“Greetings!” says the old man. “I am the Keeper of Murdac. Leave your possessions here with me and they will be safe until you return in triumph. You may take the lamp if it is needed on your quest.”
You are in the keep.
This normally would be the treasure dropping spot, and it does indeed seem to increase your score to bring treasures (like the shawm from the ogres) to this room, but I should add you need to drop all your possessions, otherwise the old man gets very grumpy:
“You defy ME, the Keeper of Murdac!” roars the old man. “Kill him!” The soldiers assail you with their various weapons and do indeed manage to kill you in lots of painful ways.
This gives me the impression that something fishy is going on, at least compared to Hamil (where we were proving our royal birth via treasure collection). Perhaps there will be a “twist ending” where after finding all the treasures we’ll need to defeat the Keeper in a showdown.
(Also marked in white for the Central, but not shown on the zoomed map, is the Mad Scientist I excerpted last time. I haven’t discovered anything new there yet.)
Going east to the Dungeon area:
Lots going on here; first off, there’s a grumpy lion who does not kill you on sight, by waiting, or by revisiting the room. Shockingly peaceful, really.
You are in the lion’s den, a rectangular room with solid stone walls. The exit is to the southwest.
There is a lion here, limping about and roaring with fury!
There’s an entrance to a haunted house where trying to go in gets you killed via furniture.
A huge dresser flies across the room and strikes you a glancing blow, sufficient to kill you however.
The region’s Dungeon has a goblin chained in the lowest level, and on the middle level, a troll who says you can only visit the room he is guarding once. Therein is a “damsel in distress”, that is, the wizard’s daughter.
You are in the ante-room to the dungeons. There are steps up and down from here and a passage to the south over which there is a notice, reading ‘ONLY ONE VISIT ALLOWED’.
A twenty-three stone troll is standing guard over the southern exit.
> s
“One visit only, mind!” says the troll as you pass. You enter the cell to discover a fair maiden chained to the wall. “My father’s staff!” says she, as you enter. You hand it over to her and explain that you are here to rescue her. “Take this token to my father and he will know what to do.” she replies, handing you a ribbon from her hair.
Returning to the wizard with ribbon in hand makes for a better reception than dying instantly. But it’s still a trap:
The wizard appears once more. “That’s her ribbon!” he says. “You have found her.” You explain the nature of his daughter’s plight, and he takes the ribbon from you, handing you a scroll, saying “May this aid you on your quest.” He then vanishes again.
You are at the top of the hill.
> read scroll
“PROMBO VAPITACEOUS MOOZLE,
WURBOTURBO SPLATOMULE:
PROPHALUDGEOUS HAGMINE POOZLE,
GNODULATIOUS PROPODULE.”
you declaim. There is a yellow flash and you find that you have turned into a boiled egg. Since this game was really intended for humans, I’m afraid that’s your lot.
I assume the scroll goes to someone else, someone who will try to cast the spell if they get a hold of it.
Manticore area next:
The sparkling pool has nothing special, other than if you try to SWIM the game specifies you don’t remember how and die. There’s some beads (not sure where they go yet) and a bit with the “see no evil / hear no evil / say no evil” monkeys:
In this room your eyes are naturally drawn to a painting of three monkeys, one with its eyes shielded, a second with its ears covered, and the third with its mouth gagged.
Finally there’s a manticore, who will be perfectly peaceful if you enter, and even if you go past to get the treasure (an ingot) behind it, but when going back you get murdered. Delayed trap again:
> e
You are in the manticore’s lair – a large cave with an unpleasant smell of carrion. The floor is littered with the remains of creatures human and inhuman. A strange being is prowling here. Its face is like a man’s, in size it is like a lion, in colour it is red. It has three rows of teeth and a long tail armed with stings. The escape routes are to the west and north.
> n
Your lamp has just switched itself off. You are in a disused mineshaft. Light enters from high above but the walls are unclimbable. A passage leads south.
There is a small ingot here which, as you can see at a glance, is composed of the rare metal Erbium!
> get ingot
OK.
> s
As you enter the manticore’s lair the creature’s tail whips into action, stinging you across the face.
You have no time to seek an antidote and die an agonizing death.
This might be simply a matter of having an antidote in-inventory first before trying to get through.
Beach side!
A centaur guards a corridor and, rather boringly, does not kill you if you try to get by, just stops you. There’s a pile of millet over a secret word…
> read word
On the floor the word A K Y G G A N E G V R I S H W is inscribed.
…and the previously mentioned beach. There’s an island visible in the distance but (as already mentioned with the pool) our character dies if they try to swim. Maybe building a boat is in order?
The north side of the beach has a “stuffed dodo” treasure, and it seems to be out in the open, and we can take it just fine, but if we try to leave (trap pattern again!)…
> s
As you pass under one of the trees the Old Man of the Sea leaps out, landing on your back, and clutching your neck extremely tightly with his long skinny arms.
The old man of the sea is on your back, his grip on your neck gradually tightening.
You are at the north end of the beach.
…we eventually die.
Last comes the maze, because all Phoenix games need a maze.
This has the gimmick that all the rooms are dark, with the light sucked in by a “black hole”.
> d
It is pitch dark. The very air itself seems to absorb the light of your lamp: you can feel its warmth but cannot see it.
> n
It is pitch dark.
> u
It is pitch dark.
So to make progress you need to test exits, and if (for example) a particular room lets you go northwest and no prior room allowed northwest travel, you know that room has to be a new room. This is structured more or less all-or-nothing — you either follow the correct path, or you get penalized by going back to a prior room. You can find some myrrh (a treasure) and some bread (feedable to a pigeon back in the Center area). I did make it out with both items, so that’s at least one area (probably) finished with.
One last thing to note, and this is perhaps more for my own memory more than anything in the narrative since I have yet to connect it to any clue. Aboveground there is a graveyard with a tombstone:
> read tombstone
The stone is worn but you can just make out the name “GAMA” and the words “… SUSPECTED … WEREWOLF …”
The tombstone text is random; I’ve seen different variants upon restarting the game. This indicates the exact text is definitely a clue for a puzzle, I just don’t know which one yet.
I still haven’t quite worked out the difficulty level of the game yet; I’m hoping I can make a progression happen with one item that makes another puzzle easy across the map and then another puzzle easy after that and so on. Phoenix games tend not to give up their secrets so quickly, though. I will say the trap-structure does give some potential; since the player tends to have access to the room where they get killed before it happens, there might be a “preparation puzzle” where the player can set a trap of their own. I’ve gone on the record before about preparation puzzles often being high quality, including two of the best puzzles in the megagame Ferret.
The forests of Murdac are some of the oldest, as well as the wildest and most isolated, in the whole land. Also they don’t take kindly to intruders — although living on the outermost fringes of the great forest, you have never been able to penetrate it: every time that you followed a track into the dark woods, you found that it somehow turned and took you away from the secret heartlands of Murdac.
It became almost an obsession with you. ‘What is the secret of Murdac?’ you wondered, frustrated at every turn. In the land where nobody ever set foot, there was surely some dread mystery to be revealed.
More specifically, Johnathan R. Partington, who wrote an entire trio of games for 1982, returns with Murdac. Hamil’s move from the mainframe to the home computer was in 1983, but Murdac had to wait until 1986.
Jimmy Maher has a thorough run-down of how the release sequence happened, but to give a short version, when Acornsoft (which published Hamil but hadn’t gotten to Murdac) started floundering financially, the rights to the Cambridge games got sold to a company called Superior Software, where things bounced around a bit more before Murdac got packaged as Monsters of Murdac by Global Software for the Amstrad.
The Global Software deal didn’t work out well, so the games bounced around again to a new publisher, Topologika Software, resulting in a “double-pack” release of Avon (previously unreleased) with Murdac in 1987.
From the Topologika manual portion devoted to Murdac.
Having said all that, the z-code “re-releases” seem to be the closest to the mainframe originals, so I’ll be playing in that format instead. z-code is the same format as old Infocom games, allowing mainframe Murdac to be playable in many different ways; for instance, online with this link.
Welcome to Adventure!
Murdac
An adventure game by Jonathan R. Partington (Cambridge University, 1982)
[This translation: version 1.111115 / Phoenix v1.04 / Inform v6.32
Please type “inform” for further details.]
Welcome to the Land of Murdac. This is version 1.07.
Type HELP for basic information, and BLURB for the full story.
All comments to JRP1 please. New commands BRIEF/TERSE, NORMAL/STANDARD, VERBOSE and EXAMINE have now been added.
You are standing outside the door of a small flint hut.
There are paths off to the east, west and south.
The door is locked.
Despite the terse opening, there’s a fairly involved backstory behind the BLURB command, or at least more involved than original mainframe Hamil; I am in fact concerned there’s a hint buried in there so I need to keep track of it. You’ve already seen the first paragraphs; continuing:
In your village there lived a wise woman, Duessa by name. Some folk said that she was a sorceress, and could cause the milk to go sour just by scratching her nose. Others said that the reason old Uncle George had only lived to be 91 (when his father had reached 102) was because he had tripped over Duessa’s cat when drunk. Obviously a woman to be wary of, especially if you wanted to make sure that you came home without growing an extra ear on the way. She certainly knew a few secrets that nobody else in the village did — like what it meant if you saw a rabbit hiccuping on the night of the full moon — and if anyone could tell you about Murdac, it was Duessa.
Our would-be hero comes to visit Duessa, who comments “this one looks brighter than the last” (thanks!) and mumbles something about a wizard needing help and a manticore. She then pours a teapot in a fireplace to look for omens, mumbles some more things about ogres (the blokes depicted in the manual picture) and an ominous “Old Man of the Sea” before giving instructions.
Following Duessa’s instructions, you went down a certain path at midnight on Hallowe’en, until you came to a clearing. There you drew a pentacle, stood within it, and shouted “PANGORY PANTHRODULAM” – words of power that she had given you. Was the intonation right? If not you might find yourself rotting in a gloomy dungeon for ten thousand aeons, tormented by creatures from the lower planes. But nothing like that happened.
This reveals a long path which leads to a garden with a small stone hut.
Now is the time for you to explore further, but do be VERY careful — it’s not every adventurer who is going to survive in this totally alien world!
This is still (from what I gather) a “find the treasures and put them in a spot” plot, but it gives the wide open feel of “you’re curious about this mystery place and you go explore it” as a setup, what I’ve referred to before as a “pastoral opening”.
However, it turns out this is not a “relaxed exploration opening”. There is a timed event right away that is easy to miss. From the Flint Hut at the start you need to get to the Brick Wall right away (S. N. S. N.)
You are standing outside the door of a small flint hut.
There are paths off to the east, west and south.
The door is locked.
> s
You are in a garden of luxurious flowers. There are paths to the north, east and south.
> n
You are in a rock garden. There are paths to the east, southeast and south.
> s
You are in a garden of exotic vegetables. There are paths to the north, east and south.
> n
The south-north path ends at a nearly-completed brick wall.
There is a still a gap through which you can pass.
Two ogres here are busily engaged in building activities.
They take no notice of you.
> n
The ogres finish the wall behind you, cutting off your retreat.
You are in a long north-south alley that runs between two extremely high sheer walls.
The way south is blocked by a newly-completed brick wall.
If you miss the timing here, the wall is already built, and you’ve already softlocked the game. Yes, this is definitely in Phoenix Cruel™. I don’t mind, exactly, as long as I’m forewarned I need to think heavily about timing as part of the puzzles.
The south-north path ends at a newly-built brick wall which blocks your way.
There are two ogres here, dressed as bricklayers, resting from their labours.
Once past you can find an “antique shawm” which counts as one of the treasures, but your way back is sealed off. The shawm, however, is a music instrument…
…so you can PLAY SHAWM. (You start with no items and of course you had to rush here, so there’s no other real possibility.)
> PLAY SHAWM
WHAAAAAAHHHHEEE!!!
The wall falls down on top of you, crushing you somewhat severely.
The odd thing is, the wall-crushing happens if you are farther away from the wall; the key is to get closer and play it then. I think the idea is that if you are far away, the wall gets unstable and tumbles towards you; if you are close, the blast is severe enough to make the direction of the wall be away from you.
WHAAAAAAHHHHEEE!!!
There is a sudden gust of wind and the wall to your south comes tumbling down with a mighty crash.
This appears to be the end of the puzzle but not really. After the wall is complete you can scoop up some items outside (a wooden plank, a metal rod, a key, a lamp). The key lets you unlock the hut, which only has a passage down. The lamp will turn on automatically in darkness…
Your lamp has just switched itself on.
A furious ogre enters. “Take that for wrecking our wall!” he says, and bashes you with his trowel. He then storms out. You are rather injured.
You are in a large quadrangular cellar. There is a flight of stairs up in the centre and passages in various directions.
… annnnnnd, there’s the ogre puzzle still going. You can explore underground more although the game keeps repeating you are seriously injured, and after enough turns, your misery is ended:
The second ogre enters. “Wreck our wall, would you!” he says, and pummels you with a heavy brick. This time you do not survive.
My guess is the first smacking is inevitable, and we’re supposed to find a “safe spot” underground to avoid the killing blow. This will require exploring underground in detail, which means skipping the shawm treasure for now; intentionally soft-locking in order to get information that can be used on the “real” run later.
I have explored the underground some but I’d like to report back on it later when I can give a more comprehensive picture. Let me share one more death section to finish things off:
You are in the mad scientist’s laboratory, which is a large room with exits to the east and west. Most of the apparatus is safely stored where you can’t get at it, but there is a bed in the centre on which is lying a huge inanimate human body (or a mixture of several) with electrodes fastened to various parts of its anatomy. There seems to be no way of activating the corpse.
> w
You are in a high tunnel to the west of the laboratory. Further west the floor is covered with a complicated tangle of wires.
> w
As you step onto the wires there is a mighty flash and you are instantly electrocuted. Was that my imagination, or did I hear the chuckling of the mad scientist as he came in to exploit this new source of spare parts (you)?
We’ve had so many visits on this blog now to the universe of Roger M. Wilcox he almost needs no introduction; we’ve so far played 18 of his games, including In the Universe Beyond and the Trash Island trilogy.
This is number 19, and still one of his “private games” not for general release. (He tried to get Vial of Doom in the Captain 80 Book of Basic Adventures but missed the deadline; otherwise, these haven’t been leaning for publication.) This leads here to content that may have been otherwise avoided in the marketplace: religion.
We’ve had games with the PRAY command, but to fairly generic in-game deities. Followers Adventure involves a protaganist who is sort-of-kind-of Jesus.
It was a rather sarcastic adventure game set in Palestine about two millennia ago, if you catch my drift.
Only kind of, since I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t use The Force, as in the literal Force from Star Wars.
The premise is to make every single person in your (small) country a follower. Here’s you converting your mother —
And yes, the only way to learn about the command USE FORCE is from the HELP command; this is kind of meta like In the Universe Beyond teaching you to beam up only if you use the HELP, or the very first command of Don and Freda Boner’s Game Fortress at Times-End being the HELP command being the exact thing that opens the front gate. It’s awkward, because there are games where HELP or HINT really does give extra information to help out of trouble, rather than absolutely necessary info, so I’m always reluctant to use it.
Moving on, I’m going to save time by specifying the nickel is shown to have a weak seam if you examine it, so you need to break it first. This gives you two “half nickels” and one can go to the beggar, who apparently doesn’t appreciate the fact it probably doesn’t work as legal currency any more.
(Normally, you give the whole nickel, and only find out later in the game you messed up. Be forewarned this game is designed for satire, not fair gameplay.)
Moving on, there’s a sword stuck in a stone nearby you can’t get out, and a roman legion who will crucify you if you aren’t careful in stealing their chariot.
However, you can USE FORCE again to distract the entire legion, and the abscond with their chariot. This lets you ride to a new area.
Yes, there’s a spaceship. This goes a bit off the hook.
There’s a nearby blind beggar that gave me a lot of parser trouble; I tried to CURE BEGGAR and HEAL EYES and so forth, assuming Jesus had some extra powers other than messing with brains. The right command is HEAL.
There’s a scene with a “starving crowd” where I instantly knew I needed a miracle, but the exact nature was bizarre: take a basket and use the command RAISE BASKET. According to Roger commenting in Dale Dobson’s blog, this came from a scene from one of the 1979 Jesus movies (In Search of Historic Jesus or The Jesus Movie).
ASIDE: There were four Jesus movies in 1979; in addition to the two serious ones there was the Monty Python movie Life of Brian, and the rather less-well known Italian film White Pop Jesus described as “Disco Jesus comes back to Earth and takes on the Mafia.”; pretty sure the IMDB date for the latter is for the English release.
Moving on: we find Young Arthur who is susceptible to the Force, and will follow you (unlike all your other followers). You can take him back to the sword in the stone where he will pull it, so you can get Excalibur. Then you can take Excalibur to the King of the Jews to get another follower.
Sure, why not.
This gives you, according to the game, 50% of the country in followers. Here you seem to be stuck, and if this was counting “treasaures” like a standard game of yore, you would be since the Roman legion will not convert. However, all you need is for everyone in the country who is alive to be your follower.
There’s some other fussing about where you can get a glowing green sphere (via using the other half of the nickel in a slot) and some wings to fly, and then climb up some obelisks and fly over to a spaceship.
That’s a cryptogram letting you know this spaceship uses voice commands for splitting and firing missiles. The problem is SAY FIRE and so forth doesn’t work. You have to give the commands in the language of the cryptogram. (Both SAY SPLIT and SAY FIRE are needed to attain victory.) I really don’t know how this gets vocalized but by this point I wasn’t letting it worry me:
When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. Also, I have a spaceship I will use to annihilate the Romans with missiles before we conquer the world.”
The people responded, saying “Gnarly! We’ll be your followers!”
…ok, I appreciated this game. While this level of satire applied to religion was there in the cinema, we barely had anything about religion at all in 1982 computer games. (BibleBytes launched in 1982, so prior to this there weren’t even really religiously-earnest types of games yet.) This was no doubt partly enabled by being a private game for fun, so even though the player is asked to do some fairly absurd commands (and say the word %2%* out loud) I appreciated the satirical atmosphere.
So in the end I was happy, or at least I remembered:
ASIDE ASIDE: perhaps you might be wondering what religious background Roger M. Wilcox had. Quoting from his webpage:
My personal experiences with Orgonomy go way back. Some people are raised in a Catholic family. Some people are raised in a Jewish family. I was raised in an Orgonomy family. And despite Reich’s insistence to the contrary, Orgonomy is a religion, filled with sacred truths which can never be experimentally verified, a single central theme which tries to explain everything in the universe, a Fall from Grace in the mythical past, and even a Christ figure in Reich himself.
If none of that rings a bell, I endorse his rabbit-hole dive and skeptic’s breakdown of the world of Wilhelm Reich and “orgone energy”. It still doesn’t fit in my brain. My best reckoning is something like Scientology but without the aliens.
ASIDE ASIDE ASIDE: Ok, fine, here’s the entirety of White Pop Jesus with English subtitles. You deserve it today.
Out of the 12 clues, we’ve solved (or at least have good guesses for) 9 of them, and have 3 left to go.
With my typical adventure games, if there’s any kind of ambiguity in a puzzle answer, there is immediate feedback from the game itself. For a static puzzle, it’s hard to have airtight certainty in answer.
In a puzzle book, you can, of course, immediately check the back of the book. The problem with Krakit (in a contest context) is that there is no back of the book, and while the rules aren’t specific, I’m guessing entrants did not get feedback in order to correct a wrong submission.
This is a common problem amongst puzzle hunts; where I think we can say we have answers with confidence is where there’s some manner of “cryptography” (in a loose sense) involved, where some operation is required to “decipher” material into a sensible text it would take a seriously major coincidence to have a valid answer be a fake.
That’s eight digits accounted for, so I don’t know why the next bit only lists numbers 0-6, which is only seven?
That is, part 2…
… has 0 through 6 repeat, but not 7, 8 or 9. This immediately led me to realize that the only important number is 10652. But what to do then?
The way words are sort-of spelled out suggested to me we simply had a track that needed to be followed. After a few false starts I realized if you start in the upper left, and pick out 1-0-6-5-2-1-0-6-5-2-etc in order, you get the letters mexic/ochih/uahua, where the path resets partway through to the “inner path” (and the number jumps from 2 to 3).
There are all sorts of other ways the clue could have been interpreted, but the absolutely clear spelled-out answer indicates this is a self-confirming static puzzle.
This unfortunately isn’t true for clue 10:
My best guess here is that this refers to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and the 1812 Overture (an opus 49). The “to go forward, think retreat” can be interpreted as Napoleon’s retreat and turn around at Borodino, Russia as celebrated in the music. Will Moczarski also pointed out based on the way Russian names work it can be interpreted as Pyotr, son of Ilya, Tchaikovsky.
Still, this doesn’t feel fully certain, and there are some other ideas from the comments (like MendelsSOHN). The lack of an immediate meaning to the retreat part of the clue isn’t the same thing as saying the answer we have is airtight.
We’re down to three completely unsolved puzzles. Two seem like they’d be self-confirming, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be easy to crack.
(I had what felt like a good crack: assume that we mean two-digit hexadecimal, but are only listing the second digit. That is, we are using hex — “curse” — but only taking half of the digits normally needed. The way characters in both regular ASCII and the ZX81 character set works makes it so there are a limited number of choices then for each digit, so it’d be easy to decipher a code. It still just makes nonsense, though.)
(I still feel like the stars have to be the key here, and a lot of the letters are ignorable; this would follow the same pattern as the SEND MORE MONEY puzzle insofar as that one also has many “superfluous” letters and we are just trying to pick out the correct ones.)
I’m going to take a Krakit break and play some normal adventure games, then unseal the answers next week. Please keep sending your thoughts in the comments! That hopefully gives us enough time to reach enlightenment before we try to do back-solving.
Canadian Parliament, including the Peace Tower. Public domain, via Wallpaper Flare.
To update on the authorship-mystery of Krakit, Strident in the comments found a reference that specifically gives International Publishing & Software Inc (of Canada and the US) as the creator and Artic (of the UK) as merely a distributor. At the very least, the game seems to have had more mention in UK circles than US one. Not only did the UK have heavier contest-mania, but there was more consumer hardware out there that could run the game. The primary platform for Krakit was the ZX81; the United States equivalent was the Timex Sinclair 1000, which Commodore was actively crushing with its VIC-20 (there was even a trade-in deal where people were buying Timex Sinclair computers specifically to trade in for a VIC-20). Krakit also had a ZX Spectrum version but by the time the US equivalent (the Timex Sinclair 2068) came out in late 1983 the contest was already dead.
Sinclair User, February 1983, with the name Artic showing up much more prominently than IPS. I like how this ad emphasizes the narrative, even though there really isn’t one.
Regarding “of Canada and the US”, yes, I’m not sure which country to blame credit more. For example, this article from December 1982 explicitly says:
The first release I’d like to discuss is called the Krakit Treasure Hunt from International Publishing & Software (PO Box 1654, Buffalo, NY) and International Publishing and Software, Inc. (3952 Chesswood Dr., Downsville, Ont., Canada M3J 2W6). It includes a real treasure for the finder that’s said to be $20,000, with this treasure lode continually increased as time (and sales) pass.
So, this references two companies but with nearly the same name:
International Publishing & Software
and
International Publishing and Software, Inc.
The actual address given for contest registration is a Buffalo, NY one, and the InfoWorld article I mentioned last time referred to the company being in New York; various other articles definitely place the company in Canada, and the address to send tapes is also in Canada. I’m going to go with the assumption for the moment that the company was situated in both.
With that out of the way, let’s get back to the game.
Remember, each clue is supposed to give us a city, country, and number. One thing I was worried about was the possibility that the city and country would mismatch; that is, the city could be in a different country than the country from the clue. However, based on current evidence I think we can say it always matches, which helps if we have a city with no clear country indicator.
This allows for at least a modicum of cross-checking (given the country is sometimes clued along with the city). The number is still the foggiest part, and I’m afraid on some of these we may need to cross our fingers and guess.
This clue, at least, we can definitively put to rest: it is a phone keypad code. I had some genuine trouble until I realized I could get LAND out of 5263, so pulled up a list of countries ending in -LAND and came up with SCOTLAND. The city is EDINBURGH and the number is just RING changed back to keypad code (7464).
#5 is Ottawa in Canada. The Parliament building, with the Peace Tower, rests on a hill overlooking the Ottawa River and Rideau Canal. Every year in the spring, there’s a tulip festival in Ottawa commemorating Canada sheltering the Dutch princess during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
As the House of Commons had 282 seats in 1982, that’d be the number of seats it was looking for.
In a theoretical sense, the “how many seats” was an important confirmer in the whole thing — there could be some vague coincidences in the text otherwise, but the seats question is such a strange one (even thinking of stadiums, or theaters) it locks things down. I think one of the keys of trying to write this sort of contest question (with no other method of cross-checking) is to have at least one odd and unique part that doesn’t fit the other pieces.
It also would help to have a meta-puzzle that ties things together so we can see if there’s an error, but IPS decided not to do that. Grrr. (Probably? Is there something secret spelled out once everything is written down? Hmmm.)
Moving on to more ambiguity:
This is as Carl points out in the comments, a straight cryptogram:
a divided city,
but not by hate.
how often can the
gnomes cross
from the little to the
great?
My best guess was Budapest (which has two cities, Buda and Pest, and a prominent count of bridges between them) but I didn’t make sense of the gnomes until Roger Durrant pointed out it could refer to Fisherman’s Bastion.
I don’t feel solid about this one, yet, but I’ll still call it the best guess.
Oh to clue 7 and more ambiguity:
This is a list of religious martyrs, not all from the same branch of Christianity and definitely not always close in time. My guess is this is meant to be a Scattergories-type list just meant to hint at the concept of a martyr, which we then apply to the Ten clue. The most strongly related martyrdom to Ten is ten rabbis, the Ten Martyrs from Judaism; the start point being 70 CE, at the destruction of the Second Temple. So that’d be my guess, although it doesn’t quite tie cleanly into part 2:
Carl points out Laury S. Sib is surely an anagram to Salisbury. Salisbury has a major cathedral one that is not in the regular form a Greek cross (note the clue’s phrasing means this is a good thing). So the place from just this part of the clue is Salisbury, England. I feel more confident here than with the ten rabbis; I admit I’m being stretched to the limits of my religious education here.
So this leaves one other clue (“A CURSE? NO, JUST HALF.”) which we really have made no progress on at all:
I guessed, based on letters only going as far as F, having hexadecimal involved. Carl made another guess that “hexadecimal = hex = curse”, but past that we really aren’t sure. Any thoughts are appreciated, no matter how outrageous they may seem.
Now it’s nearly time to give the rest of the clues, but let me just put this one up in front as it is relatively easy:
This quote is from Two Gentlemen of Verona. So 2, Verona, Italy. Hopefully that’s that? Let’s get to the trickier ones:
I also have a strong theory on 10 but I’ll drop that in the comments in case I’m wrong. On the other clues I have no idea yet.
Thanks for everyone who has participated so far! I don’t know about making a completely mistake-free “entry” into the contest but maybe we’ll get close.
Since last time, I made two very important discoveries while researching Krakit:
1.) the contest was indeed officially shelved with no winner, in 1984
2.) later the answers were released, and I have a copy (that I have not looked at)
So for our gameplay, we should make an “entry form” the best we can, and once it seems to be final, I will crack open the “real answers” and we can find out how well we did. Maybe we can “win” unlike everyone else from the early 80s? (I’m honestly happy about this. We’d otherwise get an answer list we only “feel” is correct but can’t do any kind of grand confirmation on.)
I’m also a little unclear on the actual authorship on the game. There’s an article in the 1982 December 13 issue of Infoworld which only mentions International Publishing and Software (out in Buffalo, NY) and 10,000 tapes of the game. Quoting IPS president Howard Gladstone:
Some whiz could pick up the tape and figure it out in one day, or it may take two years. We really don’t know.
He then claims the clues took “three months” to develop as done by “four of his-coworkers” who “labored part-time on the project, testing the questions for clarity, intellectual challenge and entertainment.”
The article doesn’t mention Artic (from the UK) once. Was it devised by Artic and IPS served as an “editor” so to speak? Was the president referring to the number of people who worked on the game as a whole (including people from Artic)? Did Artic really only serve as a publisher (which contradicts what various indexes say, which has Artic as author and IPS as publisher)? Or maybe the entire monologue from the president was just blowing smoke for the benefit of the journalist? IPS was the group officially managing the contest, at least, and entries got sent directly to them.
ADD: Correction, the main company IPS was in Canada, although there was still manufacturing out of New York. It also does seem to be the case (see comments) that Artic was just the distributor.
In the meantime, let’s get at the three clues from last time, and then I’m going to put the next four.
Matt W. got this one, giving the hint that the number is 7464. I tried keypad code but didn’t have any luck, so I’m still thinking on this one.
This suggests “The Big Apple”, as in New York, the Statue of Liberty, and Duke Ellington’s song Take the A Train:
You must take the “A”-Train
To go to sugar hill way up in Harlem
If you miss the “A”-Train
You’ll find you missed the quickest way to Harlem
Hurry – get on now it’s coming
Listen – to these rails a-humming – all board
Get on the “A”-Train
Soon you will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem
This suggests the city, at least, but what’s the number? Is it the date of the song (1941) or the date of the Statue of Liberty’s arrival (1885)? Is the reference there to make sure the city is Manhattan and not, say, Brooklyn?
This is reference a WW2 incident from 1942 where Lieutenant O’Hare of the USS Lexington (who was near Bougainville at the time) ended up doing a 9-vs-1 against Japanese bombers and downing 5 of them. The exact quote is:
As a result of his gallant action — one of the most daring, if not the most daring, single action in the history of combat aviation — he undoubtedly saved his carrier from serious damage.
O’Hare Airport in Chicago is named after the same person.
I’m not sure what “Hyde Park Byrd” is referring to; Carl Muckenhoupt has a theory involving a word-grid coming up with Hart, the main character in the musical Chicago.
Even if we’re talking about Chicago, this still isn’t suggestive of a date, but I’d guess 1942 given a lack of anything else obvious.
I want to save theoretical discussion for when we have some more samples, but it does seem to hold that perhaps the clues are too ambiguous to fully nail down. As pointed out in the comments on the sample which we were given the solution to…
…we could read “Tour” as Tour de France and still get Paris, France out of it. But we’d get a different number: the Tour de France started in 1903. I think “TOUR” in quotes for the Tour de France still parses slightly oddly, so I suppose the Eiffel Tower solution feels better but it really is hard to claim the question is airtight. It may be there are some “unspoken rules” throughout the clues that get followed consistently enough we can at least do a little cross-checking, though.
Now, as promised, here are clues 4 through 7. (7 is split into two parts.) I’ll toss up the last chunk of clues next time.
For my 1981 sequence of games I played Alkemstone, a treasure hunt with clues hidden in an Apple II game where the treasure has never been found. While we made some progress, most notably extracting every single clue from in the game (not a trivial task) it remains an open historical mystery.
Alkemstone was odd insofar as it was made in the United States, and the place in 1981 that really had been hit by the puzzle-contest bug at the time was the UK, where Masquerade-mania was at its height. 1982 had a bit of a let-down with the solution more-or-less cheated (see the link for the whole story) but there was still a sense in the air of the possibility of more “contest games”, perhaps in computer medium.
The most famous of these games (which is, genuinely, an adventure game) awaits a future post; as preparation, I thought I’d tackle Artic Computing’s entry into the ring. Artic Computing had an ongoing adventure series (so far I’ve written about Planet of Death and Inca Curse); however, Krakit is not oriented as an adventure and is a pure puzzle game. (ADD: Looks like Artic was only the publisher in the UK, International Publishing and Software was the original maker.)
Still:
a.) it fits into the history to enough an extent without the game I’d feel like there was a gap
b.) it allows for audience participation of you, the one reading this right now
c.) it allows me to do some more game-design-theoretical ramblings about this sort of thing
d.) just like Alkemstone, it appears nobody has ever solved it, which makes it too tantalizing to ignore.
For (d.) I am reliant on a report in Sinclair User (December 1983) which claims that the game has been “withdrawn” from advertising in the UK, with a quote from the director Richard Turner:
A number of people decided not to buy the cassette because their friends told them how difficult the game was.
From zx81stuff.
The 10,000 pounds from the cover (see above) had by that time been upped to 14,000. In the United States the game was pitched as possibly winning the player “$20,000 or more”. (See Computers & Electronics, March 1983.)
The game then seems to vanish from records. The British Newspaper Archive has no post-1983 mentions and I haven’t found any other reference digging through magazines. My suspicion (although I’m only in the 80%-90% range on confidence) is that the contest was quietly shelved with no winner.
So, with a group of smart people reading this and the power of the Internet, can we solve it now?
It does seem to be easier than Alkemstone. It’s simply a matter of 12 self-contained puzzles following a very particular set of rules; unlike the original Masquerade (or the adventure game I’ll be getting to) there isn’t buried meaning amongst a superfluous narrative. There is a very brief narrative of sorts, but I’m fairly sure it has nothing to do with the main game. Your father was a international courier, and has left you some money in a bank, and to get at the money you need to solve the puzzles.
Just to summarize, each puzzle contains a clue that will have a country, city, and number. (The number may or may not be a date.)
There’s a “warm-up puzzle” that the game gives with a complete solution worked out.
I will save the explanation for the comments so you can try to solve it yourself; the actual software leads the player through the solution via a series of multiple choice questions (essentially creating a mini-Socratic dialogue), which is pretty fascinating in itself.
In order to avoid overwhelming people, I just have the first three clues here for now. I do get the sinking feeling there might be some “ambiguous puzzles” where the answer isn’t nailed down securely for each (which might explain why it went unsolved) but I feel like we can at least get a few.
So the main quest of the previous game, the one thing that we needed in order to reach a glorious conclusion, was obtaining a piece of ivory from the elephant graveyard. It was a Treasure Hunt with only one item.
This item gets used immediately in the first puzzle of the sequel where you trade it away. I find this hilarious.
I did need to check Dale Dobson’s walkthrough for this, because I didn’t understand that the village had a game mechanic attached; drop an item for trade, walk away, and come back to find the trade has happened. In this case, they trade for a map, which leads to a side area which turns out to be really the only other part of the whole map.
The cave is dark so you can’t go in there right away, but you can pick up up some dynamite and a knife. There’s also a spring which serves as a second water source. (For the entirety of the game you occasionally have to go back to water and PUT BAG / IN TROUGH in order to fill up. I found that if I did it every time I passed a water source in general I didn’t have to think about it otherwise.)
The dynamite I was able to blow up using the flint I found last time, but it blows up immediately, which is not terribly helpful. If you LOOK DYNAMITE it mentions a lack of fuse. The solution here is to go over to the grass, grab a handful, and MAKE FUSE.
You then have a little time to run away after blowing up the dynamite.
Having high power in hand I tried it in every single room, including ones where it didn’t make sense to dynamite, with no luck. I tried lighting the dynamite while holding it and walking to the snakes; while you have an extra turn to THROW and run away, you don’t have enough time to move between rooms.
Totally stumped, I had to check for help again. The KNIFE I got from the secret area I had tried to apply to the rhino (CUT RHINO) and the game told me that I couldn’t do that. Even though it is not described, you are supposed to CUT HORN.
Ugh. The worst parser fall-down in all the Olsen games so far.
The HORN, being ivory, can be traded again; if you take it to the village, and leave it behind, you get a FLUTE in exchange. This can be immediately applied to the snakes:
The temple then can be entered, but you’re stopped by a sealed door. However, after trying the dynamite everywhere, it was satisfying to finally know exactly where it went!
The goggles rather curiously make the room dark, but they’re useful for later. The mural indicates eating bark is helpful. I had already tried CUT BARK on the nearby tree (after it is described as the BARK being eaten away) but I hadn’t tried it going up higher on the branches.
With BARK in hand, you can CHEW BARK in order to make the dark cave at the secret area bright. (To see in regular rooms while under the influence of bark, you need to wear the goggles.)
Going down leads to a ledge at some lava. You can JUMP LEDGE in order to get to the other side, but only if you’re not carrying anything.
This is immediately adjacent to King Solomon’s Treasure Room.
Just like the prior game, this isn’t the whole story yet: you have to escape with the loot over the lava somehow. If you try cart them back and THROW DIAMONDS (or RUBIES or EMERALDS) the game says
They scatter and fall into the chasm.
The key here is the bag again: it’s light enough to throw over the lava, and as long as you’ve emptied the water out, you can fit one (1) of the treasures.
While you’re doing all this, your vision-power from the bark is wearing out. It is apparently possible to follow a very tight sequence of tossing the bag over, jumping, stuffing a treasure in the bag, tossing it back, jumping back, emptying the treasure out of the bag, and repeating. You can make it safely out on the very last turn (at least according to Dale Dobson).
However, there’s an easier way: there’s still bark on the tree. The better way to handle all this is to throw over only one of the treasures, then go back up to the surface (using goggles while waiting for the tree bark effect to run out) in order to get some more bark. Alternately, you can eat the bark while up the tree (goggles required), get some more bark right away, and then use the tail end of the vision effect up to as far as you can before eating a second helping of bark.
It’s still interesting to “plan the route” of the conditions here, but at least it isn’t quite as hard as Dobson originally advertised.
There’s only one more wrinkle: the pygmies will stop you from trying to leave after you find the treasure (understandably so, although even if you don’t have it). The solution is the same as the previous game: drop the skull. The presence of the sacred skull will cause them to run away.
I like the game accounts for the possibility of losing treasure in the lava. Because everything game from the same room I still wouldn’t call it a Treasure Hunt in the regular sense.
In a purely mechanical sense, it is gratifying to see Olsen still being relatively strong; he tries to include
a.) timers and general effects (like modifying vision)
b.) relatively tight geography that gets passed over multiple times
c.) mostly logical ideas
I still would call this the weakest of his games so far, just because the trading idea was weakly signaled, the parser issues were messier than usual and … well, let me just quote Dale Dobson:
Despite our blatant disregard for animal life, native religions and archaeological integrity — victory is ours!
The serial-adventure genre just doesn’t age as well when there aren’t Nazis to fight.
This is a direct sequel to John R. Olsen’s game The Elephant’s Graveyard as published in the December 1981 edition of CLOAD (a TRS-80 “tape magazine”), and was published in the month immediately following. This might normally mean it could squeak into 1981 via the “publications tend to be out a month before their newsstand date” rule, but keep in mind CLOAD is direct-mail by tape and doesn’t follow by the same rules; also, in the preface the editor-in-chief (David Lagerquist) apologizes for the issue being late (“January’s issue should come out in January, don’t you think?”)
Also, I’ll be honest, despite John R. Olsen’s Frankenstein Adventure being solid enough to hit my recommended list last year, I was stalling. Part I of this game (“based on the jungle settings of the Tarzan novels”) has a bit with pygmies and a “witchdoctor”. It managed to avoid being terrible and certainly avoided the original book’s section where Tarzan massacres the Africans, but hovering around this subject matter always makes me concerned.
Based on the title, instead of Tarzan, King Solomon’s Mines is instead nominally based on the book by Sir H. Rider Haggard, part of the Allan Quatermain series. (Think Indiana Jones as written by an actual 19th century Victorian.)
The game picks up the day after the previous one ends. Not only does it continue the story, it uses the same rooms, setting, and objects to start with. (I don’t think we’ve hit this sequel-continuity in any game so far! Savage Island was in two parts but didn’t re-use rooms. The same is true of Arrow of Death.)
This seems to be a true Treasure Hunt this time with multiple things to find.
The last game started us at the trading post as in the screenshot above, where we went west past a village and a swamp to a temple, found a map at the temple (with a sealed door and some snakes we ran away from), then used it to go east from the trading post to the elephant grounds.
This time, east is almost entirely sealed off by a rockside, so our mission seems to be west. The temple that we only briefly visited seems to be our real destination, and the snakes (which were previously a red herring puzzle) now have to be reckoned with directly.
Unfortunately, I’m stuck fairly early! The trading post has the IVORY we found from the last game, a REVOLVER with six bullets, and a BAG that will hold water (the same one as the previous game, and I looked up my post to check the syntax: PUT BAG / IN TROUGH). The game has the same tight water timer as the previous one (maybe even tighter) and regular visits back to the trading post are needed to keep from dying of thirst.
The only thing I’ve found going east is a charging rhino, who comes if you hang out for more than one turn. Your revolver works to bring it down in two shots (if you try to run away you just die). I think the rhino might be useful later if I can find a cutting implement (CUT RHINO: “You can’t do that…yet!”)
Going west you pass by a now-abandoned village (although you can pick up a skull), a field of grass (if you need grass, for some reason) and some rocks that work as flint. If you go back and LIGHT GRASS it starts a large fire and you die.
Other than a tree you can climb and get a good view (but no items from) there’s the temple with snakes. There was no way past the snakes before, and I’m unclear what the player has new now that will help. (The revolver, flint, grass, and skull all seem to be the same as before.) If you try to shoot the snakes you get one of them but the rest take you down.
I checked and Dale Dobson played through this already so I have something to fall back on if I need to. He claims the game is rather hard and involves intricate timing.
This is a fairly difficult adventure — there are time pressures of various kinds to deal with, and once a puzzle is figured out it’s often necessary to restore, go back and re-execute as efficiently as possible. The game does have a functional SAVE feature, but it allows only one slot and using it seems to count as a move, so some care is required even there.
I at least have the advantage of using save states, giving me more than one save slot and immunity to the time-passing-by-saving problem.
Renga in Blue 
