I think I’ve squeezed most of the juice out of Easy difficulty level, even though I haven’t finished; I’m going to try upping to Hard and make at least one more post.
I did manage to fix the main thing that was bothering me, the empty gap on the top level map. I’ll show that off first:
There was no puzzle involved: in the room leading to that area, I simply missed an exit. The bizarre constantly-changing exit descriptions really do make it hard to keep track. The main feature to the area is a hedge maze, which is “classical” Adventure-style; that is, it is the kind of maze where I needed to drop items to map it out and a node-based representation (as above). The only extra twist is that upon going through the maze’s exit, sometimes it teleports the player back into the maze; this is just like the maze area on the middle floor.
The maze leads to three rooms representing a library, and a one-way exit back to the regular portion of the map I was at before.
I have not caused anything special to happen here. It may be just decoration.
There was one other a gap, a single-room missing chunk on the bottom floor…
…but I think I have that one accounted for as well. The top and middle floors are now all filled, and the Sanctuary — the room that you go up from the top floor to in order to drop treasures — needs to be placed somewhere amongst the three floors according to the game’s logic. So I’m fairly confident the Sanctuary is filling that gap (meaning I can stop trying to dig down, hit the adjacent walls with a mattock, etc.)
Just like Minotaur, if you’re holding too many items you can’t go up, and the game communicates this by just repeating the room description.
Other than that, the game has been mostly tedious. The problem is that most of the mechanics are ripped out. Getting hints from the unicorn, I found
you need a ROPE to get a SCROLL
you need a FOOD to get a MACHETE
you need a TOME to get the DRAGONSWORD
you need FOOD to get the DEATHRING
and I even got a screenshot of both the hint and its ramification right next to each other, by luck:
However, on Easy none of those items seem to be important. You do not need the DRAGONSWORD to kill the DRAGON. In fact, the MACE (one of the first weapons I found, just out in the open) kills everything including both the dragon and wizard in three hits.
No special item from the Wizard, the map sometimes is out on the open on the top floor.
The only enemy I left standing was the Jester, who appears, laughs a bit, and disappears before I can finish typing BASH JESTER. It sometimes randomly picks up items and moves them elsewhere but doesn’t attack. I can say I reached the same state I “won” Minotaur at last time (killing all the imminent threats) so let’s see what Hard has to offer.
The gaps in Easy really did undercut the game mechanics significantly; the whole idea of chains of objects needed from Minotaur is gone. As far as I can tell there are no magic spells either like in Minotaur (even on Hard!) It may be just the author decided the original game was too fiddly (which is, to be honest, fair) but the fiddly parts are what made the game work.
Even if I don’t have any significant difference playing on Hard (just making something up: now instead of 1 teleport spot there are 3 of them) I’ll spend one more post on Keys as I want to do wrap-up on the adventure-roguelike concept as a whole. This represents more or less the last game in the category from 1982 (barring a certain famous game from Australia, but it gets its own long discussion) and my impression is the genre starts to peter out starting in 1983. (Not completely! But enthusiasm for games like Madness and the Minotaur starts to wane.) There’s been some recent interest trying to use “AI” to generate maps but people attempting to do so run into the same problems that people in 1982 were running into, so I think it’s a useful discussion both for historical study and modern design.
L. Curtis Boyle, Rob, and Strident all helped with finding an earlier ad for the game than in my first post. From 80 Micro, May 1982.
It looks like the manual is nearly identical, except for one important difference: it lists specifically what attack verbs are:
SHOOT, STAB, HACK, BASH
The idea, again, is that you READY the weapon in question (you cannot have inventory otherwise, so any items are dropped if you ready something) and then use the appropriate verb. It does seem like some weapons are more appropriate for particular creatures than others.
My first real combat was unintentional. I had the game running in the background as I was checking the map and manual over and when I came back the wizard had arrived and done me in (this is at the very start of the game, so it appears the wizard can go everywhere except maybe the Sanctuary).
My second combat wasn’t a real one, because I ran across the dragon all I had was a dagger (which did nothing). I’ll show off the maps later; the dragon lair is quite early in rather than buried, but it can also be fairly easily avoided.
A quick extra comment on the text above: I was trying to see if ATTACK DRAGON had any effect (it doesn’t, but I didn’t have the list of four attacks from the earlier manual so I didn’t know that). I started typing the letters “AT” and was interrupted by the dragon. I’ve had cases where I’ve had a command interrupted where I just had to re-type it in, which means you’re in a literal typing match versus the computer.
Fortunately, at difficulty level 1, monsters really don’t hurt that much (unless you leave the game idling for an hour so the wizard can whomp you in the starting room). Here I am with a MACE using the BASH verb on a cyclops who barely gave me a scratch:
COND (condition) went from 255 to 239. The cyclops also left a treasure, the EYE OF THE CYCLOPS.
Later I bashed an orc which did a little more damage, but nothing to worry terribly about:
The main worry is while exploring, you sometimes meet an enemy before you are ready (given the inventory limit of the game is low just like Minotaur, I often didn’t have a weapon at hand), so need to make a prudent exit. However, it is possible to just zip by. I assume at difficulty level 3 this will all be much more of a hassle.
Notice my casual stroll by the wizard.
With the combat out of the way for now, let’s go over the map. I think I have nearly all of it, because multiple places tout the game as having “over 200” rooms and I’m at 197. This is not as large as Madness and the Minotaur; assuming I’m not missing something major, there’s only three floors, and each floor is eight by eight.
To make it easier to visualize, I’ve rendered it like an RPG map. It is no doubt incomplete (see the big gap on the top floor, for instance) and I don’t expect I’m 100% accurate (especially on one-way door locations, it was easy to walk through a corridor and miss the fact the way back was closed off).
Top floor:
S is the starting point, and the “ridges” are places you can jump over. The stair in the northwest corner also goes up to the Sanctuary where the treasures are stored.
Middle floor:
The arrows represent “landing points” for stairs which are one-way. The upper right 4×4 portion is a “maze” with a randomized stair, where the stair has a chance of sending the player back in the maze instead of going up.
Bottom floor:
The “dead end” leads to a Temple of Apollo where going south leads to a room on the second floor.
Just to illustrate the 3D-ness of the game, here’s a sample path from the start all the way to the northeast corner of the top floor (where there is an EMPTY CAVE):
The red side path leads to the dragon’s lair.
Along the way I had to jump a chasm…
…and solve a minor puzzle where a zither in a room could be played with a PLECTRUM (the use of this is given by a hint in both versions of the manual).
The route as shown otherwise relatively straightforward on the save file I was using, but I do again want to emphasize I’m at a lower difficulty and more things are supposed to potentially happen, and even at level 1 random traps can pop up. On one of my runs, a particular spot on the middle floor had a teleport trap which I was never able to disarm:
There are multiple places with boxes that suggest some kind of treasure, but I have yet to be able to open one. I might just not be holding the right key in the right place.
The spot I find most intriguing is at the SE corner of the top floor. To get there you need to jump over a chasm where it is possible to die if you are holding too much:
I don’t know what the limit is. This is being done at full health, so that isn’t an issue.
Here’s the actual room in the southeast corner:
The wood door leads “off the map” but could easily be a teleport, maybe to the empty section on level 1. However, I haven’t been able to get in the door; I assume another key is involved? Or possibly, there’s an arbitrary use of a magic item (which would be hard to test, given the chasm prevents carrying too much).
There are many other rooms which could potentially have something going on, but it’s not obvious what item I’m supposed to be using or magic I’m supposed to cast. There’s FAIRY DUST, for instance, and the verb SPRINKLE, but where should it go? Does it even get used at difficulty level 1? I also tried checking carefully every room underneath the gap in level 1 just in case there was something special, and this statue at a dead end looks suggestive…
…but given many of the rooms are just described for flavor, the statue may mean nothing at all.
This trumpet can be played, but I haven’t found anywhere where it has an effect.
To summarize, the various mysteries are
The large gap on the map of the top floor and the single room missing on the bottom floor
The reference to a “HIDDEN TEMPLE” mentioned on the OLD MAP
The contents of any of the locked boxes and how to open them
The wooden door past the deadly chasm
Plus, of course, any “ordinary” locations might randomly hold secrets.
Is there a way to read the carvings, maybe?
I think I’m ready to do a “fixed” run where I’ll save my game and notate where all the objects are (staying with difficulty 1 for now). I’ll likely need to abuse the unicorn RNG just like Madness and the Minotaur (assuming that trick still even works!) Also (again like Minotaur) I’ll need to take many trips to get objects to the right places as the inventory limit is tight. Unlike that game you don’t have to deal with a constant state of decay, no matter which difficulty level you play at. Your condition only goes down upon being hit by monsters; on difficulty 3 the monsters start to hit faster.
Our journey through adventures with significant randomization, or as I’ve termed them, adventure-roguelikes, has been seriously bumpy.
To be clear, not every randomization is “significant”; random wanderings of the dwarves and pirates in Adventure don’t affect the underlying gameplay at a fundamental level, and it is still possible to play with a traditional walkthrough. Mines, on the other hand, has the map and puzzle placement generated anew for each game, and The 6 Keys of Tangrin had a generator so out-of-control it was possible to land in a map consisting of two rooms.
Lugi is maybe the best representative for one of these games that includes map-randomization. That game also hit what I think is the big disjoint that makes RPG-roguelikes work where adventure-roguelikes struggle; RPGs tend to have multiple routes to accomplishing things, while adventures often have specific solutions in mind. It means in an adventure while puzzle X might require item A, you might just never find item A and be stuck; while futile searching for a desired item can happen in Nethack, usually there’s some kind of substitute strategy to muddle through an obstacle (if nothing else, you can hope to luck out).
Madness and the Minotaur from Spectral Associates uses the strategy of not randomizing the basic elements of the map…
It always has this 3d layout, where the grey cubes represent the maze.
…but rather making it so the monster-and-object-and-trap placement cause sufficient issues to feel like there is a random “overlay”. This is a decent strategy for an adventure, as you’re essentially playing two games at once: the specific game you’ve rolled up, and the meta-game of elements that will stay consistent between attempts. This makes every attempt feel like “progress”. Mapping in a game like The 6 Keys of Tangrin always felt particularly fruitless and robotic, far more than the random dungeon of an RPG (which you generally don’t have to put in work in map creation); by having a consistent map yet random elements this issue gets avoided.
Tom [Rosenbaum] loved to play adventure games but was disappointed in the computer adventure games that were out there because they had no replay ability. Once you solved them, playing again was exactly the same. Tom also liked board games like Civilization, and decided that a computer game with the randomness and unpredictability of games like this would be something he would enjoy playing over and over.
The first program I wrote for Spectral was Keys of the Wizard. I use the term “wrote” very loosely, because the underlying code was from Madness and the Minotaur and most of the “writing” I did was in the form of map changes, dictionary changes and room description changes. There were a few code changes and additions that changed the way battling creatures worked, and that gave a few of the creatures the ability to “catch your scent” and follow you, but it was mostly Madness code.
The earliest ad I’ve seen for the game is from an August 1982 issue of The Rainbow. I’ve never seen a copy of that ’82 version. What I have seen is the version printed by Microdeal from the UK starting in 1984. They made both a Tandy Color Computer version as well as one for the Dragon (the clone-computer from Wales). I’ll be playing the version for Dragon.
Via World of Dragon.
Despite Mr. Gabbard claiming there wasn’t much change with Minotaur, there’s one significant one off the start: this game has difficulty levels.
1 is for the “novice player” where “only a few treasures are hidden, the creatures are easy to defeat and only a few special tricks are active”. Difficulty 3 has “all the treasures” hidden with “very dangerous” creatures and “all the special tricks and traps are active”. I’m starting with difficulty 1 (as recommended by the instructions) and then I’ll ramp up to 3 later to see what changes.
The reference to hidden treasures is ominous. I remember this being one of the fiddliest parts of Minotaur, with acts as random as dropping a lantern in a particular place (which would change during the game) revealing a treasure. I am hoping this isn’t going to devolve into the sort of thing where I try every plausible action in every room just because there’s no hints where an event might happen.
Here’s two renditions of the opening room (level 1):
The room description is consistent in both cases (again, this is a fixed map). The direction descriptions randomize, and they randomize on the spot; if you look at the room again one time you may see THERE IS A TRAIL TO THE SOUTH and another time it may be A DIRT TRAIL WINDS SOUTH and on yet another it may be A TWISTING PATH LEADS SOUTH. The room description repeats if you walk in a wall but it repeats with the exit-description change listed above, so traversing the game can feel a touch surreal.
In the first variation there was a pool of water but no objects; in the second there were two treasures here right off the start (bag of pearls, small silver spoon). The treasures don’t go at the start but rather a location called the Sanctuary so it doesn’t give starting points just for lucky RNG. The goal of the game is to rescue 32 treasures and bring them to the Sanctuary (I don’t know if the game gives points for killing creatures, or if their lack of hitting the player is a reward unto itself).
The CYC-TRL-BAT-etc. along the top with 255 next to each represent the creatures of the game. It gives consistently at all times what their condition is and if it reaches 0 that creature is dead. The full list (from the manual) is
CYCLOPS, ORC, DRAGON, BAT, TROLL, WIZARD, JESTER, UNICORN
The ORC and DRAGON follow the player (see the “catch your scent” mechanic the author mentioned), the jester is a “trickster” (stealing items, maybe?) and the unicorn will give hints if you RUB HORN; I suppose the unicorn is this game’s oracle. (In Madness and the Minotaur, the way I finally started making progress was manipulating the oracle’s RNG to cycle through every possible hint.)
While I’m quoting manual things I should mention the weapons list…
QUIET pauses the game (this is in real time, so if you step away from the computer you might have a monster wander in and whomp you). UNCLE quits and allows a restart; READY is used to wield a weapon.
REST is a special mechanic for recovering strength, and it causes the monsters to “move 60 times their normal speed and recuperate at 12 times that of normal”. The “tome”, “necklace”, and “medallion” are magic items that can help wake you if a monster walks in. Of the three items one is chosen at random at the start to appear “and will be used during the entire adventure.”
I’d give the lore, too, but there doesn’t appear to be any; there’s a wizard, you need to get treasure, now go forth. Minotaur had a little lore so that makes one difference between the games, the other one being a de-emphasis on magic. There was a list of spells with lots of various effects in the original manual that don’t show up here; I don’t know if that means any magic is more item-oriented here or the manual is just being cryptic intentionally.
The game is in the same rectilinear format as before; here’s the map of the first floor without taking any down-exits:
I’m dutifully marking down the room names though it’s hard to tell how useful they’ll be with this sort of game. Can the “broken chariot” mention in the unicorn screenshot earlier be used, somehow? (If so, based on Minotaur, it’ll be an indication some random object gets used there.) At the very least the Wizard’s Hidden Temple seems like it must be significant because of a “golden box”:
The game says I can’t when trying to open the box. It might need the right key (I’ve found a DIAMONDKEY on one run but that wasn’t it) or maybe it only responds to the right sort of magic.
The upper left corner of the map lets you go up as well as down. Going up leads to the “sanctuary” which is where the treasures go; heading north from the sanctuary loops the player back to the cottage at the start.
So far on the first floor I’ve only met the jester (who just appeared and disappeared) and the unicorn, whose clues follow roughly the same format as Minotaur (“to get X you need Y”). I assume the danger starts when I go diving down, although in one case the diving was unintentional:
Even on difficulty level 1 this has traps! The triggers were rather complicated in Minotaur so I expect the same here.
An old map with a hint. I haven’t found it twice so I don’t know yet if the hint changes.
Next time, I’ll report in from level 2 and beyond. Based on the gaps I’m already seeing I expect once again I’m going to have to think of the overall geography in three dimensions.
Generally speaking, with this size of game, there might be one or two moments at most where a highly nonstandard verb gets used instead of a regular one (FRISK instead of EXAMINE, or from the Pharaoh’s Tomb game we just played, WALK THROUGH DOOR rather than ENTER DOOR). This game has four such moments. In at least the first case the author was doing it intentionally. I’m not sure why, but the author (Mike Farley) seems perfectly fine with inconsistency across similar actions in the game. So one door you might just type IN while another you might ENTER and yet another you might GO THROUGH.
At least to start, the game gives a little help in the ZX Spectrum version. I went back and noodled with the metal door and after enough failed attempts I was prompted by the game if I wanted help. (This is like the Crowther/Woods Adventure style hint system, which is still pretty rare.)
The game wants us to PULL DOOR. This allows the verbs IN and OUT to now work. Inside is a vault with a gold coin; in the ZX Spectrum version there is a message on that wall.
The gold color was used to signal treasures in Pharaoh’s Tomb, but remember that here our goal is to find a scroll of wisdom, not gold treasure.
The ZX81 version of the game just says “I AM IN A LARGE VAULT / THERE IS A CLOSED STEEL DOOR”; it also has the difference that rather than using IN and OUT, the game requires PULL DOOR every time the player wants to enter, and PUSH DOOR every time the player wants to leave. Basically it’s going for this comic:
An apt demonstration of the feeling of playing this game.
The RETURN mentioned in the vault room has a double-meaning. Most clearly (to me, at least) it refers to the coin itself, and if the coin gets used (as we’ll do shortly) it returns to the vault. There is no hint to this in the ZX81 game.
The second meaning is that the carpet will fly with the code word RETURN; this is totally optional as you can just walk out the cave with the carpet; it’s the ZX81 version of the game that won’t let you pick it up. (I don’t know why it didn’t work for me before. I’m guessing I had tried GET MAGIC and GET CARPET in the ZX81 port and just GET MAGIC in the other, but the game wants it referred to as a CARPET.)
My last ZX81 screenshot. If someone knows what was going on with the cryptic message about THAT feel free to drop a note in the comments.
Given the two hints that showed up in the Spectrum game I decided it was time to switch to that version entirely.
The gold coin from the vault seemed to (and fortunately, did) obviously go to the dwarf that was hawking scythes.
Remember, the coin is re-usable and goes back to the vault.
Given the limited locations available, it occurred to me the bamboo forest might be good candidate for the scythe; indeed it was, as using the scythe gave a bamboo cane. With the cane I could USE CANE while at the out-of-reach rope…
…opening up the possibility to SWING ROPE.
Next up comes a “Windy Gulley” with a spider guarding a “corked bottle”. Attached to the room are a “Wet Cave” and a “Cold Cave”; there’s a lizard that (by random) shows up in one of the two. (Remember the “by random”, it will come up later.) I fortunately had the right item in inventory for the game to handle GET LIZARD:
I then immediately took it over to the spider; I figured the lizard would eat the spider, but DROP LIZARD and RELEASE LIZARD and so forth did nothing. The right action is OPEN CASKET. Previously, OPEN CASKET didn’t even work, leading me to believe I was dealing with an open container, but no. The author is treating all the parser actions like they were attempts at solving puzzles, rather than possible manipulations of a world model. This is counter to the typical models in both Crowther/Woods and Scott Adams and most modern games.
I wouldn’t call it entirely the fault of the Trevor Toms system; at least with the previous game we played (Pharaoh’s Tomb) there were world-model elements. I’m guessing Magic Mountain was Farley’s first game (even though it gets listed last on the sequence of games for the tape) and he was still coping with technical issues.
Moving on from killing the spider, I got the “corked bottle” but wasn’t quite ready to handle it yet. First I had to deal with another parser annoyance.
The blankets can be taken; the big trouble is with the trapdoor. OPEN TRAPDOOR? No. How about DOWN, or maybe IN? Or ENTER TRAPDOOR? GO THROUGH TRAPDOOR? All good tries, but no. The game wants LIFT TRAPDOOR.
The book has the words RISE AND SHINE, although they look blurry unless you’re wearing the wizard’s hat.
Heading back to where the spider was, going east leads to a dead-end.
I had a guess (after some futile magic word attempts, see above) the bottle was supposed to work there; if you try to break the bottle you get killed by a very angry genie.
However, OPEN BOTTLE was not understood. The game is fishing for a very specific verb: UNCORK BOTTLE.
Then comes possibly the hardest puzzle in the entire game: phrasing the command to the genie in a way it will actually do the right thing. The walkthrough told me MOVE ROCKS (there are no rocks in the room description, you just have to infer that’s what the author means).
You can now go south to a “crevasse”…
…and there are two ways to deal with it which take you to different places. Realizing this is arguably the hardest “legitimate” puzzle in the game (that is, it’d be hard even with a perfect parser where communicating with the genie, opening the trapdoor, etc. was simple).
First, you can TIE BLANKETS in order to form a rope, then use them to climb down into the crevasse, finding a lantern in the process.
Second, the magic carpet works here with RISE AND SHINE. It is unclear why the words just result in a sassy response from the parser in other places (rather than the magic carpet twitching and failing to go anywhere, say, like a properly hinted game would).
The south edge of the crevasse has a vending machine which dispenses matches as long as you insert a coin. Remember the coin spent at the dwarf re-appears at the vault (or at least a new one duplicates back at the vault); fortunately going over the crevasse with the carpet is not a one-way trip so it’s possible to backtrack.
You need to backtrack again anyway in just a moment for yet another coin, as there’s a witch selling parchments.
The last coin use. The magic re-appearing coin was my favorite part of the game, although I don’t know I would have felt without the “always return” hint. Also, notice the inconsistency: we had to GIVE COIN for the dwarf, but here the game wants BUY PARCHMENT.
The parchment says PHOOEY, which gets used near the end of the game. Near the parchment-seller is a dragon that we need an item first in order to defeat.
Near the witch is a house where you’re supposed to LIFT SLATS (not GET or PULL) and … look, I admit I just got this one out of the walkthrough. It’s not terrible as the use at the trapdoor but it’s still pretty dodgy without some synonyms.
The secret room you find under the slats.
With the keys in hand there’s still the dragon to deal with, and this is a puzzle that’s more likely solved via passive means rather than actively thinking it out. One of the rooms in this area is a “dark gully” and if you have the lantern going it will reveal a new object. (You need to LIGHT MATCH, and then the lantern is lit if you wait a turn more. Only then walk into the dark gully.)
The sword is sufficient to kill the dragon, although at first my attempts to walk in the dragon room were still being stopped. You have to type KILL DRAGON even though the dragon isn’t in the same room as you.
Last area! Let’s bust out of this joint.
First comes the place where the keys (A, B, and C) from below the witch’s house get used.
The game inquires about an order. There’s six possibilities (ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA) and for me the order was ABC, so I didn’t have to try very hard. According to one of the walkthroughs you can ask the dwarf your fortune and get the sequence from him, but working out how to say that (DWARF TELL FORTUNE, I hate this parser) is far tougher than just ramming through six cases.
The rest is straightforward; there’s a storage room with some oars, followed by a river with a dinghy (the author was nice enough to describe it as “portable” so I picked it up before using ROW DINGHY, otherwise it might have taken more parser struggle).
This lands the player next to a “Scroll Bearer’s Path” where going west kills you rather vividly (“The Mountain’s powerful forces combine and blast me with a ferocity unknown to man!”)
You need to head north to scoop up the Scroll of Wisdom first (which is, sadly, not READable, but this was not a surprise).
Trying to leave results in you getting pushed back by an evil force, but as the only unused things I had were
1.) the quill pen
2.) the word PHOOEY
it was not hard to pass through.
The quill pen is a red herring and never gets used.
Just to summarize, the game gave active trouble
opening a door
opening a trap-door
opening a bottle
commanding a genie
with lots of small issues besides (like “BUY” instead of “GIVE” depending on the vendor). This may not read so horrible when I’m conveying what happened in brisk prose, but I assure you each point of getting stopped represents a long amount of time, in some cases 30 minutes or more. While some of it was technical trouble, I think the author also had a walkthrough in mind that seemed reasonable without thinking about the effect on the player. One can see after the fact how MOVE ROCKS would be an appropriate command, but without mentioning them the puzzle becomes a far different experience than intended. Or maybe the author’s technical chops at this point allowed for no synonyms, hence UNCORK rather than OPEN (rather than having them both)?
We’ll see Mike Farley again in 1983, as he does have one more game, this time solely for ZX Spectrum. Hopefully it’s more along the lines of Pharaoh’s Tomb than Magic Mountain! Before checking out I wanted to mention one more quote from the author, back with his comments in Sinclair User; or rather, a quote from Philip Joy (who wrote the article) paraphrasing Farley:
He says that any game advertised as a new set of dungeons each time the game is played cannot be a real adventure. Games such as Catacombs, Perilous Swamp and Oracles’ Cave were in this category. This view could be taken either way but I feel that a real adventure should have the same story each time it is tried.
I find it fascinating that we’re getting some “gatekeeping” as to genre here; plenty of RPGs have been marked as Adventure at this time and the concept of a self-contained game-genre was just starting to be formed. (I’m not thrilled about the term “gatekeeping” as I don’t think sorting games is necessarily a negative thing; the mere act of coining “walking simulators” ended up creating more of them as authors now had a way of hitting the right target audience who wanted more of that kind of experience.) We’re still in the age where people have tried all sorts of adventure-roguelikes — with randomizing of elements including the map — but adventures have never been fully comfortable with randomization. I find the quote also interesting in that Farley had a random element in Magic Mountain (the lizard); perhaps this was something he discarded after experimentation, but why including it in the ZX Spectrum version of the game then?
All this is a funny segue since we’re about to hit a game with heavy randomization, the sequel to Madness and the Minotaur, which remains one of the most difficult games I’ve played due to its logistics and tricky map. Will it murder me as much as its predecessor?
Here we embark on the final part of the trilogy from the ZX81 Adventure Tape 1 as published by Phipps Associates and written by Mike Farley (see previously: Greedy Gulch, Pharaoh’s Tomb). The collection of three games was based on the Trevor Toms system used in The City of Alzan. The Toms system itself was based off the code in a August 1980 issue of Practical Computing. Additionally, Farley was an admirer of the Artic games, again based off the August 1980 issue (derived directly).
The package served as an advertisement of sorts for both the ZX81 Pocket Book and the make-your-own-adventure system that gets mentioned within, as the instructions include a sample from City of Alzan as well as ordering information (book for £5.95, accompanying cassette £5.00).
132 PAGES OF GAMES, USEFUL SUBROUTINES, ARTICLES ON EFFICIENT PROGRAMMING, USING MACHINE CODE, USING THE TIMER, HOW TO CREATE ADVENTURES PLUS MUCH MORE.
The games were republished in 1983 individually for ZX Spectrum. With Magic Mountain — for reasons you’ll discover — I decided to play both versions, meaning I gritted my teeth and make it through the screen-clear-as-you-type interface on ZX81. I’m stuck at the same part in both versions. I might normally just bust out hints now, but the nature of where I’m stuck involves a “crossword clue” (maybe) which lends itself to crowdsourcing. That is, assuming you aren’t reading my archive, I’m stopping at a point where you, the one reading this might now, might be able to figure out what to do next.
The three-game ZX81 collection was also republished in 1983 with a new cover, as shown. Via zx81stuff.
Our goal is not to collect a hoard of treasure but rather to find the Scrolls of Wisdom on Magic Mountain. Maybe they’re the Four Vedas. Score is given by progress rather than by placing treasures back at the starting room.
Rather oddly, the directions state the possible directions are north, south, east, west, and down. No up.
The ZX81 version of the game starts with
I AM AT THE FOOT OF A MOUNTAIN
PATHS GO EAST WEST AND DOWN
and you might notice the ZX Spectrum version does not say anything about the east and west exit. I’ve been needing to test exits on the revised version but never on the ZX81 one (although to be fair, on Pharaoh’s Tomb, the extra CLIMB SLOPE at the start was just as secret there as on the ZX Spectrum version of the game).
All this is to say: it’s easier to map out the ZX81 version, not only because of the issue above but also because there’s a maze right away and the player doesn’t have to wait for the graphics to slowly redraw at every step.
Red-marked exits go to the red-marked Maze room. The blue north exit off Edge of Fissure is on the ZX Spectrum version of the game; the ZX81 map just has the exit from that room going to the west.
Prior to the maze let’s take the starting east-west chunk. From the far west is a “cave entrance” and no way I can find to enter (ENTER CAVE, IN, GO IN CAVE, etc.)
The casket is a “box” in the ZX81 version and OPEN BOX / OPEN CASKET doesn’t work.
Just to the east is a room with a steel door that appears to be locked. At least here I don’t feel like I’m missing a parser trick.
Note that the east/west exits are given here. The inconsistency is quite frustrating.
One more step goes to the starting room which you’ve already seen, and then on the far right there’s a rope just out of reach along with some soft shoes. I’ll give the ZX81 screen this time:
I think it’s possible this is simply showing action in medias res. That is, we are supposed to assume the rope was used in a prior attempt (either by the current protagonist, or a prior adventurer). The back of the ZX Spectrum version of the game reinforces this:
An out-of-reach rope above a rock fissure is the only way into this Magic Mountain — or is it? Rumour has it that there are vast stores of treasure inside, but legends also tell of huge poisonous spiders, lizards and magic at work — you’ll need more than just cunning to come out of this in one piece! An Adventure which uses split-screen graphic pictures and scrolling text window, and machine coded English command line scanner for fast word recognition.
Heading back to the start and going down leads to a “large cave” with a quill pen as a dwarf selling scythes:
The fortune telling got added for the ZX Spectrum version.
Past that is the maze already mapped above; note that it follows the same “sinkhole” pattern where most wrong exits funnel back to the start. This has the specific effect of making it harder to get to the exit randomly, with the side effect of feeling unrealistic.
At the last step of the maze before looping back to the dwarf, you can go down instead of n/s/e/w to find a hidden cave.
This is the part where I am truly and completely stuck and appeal to y’all reading this right now. The carpet can’t be taken, so it seems like the intent is to fly away with it on the spot, but the obvious commands (like FLY CARPET) get nothing. The ZX Spectrum version of the game doesn’t even provide any guidance with HELP.
The ZX81 version of the game, on the other hand, does!
I suspect this might be an intentional guess-the-phrasing puzzle rather than an accidental we-left-out-tons-of-synonyms one. (See for comparison: riding the camel from The Sands of Egypt.)
BOOK THAT TO “WHERE”
The clue might be literally cryptic, as in “cryptic crossword” of the kind common in the UK. That’s at least how the review from the May 1982 issue of Sinclair User refers to things. It did occur to me that the highlight on HAT was referring to the wizard’s hat from the opening room, but that hasn’t helped me in my tussle vs. the parser. Any recommendations are welcome!
Shockingly, this game’s name does not clash with one I’ve already played yet; we had Pharaoh’s Curse and King Tut’s Tomb but never put the two together. CASA has one other game with the same name but lacking a year. It was published by Leon Young Software Company (LYSCo), an Australian company that didn’t exist until 1984. Hence, we’ve got a ways to go before the two games do battle.
This is the second game on the ZX81 tape that contained Greedy Gulch. The original tape was later ported (with graphics) to ZX Spectrum. Greedy Gulch was obnoxious to play due partly to some misleading text in the ZX Spectrum version, and I thought about going back to ZX81 for this game, but then I started playing and it went to that update-screen-every-keystroke type screen we saw with Planet of Death. Again, I’m going to be polite and not give a video, but let’s just say it pretty quickly drove my back over to the ZX Spectrum game, even given my previous experience. I’ll give the opening room as it looks on ZX81, at least:
To be fair, I did use the word “partly”; the worst thing about Greedy Gulch was a desert with slow screen draw which required trekking across many times. A Egypt-themed game could have the same problem but it fortunately starts the player right next to the Tomb in question; the rough equivalent turns out to be a maze which requires multiple treks but it turns out to still not be quite as irritating.
You start just south of the tomb next to a box of matches, and need to go north and PUSH ROCK to open up the tomb. Afterwards the command IN gets used here to go inside, and this is the only place in the game this is used. (Ominous forewarning.)
Walking in with the book of matches turns out to be a mistake, because there’s a “fire room” immediately upon entering that burns them up.
The most annoying of the game’s softlocks, but at least this is early.
From this point things open up, so here’s a map:
Lying out in the open are a “magic cloak” and a “magic ring”. The magic cloak, when worn, says it turns you invisible; the magic ring does nothing (yet).
This invisibility is important because there’s a “large wooden door” with a warning sign that ALL PEOPLE WILL BE KILLED ON SIGHT. The trick is to not be in sight; entering leads back to the start of the tomb, right before the fire room.
This puzzled me at first but I realized another item susceptible to the fire room is a block of ice (in an appropriately named “ice room”).
You can use the death-passage to take the ice back to the book of matches; then, while holding both the ice and matches at the same time, the fire room will melt the ice but not set the matches on fire. I assume the idea is you are holding them “together” so the ice serves as protection, even though the player doesn’t actively provide a verb.
The ice has melted – I had better leave NOW!
The opening rooms also have a fan in addition to a “storage room” with candles, a master key, and a ladder; the candles light by typing USE MATCH while holding both the candle and book of matches at the same time. There’s a weird room where you get trapped in a magic lamp (??) and the rub the lamp from the inside in order to get out, leading to a room with a heavy slab.
Finally, there’s a “Guards Room” with a lever and chain. Pulling the lever causes rumbling in the distance; this opens a door on a timer, and you need to get down to where the door is quickly in order to beat the timer, so let’s check that part of the map next:
Red exits lead to the red-marked Maze room.
You can get in here by going down from the Ice Room. There’s a gate that locks behind you; just a bit in there’s a “scale room” where you can drop that heavy slab from the lamp room in order to weigh it down and push the gate back up. (The scale room also contains an axe which seems to be a complete red herring, which is not in this author’s usual style, I’m not sure if the author had a puzzle in mind and ran out of space.)
Past the scales is the maze.
This is a “sinkhole” style maze where there is one central room that gets dumped in as a trap of sorts, but there’s also forced loops through. The first loop leads to a Death Dungeon; down from there (entirely a secret exit, no description) there’s a room with a gold brick, and getting back to the Death Dungeon requires taking a second loop.
You need to also do a third loop because of the timed lever I mentioned earlier; you can handle the brick and the timer at the same time. So on a third loop you can head west from the Death Dungeon to a Guards Room.
This is the absolute worst part of the game. Not the timing: entering the door after it is open. I spent ages on this part.
GO DOOR
GO DOORWAY
ENTER DOOR
ENTER DOORWAY
W
N
S
U
D
OUT
IN
LEAVE
ENTER
EXIT
LEAVE
IN DOOR
ENTER ROCK
GO ROCK
WALK OUT
USE DOOR
USE DOORWAY
Maybe something hidden was making it impossible to enter? I tried different inventory combinations in addition to throwing every parser combination I could think of, and eventually (after spending two days stuck on this one part) I had to just check a walkthrough and find that the game was wanting GO THROUGH DOOR. This game only mostly has a two-word parser.
The other annoying thing to point out is that while the game technically gives you time to nab the two treasures past the door (the statue, seen above, and a golden mask) it gives absolutely no extra moves, and making a typo or even hitting ENTER accidentally counts as a move. I got trapped one time through for an accidental ENTER-press. (One other approach is to only nab one of the treasures, head back to the lever, and then repeat the whole process again.)
With that out of the way, let’s try tackling a different section.
Down from a “Snow Room” near the Ice Room there is a “Sacrificial Chamber”. If you enter without holding the ladder you’ve softlocked the game as you can’t get out.
Going farther in requires a lit candle; there’s a room with wind that will randomly blow the candle out so you need to keep the book of matches handy as well.
There’s a plank out in the open that gets used fairly soon after:
South from the Rock Chamber leads here. To go back north you need to USE PLANK. Weirdly, you can still go south from the Rock Chamber even though the path has now crumbled. I’m guessing the author thought of this part “cinematically” rather than in a simulationist sense.
This then leads to a variety of rooms that serve mostly color…
…along with a golden ram and golden necklace which are treasures that need to go back to the start.
“Serve mostly color” is worth a little more attention; take a look at the section of the map:
The Hall of Mirrors-Sphinx Room-Glass Store system reminds me of Inca Curse having small clumps of rooms that don’t really serve a purpose other than to be described as rooms. In a way, the accumulation of rooms (having only their name in the original ZX81 version) makes for a way of describing a region without having any depth to the room descriptions.
From Inca Curse, which says no more than YOU ARE IN A KITCHEN etc. The intent seems to be to “decorate” the area while maintaining the very low file size forced by technical limitations. The ZX Spectrum version of Pharaoh’s Tomb is able to have longer room descriptions but it’s simply a port from a pack of three ZX81 games stuffed on one tape.
The last section I also needed the walkthrough on: to the south of the Storage Room (which had the key, ladder, and candle) there’s a room with a “sound lock”. I had found no musical instruments.
Way back at the start, I missed that the oasis had a line “THERE IS A MOUNTAIN SLOPE HERE” which needed to be interacted with. You can CLIMB SLOPE and find a horn. This is rather like a left-to-right platformer where you start the game by going left into a secret area.
Blowing the horn opens the lock to the last part (for me) of the game.
It’s fairly straightforward here except for a “magic panel” blocking the way. This requires arbitrary use of magic, and the only thing that made it solvable was I had one item I hadn’t used yet: the magic ring. Rubbing it lets the player pass through.
The last treasure (a golden rod just past the sound lock, and the golden shield) was all I needed for victory.
This did end up being more pleasant to play than Greedy Gulch; while there was some inventory juggling it didn’t take literal hours to fully resolve, and the puzzles in the end were mostly straightforward things that the parser could handle. I just need to remember the author’s tendency to sometimes lapse into a three-word parser, because coming next: Magic Mountain, the last game off Adventure Tape No. 1, followed by Keys of the Wizard, the sequel to ultra-difficult Madness and the Minotaur.
I’ve finished the game. My previous post is needed for context.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
This was mostly a matter of realizing the system this was going for, which is to use almost no verbs at all. The command list given in the game is essentially
with a heavy, heavy reliance on DROP. DROP doubles as USE: it applies the object you put to whatever is nearby, and it may or may not display a helpful message as it does so.
The atmosphere is something a cross between Seek and Arkenstone. Seek in that having nearly everything happen with DROP (combined with sparse descriptions) makes for an almost board-game like feel, and Arkenstone in having all of the locations from the book jammed together in a way that doesn’t entirely make sense.
Continuing from last time, there was a warp transporter hanging out near Arthur Dent’s House that I was unable to activate with a crystal. Following my statement above, you just need to DROP the crystal and it works, but it works by opening a passage to the south with no fanfare.
This leads to a “Betelguese Spacedome” and I’ll mark the whole area in light purple. Not everything is accessible right away.
You’re first stopped by a “nutty Vogon guard” and you’re supposed to DROP some peanuts (ha ha, ha).
the Vogon jumps for joy and runs off
with a handful of peanuts
This is immediately adjacent to the Restaurant at the End of the Galaxy (see? it’s like Arkenstone geography) where you can buy a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster with money. (Or rather, you try to TAKE PAN, are told the bartender needs money, drop the right item, and then you are allowed to take the Gargle Blaster. Also, take the item you used to pay for it, since it just gets left right there.)
After that comes a fountain with a babel fish that is not cooperative about being picked up and an “angry Arkelsiesure” blocking a hallway. (As usual, it isn’t clear the creature is blocking anything — you only find out after resolving the obstacle.)
Available also for nabbing are some matches, a Vogon mega-steak, and a galactic data card. There’s one locked door (keys are coming soon) and some whalemeat that you do nothing at all with.
We are on an undulating walkway
You can go North, East
That looks like
ten tons of whalemeat
Taking the matches, we can head back over to the hay monster that was stopping us before and set it on fire (again, DROP, not LIGHT MATCHES or anything like that). This opens up a Small Shop with a stun gun, which can then be toted over to the Vogon Captain and — astonishingly enough — used via the SHOOT verb rather than DROP. I guess here it seemed too implausible to activate a gun by dropping.
This opens up the third area, which is roughly “ship + outer space” but again things are very loosely connected to any real geography:
Some keys (told you they were coming) are easy to grab, as is a cheque signed by Zaphod Beeblebrox which is ripped directly from Supersoft Hitchhiker’s. Let’s save the cheque for now and go use the keys:
Poetry, my favorite, and it gets applied in exactly the same way as it does in the Supersoft game: to scare a way a tiger.
From here you can access a “beast of TRALL” who will take the mega-steak, opening passage to a white mouse that is too fast to take. Going east instead leads to an Engine Room described as having an improbable situation. I nabbed the Improbability Drive (just hanging out in town), plopped it down, and was mystified when nothing happened. This is the one part where EXAMINE was useful, as I could EXAMINE the engine.
Fortunately I had one of those; dropping both items activates the engine and new exits, leading to: a Vogon coin, a Vogon data machine, a robot control circuit, chocolates, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Deep Thought, and a mega-elephant blocking the way. Deep Thought is an item you can pick up and as far as I can tell (despite being the mega-computer that figured out “42” in the book) is entirely useless in the game.
To get past the mega-elephant, you need to go back to the market with the cheesecake, buy it with the Vogon coin, and drop it at the mouse, which suddenly gets described as sleepy. (There’s some text that doesn’t show in the game about it eating the cake up. The cake doesn’t actually disappear, though.) Then toting the mouse over to the elephant:
This opens up a Vortex where there’s a colorful poster; the poster is one of the artefacts. (We’ve already seen two other artefacts, the book of poetry and the Hitchhiker’s Guide. The only way to tell is to drop the items at the Inn and check if your score has increased.)
Toting the chocolate back over to the babel fish — look, this was just something you did in the Supersoft game, I have no idea what the motivation would be here — you can drop it, and the fish will eat the chocolate and get drunk, allowing you to pick it up and get the language-understanding from the book.
If you use the cheque (from way back a bit when we found keys) you can buy the Gargle Blaster and deliver it to the Arkleseizure; as long as you’re wearing the babel fish you will find out exits you can take. Again, this is entirely a ripoff of the Supersoft game, including the softlock that happens if you hand over the drink before wearing the babel fish.
In the original he said to go west.
This opens passages to a dirty towel (not a treasure), a bowel of petunias (treasure), Slartibartfast (who you can pick up for some reason), and Marvin the depressed robot.
Dropping the circuit board from back in the Vogon/space area over here doesn’t seem to work, but it’s just the game’s code being weird; once you have dropped the board, you are allowed to take Marvin, and the board will come along with him.
There’s a third game this all reminds me of, and that’s Eldorado Gold. That was a game which took a different game (Lost Dutchman’s Mine) and did sort of a parody version but was otherwise ripped quite directly, including I expect the code.
Here, there doesn’t seem to be any parody going on: this is just the author apparently being a fan of the Supersoft game and doing their own remix, including stolen puzzles. It still counts as its own game and the extra bugs (and intentional red herrings) mean you can have very strange object lists.
According to the walkthrough on CASA, there’s some unused text:
“The barman won’t let us”
“The barman says THAT’LL DO NICELY”
“The mouse swallows the cheesecake,burps and falls asleep”
“Marvin says LIFE’S TOTALLY BORING and wanders off”
“Great Idea Guys-nothing happened”
“Whoops!! A nasty Vogon just spotted us”
“Vogon has disintegrated us”
“Great Idea Guys,maybe the Megadonkey cancarry some stuff”
“jumping Gargle Blasters,the Megadonkey kicked everything off
and bolted”
which suggests the author got up to the point where the game was “working” and then decided it was good enough to put onto tape. Is Marvin wandering off a softlock or was there meant to be a mechanic where we can follow him around? Was the Vogon meant to be more aggressive? What was the real plan with the Megadonkey? The inventory limit is 3, so an increased capacity would have been welcome. Funnily enough, the presence of the Megadonkey means this game could even have gone to the same source as Eldorado Gold (Lost Dutchman’s Mine) as that game has a mule that you can use to carry inventory, and it isn’t a common attribute in games of this era at all.
Peter Smith will return soon with a Dr. Who-themed game. For now, coming up: two short games, and then the sequel to one of the most difficult games from 1981.
One exit will either send you to a random close-by room if you’re holding the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, or send you into space if you’re not. I have no idea if there was some plot or puzzle this was supposed to lead to that the author simply forgot about.
In the early 80s, Computer Concepts was a BBC Micro-focused company in the UK mostly known for applications and graphics software, like a Graphics Extension ROM and a LOGO package (LOGO being a beginner language specifically for making computer graphics).
However, just like any company getting their footing at the time, they threw out lots of products; this October 1982 ad emphasizes a word processor (Wordwise, we’ll come back to it) but also five games: Asteroid Belt, Chase, Chess, Reversi, and what the ad calls Hitch-Hiker’s Guide although the cassette box from the Museum of Computer Adventure Games just says Hitch-Hiker.
An adventure based on the characters of the book ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’. The aim of the game is to collect five specific objects that are located in such places as the ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe’, Arthur Dent’s house and Betelgeuse Spacedome. The computer can understand plain English commands such as North, Shoot and Get. Clues (sometimes very subtle) are given that indicate the whereabouts of these objects or the method of getting to new areas or locations in the game.
Only £5.80 plus VAT!
You might think this is another one of those companies that’s disappeared after producing a handful of dodgy games, but no, they actually did quite well for themselves because of Wordwise. A 1984 ad that mentions a change of address:
That second address is not a normal house. It is a full estate, one built between 1768 and 1773 that has its own Wikipedia page and was used as the set for movies. It was bought by (and still owned by) Charles Moir, who became very rich from his company.
Before Computer Concepts, Moir had been interested in electronics and he’d belonged to computer clubs. After he had finished school, he avoided university and was tinkering with his dad’s business instead. But aged 17 fate took a hand: Moir met Acorn founders Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry. By the age of 21 he’d written Wordwise programming in his bedroom.
Demand for those early machines exceeded expectations and sometimes supply: the BBC’s target for the BBC Micro, for example, was 12,000 units but in the end 1.5 million went to eager young geeks. BBC Micros sat in 85 per cent of British schools.
Moir tells us: “The BBC Micro became huge and the product I did, Wordwise, became very popular on the back of that. All of a sudden I was making a fortune much to the amazement of my parents, because I was 21.”
As far as the author of today’s game goes, Peter Smith, I haven’t found any evidence he had a special relationship with Computer Concepts. He was a math teacher who eventually went full time into software development. His other 1982 text adventure which we will be getting to (Time Traveler) was published by an entirely different company, Software For All. He later did children’s software through BBC Soft (the BBC’s own software house), with titles like Picture Craft, Maths With a Story and Through the Dragon’s Eye.
All this (from two people who either create or land with very respectable companies) makes the content of Hitch-Hiker even more puzzling, as this not only is it a unlicensed product of the Douglas Adams book, it rips in a minor way of a different company’s version of Hitchhiker’s! (This is still two years away from Infocom’s game.)
To back up and explain, we’ve had so far a 1980 version of Hitchhiker’s with the serial numbers crossed out (Galactic Hitchhiker) but for the obscure UK101 where it wouldn’t cause a fuss. We also had a made-with-permission-from-Pan-Books 1981 text adventure by Bob Chappell and published by Supersoft. Supersoft made the mistake of trying to republish the game in 1983 when people were paying more attention to these “electronic game” things, getting themselves a knock on the door from literary agent Ed Victor and a lawsuit. It was settled out of court (despite the letter giving permission) and Supersoft had to rename their game Cosmic Capers.
You might think that a company with deep pockets would also be a target, but Computer Concepts seemed to shy away from games when 1983 rolled around and the sweet word processor money started to pour in, so nobody paid their game much attention. (Compare with how the VisiCalc folks initially published Zork.) The game seems to be rather rare besides.
Supersoft didn’t make a fuss either, even though the opening room seems to be taken directly from their game:
The Five Artefacts Inn is not some sort of Hitchhiker’s lore, but rather simply the location the treasures go in Bob Chappell’s game. (It had an interesting take on “treasure” in the Hitchhiker-verse; a high-value check was not considered a treasure, but a towel was.) There’s also a “rubbish tip” early which shows up in the Chappell game…
…but that’s it. Things go in rather a different direction. For example, the Vogon is not actively trying to kill you. You can try to GET him and the game will say “I’m not getting that villian.I’d shoot him” but there’s nothing in the starting locations that suggests a weapon:
While Supersoft Hitchhiker’s was weirdly laid out I still got the impression of different specific zones; here I have no idea why we’d start next to a small dog, improbability drive, cut price cheese-cake at a intergalactic market, sparkling crystal, strong cup of tea, and pack of galactic peanuts. The level of surrealism isn’t quite up to Fantasyland but it’s nearing that level.
The only real obstacles are a “horrible hay monster” (GET MONSTER: “Sorry I’ve gotten hay fever”) and a warp transporter which says it uses crystals. That means, you would think, the crystal would apply for teleport (and maybe get this game kicked off but I’ve tried many, many verbs with no luck.
USE CRYSTAL, ENTER TRANSPORTER, POWER WARP, ENTER WARP, BEAM UP, THROW CRYSTAL, INSERT CRYSTAL, PLACE CRYSTAL, etc.
INSERT CRYSTAL at least has a prompt about what I want to insert, but typing CRYSTAL just gives no reaction. The game takes the standpoint of simply refreshing the room description if a command isn’t understood, with no hint if it was a verb problem, noun problem, or it just is deciding to be fussy.
I do think this parser has more chinks in the armor than Windmere Estate did so I expect to be able to break through for my next post.
There was briefly some “professional” distribution via Aresco. Based on the manual’s date (December 1979) it was simply distributed throughout 1980. They put in classified ads but not what one might call full professional advertising.
The “Ask Me About Kim-Venture” distribution happened after distribution had trailed off already at the end of summer, 1980, at the Personal Computing Show in Atlantic City. (Only the West Coast event gets described as a “faire” so I was getting the events confused.) Since Leedom himself is in the comments he can check me if I have this right now!
The Apple 1 debut at the Atlantic 1976 show. The man in the picture is a friend of Steve Jobs, Daniel Kottke. Source.
So last time I was stuck due to a dragon eating my bird, and none of my other objects seemingly getting any acknowledgement. The Original Adventure involved fisticuffs, where you ATTACK DRAGON and it asks you if you mean your bare hands and you say yes; this game had no equivalent (although I did test dropping all my items and applying Use, I mean Employ; there’s just no message that appears if you have no objects, though).
I finally peeked at the map which indicated the bird worked on the dragon after all. (??) Rather confused, I tried to drop the bird rather than employ it, and this time the bird scared the dragon off. I have no idea what the difference between the two is (does the game assume “employ” means I wanted to hurl it into the dragon’s mouth? I am failing to visualize what’s happening).
The remainder of the game was relatively straightforward, as I had already resolved the hard part (figuring out where the magic gets used so you can warp at the steps — you can’t bring one of the treasures up from the steps, so warping has to be used).
Mapping was the difficult part; as you can tell above, the directions start to twist more or less on every single step. Everything funnels down to a pair of three “pits” (north, east, south) and going down at the north and the east pit leads to a “hole” where the rope is needed to escape. I think the intent was to fool the player into not also testing going down at the south pit but that leads to an entirely new location, a blue den, and going down again leads to some pearls.
You still need a rope to get out, and it is definitely possible to get softlocked here (one of the ranks in the scoring system is “you got stuck”, accounting for this).
The other element is a Gully, where going west has the game prompt you how.
There’s no description but given there aren’t many objects to play with it isn’t tough to realize the so-far unused rod has to apply here.
This leads the way to some Gold, and just like original Adventure, you can’t get the Gold back up the steps. This is where the teleportation comes into play, and so you can drop the treasures off and win.
The game lets you try for a maximum-optimal time for higher score. This is far tighter than normal but keep in mind the context of this game (it’s already enormously tricky to get the game running in the first place) so I can see trying to squeeze out every ounce of potential interest.
By the way, there were no assemblers, at least I didn’t own an assembler back at this time. All of this was in machine language, and hand-assembled, and I created…I had messages in there…you know, on a 7-segment LED display, you can’t make a K or a W– there’s several letters that are just too complicated to put up there. I could make an S, I can make a lowercase N.
Just to reiterate, the calculator display wasn’t able to show a K or W letter, so the way Leedom worked around that is to simply avoid using words that had either letter. There could be a red room, or blue room, or purple room, but a white room or a black room simply weren’t possible with the technology.
Most histories of personal computing focus on devices resembling a modern computer, with a keyboard and screen — perhaps provided separate from the main product — and the main hardware hidden by a case. However, a full accounting of computers for personal use really ought to be more expansive. If you wanted a computer in the 1950s, you could go with the Geniac, made out of masonite disks and wires.
Some kits from the 1970s involved literal exposed circuit boards. The TK-80, for example, was a kit sold in Japan; one of the earliest adaptations of anime to computers (Space Battleship Yamato) was made for the system.
ASCII Magazine, August 1978, from bsittler via Gaming Alexandria.
The system for today’s game is a KIM-1, which first was sold by MOS Technology in 1976. By default it had room for displaying six characters of text at a time using a “calculator display”.
Based on source code from The First Book of KIM (1979) the six letters could go a long way, allowing for Blackjack games, Hunt the Wumpus, Lunar Lander, and an animal-recognition program called Farmer Brown.
As the symbols above imply, the calculator display can be used in unusual ways; letters and words required creative modifications.
Read the text here as “you are at”.
Today’s author, Robert Leedom, started his experiences with computing in the hardscrabble 60s; while he didn’t build the paperclip computer, he did build an analog computer while in high school. He ran across the People’s Computing Company in their early days, and after attending college at Johns Hopkins (programming with punched cards) he got a job at Westinghouse and obtained experience with a Data General Nova, noodling with the programs from Ahl’s collection of BASIC computer games.
I had seen Colossal Cave Adventure running on an IBM mainframe, so I decided to see how much of a similar game I could cram into 1188 bytes–I think that’s the total on a virgin KIM-1, which was the only computer I had access to. I had no I/O capabilities other than the KIM-1 display and keyboard, plus a cassette tape recorder. Therefore, the program was assembled by hand, and then I typed (on a typewriter, of course) the “listing” of the source code.
Just like a common hack for modern machines is to see if it runs DOOM, programmers of the late-70s-early-80s tried to make every computer play a form of Adventure, even ones that were absurdly limited. Leedom cheekily explains in an interview he managed to fit “26 rooms, 2 treasures to take back, a magic rod, a magic word, a dragon, a bird, a whole bunch of stuff in there and I crammed it all into 1,185 bytes. I left 3 bytes over for user expansion.” In a different interview Leedom explains he used compression rather like the Z-Code of Infocom or the A-Code of Level 9.
He managed to find a local company to print copies and showed up to the 1979 Computer Faire in San Francisco Atlantic City wearing an “Ask me about KIM-Venture” shirt.
I had technical issues getting the game running (I tried roughly back when the game was first dumped) but there’s now a helpful Youtube guide accompanying an online emulator and the source code on Github. Due to the size limit the score can’t be known from the base game; after finishing you can upload the SCORER program to the right address (which copies atop the main program) and run it.
The limited keyboard of the KIM-1 means it has no parser but rather improvises using the buttons available. From the manual:
I love the fact that (due to the letters being restricted to A-F, as in hexadecimal) “E” for Employ becomes the Use button.
Our quest is to find the hidden caves of Nirdarf and its treasures.
Many, many years ago, before the Semi-Colossal Caverns of Nirdarf were the subject of whispered terror, a townsman found a scrap of paper wrapped up in an oak leaf, down in Least Valley. That’s a few miles north of here, and that’s where the last explorers were finally found … absolutely mad. Anyway, this scrap had some scribbling on it, and a little drawing, and lots of the local folks think the message has to do with the caves and the treasures.
The scrap of paper is not only provided in the manual…
…but also gets represented in the game itself. You get prompted to act by what vaguely looks like a question mark, and on the same display you also get shown the “current image” of the most recently seen symbol.
Here’s an animation of the opening of the game just to show what the game looks like to play; I enter a location described as having a 2-inch slit. (This is a larger GIF size than I normally use, but the experience here is so much different than a typical computer game I think it’s important.)
The game kicks off in a clearly-inspired-by-Adventure area. You’re at a stream, a house is to the north, and if you go down while in the house you can find a cellar with a file, cage, and rope.
The game deviates from Adventure upon heading south and arriving at a grate; employing the file (not keys!) turns it into an “open” grate. (The way using objects works is you press E to start the process, and then the game lists each of your objects in order; you press E again when the right object displays in order to use it.)
First off while inside is a “tunnel” with a rod, and a “bird room” based with a bird that can be caught in a cage. The usual behavior applies where you can’t pick up a bird while holding the rod (this is mentioned in the manual as a hint).
Next comes a “purple oracle” room, which I’ll show as actual screenshots. Keep in mind these appear slowly one at a time!
So the purple oracle has a sign that says the magic button is 0. This is hinting about an mention in the manual about the “F” key; if you press it, the game requests what the magic button is. To get the magic started, you need to press “0”. In most locations this will do nothing still (“no joy”) but if you are at the Stone Steps in the underground you get teleported to the Cellar, and vice versa. I don’t know if there are more teleport spots, because I’m stuck immediately after on a dragon.
The dragon blocks all directions except back to the steps. If you employ the bird (thinking perhaps this will work like the snake in Adventure) the dragon simply eats the bird. The rod, rope, file, and cage get “no joy”. I am honestly not sure what to do from here!
I have not tried every item in every place (maybe the bird wants to be free in the glen?) mainly because it is very slow trying to do anything in this game, but I find it fascinating to be stuck with such apparently limited options. I also have not investigated any of the glyphs that show up in the rooms (the symbols that show when the game prompts for an action) and if their significance needs to be gleaned for a puzzle.
There’s a longplay on an actual KIM-1 so I can fall back on that if I need to, but despite it being on such an unusual system I’m going to treat it like a regular adventure game and hold off from looking up hints for a while longer.
Thanks to Code Monkey King and Kevin Bunch, whose interviews with Robert Leedom I used for the history section of this post. Code Monkey King also made the emulator but note you should use the older version of his emulator if you want to play, as the newer one I’ve found has an error. (Specifically, when uploading the main code, it ends up resetting the variables to 0.)
Renga in Blue 
