I did not need to bop open the North Star version of the game after all, although I did hit a
I/O ERROR
BREAK IN 0
for no apparent reason once. My biggest breakthrough sounds kind of silly written out, so let me just give a map first. Yellow rooms are new.
Yes, I was foiled by diagonal directions. I had been testing them tediously nearly everywhere (YOU CANNOT MOVE IN THAT DIRECTION, YOU CANNOT MOVE IN THAT DIRECTION, YOU CANNOT MOVE IN THAT DIRECTION, etc.) but had apparently forgot to check in the West Upstairs Hall, one of the only rooms that has any! They’re technically in the room description, but given the presence of zero diagonals briefly, I hope you understand my issue.
THIS IS THE WEST ENO OF THE UPSTAIRS HALL. THERE ARE EXITS LEADING IN ALL DIRECTIONS.
After finding this I also noticed there’s exits up and down, again technically included in “all directions” more often not counted with that sort of statement.
The diagonal rooms technically speaking don’t yield much other than SILKS (just a treasure) and an IVORY CARVING (which we’ll need later). There’s an amusing music room scene which I think does nothing but might be a Cranston Manor reference.
Mr. Strong had almost certainly played Cranston Manor: it was the most famous of the North Star games, having the Apple II version published by Sierra. (This fact was later advertised, trying for piggyback marketing.)
Leading down goes to inside a (non-working) furnace in the basement with a GOLD EGG. I previously did not know the furnace was enterable; the EGG is just like the vase in Adventure where it breaks upon dropping (and you can’t LEAVE it to somehow indicate “set down more gently” like with the UK game Zodiac). I found the proper item essentially by luck, as I had all my stuff (including treasures, warehouse trips came later) in one room including the sawdust box so setting down the egg became safe by default.
Before going up, I should point to the other yellow spot on the upper floor: at the master bedroom, with the suspicious PORTRAIT, it turned out I was supposed to refer to it as a PICTURE, and TURN PICTURE. Just wonderful, game.
The skeleton now unlocks (with INSERT SKELETON) the door back at the well. It does not lead to a new area at all, but rather directly to the warehouse holding treasures.
Since going up the well takes the player almost directly to the warehouse already, having this extra path was puzzling. There’s a reason but we won’t get to it until nearly the end.
Warping back to that UPSTAIRS HALL and going up leads to a rooftop with an observation tower holding KEYS. The keys unlock the trunk back at the garage I was having trouble with (getting STAMPS, just a treasure; the keys aren’t useful for anything else).
You might notice the weathervane being described as to the west. This baffled me for a long time, and for compactness I’ll give the resolution now: the weathervane is to the east rather than the west. (I did say “exits being ornery to find” was the theme!) I will also confess I did not “solve” this issue but rather found this on the CASA walkthrough; I suspected high bug shenanigans.
Turning the weathervane is strongly clued…
…and that drops you in a secret corner of the hedge maze with a dagger.
With the dagger it’s possible to deal with the mysterious STAB RATS message. The problem is the rats aren’t in the same room as the plaque.
One of the items I had been frustrated by was a SACK which stubbornly refused to be opened or have anything else done with it. The sack turns out to be a passive item; if you’re holding it, you can pick up the rats, will end up inside the sack. This lets the player safely cart the rats over to the plaque and finally STAB RATS.
Typo aficionados may appreciate “SQUEEL FROM THE PAIN”.
I’ll show off the destination in a moment, because there’s another way in, involving something I already tried: swimming at the lake.
(The marked-corner spots are dark, which will be important.)
Note that swimming in the lake ends up hitting one of the few bits of world-model awareness in the game’s coding: getting the flashlight wet will fry it. You need to leave the flashlight behind, and you can then nab the DUBLOONS, a SPYGLASS (a treasure, but also useful for something) and a SWORD (not useful at all, even for stabbing rats).
From the map layout, the dubloons/spyglass area can only be reached via swimming. However, to see in the dark rooms, you need to bring the light, which requires taking the rat passage. (It’s possible to walk in the dark without dying for at least a few steps, so it’s fine to swim in first; this also gives a hint that there is, in fact, a secret passage at the STAR BATS room.)
The important dark room is a self-described “RIDDLE ROOM”. You are requested to drop “SOMETHING THAT IS PURE (OR ALMOST).”
This seemed to me like it had to be a treasure, but which one is “pure”? I got the right item first try but I’m not sure if I got lucky or not: I was thinking about the common advertisements (up to at least the 80s) for Ivory Soap.
The “OR ALMOST” in particular made me think of the weirdly exact “99 44/100” tagline for the soap.
You can normally just leave through the south, but the EMERALD can’t be taken that way; however, putting it in the opening sends it through an “ELEVATOR” which is clearly the dumbwaiter…
YOU PLACE THE EMERALD IN THE OPENING. THE MECHANISM WHIRRS AND THE STONE IS LIFTED AS IF IT WERE ON AN ELEVATOR.
…so all my struggle with that got resolved by simply using the dumbwaiter from the other side. (That is, the emerald can now be picked up at the Servant’s Quarters.)
That’s all of that section. The next section I was missing is almost entirely on me.
THE GARAGE HAS LONG SINCE BEEN EMPTY BUT THERE IS LAOOER LEADING UP
Almost entirely: there’s an undescribed exit to the west.
sigh The Nemesis returns.
YOU ARE ON A NARROW PATH
>NW
THIS IS WHERE THE WATER FOR THE ESTATE COMES FROM. THE PUMP NO LONGER WORKS BUT THE FLOOR IS WET FROM A SMALL TRICKLE OF WATER SEEPING FROM THE SEAL. NEXT TO THE PIPE IS A HOLE WHICH LEADS INTO DARKNESS. IT LOOKS LARGE ENOUGH TO SQUEEZE THROUGH BUT…
This area is relatively straightforward, except for:
a.) There’s some RUBIES that you need to be holding the SACK again to get.
b.) There’s a “doorless room” with a LAMP; you need to RUB LAMP to get out, which is almost reflex now for me and early 80s games.
c.) There’s a cufflink in a LOST CAVERN where leaving the room gets the message that something seems to be missing (the cufflink). This puzzle is meant to essentially waste your time since there’s nothing you can do (no elevator chutes or whatnot) and it turns out the cufflink teleported back to the WAREHOUSE where it belongs.
I will say there was a sense of atmosphere built up here; even though it wasn’t really a secret area, the fact it came up late in my gameplay gave the section an extra dose of mysticism.
Oh, and d.) I finally get to use the shovel where DIG??? was the response everywhere. At least the description telegraphs the puzzle.
From here I was really stuck and did a bunch of treasure-transfers back to the warehouse. It started getting fairly stuffed.
It doesn’t even all fit on the screen.
One item that seemed like it might be helpful is the GOLD SPYGLASS from the island. I tried GAZE SPYGLASS, LOOK THROUGH SPYGLASS (not a three-word parser but the game might have decided to be cruel here), USE SPYGLASS, etc., always getting the response
GAZE SPYGLASS???
This is a case which shows why bespoke actions at locations are a super-bad idea. The messages imply that all the syntaxes are wrong; even if you have awareness this might not be the case (as I did by this point) you essentially need to try every plausible syntax in every plausible room. The right room makes sense but it’s very easy given the circumstances to mess up.
I can easily see why from the perspective of Dennis Strong there wouldn’t be a problem here: the text does signal the observation tower is a helpful place for the spyglass. However, this is certainly an abductive reasoning moment and there are far too many circumstances where a player won’t find this because of the extra parser hurdle. (Quick definition recap: with deduction, we have fully known rules and circumstances that when together force some kind of conclusion. With abduction, we have circumstances where we have to infer the chain of events, but it’s a probabilistic guess.)
With the sighting from the spyglass, you can now go north from the “BREEZEWAY” which isn’t described as anything other than being a breezeway.
For the start of this final section, I hit a horrid moment where I thought I needed to restart the game.
Going down the hole causes you to break your neck, in a message reminiscent of trying to jump into the well at the start of the game. At the well, I had used a rope to go down (TIE ROPE) and it formed an odd second shortcut to the warehouse (since the bottom of the well had the skeleton-door leading straight to the warehouse). You’re supposed to use the rope here. I went back to the well to get the rope back:
UNTIE ROPE
UNTIE ROPE???
GET ROPE
THERE ISN’T ANY ROPE YOU CAN GET
??? Really? Fortunately, knowing how bad the parser is, I made a few more attempts, and hit upon TAKE ROPE.
Just to be clear, even though get and take are normally treated as synonyms, for the one specific case of getting the rope back, TAKE works and GET does not. Parsers keep finding new ways to disappoint me.
With the rope and hand we can get into the cave:
Just a bit farther is an unsteady subterranean lake.
The choice above (with the dam about to burst) is once again puzzling. I tried the most obvious thing of directions first (outrunning the event, maybe) but the game told me east and west weren’t exits. I kept going and found that NORTH brings you back to the lake but also floods the tunnel, while SOUTH somehow stops the flood.
YOU MANAGE TO SUCCESSFULLY STOP THE WATER FLOW BEFORE IT FILLED THE CAVERN.
Your guess is as good as mine. All these leads to a dead end and a PLATINUM PLATYPUS.
Just to be clear, I’m emphasizing the parts of the game I had trouble, but this isn’t generally intended as difficult (I think the RATS/BAG thing is the hardest, especially with the poison fake-out). When this was simply a game about exploring new areas and scooping up treasures it felt satisfying, and it is even possible some of the friction I suffered helped make the simple moments come across better.
That is, I enjoyed scooping up the platypus even though I still don’t know what was going on with the dam puzzle.
That’s everything, I think? (There are so many treasures I might have missed mentioning one. I’ve covered all the puzzles, at least.) Once you drop the last treasure in the overfilling warehouse the endgame immediately starts.
This is a two-room endgame, just like Crowther/Woods Adventure.
It also has nearly the exact same solution as Adventure, albeit much more fairly clued. Not only do the room descriptions suggest the keg goes to the rubble, but there was a book long back that made the comment to BLAST those pirates.
I do not care about exploration percentage maximum, although it was good to signal how many chunks of map I was missing.
This could have been a fun straightforward exploration game, but it was undercut by technical issues. Here is another case where I wish the author had a modern copy of Inform (or hell, even AGT) because so many of wobbly parts would be resolved.
There was some imagination and attempt and building a world full of shortcuts and niches. One room I skipped mentioning gives an idea:
FROM HERE YOU CAN SEE THE WESTERN PART OF THE ESTATE. YOU ARE SURROUNDED BY A THICK FOREST OF WALNUT AND OAK TREES. TO THE NORTH YOU CAN SEE A SMALL STREAM WINDING THROUGH THE FOREST. TO THE WEST ATOP A SMALL KNOLL IS SHALL BUILDING FROM WHICH A PIPE EXTENDS TO THE HOUSE. YOU CAN BARELY SEE SOMETHING TO THE NORTH BUT YOUR VIEW IS MOSTLY BLOCKED BY SOME LARGE TREES.
Sure, this isn’t artistic at a prose level, but — this indicates the garage-exit I had missed, and also the author really was thinking about the big-picture view of how everything is laid out. The extra area to the north is hinted at here (and can only be seen by the spyglass on the roof — it really would be a good puzzle if the parser didn’t keep screaming at the player). We’ve had authors that haven’t taken nearly that much care and seem to be just laying down one room after another. I hope even if Zodiac Castle turns out to be a worse game somehow the author keeps up his sense of architecture.
Coming up: a game for a computer with only a six-character display.
Let’s start in the area we’ve already seen, at the room just east of the beginning:
This is the Main Entrance to the estate, although the gate is rusted shut. Through the gate is visible a large low building. South is the Gate House, north, a path runs along the wall, and east is a gravel path.
I was puzzled by this room description at first as it seemed to imply (via it being a Main Entrance) that we entered through that route, so why would it be rusted shut? Maybe we parachuted in, like Avventura nel castello.
A bit across the estate there’s a crowbar, and if you tote the crowbar back, you can PRY GATE to bust it open and reveal a WAREHOUSE. This is where the treasures go.
Let me give my meta-map before going any farther (this gives how things are connected in a general way):
I’m likely missing a fair chunk; the most likely candidate for missing geography is the strange door at the bottom of the well I gave a screenshot of last time. Just as an encore:
The DIARY found early unlocks with a KEY laying around the estate, and it contains the hint that THE SKELETON IS YOUR KEY TO SUCCESS. I don’t know if that means I’m supposed to make some horrid pun to open the door or if I just use something unusual like a bone; since I haven’t found any bones I can’t test that yet.
On to the main house proper:
It’s essentially one long central hall with some side rooms. To the north there’s a study with a map (“25L 40R 88L”) that we’ll use in a moment, and a book which I haven’t puzzled out yet (other than it does count as a treasure).
THIS BOOK APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN THE JOURNAL OF ONE OF THE ANCESTORS OF THE FAMILY. IT DESCRIBES BEING ROBBED BY PIRATES WHILE ON A SHIP FROM ENGLAND. THE MAN WAS OBVIOUSLY UNHAPPY SINCE THE LAST WORDS ARE ‘BLAST THE PIRATES’.
To the south are a candlestick (treasure) and a truly confusing room with a plaque I shared last time.
The plaque says “STAR BATS”.
Thinking in terms of a mirror, this could be written as STAB RATS. Two rooms to the east there are, in fact, bats, and STAB does nothing as far as the parser goes, although KILL works as long as you are holding the poison from the groundskeeper’s house.
In some games this would mean simple victory, but seems to be absolutely no positive effect to killing the rats. I suspect I’m chasing down a blind alley somehow.
Oh, and speaking of parser issues, there’s a Servant’s Quarters with a DUMBWAITER that is resistant to any of my efforts of having it do anything at all. If there’s another giant set of rooms it probably is related to that.
On to the upstairs (map above)! There’s a gold watch, lighter, and pair of earrings just lying about. The earrings are in a MASTER BEDROOM with a truly suspicious portrait which is again resistant to my parser-shenanigans.
Notice how the last parser message is different. I wonder if this is a “chink in the armor” so to speak; occasionally in what is mostly a bespoke parser I can still work out things like “which nouns are useful to try mucking about with” via odd phenomena like this.
The upstairs also contains a room with a roll-top desk (no idea if it can be referred to) and a VAULT. The vault clearly was intended to have the code from the MAP downstairs applied, but I was truly baffled trying a set of commands like TURN DIAL, OPEN VAULT, ENTER CODE, etc. Rob and Roger in the comments let me know that 25L 40R 88L needed to be typed flat out, exactly like that.
Inside is some CURRENCY, and that’s that. (You’re forced to leave behind the MAP, but it seems to have no value.)
Finally, let’s visit the garage and docks:
Not much to speak of yet. There’s that crowbar used on the main gate, a box of sawdust, and a locked trunk I have been unable to open; there’s oars lying around and a boat you can ROW. Typing ROW BOAT, weirdly, leads you over to behind the caretaker’s house where there’s a treasure (a STATUETTE). I’m unclear the geography here, but given you’re supposed to be moving along a stream, I don’t think it’s meant to be a literal wrap-around map like The Hermit’s Secret.
Instead of jumping in the boat you can go west over to a pier, where there’s a lake and an island visible to the southwest. However, jumping the lake and typing SWIM just takes you back to the docks. The boat won’t move and I haven’t been able to steer it towards the island. I suspect this represents a third set of rooms I haven’t seen yet.
That weird “MOVE” response again.
Maybe I’ll switch back to North Star for a while; even if it is buggier than the Apple II version, it might be buggy in different ways that will reveal potential puzzle solutions. Maybe just seeing the text without ALL CAPS will trigger my brain to move in new ways.
This is a continuation of the historical story from Uncle Harry’s Will and Whembly Castle, as today’s game was again sold by Dynacomp for North Star computers, but this time with a different author: Dennis N. Strong. Mr. Strong had two games (this one and Zodiac Castle) show up in the Dynacomp Winter Catalog as “late additions”.
As the disk above implies, there is an important difference between the Strong games and the Turner games: Strong’s were ported to Apple II.
Through the investigations of Roger Durrant, we know the Apple II version of Windmere Estate is preferred (the North Star is glitchier, and the Apple II has some extra ASCII graphics). The reverse is true of Zodiac Castle as the Apple II version of Zodiac Castle has a fatal bug.
This is a straightforward explore-the-place-and-nab-the-treasures adventure; here, they’re going to a WAREHOUSE.
The most notable early difference is that the Apple II port notes
THERE ARE OCCASIONALLY ‘HINTS’ AVAILABLE AT THE COMPLEX SPOTS.
which is not mentioned in the North Star version! HINT is a recognized command on North Star but it crashes the game.
Oddly, the Dynacomp catalog’s “ad” has instructions with more detail than either version. Specifically:
Lights turn on with LIGHT ON or ON; given the light device is a FLASHLIGHT, this is rather difficult to discover (otherwise why not FLASHLIGHT ON?).
There is a strong emphasis on hidden rooms.
The inventory limit is seven unless you can place an item inside another item.
There are deadly vampire bats although there’s “one sure repellant available somewhere out there.”
For the very first part of the game I’m going to give some clips from the North Star version before switching over entirely to Apple II.
You are in the Rose Garden.
You are standing in the middle of a Rose Garden. To the north a path leads to a small Building. To the south you can see a tall hedge row. A path leads east toward the Main Gate, and west is an old Well.
E
You are At the Main Gate
This is the Main Entrance to the estate, although the gate is rusted shut. Through the gate is visible a large low building South is the Gate House, north, a path runs along the wall, and east is a gravel path.
S
You are in the Gate House.
This is the Gate House for the old Estate. It has not been used for quite some time, and there is dust everywhere. The only remaining furniture is a small cabinet on the floor.
There is a locked leather DIARY here!
Opening the cabinet reveals the FLASHLIGHT where I tortured myself for a while trying to activate it before discovering the information from the catalog (again, despite it be referred to as a FLASHLIGHT in text, the parser wants it used by typing LIGHT ON; light is being used as a verb, there’s no way to light the flashlight by using flashlight as a noun).
Heading back to the start and going north:
You are standing in front of what appears to be the groundskeepers house. There are paths west, south, and east. There is a door and one window visible on the ground floor.
N
It is dark – You cannot see anything!
ON
That’s much better!
A devilish looking Vampire BAT swoops down and blocks the way
You are inside Groundskeeper’s House.
This building obviously has not been used recently, judging by the dust. There is a cupboard standing open in the corner.
There is a box of rat POISON here!
There is an old SHOVEL here!
There is a coil of ROPE here!
There is a Vampire BAT here!
Unfortunately, at trying to get something the bat swoops down and kills you. You need to get the “repellent” first before the items.
Well, most of them. The ROPE is not placed here in the Apple II version of the game, but rather past a hedge maze leading to the main house!
Finding this difference (and knowing the Apple II version has working hints) I decided to swap over entirely.
The vampire “repellent” was rather quick to find: you can go up past the bat room.
YOU ARE IN THE LIVING QUARTERS.
THIS IS WHERE THE GROUNDSKEEPER USE TO LIVE. IN THE ROOM ARE A BED, A DRESSER AND A CLOSET.
>OPEN DRESSER
YOU SEE A SMALL JEWELED ‘CROSS’
Entering a dark room without the cross results in the back coming back, so I expect the cross will be carried the entire game, meaning two of the seven allocated inventory slots have already been eaten up. Not great for a treasure collection game!
Fortunately, just in the closet (OPEN CLOSET) there is some relief, as in addition to a gold key it contains a sack; this presumably is what the catalog-instructions was referring to. Unfortunately, I have no idea what command makes the sack work!
I referenced a hedge maze already, so let me give the initial part of the game:
I used Dungeon Scrawl for the hedge maze.
Getting down to the bottom of the well requires simply TIE ROPE (not ATTACH ROPE as the Dynacomp catalog implies)
YOU DEFTLY TIE THE ROPE TO THE CRANK SPINDLE ANO TOSS THE OTHER ENO DOWN THE WELL.
This leads to a waterless “well bottom” which also turns out to be underneath the house. It connects with a “wine cellar” and “furnace” and some stairs leading up to the main building.
I have yet to get in the door with the strangely shaped keyhole.
Everything past this is very open so this is a good place to pause. I suspect the “hidden rooms” are going to cause the biggest pain. This is especially true because the parser is quite non-cooperative. Nearly every command that is not understood repeats the command back with question marks. So if you want to MOVE BED to check for something underneath, it responds with MOVE BED??? and no information is conveyed about if the verb is understood, or if the noun is something even meant to be referred to.
There easily could be a secret here, but nothing I’ve tried has worked. The plaque says “STAR BATS”.
Even the winged birds and the two-footed and four-footed, o silvery
Dawn, have set forth following your regulations of time, from the ends of heaven—
For, dawning forth with your rays, you illuminate the whole luminous realm.
— Rig Veda, I.49 Dawn
I was stalled by, once again, spelling. But in a different way this time! (For my previous antics, see my writeup of Circus.)
You see, I was somehow mentally shelving this game having as a three-letter parser, I think because of the spelling “albotross”; ALB was fine for me mentally, ALBO or ALBOTROSS slightly broke my brain. So I went through what turned out to be correct (KILL) but typed it as KILL ALB and not KILL ALBO (whereupon you must specify throwing the knife).
The manual’s hint specified flying; looking at the dead alb– grr, let’s say, “bird”, the game says it has a hole. Miraculously, probably form playing too many Sierra games, I quickly came up with
LIGHT MATCH
MELT WAX
WITH MATCH
which was sufficient to plug the hole.
THE WING IS NOW SUITABLE FOR FLIGHT.
So just to be clear, we’re toting around a dead bird and using it to fly. Sure? You can then go back to the cold lake and fly your way across, but before showing you the next spot, I should mention this is probably the part closest to the Vedas. The gods can “fly like birds” and get constantly compared to them. In a portion on the Maruts (storm deities):
With your chariots fitted with lightning bolts and with spears, whose wings are horses, accompanied by lovely chants, drive here, o Maruts.
Fly here like birds, with highest refreshment for us, you masters of artifice.
In the literature from this period generally there’s enough references to flying and magical Vimānas (flying palaces or chariots) that modern conspiracy theories have developed around them. The 20th century book Vaimānika Shāstra claims the magic is in reality advanced technology; UFO enthusiasts go on to make claims about ancient astronauts and/or aliens depending on their inclination.
My wondering about a random American in the Midwest picking this as a topic could be resolved by this mythology, as it is one of the most famous pieces of cultural lore to come out of the Vedas. It still easily could be by accident but the moment of grabbing a gigantic bird from the sky and using it to fly did feel just a little bit like a moment of the gods (fly, not glide, we’re launching from ground level).
Across the lake is a narrow island. In the middle a soldier blocks the way.
The soldier has armor so you can’t just use KILL; a quick item roll call:
cup with water, knife, matches, shovel, dead bird, two Vedas, coin
I didn’t have the water before, but while frustrated by the bird I tested TAKE WATER at the lake and it worked. The coin came from looking at one of the Vedas (a bookmark, I suppose) and can be given to the soldier who will take it as a bribe and leave. This is followed by the other end of the island, where you can fly yet again.
No more lake: you’ve landed in a desert, which is fairly empty except for a cactus in the center. I tried various attempts to apply the KNIFE to the cactus before simply attempting a DIG instead.
This leads to an underground chamber and the Yagur Veda.
A bit further is a locked door; the game lets you PICK LOCK and specify you want to use the knife. I appreciate the amount of item re-use this has had.
Then comes the last obstacle, a TOMB ENTRANCE with a zombie and some burning leaves. I didn’t have much to work with but I was still carrying water; pouring it led to the leaves being extinguished and the zombie disappearing with the leaves (??).
Finally the fourth book can be claimed.
The locations for all the Morgan games have generally lacked depth, including this one, although somehow the format of a quasi-mystical challenge made it more playable; I had an easier time than Miner 49’er, certainly, and only got stalled by the bird.
Part of the Yajur Veda, via Wikipedia.
I finally made a breakthrough on the mysterious ASD&D. I was poking about in this catalog which has the RPG Wizard’s Domain mentioned, and the name Thomas Johnson. This ended up being a much better lead than Scott Morgan, and I eventually landed on a timeline page which supposedly has a full story:
A Third-Party software house owned by Tom Johnson and run out of P.O. Box 46 Cottage Grove, MN 55016. The company seems to have surfaced in 1981 and disappeared in 1984, shortly after the 99/4A was abandoned by Texas Instruments. Among the dozen or so BASIC and Extended BASIC educational and entertainment products the company manufactured, perhaps the most remembered were Wizard’s Dominion and Entrapment. Wizard’s Dominion was an extremely popular fantasy adventure type game written by Johnson himself. Entrapment, another Tom Johnson creation, was a Mini Memory assembly language coded game that was so well written Texas Instruments had decided in early 1983 to pick it up and market it. Unfortunately, the big “bailout” of October 28th, 1983 took place first and Entrapment never came to market under the TI banner. It did surface through Tenex Computer Express in 1986 however.
The October date is when the TI-99/4A was discontinued.
There’s no sourcing on the connection and I haven’t been able to unearth anything definitively saying Johnson owned the company, but I’ve found enough products with Johnson’s name attached I’m comfortable saying the paragraph is mostly accurate. Previously I speculated
Still, I get the vibe we’re dealing with a 2 or at most 3 person operation here.
which is right, it’s just there’s really only one person (Johnson) who published Morgan’s work.
Now the Lord of the Sacred Formulation proclaims the mantra worthy to be spoken,
in which Indra, Varuṇa, Mitra, Aryaman, and the gods have made their home.
Just that would we speak at the rites—the faultless mantra that brings good fortune, o gods.
And if you gladly receive this speech, o noble men, it will attain all things of yours worth winning.
— Rig Veda, I.40 Brahmaṇaspati, Jamison and Brereton translation
Scott Morgan of Eden Prairie, Minnesota produced a series of six games for Texas Instruments computers in 1982 published under the name American Software Design and Distribution (ASD&D).
I am not clear on the intended order. I started with the “beginner” game (Aqua Base) which said at the end to play Haunted House, and the ending of Haunted house said to play Miner, and the end of Miner said to play Vedas, so I’m just following the chain. I should find out at the end of this game whether I’m playing Fun House or Stone Age next.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
In Search of the Four Vedas is one of the two games (along with Fun House) marked as “advanced” although at least the start of the game is straightforward.
During this adventure you must find the ancient books that your tribe lost many years ago. They contain great knowledge of magic and the past.
Your goal is to find the four Vedas of Hinduism: the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda and the Atharva Veda.
I don’t think there’s world-verse integration like we had with El Diablero; it’s just the four books form the “treasures” of the game and are a little more interesting than the usual *RUBY*, *DIAMOND*, and *GOLD NECKLACE*. I am not sure why a random American in the Midwest latched onto the Vedas as a good goal, but I appreciate the variety.
A 450-year old copy of the Rig Veda written on bark. The Rig Veda is the oldest of the four, with it being passed orally from somewhere in the second millennium BC. It includes mantras which allegedly are linked to the creation of the cosmos.
The action kicks off on a beach next to a lake too cold to swim in.
The anchor can be nabbed, the X can be dealt with later, and tree can be climbed.
The manual hints about flying a bird, and FLY ALB says “CAN’T FLY…YET!” so I assume there’s some way of setting it up. Here’s the remainder of my currently accessible map:
While quite small I already have two of the Vedas! The first can be found by retrieving a rope from a nearby cave, tying it to the anchor, and then throwing the anchor while next to a “very large tree”. This allows entering a treehouse.
The shovel can then be carted over to the beach where the X sits; digging reveals a chest and the second of the four treasures.
That went rather quickly, but perhaps the treasure distribution is “imbalanced” and the third and fourth will raise serious difficult. As things go I am stuck as there is not much to noodle around with. The Rig Veda had a coin inside; a hut had matches, wax, and a cup. Other than those I still have the shovel for digging as well as a knife, but that’s it. There doesn’t seem to be any places for secret exits, and the “albotross” is not cooperating with any verbs I’ve tried to throw at it. My guess is, structurally, the bird takes us to Part 2 and that’s where things get complicated or at least Advanced.
About now is when I’d trudge through my verb list but the parser treats every valid command in a bespoke way, so there’s no way to find out (say) LASSO is a valid word without testing it in context.
In 1988, a contest was run by the Adventureland BBS out of Lexington, Kentucky called The Great American Adventure Search.
ADVENTURELAND, the largest public domain Adventure base in America, is looking for a few good adventures. And we are offering a prize for the best! From September 1, 1988 to October 30, 1988 we’re offering a prize for the best adventure uploaded! What sort of a prize? How about the Adventure of your choice? Want a copy of Ultima IV? How about Kings Quest III? You might choose a paid-up license for the Adventure Game Toolkit. Any adventure game you’d like (up to $70.00 in value) can be yours IF the adventure YOU upload is chosen as the best!
It seems to me that there have got to be others out there in modem country who have adventure running around in their heads. If you are like me, you are brimming over with plots, and just can’t fathom how to code them. Well, since I started writing adventures in 1981, I’ve learned alot about how to code.
The tutorial package I just mentioned includes, as a sample game from the author, The Case at KAXL. We played that game here already; it’s notable for trying to model a “real” environment as opposed to a puzzle-laden one, with locations that only exist because they’d be part of a real radio station and not in service of a story. At the time I didn’t have any other information on the author, but I now can say not only was Douglas C. Rogers responsible for all the BBS activity above, he was the one who wrote today’s game, Drive-In. My suspicion of his involvement with radio was correct; while running the BBS he was a professor at Eastern Kentucky University in Communications.
A news story where Doug Rogers discusses campus radio. Source.
Drive-In is a much different game than The Case at KAXL. It is, as The Adventurer’s Guild calls it, smut. In fact, I’m going to drop a not safe for certain work environments warning.
Beware of anything past the magazine cover below.
Adventureland BBS gets a mention in this 1992 magazine for being a member of Fidonet, a communications network for BBSes with different communities.
As Rogers was rather dedicated to the public domain model of adventure distribution, Drive-In didn’t need to follow the same path as Bawdy Adventure with sales in a New Orleans-published book; rather, Rogers himself could simply distribute the game on his own BBS once it got started.
Well, here it is! The big evening
Your buddy Arnie set you up with this little number named Andrea, and here you are
a 1987 version for Coleco ADAM by “ADAMafic Software”
a PC port in 1987 (almost certainly by the author himself, as he ported his other C64 adventure game Nectar of the Gods using the same company name, Program Dynamics)
a port by Alan Pilon in 1988 called Passion Pit with a randomized female companion
a shortened 1990 version called Crusin
I went with the Rogers ’87 port. (The C64 original has a moment mentioned in the Adventurer’s Guild writeup that the author clearly re-considered.)
Before moving on to “the big evening” I’m going to interrupt with a question: is this also “the first” text adventure smut? Not exactly: first of all there’s all the mainframe games we’ve now visited, like Castle ending in a three-way, or Haunt’s “touchdown”, but there’s a general lack of detail. The other early candidate is a game called Porno Adventure (1981) which I haven’t written about yet, and probably isn’t worth a post on its own, so here’s the sidebar–
This game is more a “simulator” than an adventure game and has serious customization involved as the player is able to have a “UNINHIBITED, UNCENSORED ADVENTURE” with “ANY WOMAN THEY CHOOSE”. Unusually, the game lets you swap who you are giving commands to, so while start as a man having an uninhibited adventure with a custom woman, it is possible to change to the woman at any time by typing “0”.
SINCE THIS IS A FREE ADVENTURE, WE SPARED ALL COSTS AND PROGRAMMING SHORTCUTS TO BRING YOU THE PROGRAM IN THE CHEAPEST, QUICKEST WAY POSSIBLE. THEREFORE THIS PROGRAM NILL NOT RECOGNIZE ANY ABBREVIATED COMMANDS.
You are then asked the woman’s name, measurements, clothing, what she calls you, where it takes place, and some other details. You then have a selection of items like “Vaseline”, “priest robe” and “whip” you can pick up before entering the scene.
GENTLY, I TAKE INSERTNAMEHERE’S FACE IN MY HANDS AND DRAW HER TOWARDS ME. SHE TREMBLES AS I PRESS MY MOUTH AGAINST HERS, THEN PARTS HER LIPS, INVITING MY EAGER TONGUE TO EXPLORE THE WARM AND SENSUOUS WETNESS OF HER SOFT MOUTH.
The reaction to KISS is shown above. Sex scenes are also possible. If you swap perspectives, the actions are still done from “I” perspective — it’s just you can specify the command UNDRESS or whatnot and see the result.
Again, this is really a “fantasy simulator” and anything you try succeeds (if the parser understands it). While you are still “in a world” delivering commands like an adventure game, it doesn’t play like one. I’m also unclear if Otto Bresser is a pseudonym. A DOS port in the late 80s changes his name to Dr. Otto Bresser. It does, for certain, qualify as “smut” far more than other games we’ve seen; I think the distinguishing factor is that there’s no “movie cut” past whatever scene gets initiated, and you instead can describe a sequence of actions in detail.
Drive-In is firmly an adventure game. Just like “Dr.” Bresser’s creation it has the player describe actions in detail, as they visit a drive-in with Andrea and attempt to score a touchdown. Very much unlike the Bresser game, you can’t just do whatever you want.
You are in the front seat of your car
You see: ANDREA, wearing halter-top and shorts. loudspeaker. radio (OFF).
Trying to turn on the radio led to a curious response.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO ? TURN ON RADIO
ARE YOU TRYING TO DEAL WITH THE LOADSPEAKER OR THE RADIO? YES
TRY A NOUN-VERB COMBINATION INSTEAD OF VERB-NOUN
The parser here wants LOUDSPEAKER OFF, RADIO ON, or RADIO OFF. The game comes close to understanding the command, it’d be nice if it went all the way! The game hints (when typing HELP, which I relied on quite a bit) that you want to switch from the movie sound (loudspeaker) to music, so the right acts here are LOUDSPEAKER OFF (“I dropped it out the window…”) and RADIO ON. You are then instructed you can HOLD HANDS…
SHE SLIDES CLOSER TO YOU.
…at which point the HELP feature gives no further direction. My other attempts at interaction were either not understood (the game does not understand conversation at all) or lightly rebuffed, so I got out of the car and went searching. (I thought possibly the game was one-room up to that point; the variation Crusin I mentioned puts all the action inside the car.)
You are Outside, next to YOUR car
You see: YOUR car.
YOU CAN GO: NORTH EAST SOUTH WEST
The map is essentially a straight north/south line. You can wander away from it but that either lands you in a VACANT space or LOST, at which point you are stuck there forever until you restart the game. I always like a little existential dread with my dating simulators.
Again, most locations let you go east or west but reach a vacant location or LOST. Once I found a not-useful broken speaker.
There’s a playground along the way with a slide, and on top there is a note via Arnie (who set up the blind date) saying “I forgot to tell you! Andrea is NOT on the pill! BE CAREFUL”; this is an indication a condom is needed.
To the far north is a “snackbar COUNTER” and I was unable to read the sign or find out any kind of menu. (It kept repeating the message on the note from the slide.) The player avatar has a billfold with a dollar and popcorn costs 50 cents, but that’s just by guesswork, I’m sure they have other items.
YOU ARE HOLDING:
shirt which you are wearing.
slacks which you are wearing.
briefs which you are wearing.
billfold.
.50 in CHANGE.
popcorn.
The change is enough to go outside, go to a men’s room (deceptively as a drawn arrow, but going “west” is VOID, sorry, you need to GO MENS) and buy a condom from the machine (except the game only understands RUBBER, by this point I was checking the walkthrough).
After all that, I had nothing left to do but go back to the car. Based on the walkthrough I was missing PUT ARM after HOLD HANDS; the parser is very finicky.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO ? PUT ARM
AROUND WHAT (1 WORD)?
The player is now free to start kissing. FACE isn’t a recognized word. Andrea isn’t into going for the lips right away, but she’s fine with neck kissing. From there the player can move into blowing into her ear, and then she’s fine with kissing lips.
Any further steps mention it getting “cramped” and the idea here is to (without any real mention this even counts as a location) GO BACKSEAT followed by CALL ANDREA.
From here I’m not going to go into intricate detail on each step after. I’m unclear how fixed the walkthrough is and how much is simply “freestyle” choices. (At least some choices the HELP command comes back, at least.) The idea behind the game is to avoid messages like “pushing you away” eventually finally getting to use the rubber. I found it interesting how many different body parts were accounted for (and how easy it was to nonetheless run into an error parser message with an unrecognized part) but the parser made it very difficult to get any progress.
The Case at KAXL was a much better game, but that was a game where the action all clearly fell within the parameters of standard text adventure commands; here, the author was trying something relatively new. The game opened up — due to its nature — a wide potential list of actions, but only understood a fraction of them.
You could point at Crowther’s participation in a Tolkien-based D&D campaign and say nearly all adventures games are spawned from Tolkien. However, for direct attempts at adapting Tolkien, we’ve so far only had
Cracks of Doom based around the Mordor area at the end of Lord of the Rings.
Firienwood is a name reference only so doesn’t count. What does count is today’s game, Arkenstone, which has the Misty Mountains, Mount Gundabad, Mirkwood, Lake Town, Wilderland, and Lonely Mountain. What’s truly perplexing is how those are represented by a grand total of eight rooms.
Map from the Lord of the Rings movies, art by Daniel Reeve. Erebor on the right side of the map is Lonely Mountain, source of the river Running, occupied by Smaug the dragon. Mount Gundabad is in the upper left; that’s a hike!
The source of our minimalism today is the unmodified VIC-20, the same type of computer Victory Software dealt with. It comes from the book ZAP! POW! BOOM! Arcade Games for the VIC-20, written by Mark Ramshaw.
It was published by Interface Publications in the UK. The book was later merged with the spectacularly named Symphony for a Melancholy Computer by a different author (Tim Hartnell) to form the US version of ZAP! POW! BOOM! Arcade Games for the VIC-20.
We’re caring about Mark Ramshaw’s book as it included a game called Adventure which got re-dubbed Arkenstone upon its US debut. (I went with the easier-to-search-for name, at least I had an option this time!) I played what was technically the original version (download here) although it appears there is no difference between the two.
The code is short and consists of only one more page.
In order to cope with the tiny memory size of the VIC-20, Ramshaw does a very unusual trick with the parser. Each word is typed on a separate line, with ENTER pressed between, and the last word needs a period. So to pick up a spear, you type
pick
up
spear.
It’s exceedingly surreal to do this. We have experienced a separate-line parser with two words before (like with Chou’s Alien Adventure) but not more than two words, and never with the period mark convention. If you hit enter nine times the game says you are being “Too verbose” so it clearly is aspiring to understand long sentences.
The commands as given in the book are go or move, catch, skewer, fill. kick, pick, swing, inventory, listen, drop, and throw. Recover is a special command for claiming the Arkenstone after rescuing it.
The last part of the source code.
You are the “intrepid hero” and start out in South Mirkwood where there are trees and a bucket.
Your job is to make your way to Lonely Mountain where the dragon sleeps and nab the Arkenstone, the long lost treasure of the dwarves.
Regarding the amusingly compressed map, there is at least a little precedent for that (see, for example Caves of Olympus); here the idea is stretched to its limit as each step takes a matter of days. At least functionally you can still treat the rooms like they were all next to each other.
You might think, given the size of the map (and the fact there is nothing blocking your way) it ought to be possible to just saunter east three times, north once, and then nab the Arkenstone for victory. I did in fact do this once.
The problem is that it was very lucky: usually what happens at the start is the dragon wakes up and then hides the treasure if you wander into the dragon’s location while awake and without any defense, you die. So let’s ignore this as a bonus ending (STEAM ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: THE DWARVES HIRED A REAL BURGLAR) and figure out how to cope with the dragon.
It’s … not much more complicated. Just to the north there is a spear. You should start by going to pick it up (even if the dragon wakes up right away, you have time).
Then defeating the dragon is just a matter of using “skewer/dragon/with/spear” when you see him.
That works if the dragon is awake or asleep! Now you can again just go in and grab the Arkenstone and use “recover”.
You can do a little bit more: you can take a “cage” over at Mount Gundabad, take it to the Misty Mountains (which is south of the Wilderland for some reason) and catch an eagle. (!!) Then it can give hints. (!?!??)
2015 Print”The eagle says:”
2020 Print “What is best axe or spear?Why not quench the worm’s thirst”
2025 Print “There is something special in Mirkwood”
The axe is where the dragon as sleeping, and you can take it to Mirkwood to SWING AXE AT TREES
That was clever — some trees fell down
but other than that message the trees do nothing. And of course it is so simple to take the spear to the target why bother with any of that? I suspect this was a text adventure in progress that got tossed into print without smoothing out the rough edges.
Regarding Mark Ramshaw, who wrote the game, and Tim Hartnell, who wrote the VIC-20 book that combined with Ramshaw’s, the most complete information I’ve found on them is from a book they co-wrote in 1983, Getting Started on Your Commodore VIC-20. Tim is described as founder of the “British National ZX Users’ Club” and its magazine Interface — that is, his club did the publishing.
But what about Ramshaw? He is literally described as a “schoolboy” with “an active interest in VIC games”. This suggests to me he was a teen-aged author like many others we have had, who knew Hartnell from his computer club activities. Ramshaw kept his publishing connection and went on be a journalist for magazines in the UK such as PC Review.
Tom Sato, also known as Toshiyuki Sato, was a Japanese national whose interest in computers started as a child:
I watched the film of men landing on the moon, and I was fascinated by the computer in the film.
He moved to London at the age of 14, eventually going to college to study physics and astronomy while teaching himself programming. He went to work for Microsoft right out of college while also writing for various magazines, focused on the MSX computer (being a Microsoft product). His writings include a 1985 article on the history of MSX Basic and technical books on the platform.
A book Sato collaborated on; the front cover uses Toshiyuki and the back cover uses Tom. From the Internet Archive.
Reversing back in time back to around when he graduated college — 1982 — he kicked off his own company, Orchestrated Computing, later renamed to Program Direct. (Orchestrated Computing seems like a better name to me. At least it’s easier to search for!) He started with no company name at all, posting a classified ad in Popular Computing Weekly 5 August 1982:
Just selling a conversion of Star Trek with “extra asteroid storm and others”.
This is before the existence of the MSX, so he was working with the BBC Micro. The second package listed has an Adventure as the main program with — as a bonus — the programs INVADERS, PONTOON, and LUNARLANDER. The last three games have been lost, but Adventure was recently found on a C90 tape stuffed with other games (Lords of Time, Castle of Riddles, Bumble Bee, Planetoids, Cruncher, Danger UXB) and rescued in 2023.
Enter the DUNGEON at your peril but you have been warned: you are likely to get killed if you don’t use your imagination. Use your weapon, magic, food and treasure efficiently or else. Don’t enter the RANDOM MAZE or you’ll be shouting for help.
Despite the name being Adventure, this is not an adventure game; this is quite directly an RPG. It took enough work to confirm this I decided to plow ahead, but there are zero puzzles: this is mainly a game about fighting enemies in the right order relative to one’s stats, and making sure to eat enough food to rejuvenate.
The game at first appears to have a parser, and it took me a while to realize it was mostly only looking at the first one or two characters of what I was typing. I ended up checking the source code to find:
N/S/E/W/U/D = Directions
F = Fight
G = Get
I = Inventory
O = Open
T = Trade
Q = Quit
EA = Eat
DR = Drop
ST = Status
So if you type G for Get, it then asks another prompt what it is exactly you are getting; if you type GET DIAMOND the game will prompt what you mean to pick up because the entire text “ET DIAMOND” got ignored.
My struggle in picking up a CERAMIC TIGER.
ST, or STATUS, provides STRENGTH, CONSTITUTION, DEXTERITY, DEFENCE, WEALTH, and EXPERIENCE.
I’m not sure what the max is for Strength and Constitution, I would guess 255. All four stats including Dexterity and Defence both can get damaged by enemies; all four stats can be brought up by food (Meat is the best, giving +2 to Strength and +1 to Constitution).
Before showing off the map, and discussing how combat works, I should mention this is a branch of a Wizard’s Castle style game. (The original is from 1980; in the 80s I played the DOS version for many hours off some random public domain disk.) I’m not going to go into intricate detail as the CRPGAddict already has, but the general idea of this small mini-genre is having a small set of mini-floors (generally 8 by 8). These games generally give a “lamp” or some other method of seeing ahead so you don’t have to fight monsters if you don’t want to, and the strategy tends to be to soak up all the treasures possible, convert them into money to buy potions/level-ups for stats, then either go on a monster rampage after or just kill the small selected set of monsters needed to win the game.
Leygref’s Castle (1986), via Mobygames.
Now, the top floor of the map (there are three of them).
Again, 8 by 8. You start in the upper left. All blue squares are treasures, all red squares are monsters (some are randomly placed, some are not). Green represents a “merchant” where you can (T)rade and either sell treasures you’ve found or buy things like food and weapons. The easiest way to buy things is to simply go to the town in the upper right corner which has shops.
You start with 50 wealth so there’s really no reason not to buy the best weapon (mace) and shield right away.
The version I downloaded, by the way, has an error in line 830 checking if the player has a shield — you need one to fight. I just replaced the line with PRINT “”, putting an extra blank line at the start of fights. It looks like the line had a corruption in the dump.
In retrospect, after studying the code, I think OSCLIOSCLI represents two bytes, and that should be =0.
In addition to the weapon and shield you can get a KEY (for opening doors, it doesn’t get used up and it is cheap, again: just buy one), a CROSS, and a WAND. The latter two are for magic; I used one of the two once in the entire game.
The main difference between this game and a regular Wizard’s Castle clone is that it tries to describe all the rooms. Some of the descriptions are minimal, sometimes Sato has added slight touches.
Dwarves are the lowest form of enemy, only giving one experience point each. This is followed by goblins at 3 experience points and centipedes at 4.
Each combat starts with a monster description which may or may not suggest some strategy. I found the descriptions a nice touch, although of the different moves possible…
…most of them aren’t really needed. I did, upon fighting a difficult scorpion, try using Backwards to change the distance to the enemy hoping to reduce damage; you can then Throw from safety assuming you have multiple weapons. (If you throw with only one weapon, you get a game over: “You silly fool! You haven’t got anything to fight with”.)
However, other than the very early fights I found no difficulty just plowing through with Hitting everything with my mace. I think there’s the vague promise of a system here but it falls apart almost immediately as the player gets experience points. Every 10 experience points gives the player a “level” (not mentioned in the text, but I poked at the source code to check) and after about four levels as long as the player keeps some food around they’ll generally be safe.
An early combat where I died. You might notice A is not on the list of commands. I was typing ATTACK without realizing how I was supposed to attack. I’m pretty sure this game came with instructions; after enough times or realizing I was causing no damage, I hit the source code in order to get the full list of valid moves.
This game has the problem a lot of Wizard’s Castle clones do: you can play it far too safe. Most enemies do not attack on sight (the scorpion, dragon, and troll do, I didn’t find any others). So you can wander and hoover vast amounts of treasure, trading it in for cash, and buying meat. You can then eat vast quantities of meat to pump your Strength and Constitution up to high levels and stomp any enemies afterwards.
There’s exactly one spot with a trap I found (a pit) and otherwise it’s just mundane mapping, with the occasional one-way exit.
Yes, there are gaps — my map is likely incomplete. I managed to win without finishing.
By “win” I mean there does not seem to be an end condition, but looking at the rankings the top is GRANDMASTER where you attain a wealth of 450 and experience points of 250. The wealth of 450 turns out to be mostly trivial (amusingly, you can get a rank of GREEDY COWARD by getting lots of treasure but killing almost nothing).
Getting 250 experience points did require trying to mop up everything I found. This includes the only “puzzle fight” against a ghost, where the text specifies physical attacks won’t work.
20 experience points is fairly substantial; killing a DRAGON only gives 10.
The dragon is only interesting as being one of the few enemies that forces a fight, rather than just letting you walk by.
The big hunt monster is to find T-Rexes. I found two of them and each gave 70 experience points. They were just as easy as any of the other enemies (by that point, I had eaten enough meat to even make a competitive eating champ turn away in disgust).
Once I was over the thresholds (which I should emphasize I only learned about by checking source code) I typed Q to quit the game and arrive at victory.
The author typing in room descriptions did give this a little more interest than your standard WizCastleLike, and the map shows “sections” with structures that pass over to multiple rooms. For example, the third floor has a “Chamber of Horrors” you can fall into (the only trap) and a one-way exit from the Chamber leads to a Library. My Library had one of the T-Rex fights in it. (I don’t know if was fixed or random.)
However, there’s enough spelling and map errors that it throws off the enjoyment. One of the treasures is a SILVER FULTE; another unfortunate typo is arrived at by dropping a letter from JEWELRY. There were many spots with a “door” that didn’t exist, or a “brick wall” that nonetheless could be walked through (and was clearly not intended as an illusion). I just had to start ignoring what the rooms said about available exits and try them.
The “random maze” the ad copy warned us about. You can get here by moving to the third floor, then going up to the second floor in a “gap” which is otherwise unreachable. Unfortunately, all this room seems to do is send you to a random spot on one of the three floors.
I enjoyed the original Wizard’s Castle near the beginning, before I realized the power-strat was to avoid monsters altogether; in that game, you are forced into fights often if you aren’t careful. In this game, the monsters are so passive it becomes blatantly obvious you aren’t supposed to fight them until you’re ready, so while the author attempted to add some “crunchy” parts like distance, it fails to sustain interest as a system.
I appreciate the attempt at adding some room flavor; it seems to have been Sato’s attempt to modify and enhance the original Wizard’s Castle just like his version of Star Trek added asteroids and a secret weapon. Given the very recent rescue off an obscure tape, I doubt it made for many sales. Just like The Desecration from last time, maybe the most lasting effect of the game was to give Tom Sato business experience; at least that’s his own claim:
That experience taught me about the process of developing a program and commercializing it.
Tom Sato (left) pictured with his long-time business partner Tetsuro Eto (right). Source.
Soon after Sato wrote the MSX book on the top of this post, he was offered a transfer to work for Microsoft Japan, and was the product manager there for Windows 2.0 and 3.0. Eventually Sato left Microsoft and found his way to Silicon Valley; he now works on connecting companies in Japan with companies in the US.
I did get a victory screen, and I am surprised because I thought the whole game was going to collapse in a mess of bugs before I got there. I had Dunmark Pykro in my inventory when I won the game.
Continuing directly from last time, I had a robot guard where I was unclear what to do. Part my of issue is that using OPEN on the PURSE gives an error, and I had already been able to nab the food from the grocery store; combining the two facts, I assumed the purse was being implicitly used somehow. No: the purse is opened by using LOOK on it, at which point you find some GOLD. You can then GIVE GOLD which is effective on the guard, and even the main character is confused that the puzzle solution worked.
This opens up a new section of the game.
To the east of the guard is a “sewer entrance” and a “thiefs lair” and as far as I can tell you never get your objects stolen so the lair is just for color.
This might genuinely just be for atmosphere.
To the north of the sewer (… not even going to bother with the forward/backwards/left/right thing anymore …) there is an armory with a robot de-activator. You can cart the de-activator back over to where the ROBOT DOUBLE was and use it to fry the robot, leaving behind a robot hand.
Behind the fried robot there is a universal communicator, which you can take over to the alien — the one that was our informant but we couldn’t understand — to get the password for the keypad.
If you go back to the start which had a side entrance with a keyboard, trying to use the password just gets you tossed into jail.
I should give some attention to jail, as it is entirely optional — you just avoid anything that gets you caught — but it does something clever. The first time you’re caught, you end up in a “low security” cell where you can CUT MATTRESS (how? don’t know) and reveal some SPRINGS, then use the springs to PICK LOCK and escape. This deposits you at the LOCKERS and you can LOOK LOCKERS to retrieve all your stuff you had in your inventory. (This includes, still in my case, a TECH GUN, ROBOT GUARDS, ALARM, and SECRETARY. This will become important later.)
If you get caught again (in addition to the door trap, typing SLEEP will get you picked up) you land in a medium-security cell. This time there are WALLS you can look at to find a BOLT, and USE BOLT will free you (it is unclear what is being done with the bolt, but I assume it’s PICK LOCK again except there’s no lock object to refer to).
If you get caught yet again you land in a high-security cell, which you can escape with the power of your mind via THINK. The text clues it pretty well (I had also made my verb list by now and I knew THINK was on it).
Get caught a fourth time and you die. The “upgraded accommodation” trick I ended up finding the best part of the game (there’s shades of a similar trick in Legend of Kyrandia 3 but it is still uncommon).
Returning back to the action: the password needs to get stored under our hat for now, and fortunately there’s still another route to go, as heading east from the sewers will reach a Urr-Beast. The Beast blocks exits to the north and east but you can still go south to find a BEAST KEEPERS ROOM.
The side room has a GROOMING KIT; taking it back north, you can GROOM BEAST and it will purr happily and go to sleep in the corner. This opens access to a data library with a MANUAL…
There’s a MAGTAPE also that can’t be referred to. This game has a nasty tendency to put objects in the room description that don’t exist with respect to the parser.
…and the manual can be read in order to learn operation of a ANTI-ASSASSIN COMPUTER and shut it down.
I never found out what grisly death this prevents.
Back at the guard which was bribed with gold, there’s an exit to the west (I had the accidental fortune of finding it after I finished all the events above). There’s a palm scanner and you can use the robot hand from the double in order to activate it.
Now comes the hardest of the three minigames, as after you cross the bridge over the spikes you get swarmed with droids. They appear on all sides, and you move with the keys right, left, A (up), Z (down), with space for shooting.
This game is genuinely original. It feels somewhat like Solar Fox as far as flying around a middle space section and avoiding things from the side, but I can’t think of an exact equivalent. You’re still getting shot at just like the previous mini-game and once again you have to defeat all the enemies twice.
This was by far the hardest of the three mini-games due to having to keep track of all four directions. If you hit a wall you bounce, so there’s no wrecking on the sides, but it is very easy to keep trapped with no way out by a rogue bullet. It was possible to be trapped in the first mini-game but only at the very start with the initial volley of bullets all coming at the same time.
You can afford to get hit twice, and there’s colorful narrative text going along with the hit. This is another fairly novel idea but it gets tiresome when you are playing the arcade game on repeat, which you will be unless you make liberal use of save states.
Moving on to the third part of the game, it goes fairly linearly. First, there’s some toxic gas (wearing the breathing apparatus works to get through).
This is followed by a uniform storage closet.
You need to wear a uniform, as well as nab the makeup kit from the lockers and use that as well, so you appear like one of the regular guards. This lets you get past a security checkpoint…
…and a secretary (which our protagonist wants to skeevily hit on, 1930s noir style).
Just walking past takes you to a transport tube, where there’s another keypad. This time you can type the password (PYKRO RULES) without getting caught.
Finally our hero reaches the Dunmark Pykro’s office, and things go very strange indeed both at the reality level and at the game-bug level.
The cut-off part of the text says he’s SURE ACTING KINDA’ KINKY. I have no idea what the evil business overlord gave us, because it never appeared in the room or in my inventory. In fact, Dunmark Pykro isn’t in the room at all. (I can at least reassure you that no WHIP object exists in the game.)
Baffled and strongly suspecting the game might be unfinishable, I tried going LEFT and found myself back at a steel door with another keypad. Trying to use the password again got me caught and tossed into jail (I hadn’t burned all three iterations on this save file) so I broke out and looked over every location I visited in case something new had happened. Indeed:
That’s back at the beast keeper place, where there was also a newly-added pile of junk. The Dunmark Pykro object somehow got teleported over here, and furthermore, I was able to TAKE him and carry him in inventory the rest of the game.
Heading back to the steel door, you can just ignore it and move on to find an intersection. Off in one direction is a SMALL ARMORY with a spacesuit…
…and in the other is a spacecraft you can escape with.
Again, Pykro was still in inventory when I did LAUNCH. I did try to KILL PYKRO but the game said
IT DIDN’T WORK FOR SOME REASON.(!?)
and no other verb from my big list had any effect at all. It doesn’t matter because launching the spacecraft leads to the third mini-game, followed by victory.
Almost identical to the first mini-game, but the two rows of ships are moving in opposite directions and you’re shooting from the bottom.
As before, the ships move faster when there are less on the screen. Unlike before, you need to beat the screen four times — that is, after everything is killed, it resets and you have to do it again — before reaching victory.
Adventurecade #2 coming soon, eh?
Let’s check out of this by asking the question: why did the company disappear? First of all, as you can probably tell, the quality was wobbly; despite some clever moments, I would take any of the Sierra On-Line games over this one. The mini-games were not fun to play and tilted annoyingly hard, especially given the screen repeats. I will give the game the benefit of the doubt as far as the bugs go; like most Apple II games, this one needed to be “cracked” to be played due to copy protection, and it is possible something broke which caused a SECRETARY to show up in the player’s inventory immediately upon finishing the first mini-game.
Still, for Apple II circa 1982, it had a fighting chance in the market, especially because the graphics genuinely hovered around “decent”; all the people were clearly of the squished-head Sierra variety, but the environmental graphics shows some genuine artistic thought.
Mind you, even Sierra was struggling to sell their graphics starting in 1983 (when The Desecration finally hit general distribution) so possibly it was a game made a little too late.
Additionally, the Mind Games duo (Greg Segall and Gil Beyda) went entirely on their own: they turned down distributors at Applefest (which was, in retrospect, a mistake). A September 1983 profile from the magazine L’Ordinateur individuel notes they have “d’entreprise bien américain” and how it was admirable that they did everything up to and including distribution to retailers. The article claims it is “un exemple à suivre” (“an example to follow”) but I suspect low sales led to their downfall. I have never seen a copy of this game for sale so it is likely quite rare.
In my comments, Rob had found a Japanese article from 1979 involving a visit to Los Angeles and their computer stores. This picture is from Computers Are Fun in central LA, where Gil Beyda was working. The article notes the store mostly specialized in Apple II products but had trouble making their rent of $400 a month. (Image assistance from eientei and ftb1979.)
Maybe it was good for the experience. While I don’t know about Greg Segall, Gil Beyda at least went on to a successful career in technology and now works as a venture capitalist.
Coming up: Some small non-sci-fi games, just for a change of pace, including another early Tolkien game.
When I wrote about Dragon’s Keep, I discussed an event called Applefest that happened in December of 1982. (If you haven’t read that post, I recommend reading it before this one.) The company Sunnyside Soft met Ken and Roberta Williams there, leading to Sierra buying them out and Al Lowe eventually going on to write the Leisure Suit Larry series.
There was another software company at Applefest I’d like to discuss today, one rather less famous: Mind Games. It’s completely understandable if you haven’t heard of them, because they only published one game.
The Softline interview indicates that Segall and Beyda had met 8 years before (aged 11) at a Los Angeles Boy Scout troop; both were up for a “promotion” to a troop rank but the two decided to share the position rather than compete for it. They consequently became friends.
They joined the Beverly Hills computer club and did pranks with the DEC-1170 system (as the interview notes, it was one of the only high schools in the country with such a computer); they followed this with computer jobs at early ages, as Beyda got a job at a computer store at 15 (leading to contacts and consulting work on educational software) while Segall got a job at 14 working for Farmers Insurance (also helping Beyda with the consulting).
From Wikipedia.
In 1981 they got the urge to write a game. They wanted something “more complex” than a two-word parser while avoiding the “rigid conventions of the traditional adventure”. Quoting Segall:
Forget this North, South, East, West stuff; I just wanna go through the door!
They wanted multiple responses to commands that have “nothing to do with the adventure” and writing “like a pulp thriller”. Then as a “hook” they decided the game should be “the first adventure to have serious arcade-game levels”. Quoting Segall directly again:
You don’t want to do the obvious rip-offs — walk into an arcade and see what’s hot and copy it — but take an idea, or several ideas, and make a twist on them. So we put arcade games inside an adventure.
It started with Segall working on plot and design and Beyda doing the programming, but they ended up sometimes swapping responsibilities. The process took 11 months working out of their garage, and then they tried shopping it around to distributors with no takers. They decided to pool the rest of their money to get a booth at Applefest.
At Applefest there’s a story which intercrosses with the Dragon’s Keep one. Mind Games had “distributors” ask for copies of the game, who supposedly were told:
You sent back the one we gave you.
Going back to Dragon’s Keep, and the quote from Hackers about Ken Williams:
Ken tried to throw himself into the spirit of the show, and took Roberta, looking chic in designer jeans, high boots, and a black beret, on a quick tour of the displays. Ken was a natural schmoozer, and at almost every booth he was recognized and greeted warmly. He asked about half a dozen young programmers to come up to Oakhurst and get rich hacking for On-Line.
The adventure-game portions of The Desecration have a strong resemblance to Sierra in visual look. Given the prominence of Sierra in California, and the fact they recruited Sunnyside because of Dragon’s Keep being close in look to Sierra products, it seems almost guaranteed Mind Games was one of the companies that Ken Williams talked to; the exact “you sent back the one we gave you” line may have been spoken directly to him.
Mind Games has been Apple-oriented up to this point, but the company is now looking into Atari and Commodore systems to “see what they can be used for.”
“Programmers are coming to us, now. We give them their freedom because we want them to have the same freedom to create that we had.”
I’m not clear what caused this ambition to unravel, but this game is the only evidence I found of Mind Games publishing anything. Ads starting showing up in 1983.
We’ve seen mini-games before, but the ones here genuinely are more extensive than previous ones; the game is fully half arcade and half adventure. (The closest we’ve seen to that is Mad Martha from the UK, created roughly the same time as The Desecration.) The adventure and arcade sections alternate.
Our job is, according to the game, INTERGALACTIC ASSASSIN. Our assignment is to go to Pykron 9, part of the Pykro Corp. Mining Empire, and kill the chairman, Dunmark Pykro, as he has been “KNOWN TO HAVE AN EYE FOR EASY EXPANSION OF HIS CORPORATE EMPIRE.” Some of his “targets” have pooled money together to hire you for “your usual fee” of 10,000 galactic sovereigns.
Action continues directly after receiving the message.
The interview was fussy about games using NORTH, SOUTH, etc. for navigation, so as exact equivalents this game uses RIGHT, LEFT, FORWARDS, BACKWARDS (abbreviated to R, L, F, B). We’ve had authors thinking “but why compass directions” all the way back to Empire of the Over-Mind and Battlestar. As this game maps them as exact equivalents — you don’t have “relative directions” where entering a room from the opposite side means “forwards” is now “backwards” and so forth — I mentally just thought of them as the usual N/S/E/W.
The TRANSPORTER ROOM mentions transporter controls but as far as I can tell there is no way to examine them or refer to them other than KICK CONTROLS. This is equivalent to activating the transporter. Not a great start.
The opening is relatively short — you can make your way over to a ship, but when you try to sneak it you get caught and tossed in a jail.
It’s a laser door, there’s a mirror, and you can USE MIRROR to get out.
There’s a cell where the main character wonders if he should free the locked-up alien. This is what happens if you try.
LAUNCH SHIP is the right action to take off, leading to the arcade game. Before going there, I should point out two things:
a.) As I already alluded to, the parser is miserable; it seems to be completely not only location-bespoke but also looking for exact phrases. That is, it isn’t using a world-model as opposed to just hand-coding each individual scene; you can, for example, go back in the cell, and the mirror is back to where it was.
b.) The authors seem to have written their room descriptions with a particular sequence in mind, as you can turn south (I mean, “backwards”) instead of going straight to the field to find the cell area, and the description implies you are in the middle of making your escape from the cell (when you haven’t been thrown in yet).
Onto the arcade game!
This is, straightforwardly, horizontal Space Invaders. (So much about avoiding taking actual games from the arcade.) The screen above shows one of the vehicles already vaporized; you drop bombs and they shoot up at you while moving left to right. The start is the hardest as the screen is completely filled with projectiles, and as more enemies die while they move faster, there are gaps that you can sneak your spacecraft between. (If you’re playing on keyboard, note you can double-press to scoot over faster. I think the original intended control was paddle.) Here’s Highretrogamelord attempting to get through:
Note that both this walkthrough and the one from AppleAdventures give up at this mini-game, and both imply they somehow give a complete walkthrough of the adventure portion.
You have to not only kill all the enemies once, but twice. It is definitely a pain but it is possible to get a rhythm in after surviving the initial volley. You can die twice and still continue before hitting a game over.
Why did both video walkthroughs cut off there assuming they had seen the entire game? Well, it starts with a menu where you can choose the three mini-games to play individually. I’m guessing they thought there were four discrete sections, adventure-arcade-arcade-arcade, and not an alternating arrangement where if you pick “adventure” you get the “full game” with the arcade games interspersed in a longer experience.
Even I originally thought this might be four separate games where the adventure game is only at the start.
So with the enemies defeated, we can move on to the Dome City wherein our target awaits.
I added the second shot here to show off more of the writing, where they were aiming for “pulp”. It has the feel and quality of written-by-teenager but I appreciate the effort in giving the main character some attitude, which was not common in 1982.
Our inventory has an I.D. card for getting into the dome, but also, weirdly, a TECH GUN, SECRETARY, ALARM, AND ROBOT PATROL. I assume that’s a bug (it may be a cracking-the-disk bug rather than an “authentic” bug).
Heading down from here leads to a STEEL DOOR with a keyboard which I don’t have a password for yet. However, ahead there are doors where the I.D. card can be used to enter the main complex.
To the left (west, whatever), there’s a person with a “purse” you can steal in order to get some food from a supermarket…
…a breathing apparatus lying about a storage room…
…and PYKRO’S ROBOT DOUBLE. I am unable to interact with it in any way.
To the right (east) is a sleeping police officer and some lockers, which are describing as holding STUFF THAT BELONGS TO THE INMATES. Again, the game’s writing assumes a particular sequence, as it says I BET MY STUFF IS IN HERE SOMEWHERE.
To become an inmate, you go back to the main doors and head forward (north). There is a INFORMANT MEETING PLACE but this person is not the correct informant, so if you try to SMILE as the message at the start of the game suggests, you get arrested.
No progress here, and no luck applying any verbs to the mattress.
If you bypass the first “informant” and head north, there’s a second one talking in an alien language. That’s the real informant, and if you SMILE you get some KEYS.
Past that is a robot guard, and it implies there’s something past the guard, but I have (again) yet to get any verb I’ve tried so far to work.
Almost nostalgic for that dodgy Dark Star parser after playing this for a while. I’ll still keep persisting, for if nothing else, two adventure-walkthrough-makers have already made an attempt and fallen.
Renga in Blue 