Archive for the ‘Interactive Fiction’ Category
As an example, suppose that the referee decides to build a story around the Glittering Caves with their unknown treasures and dangers. The referee must then decide when the story takes place, draw maps of the caves, and build the entire setting for the story. Finally, the referee must invent a beginning for a tale that sets forth some problem for the expeditionary force that will soon make its way into the imaginary realm. Perhaps there are tales of a great storehouse of gold to find or a dragon to be slain. Here, the referee decides that a large party of dwarves has been lost in a previously unexplored region of the Glittering Caves for whom the new expedition must search, discovering treasure and fighting against danger along the way.
— Eric S. Roberts, Mirkwood Tales
Back when I started the All the Adventures project in 2011, I embarked on what I understood at the time to be the first adventure game, Will Crowther’s version of Adventure. Will Crowther had abandoned his unfinished game in 1976 — eventually launching the form known as text adventures — while working at the computing firm Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. Don Woods took up the source the next year making the “canonical” 350 point version of the game which spread across the world. Source for the original (pre-Woods) game was only made public by Dennis Jerz in 2007.
Members of BBN in 1961 when the company went public: Leo Beranek, Jordan Baruch, Dick Bolt, Samuel Labate, and Robert Newman. This is 8 years before the initial demonstration of the ARPANET (leading to the Internet) and more than a decade before Will Crowther started working there. Source.
Before Jerz’s article, it wasn’t known what the original looked like: fantasy or not? How much was a “game” vs. “simulation”? The discovery included puzzles, magic, a maze, and a hint system, resolving this speculation. Still, most writing (including my own) focused more on the simulation-aspect than the magic-aspect of the game, but there was an enormous amount of material about Crowther’s caving experiences and not much about any other possible influences. Off and on Dungeons and Dragons had been mentioned, but even I didn’t make much with the connection, because Crowther didn’t talk about it in interviews and the evidence was light. However:
When a collection of BBNers learned about Dungeons and Dragons, the dungeon master created a game that was particularly detailed, went on for a year, and concluded with a 100-page “final report;” Will Crowther, a participant in Mirkwood Tales, soon after created the first computer adventure game.
That’s quoted from A Culture of Innovation: Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN. Another participant in the campaign (not necessarily the same group) was Dave Lebling, future co-author of Zork and founder of Infocom. The nature of Mirkwood Tales remained murky, and given the lack of the “report” (which is more like a rules description), nobody had opportunity to pull that thread.
You can find the Mirkwood Tales report here. It has not been generally available prior to today (December 5, 2024). (Thanks to Kate Willaert, historian, and Eric Roberts, who ran the campaign and wrote the report. Note that file that Willaert received has had corrections and reformatting, meaning it is no longer 100 pages, but that might have been a round-number estimate anyway.)
I’m going to re-do the entire Adventure story, then replay the game, comparing the virtual cave with the actual cave (as done by Dennis Jerz) and comparing elements of the game with the Dungeons and Dragons campaign that Crowther and Lebling played in (which has never been done before).
…
In the middle of 1975, Will Crowther got a divorce.
He was married to Patricia Crowther, who had met Will while working on a Physics degree at MIT in the 50s, and they had two children. Even without the connection Patricia would have been famous for her caving prowess, as she was part of the 1972 expedition that discovered a link between the Flint Ridge Cave System and Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky, proving they were the same cave and hence the longest in the world.
As a result, Will started making his new game, combining his caving interests with fantasy:
Suddenly, I got involved in a divorce, and that left me a bit pulled apart in various ways. In particular I was missing my kids.
Also the caving had stopped, because that had become awkward, so I decided I would fool around and write a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing.
My idea was that it would be a computer game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that was one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the game with natural language input, instead of more standardized commands. My kids thought it was a lot of fun.
— Will Crowther
The timeline, as clarified by Jerz, has Crowther’s sister (Betty Bloom) taking a sabbatical during the development of the game, which we know to be the 1975-1976 academic year; she play-tested the game regularly, and it was her that ended up being the reason for the first magic word:
I was bored having to go through all the steps every time, and I said, “I want to go directly into the game.” [Dramatic pause.] “Ecks-why-zee-zee-why!”
This is referring to XYZZY, a magic word early in the cave, which is usable from the start to warp directly there. It’s a little odd in that it only bypasses what is barely a puzzle (finding keys to unlock the way in) but it makes sense as a vestigial “developer code”. Magic word as a system mechanic get utilized multiple times later by Woods.
The evidence shows the game being developed up from ’75 before progress stops in early ’76, whereupon it was released to Crowther’s system at BBN and seen by the public more generally. (My dating system for mainframe games gives the original Adventure a date of 1976, where it first started being distributed beyond the author’s inner circle.) Enough copies spread that one landed at Stanford, where Don Woods in 1977 saw it and decided he wanted to expand it. It wasn’t clear how to get into contact with Crowther (who was no longer at BBN by that point) so he sent a message to every single domain on the Internet with crowther@ at the front, getting a hit at Xerox.
This was in March 1977; we have a very exact month for this because files retrieved from Woods’s account include time stamps. The source code is here and a compiled version for Windows is here and will be the version I’m playing.
The plot, in this version, is looking for TREASURE AND GOLD. (In original D&D, finding treasure meant getting experience points. This is part of why the player is able to square off against the thief in Zork only after grabbing some treasure.) The “I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS” perspective imagines that the avatar in the universe and the computer narrator are one and the same. This is exactly analogus to how the “referee” of Mirkwood is described:
As the expedition wanders through the passages beyond the great Door, the referee acts as the party’s eyes and ears and describes each new scene.
The starting building has no analogue in Mirkwood…
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.
…but it does in the real cave, with one brick building that is now rubble, and also the historic Bransford Spring Pumphouse built in the 1930s.
Via Wikipedia.
Crowther’s building has keys, lamp, food, and a bottle of water that would be standard in all versions.
YOU ARE INSIDE A BUILDING, A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING.
THERE ARE SOME KEYS ON THE GROUND HERE.
THERE IS A SHINY BRASS LAMP NEARBY.
THERE IS FOOD HERE.
THERE IS A BOTTLE OF WATER HERE.
The outdoors are otherwise very small, and this is reflected by the Mirkwood notes:
Most of the action of the Mirkwood Tales occurs in underground caverns or inside large buildings rather than in open terrain. There are two principal reasons for restricting the setting in this way. First, the geography of a subterranean fortress or dungeon is much easier to define than that of an open area above ground. Rooms and passages may be described in relatively simple terms, and it is much easier to work with right angles and measurable distances than with general topographic descriptions. Furthermore, by restricting the world to a smaller area, it is possible to make the passage of time more meaningful. When large distances are involved, the time required to move from one region to another must be taken into account.
In order to achieve the effect of feeling like a forest where the player can move in any direction, Crowther includes “loops” which became quite standard, but also included “random” exits; sometimes a particular exit would do something different, making the act of mapping feel a little uncertain. This legacy caused some clone-games based on Adventure to have random exits (like The Phantom’s Revenge) and it has generally been awful every time. The reason it works here is that the design clearly is nudging the player away from the outdoors to the underground.
The most nightmarish version of random exits I’ve encountered is Dr. Livingston, where I needed to test every exit 10 times just in case there was a random trigger that caused the exit to do something else.
Exits marked with a color go to the “Forest”. Going north from the Forest will sometimes lead to a second, distinct Forest.
YOU ARE IN A 20 FOOT DEPRESSION FLOORED WITH BARE DIRT. SET INTO THE DIRT IS A STRONG STEEL GRATE MOUNTED IN CONCRETE. A DRY STREAMBED LEADS INTO THE DEPRESSION.
THE GRATE IS LOCKED
The Mirkwood campaign book describes a campaign session which kicks off with a cave with a long-forgotten door having old dwarven lettering.
Behold the Door to the Vault of Khazin, Lord of the Caves. Seek not to force this Door, for it is sealed with the power of the sun and the moon.
The riddle indicates a full moon followed by a sun must pass through the sky before the door opens. The Crowther grate rather just succumbs to the keys from the building, feeling a bit more like the simulation, but the results come across the same:
The Door stands open. Beyond the Door, there is a narrow dark passage that leads straight back into the earth.
Crowther’s tries to be a touch more realistic…
YOU ARE IN A SMALL CHAMBER BENEATH A 3X3 STEEL GRATE TO THE SURFACE. A LOW CRAWL OVER COBBLES LEADS INWARD TO THE WEST.
THE GRATE IS OPEN.
west
YOU ARE CRAWLING OVER COBBLES IN A LOW PASSAGE. THERE IS A DIM LIGHT AT THE EAST END OF THE PASSAGE.
THERE IS A SMALL WICKER CAGE DISCARDED NEARBY.
…and Jerz is able to start matching one-to-one pictures from the real cave with Crowther’s map.
The cage is followed by a “debris room” described akin to a real cave, but with Betty Bloom’s testing magic word, and the iconic three foot black rod with a rusty rod.
YOU ARE IN A DEBRIS ROOM, FILLED WITH STUFF WASHED IN FROM THE SURFACE. A LOW WIDE PASSAGE WITH COBBLES BECOMES PLUGGED WITH MUD AND DEBRIS HERE, BUT AN AWKWARD CANYON LEADS UPWARD AND WEST.
A NOTE ON THE WALL SAYS ‘MAGIC WORD XYZZY’.
IT IS NOW PITCH BLACK. IF YOU PROCEED YOU WILL LIKELY FALL INTO A PIT.
A THREE FOOT BLACK ROD WITH A RUSTY STAR ON AN END LIES NEARBY
The black rod represents the serious magic item that Crowther added, and it curiously enough, has two effects:
a.) a bird that comes shortly after cannot be caught while holding the rod
b.) a gap can only be filled with the rod, forming a crystal bridge
Original D&D does not have an generalized identify spell. Items are meant to be identified by experiment. Zenopus Archives mentions an example from the third OD&D book involving testing on some boots and identifying them as elven. Mirkwood also discusses the identification of magic, and again, the emphasis is on experimentation:
In addition to spells, magic appears in the Mirkwood Tales in the form of magical artifacts and equipment. More often than not, the magical effect of some object will not be clear from simple examination of the object, and it may require experimentation or searching for further clues to its nature.
This means the experience of fiddling with the rod — and finding two effects, both positive and negative — are similar to OD&D campaigns. In fact, it is rare in adventures (up to at least 1982) to have this type of dual-effect paradigm, and is more likely to be happened upon by someone creating a “campaign object”.
THE BIRD WAS UNAFRAID WHEN YOU ENTERED, BUT AS YOU APPROACH IT BECOMES DISTURBED AND YOU CANNOT CATCH IT.
Some more cave-matching rooms happen, and then the Hall of the Mountain King.
YOU ARE IN THE HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING, WITH PASSAGES OFF IN ALL DIRECTIONS.
A HUGE GREEN FIERCE SNAKE BARS THE WAY!
drop bird
THE LITTLE BIRD ATTACKS THE GREEN SNAKE, AND IN AN ASTOUNDING FLURRY DRIVES THE SNAKE AWAY.
The Mirkwood campaign mentions “orcs and trolls”; with the snake Crowther is likely thinking more on the simulation end, as the Park at least does have venomous snakes (copperheads and rattlesnakes). That’s not the only enemy, as dwarves do appear and throw an axe at first, followed by knives.
THERE IS A THREATENING LITTLE DWARF IN THE ROOM WITH YOU!
In Crowther/Woods, you can pick up the axe and throw it, but that doesn’t work here, as Crowther was seemlingly worried about parser ambiguity in a way almost nobody working with a two-word parser was concerned with afterwards.
I HAVE TROUBLE WITH THE WORD ‘THROW’ BECAUSE YOU CAN THROW A THING OR THROW AT A THING. PLEASE USE DROP OR ATTACK INSTEAD.
Oddly, while you can ATTACK as suggested, the word ATTACK does not take a noun. You have to type ATTACK on its own, without DWARF following.
attack
YOU ATTACK A LITTLE DWARF, BUT HE DODGES OUT OF THE WAY.
The mechanic is clearly fully fleshed out, but Woods obviously did a little fixing here. The other oddity with the Crowther version of the game is that the axe doesn’t need to be held.
THERE ARE 2 THREATENING LITTLE DWARVES IN THE ROOM WITH YOU.
2 OF THEM THROW KNIVES AT YOU!
HE GETS YOU!
Switching back to Mirkwood, the dwarves in the Mirkwood campaign are dead…
The body is clearly that of a dwarf, but you do not recognize it immediately. All of the mail and weapons have been taken from the body, and the middle finger on the right hand has been cut off. Narvi remembers that Darzi wore a ring of gold and sapphire on his middle finger, and believes that this is Darzi’s body, mutilated by a band of orcs.
…but it is not hard to imagine them being alive and hostile. Maybe we’re the orc?
North of the Hall of the Mountain King are bars of silver, and farther north still is a room marked Y2. The Y2 is an actual survey station name in the actual cave. Enough turns in the room will have a hollow voice saying the word “PLUGH”, which this is activated so the player has another method of warping back to the building.
YOU ARE IN A LOW N/S PASSAGE AT A HOLE IN THE FLOOR. THE HOLE GOES DOWN TO AN E/W PASSAGE.
THERE ARE BARS OF SILVER HERE!
get bars
OK
n
YOU’RE AT Y2
A HOLLOW VOICE SAYS ‘PLUGH’
plugh
YOU ARE INSIDE A BUILDING, A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING.
“Jewelry” and “many coins” are off to the south and west of the Hall of the Mountain King and are just lying there (exactly like they are in the Woods version). “Diamonds” are also just lying about to be scooped up.
YOU ARE AT THE EAST END OF A VERY LONG HALL APPARENTLY WITHOUT SIDE CHAMBERS. TO THE EAST A LOW WIDE CRAWL SLANTS UP. TO THE NORTH A ROUND TWO FOOT HOLE SLANTS DOWN.
e
YOU ARE AT THE WEST END OF HALL OF MISTS. A LOW WIDE CRAWL CONTINUES WEST AND ANOTHER GOES NORTH. TO THE SOUTH IS A LITTLE PASSAGE 6 FEET OFF THE FLOOR.
e
YOU ARE ON THE WEST SIDE OF THE FISSURE IN THE HALL OF MISTS.
THERE ARE DIAMONDS HERE!
The only other treasure-puzzle is the “sparkling nugget of gold” which is too large to get up steps, and needs to be teleported via the aforementioned “plugh” method.
THIS IS A LOW ROOM WITH A CRUDE NOTE ON THE WALL.
IT SAYS ‘YOU WON’T GET IT UP THE STEPS’.
THERE IS A LARGE SPARKLING NUGGET OF GOLD HERE!
Crowther clearly intended to expand farther. To the north and down from the Hall of the Mountain King is an area leading to some “messy” rooms which go in random directions, but also one direction that crashes the game…
…and most importantly, an “under construction” sign. This is clearly meant as literal as Crowther was in the middle of “constructing the cave”.
YOU ARE AT A COMPLEX JUNCTION. A LOW HANDS AND KNEES PASSAGE FROM THE NORTH JOINS A HIGHER CRAWL FROM THE EAST TO MAKE A WALKING PASSAGE GOING WEST THERE IS ALSO A LARGE ROOM ABOVE. THE AIR IS DAMP HERE. A SIGN IN MIDAIR HERE SAYS ‘CAVE UNDER CONSTRUCTION BEYOND THIS POINT. PROCEED AT OWN RISK.’
There are exits described that don’t actually exist.
YOU ARE IN SECRET CANYON AT A JUNCTION OF THREE CANYONS, BEARING NORTH, SOUTH, AND SE. THE NORTH ONE IS AS TALL AS THE OTHER TWO COMBINED.
n
THERE IS NO WAY TO GO THAT DIRECTION.
The “crash” on the map incidentally sends the player back to the building at the start, and then immediately quits the game.
The last aspect of note — which has no treasures and is also clearly meant as a stub — is a maze, the “all alike” maze. It has different design than the Woods version, as it is far more regular and there’s no pirate nor pirate treasure.
Mirkwood Tales likely cannot be blamed at all for the maze; the word “maze” does not even appear anywhere in the text.
Crowther’s Adventure has a similar perspective on resurrection as Mirkwood Tales: if you die (via dwarf knife or by trying to walking around in dwarkness) the game simply ends with a PAUSE, unlike the Woods version of the game which offers resurrection for a price. Since Mirkwood is quite directly based on Tolkien, and the player isn’t Gandalf, if they’re dead, they’re dead.
In all games designed along the lines of Dungeons and Dragons, there is a strong temptation to make death somewhat less fatal by allowing resurrection or reincarnation. In Tolkien’s world, the ordinary character has no power over death, and only Gandalf is able to return to the world of the living. As such, resurrection does not play a part in the Mirkwood Tales, and death truly represents the final moment of a character’s existence.
However, the system itself does offer the possibility of resuming the game. Typing “go” will resume a paused program. The overall impression is a “cheater” version of resurrection like the one found later in Orb.
YOU FELL INTO A PIT AND BROKE EVERY BONE IN YOUR BODY!
PAUSE GAME IS OVER statement executed
To resume execution, type go. Other input will terminate the job.
go
Execution resumes after PAUSE.
light lamp
YOUR LAMP IS NOW ON.
It isn’t like Crowther was trying to “adapt Dungeons and Dragons” entirely — this is not an RPG, and nearly every room has an analogue in the real cave — but there’s still clearly some flavor of Crowther’s world found in the campaign he participated in, with the treatment of magic, direct reference to the computer as the “eyes” of the player, and heavy emphasis on dwarves (if a bit more aggressive in this game).
The key to Dungeons and Dragons is that the spirit behind the dragon is not a player in the game. The players all stand together as they come to grips with the forces of the universe. The dragon is part of that universe, and like all things within that universe, good and bad, the dragon is controlled by the designer of the world who acts not as a player, but as a referee in a game of imagination and adventure. The referee sets forth the beginning of each legend, gives out all the new information as the epic unfolds, controls the characters in the story that the players encounter, and manages the workings of the world. And yet, the referee is not the actor in the story. The referee sets the scene, but the players independently determine the course that events will take.
There’s some new material we have when Woods picks up the story, so what I’m going to do next is write about the Software Toolworks version of Adventure (the only one that paid Crowther and Woods) and continue the history at the same time.
Map to the Mirkwood sample adventure given in the document.
(Also, go read Kate Willaert, and the Gaming Alexandria discord, without whom this post would not be possible.)
I had only one (1) puzzle to go. (My prior posts on Circus are here.)
Before explaining, I should mention something about my job.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I work for a company in Europe. We have both European and US clients. I quite routinely will work on two projects in one day, meaning midstream I need to swap my spelling conventions, so instead of analyzing someone’s work I am now analysing it. I have gotten decently good at swapping continents at will.
With Circus, I had received a snorkel from a seal lion, and had surmised there was some petrol hiding the generator but I just needed to get it out. I mentioned, in passing in my last post, the possibility of siphoning some petrol.
I have never, in any of my business dealings, had to spell the word “siphon”.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
That was it. That was the only puzzle. The game wanted “syphon”. Unless you count having yet another parser struggle spot right after as a puzzle.
The rest is straightforward: short the circuits as I mentioned before (you need to be holding the spanner/wrench, though) and book it for the car, taking off while everything explodes.
You might ask: what about the hacksaw and the cannon and the net? Those were, according to Dale Dobson, part of alternate solutions, but I’m honestly confused about them. To place the net you need to ERECT NET (more parser loveliness) and you can then fall off the tightrope safely, but why fall off the tightrope? Why break into the maintenance shed for a hacksaw? (It can’t be the chest — you have to get into the chest to get the tool to break into the maintenance shed, unless I’m missing something.) The cannon is especially baffling as there really is plenty of time to just walk out, flip on your cool shades, and let the cursed circus explode behind you.
it’s amazing when an adventure game makes you feel like Indiana Jones
too bad it was Indiana Jones trying to spell “Jehovah”
— Voltgloss in the comments to my last post
Unfortunately there was no extra dose of Evil tangling up the plot, unless you count the major parser issues (at least six of them). There was a lot of potential that just never had a pay-off; it’s like if Something Wicked This Way Comes didn’t have Mr. Dark.
Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark, who was also in Brazil as Sam Lowry and recently was David Cartwright in Slow Horses.
This game does seem to be remembered fondly by children, so I should add of all the Howarth games so far it was the most fun to “noodle around” in; it’s a place to explore without too many stopping points like Avventura nel Castello. Even though the enigmatic feel might dissipate in the end, your average 6 year old might have never beat it, meaning the game holds onto its mystery.
Coming up: returning to Crowther’s Adventure, the very original before Woods, as history has been found since I last wrote about it, including a 48-page document that has only recently been unearthed.
I am likely just a few puzzles away from the end. (Previous post on Circus here.)
Via World of Spectrum.
In the the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Elementary, Dear Data (season 2) Data tries to play a Sherlock Holmes themed simulation on the holodeck but runs into an issue: the computer mashes all the previous Conan Doyle stories, ChatGPT-style, such that Data knows exactly what the solution is to the mystery he’s given. Hence what ought to be a jaunt lasting many hours is cut into a minute.
Data, Geordi, and Doctor Pulaski in front of a sign indicating The Red-Headed League, giving away significant details of the mystery.
Circus has a related issue. The design is fairly wide-branching (in contrast, with, say, the heavily linear Arrow of Death games), meaning it is possible to access many puzzles at once and solve them in any order. One of the very easiest turns out to be the method of destroying the circus.
Specifically:
STEP 1: Pick up the whip, out in the open in the circus tent.
STEP 2: Go over to the tiger and use the command CRACK WHIP (that exact verb was what I was missing before).
STEP 3: Go down beneath, where you’ll eventually find some terminals and a blueprint. The blueprint says that shorting the terminals will cause a detonation sequence.
STEP 4: SHORT TERMINALS, run away, and boom.
There is still of course a problem given that end screen: there’s still no way to drive away with the car without the petrol. But in a dramatic sense, it feels very weird to have a method already for blowing up the cursed circus (which didn’t involve anything mystical) and just need to get fuel. I was expecting the Evil to somehow interfere.
It is still possible the Evil might interfere because there’s a whole sequence with the cannon that otherwise doesn’t make sense. For the moment, though, the story tree feels a little deflated compared to the high I was on last time. A good analogy is how Geordi and Doctor Pulaski reacted when Data solved the newly constructed mystery instantly. It isn’t like the game is over, but I feel like I’ve skipped to the end nonetheless.
Let’s get to that cannon:
Launching it “splatters you against the canvas”. I had already experienced using the trapeze to get up to the canvas roof, but hadn’t been able to do anything with it; I was trying to open a hole with the penknife that the player starts the game with. I just needed to CUT CANVAS, not CUT ROOF (sigh).
I had trouble getting back, and I think I must have mistyped something before, because I tested again trying to get back on the trapeze (ENTER TRAPEZE) and it worked just fine. Then SWING TRAPEZE a second time lands the player back where they started, so it is possible to go back to the cannon with a cut-ceiling and die again:
Now, I already suspect what I need to do. If you LOOK ROPE it turns out to be a SAFETY NET, so I need to drop it in the right place, but I have no idea where the landing is from that description so I’m going to need to test everywhere I guess (and hope DROP NET is the right command and I’m not supposed to use something fancy). Why do the launch anyway, though? If you set the tent to blow up you can just walk to the exit. Maybe, if you have the car filled up, there’s one more spirit-obstacle that appears that threatens you, and finally Only a Little Evil becomes Actual Evil.
In the department of other-stuff-I’ve solved: I mentioned last time a chest I couldn’t open. OPEN CHEST says “Nothing Happened!”, UNLOCK CHEST gets the response “I don’t understand what you mean”, and SMASH CHEST says
How destructive!
The latter is the worst message of all: it essentially conveys to the player that violence is not the answer and they’re barking up the wrong tree. Yet, the answer is destruction, as you are required to specifically type KICK CHEST.
You can just feel my goodwill for the game soaking away.
With the slippers on, it is now possible to tackle the tightrope, and at the end there is a metal rod. So Matt’s prediction was kind-of on but reversed.
The metal rod isn’t used for tightrope walking at all, though. Back outside the circus tent there was a maintenance door where all the various destroy-verbs (including KICK) don’t work. However, if you are holding the metal rod and try to OPEN DOOR, it works, revealing a HACKSAW:
I don’t yet know what the hacksaw does. I did also figure out the water tank, which had some entirely different cryptic parser shenanigans.
Typing EAST enters the player in the water location, and makes it seem like they are swimming automatically. SEARCH WATER and so forth yield nothing. However, if you type SWIM while you are already swimming (?!) a sea-lion is revealed.
Bringing the fish over (which I previously assumed was for the tiger, but nyet) and feeding the sea-lion yields a snorkel.
To summarize: I have a hacksaw and a snorkel I haven’t used yet. I have a cannon where I can launch myself to the outside, but I don’t know the landing spot to put a safety net (assuming that’s even the intended act). I have yet to get the petrol for the car to escape. The generator is still broken (mentioning the lack of a cable) but it may be there’s petrol in the generator and we’re just supposed to get it out (siphoning with the snorkel, maybe?) but I haven’t gotten any commands like SAW GENERATOR to yield fruit, so I must have a puzzle or two still outstanding.
A good ending might rescue the game, but for now, the parser deception did not make me happy.
Circus is the next of our Mysterious Adventures, and allegedly better than the last, Pulsar 7. According to the author it is his favorite.
Circus comes to mind as the effort that satisfied me most. (Nobody collaborated with me on the one BTW – entirely my own effort). Can’t think exactly why it’s my favourite, but I did think it was cool that a number of people felt it was somehow reminiscent of “Something Wicked This Way Comes” by Ray Bradbury.
— From an interview with Brian Howarth
I don’t have more history to share at the moment that hasn’t been in my previous Mysterious Adventures posts; eventually Brian will form the company Digital Fantasia to sell his own games but that doesn’t come until 1983.
As is typical of spooky protagonists everywhere, our car has run out of gas on a strange road. We go exploring and find, strangely, an abandoned circus.
Despite us seeing many spooky domiciles games, this one feels a little different; there’s no immediate vampires or clowns with axes chasing the player around and there’s a genuine attempt at a slow burn. Something Wicked This Way Comes doesn’t start with a circus, but rather a storm, where near the end of the fourth chapter there is the incidental smell of licorice and cotton candy.
You can first go south back to the road to visit the car. Going all the way back there’s a hole for petrol, and a boot that is not described in the text version; fortunately, I was playing the graphical version so it was prominent enough for me to try opening it.
The boot (or TRUNK, the game is nice enough to have US/UK synonyms) has a spanner (wrench) and a flashlight, which supplements the player’s starting inventory of car keys, a penknife, and an empty petrol can. We’re better equipped than a doctor dropped off on a secret operation by the Air Force!
Staying outside the circus…
…to the east there’s a generator which needs a cable to be fixed, and a field with a shovel. The shovel digs up a “starting handle” which I presume goes to the generator, but I don’t have a cable yet.
To the west is a maintenance wagon with a locked door. The resistance to my attempts to break the door or pick the lock suggest a key simply comes up later.
Heading inside the tent, having the flashlight on is required.
Again, slow burn: there are no obvious mystical things going on. A clown will occasionally appear and run away, and I’ll show off what happens after the tour:
To the east of the entrance is, straightforwardly, a tank of water you can enter (but DIVE doesn’t work). To the west is a closet, a chest which I can’t open, a clown costume which we’ll get back to, and a whip.
Headed into the ring, there’s a rope you can pick up and two ladders. One leads to a tightwalk (walking leads to death) and another leads to a trapeze. I was able to SWING TRAPEZE to find a new “room” where I was swinging near the roof, but I was unable to do anything yet from there.
Off to the west there’s a freezer with some fish, and off to the right there’s a cage with a tiger. I assume whip + fish + tiger can get something interesting but I haven’t experimented enough yet.
To the north side of the tent there’s another ring where the clown starts appearing (“Clown runs off!”) and a cannon adjacent. You can climb in the cannon and pull a lever to launch it from the inside, which kills you.
If you go back and wear the clown costume, rather than the clown running away they hover nearby instead, and point at the ground. A note appears.
That is, even though we are not technically trapped (we can still walk back to the car just fine) and there are no immediate threats in the circus, the circus is nonetheless cursed and our fate is to destroy it.
This is far stronger (so far) than Howarth’s last game. Somehow the sparse Adams-minimal prose works together with the premise better than any of his regular fantasy games. I also like how there’s a reason for open exploration which nonetheless promises we’re going to get layers as we figure out a mystery, something akin to Voodoo Castle requiring the player to enact a ritual.
Mr. Crosetti looked at the pole, as if freshly aware of its miraculous properties. He nodded, gently, his eyes soft. “Where does it come from, where does it go, eh? Who knows? Not you, not him, not me. Oh, the mysteries, by God. So. We’ll leave it on!”
It’s good to know, thought Will, it’ll be running until dawn, winding up from nothing, winding away to nothing, while we sleep.
“Good night!”
“Good night.”
And they left him behind in a wind that very faintly smelled of licorice and cotton candy.
— from Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
I’ve finished, but my “win” had hacking involved; it became a meta-solve where I was prodding at the source code trying to figure out what was wrong, essentially creating a new puzzle in the process.
The true 1982 experience!
(Also, my previous post is needed for context.)
Via World of Dragon.
My first step after last time you might think was a major one; after all, I had trouble lighting some driftwood to scare some wolves.
DIG BEACH yields matches, so I cheerfully took them over to the wolves with driftwood also in hand and tried LIGHT MATCHES and … still nothing. Nope. The game does not understand.
The game does understand LIGHT MATCH but in a different spot: near the dragon there’s a dark room right before the pit.
This means, technically speaking, you can be forewarned about the pit, but it’s faster to die than figure the secret out.
With the crossbow in hand, FIGHT DRAGON goes down a little better than last time (“YOU CAN’T GET TOO CLOSE”, the game said).
Unfortunately the treasure chest is locked, so this still doesn’t win the game. The wolves needed resolving, and I ended up just dumping the source code, which I have here (start Xroar with -lp-file nameoffile.txt to assign a printer target, then type LLIST to send the source code to the printer). The offending portion:
470 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(4)=1 OR OB(7)=1) AND CP=6 THEN PRINT”THE WOLVES HAVE FLED!”:M(6,1)=7:OB(4)=0:R$(6)=”AT THE EDGE OF A PINE FOREST”:GOTO280
480 IF NO=5 AND OB(5)=1 AND CP=28 THEN PRINT “THERE’S A CROSSBOW ON A LEDGE AND A DEEP PIT TO THE EAST”:OL(1)=28:GOTO 280
490 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(4)=1 OR OB(7)=1) AND CP=28 THEN PRINT”THERE’S A CROSSBOW ON A LEDGE AND A DEEP PIT TO THE EAST!”:OL(1)=28:OB(7)=0:GOTO 280
500 IF NO=16 AND OB(7)=0 AND OB(4)=0 THENPRINT”THERE’S NOTHING TO BURN”:GOTO 280
510 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(7)=1 OR OB(4)=1) THEN PRINT”NOTHING HAPPENED”:GOTO 280
To goal is to get line 470 to trigger. Let’s isolate the conditions:
470 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(4)=1 OR OB(7)=1) AND CP=6
The objects are numbered in order starting from 1: the crossbow is OB(1), sword is OB(2), a key you’ll see in a moment is OB(3), the driftwood is OB(4), and the box of matches is OB(5). OB(5)=1 means the box of matches is in the player’s inventory. The line only triggers if you’re holding the matches.
470 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(4)=1 OR OB(7)=1) AND CP=6
OB(4) is the driftwood or OB(7) are some pinecones you only find after scaring the wolves (strange logic there), so the driftwood also needs to be held for the line to trigger.
470 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(4)=1 OR OB(7)=1) AND CP=6
CP is the character’s location (“character place”); CP = 1 is the room EMPTY, CP = 2 is the beach, 3 is a cove, 4 is the first pirate, 5 is the cave they’re guarding, and 6 is the forest. The source after also shows the effects of going north, south, east, and west; 88 means the player is stopped by an obstacle. From the pine forest, the player can normally go north, but they are stopped by the wolves.
1120 DATA EMPTY,0,0,0,0
1130 DATA ON A BEACH,9,0,3,6
1140 DATA IN A SMALL COVE,0,0,4,2
1150 DATA AT THE ENTRANCE TO A CAVE GUARDED BY AN EVIL LOOKING PIRATE!,0,0,88,3
1160 DATA IN A CAVE WITH WRITINGON THE WALL,0,0,0,4
1170 DATA AT THE EDGE OF A PINE FOREST.A PACK OF WOLVES GUARDS THE ENTRANCE,88,0,2,0
On to the last condition:
470 IF NO=16 AND OB(5)=1 AND (OB(4)=1 OR OB(7)=1) AND CP=6
NO is the noun object. This baffled me for a bit; lines 480 and 490 both are “you found the crossbow” triggers, where the noun can be number 5 or number 16 and get the same effect. 5 is the matches, and 16 is…
…the word FIRE. Argh!
So to summarize, you need, upon typing LIGHT as a verb: to be holding the matches, to be holding the driftwood, to be in the pine forest, and to use the noun FIRE. LIGHT MATCH works in the other place because the author anticipated this is a much (much) more normal thing to type than LIGHT FIRE, which requires arbitrarily realizing the noun that previously didn’t exist in the game should be the target.
The wolves are still shown in the room, but they’ve also fled.
After THE WOLVES HAVE FLED! the north exit allows the player in:
The sign indicates you should try going NORTH repeatedly and eventually you’ll get somewhere new: a hut with a key.
This is the very key needed to unlock the treasure.
With most of these games there’s typically some sort of hints and/or a map up at CASA or elsewhere; here I was on my own (it got added to CASA by Strident but with no walkthrough or map). Of course, most people in 1982 were on their own! This is why there were letters to send in to companies, or help columns, or hint phone lines, or authors begging people not to call their phone. Without that, players had to pry at the source code like I did so it was more of an essential part of the 1982-experience than I sometimes get across with these write-ups.
Coming next: Roll up! Roll up!
Not to be confused with the other Island Adventure game published in 1982.
With Vince Apps having many books to his name (admittedly very similar books) it feels strange that his company Apex Trading is still somewhat mysterious.
The games have been
Devil’s Island
Forbidden City
Pharoah’s Curse
Haunted House (the oddball of the set, more of a strategy game)
where the main games all feature a lot of “deadly exits” where there isn’t necessarily a way to find out about them until hitting the end screen. Island Adventure is no different and follows the same structure as the other games so I’m fairly certain Vince Apps is the author (~99.5%)…
It has the exact same variable definition as his other games, for instance.
…but I also think this might be an early game of his, if for nothing else the fact the game requires the whole text TAKE INVENTORY in order to show what the player is holding (as oppose to just typing INV or INVENTORY).
From the World of Dragon
A January 1983 ad for the company mentions the games Haunted House, Treasure Quest, Forbidden City, and Pharoah’s Curse in order. I have never found an ad that mentions Island Adventure; perhaps it only showed up in the Apex Trading catalog because the author was sheepish about it (again, I think it’s an early game).
You’ll notice I haven’t linked to a playthrough of Treasure Quest. We don’t have this game. We do have a game called Treasure Quest that’s on TI-99…
…but it doesn’t mention Apex Trading and is undated, attributed to a Jim Beck of Canada where he asks players to please send $5 to his address if they like the game.
Not Brighton, England.
It’s an easy name clash to have and I suspect there’s likely just a lost Apex Trading game out there.
With that out of the way, let’s hit the island, where we are hunting for a “FABULOUS TREASURE”.
Things kick off on a beach with a driftwood, which isn’t quite as common as being in a forest with trees, but it feels up there. When you EXAMINE it is described as “very dry”. (This suggests you can light it on fire, but I haven’t been able to do, which is the main catch to why I haven’t beaten the game yet.)
Don’t worry, the forest is nearby, just to the west.
Incidentally, EXAMINE WOLVES says there are too many to fight, and FIGHT WOLVES doesn’t go well.
Laying out the rest of the map as I have it so far:
To the east of the start is a pirate guarding a cave (hanging near a dead rat and an old boot, for some reason)…
…to the north there’s a cave with too many pirates (probably not meant to be entered)…
…and a pirate who needs a password (which I’ll get a little later).
I was hard stuck for a bit and had to make my verb list early.
I was somewhat suspicious of one room which had a “FLAT BLANK FACE OF A CLIFF” but only a bush. A bush is not a normal “secret mechanism” but I ran through my verb list anyway and got a secret opening.
This leads to a orthogonally-arranged set of caves with one pitfall, and two rooms with a item you can use PULL on. One is safe, the other is death. Death first:
The graffiti reads — keeping in mind the word wrap — LLPU ROF TTSNIAN ETCIUNORTDS. This anagrams to PULL FOR INSTANT DESTRUCTION although it’s faster to just test things out.
The other pull-moment has a slight cryptogram, although again it is easier to yank first and solve later.
Move the letters backwards by one to get PULL FOR WEAPON.
The sword has a serial number of 2119562112 61518 16918120519 where the numbers go with the pattern 1 = A, 2 = B, etc. to translate to USEFUL FOR PIRATES. Given the pirate alone at the cave with the dead rat for some reason is described as needing a weapon to be defeated, this seems redundant.
The “NUT CRUNCHIES” mentioned in the cave are the password to get by the other pirate. This leads to a small area with an empty bucket, another deadly fall, and a dragon.
Here I’d like to try lighting the driftwood, but nothing I’ve tried has worked. I especially am interested because at the WOLVES the command HELP gives the information YOU’LL HAVE TO BE BRIGHT TO GET RID OF THESE! Just to summarize, I have:
some sand, a bucket, some driftwood, a rock, a stone, a dead rat, an old boot, a sword, a flask of water (poison)
The stone and rock are not given any description (I might suspect flint and steel, but they’ve been highly resistant to any verbs working on them at all). The source code is BASIC so checking for a solve should be easy but there’s enough to play around with (despite the murderously limited parser) I’m hanging on for a bit longer. In this kind of circumstance it doesn’t feel like an adventure game as much as a puzzle game where I’m in a battle with the machine to find the next command it will understand.
If you look at Jason Dyer’s blog, he’s been at 1982 for three years with no signs of finishing it yet, and he seems to show no signs of reaching 1983.
— MorpheusKitami in a comment on The Adventure Gamer blog
Believe it or not, we are getting close to the end of 1982. This is my final list. If any games show up after this point they can go on my float-list. That doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily wait, but I don’t need to finish them for 1982 to be “done”.
I am excluding games that are lost media or I am unable to play at the moment for whatever reason (if Testament shows up, for example, I’ll be bumping it up in priority, but it isn’t on this list).
These are more or less in alphabetical order.
…
Arkenstone: minimal type-in for the VIC-20 with some Tolkien inspiration.
Arsène Larcin: French game from Québec for the Apple II.
Bedlam: The other 1982 game by the author of Xenos.
Circus: The last of the Mysterious Adventures from 1982.
The Colonel’s House: First of a supposed series from Rabbit Software, but it looks like only the first game was written.
Cornucopia: One of the Brian Cotton games, although I need to play Witch Hunt Goblin Towers from 1981 first. (Update: have played it, now free to play Cornucopia.)
Countdown to Doom: Last of the Acornsoft games from 1982.
Crystal Caverns: Hayden’s other text-only Apple II game, other than the buggy Crime Stopper.
The Curse of the Pharaoh: Kirsch, while not busy cranking out Adventures of the Month, also did a graphical adventure that got tossed on one of the Softside special disks.
The Deadly Game, The Dalton Gang, Alaskan Adventure: The final games for the Softside Adventure of the Month.
Danger Island: Another game for the Dragon.
Dark Star, Mexican Adventure: The other SharpSoft games remaining.
Derelict 2147: Roger M. Wilcox’s last game of 1982 (number 20 out of 21 games).
Drive-In: A naughty game, not the earliest but pretty early.
Enchanted Forest: Tandy CoCo game with weird graphics.
Espionage Island: The fourth Artic game after Ship of Doom.
Geheim-agent XP-05: The second-oldest German text adventure game we have.
Grave Robbers: Victory Software, of the minimal VIC-20 games like Jack and the Beanstalk, somehow now also includes text-mode graphics.
Haunted House: The last 1982 game from Aardvark.
The Hobbit: The famous Melbourne House game, probably the most famous game of 1982 I haven’t played yet.
In Search of: The Four Vedas, Stone Age, Fun House: The remaining TI-99 games by ASD&D. Fun House was sleuthed out recently by reader LanHawk.
Island Adventure: The last Apex Trading game for 1982.
Keys of the Wizard: The sequel to the ultrahard Madness and the Minotaur. Probably the hardest game remaining on my list.
Mad Martha: Satirical Britgame with minigames, from the author of Mines of Saturn.
Mysterious Mansion, Troll Hole Adventure: Two games for the Victor Lambda computer from France, based on the US Interact Model One.
Quest: Schatzoeken: Mysterious VIC-20 game.
Rainbow Adventure: Tandy CoCo type-in.
Search For The Ruby Chalice: Type-in via the Rainbow Book of Adventures. (Moved to 1983.)
Sherwood Forest: Apple II graphics game.
Softcore software collection: A set of naughty games. Not all the games are available. (Note: need to finish 5 and 6 now.)
The Software Toolworks version of Adventure: With three extra treasures, for CP/M.
Time Adventure, Hitch Hiker: Two from the same author, the latter being a modification of Supersoft Hitch Hiker’s Guide.
Time Warden: An unpublished game by the author of The Scepter.
Tom Sato Adventure: An obscure BBC Micro game, the rest of the games on this collection are lost but the adventure got rescued last year.
Windmere Estate, Zodiac Castle: Two that originally were on North Star, and one is weirdly a modification of the other. Maybe?
There’s also Apple II versions which are supposedly broken due to a bug.
I’ve finished the game, and my previous post is needed for context.
I was actually near-done with the town. I had mentioned finding BREAK working as a verb for the crowbar, but I hadn’t tried it yet at the sheriff’s office desk drawer (I think I did in my head but hadn’t actually gone through with it).
One of the keys (the small one) goes to the gun chest, and lets you get the shotgun. I immediately went to try it in the desert and it worked:
However, the monster is kind of like the dwarves in Crowther/Woods; that is, there’s more than one, and the shotgun only works twice. The other shotgun target was the snake, so I didn’t have to bother with all that “antidote” nonsense.
The shovel then can dig up the big sand pile I mentioned, and find a storm cellar. Nobody in the storm cellar, but there is dynamite, because (???).
I tried goofing around the town more (you can blow open the bank vault, it’s the wrong use of the dynamite) but really that’s everything: the tires and truck are a complete red herring, as is the bottle, and the water, and even the food. I discovered while mucking about the desert you get a fairly generous timer so I figured all I needed to do was puzzle out a route and I wouldn’t even need to bother.
There are random loops and bits of geography that don’t make sense in the desert, but I did finally manage a path:
Midway there’s a stop with a dead alien.
(The cube is useful, the rod does nothing as far as I know.) From there there’s a path with “crawl marks” so it isn’t hard to then find the crashed alien spaceship, which I knew had to be there because it’s on the cover of the game.
The whole purpose of the town section is to give the player the dynamite and the shotgun (I had the monster chase me to the end, here, and used my second shotgun blast so I could deal with the UFO entrance without fuss.) The dynamite is fussy to use: it gives the parser command STRIKE FUSE, but my process of
DROP DYNAMITE
STRIKE FUSE
EAST
in order to get away just blew me up. It took a while (after the fact, really) before I understood the game was implicitly picking up the dynamite again in order to “STRIKE” it even though that never gets said outright in the text. THROWing the dynamite didn’t work either.
The actual sequence is
STRIKE FUSE
DROP DYNAMITE
EAST
which is irritatingly specific. With the boulder blasted, you can go in to a brand-new area which feels like a Part 2 to the game.
(It’s not clear at all from the text, but LEAVE OUT from the entrance of the UFO lets you leave again — it felt for a while there I was trapped in.) Compass directions now get dropped: you’re supposed to PUSH X BUTTON followed by ENTER OVAL to go anywhere on the ship. The overall impression is slightly tedious and would be triply irritating for a slow typist.
The strange room descriptions do get cleared up later, but (I suspect for most players) pretty late, as in after the entire map is done being made.
Important rooms marked in color.
There’s a lot of rooms with weirdly-described cylinders and I admit I appreciated the atmosphere of feeling alien as opposed to, say, Menagerie, which clearly was a thinly-veiled Earth-type zoo. The odd movement reinforced this even though it got irritating by the end.
To get in at all you need to fill a hole with the cube from the desert; that causes to buttons to start working. Then deeper in there’s a “grey cube” that gets used on another machine to form a “white cube” and finally on a third machine to make it so you understand the alien language. Nothing is labeled and all three are somewhat distant from each other so it really is just luck for things to happen.
With the final effect, you can understand what rooms are and what the messages mean.
The particularly interesting room is the weapons room.
The white button pops up a viewscreen, and the green button (while the white button is active) gives instructions on how to shoot things. You can pick your target.
Being a loyal Earthling.
With the mothership destroyed, the overall threat is gone, and you can escape the way you came all the way back to the entrance. I had a monster chasing me half the time, so it’s not like the desert is entirely peaceful, but I guess the Air Force can roll in now with guns blazing for the rest.
This game has some vivid memories. Some of this just comes from the distribution influence (Tandy really did not sell much other than Tandy product in their stores, so TRS-80 players often only saw the “official” games like this one) but there is a certain vivid haunting-ness to the environment that I found appealing. From Figment Fly:
I could manage to kill one alien with the shotgun, but I never found a spaceship. I never knew what the game was about back then. One of my dad’s co-workers told me about a spaceship and all that, but I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not.
I could only remember one: An adventure game that began with “Xe…” It featured a dusty empty town, a hot desert, aliens, and a space ship.
Lately I had a yearning to complete the memory, and luckily I found your site. A few emulators later, I’m in Purgatory, and this time I shoot that rotten nine-foot diamondback snake in two. And finally I get past the boulder and get in the spaceship that has taunted me since the early 80s.
I didn’t know there was a UFO back then, until I found your website. I originally thought the game was going to be about ghosts or something like that because of the ghost town feeling in the first half of the game. I preferred the first half “old town” part of the game to the last half about the UFO. It was a lot of fun exploring the town, and the way it was written really made the town come alive for me in my imagination. I could almost hear the wind blowing and see the tumbleweeds moving through the desert.
I’m guessing not a lot of people played with their eye on the art cover. Like: they found it on a parent’s computer and the disk was copied third hand via a piracy network. The desert maze really is very stressful and there’s lots of spaces where you just loop around, and the whole time there’s chasing monsters + messages about dying from lack of food and water (and as far as I know, no portable way to carry water!)
Still not bad for a modern experience, although the parser remained horribly finicky to the end; having a straightforward error message is really so much better that what happened here. It’s one of those route-not-taken in UI history where I think it could have been turned into something special, but people were eyeballing Infocom (and eventually, Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls) as the model to follow, with only a few weird experiments (like Amnesia) otherwise.
One last comment on the title: it refers to the shotgun in the game. We have had, almost as a complete stereotype now, so many weapons fail to work on enemies; they get laid low via some roundabout puzzle instead. This is normal for adventure games. But the shotgun just works and starts blasting things and I had the brief pleasure that usually comes from playing DOOM or something where the hordes fall by the wayside.
3:08 a.m. RRRRIIIINNNNGGGG! At first, you bury your head under the pillow, hoping it will go away. But no…RRRRIIIINNNNGGGG! There it is again. What idiot could possibly be calling at this unholy hour?
You search your nightstand in the dark, clumsily grabbing the receiver. “Yeah?” you mumble at this nuisance of a machine, hoping to convey extreme crankiness and anger. “Dr. Sands?” the voice at the other end of the wire asks.
“Nah, it’s Mary Poppins. Of course it’s Dr. Sands! Who is this and what do you want?”
“Dr. Sands, it’s General Thatcher, U.S. Air Force, at the Pentagon. Sorry to wake you, but I have an urgent situation here.” The general’s voice sounds close to panic.
Xenos is part of a long saga for this blog, as the author Robert Arnstein first appeared in Tandy’s 1979 game Haunted House; I wrote that post 8 years ago. Haunted House is the same game that influenced Das Geheimnisvolle Haus; the fact it was distributed by Tandy itself meant it had more influence on the TRS-80 scene than its quality might indicate. Arnstein’s works after were stronger: Pyramid 2000 was a decent re-skin of Crowther/Woods Adventure, Raäka-Tū was an archaeology-raid game with creative traps, and Bedlam we haven’t gotten to yet but is another adventure along the lines of Asylum.
I’m not actually clear whether Xenos or Bedlam came out first but they both are solidly dated as 1982 so I’m not going to fuss over the order.
From Figmentfly. Notice the 32K of memory requirement: this is chunkier than the standard TRS-80 game from the time.
We play as Dr. Sands, who is tasked by the Air Force with investigating a “strange glow” in Purgatory, New Mexico. Some investigators were already sent in that didn’t make it out, except for one who lost their mind.
7:32 a.m. – You step out of the jeep, just west of Purgatory. Turning to the driver, you ask “Did the general give you any instructions to wait for me?”
“Are you kidding?” the edgy private squeaks. “I’m getting out of here as fast as I can!” The jeep does a 180 and roars off in the direction from whence it came.
Looking down the road you can see that you’ve made the mistake of you life. The air seems oppressive as you begin walking toward town. There are no signs of life — you should have known better than to get mixed up in this. “Next time I’m leaving the phone off the hook,” you say aloud, to be answered by the ominous howl of the arid wind.
I appreciate the plot setup which a.) has us exploring a strange area, as is exceedingly typical for adventure games yet b.) gives the framing an X-Files style setup which is unique enough that I feel from the start like I am entering a story rather than just a world.
Before diving headfirst into the game, I should mention the parser, which is different than any we’ve seen so far. It uses multiple words, and it will ask to clarify if you don’t type enough words for the game to understand something.
The word “which” is flashing.
In the screen above, I was holding more than one key (I had a skeleton key, a master key, and a brass key) so the game takes the line I just typed and modifies it, to put the word “which” in there as a gap. After the flashing concludes, the cursor is at the empty spot, and the idea is that you then type the needed word (“brass” or whatnot) to make it so the parser now understands you.
This sounds terrific conceptually and is unlike any modern game I’ve played, but it is too easy to get into a loop of misunderstanding. I often just completely deleted the line I was trying to type and moved on. For example, there’s a crowbar that shows up early, so I was trying to use it to get in some areas that were locked.
PRY MASSIVE DOOR WITH CROWBAR
Typing that led to the word ?VERB? showing up, and then the cursor landing immediately before the word “pry”. The problem is I didn’t know what verb to try that the game would understand, or even if I was in the ballpark where any synonym would work. I eventually came across
BREAK MASSIVE DOOR WITH CROWBAR
YOUR TOOL IS TOO SMALL FOR THE JOB.
but in other cases I simply had to abort trying to type anything at all, which required deleting the whole line by hand. I think there’s a possible UI direction here that really does work and completely sidesteps any old or modern norms; it would need to prevent the player from getting “stuck” and frustrated when they don’t have a verb or noun to fix things, or where the player forgets the exact colors of the keys in their inventory.
Back to the X-Files —
Rather than playing like an alien-game, what this really feels like is a Western akin to Ghost Town or Greedy Gulch. The player starts near the abandoned town of Purgatory and there is a large desert around, and crossing the desert requires food and water. The big difference is the monster; if you start by turning around and going west, you’ll have an immediate encounter:
You can run away and there will be multiple turns of the creature “following”. I suspect we might need to get somewhere in the desert first before dealing with the creature, but I haven’t got that far in the game yet.
The town is a big west-to-east street (again like Ghost Town or Greedy Gulch) and it will help visualize things to give a meta-map first:
This is not what things look like square-by-square, which is something more like this, although the map is incomplete:
Essentially there are “in between” squares so that the space in between each of the buildings is included.
The gas station is the first building the player will encounter approaching from the west. It has a crowbar, pump, and skeleton key. The skeleton key (as far as I can tell) only is used to unlock a bathroom on the east side of the station, and there is nothing in the bathroom. Around the back of the gas station there is a junkyard with a broken jeep that has a deflated tire, and an inflated spare tire next to it. The deflated tire is on the jeep and the game indicates it needs to be jacked up in order to get the item, but I have yet to find the right verb combination to make this work. (I also have yet to find the a place where I urgently need a deflated tire, so it hasn’t been a priority.)
Going farther east there is a saloon to the north, and a sheriff to the south. The sheriff is initially locked so we’ll go back to that later.
In addition to the radio which talks about how great you are, there’s a bottle with questionable brown liquid (and a label mentioning it will “help with what ails you” although trying to drink it just informs the player it’d make them sicker) and some water. I would assume the bottle gets emptied to fill with water but I haven’t been able to accomplish this given the parser.
Stepping farther leads to a grocery and hardware store. The grocery, straightforwardly, is mostly empty but still has some food. The hardware store contains a shovel in the back guarded by a snake.
This is a delayed-death so it may be a matter of finding a cure instead of fighting off the snake. To the west of the saloon is a giant pile of sand which requires some kind of tool for digging as is presumably where the shovel goes; there’s also a sign in the hotel which states “in case of tornado all hotel guests should meet at the west side of the saloon and enter the storm shelter”, so there’s definitely a location down there.
Moving further is the aforementioned hotel and a bank. I have not been able to get into the bank.
The hotel has a master key which can be used to unlock two rooms further in. One of the rooms is empty, while the other has a brass key in a dresser. The brass key goes back to the sheriff’s and can be used to unlock the main door.
Again like Greedy Gulch! Unfortunately I’m stuck here; two of the desk drawers are locked (and the third is empty); the cabinet also has resisted my attempts at opening it. This resistance may be because of the ornery parser where it is hard to rapidly test verbs out; I’ll hopefully make progress on that by next time.
Just to be clear, the issues open are: dealing with the monster in the desert, getting the flat tire (almost certainly a parser issue), dealing with the locked things in the sheriff office, dealing with the snake (potentially also a parser issue), and getting into the bank. This feels almost near to playing an Infocom game except for all the “potential parser issue” parts, even though the prose has been straightforward so far.
The game was mostly straightforward but there was one horrendously obscure part and two major bugs. My previous post is needed to understand this one.
This game was swiped by Keypunch on the same disk as the broken Cavern of Riches port; the one that made it impossible to score. Weirdly, the stolen C64 version of Castle Adventure might be less buggy than the original. Via eBay.
I had left off last time being captured and tossed in a cell with a “horny toad”. The most immediate obvious thing it seemed to try — given this was a princess-rescue expedition — was to try to KISS TOAD.
However, I had no method of getting through the locked door, so this was a dead end. The main catch to realize is that even though there’s a rope with grappling hook immediately adjacent to a place it gets used (arriving at the guard and then this scene) that doesn’t mean the rope gets used in that spot first! The right action is to grab the grappling hook, turn it around, and use it on the castle instead.
Doing this opens a significant amount of map since nearly the entire interior of the castle is now accessible.
New rooms marked in color.
You can technically scoop the rope up behind you as there’s a battle axe off in one tower that you can use to drop the castle’s drawbridge. I say “technically” because this was one of the bugs of the game: halfway through the drawbridge just disappeared for no reason and I had to restart.
Other fun items are the Baron’s best horse which you can steal away with…
…and some armor where the mere act of carrying it is enough to confuse wandering guards into thinking you are the Baron. (I assume it is passively intended that you wear the armor when you pick it up, but it still was funny the first time it happened.)
The bookcase here incidentally has two entirely different books, and both are needed. I got lucky and found one book on one playthrough and the other on a reset, so I knew they were both there, but this would be a case where it’d be quite easy to miss an item.
One book is a “horror” book that has a diamond inside which counts as a treasure, and the other is a rare edition of Scott which has the word “Ivanhoe” (as hinted at by the graffiti, so I guess it’d be fine to find the horror book first since there’s a hint that the second book exists, but I found them in the reverse order).
The “piano keys” are found by trying to play a piano. They get used later to unlock a door, because adventure game logic. The joke made sense in Kidnapped but not as much sense here.
The bookcase also hides a secret passage leading to a treasure room with gold bars and a silver cross. However, taking one of the treasure items causes the door to seal and lock (and not a lock openable via piano keys). What does work in the room is the word IVANHOE which teleports the player over to a dungeon area, but I wasn’t sure at first what use that was.
Another secret passage goes off of a fireplace (just ENTER FIREPLACE) and it leads into a family crypt with a talking skull.
The “vampire” being warned about is a little farther down, where there’s some rubies and the sound of flapping wings. At random, you might get bitten by the vampire bat and die (the silver cross offers protection, but it’s easier to just save your game and hope for the random luck, it seems like you get through about 90% of the time anyway).
The next move turned out to be slightly tricky: I had the means to escape the cell with the princess already. (You can try to attack a guard anywhere, like where the books are, and you’ll get sent there.) The guard is nice enough to send you to the cell while still holding a battle axe, so you can SMASH DOOR. It is unclear why smashing the door works there (and not any of the other locked doors); the three doors (guard in the cave, the door at the treasure room, and the cell) all have different methods of opening even though they look indistinguishable.
With the princess in hand you find yourself back in the dungeon, the same dungeon that IVANHOE works in to zip over to the treasure room. The problem is that the treasure room locks itself even if you don’t try to steal anything, so there doesn’t seem to be any escape. The trick (which I found out via walkthrough) is to wait around for a guard to appear, and then fight it. Fighting a guard before was useless other than to get captured, but the second time works out.
Now here’s the astonishingly bad part. Even though there’s no command to examine the guard further, and LOOK yields nothing new, you can still TAKE KEYS from the guard. I guess you’re supposed to assume he has some? This is so egregious I think it’s probably a bug. The keys from the guard work on the treasure room, so it’s now possible to escape (not only with the princess, but the gold bars and silver cross).
Almost done!
The last treasure is found back at the cave. The guard that was at a door is now unconscious in the dungeon, so you can open the door unmolested; this is where the piano keys work.
It’s a cute joke, but the game never previously established this kind of tilted-reality in the same way Kidnapped (which uses the same joke) or Mad Venture (where you pick up a “fork” in the road) does.
There’s a wrong route where you can end up LOST IN THE PET RAM (fine, there’s one other titled-reality moment), but the important part is the BARON’S SECRET STRONGHOLD.
The treasure just disappears if you try to get it, and I was past my patience at this point, so I just checked the walkthrough: the treasure teleported itself up to a previously-empty turret, so if you trudge up there you can pick up the chest (which I guess only has enough energy to teleport once).
This game had more charm than I think I’ve been getting across, but I really did have two massive bugs overshadow my gameplay and require resets. One was the previously-mentioned disappearing drawbridge (and it took a while to confirm that this was a bug, and not me messing up a puzzle); the other issue is the torch will suddenly start to run out of light, and then when it finally does rooms that previously don’t need a torch suddenly go dark. The torch is otherwise only used for a handful of cave rooms. Generally speaking, you can just drop the torch early in the game and ignore it and it won’t run out, so I feel like the author intended some kind of daemon which just broke hard.
Malmberg certainly kept it in mind because in 1987 he showed off his new AGT system with a game called Crusade, which is just a port of Castle Adventure.
You are in the midst of a thick woods. The ground is damp with dew. The night air is chilly and you shiver from the cold.
There are large trees all around you.
You see a crumpled-up piece of paper with writing on it.
(The paper is an ad for the AGT system.) One last noteworthy element that’s specifically in the AGT version: the author mentions the possibility of giving hints, but is emphatic that it should be done via letter. He is quite firm that you should NOT call his phone number, ever ever. This suggests the author had some unfortunate past encounters, given the number of exclamation marks used.
HOW TO GET INTO THE CASTLE, OR FOR SOME OTHER HINT!!! I will be glad to provide a solution, but I want to do it by letter, not by phone!!!
Renga in Blue 