I have always been interested in adventure games — ever since I first played Scott Adams’ Adventureland and issued the command CLIMB TREE and I entered a whole new world.
Castle Adventure is another entry in the “early work of a person who would become notable” genre. Other examples include Temple of Disrondu, with two of the Magnetic Scrolls authors (Rob Steggles and Hugh Steers) in a team-up; Brian Fargo started his career with two adventure games including Demon’s Forge; the team for Dragon’s Keep included Al Lowe who would go on to pen the Leisure Suit Larry series.
David Malmberg was an executive by day, but would eventually become an important name in text adventures by modifying the GAGS text adventure system into the much more powerful AGT, Adventure Game Toolkit. In the late 80s and early 90s, for text adventure authors not using the older Quill or the more recent TADS, it was often the default game-writing system. It showed up in games like The Multi-Dimensional Thief (1991) and Shades of Grey (1992) which are still worth playing today.
After studying GAGS in detail, it became obvious that it was limited to very simple games with only a few verbs. I wanted to create Infocom-like games. GAGS in its current state would never make it. However, Mark had defined the essential data structures very well, e.g., ROOMs, NOUNs, and CREATUREs, but GAGS lacked flexibility in manipulating those objects. So I set about extending GAGS by adding what I called “meta-commands,” which really increased the power and flexibility of GAGS. These meta-commands allowed for an almost unlimited number of nouns, verbs, and objects (and synonyms for any of them) and the ability to manipulate them. It came close to my goal of creating games that were truly Infocom-like.
Malmberg’s interest in creating programming tools extended to making this LOGO/PILOT hybrid program for graphics, prior to writing Castle Adventure. Via eBay.
This impulse to extend an adventure-writing system did not come from nowhere; to make Castle Adventure, as published in the November 1982 issue of Micro, the author studied various articles by Scott Adams detailing how his own system worked.
Many of the ideas in CASTLE ADVENTURE, as well as other adventures that are widely available, owe a tremendous debt to Scott Adams. In the specific case of CASTLE, it uses a database structure and table-driven logic similar to those first described by Adams in several articles.
The articles in question are from Creative Computing (August 1979), Softside (July 1980) and BYTE (December 1980). According to this thread Malmberg took actual PET source from 1979 as a base (rather than just eyeballing the article) and Strident points out that there’s a biographical note from a year earlier that already mentions adventures…
David Malmberg is Director of Management Systems for Foremost-McKesson in San Francisco. He has a PET, as well as a VIC, and is interested in machine language utilities, strategy games, and writing his own “Adventures.” He’d like to hear from anyone who develops interesting VIC applications (with or without the light pen).
…meaning Castle Adventure may have existed in some form before 1982.
We are here to rescue a princess, somehow winning her hand in marriage in the process.
In CASTLE ADVENTURE you play the role of Godfrey de Goodheart, a bold, but impoverished knight. King Fredrick has dispatched you to rescue his only daughter, the beautiful Princess Fatima, from the dungeons of Baron von Evil’s castle. You have also been asked to capture the Baron’s treasures of gold, silver, and gems, which he enmassed by cruelly exploiting his serfs. If you can rescue the princess and return with all of the Baron’s ill-gotten treasures, King Fredrick has promised you Princess Fatima’s hand in marriage.
Oddly, despite the supposedly standard concept, princess-marriage doesn’t happen that often in early adventures. The prototypical example, Wizard and the Princess, doesn’t even give you half the kingdom. Dragon Quest at least gives the hero a pile of cash but they just get a kiss from the princess. Slaying the dragon in Treasure Hunt yields a “little black book with the addresses and phone numbers of every beautiful princess that lives in Vermont.” The princess in Program Power Adventure invites you to a banquet. Hezarin has a princess and a prince but not as the main goal, and where “only one offers their hand in marriage, but that ought to be enough for any normal Adventurer anyway. They can always marry each other if you don’t like the idea.”
What is quite standard is kicking off the proceedings in a forest.
Out of all games that start in a forest, this is one of them.
Don’t worry, though, the game gets abnormal again quite quickly.
Normally, the player starts with a knapsack containing some matches. However, the command JUMP will break your arm (!) and now you have a broken arm in inventory too. The broken arm has genuine effect; for example, you can’t CLIMB TREE with one (as suggested by Malmberg’s early moment of excitement in Adventureland)…
…nor can you go to a nearby cave, which has a torch at the entrance that can be lit by the matches.
If you hang around enough turns (15 or so?) the message YOUR ARM HAS HEALED appears and the adventure can resume as normal.
In addition to the above shenanigans, you can swim across the moat helpfully marked “NO SWIMMING — DANGER!” and hang out with some MAN-EATING PIRANHA. (In a nice detail, the matches go soggy if you’re carrying them in water.) If you’re just passing by you are safe, except past the moat is a raised drawbridge which isn’t too helpful. Hanging out with the killer fish results in YOU’VE MADE A TASTY MEAL! and a scene where you can try to pick the correct direction to resurrect yourself, early Scott Adams style.
Going the wrong direction leads to YOU ARE LOST IN THE PET ROMS and the game ending.
Weirdly, going through the death scene is how I first found the “treasure spot” of the game, as it is the landing point of a successful resurrection. Back at the cave (I showed a screenshot earlier where trying to go near is prevented by a broken arm) you can GO HILL to arrive at a new room. I’ve always hated this sort of “hidden exit” when it has happened, but at least there was an alternate method of finding the place!
Veering back to the cave, going in leads to a slight “maze” (just the author dropping some loops in), and a grappling hook with a rope right before a tall room where it gets used.
After climbing the rope, there’s a door with an angry guard. Doing battle lands the player in prison with a “horny toad”, and that seems like a good stopping point for now.
The Scott Adams influence is clearly showing up in gameplay already, with the “broken arm” scene, the matches that can go soggy, and the resurrection. As I’ve mentioned before, the “daemons” from the Scott Adams system add timing and condition elements; they tend to make games more complex than the norm, so I expect Castle Adventure to go above and beyond a typical type-in game.
We’ve fought dragons, traveled through time, explored futuristic cities, and raided Egyptian tombs. We’ve encountered some of the toughest puzzles ever written, and even conquered some of those without looking anything up. We’ve defeated a demon lord (twice) and re-enacted the “you shall not pass” scene with a balrog by destroying a bridge. We are now an ultimate adventurer, and we need an ultimate game to match.
We need a game where we face off against bears, sharks, squids, meteors from the sky, and we PUNCH THEM IN THE FACE.
Via World of Dragon.
Ultimate Adventure is by Phil Edwardson of Americus, Kansas, who studied printing technology in the 70s; this is his only amateur effort. It is another one of the games from tapemag Chromasette that ended up getting picked up by Microdeal for a Dragon port. (See: Mansion Adventure.) As a brief reminder, CLOAD was the very first tapemag and published for TRS-80, and Chromasette was a spin-off started after the Tandy CoCo became available.
From the May 1982 issue, in which Ultimate Adventure appears.
I also need to make a correction, as I previously implied CLOAD must have had better sales than Chromasette due to the rarity of the latter. According to the editor Dave Lagerquist, Chromasette actually exceeded CLOAD in sales (he estimated 3000 subscriptions at its peak, although he didn’t remember if it was 3000 for each publication or 3000 combined). In the same interview he mentions — relevantly for today — that CLOAD submissions had gone through a hobbyist-to-professional cycle as people started to master programming for the original TRS-80, so that by the time Chromasette kicked off in the summer of 1981, TRS-80 Model 1/3 programming had “matured” into complex machine code games; the Tandy CoCo’s debut in September 1980 essentially “reset the stage” so people were experimenting and writing hobbyist work again.
Also from the May 1982 issue.
Ultimate Adventure, despite the name, is only marginally an adventure. It belongs in the strategy-adjacent genre seen most recently with the Apex Trading Haunted House and not recently at all with Lance Miklus Treasure Hunt.
The goal is to obtain $1000, starting with $250. The starting money is because everything needs to be bought; there are no puzzle-solving items to be found “in the field”.
The small-ish map of the game consists of various biomes connected by “portholes”. These portholes are “teleportation portals” and normally just behave like rooms but there is a random chance one will send the player to a different location.
Yellow marked rooms are the “puzzles”. For example, you are unable to enter outer space without a space suit on. You are unable to dive underwater without scuba gear. The game is fairly polite about telling you what’s wrong.
Going back to that price list, the knife and the gun are weapons, some items help protect against a hazard which might or might not appear. Consider, for example, the “fur coat” which clearly goes to the arctic; you may simply not get cold in the arctic by luck, and even if you do, it will be a decrease of strength points penalty, rather than the end of the game.
Even if you don’t have a weapon, you can still try (as the game’s instructions suggest) typing HANDS and getting through via chutzpah. Here are two different results from punching a bear:
The CLUE will let you know where a treasure is hidden…
…and buying the shovel will probably do something useful? I never quite figured out if it helped with the treasures or not.
Other than random encounters with biome-appropriate hazards…
The game is prompting for an item here.
…the gameplay consists of visiting each one and typing SEARCH. This may or may not yield a treasure. A little “line moving” animation accompanies the search.
Multiple searches tend to be required. Each search is accompanied by a random chance of a bad hazard. For example, while searching underwater I found a treasure (SUNKEN TREASURE WORTH $224) but I got set upon by a giant octopus in the process.
The helpful thing — the thing that makes the game manageable — is that one of the rooms is an Infirmary. When you step inside your strength, which tends to get battered around by the various hazards of the game, gets restored to full. This place can be re-visited as many times as you like.
This ends up making the game more or less just a matter of patience. While it can be un-nerving to search through a mine field without appropriate protection, you can try to literally punch anything to get your way out of it.
Hazards can roll at any turn, and that can include right after encountering another hazard. So it is possible to get three polar bears in a row charging, and it likely is even more possible if the difficulty is cranked (it goes from 1 easy, to 5 hard).
I have no trouble with strategy, but Ultimate Adventure doesn’t really scratch that itch: it doesn’t have any interesting choices to make other than “do you push your luck searching, or go back to the infirmary now”. A very young me desperate for entertainment might try to scrounge the turn count down but again, the game is lacking in the ambiguous choice and multiple viable routes that really makes a strategy game work.
We did get to punch tigers! And landmines, somehow.
I have finished the game; my previous post is needed to make sense of this one.
Mind you, I’m not sure how much sense things really make. This game is, in a way, easier for beginners than veteran players: veteran players (ahem) might actually sit down and try to figure out the connections between the various rooms, and why some things appear or don’t appear at random, while a beginner might be satisfied wandering to the end without any such documentation.
I really did make an honest attempt at first at mapping…
…but I kept having connection not make any sense, and directions that went one way during one play-iteration go a different way on another. On top of that, testing exits always could randomly lead to being randomly walloped by a goblin with no chance of rescue, or even by a balrog (who appears at any time).
I found the general idea of the authors was to have hyperconnectivity. By which I mean: there would be two or three or even five ways to get between two points. This can be a fun and charming aspect to early games: Zork might drop the trapdoor after you enter its world at first, but gives quite a few ways to get back to the daylight (someone with more flexibility than others) and it gives the impression of a universe with lots of options; here, it feels more like the authors were just drawing in links at random. There’s a trapdoor that lets you wrap around back to the starting area. You can somehow land back where the boat is (and take the remaining set of items) with the boat never having left.
This only opens from the other side, which is dramatically interesting, but the other side is roughly six steps away and just as easy to get to as walking through the trapdoor, which is not so interesting.
Eventually I managed to randomly come across someone saying the word NEIRIF. This is a trigger to send you to another part of the map that is quite important.
No puzzle solving, just patience and luck I didn’t get walloped by a balrog this playthrough.
This lands you just outside a tree with a rope and some food; all you really need to do is grab one piece of food. Later, nearby, there’s a hungry person who will help you assuming you share.
With the wizard hat on from the starting area, the staff that the dog brought over works and you can WAVE STAFF to form a bridge (and then, with some parser difficulty, CROSS BRIDGE). This leads to a new area where you can just wander around until you find the golden bird, the whole point of the quest.
Hang out and a wizard will eventually appear. The word ZOOT previously just gives a rumbling noise, but here it actually wins the game, for some reason (and yes, I just got annoyed and looked this up rather than actually solve anything).
Referring back to the paradox of the two reviews, yes, I could see someone blustering to the end in a few hours and assuming (given that very little in the way of puzzle solving happened) that this was an easy game. I could also see someone impossible stuck for weeks because of the RNG going in weird directions.
The design intent clearly had the player whacking at monsters — you can get 10 point per monster, and you can use the staff to send down lightning bolts on things. But back even in 1982 we didn’t care that much about score and it was a mainly a way to notice “hey, you missed some puzzles”, not get a genuine feel of achievement the way a new record on Asteroids might.
Via Acorn Electron World.
I feel like the authors zeroed in on aspects they liked (hyperconnectivity, monsters, randomness) without thinking that the structure they’d be left with wasn’t fully sustaining. It’s the sort of game where since the designer knows their map they easily can get a different impression of play than an actual human who has no insider knowledge. I’m hoping they got some feedback which can be applied later, since this is only the first of four games, even if it is the only one of the authors that lands in 1982.
Brytta, 11th King of Rohan, was not to be given a peaceful reign, despite being beloved by all and given the name Léofa. The War of the Dwarves and the Orcs had caused numerous orcs to leave their realm in the Misty Mountains to find settlement in the White Mountains just south of Rohan. Brytta went to war to remove their scourge, and by his death was thought to have destroyed them; this was not so, as they were merely in hiding.
The next king, Walda, met unfortunate circumstances 9 years into his reign. As Tolkien explains in Appendix A of Lord of the Rings:
He was slain with all his companions when they were trapped by Orcs, as they rode by mountain-paths from Dunharrow.
Walda’s son Folca took up the task of vengeance for his father, and swore to never hunt a beast until all orcs were removed from Rohan for good. This task he accomplished by the age of 60, so he followed this up with a trip to the Firienwood (or Firien Wood, or Firienholt) on the border between Rohan and Gondor. It held a mighty boar, and while Folca the orc-slayer managed to defeat the boar, he soon died after from tusk-wounds.
Today’s adventure is from another British company (MP Software) where I have only been able to scrounge out the barest of information. Their adventure Firienwood first gets mentioned in the November 1982 issue of Personal Computing Today as “coming soon”, and I’ve been able to confirm it is listed as existing by the February 1983 issue (reaching the street January 1983) and the internal copyright date says 1982, so we’ll roll with that; if it didn’t quite squeak in being published by the end of ’82 it was close enough. (Thanks to Ethan Johnson who helped with my search.)
As far as I can tell Helen Seymour and John Hudson produced all the MP Software products; this is the first of four adventure games they made (later: Crown of Mardan, Sadim Castle, Woodland Terror). They were originally for the BBC Micro, but also ported (with likely very little change) to the Electron. The address listed (even on later printings) is a clearly residential area in Bromborough, Merseyside, suggesting the pair were yet another garage-operation (well, the houses don’t have garages, but you get what I mean).
From Every Game Going.
This is harkening back to the cavalcade of Crowther/Woods clones but adds an element which makes it almost uniquely painful. It’s easier to explain in context what I mean, so let’s dive in–
Our aim is to find a golden bird of paradise, and there’s a Wizard making things difficult. We are rather unusually told up front that monster kills are worth 10 points each, which is more like RPG than adventure behavior.
Our adventure, not shockingly, starts near the title forest, and if we try to go in we get tangled in and die via thorns.
The intent seems to be to funnel the player towards a boat at the very start, where you pick three out of six items (as you can’t carry more on the boat).
I already know the hambone gets used almost immediately, and I think the sword is necessary, and I’ve found use for the keys. This is not an absolute guarantee that this represents the set that must be chosen. Philosopher’s Quest had two gimmicks, one where a bonus item could be scrounged, and one where an item that doesn’t get taken nevertheless gets found anyway. So I could see (despite me using the keys early) another set of keys somehow surfacing, or maybe a way of putting them out forward. (Having said that, the most obvious action, tossing stuff in the river hoping it gets carried somewhere helpful, doesn’t get parsed.)
Taking the boat leads to a cave with a “vicious dog”. This is where the bone comes in handy.
Specifically, the dog suddenly not only becomes happy, but brings forth a “Wizards Staff” that “has many powers”. The only power I know of so far is that it lights up automatically in darkness.
From here comes the traditional cave-in-many-directions, and I’ll give a pair of screens which might explain my struggle:
Specifically, past this point in the game, a goblin can attack at any time. The goblin will have a random chance of killing you on sight. If it doesn’t kill you, you have a chance of doing KILL GOBLIN via the sword and having success, but then the goblin can still return at any moment. “Any moment” includes actions like “check if an particular direction has an exit or not” or “check if the passage that you entered from the east lets you go back the same way to the west, or if it is one-way”. This has one of those unfortunate twisty maps wherever everything everywhere needs to be checked but this is also combined with a high probability of death at any moment.
(Oh, in addition to N/S/E/W/NE/SE/SW/NW, LEFT and RIGHT are directions too sometimes.)
The very curious thing is that the two 80s reviews I’ve run across (not intentionally, just trying to find files for the game) both mark this as a “beginner game”. Both are reviews for the Electron, though, rather than the original BBC Micro version I am playing. I may switch it up if this gets too terrible and see if the authors lightened up the RNG death in the revised version. What I can’t do is simply hack BASIC source, as this is a machine code game.
Germany got a jump start on computing early. The earliest “real computer”, arguably, was via Konrad Zuse with his Z3 in 1941; fortunately for Zuse’s modern reputation, it failed to drum up much enthusiasm with the Nazis, and while it got used for some minor aeronautical calculations, the monster application of the war — codebreaking — was left to the Allies.
After the Nazis were defeated, post-war restrictions meant aviation and nuclear research were banned. So, while Zuse met Turing in 1947 and later founded a company (Zuse KG) and IBM had a presence (their German spinoff Dehomag was redubbed IBM Deutschland GmbH in 1949) it still took a while for computing in Germany to really be established. (I’m referring now to West Germany; East Germany went to the Soviets and has its own story.)
In 1955 the Allied occupation ended and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council) was founded. Computers quickly started to occupy universities, with half of them having mainframes by 1960. Local private companies started to face off against IBM. Siemens got on board early (1954, before restrictions were lifted) and went after big industry. The radio and television company Telefunken (parent company AEG) made a mark with the TR-440, dominating the university market, but AEG’s lack of enthusiasm eventually led to their large computing operations being sold to Siemens; Siemens kept up with the industrial-scale computers, while AEG focused more on mid-range business operations. A few more companies like Triumph-Adler focused on office settings.
Ludwig Zagler posing with his chess program written with Siegfried Jahn for the TR-440: Daja (1974). It could only be run at night. Picture from Der Spiegel, April 1976.
Missing from all this is home computing. Referring to a May 1980 issue of Mikro + Kleincomputer, the Schweizer Computer Club had access to Apple, Pet, Sorcerer, Superbrain, and TRS-80: none of those are from German companies. The big locals were still focused on business and industry; Triumph-Adler, which started to try their hand at the personal market with their Alphatronic, was never a consumer hit. (According to one author, they originally tried to “sell them like typewriters” in batches.)
The foreign companies of the Trinity, then, were the dominant force in 1980, although in a different order than the US: Commodore PET, Apple II, TRS-80. Commodore would eventually creep up to be dominant all the way to Amiga, but for the time of our story there was still a pitched battle. TRS-80 had a brief moment in the sun not in its original form imported from the US, but as a cheaper clone via a company from Hong Kong.
…
Hannover Messe was an “export fair” which had been running since 1947; in 1970 the fair added the Center for Office and Information Technology (Hall 1) which included computing devices.
In 1980, Fred Trommeschläger was at Hall 1. He had previously sold electronics (interrupted in the mid-70s by a foray into aviation), but he pivoted from electronics to computers when they became more profitable, forming Trommeschläger Computer GmbH. He sold imports of TRS-80s (via the Tandy headquarters in Belgium) but tried to undercut his competition on price. He was tipped off that there was a cheaper TRS-80 alternative showing. The machine was being sold was the Video Genie by EACA, a Hong Kong-based company that had been founded in 1970 by mechanical engineer Eric Chung (previously of Fairchild, the same company that eventually released the first home console that uses cartridges).
Trommeschläger sent his employees scouting, found the machine at the fair, and got an invite to a sales meeting. Negotiations happened in Holland with multiple companies vying for rights, and Trommeschläger managed to impress the representatives from Hong Kong — landing an exclusive deal — by arriving in his own plane (remember, he briefly had went into aviation!)
Sales blew up, with volume going by by a factor of five from 1980 to 1982. Volume went up in 1983 as well, but there was a catch: EACA imploded. Eric Chung was reported fleeing with a briefcase containing 10 million USD. One issue was simply Tandy themselves, which had brought up a lawsuit in 1981 for infringement; it was settled out of court, but it must have represented a significant financial hit. Additionally, while the Video Genie was a success EACA had also gone into other products like radios that were a failure, and then also decided to compound that with speculation on property (!).
This left Trommeschläger’s company in trouble, as they had already done more hiring and had already announced future product based on the EACA’s upcoming computers (now vaporware). They tried to adapt a different computer (the Ferranti PC) and re-dub it with the now-known-in-Germany Genie name, but it wasn’t enough, and his company went down in 1984.
The reason why all this is important is that it meant the Video Genie name became more well-known in Germany than the original TRS-80; while the US had magazines like 80 Micro supporting the TRS-80, Germany had Genie Data. Also, one of the copies of today’s selection (Das Geheimnisvolle Haus, The Mysterious House) is in a directory titled genie1.
I found this game while looking for another game, Geheim-agent XP-05, the existence of which had been sleuthed out by commenter Rob; it was thought to be lost. I dug around the far corners of the Internet and managed to find the secret agent game in a public German archive by checking every disk. XP-05 was on disk 5. From disk 7 I found this:
I had a copy of HAUS.BAS already, but variations can differ, so I opened the source code and hit paydirt:
21050 GESCHRIEBEN IM OKTOBER 81 VON UWE SCHUSTER
October 1981! My other copy mentioned Uwe Schuster, but not the date. This places it as the earliest German adventure game currently found. I will not give any guarantees there isn’t older; early German computer history still needs study. I can say that when Mikro+Kleincomputer did a review of Apple Adventure in February 1982, it was written as if adventures were a new idea. It explains that you communicate using commands of two words, and that you are searching for treasure, that there are “beinahe unendliche Labyrinthe” and you should make a map.
We have some clue as to Uwe Schuster’s influences, as while one copy contains a year and month, the other contains an author statement.
Dieses Programm erhielt seine Anregung von “Haunted-House”. Es erschien mir reizvoll, dieses Thema weiter auszubauen. Da mir die Abenteuer von Scott Adams gut gefallen, habe ich versucht, dessen Schema zu übernehmen, um ein lästiges Scrollen des Bildschirms zu vermeiden. Gewiss ließe sich das Programm noch weiter ausbauen, aber ich hoffe dass es trotzdem Spaß gemacht hat.
(Uwe Schuster)
The program was inspired by the game “Haunted House” and the author wanted to expand on the same idea, following the pattern of Scott Adams that avoided screen scrolling. While we’ve had multiple game titled Haunted House only one has been for TRS-80, the very early Robert Arnstein one sold by Radio Shack.
The instruction screen I gave earlier indicates shortcuts move around (N, S, W, O) take inventory (B) or redraw the screen (R). However, there’s also a full verb list, and following my procedure with Languages I Am Not Great At, I grabbed the list from the source code directly:
NEHME -> TAKE
NIMM -> TAKE
HOLE -> TAKE
GEBE -> GIVE (functionally DROP)
LASS -> LEAVE (DROP)
STELLE -> DROP
LAUFE -> RUN
GEHE -> GO
STEIGE -> CLIMB
SAGE -> SAY
SPRICH -> SPEAK
RUFE -> CALL
SIEH -> SEE
SCHAU -> LOOK
SUCHE -> SEARCH
FINDE -> FIND
BRICH -> BREAK
SCHLAGE -> HIT
BRECHE -> BREAK
SCHNEIDE -> CUT
TRINKE -> DRINK
GIESSE -> POUR
SCHUETTE -> SHUT
SCHLAFE -> SLEEP
WARTE -> WAIT
HILF -> HELP
OEFFNE -> OPEN
SCHALTE -> SWITCH
Despite being inspired by a haunted house game, this really is more of a “mysterious” house: there are no ghosts or other spooks to battle against. There is a little magic. Our goal is to escape with all the treasures (three of them).
The description follows the minimal format of “you are in a suchandsuch” and most of the rooms have one item in them, either takable or non-takable (above, a guest room, with a bed).
You’re in a living room, with a carpet. The carpet can be taken.
Balcony with railing, which can’t be taken.
Breakfast room with endless coffee cup, which can be taken, and mysteriously doesn’t count as a treasure.
The house is mostly wide open, and the starting approach should be something like Eno: break and smash and tear stuff looking for hidden objects.
For example, there’s a television set showing the Arabian Nights, and you can smash it into pieces with a hammer. You can also smash the coffee cup (not helpful) and a mirror (helpful, I’ll show that off shortly). A knife also gets use as you tear open an upholstered chair, revealing a diamond, and a coat, revealing a wallet.
That makes for 2 out of 3 treasures, suggesting this game will go quickly, but it turns out treasure 3 (which is needed to escape) was kind of hard to find. But let’s go back to smashing the mirror first:
The mirror breaks into thousands of pieces which immediately dissolve into nothing. Behind is a bottle of acid.
With the bottle of acid, and destruction still on my mind, my eye turned to the marble floor in the room immediately adjacent.
The acid dissolves the floor reveal a magic word: KERKY. Upon then doing SAY KERKY, I was teleported to the room shown above (“secret room”, with a “hole in the ceiling”) and was told that “all good things come in threes”. What this is hinting at is that the word only works three times to take you to the secret room, after which it will teleport you to random places, including a mid-air drop killing you.
I have fallen from the 13th floor! The adventure is over.
With my eye on the hole in the ceiling, I brought over a ladder from a nursery, and was able to climb to a roof.
I climb through the ceiling and get to the roof of the house. It’s very cold.
Going in a direction seems to randomly either kill you or land you in a room back in the house. It was here, at 2 out of 3 treasures, that I was very stuck. Just to list the inventory available:
key, cup of coffee, knife, bottle opener, jug of cognac, ladder, hammer, carpet, diamond, wallet
The jug of cognac is also auto-refilling and is essentially to opposite of the cup of coffee. I hadn’t found a use for the key but it turned out that I never would: it’s a red herring. Looking at the carpet, the game just states “a vacuum cleaner wouldn’t do any harm” so it took me poking inside the source code (it’s 10k, roughly the size of Raspion Adventure) to realize it could be transformed into a flying carpet.
But how? I tried various uses of the magic word, setting the carpet on the roof, plummeting off the edge while holding the carpet, whacking at the carpet really hard, and still no magic appeared. I finally broke down studied the relevant source portion rather than just glancing:
7100 IFX>23THEN7200:ELSEW1$=”B”:W0$=”A”:GOSUB12000:IFW0=1ANDCO=1ANDW1=1THENPRINT”DER BODEN LOESST SICH AUF UND EIN SCHILD WIRD SICHTBAR”:PRINT”DARAUF STEHT: MAGISCHES WORT “:D$(2)=”SCHILD MIT MAGISCHEM WORT”:M(2)=1:S$(3)=”SCHI”:S$(4)=”MAGI”:GOTO131
7110 W0$=”H”:W1$=”F”:GOSUB12000:IFCO=8ANDW0=1ANDW1=1THENPRINT”DER TEPPICH FAENGT AN ZU SCHWEBEN”:S$(11)=”FLIE”:D$(6)=”*FLIEGENDER TEPPICH*”:SC=SC+1:GOTO131
The first line 7100 is the result of pouring acid on the marble floor. I realized 7110 must also involve pouring a liquid of some sort.
The above depicts me on top of the roof pouring the jug of cognac while the carpet is sitting their waiting to absorb its precious energies. After this is done on the next turn (no matter what you type) you’ll fly off to safety.
The carpet floats up and away with me. I’m saved and have found all the treasures.
It is possible I am missing some subtle hint in German to this, or maybe there’s some mythology involving alcohol and flying carpets? The source code is here if someone would like to try a poke.
I found it interesting that while Mr. Schuster managed to pull off a two-word parser just fine, he stuck with a fairly grid-like map like the French Colditz game by Marcel Le Jeune. Most games from the US and UK insisted quite early on with having twisty maps, yet these two early examples of non-English adventure games eschewed cavelike-maze layout altogether. This may be because in both cases the influence came primarily from Scott Adams; while Adams had some mazes they were fairly small and didn’t really dominate in the same way the Crowther/Woods mazes did.
Or it could be that figuring out a parser from scratch (which both authors had to do) was complicated enough as it was, so they decided to keep the map aspect simple to keep track of.
Unfortunately I have not be able to unearth anything more about the author. His name shows up in a 1986 German magazine, but just in asking a question to the editors. While Marcel Le Jeune knows of the first-original-adventure-game-in-French status of his work, if this really is the first adventure game in German, I’m not clear if Uwe Schuster is even aware of it.
I was stuck on multiple things, but I went for the mini-game first. This involved water skiing in Miami, while passing to the left of green buoys and to the right of red buoys.
I had trouble with the game for a while, and had almost fully justified the game was impossible. My problem turned out to be essentially one of hitboxes. (These are the little boxes that register collision in video games, and they often don’t match graphics exactly in order to be “more forgiving” for players but also for ease of calculation.) The “front” of each buoy is only at a spot near the very start of the rectangle, and then you can pass clean through the graphic without issue.
So rather than thinking of the obstacle course as dodging to the left or right of things, I switched mentality to passing through the white-colored side of each of the buoys. I suddenly had much more success, although in some cases the turns are very tight.
The graphical settings are a bit off on this recording, but you can see what the sequence looks like, courtesy of AppleAdventures.
The whole point of the sequence was to win a beach towel. (Yes, this game has “dirt quests” just like Time Zone where you meet Julius Caesar only so you can steal his ladder. We had to carry chicken soup with us all the way from New York, and we couldn’t just obtain a towel from a store with money, we had to win it. The difference here is that the game is clearly taking a comedic bent to the whole approach.)
With the beach towel I could resolve one of my other issues, that of having the explosion at the boat. After GET GAS causes a spill, a simple CLEAN GAS and we’re able to take off at San Juan without blowing up.
This leads to an open ocean map and you can steer in the wrong direction and go forever. I knew from the tip in London that I needed to find St. Thomas, and eyeballing a real-life map it’s a bit east, so I just decided to try typing EAST multiple times, and fortunately it wasn’t long before I arrived:
St. Thomas isn’t large and consists only of one beach house. (That sort of simplification happened in Time Zone all the time, but here it’s just comedic representation of geography.) There’s a door where you can KNOCK ON DOOR and they ask who you are looking for. I tried RAND or MAJOR RAND (again, based on the London tip) with no joy.
My critical issue turned out to be this is the kind of game where learning information can open things up. Uncle Harry’s Will had a moment where you had to listen to a radio broadcast about an open route before a gate would actually be open; the causality doesn’t really make sense, but it’s trying to force a certain game-plot. Here, I’m not even 100% sure what the exact conditions are. I know on the save file I was using to get the screenshot I had not met the contact in London, so at the very least, this is a case of Major Rand not showing up until you are told Major Rand is going to be there.
I’m going to loop back to the things I missed (both London and Rome) and then return to St. Vincent shortly.
First, back to London. That Telex that stopped mid-word had more information.
I thought we were supposed to infer that this is convey that missiles are going to be used rather than bombs, and the rest is just unreadable. There are games where the player really is meant to just filling in the missing information themselves, but here you’re just supposed to SHAKE TELEX.
The message goes on to indicate the contact is at the bridge (so you don’t have to hit upon him randomly after all) and also a “CODEWORD” that is intercepted. It gives the letters SNE but then the screen goes black, and then the screen goes back on showing only the letters ED and the revelation you’ve had your (not-visible-in-inventory) money stolen.
You might recall the Krishna gave over money if we gave flowers, but I was confused why we needed to do that since the player has money from the start. This scene is why. Just make sure you get the replacement money after this scene.
Outside the telex there’s also been a “blunt instrument” left behind which turns out to be a telescope. I guess you just hit people with whatever’s handy.
With the telescope in hand, we can resolve the issue at Rome. You can’t ever go through the gate — fortunately I was catching on the vibe and didn’t waste too much more time here — but if you LOOK DOOR rather than LOOK GATE you can see a note.
Trying to look while not holding the telescope.
What happens if you are holding the telescope instead.
The bizarro thing about this sequence is we get told again shortly the exact same information. I assume this “unlocks” something in the sequence to follow, but it is nearly possible to skip Rome entirely. The only reason why not is that you pick up a flashlight at Rome (needed for a cave later), but I’m pretty sure they also sell those in airports.
With those gaps filled in — and with the key from Paris still unused in our possession — it’s time to repeat the Miami sequence, followed by the boat sequence, followed by arriving at Major Rand’s door.
We’ve found Rand, so we can ask about Stupertino:
The plot is deeply confusing. How do we know Major Rand wasn’t up to anything nefarious as opposed to Count Stupertino? Why is it that the energy company mentioned in the newspaper ties everything together in the first place? I assume the informant-shorthand conversation was meant to imply all these things, and for a bounce-from-one-place-to-another plot of Rungistan it’s fine to be brief about such things, but here the player genuinely needs to be investigating in the correct direction.
Nevermind: with this info in hand we can hunt for Martinique, again using the power of real-life geography. As far as I can tell there is absolutely no way to do this other than eyeball things, realize Martinque is southeast somewhat of St. Vincent, and do some guesswork.
I ran into Antigua first, which is north of our destination. I don’t know what other places are included, but I did run into a crash once so there’s clearly some bugs in the air.
From St. Vincent, 14 steps south with the boat, followed by going east until hitting landfall will work.
Stepping off on Martinque results in landing at a “topless beach”…
…and then eventually a cave.
Inside is where the “code word” gets used, combined with the idea from way back at New York where a door might respond to a voice command. Say SNEEZER.
This is the final area. There’s a giant gun on one floor, followed by the “evil Count Stupertino” on the next. He throws a dagger at you and you need to (in real time) type DUCK.
The Count runs away and you can approach the panel. The launch countdown is already going, but you can activate the giant gun from earlier using the key from Paris.
Then it’s just a matter of strolling back to the gun, waiting for the countdown, and playing a mini-game. You have to shoot down each one of the rockets as they launch (space bar to shoot, IJKM to move the crosshairs).
Get every single rocket and you’ll be victorious.
Yes, that’s it. No idea
1. What happened to the Count
2. Why the Count was shooting missiles
3. Why the fake-out with missiles instead of bombs
4. What connection this had with the energy company
5. Why one of the directors was dead but Major Rand was fine
6. Why the Count had no personnel manning the missile area other than himself
I still enjoyed this roughly as much as Rungistan, and it was even easier — it didn’t have anything like the safe puzzle, or the weird airplane directions, or predicting an eclipse. However, I can objectively recognize the plot doesn’t even make sense as a romp, and someone who was sincerely trying to keep notes of their investigation in the hope of putting the pieces together would be disappointed.
Rather than lingering on that, I would like to discuss a bit more the unique aspect to the game: the action sequences that happen without separation from the regular world. When the bomb arrives you need to pick it up and throw it, and there is no sense that the game mode has shifted at all; the same for responding to the thrown dagger.
When people talk about the leap made by Sierra with King’s Quest 1, the third-person view with character movement is often what gets referred to. But in essence, the real innovation is making the adventure “cinematic”, by adding real-time animations to everything and having the player respond in kind. While the scenes are limited, the Bob Blauschild games are a proto-version of that. A history of adventure games that starts with King’s Quest 1 is missing quite a lot — Sierra’s earlier text-adventure work, for instance — and I think the Blauschild games also form an essential building block, and the only reason the world isn’t animated even more is due to technical limitations. King’s Quest 1 could have worked (awkwardly) in first person, but King’s Quest 1 could never have worked at all if it was missing the connectivity between commands and dynamic animation.
Up next: our first German game of the All the Adventures project.
Just as a reminder, this game involves multiple cities that are going to go nuclear, and we have to go globe-trotting to stop the mad bomber. (Or evil corporation; more on that later.)
The curious bit is that I made some progress in a manner that resembled one of the old Carmen Sandiego games, where I thought about the actual geographic location as opposed to solving a regular puzzle.
We’ll get to that, but first a quick note on the dating for this game. As I mentioned last time, I got the date from the Computer Adventure Solution Archive but didn’t know where 1982 came from. It comes from the disk label.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I found an eBay auction with an Apple II disk that also had 1982 on it. The back on the box says 1983. While this might suggest a pure typo on the disk’s part, I suspect it was a matter of delayed production, like Kabul Spy which has some 1981 dates but was published on the 16th of February, 1982. We have that specific of a date because Sirius filed it as such with the US Copyright Office. Escape From Rungistan has a “Date of Publication” of June 2nd and The Blade of Blackpoole is listed as November 24th. The last entry was filed at the start of 1983 and there are no later filings from Sirius, suggesting they stopped bothering.
Enough lingering, we have criminal(s) to catch!
From the UN Building you land at you can go east to find a shoe store and and a deli. Between the two is an “alley” that has a thermos bottle. The shoe store says it is “closed” (I don’t know if it ever opens) and the deli says it opens at 10. Going a little further is Ajax Security Systems with a sign that mentions voice activation.
The door is locked. I don’t know if this means we are supposed to break in with a voice command, or if this is just a hint that there’s a voice activated door later that uses the system.
While the shoe store and Ajax remain unresolved (and may stay that way) the deli really does open at 10 and you can wait briefly before coming in. You then find out the store is only selling soup and you have to choose what kind of soup you want.
The thermos from the alley is required. Mm, alley soup.
I chose tomato, and the game lets you pick that (and then kicks you out of the store because the health board comes and closes it down). It turns out I chose poorly but I’ll get back to that.
To the west is a taxi, and it is always the same graphic.
I don’t know what this clue means yet.
You need to tell the driver where to go, and the prompt is open ended. Theoretically, the SUBWAY or the STATUE OF LIBERTY or the MET or YANKEE STADIUM are all possible, but you instead need to suss out where the game wants you to go. You need to think back to the envelope from the UN Building. It mentioned that the threatening message came from a pay phone at the Central Zoo, so maybe there’s a clue at the ZOO.
The music cues from Rungistan are still in, by the way. This spot plays “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. There’s also an anxiety-inducing tick-tick-tick as the time goes by when you aren’t typing anything so I was not playing with the sound on.
New York. Not complete in that I don’t know if the shoe store or the security store can be entered.
If you haven’t been able to tell yet, this game doesn’t even remotely pretend to be realistic representations of the various cities, but just have some stand-in places. So while Roberta Williams might have a lot of Zoo rooms that do nothing and are meant to simulate the feeling of being there, Bob Blauschild gets straight to business.
Just to the west of the elephant is a “junk food” stand. I tried BUY ICE CREAM and the game told me I was restricted to popcorn, potato chips, and peanuts. Attempts at buying the popcorn and chips inform you the stand is out, so only the peanuts are available, and they go straight back to the elephant.
Going east there’s the seal pond, and trying to step further results in an animated bomb bouncing on screen. You need to (in a timely manner) GET BOMB and THROW BOMB to dispose of it.
Further on is a man-eating lion cage, and a paper inside. Going in the cage is fatal, but you can GET PAPER / WITH BROOM (the lion eats the broom).
A clue! We can technically take the airport straight from New York to Paris, but our “contact” is in London so let’s do that first.
Unlike most of the airports, the London one has a few extra locations to visit.
First off is a Telex — that’s a teletype, like the old-timey stock market ticker. This drops some information that not all might be as it seems.
The specifically gives the warning that there are no bombs but rather “MISSILES TO BE LA…” (messages cuts off) Adjacent to the telex is a newsstand where the newspaper gives even more mystery.
To summarize, it mentions an industrialist (Renee Renoir) found dead, and he must have died the same day as the bomb threat. He was lead of a now-dissolved energy company, International Energy Limited, and the two other people involved (Rand and Stupertino) are missing, so it’d be useful to find them (or potentially, their dead bodies).
Finally, marking the game definitely as from the 80s, there’s a Hare Krishna. They used to be common at airports in the US before they were banned from prophesizing at terminals; there was a court case about it trying to argue for 1st amendment protection (they were decided to be “not public forums under the First Amendment”).
Their appearance is marked by the tune “We’re in the Money”. They were known for having flowers so I tried GIVE FLOWERS and and received money, which is odd, since I’ve been using money (to buy plane tickets, etc.) even though I don’t have them listed in inventory. I assume this gets used for a Serious Bribe later.
You can try KILL KRISHNA to which the game responds YOU MUST BE FROM N.Y.!
Now comes the taxi and the Carmen Sandiego part, since we were given no location for the contact. I tried BIG BEN and the driver told me the traffic was bad but how about Buckingham Palace. Sure?
The main vibe to catch onto here is that despite the fact we were given no directions to the contact, by finding some place in London to go we’ll be able to find them anyway quite quickly. Just one step is away is New London Bridge, and he’s waiting for us at the north. Here’s were the word LITHIUM (randomly on the wall at the start of the game) comes into play.
Connected to the same area we can go to Paris by train. The Chunnel wasn’t finished until 1994, unless I’m missing something this otherwise wasn’t possible in 82-83?
Here’s what likely is the entire Paris map:
The train lands us by a taxi, and this time we can either use the clue and go straight to the street with the Laundry place (on the paper we found at the lion cage) or we can just say we want to go to the EIFFEL tower and of course it is connected.
Inside, we can give our slip and find out while the pants are clean yet, they found a key inside that they hand over. I have yet to figure out what the key goes to, but it managed to form some drama anyway, as while trying to get over to the taxi (to go to Rome, the next destination) it falls into some sewers.
The sewers are easier to pre-map out before this, because when you pick up the key the sewers coincidentally decide to start dramatically filling with water. This is done in real time and you have to make your way back out in time.
Unfortunately, you aren’t out of the woods yet: you start shivering from cold and die quickly from pneumonia afterwards.
The trick is to — rather than picking up TOMATO soup earlier — pick up CHICKEN NOODLE. Because that’s what’s good for health, right? (It was a thing in the 80s, at least. As was the flowers thing. As was peanuts going to elephants. There’s a lot of “unrealistic common wisdom” puzzles going on.)
OK, Rome. This time I didn’t know exactly what to tell the Taxi. The newspaper mentioned Stupertino, but that doesn’t work for a prompt. I literally Googled “rome tourist” and started running through the list, getting a hit on FORUM.
Just to the east of the Roman Forum. Weirdly, not unrealistic for these two places to be close.
These are right next to the Stupertino Villa but it is locked up and I don’t know how to get in. The key doesn’t work.
The last threatened city is Miami, which is available flying from New York. After some noodling I was able to go to the BEACH.
There’s no clues or anything pointing to a mad bomber / missile launcher, but there is a water-skiing contest, and it uses the left and right arrow keys in order to steer through some buoys. I haven’t beaten it yet so I can’t tell you what the reward is.
Miami has one more destination: San Juan.
Going back to the informant’s message, they said Rand was at St. Thomas. So if we’re looking for Rand (or their dead body) we need to get from San Juan to St. Thomas, which is why I (successfully) tried out BOAT.
Trying to GET GAS for the boat causes some of it to spill, and disasterous consequences.
I could easily still be missing a location via Carmen Sandiego method, so I should do a screen just in case the Miami taxi also can visit the Everglades. Other than that, I’ve got the security and shoe stores I haven’t entered (New York) a villa that can’t be entered (Rome), a key I have yet to use (from Paris), a mini-game I need to beat (Miami) and the boat/gas problem (San Juan). No hints yet, please; if anyone has played this before, you’re welcome to speculate.
One thing that’s felt unusual about the All the Adventures project compared to studying, say, short story authors, is the vast number of people in the early days “just passing through” and either writing one or two games. Even most relatively prolific authors have had their main work confined to a small span of time, so we can’t look at their works like we might cinema and compare Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) to Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Other authors who have gone into games have just touched upon adventure games briefly. Yes, normal publishing (and cinema, and art, and etc.) also have one/two-hit wonders, but the nature of the genre here seems more transient. Even the Infocom veterans really produced most of their work in the 80s and the diehards like Steve Meretzky had trouble keeping the flame alight.
In the case of Bob Blauschild, before he wrote his two games for Sirius (Escape From Rungistan — which we’ve already looked at — and today’s selection) he worked in chip design, and after he was done with his games he resumed with chip design. He has other published works but they’re all things like a chapter in the 1990s book Analog Circuit Design titled Understanding Why Things Don’t Work.
In an early attempt to build an electric light, Thomas Edison used a particular construction that glowed brilliantly for a brief moment and then blew out. An assistant made a remark about the experiment being a failure, and Edison quickly corrected him. The experiment had yielded important results, for they had learned one of the ways that wouldn’t work.
Learning through our mistakes doesn’t apply only in the areas of dealing with IRS agents or meeting “interesting” people in bars — it’s also one of the most important aspects of the creative process in engineering. A “failure” that is thoroughly investigated can often be more beneficial in the long run than success on the first try.
But let’s not be wistful and just enjoy the game, eh?
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
Critical Mass maintains the animation and sense of humor of the first game, except it adds color and an extra stakes of saving the world from nuclear annihilation.
On June 1st, the United Nations received the following message: “Good morning. Just thought I’d drop a line to let you know that precisely at 8 p.m. on June 9th, I’ll be destroying the world’s five largest cities with thermal nuclear weapons. It ought to be a real blast! Sorry, but that’s about all I can tell you. Thanks for your time and have a a nice day!”
The delegates gathered quickly. How could this demented person be found and stopped? The task would require someone who could understand how the sicko thought. Well, naturally, they thought of you! Hurry now, you’ve got just nine days to prevent this heinous crime and save 50 million lives! That is, unless you’ve got something more important to do.
I’m just trusting this one on CASA in terms of the publication date, even though the manual etc. say 1983. Likely it was right at the end of the year.
The red center animates ticking down. This is slightly less elaborate than the zoom-in of Rungistan but this may have needed to be a compromise for color.
The mushroom cloud is animated rising.
After the opening graphics the game asks you to flip over to side B. (Note if you’re playing on the WOZ version, AppleWin isn’t happy with the second side WOZ file, but the package comes with a DSK version.)
The envelope on the desk notes that a message was received at 1:00 in the morning on June 1: at 8 pm on June 5th, the five largest cities in the world will be obliterated by thermo-nuclear devices.
The call “was traced to a pay phone at the Central Park Zoo” but there were no clues, and we must “find a way to neutralize this treat”. Our first destination is a contact in London.
Just to be clear, this is not a “realistic” nuclear paranoia type game, like maybe Wasteland, but more of a James Bond setup where for some reason only one person can save the world. The scenario includes a great deal of emphasis on time, and there’s a long explanation in the manual:
Each command uses 1 minute.
Taxi Rides use 30 minutes per ride.
A boat on the Sea uses 30 minutes per direction.
A boat near Land uses 1 minute per direction.
Walking uses 1 minute per direction.
Time elapsed for city to city travel varies by type of transportation.
If you are knocked unconscious a certain block of time will pass.
If you do not enter a command within 10 seconds of your previous command, the clock will advance 1 minute.
The last sentence is highly significant: the clock advances in real time. With an emulator on max speed you can watch the clock advancing quickly to doomsday.
Yes, that’s a bit anxiety-inducing. I might be doing a lot of reloading to redo sections faster, although my general suspicion is that the real-time part is more or less insignificant but city travel time might be very important.
After reading the envelope, it vaporizes, Mission Impossible style, and then we have nothing else to do but hop in an elevator.
More anxiety-inducing than the real time aspect is having commands not get accepted and having the clock tick down as a result. You can’t just GO ELEVATOR so you need to PUSH BUTTON instead first.
The elevator says there is a “special command word” but typing GO DOWN seemingly works.
As you keep riding down, the elevator “has a nervous breakdown” and the number ticks down and lets you type more commands, but all I’ve attempted so far gets me a “you can’t stop it” response.
After some fiddling around (and trying the word LITHIUM from the opening room, which also doesn’t work) I decided to invoke a page from Rungistan and try JUMP, which works to represent you going into the air by the room-picture moving down. You need to time JUMP such that you’re in the air as the elevator hits floor 1.
A grim beginning! I enjoyed the author’s prior game quite a bit so I’m willing to give some latitude here even given the ticking clock (I have the magic of save states to smooth it over) although I suspect this might be a harder game than Rungistan.
I’d like to start today’s game by talking about something that doesn’t seem special at first but has a remarkable history behind it. Specifically, the REM statements at the start of Ship Adventure (shortened to be ‘ marks); in BASIC they don’t get interpreted as code but are used to make comments.
5 ‘COPYRIGHT(C) CLOAD 1982
30 ‘CREATED BY: JOHN R. OLSON
40 ‘ HOXIE, KANSAS 67740
Thus starts the first lines of Ship Adventure, as put in the December 1982 version of the tapemag called CLOAD (and diskmag after October ’82). This is John R. Olson from Kansas this time (see: Island Adventure) not John R. Olsen from Oregon (see: Frankenstein Adventure).
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
The game is extremely clear on the name and location of the author, and this has been true on every single adventure from CLOAD we’ve seen. From Troll’s Treasure:
1 ‘COPYRIGHT (C) CLOAD 1981
2 ‘BY RICHARD MOFFIE
3 ‘ 20121 LEADWELL ST. #3
4 ‘ CANOGA PARK, CALIFORNIA 91306
From CIA Adventure:
10040 ‘COPYRIGHT (C) CLOAD 1980
HUGH LAMPERT
110 LINDNER PL.
MALVERNE, NY 11565
From Frankenstein Adventure:
by John R. Olsen Jr.
P.O. Box 181
Newberg, Or 97132
(503) 538-3031
Compare with the Adventures of the Month (like Menagerie that I wrote about last); only some of the adventures have clear identifiers, and we still don’t know who wrote Black Hole Adventure even though we have all three ports. Survival was published in Creative Computing in their January 1982 issue with no author identifier within the code, even though it must have been there because it got restored in the 1984 reprinting.
Now, the latter case is understandable: the author is mentioned in the print article, there’s a premium on space. However, this removal from source can still mean games get detached from their sources. The most spectacular case of this was Korenvliet, a Dutch game which was a translation of Stoneville Manor, but the connection was so non-obvious that many years later Korenvliet got translated back into English with no awareness the game was in English in the first place!
As far as why CLOAD was so careful to always print author and location, it has to do with fraud from their earlier days. This story backtracks all the way to 1978, when the publication was founded in February as the first computer tapemag, with Ralph McElroy as publisher and Dick Fuller as editor. (David Lagerquist took over in 1980.)
160 REM MODIFIED BY JOHN OLSEN, BOX 181, NEWBERG, OR. 97132
…but this was derived completely from the same version of David Ahl’s 101 Computer Games. As explained by Ralph McElroy in the October 1978 issue of CLOAD, the file was clearly marked as a derivative of Ahl, but the source code only credits the author who modified the source (Oregon Olsen). Ahl saw the issue, and raised concerns, but:
After some preliminary running around, we got together and worked the situation out to everyone’s nominal satisfaction.
That was an accident, but the very same issue of CLOAD also included a copy of Othello.
As McElroy explains:
The original author (Mr. Donald L. Dilley, of Federal Way, Washington) had sent a copy to Radio Shack, to Kilobaud Magazine, and to his son in southern California. This last copy was evidently sold with his son’s computer system, thereby ending up in New York, from where it was submitted.
To summarize, someone bought a used computer with a piece of computer code that wasn’t theirs and decided to sell it.
Hence, a new policy at CLOAD was announced that “the author’s name and address” needed to be put into REM statements “in the first few lines of code”. This would “discourage” theft (or at least require thieves to have even more chutzpah), and they did not “want other people’s work, no matter how good or how cheap.” (The “first few lines of code” part of the policy must have changed, given CIA Adventure put its notice on the end of its code.)
Enough about TRS-80 REM comment drama —
— John R. Olson’s games have been mechanically simple and straightforward and this one is not an exception, although it is yet another case of shipboard directions (port, starboard, fore, aft) and I’m such a landlubber I had to double check I wasn’t mixing up port and starboard again.
The introduction asks you to find seven treasures, but I need to slow down and explain because both in a plot sense and a gameplay sense this is a slightly different Treasure Hunt than normal.
While I collected my treasures here (at the start) to keep my inventory free, they only count if you’re holding them.
In Crowther/Woods and descendants, the treasures typically serve as markers that you have solved particular puzzles. The treasures are often incidental proof you’ve reached particular rooms as well as a convenient way of making the game non-linear. Here, we are tasked with inspecting a ship that is smuggling treasure, and there is almost nothing gated off by a puzzle: rather, you need to figure out the hiding spots. It is more analogous to a collectathon from the N64 era than a standard adventure game. Sometimes the collectable items are in tricky places, but you don’t need to outwit a dragon first to get to where the Golden Foozle is buried.
This feels like a natural extension from the author who wrote Mansion Adventure; in that game, the play is almost solely in collecting clues to break open a particular lock with a few traps at the end. Here, most of the seven goal treasures are straightforward to find, with only the seventh behind a safe causing trouble. (It turned out to be a text-garbling issue likely having to do with the emulator, I’ll explain when I get there.)
The other thing the author emphasizes — and again this is a continuation of his previous work, although here it feels more systematic — is that there are plenty of objects that are there just because it is a ship and it’d be logical to have them there. There’s a rope on the deck that doesn’t get used, a lantern in a lifeboat that sees no action, a radio in a radio room that doesn’t get turned on. They don’t even feel like “red herrings” exactly; they’re things to prod at to check if there’s a treasure or a tool hiding, but don’t occupy much brain-space otherwise during gameplay.
Three above-deck rooms to demonstrate:
This is the one spot you can die, but at least there’s good forewarning. Notice the educational ship vocabulary tidbits!
There’s one chest with the word SAFE, which is solely there to hint there’s a hidden safe.
There’s a crowbar in one container that later will be useful…
…and one treasure hidden in the crow’s nest…
…but other than that it’s just atmosphere. I did find a “closed, locked hatchway” which is unopenable but it gets described as heavy steel, so I didn’t waste much time trying to open it.
There’s two floors below, let’s head to the bottom first since it is simpler.
This mainly serves to dispense a “screwdriver” in a work area, and a secret area with a diamond unlocked via a lever.
The remaining five treasures are on the middle floor.
A cargo hold contains a ruby, extractable via the crowbar.
The mate’s cabin has a bag with a flag in it that is folded. Open the flag, and out comes a sapphire.
A strongbox in a desk contained in the captain’s cabin has a jade.
Rather more trickily, the cabinet in the infirmary is described as being held by screws. Using the screwdriver from downstairs reveals yet another secret treasure.
This leaves the safe, and it was indeed helpful to have the word “SAFE” earlier since I had a notion what I was looking for. I tried MOVE on all the items I could touch until reaching the captain’s cabin again; the desk not only holds the jade but moves to show a safe.
As far as the combination for the safe goes, there’s an index card in one of the other cabins which is a straight self-contained puzzle.
Yes, the text is glitched here.
I tried 12/2/6 (thinking of the x marks as multiplication) and relatedly, 12/2/120 and 12/2/20. I eventually suspected the text was not displaying correctly and checked the source code.
1870 DATA”CAR”,”A small index Card”,”There is writing on it: 3x/4x+1/2x-1 where 3x + 2 = 20 ! ?”,0,1
Oho! So it’s just supposed to be an algebra problem (Olson was originally a college algebra teacher, remember). With 3x + 2 = 20, x has to be 6; then plug 6 in for x on the other three expressions to get 18, 25, and 11.
There was absolutely nothing sophisticated with the parser or world model, but the author kept to a mode of gameplay the parser could support and given this was supposed to be a short jaunt from a tape/diskmag, this ended up being enjoyable in the same manner as Eno. The author had a style that he ran to its conclusion (even including educational spots explaining what ship parts are) rather than trying to mimic Scott Adams entirely, making it a better game than his other two we’ve looked at so far.
Coming up: The Archive is in a good enough state I can make my second Missing Adventures post, and then we’ll finally wrap around back to the warm glow of the Apple II.
Another picture from the September 1982 cover of Softside.
After getting by the snake (which was a matter of realizing I could take an item from a room even though it doesn’t get described that way) the game was mostly straightforward; the pattern is that you have access to a whole, er, menagerie of animals, and they get used in various ways to solve puzzles. In a narrative sense, the animals are rallying together to assist in your breakout (except for the snake, and another critter you’ll see later).
To recap: I had a deadly snake blocking an intersection, and the only ways I could go were one way blocked by a metal wall, and another with the mirror (shown above) hiding a light rod farther back.
I’m generally used to the Kirsch games being explicit about items in rooms, but the mirror room is an exception. You can TAKE MIRROR, then apply it to the snake.
The “It’s getting darker” is because I didn’t have the pole-on-fire get blown out by the wind in this run. I’m still holding the light rod as shown so it counts as a bug.
I’m glad I had already made my verb list (SHOW might have otherwise still taken a little time to get to). With the snake out of the way (although we have to keep doing SHOW MIRROR passing through the center) we now have free travel of most of the ship. To the west is the bridge, which is only interesting in a narrative sense.
This helps explain why we don’t face much opposition in the events there are to come.
Headed upstairs first…
…the symmetrical arrangement has an empty cage in the middle (I suspect meant for our protagonist), a storage room with some rubber gloves, a meeting room with some keys and the notation north = Mars, south = Earth, a “control room” that clearly needs a battery…
…and a Robot Room with one of the more interesting moments in the game.
The robot is painting EARTHLING and you can come back later to see more letters painted.
This makes for a slightly unnerving timer to the events (if they finish, they catch you) but in gameplay terms the amount of time you have is fairly generous.
Heading downstairs is where all the animals are kept. And my apologies, but I misspoke last time: the animals are NEARLY all from planets other than Earth.
The rooms are pretty description-free (“YOU’RE IN A STALL”) so let’s focus on listing the menagerie. None of these animals talk:
VENUSIAN METAL EATERUS
MERCURIAN LAZY CLAM
NEPTUNIAN TERMITE
PLUTONIAN DIAMOND-HEAD WOLF
SATURNIAN PEACOCK
ELECTRIC EEL (in a water tank)
(If you were paying attention before, you might immediate spot two of them help solve puzzles, but let’s finish listing the menagerie first.)
There’s one completely empty room that will get filled later, and one which had a resident that has now left.
On top of the non-talking critters there’s GALAXIAN WISE OWL that dispenses some hints.
The other hints (picked at random) are “diamonds cut glass” and “ask the cat”. Speaking of the cat, the cat asks for a pearl.
We’ll come back to the pearl in a few; let’s get out the way the electric eel first. With the rubber gloves on you can pick it up and put it directly on the control panel (!!) and the lever will work.
This brings down a force field later. However, you don’t find out about the force field at all if you do this first, and I only learned about the force field by looking up a walkthrough after beating the game.
The METALEATER, as you might also have predicted, goes back to the mysterious wall made of metal. (Past this point, any animal you cart around has to have the chain unlocked first with the keys from the meeting room.)
Right after this wall is a wall made out of wood (bring forth the NEPTUNIAN TERMITE) and then one made out of glass (meaning we now want the PLUTONIAN DIAMOND-HEAD WOLF). The wolf doesn’t cut the glass automatically; we need to type CUT GLASS, suggesting we somehow pick up the wolf and use it as a can opener of sorts.
All this leads to a branching hallway where one way goes to a dead end with a stone wall, and I did not seem to have any creatures that could handle stone. The other way is a navigation chamber.
YOU’RE IN A NAVIGATION CHAMBER.
There’s a large compass standing on a green plush carpet. An arrow on a gauge points “N”. A dial is missing fron the navigation control.
With that route all a dead end, let’s return to the demand of the cat. It wants a pearl.
The CLAM immediately came to mind but the game didn’t understand TICKLE when I tried it (as hinted at by the owl). The game specifically says
Sorry, you can’t do that
which it normally does for actions it understands but won’t ever do, but in this case, I was simply missing the right item in inventory. I needed to go to the SATURNIAN PEACOCK and TAKE FEATHER first and then the clam would give up a pearl.
Once you deliver the pearl the cat has another demand.
This is when a Janusian mouse starts showing up at random. It runs away, but you can drop the half-eaten cheese and wait and eventually it will show up.
But wait! A twist!
You can, of course, ignore the mouse and cart it over to the cat (the mouse keeps repeating “please don’t feed me to the cat”) and eventually get laughed at.
When the cat mentions the landing on Mars, a counter starts ticking to actually arrive; a MARSIAN BULL gets scooped up at that stop and added to one of the stalls. The bull can’t talk but will help you with the stone wall.
Remember, there was a red flag attached to the flag pole at the start.
Behind the wall is a room with the missing navigation dial, so you can bring it back and fix the device.
Using the “north = mars, south = earth” guide…
…it’s almost time to go home. However, a robot is unhappy with your shenanigans (now they pay attention).
Alas, the bull doesn’t help you bust through.
I ended up needing to check Dale Dobson’s walkthrough who himself needed to check the source code. Back at the navigation room there’s a richly-described carpet (and nothing is richly-described in this game); it hides a secret exit, but you can’t just GET CARPET, you need to MOVE COMPASS first (!!).
This lets you bypass the guard robot and sneak your way out as soon as the vessel lands on Earth.
This would be the second game in a row where Kirsch gives a slightly unhappy ending. I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t swipe any artifacts, because the IRS would be after us for undeclared income.
This was simpler than the last few Kirsch games, but with him still cranking out content monthly (and not having any others jump in) it is understandable he tossed a more straightforward game in the queue. It does have his moments of plot beats (the Mars landing doesn’t happen until the cat talks about it), but the theming around animals = solutions means that most puzzles are simple to solve, even if somewhat elaborate in plot terms (I especially liked picking up a BULL and toting it around).
Renga in Blue 
