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).
You’re on a pasture. Straight ahead you see a strange vehicle which appears to be a spacecraft of some sort. You are being drawn closer and closer, as if by sone magnetic force…
Through the doors you can see an eerie red light, illuminating an otherwise dark, foreboding passage. You can hear strange cries from within.
Suddenly you are rushed through the door, almost as if pushed from some outside force.
The September 1982 issue of Softside Magazine was devoted to computer graphics.
Art from the cover, scan via Atarimania.
Meanwhile, the Softside Adventure of the Month series marched on as an all-text jam (previously: The Mouse that Ate Chicago), with Peter Kirsch once again the author, as credited in the TRS-80 source code (dated June 1982). Once again, there are also Apple II and Atari versions. This time I went with Atari. I’ve already done a thorough job on what we know about Kirsch (including his first game, Magical Journey) so this was an ideal pick to go with while the Internet Archive is still down wobbly.
We’ve been scooped up by an alien spacecraft and the action immediately continues from there.
We’re immediately next to a dark room, and has matches. They’re the kind of matches they light up a room temporarily without any possible action in-between.
This appears on the screen temporarily before the game goes back to the dark description.
You can still pick up the pole while in the dark, the flag just rolls away. You can then light the pole (requiring another match) and treat it as a torch.
(It’s fascinating how there are specific rules being followed here and how different they are from other games. Here, you can walk in the dark safely but can be killed by something specific that is dangerous; you can pick up items while in the dark. There are plenty of games where dark = no manipulation of items in a room other than possibly dropping something. There’s also been plenty of games with matches, and while they usually don’t work as long as lamps or torches, only in a few games have had the mechanics like this, with the room made visible but 0 turns allowed. The ability to pick up items in darkness compensates.)
The snake here is a little farther, and I haven’t gotten past it yet. You might think the pole/torch would be good for prodding it, and that might even be the right action, but I haven’t found the right verb to express this if so.
TICKLE is the main one I wouldn’t normally think of, and it’s useful to know now there’s an emphasis on conversation and SHOWing things.
Fortunately, the snake only blocks some of the exits. Specifically the east-facing exits are all accessible. To the northeast there is a passage to a room of mirrors; you can break one of the mirrors in order to get into a windy passage which blows out your torch. At the end (in a room you can briefly light up with the matches) is a room with a “light rod”, and typing ON ROD (and no other syntax, as far as I can tell) will turn it on.
Directly to the east of the snake is a single room with a suggestive metal wall, but again, if there’s simply a parser action to do, I haven’t found it yet.
While it is not unusual for me to be stuck on a Kirsch game, usually the verbs have been reasonable to find, but given how little I have so far to work with (pole, matches, light rod, and the red flag from the pole which you find after you get some light) that seems like the only possibility. My suspicion is one of the two puzzles (snake or metal wall) will fall and then I’ll have a whole chain of events next time.
From the Winter 1982 Dynacomp catalog, via eBay. Two of the other North Star adventures upcoming (Windmere and Zodiac) are listed as “Late Arrivals” meaning Uncle Harry/Whembly came earlier.
I left off last time on a moment I felt was genuinely promising. The game had bestowed some clues where I thought I just needed to interpret them and arrive at the goal, but the only clue of any note is “DIG 1800 GOLDPIECES………”. I still don’t know what the purpose of Alice and the rabbit and so forth are.
I was sidetracked into thinking (because the rabbit had a wristwatch) that maybe 1800 referred to a time, 18:00, which on a clock would be “south”. Just to the south of the painting is a privy, and maybe I could use the rope to go in….?
AGAINST THE EAST WALL. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A PAINTING OF A YOUNG GIRL HOLDING A RABBIT. THE RABBIT IS WEARING A WRISTWATCH. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND SOUTH.
YOU SEE HERE, A NOTE
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE IN A PRIVY. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND SOUTH.
NOW WHAT? >D
YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY
No. What you can instead do (with help from Gus and Rob in the comments) is go to the random well in the northwest corner and TIE ROPE to go down. As far as I can tell no clue is related to this.
YOU ARE HANGING AT THE END OF THE ROPE.
YOU ARE AT THE END OF THE ROPE DANGLING OVER A TEN FOOT DIAMETER HOLE IN THE FLOOR OF A LARGE ROOM.
NOW WHAT? >D
YOU ARE IN THE LOWER WELL ROOM. THERE IS A 10 FT. DIAMETER HOLE HERE. THERE ARE DOORS EAST, SE, AND SOUTH.
It isn’t like “climb the well” is unreasonable but it was disappointing to think the game was going in an interesting direction only to find not much going on.
From here is when the slog begins.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF HALLS
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE AT A DEAD END
The game decided to give another maze. I sighed and started dutifully mapping. My map is a mess and incomplete so I’m not going to give the whole thing.
Early on there’s a bit of a trap: what looks like a vault door. Perhaps the gold is inside?
NOW WHAT? >OPEN DOOR
THE DOOR SWINGS OPEN WITH A CRASH. TONS OF ICY WATER POUR THROUGH THE OPENING. THE WATER LEVEL RISES RAPIDLY! YOU DROWN!!!
WELL, YOU MANAGED TO GET YOURSELF KILLED! BETTER LUCK WITH YOUR NEXT TRY. HOPE YOU REMEMBERED TO SAVE THE GAME BEFORE TRYING SOMETHING NEW!
After enough trudging I finally hit a room with something different:
YOU ARE IN A LARGE ROOM. IN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM ON A ROUND BASE IS THE STATUE OF A WOMAN. HER ARM IS RAISED AND POINTING AT YOU.
NOW WHAT? > ROTATE STATUE
ROTATE TO WHAT DIRECTION? W
A DOOR IN THE WEST WALL OPENS. THE OTHER DOOR CLOSES.
The rotating arm lets you flip between exits. There’s a switch to a water pump to the west that will drain the water, and a battery in another. Additionally, in a completely random spot in the maze, down a dead end, there is a flashlight to go with the battery. I found the flashlight first and found if you try to light it the game just wouldn’t let me, and the player is just supposed to use their imagination to guess that a battery is required.
With the water drained, you can pass through the vault-looking door to find yourself underneath a pool that marked the center of the castle.
YOU ARE IN A DAMP CHAMBER. THERE ARE PUDDLES OF WATER EVERYWHERE. HIGH ABOVE IS A LARGE CIRCULAR MESH GRATING. YOU CAN SEE THE SKY THROUGH THE GRATING. THERE IS A TUNNEL TO THE NORTH AND AN EXIT WEST.
I thought, well, finally, this is getting back on track. Maybe we’ll have to triangulate directions based on the fact we know the pool is in the middle. Going north required light (LOAD FLASHLIGHT / LIGHT FLASHLIGHT) and I moved forward to gloriously find myself…
YOU ARE AT THE BOTTOM OF A LONG FLIGHT OF STAIRS A TUNNEL LEADS SOUTH
NOW WHAT? >U
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TUNNELS
…back in another, entirely distinct maze.
The game is nice enough to maintain the rule that if room A goes to B, an exit from B goes to A. However, even given games like Acheton which went overboard with their mazes, I’ve never experienced a game with the mazes as grinding as this. Acheton tried to mix in variety, with things like a “turn-based Pac-man” maze, a hedge maze, and a gimmick maze that required an item; here, it is literally the same action over and over and over and over. Drop items, keep track of exits, repeat.
Incidentally, as part of all this I found an exit going back to the manhole near the cabin. Unfortunately, this is a one-way trip, so this bit that might be nice location continuity (and the opportunity to enter the maze via a different route) ends up being a softlock.
Eventually — after another moment of false promise climbing down a hole which seems like it might be the end, but no — the maze winds its way to the outside.
YOU ARE AT THE BASE OF A LARGE MOUNTAIN. THERE IS A MINE ENTRANCE TO THE EAST. A PATH LEADS NW. THERE ARE DENSE WOODS ON BOTH SIDES OF THE PATH.
NOW WHAT? >NW
YOU ARE ON A PATH IN THE WOODS. THE PATH TURNS NORTH AND SE HERE.
This leads to a fork in the road. On the northeast fork there is a “SMALL CLEARING” with a “WOODEN BENCH” and a “SHOVEL”. To the left are some graves and the last part of the game, so you might think: we are free of mazes, yes? We are now trying to use the clues to find the gold?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha no it’s another maze.
At least this one is interesting to look at.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
SIR JOHN WHEMBLY
1729 – 1818
KNIGHT & PIRATE
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
P. MORTON CLYDE
HUNG TILL HE DIED
HIGHWAYMAN
1632 – 1688
As I said earlier, the 1800 clue is pertinent: you’re looking for the year. However, there’s not really much reason to look hard, since it is easy to DIG in every room, and the important one is most likely going to come near the end of your mapping due to how the map is structured.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
BABY
AURUM
DIED-A-BORNIN’
1800
NOW WHAT? >DIG
YOU DIG INTO THE GRAVE.
YOUR SHOVEL HITS A COFFIN.
The coffin has a small skeleton (…sad…) but if you LIFT COFFIN you see an extra hole and the treasure.
NOW WHAT? >LIFT COFFIN
BEHIND THE SIDE OF THE COFFIN IS A HOLE IN THE SIDE OF THE GRAVE. THERE IS A CHEST IN THE HOLE.
NOW WHAT? >OPEN CHEST
THE CHEST IS FILLED WITH GOLD COINS.
A SHEET OF PAPER IN THE CHEST READS: CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE FOUND MY GOLD! NOW, LEAVE IT HERE AND SEE IF YOUR FRIENDS CAN FIND IT!!!
JOHN WHEMBLY
For my longtime readers, you know I’m willing to tolerate a lot of nonsense. I’ve played enough games from the era to be able to be “in the head” of a player from that time period and get a feeling how they’d react. I just don’t see even the most maze-crazed of fans being enthused about this. Most of the games I’ve played has kept to the unspoken rule of one (1) standard maze and if you insist on more you need to mix up the configuration somehow. So despite an absolutely standard maze in Murdac it could be one of my favorite games of 1982, and when there was a second maze (the haunted house with the flying furniture) it wasn’t really a maze at all.
But I’m mostly annoyed that the premise didn’t pay off. Uncle Harry had a genuinely good moment with home base (undercut by a bug, but still, conceptually) and I thought the follow-up might have more of that with less of the fluff of mapping an endless freeway system. The endless mazes made this game worse instead.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF GRAVES.
A HEADSTONE HERE READS:
HERE LIES IMA PRUDE
BORN A VIRGIN
LIVED A VIRGIN
DIED A VIRGIN
WHO SAYS YOU CANT
TAKE IT WITH YOU?
1740 – 1831
I’ve been on the hunt for R.L. Turner still, and maybe the open possibility that he or she did more games, but I’ve come up empty. However, it’s only recently these games were even unearthed, so I’m still hopeful at least more information will appear in the future.
For now, let’s return to the (fictional) future, as we get help from various animals in an alien zoo to escape a UFO.
As part of their maximalist approach, Dynacomp also did public domain distribution. Disks via eBay.
ADDENDUM: I got so caught up in the maze nonsense that I forgot to mention the resolution to the drawbridge. With the crank, you can LIFT PORTCULLIS as a direct command; the use of the crank is passive and automatic if you’re holding it, so the bit with the small hole can be ignored. With the sword you can then CUT ROPE to open the drawbridge. All this turns out to be meaningless, as there’s no point in going back outside. This seems to be due to a bug. You were supposed to leave the can with gas behind before climbing the vine, and then get it after dropping the drawbridge, then use it to start the generator. Since the generator already has gas — I assume due to a bug — none of this is necessary at all.
The essential vibe that Uncle Harry’s Will had that felt “original” wasn’t necessarily the car aspect as much as deciphering a riddle while applying it to a large landscape. Many adventures have had cryptic instructions as part of their gameplay, but they usually don’t involve what might happen in a realistic “puzzle hunt” where there’s an enormous amount of extra space, and you have to apply the riddles/poems/clues in a way that whittles down the possibilities. The MIT Puzzle Hunt — the in-person component, at least — has an entire college campus as fair game, but only a small percentage is used.
I’ve hit this moment in Whembly Castle, and I’m not sure yet how to decipher the clues. While the game doesn’t start you with a poem there are some hidden within the castle itself.
Cover of one of the Dynacomp catalogs, from Jason Scott.
But first: last time I had stopped right before getting down to the bottom of a ladder under a manhole. At the very bottom is a compass, which can be used at the foggy lake.
YOU ARE IN A SMALL CHAMBER AT THE END OF A TUNNEL. THERE IS A LADDER FASTENED TO THE SIDE OF THE WALL. A LARGE SHAFT RISES ABOVE YOU. A TUNNEL LEADS WEST.
YOU SEE HERE, A SMALL COMPASS
Going west from here leads to darkness. It may simply be a red herring or it may be the tunnel gets entered via the opposite direction later. I don’t have any obvious light sources; while I have a can of gasoline, there’s no method of lighting it. The rusty key, the iron bar, and the oars aren’t helpful; I’ve got the deck of cards, but my character isn’t Gambit.
YOU ARE IN AN EAST-WEST TUNNEL THE TUNNEL SLOPES UPWARD TO THE EAST.
NOW WHAT? >W
IT IS PITCH BLACK HERE. TO CONTINUE WITHOUT LIGHT COULD BE DANGEROUS.
Leaving this be for the moment, I went to take the compass to the lake and got hit horribly by the boat bug again: while in the boat, the game claims you can’t go west (even though you should be able to). Rob suggested dropping the oars but I found it made no difference. I went as far as restarting my game altogether in case I had some corruption. Being able to go WEST ended up just working sometimes at random. I can’t guarantee this isn’t an emulator bug.
Here’s what my playing setup looks like. North Star is being played as an emulator inside an emulator, which works better than you might expect, but there’s still the open possibility of some obscure command being performed wrong.
Finally breaking out into the lake, though, the game uses a grid of rooms:
The Castle is marked by a berm that you can row around.
YOU ARE ON THE LAKE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE CASTLE. A 5 FOOT BERM RUN EAST AND SOUTH HERE. A HUGE TOWER RISES INTO THE FOG HERE.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEAR THE BERM BY THE WEST WALL.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
Hopping out of the boat causes the boat to float away (I think this is meant to be a one-way trip). The south side of the berm has a drawbridge (not openable from the outside) and on the southwest side there’s a tower with vines that indicates you can climb.
YOU ARE ON THE BERM AT THE BASE OF THE SW TOWER.
THERE IS A THICK VINE GROWING UP THE SIDE OF THE SW TOWER. IT LOOKS LIKE YOU COULD CLIMB IT IF YOU ARE CAREFULL.
I had quite a lot of frustration here as CLIMB VINE simply told me YOU’RE UNABLE TO DO THAT with no explanation why. I finally realized this was not a “your command is not being parsed properly” scenario but rather “something is preventing the action but we’re not going to tell you what it is because transparency in error messages is for weaklings”. I tried dropping everything and the climbing finally worked:
YOU ARE HALF WAY UP THE TOWER. THE VINE HERE IS THINNER AND SEEMS TO BE A BIT LOOSE. BETTER HURRY UP.
NOW WHAT? >CLIMB VINE
YOU SCRAMBLE UP THE VINE. NEAR THE TOP THE VINE IS THINNER. YOU CAN FEEL IT BEGIN TO COME AWAY FROM THE TOWER WALL. AS YOU GRAB THE EDGE OF THE PARAPET, THE VINE TEARS AWAY AND FALLS TO THE GROUND. YOU PULL YOURSELF OVER THE TOP.
YOU ARE ON THE TOP OF THE TOWER. THERE IS A HATCH HERE.
(On a repeat test, I was able to climb holding one item. I don’t know what the limit is.)
Going through this lands the player on the second floor of the castle, so let me give the map of that first:
It’s hard to know what to focus on; there’s a lot of places that are clearly just functional but it may be we are supposed to do something vital in a nondescript room just because one of the clues (which I promise I’ll show off soon) signals it.
YOU ARE IN AN EMPTY STOREROOM. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND WEST.
NOW WHAT? >N
YOU ARE AT THE JUNCTION OF THE WEST AND SOUTH HALLWAYS. THERE ARE DOORS SOUTH AND WEST.
The northwest corner has a ornate bedroom with a button next to a mirror.
YOU ARE IN A VERY ORNATE BEDROOM. THIS IS THE MASTER BEDROOM. THERE IS A FOURPOSTER BED AND AND LARGE DRESSER HERE. ON THE NORTH WALL IS A FULL-LENGTH MIRROR. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND EAST.
NOW WHAT? >EXAMINE MIRROR
THERE IS A BUTTON ON THE EDGE OF THE MIRROR.
(PUSH isn’t normally recognized as a verb; it seems the game has PUSH BUTTON hardcoded as a thing that works.)
Going in you can find a tower with a brass key, but also a corpse and some warning about blocking the entrance. The mirror once closed can’t be opened the other way.
YOU FORGOT TO BLOCK THE DOOR WITH SOMETHING! YOU SLOWLY STARVE TO DEATH! TOO BAD!
WELL, YOU MANAGED TO GET YOURSELF KILLED! BETTER LUCK WITH YOUR NEXT TRY. HOPE YOU REMEMBERED TO SAVE THE GAME BEFORE TRYING SOMETHING NEW!
The random leather boot can be used to invoke the command BLOCK MIRROR after opening it, allowing the player to grab the key safely.
A similar “trap room” can be invoked by visiting the first floor…
…finding the power room and pulling the switch (which does not need extra gas to run, although I assume we’ll still need to fill it up later)…
NOW WHAT? >N
YOU ARE AT THE JUNCTION OF THE EAST AND NORTH HALLWAYS. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND EAST.
NOW WHAT? >N
YOU ARE IN THE POWER ROOM. THERE IS A LARGE GASOLINE GENERATOR HERE. AT ONE END IS A SMALL GAS TANK. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A SWITCH. THERE IS AN EXIT SOUTH.
NOW WHAT? >PULL SWITCH
THE GENERATOR STARTS WITH A ROAR!
…then going back to the second floor (southeast corner) with an “office” that has a button that can be pushed.
THE DOOR SLIDES CLOSED BEHIND YOU
YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM. THERE IS A TABLE AND CHAIR HERE. SEATED AT THE TABLE IS A SKELETON. SCRATCHED IN THE SURFACE OF THE TABLE IS THE FOLLOWING: LAST WILL OF SILAS FRUMP. GOT LOCKED IN THIS ROOM. HOPE THE PERSON THAT FINDS ME THINKS TO BLOCK THE DOOR WITH A CHAIR. I AM STARVING. I WILL LEAVE A CLUE I DISCOVERED. DIG 1800 GOLDPIECES………
You can block again, this time with a chair, but there’s no item as far as I can tell? This means there’s something essential in the text but it’s a fairly vague clue.
Other clues include a note randomly in one of the side rooms…
THE NOTE READS:
GOOD LUCK FRIEND, WITH YOUR ONGOING SEARCH FOR MY GOLD. LEAVE NOT A STONE UNTURNED DURING YOUR WANDERINGS AND IN TIME YOU SHALL FIND MANY NEW CLUES. SOME OF THEM WILL GUIDE YOU STRAIGHT, SOME NOT. ROAM EACH HALL, SEARCH IN ALL PLACES. SOME THINGS WILL VERY LIKELY PASS UNNOTICED, EVEN IF YOU LOOK AT THEM!
…and a secret inscription off the northeast corner, this time found by pulling a hook.
YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE NE TOWER. THERE IS A BRONZE TABLET FASTENED TO THE WALL HERE. IT READS:
I HAVE HIDDEN IT WELL.
TO FIND MY GOLD WILL
BE DIFFICULT. THE KEY
CLUE SHALL BE NAMED.
YOU SHALL SEE FOR YOURSELF
THE GOLD IF THE SCRATCHES
PLACED ON THIS TABLET
ARE READ AND MADE NOTE
OF. SIR JOHN WHEMBLY
The southwest tower similarly has a clue but is not blocked off:
YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE SW TOWER. THERE IS METAL PLAQUE FASTENED TO THE WALL HERE. THE PLAQUE READS:
“PUT FIVE TOGETHER. SHE KNOWS WAYS.”
STAIRS LEAD DOWN.
The “five together” might be referring to letters that are scattered randomly through rooms on the first floor. Samples:
YOU ARE IN THE STEWARDS OFFICE. THERE IS A DESK HERE. ON THE WALL IS PAINTED THE LETTER “I”. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH,EAST AND SW.
YOU ARE AT THE SOUTH END OF THE “GREAT HALL”. A LONG, HIGH ROOM USED FOR EATING. THERE IS A LONG TABLE DOWN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM. ON THE WEST WALL IS A MASSIVE FIREPLACE. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS PAINTED THE LETTER “L”. THERE IS A DOOR EAST.
Put all together, there are the letters, I, L, C, E, and A. They anagram to ALICE. This is clearly referring to a picture found at the note I mentioned earlier (the one that mentions “SOME THINGS WILL VERY LIKELY PASS UNNOTICED”).
YOU ARE IN THE STUDY. THERE IS A DESK AGAINST THE EAST WALL. ON THE SOUTH WALL IS A PAINTING OF A YOUNG GIRL HOLDING A RABBIT. THE RABBIT IS WEARING A WRISTWATCH. THERE ARE DOORS NORTH AND SOUTH.
YOU SEE HERE, A NOTE
I haven’t gotten any significance out of this room otherwise and I suspect I’m missing a parser command. Doing EXAMINE or MOVE give me nothing on any noun other than the note (MOVE isn’t even recognized as a verb).
There’s still other new items lying around to play with (a sword, a rope, a horseshoe, a crank, a silver key in addition to the brass one I mentioned earlier) and there’s one more straightforward concrete puzzle: how to open the drawbridge. With a key (I’m not sure which one, they work passively!) you can get at the drawbridge controls, but I can’t get them to work.
YOU ARE IN THE DRAWBRIDGE EQUIPMENT ROOM. THERE IS A LARGE WINDLASS HERE WITH ROPES LEADING TO THE TOP OF THE DRAWBRIDGE. IN ONE CORNER IS A LARGE PULLY WITH WIRES LEADING DOWN TO THE PORTCULLIS. THERE IS A SQUARE HOLE IN THE PULLY WHEEL. ON THE FLOOR HERE ARE SOME SMALL HOLES LOOKING INTO A PASSAGE BELOW.
TURN WINDLASS is recognized but it is described as rusty. The crank is suggestive but I have not been able to get the parser to recognize any use of it. Other than bespoke commands (which includes turning the windlass) the only ones I have are CUT, DIG, CLIMB, READ, OPEN, LIGHT, UNLOCK, TIE, JUMP, EXAMINE, ENTER, and CHOP — not suggestive for fixing anything, and I’m pretty sure TIE is meant solely for tying the boat at the docks.
I will take speculation at this point on anything (although my one reader, hello Rob, who has solved it already — please hold off on hints for now).
Recently, the Internet Archive went down, and unfortunately, my next several posts were dependent in some way or another on references there. Hence, I scrapped my schedule and picked something I didn’t need extra research for: the sequel to Uncle Harry’s Will, by R. L. Turner, as written for the North Star Horizon.
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE PERSERVERED TO THE END OF THE SEARCH! THE MONEY YOU HAVE FOUND IN MY CHEST WILL PAY YOUR WAY TO ENGLAND THERE, YOU’LL FIND YOUR NEXT ADVENTURE. SOMEWHERE IN WHEMBLY CASTLE LIES HIDDEN A HUGE TREASURE OF JEWELS AND GOLD. HIDDEN THERE BY YOUR GREAT, GREAT, GRANDFATHER ALMOST TWOHUNDRED YEARS AGO. MANY HAVE SEARCHED, BUT NO ONE HAS FOUND IT. WITH YOUR LOGIC AND INTELIGENCE I KNOW YOU WILL BE ABLE TO FIND IT! GOOD LUCK!
The previous game involved a gigantic map which tried to re-create the roadmap of an entire country, and the player had to follow the instructions of a poem in the manner similar to a gimmick road rally. It was, if nothing else, unique.
Whembly Castle is much more traditional: we’re on foot, we’ve arrived at a castle, we’re looking for treasure with no poem to guide us.
We even start adjacent to a forest! Very unexpected, I know.
YOU ARE AT THE END OF A ROAD LEADING NORTH. THERE ARE DENSE, UNPENATRABLE WOODS ON EACH SIDE. TO THE WEST IS A SMALL GATEHOUSE.
NOW WHAT? >W
YOU ARE IN A SMALL EMPTY ROOM. THERE IS A SIGN PAINTED ON THE WALL HERE. IT READS: BEWARE THE ICY WATER!
The start area is meant generally just to stall the player from trying a direct approach.
Entering a gate over a bridge leads to a lake which is a dead end.
YOU ARE AT THE SOUTH END OF A BRIDGE EXTENDING NORTH OVER A VERY FOGGY LAKE. SMALL TOWERS FLANK THE PASSAGE. THERE IS A DOOR INTO THE WEST TOWER.
NOW WHAT? >N
YOU ARE AT THE NORTH END OF A BRIDGE WHICH ENDS ABRUPLY HERE. TO THE NORTH LIES THE LAKE. MISTY WHITE FOG COVERS THE WATER. YOU CAN SEE A DARK MASS IN THE FOG TO THE NORTH.
Trying to enter the lake results in the icy doom warned about in the sign. The proper way to go is the previously mentioned west tower, which has a deck of cards. After picking up the deck of cards, the game rather unusually gives the player ACE OF DIAMONDS through KING OF DIAMONDS as individual objects.
YOU ARE IN THE WEST TOWER OF THE BARBICAN.
THERE IS A BENCH AND A TABLE HERE.
NOW WHAT? >INVENTORY
YOU ARE CARRYING:
AN ACE OF DIAMONDS
A TWO OF DIAMONDS
A THREE OF DIAMONDS
A FOUR OF DIAMONDS
A FIVE OF DIAMONDS
A SIX OF DIAMONDS
A SEVEN OF DIAMONDS
AN EIGHT OF DIAMONDS
A NINE OF DIAMONDS
A TEN OF DIAMONDS
A JACK OF DIAMONDS
A QUEEN OF DIAMONDS
A KING OF DIAMONDS
This is quite unusual and ominous, and I immediately knew this signaled a maze coming, and the objects were intended to map things out. Indeed, heading back to enter the forest, one step in reveals “YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS”.
Topologically, you can consider the map above to be in three sections.
The “main” group is an interconnected set of 11 rooms, with many of them having a “Dead End” branch room. (The idea of random dead ends scattered about dates back to Crowther’s Adventure, even pre-Woods.) In a narrative sense, if someone is stumbling around they’ll essentially go in circles although there’s no special tendencies to force the player back to the start (unlike some mazes, which include special one-way “trap” exits; see the ending maze of Sphinx Adventure for the most extreme example). This is essentially forced by the author’s insistance that if room A goes to room B, there is a path that also lets you go back from B to A. In the context of a cave, one way exits can make sense (you come from above using gravity somehow) but in a forest it doesn’t, so I appreciate the decision.
The “branch” I have marked is miss-able by someone not thorough enough: it leads to a key.
YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS
NOW WHAT? >E
YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS
YOU SEE HERE, A RUSTY IRON KEY
The “ending” section is separated from the main set, making it less likely someone will wander to the end of the maze by accident.
YOU ARE IN A TWISTING MAZE OF PATHS
NOW WHAT? >NE
YOU ARE AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS. TO THE NORTH IS A CLEARING. THE LAKE LIES ALONG THE WEST EDGE OF THE CLEARING. THERE ARE WOODS SURROUNDING THE CLEARING. THERE IS A TRAIL INTO THE WOODS TO THE SOUTH. YOU CAN SEE A BUILDING TO THE NORTH.
This leads to a shack next to a dock and a boat. Just for simplicity of explanation, I’ll assume a player who has already poked ahead to the next outdoor area (a cabin) and returned with a metal prybar lying out in the open.
With the prybar you can bust through a rusty padlock into the shack and find some oars.
YOU ARE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE SHACK. THERE IS A HAND-OPERATED GASOLINE PUMP HERE. THERE IS GAS IN THE PUMP.
NOW WHAT? >S
YOU ARE AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE WOODEN SHACK. ON THE DOOR THERE IS A RUSTY HASP AND PADLOCK. TO THE WEST IS A BOAT DOCK. TO THE NORTH A GAS PUMP.
NOW WHAT? >OPEN DOOR
OK!
NOW WHAT? >E
YOU ARE IN A SMALL OFFICE. THERE IS A DUSTY COUNTER HERE.
THERE ARE DOORS EAST AND WEST.
NOW WHAT? >E
YOU ARE IN A DIRTY STORAGE ROOM.
YOU SEE HERE, A PAIR OF OARS
The oars let you jump in the boat and row around, although I found it quite finicky; the game insisted I not use ROW WEST but instead just type the direction, but at first just typing the direction failed. I am unclear the source of the bug.
Even after getting to the lake, it turns out to be too foggy to move around.
YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEAR THE EAST SHORE. THERE ARE ROCKS EAST.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
NOW WHAT? >W
THE LAKE IS VERY FOGGY! YOU’LL NEVER FIND YOUR WAY WITHOUT A COMPASS!
There’s another bug with the boat I’ll get to in a second, but let’s check out the final area first.
This is straightforwardly a cabin with another locked door, but rather than forcing it this time, you can use the key from the forest maze.
YOU ARE IN A LARGE ROOM. THERE ARE CHAIRS AND A TABLE HERE. A LARGE DESK SITS IN ONE CORNER NEXT TO A FIREPLACE. THERE IS A BED ALONG ONE WALL. NEXT TO THE BED IS A SMALL DRESSER.
YOU SEE HERE, A GAS CAN
(The desk, dresser, table, etc. don’t seem to be hiding anything.)
The gas can can be filled up back at the shack; I haven’t used the filled can for anything yet, but I do wonder if we get to hit the road somewhere just like the last game. There’s also off to the side a manhole that goes underground.
YOU ARE AT THE NW CORNER OF THE CLEARING.
THERE IS A MANHOLE COVER IN THE GROUND HERE.
NOW WHAT? >OPEN HATCH
THERE IS A LADDER HERE LEADING DOWN TO A CHAMBER BELOW.
NOW WHAT? >D
YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE LADDER.
THERE IS A TRAPDOOR ABOVE YOUR HEAD
(Notice how it is referred to as a “manhole cover” but you need to call it a “hatch” to get anywhere. Yes, this game retains the guess-the-noun from the previous one.)
I’ve gotten a little farther, but this seems like a good place to cut off. I did promise I’d return to the boat.
While I was able to enter the boat, I have yet to discern a good syntax for leaving the boat. Out of desparation I just tried leaving east at the docks, thinking it might have my avatar hop out of the boat automatically. Instead, the boat stayed with me.
YOU ARE AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE WOODEN SHACK. ON THE DOOR THERE IS A RUSTY HASP AND PADLOCK. TO THE WEST IS A BOAT DOCK. TO THE NORTH A GAS PUMP.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
Land boat! You can “ride” the boat all the way to the underground, but if you do that, you hit the “fog” condition and end up getting warped back to the docks.
YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE LADDER. THERE IS A TRAPDOOR ABOVE YOUR HEAD
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
NOW WHAT? >D
THE LAKE IS VERY FOGGY! YOU’LL NEVER FIND YOUR WAY WITHOUT A COMPASS!
YOU ARE ON THE LAKE NEXT TO THE DOCK. THE LAKE IS COVERED WITH A DENSE FOG.
YOU ARE IN THE BOAT.
The last game went up to roughly 200 rooms and I’ve only got 71 so far, so I expect quite a bit to go. I do find it interesting the same room-to-object ratio is still fairly large. In a road trip, it’s understandable you wouldn’t see much by the side of the road worth picking up; here, in a “classic” style adventure, the ratio feels a little more uneasy, but it is possible the game will change things up later.
Renga in Blue 
