I’m likely not far from the end, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy to get there.
Via an Asylum II ad in 80 Microcomputing Magazine, May 1982.
Last time I left off on the very simple problem of being able to press a button on a wall. (LOOK BUTTON says there is no button here, so I wasn’t even sure if it was a button.)
PRESS BUTTON and PUSH BUTTON did not work. I did discover while fiddling that VOCABULARY works just like Asylum so you can get a full list of verbs and nouns.
Even with this list I was having no luck (I went as far as guessing it was a HOLE instead of a button and trying things like INSERT GREEN KEY IN HOLE). Fortunately, Gus Brasil, who seemingly gravitates to the really obscure stuff I play, picked up the game and played all the way to the end. He let me know the right syntax is PUSH BUTTON ON WALL. Argh!
The syntax becomes relevant again shortly.
I was thus able to enact my plan: light a rocket, drop it at the guard, run to the steel walls, survive the explosion, and get past the guard to a new area.
The box the guard leaves behind has a rubber truncheon. You can also go all the way to the end of the four doors and use the green key to find a purse with some gold coins.
I already suspected the truncheon went to the mined area (either smashing a glass wall or a mirror) but I’ll save that for later and deal with the gold coins first, which directly go to an inmate near the start who wanted to trade them for a fuse.
Again, every character that isn’t a guard can be referred to as an INMATE.
With this, I was able to go to the transporter and … still not operate it. It was described as having a button on it, it had a fuse in a “fuseholder”, and it was too heavy to cart around (you can pick it up, but you have to drop it in place). The key turned out to be the highly (highly) unusual syntax which has you PUSH BUTTON ON TRANSPORTER.
Doing this fries the fuse, which is why we needed the New Fuse in the first place (I had originally thought the lack of working was the fuse, not the parser being finicky). This was followed by an incredibly long struggle with the parser to try to take the “Blown Fuse” out, and put the “New Fuse” in. GET BLOWN FUSE doesn’t work, nor did most of the variants I tried. (“GET BLOWN FUSE FROM TRANSPORTER”: “You can’t do that”.) The big issue on top of everything else is that the parser has a character limit so you can’t type in anything you want. If you try to TAKE BLOWN FUSE FROM TRANSPORTER you get stuck by not being able to type in the “R”. Trying to use REMOVE (off the verb list) is even worse:
This is the first time I’ve ever had difficulty with a parser because it refuses to type all the characters I need for a command. Gus Brasil mentioned (based on the Vocab list) that TRANS works as an abbreviation, and indeed it does: REMOVE BLOWN FUSE FROM TRANS gets the much desired Blown Fuse.
But things aren’t over yet because now I needed to put in the new one, which was another saga in itself, and I actually took a break from the puzzle and went exploring a little in case I missed stuff. Gus also incidentally pointed out that the teleport-to-nowhere I found which kept repeating had a clear message if you do the map-upside down:
This is exactly like troll levels in Mario Maker.
Finally being satisfied that I had everything resolved (except the truncheon, which I’m saving) I went back to the grind:
put new fuse
put new fuse in trans
insert new fuse in trans
put new fuse in fuseholder
insert new fuse in fuseholder
This wasn’t a problem with guess the verb or even guess the noun, but guess the preposition. The game needs “into”: INSERT NEW FUSE INTO TRANS.
There was one small benefit from all that fiddling. At one point I typed OPEN BOX rather than my usual command (I had PUT NEW FUSE which seemingly worked, but only set the item down). I discovered that the square also contained a silver key.
You can’t move off the square without dropping the transporter (again, too heavy, so it always would look like there is a box there no matter what). The silver key is being hidden by the property of the game always displaying a single box for any item being in a spot, no matter how many items there are. If anything in this game is a troll at the level of what a fangame normally does (rather than a professional game) this is it: this is the kind of glitch in reality that most authors try to hide (and as far as I remember, never got used by Corr/Denman) but the exact conditions here (you have to drop an item on the square to turn around and look at it, you can’t see a box in the square you are standing) are being exploited by a superfan to their limit. Compare with Super Mario romhacks that require using glitches to beat:
Moving on, as we still haven’t explored the area the transporter lands on:
It’s fairly straightforward except for yet another troll, which is somewhat dependent on the player’s keyboarding. They have to wind their way out a “wormy” passage, followed by a very long passage where one step before the end you need to turn left. This means you are hitting the “up” key a lot, and if you accidentally hit “up” one too many times you plunge into a pit. I didn’t have this happen since I was moving slow to make a map, but since I could tell what the author was aiming for, I made an animation demonstrating the fall:
The bottom of the pit has infinite hallways in any direction. You have to reload. (Again: The original Corr games did have some softlocks, but not of the kind where you realize you are in an impossible room or area.)
Turning correctly, you can make it over to pick up a magic map, which is the only other item here. Normally then this would be a jump back to where you started, followed by a trip up to the mined floor, but…
…it doesn’t land you back at the same place you started! (I marked the landing point as the swirly wormhole.) I’ve also simplified the map a bit here, as there’s some teleporters that loop you around (and I didn’t feel the need to find the exact positioning for each one) and I’ve also left off marking most of the doors, some which use a gold key (which we haven’t found yet); just note you need to come back here once you have the gold key in order to pick up the red key.
After some major map-fiddling I found the “escape” door (a door seen from the other side, but requiring a silver key to open) so finally made it back to the elevator and the mined level, with the truncheon and magic map in hand. I already knew the magic map was relevant because when examining it at first, it gives the same grid as before. Once you actually arrive there, a path is drawn out like this:
Clearly my own map was turned from the “real” compass the game was using (I hate not knowing how to orient things, grr) so I did some magic with Microsoft Paint in order to redraw the route on my original map.
To get through to the route in the first place involves busting the mirror. I had some difficulty because the typical HIT and SMASH and ATTACK weren’t in the list, so I had to go with CHOP. Chopping with a truncheon?
The path then follows mostly uneventfully as long as you don’t typo your keypress. There’s also a “big blue nothing with a button on the rear side” but that’s again just trolling, and to get through the last step you should look in the box as it contains a contact mine which needs to be picked up (don’t step on it!). In the end you can reach the corner box which has a gold key.
The route is changed on the way back, so you need to refer to the magic map (or do a lot of saving and loading) to make it to safety.
In the end I wasn’t too annoyed by the fact I mapped it first before finding a relevant item, as knowing the boundaries helped make sure I did the path correctly.
With the gold key in hand you can head back and get the red key, and then go on a spree of opening doors. This yields a Speak and Spell, a geranium, a botanist (who doesn’t want a shriveled geranium and kicks you out if you try to give it over), and John Carpenter, the director (in a room marked “Director”). Seriously:
This would be after he made The Thing, but I don’t know what that means for the game. I tried GIVE for every item I had and got no reaction.
The only other open area I have is back where I blew up the guard; there’s a second guard blocking the way further, and it seems like they need to be removed out of the way as well. You can step back and throw the contact mine, then throw an item at the contact mine to blow it up, but that blows you up as well.
Guard #2.
After throwing the contact mine to be next to the guard.
After THROW TRUNCHEON. You can’t throw farther.
So that leaves the botanist (and maybe getting a non-withered version of the plant over), the director, and the guard to deal with. I still have an empty wine bottle (the flower can’t go in it) and a Speak and Spell but I’m otherwise out of options.
Gus, you’re welcome to drop hints but ROT13 only please. Based on the vocabulary list there isn’t much left to find. Anyone else is welcome to speculate about wacky stuff to try and I’ll test it out.
No cereal boxes in the vocabulary, unfortunately. COME BACK ALI. COME BACK ALI’S SISTER.
One of the disadvantages to a write-as-I-play style is that I don’t get to plunge into the hex machine code until I’m done (or at least I get really, really, stuck); Rob in the comments searched through and found a copyright notice which explains quite a bit and also makes the whole experience even more terrifying. Previously I theorized this could be a “hacked” game but special tools were needed that didn’t exist at this time to do the kind of work required here. It appears a madlad from Germany custom-made his own.
ADVLIB Copyright (c) 1982/83 Eberhard Mattes
Eberhard Mattes was a Video Genie enthusiast and has his name linked to some “monitor software” which tracks what’s going on in machine code and a bios to use CP/M on Video Genie. The copyright statement above implies he made his own fangame program to modify the machine code of the Frank Corr engine. Without any other name attached I’m going to guess this game is likely by Mattes himself. (It could even be the tool ADVLIB never got released, just the game made with it.) I’m not clear yet which game was the “base” but the verb FART is included and only showed up in the first two (Deathmaze 5000 and Labyrinth) and the screen layout is closer to those games; the inmate graphics and some other elements only show up starting in Asylum.
Fangames often are harder and less fair than the originals of a game; the enthusiasts who have played through a game multiple times really want a challenge and/or to torment their friends. For example, the “troll levels” so now well-refined through the Super Mario Maker games are their own ecosystem far from the ethos of Nintendo-designed levels.
You might ask, how could a Deathmaze 5000 style game be less fair than the original? You’ll see.
Continuing from last time…
…I had traded some gun powder for a bottle and a firework rocket (the rocket indicates it has a cord if you LOOK at it). I also had in my inventory a green key (used everywhere I could manage), lighter fluid, and a golden lighter (which I had filled with the aforementioned fluid). On the obstacle side of things, there was an inmate who wanted five gold coins for a fuse, a “transporter” that seems to need aforementioned fuse, a guard that stops me on level 1, a place where steel “protective” doors fall on level 1, and (still unexplored as of my last post) I had a teleporter square to get through and a mine-laden level 3.
I’m going to do the teleporter first (which will be short), then the mine area (which will be frustrating), and finally the guard and the steel doors (which are connected).
After stepping into the teleporter and turning “south”.
I don’t have much to say about the teleporter area; it drops you in a region which “loops” the west to the east side and seems intended to just make you walk forever if you don’t notice what’s going on. I dropped items (which left behind boxes) to confirm the area is endless. Mind you, Deathmaze had something trigger with particular turn numbers in a static room, so there may be something to this area still, but I have no clues pointing here yet.
There is also the possibility there is something on one of the random walls (I have yet to face each and every one to check); there’s a wall with a special object on level 3 (the mined floor) as you’ll see next.
Arriving in the elevator to level 3 and turning “north”.
The level is mostly divided into a grid pattern, where the outermost circle is mine-free, but there are many dangerous squares that will blow you up if you step inside the grid.
The mines are hopefully self-explanatory (they’re invisible, I had to step on every single one to map them); some other points on the map above:
1. There are many doors marked “elevator”. Only the door you came in on is a real elevator; walking into any of the other “elevator” rooms lets you know the room is fake, and it drops you down into a 1 by 1 room with no apparent means of escape. This seems to be a softlock.
None of the Corr games had this kind of softlock; one reason why this one is more unfair.
2. In the upper right corner there’s a visible box, but it is blocked by glass walls to the west and south. I have been unable to break through the wall, even when using FART from all the way across the map, flying towards it, and ramming. (Before anyone asks, it doesn’t work to bypass mines either.) Animation below:
3. There are two squares marked “NOTHING”. Those are boxes, and when you open them, the game describes that you have found nothing. You are unable to take nothing. They are pure trolling. (Again, a few steps past anything Corr did, although he did have red herrings in Deathmaze.)
4. There’s one wall (the only place where the grid breaks) with a mirror. I haven’t been able to get anything useful to happen here but it does indicate looking at particular walls might be needed (meaning I need to comb over every area very carefully).
The map is no doubt incomplete since I haven’t made it to the inner area yet. My guess is I’ll bust past the glass wall (somehow) which will then give access, and I also guess that the box in the upper right corner has NOTHING just like the others. You might think the firework rocket would be helpful for the glass. Unfortunately, it’s a little too explosive; you can light the cord, drop it, and run away, but it always makes a big enough explosion to (presumably) smash the glass but also kill the player.
Now, the level with the guards. There’s not much to it at the start other than the guard telling you to go back to your cell…
…and the steel wall…
…but notice how it is protective. And we have a very powerful rocket. There’s enough time while the cord burns to drop the rocket next to the guard and make a beeline for the wall.
The wall that dropped has what looks like a button.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to press it! I might need to do some serious noun-hunting (again, this is a little more unfair than what Corr did). It could even be a “hole” rather than a button or some such nonsense. If there was a way to look at the wall that might help but the obvious candidates (LOOK WALL, LOOK STEEL WALL, LOOK AROUND) give no joy, and plain LOOK BUTTON says “I see no button.”
Enough events have happened this seemed like a good time to report in, at least. I don’t think this is going to go as long as the Asylum games but we’ll see.
Consolidating the information from Will Moczarski, Ernst Krogtoft, and a 1981 interview, Frank Corr was an 18-year-old student at MIT when he used his TRS-80 to make the game Rat’s Revenge in BASIC. Denman saw a copy and offered to publish it. While Corr didn’t originally write the game to sell, he agreed to a deal, as long as he was able to “learn machine language first.” (He managed to parley writing a research paper for English into one about machine language.)
During MIT’s summer break, Corr went back to make a machine code version of Rat’s Revenge, and followed up by adding enough content it went from straightforward maze game to an adventure game: Deathmaze 5000. (This started as a true outsider whim: he had never played an adventure until he was halfway through making Deathmaze.) This same engine was used (with collaboration by William Denman himself) for a follow-up, Labyrinth. All three were out by October.
In January 1981, he made improvements to a routine “that allows graphics to be stored as data”, leading to the more elaborate game Asylum (out by the release of their Spring 1981 catalog). Corr also claimed (post-Asylum) that he was going to write one more game with “octagonal rooms” and “use a space station or similar setting.” Corr is only credited on Asylum II with the “graphics”, so he apparently either relaxed on game development to focus on MIT or switched to working on the space station game (which never came out).
There are three other lost Med Systems we know about from the 1981 catalog, which all seem to be from Denman in 1980: Samurai, Starlord, and Bureaucracy (out at least by September). The first two may not be adventures, but the last one describes itself directly as such:
Bureaucracy, the adventure of government agencies, places you in the role of an amateur mechanic who has devised a way to get 80 mpg from your old Cadillac. Your mission is to bring this cheap technology to the attention of the Department of Energy Assistance (DOEA). You must get past hordes of secretaries, muddle through myriad forms, and mix with middle management. But don’t lose yourself in DOEA’s great office building, the Octagon, and be sure to get finished before 4:30. In addition to the standard adventure features, Bureaucracy offers soft-keys for short conversations with the various personalities you will encounter and a “mini” 3-D graphics display.
All this establishes a picture of a company whose history is settled, even though it has a couple lost games (that will hopefully turn up one day). Today’s game throws that for a loop. It is not listed in any advertisement or catalog for Med Systems, yet it clearly uses the Frank Corr engine and I am fairly certain it is by Frank Corr himself (with or without Denman helping). It is a lost game that we didn’t even know was lost.
I found it while searching the same German archive I found Geheimagent XP-05. For the most part, the games there I recognized, although there are some German translations that I hadn’t seen (like one of Assignment 45). On disk 15 I found a file called MADHOUSE.CMD. There is a known Mad House game from 1983 but that’s a regular text adventure by Peter Kirsch written in BASIC. The CMD suggested the file on disk 15 was machine code so I gave it a load and was shocked by what I saw.
Above is the starting screen when you boot the game; there’s no mention of Med Systems. It has the inventory to the right like Deathmaze 5000 and Labyrinth and feels like an intermediate game between Labyrinth and Asylum. Was it a test game of some sort? That suggests it was written perhaps starting in October 1980, and for some reason shelved before Asylum came out. (Maybe the routine Frank Corr found in January made him want to start over?)
If that’s the case, then how did it get out? (I also considered if it was possible this was a third-party hack. While people made their own games with the Scott Adams database format, Madhouse is pure machine code and doesn’t lend itself to getting modified without modern tools.)
I have played a fair amount and nothing matches either Asylum game. It could be the Asylum material will creep in or it could all be brand new. Either way I don’t understand how the Germans have a copy. Perhaps some content in the game itself will help (Denman appears in Asylum II, so cameos aren’t impossible).
You start in a 1×1 cell with no bed or items. The only thing I could find that worked was to YELL. This causes an elevator sound, and a “sadistic guard” to approach.
He drops a “green key” but it does not open the door. The only thing to do is to YELL again whereupon you get “hit by a rubber truncheon” and end up in another cell, in the dark.
The dark cell is a 2 by 1 room so you need to move slightly before finding the right wall where OPEN DOOR acknowledges there is a door there.
Now UNLOCK DOOR WITH GREEN KEY will work (just like Asylum 1 & 2 the game is fussy about complete sentences). This opens the map up wide:
Every door that has been passed through will unlock with the green key from the start of the game (except the elevator, which is already unlocked). Every other door either requires a different key (or lockpick, or grenade pin, or whatnot).
Facing “east” after leaving the starting room.
Near the start (to the “west” after passing through some locked doors, note there’s no compass so my directions are arbitrary) are two people in rooms. One of them wants to sell you a fuse for “5 gold coins”…
…and the other describes themselves as a “pyrotechnician” with no further clarification.
Past that is a section which can be confusing to map.
The Xes are placed so that in particular positions it looks the same in every direction. As long as you’re careful mapping it’s fine, but it does give the effect of a spinner or teleporter Wizardry-style without resorting to actually moving the player around.
That is, it is easy to lose track if you’re facing north, south, east, or west while passing through this “same visual in every direction” type of intersection.
Mind you, the game is perfectly happy to resort to teleporters like with Labyrinth; stepping on the northwest tile sends the player elsewhere, although I haven’t fully mapped out the result yet.
Out in the open to the south are some boxes (in the standard Med System style) with a variety of explode-y objects: gun powder, lighter fluid, and golden lighter. You can take the gun powder back to the “pyrotechnician” and they are willing to trade for a firework rocket and a bottle.
Fortunately you can use the word INMATE (like the Asylum games). The game runs out of characters if you attempt to type GIVE GUN POWDER TO PYROTECHNICIAN.
Finally, in addition to the teleport square in the corner (which I’m ignoring for now), there’s an elevator and a “transporter” device. The transporter is an item you can pick up but it is too heavy to move, and it has a button. It doesn’t work yet but there’s a “fuseholder with a fuse” that is suggestive.
Unfortunately, PRESS RED BUTTON gets the message “Bad construction” which might mean some kind of bug. My guess is the fuse needs to be replaced first, via the inmate who wants 5 gold coins.
The elevator works normally without issues as long as you close the door behind you.
Level one has a guard that says to go back to your cell.
You can also get yourself trapped by a “protective steel wall”. Nothing else is accessible (for now).
Level two is where the player starts, and level three represents another large map, although some squares have mines (the screen turns white, you die).
Clearly the next step is to work on the third floor and the area reached by the teleporter, but teleporting and death squares tend to make mapping take a long time, so I thought this would be a good place to report in.
If you want the game for yourself, I have a download link here. There are no hints or clues anywhere because there is no documentation that this game ever even existed.
I’ve finished the game; my previous posts are needed for context. You can read my complete Ringen series including the 2019 content here, and my series starting from the DOS port here.
Nearly to the end, this game has a serious issue with how events are triggered: it relies heavily on random number generation. This is an issue I’ve brought up multiple times but it’s worth a re-fresh:
Suppose you have an event that happens 1% of the time in your game, checking every turn. How likely is it that it will take over 100 turns to see the event?
Intuitively, many people would think it quite unlikely. Another way to phrase the question is “how likely is it to get 99% — the failure state — 100 times in a row?” This is simply .99 raised to the 100th power, or approximately 36.6%. That means more than a third of players will be failing 100 times in a row.
How about 200 times in a row? That seems unlikely, right? Well, no, it’s actually 13.4%. Remember this is a designer who likely was thinking “oh it’ll be about 50, at worst about 100” and more than 1 of 10 in players are now waiting double the “maximum”.
Surely not 300 turns in a row? That’s still around 5%, or 1 in 20 of all players. Especially in the context of a text adventure, 300 turns is a very long time.
The curious thing about Ringen is there is at least a little acknowledgement of this problem. Let me go back to the scene with Legolas appearing, and giving Sting (which turned out to be central to my last leap and winning the game).
I will try to help you out of here, but first I will try to find our mutual friend Gandalf. In the meantime, help yourself the best you can. Fortunately, I have found your dear sword, Sting. Take your magic weapon, and you will have something to defend yourself with! We’ll meet again soon!
The Legolas encounter can occur any time in the game, with a 1% chance. The source code also adds an extra condition that Legolas will appear automatically if you exceed 200 moves (what I ended up doing on a rest was just walking back and forth between two rooms, and it did take until move 201 for Legolas to show up). So, under normal play conditions most players will eventually do enough turns to see him.
The problem is that the upshot — the thing I was missing — is a random roll that happens after you get Sting. What you want to happen is have the “small trolls” appear again (the ones who thought you were a wizard). However, in actual practice, they weren’t showing up for me; at first this was just by chance, but then I went to check source code and tried to get them to show intentionally and still had enormous trouble. I went to over 300 moves without seeing them (1 in 20 isn’t that unlikely! It’s just your natural 20 in D&D!)
They see the glittering sword you are holding, shout wildly, and run away in total confusion.
In the process of doing this, one of the trolls drops some clothes. (This is non-obvious; you have to either look at the room again or return to it later and be observant.) You may recall last time I was trying to translate “trollham” and I went with “troll-skin” knowing there was some ambiguity. K had it right in the comments: you’re supposed to dress like a troll to win the battle against the Balrog. The other items you’ll need are Balin’s axe and the wizard staff (technically the One Ring because the game doesn’t let you drop it, and you need to escape with it, but the Balrog can see you either way so it doesn’t matter if you are wearing it).
Before taking on that battle, a couple more RNG instances —
Back at the dragon I was confused about an inclined room to the north where seemingly every direction drops the player back down to the start. I was a victim, again, of RNG: going north sometimes will drop back to the start, but sometimes drop into a “royal” room instead.
I may not have every room (see: RNG, even testing 20 times there’s no guarantee you didn’t miss something) and on my winning run I didn’t even bother entering; it’s just treasures like a crown and a shield. (They would help with the 200 point thing with the wizard, but a.) I didn’t bother with the wizard on my final run b.) I already had enough treasures to fill my inventory, so for any extra treasures to count I needed to cash them in at the Pawnbroker, something I never figured out how to do.)
I also had an encounter with Arwen. I believe this triggers if your points are above a certain level and then your random number gets lucky again, and it is worth mentioning because it redeems the wizard scene slightly: she gives you a tiara and tells you explicitly the wizard now wants to see you, making it not so arbitrary any more to visit him.
Ei strålende vakker alveprinsesse får se deg. Hun stopper opp og ser på deg med et fortryllende vakkert smil, og sier :
`Jeg er Arwen Undomiel av høyalvenes folk.
Jeg må straks tilbake til mine egne, så jeg har ikke tid til å prate.
Ta denne tiaraen, Ringbærer, den vil kanskje kunne hjelpe deg.
Trollmannen ville treffe deg på sitt oppholdssted. Gå dit!’
Prinsessa forsvinner i en sky av flagrende gevanter.
A beautiful elf princess comes by and sees you. She stops and looks at you with an enchantingly beautiful smile, and says:
“I am Arwen Undomiel of the people of the High Elves.
I have to get back to my own people now, so I don’t have time to talk.
Take this tiara, ring bearer, it may be able to help you.
The Wizard wanted to meet you at his location. Go there!”
The Princess disappears in a cloud of fluttering robes.
Finally, the bit with the earthquake that opens a gap is not linked to the picking up the ring — it eventually just happens. This allows you to visit the Pawnbroker and the west side of the lake and the Palantir without worrying about Gollum swiping the ring.
You may incidentally wonder how I handled reclaiming the ring from Gollum. I just made sure he didn’t steal it in the first place. I don’t know the exact logic (I studied the code and I’m still unclear) but when I was ready for the final challenge, I put on the ring right before entering the earthquake passage; there’s enough time to get to the Balrog and kill it before taking the ring off, and Gollum can only steal the ring if you’re visible.
With all that taken care of, while approaching the Balrog in troll clothes he pauses, giving you enough time to act.
The Balrog seems to hesitate a bit.
What are you going to do now?
A little parser struggle here; “use axe” doesn’t work (even though that’s what you’re using), you have to “kill balrog” instead.
You attack the Balrog with Durin’s axe!
The giant monster roars furiously and strikes after you!
Durin’s holy axe seems to have a life of its own!
Suddenly it flies from your hand and hits the monster in the eye!
The monster takes a step back, loses its footing, and stands swaying.
What are you going to do now?
Using the staff, which before gave out stunning light:
The Balrog falls with a terrifying scream into the abyss.
You have defeated the Balrog!
This is not the end of the game. The fact this keeps going a little longer is arguably the classiest part of the game; not only is there one last dramatic moment, but the ending feels like a real denouement. So many of our fantasies have had an abrupt “you got all the treasures, you win”; even the ones with an “endgame” generally have not let the plot wind down gently.
You are following a road that runs east/west.
This is the widest road yet; the floor is worn from long use.
A fresh breeze comes from the east!
>e
Okay.
You are walking on a wide east/west road.
A breeze is felt from the east, and there is a faint daylight coming from there!
There are multiple rooms going out and you can find some of the random treasures here; on my winning run there was a platinum egg and Boromir’s horn. Just right after the exit:
You are on the east side of the Gate Hall. To the east, the mountain opens up.
You can see the blue morning sky a stone’s throw away, from a wide portal.
Just a few more steps, and you’ll be outside!
From behind the stones, a horde of Uruk trolls suddenly jump out with cries and block the entrance.
In the middle of them sits a black, shrouded figure on a black horse. It is a Ringwraith, a Nazgul!
With a thunderous voice the Nazgul says:
`Stop! Who are you, walking in troll clothes?’
ha ha ha yeeeeees
You see, I knew exactly what was about to happen: while Sting scared some trolls and caused them to drop some clothing, surely it was put in the game for a nobler purpose?
Nazgul illustrated by Margrethe II of Denmark for a Danish edition of Lord of the Rings.
>kill nazgul
Sting flashes furiously, and with one blow you knock the stunned Nazgul off his horse! The Uruk trolls recoil in surprise.
What are you going to do now?
You can now go east to escape (if you do anything else, you get pelted with spears).
Du er utenfor de store portene i Dimrill-dalen.
Mot øst strekker den store porten seg, og du kan se et lite vann blinke under deg. Morgenhimmelen er blå, og den lave sola skinner på fjellet over deg. Under et steinkast mot vest gaper de svarte åpningene – dystre og skjebnesvangrende. Bare litt til nå, så har du klart det!
>ø
Ok.
Du er på et platå øst for de store portene.
Under deg er den grønne dalen, og speilsjøen ligger som et prydblad og funkler under den lave morgensola; som nå endelig kaster sine stråler på deg. Intet troll kan nå deg her. Du har klart å komme igjennom Tåkefjellene. Som Ringbærer har du trosset alle farer, og fått med deg Ringen, Den Ene, gjennom de dype minene i Moria – Gratulerer!
You are outside the great gates of the Dimrill Valley.
To the east stretches the Great Gate and you can see water shimmer. The morning sky is blue, and the low sun shines on the mountains above you. A stone’s throw to the west, the openings gape black and gloomy. Just a little farther!
>e
OK.
You are on a plateau east of the gates.
Below you is the green valley; the mirror lake sits like a leaf and sparkles under the low morning sun, which now finally casts its rays for you. No troll can reach you here. You have managed to get through the Misty Mountains. As a ring bearer, you have defied all dangers, while taking the ring, the One, through the deep, the mines of Moria – Congratulations!
This had the most satisfying ending I’ve seen in a text adventure for a while. Despite the action being steps forward, there’s something much more dramatic and tangible here than the usual passage (with the brief tangle with the Nazgul at the end).
It almost makes up for the terrible RNG parts. There’s no real “points” here to balance, but I did have multiple hours wasted on what turned out to be bad dice rolls, and the game was never transparent about what was going on behind the scenes. I think the intent works better in a computer lab: multiple people playing in such a setting are more likely to collectively trigger certain events, so if one person meets Legolas the others know he is around somewhere.
The treasures came off as superfluous, even with the point-total aspect to the wizard (why should I care about the platinum egg on the way out?), but again, there’s a collective-group sense to them: if this is a game people are burning processor power over a whole semester on, forcing the addition of a restriction to computing time, an extra element other than just beating the game helps.
If nothing else, it helped I felt like I was “in the world” of Tolkien more than Ring Quest, despite that game’s bigger sweep of focus (and boosted ability scores handed over to Frodo, who was able to solo the Balrog).
Checking against the MUD, the author included many of the same rooms, but mixed up their geography. I still don’t know where to find the sulfur in MUD-form (to get by the dragon) or how to find the name on the third riddle (it would be amusing if it could be brute-forced just like Ringen; there’s no apparent wizard substitute on the MUD). As you can just walk out of the region in the MUD it loses much of its tension. The original product was in the end more satisfying, even if I had quite slow progress due to the Norwegian.
Original notes for translating the room descriptions to MUD form.
Coming up: A completely unknown and undocumented game by a (relatively) famous company. It hasn’t even been mentioned in this blog’s comments before.
Some progress, although I confess to looking at the source code for one puzzle; I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever based on what I found.
The 1984 Norwegian translation of Lord of the Rings, considered a superior version to the 70s one. Via Reddit. There’s a third translation called Ringdrotten from 2006 which adds more dialectical flair.
Just to clear up an issue I had last time, I somehow translated “en skitten striesekk” as a “pile” rather than a “sack”; I was reinforced in this by trying to “ta striesekk” (ta=take) and being denied, leading me to think it was an item that was not meant to be taken. You have to refer to the noun as a “sekk”, and then holding it will passively increase your inventory limit. (I should have done my image search.)
Regarding the cylinder (“sylinder”) I wasn’t sure about, I hadn’t randomly done “bruk sylinder” with it anywhere
Sylinderen utvider seg svært raskt. Snart er den helt oppblåst, og det viser seg til slutt at den har blitt til ei stor og sikker plastflåte.
The cylinder expands very quickly. Soon it is fully inflated, and has turned into a large, secure plastic raft.
“Plastic”, eh? In any case, it meant this was a “you’ll know where to use it when you see it” type item, not something where (I originally had in my head) I need to find a matching sphere and pyramid, or I need to find a hole in a door that it becomes a key for.
The magic staff similarly reacts to “bruk”, and creates a burst of light. If you’re being chased by trolls (from off the area to the north, say) they’ll scatter. The only problem is you can’t use the staff to assault their position because they just keep respawning in the same turn.
Finally, a fun encounter after getting the mithril armor gifted by the elves (which again, like, the sack, gets used passively, you don’t specify you wear it):
En liten flokk med småtroll kom nettopp gående ut av en sidegang. De bråstopper da de får øye på deg.
Med et triumferende rop støter den ene et spyd rett i magen din !!
Spydet skrenser av, og det faller ned brukket.
`Han må være en trollmann !’, skriker den ene hest, og alle trollene forsvinner forsvinner i ei voldsom fart.
A small group of trolls come out of a side passage and stop suddenly when they see you.
With a triumphant shout, one of them thrusts a spear right into your stomach!
The spear snaps, falling to the ground broken.
“He must be a wizard!” shouts one of the trolls, and they all quickly disappear.
This left me with a magnifying glass and a knife unused. I tried a restart and found that items were shifted a bit — placement of some things are randomized (like treasures) but others are not (seemingly the “practical” items like the magnifying glass and the raft). I found some stones (which turn out to be flint and can make sparks, but don’t light anything I can find) and Boromir’s horn (which you can play, bringing your spirits up, but doesn’t do anything useful I’ve found).
One last random-position item is some rope, which breaks the practical/treasure dichotomy, but seems to be purely optional. On the far north of the big corridor (with the trolls guarding making any progress farther) there’s a branch to the east leading to a “star room” (“covered with deep-blue silk walls and glittering stars”) followed by an otherwise-undescribed “wizard’s room”. The Star Room includes a hole with a hook next to it, and if you use the rope there you can climb down to the troll dungeon (the same area that you can get tossed into involuntarily by being chased). I think the only reason to do this is there’s a random chance the trolls will kill rather than capture, so the rope is a sure thing, but sometimes the rope is randomized to be out of reach anyway.
You may notice a very important item mentioned on the map. It can’t be reached from the dungeon (I think); I’ll get back to it.
After either being tossed in the prison or entered via rope, there’s a message below giving a hint how to escape.
The lower dungeon.
This is a small hole roughly carved out of the rock. An exit is up. On the dirty and dusty wall is a sign: “I, Gloin, was here. There is a secret exit from here, which the trolls do not know about, made by us dwarves. Just say the name of the legendary Bilbo’s nephew, son of Drogo, and you will escape — but watch out for trolls!”
FRODO works here. You can then go south and east to find what the game describes as a climbable wall, except nothing I’ve thrown at it works (trying to actually use the verb climb has the game respond if you mean up or down, suggesting that the directions up and down are overriding, but neither works anyway).
Veien mot øst er blokkert av en mistenkelig glatt og skitten steinvegg. Det virker som om det skal være mulig å forsere denne.
The route to the east is blocked by a suspiciously smooth and dirty stone wall. It seems as if it should be possible to climb over it.
I threw a ton of verbs out here with no luck, but since I’m using an English-Norwegian dictionary, I could be missing something totally obvious.
If you go south a bit from here there’s a “stone table” which seems like it might be moved over to the wall (so you can get high enough to climb). No verbs here work either and the noun isn’t even recognized, suggesting to me I’m wrong here, but given the wall has completely stumped me I can’t discard anything.
With the aforementioned wall (probably stuck by a verb), the “maze” which might just be a trap in the undergrowth, the trolls, and the witch with the riddles being my only real obstacles, I cracked at each one for a while alternating but just had no luck at all. The trolls seemed the most promising since you can pull them away from their guard spot and they have lots of reactions, but there seems to be an endless supply of them so it doesn’t matter. I started to suspect (especially on the wall) I was having a verb issue, so decided to dive into the source code.
That’s making a set of names (vicci, dicci, sicci, etc.) by random choice. I decided to try them out on the Huldra (“Witch and sorceress, what is my name?”) and got lucky my first try: “‘Correct — and never come back!’ A hole opens up in the floor.”
The hole leads down to the One Ring, behind the trolls.
Trollenes skattekammer!!
Ei stor, flat steinhelle dekker mesteparten av gulvet. I et hjørne er det ei sjakt hvor det stiger opp råtten stank. Går du ned dit vil du ikke komme opp igjen samme veien. Det er ei dør mot sør.
Du ser:
En liten gullring uten inskripsjoner. Dette er Herskerringen, Den Ene.
The Trolls’ Treasury!
A large, flat slab of stone covers most of the floor. In one corner is a shaft with a rotten stench. If you go down, you can’t come up the same way. There is a door to the south.
You see:
A small gold ring with no inscription. This is the Ring of Power, The One.
While the ring is often depicted with the Black Speech on it, by default the One Ring is plain, and the words only appear when the ring is heated up. This is depicted in the Peter Jackson movie:
From here you can drop into the prison or just use invisibility to saunter away. Note that wearing the ring for too long will cause Doom so you should take it off again once safe (“If you wear it too long, Sauron will be able to capture you in his power”).
After getting the ring, an earthquake hits and a new exit in the long hall busts open, leading to the east. In my play sequence I explored that first before looping back, but let me explain how you were supposed to find the witch’s name (Vicci / Dicci / etc.) in the first place. I needed the source code again.
There’s a scene with a wizard — back at the Star Room — where the wizard appears and tells you some information.
You are looking for the ring you have lost, but it is well hidden in the trolls’ treasury. There is no way you can get past the guards alone, but there is a person in Moria who can help you. somewhere in the mountains lives an old witch who knows an entrance to the treasure chamber.
He then tells you the name, based on the random choice at the start of the game.
I spent a long time (without checking the code) trying to get this scene but never could. Eventually — after about two hours of effort — I gave in:
5410 IF RN%=20 AND NOT(TB%) AND SC%>200 THEN 6420
SC is referring to the score. You need 200 points for the scene to trigger.
(… incomprehensible yelling goes here …)
If this was a low threshold, this moment might be semi-acceptable, but 200 is a tough score to hit: you need to visit all the rooms (visiting a room gets a point), and you need to get somewhat lucky in the layout of the items (some which can land in the post-ring area which you are about to see). You only get points for items if you’re holding them so you need to shuffle your inventory to high-value items even if you aren’t using them. If you wander into the Star Room with these conditions you’ll trigger the wizard.
It’s one thing to know that as a goal you need score, but prior to this, there was no indication that score was anything more than a progress marker. I was storing all the items in a central chamber as there was no obvious “treasure bonus spot” and because I was reloading after dying, I wasn’t necessarily including “explore every side room” in my save file — after all why would you expect a stop by a Rose Garden would cause a wizard to appear all the way across the map?
I can’t be sure but I think it’s possible to simply get unlucky with item placement and have it be impossible to reach 200 points. After figuring all this out I ended up going back to guessing the name randomly (and saving right beforehand) because it was so much easier.
Going back to the newly created hole (post-Ring finding) and going east:
To the north is an opening, while the main corridor continues from east to west. In one corner is a dirty, heavy stone slab; impossible to carry. In the middle is an area which appears to have writing, but it is so small you can’t decipher it.
This is where the magnifying glass comes in handy.
Jeg, Filur, risset dette.
Durins øks i menneskehender
skal en gang beseire
den grusomme Balrogen.
Ild skal sprute og glør fyke
når mennesket i trollham
ødelegger det uhyret
som har kuet Durins barn,
og jagde dem vekk fra minene
de en gang for lenge siden bygde
med sine egne hender.
I, Filur, carved this.
Durin’s axe in human hands
shall one day vanquish
the cruel Balrog.
Fire shall burst and embers blaze
when the man in troll-skin
destroys the monster
that has subjugated Durin’s children,
and driven them from the mines
they once built long ago
with their own hands.
“Trollham” which I currently have as “troll-skin” is a curious word and the translation may be important for the final puzzle of defeating the Balrog. (Does the Mithril count?) It does seem like us (Frodo) will be the one doing the killing/wounding, but we’re not human? (Can “mennesket” refer to a Hobbit rather than full-on Human? Does this depend on which translation of Lord of the Rings you’re using?) I did run into Legolas later so rather than doing the deed ourselves we may be handing the sacred axe (the one the “scary dwarf” kills us over) off to someone else. This conflicts with another piece of information later, though.
While in this area, almost inevitably, Gollum shows up and steals the ring. I bet you can figure out what “min dyrebare” means.
Ååååhh, min dyrebare !! Min egen Ring, endelig !
I have not found where he ends up to get the Ring back (my guess he somehow lands in prison, which I haven’t checked, or he still keeps eyes on you — there’s still a “shadow” that appears once in a while, although I’m at a 25% chance of that being Sauron instead).
Just exploring without the ring — you can drop down into a Great Hall, and then off a side passage reaching a Secret Chamber (so-named because of an unmentioned exit to reach there); going north then goes to an Even More Secret Chamber and the palantir.
This is the palantir of Orthanc.
This ball, and three like it, were made long ago by the elves.
With such a palantir you can see things that are happening far away, and things that will happen in the future.
Use this too many times and Sauron gets you, but you can get a few hints. Notably Aragon says something about “the key” being in the blackest depths (there’s a key later just lying around, so maybe he doesn’t mean a literal key)? Gimli, more helpfully, has a palantir appearance where he says…
The dwarves only accept the Ringbearer touching Durin’s axe! If you have it, you will be fine!
…meaning ring + axe is safe. (I need to get the ring back from Gollum first, though!)
Incidentally, near here is where I ran into Legolas, and unfortunately it’s another cryptic trigger like the wizard so I don’t know the exact conditions.
Towards you comes a tall, sturdy figure dressed in white elven clothing.
It’s your dear companion Legolas who is finally here to help! He hugs you with a friendly embrace, and says in a low voice:
‘I will try to help you out of here, but first I will try to find our mutual friend Gandalf. In the meantime, help yourself the best you can. Fortunately, I have found your dear sword, Sting. Take your magic weapon, and you will have something to defend yourself with! We’ll meet again soon!’
With long, firm steps, Legolas walks away down a hall and disappears.
I have not put Sting in action yet. There’s another, more regular encounter in the same area: a “pawnbroker” dwarf who says something about trading treasures. (I have thrown out many verbs with no luck, and this even includes checking for verbs in the source code.)
We accept all valuables and give good prices!
Have a good trade with Thorin!
Across from the pawnbroker is a lake; if you remember way back 2000 or so words ago, I mentioned the cylinder was really an inflatable raft, so it can apply here…
You set out on your raft. Just before you reach the other side, the raft hits a sharp stone and flips over!
The raft drifts away, but you make it to land safely.
…leading to what I assume is the last section of the game.
I found a gold key on the other side, followed by a dead dwarf with a fairly unhelpful message:
Couldn’t …. the great monster … cruel … 20 feet high … no chance … while I am still alive … Listen … my last words … not pr … the balrog out…. by … !!
Balin.
The letters cut off (“pr”) might represent some sort of Norwegian word puzzle, and if that’s the case, I would prefer someone who knows the language well just tell me because that’s past my skill.
ikke pr … balrogen ute
There’s a “secret chamber” with a door where it says you need to people to open it — maybe we get Gollum along for the trip? — a cave with an exit so burdened with cobwebs the game says to not bother (hard to know if that’s serious or not) and then of course the Bridge of Khazad-dum. Rather than chasing us up to the bridge, the Balrog is lurking at the end.
Like this, but the sides are reversed, and also it’s just Frodo. Via coolminiornot.
Keep in mind this is being done without the One Ring on, I’m just mapping ahead:
Mot øst er det en svart og bunnløs avgrunn!! Ei smal og spinkel steinbru buer seg over denne til østsida. Dette er Khazad-dum, dvergenes forsvarsverk mot øst. Brua er så smal at bare en angriper vil kunne passere over i bredden – og vil derfor være lett sårbar.
>ø
Ok.
Du er på steinbrua Khazad-dum!
Dette er ei spinkel steinbru over ei bunnløs kløft. Under deg kan du bare se mørke. Mot øst de første salene som fører ut i friheta!!
Føttene til den enorme Balrogen tårner opp over deg !!
Det stygge uhyret løfter ei meterstor hånd for å fjerne det ekle, lille krypet som rekker han til knærne !
Balrogen ser hånlig på deg. Før du får gjort noe har han knust deg som et egg under de svære labbene !!
To the east is a black, bottomless abyss! A narrow, thin stone bridge arches over to the east side. This is Khazad-dum,
the dwarves’ defenses to the east. The bridge is so narrow that only a single attacker can cross — so will therefore be vulnerable.
>e
Ok.
You are on the stone bridge of Khazad-dum!
This is a thin stone bridge over a bottomless chasm. Below you you can only see darkness. To the east are the halls that lead to freedom!
The giant Balrog towers above you!
The hideous monster raises a meter-long hand to remove the nasty little creature that reaches his knees!
The Balrog looks at you with a sneer. Before you can do anything, he has crushed you like an egg with his giant hands!
It certainly feels like I’m close to the end; I need the ring back, mainly, although I suspect I’ll need to do something other than just be wearing the ring and holding the axe in order to win.
I’ve done some major exploration of Moria, which is very open. I get the impression that part of the goal is “touristic”, just letting the player inhale the air of Tolkien’s universe without having too many puzzles in the way.
Moria, as shown on a movie poster by Dan Mumford. Source.
Let’s start with a meta-map. (If you haven’t seen one of mine before, this is a map where the directions are only vague, and is intended to show the general interconnectivity and sort things into regions.)
The maze may be an absolute trap — at least it seems to be one room that loops, and any items that you drop get swallowed up — and the trolls are an obstacle I haven’t gotten past yet. (And the point of them may not be to go past, but I’ll get into that later.)
The start area is central in more ways than one. There’s multiple holes visible in the ceiling from the start that you can’t reach, but you can go through the on the other side. That means multiple places will drop down back to the starting room (whenever they occur, I’ve marked them in red).
Regarding that “shadow” I saw just east of the start room, it appears at random at any point during the explorations, so is an “event” like the pirate appearing in Adventure. You can simply just wait in place (or as happened to me often, test to see if particular exits work and get lots of “dead end” type messages) and it will re-appear. There’s a knife nearby and I tried to USE it while the shadow was visible but Frodo is apparently “clumsy” and “unaccustomed” to handling one and just manages to cut himself instead. That’s not to say an aggressive approach will always fail but for the moment in my gameplay the shadow (my guess is, Gollum having reclaimed the ring and lurking invisible) is just something that happens.
Another possible random encounter is a “flokk med småtroll” (“group of small trolls”) although as long as you move to a different room when they appear they won’t cause trouble. (Orc in Norwegian is Orker; when I first encountered the flokk I briefly wondered if småtroll was intended to mean orc.)
Just to the north of the start is the axe which promised death, and I took it with no ill effects (but I theorized one might come in the future). Indeed, later (I don’t know if “at random” or on a timer) a “skummel dverg” (“scary dwarf”) arrives and looks at you; it may simply run away, but if you happen to be holding the axe, he’ll return with friends.
Dvergen ser skarpt på øksa du holder og piler rundt hjørnet. Etter noen sekunder kommer en hel flokk dverger løpende mens de roper noe opphisset. De river fra deg den hellige øksa og hugger deg ned.
The dwarf looks intently at the axe you are holding and darts around the corner. After a few seconds, a pack of dwarves comes running while yelling. They rip the holy axe from you and cut you down.
Closing out the central area is a pile of straw to the west of the axe, and a “wing of literature” to the east. Randomly, that wing has an elf hat and a pearl necklace, but also the inside text of the One Ring written in Black Speech.
(“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”)
Proceeding in that same direction leads to a “square room”…
…where branching off to the north is a pyramid (“some notes of music can be heard in the distance”), a “rat’s nest”, and finally a dwelling of a “huldra”. The huldra is a Norwegian mythical creature/sorceress that is usually depicted as young…
…but for the purposes of this game, it is old, and surrounded by toads. She asks if you want to solve three riddles; if you fail, you’ll get toad-ified.
Ei gammel trollkjerring sitter foran en stol oppstøttet av silkeputer.
Hun vrir det heslige ansiktet sitt til et groteskt grin og sier:
`Er du beredt til å svare på tre vanskelige og skjebnesvangre gåter?’
An old witch sits in front of a chair, propped up by silk pillows.
She turns her ugly face into a grotesque smile and says:
“Are you prepared to answer three difficult and deadly riddles?”
This was in MUD-Ringen and the riddles are the same, except that the translation of the creature is of a “ogress”. This is one moment we have confirmed from Pål-Kristian Engstad himself that this was added by him to the home computer version.
… I have only made this creature up from my imagination. It might or might not be very Tolkienish, but it always made the players wonder. I have personally always felt that the passing through of Moria was too briefly explained in Tolkien’s works, but that is in a way nice, since it allows to imagine what actually is there (or might be there).
The first riddle asks about a being who covets something round (Sauron) and the second, trickier riddle asks about which dwarf “made the great gate in the west.” Despite the gate in question being the Doors of Durin this refers to the dwarf Narvi.
He’s in the Rings of Power television show. (I like the dwarf parts, not wild about anything else.)
I have no idea the answer to the third riddle.
Deep in the mountains, in the Mines of Moria.
Witch and sorceress, what is my name?
It might be in-game rather than trivia (since the author already admitted the character was non-Tolkien). (And before anyone asks, “name” or “my name” do not work.)
Moving back to the main path, you reach a crossroads, then can go south down a slide (back to the starting room) or north past a “greenhouse”.
Du er inne i et fabelaktig drivhus av en dal!
Et mylder av vekster gror her, og det er ganske mørkt. Mot sør er ei åpning og mot nord fortsetter hagen så langt du kan se. Stien mot nord er smal, men brukbar.
You are inside a fabulous greenhouse of a valley!
A multitude of plants grow here, and it is quite dark. To the south is an opening; facing north, the garden continues as far as you can see. The path to the north is narrow but usable.
Off to one side is a “low hill” with an herbal drink; this herbal drink serves as healing (in case of, say, clumsy knife handling). Farther on is a dense undergrowth “maze” I mentioned earlier which may be a trap rather than a maze.
Du har gått deg vill i krattskogen!!
>ø
Ok.
Du har gått deg vill i krattskogen!!
>v
Ok.
Du har gått deg vill i krattskogen!!
>n
Ok.
Du har gått deg vill i krattskogen!!
Reversing back to the beginning and heading west is what I’m calling the Gorge Area.
To the far west is a Maritime Room with a cylinder (no idea what it does); the most important room is a hall with a bag of gold dust and some elves that appear. They will shout “troll” if you appear normally, but if you happen to be holding the elf hat they’ll have a different reaction.
Jeg er Gloriendel, lederen for denne lille flokken. Jeg ser av ditt hodeplagg at du er venn av alvene. Er du Ringbæreren?
I am Gloriendel, the leader of this small group. I see from your hat that you are a friend of the elves. Are you the Ringbearer?
Saying “yes” has Gloriendel give some advice about an “enormous monster” known as the Balrog which “has been in Moria since the dawn of time.” According to the elf, the One Ring has “a power greater than the Balrog” and that if you have “received the wizard’s mark” you may be able to overcome him.
You then receive a gift of mithril armor.
While you can go directly to the throne room area by going up where you meet the elves, I’m going to loop back to near the start where the knife was, and go east to what I’m calling the Huge Corridor Area.
As the name implies, the geography is dominated by a large corridor, although you can go up to a “window” to get a scene that I remember from MUD Ringen.
Du er ved vinduet.
Du ser utover et majestetisk slettelandskap. Fra ditt utsiktspunkt høyt oppe i fjellsida har du utsikt over fjell og daler ute i det fri, og den klare fullmånen som belyser landskapet. Mot sør strekker Tåkefjellene seg, og mot vest de gresskledte slettene i ditt hjemland. (Snufs!) Det er ikke mulig å presse seg ut av vinduet, men det er et hull i gulvet her, og mot sør ei vindeltrapp.
The direct translation from the MUD is:
You are standing by the window. You have a majestic view over the scenery from here. From this spot high up in the mountain you can see past mountains and valleys out in the free, and the clear full moon shines upon the landscape. Southwards the Misty Mountains extend, and to the west there are the grassy plains of your homeland. (Sniff!) You cannot squeeze yourself through the window, but there is a hole in the floor here, and a spiral staircase in the south end of the room.
I had theorized this was pulled from the original just due to how unusual a description of state of mind is in MUD-rooms. (In general, the DOS game has lots of “scenery” rooms so leans to MUD-like already. I can see why Pål-Kristian thought of porting it.)
The corridor includes a black staff and a necklace and at the far north are two trolls that will spot you right away (I assume the One Ring mitigates this). You can run away by climbing up, or you can try to run down the corridor instead and get captured and thrown in troll-jail. It’s then possible to break out and this seems to be a new area, but I’m going to save describing the dungeon for next time because I haven’t explored thoroughly yet. The important point here is that possibly you need to get captured to win the game.
The lower dungeon.
This is a small hole roughly carved out of the rock. An exit is up. On the dirty and dusty wall is a sign: “I, Gloin, was here. There is a secret exit from here, which the trolls do not know about, made by us dwarves. Just say the name of the legendary Bilbo’s nephew, son of Drogo, and you will escape — but watch out for trolls!”
One branch off the corridor leads to a “secret meeting room” with some stinking sulfur which will be used for a puzzle in a moment. In the meantime, let’s go to the last section I’m talking about today:
There’s a throne room described as being where the “Mountain King” held court, with a small side offshoot behind some drapes containing a magnifying glass. To the east is a “holy room” (with a “scent of incense and myrrh”) next to a “gold room” (everything is made out of gold, but you can’t pick it up) with an empty bottle. Curiously, the spiritual room is right next to a Vampire room, where some bats will bite and poison you if you hang out too long. The game explicitly mentions the medicine at the greenhouse as curing the poison.
Under the ceiling are several thousand small vampire bats. The floor is covered in excrement and there is an intense smell.
Back at the throne room just to the north is a dragon’s lair. This was in the MUD version and I kept getting shoved out of the room because of my scent being detected, but while holding the stinky sulfur it is possible to enter safely.
A fifty-meter-long dragon lies sleeping here. There appears to be an exit to the north, behind the dragon.
The problem is that going past the dragon just hits a slide, which goes back to the start! So I have no idea why you’d bother with the dragon in the first place. I still don’t know if the game’s norms allow this to be a “scene” for fun or if there must be some deeper significance (or at least a treasure).
Speaking of treasures, you may have spotted there have been items like the gold dust and the necklace which seem to serve solely as treasures in the Crowther/Woods style. I don’t know yet if that’s how they’ll work out; the game’s sole objective given at the start is escape, but perhaps the treasures count as points and Frodo can afford a small beach vacation before tackling Mount Doom.
Æons ago, in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, I wrote about the Norwegian game Ringen, based on Lord of the Rings. I only knew about it from a vague reference in a list of Tolkien games which gave the game as being from 1979, written by “Hansen”, and later converted into a region of Genesis MUD (that later made it to VikingMUD). VikingMUD’s section is still mostly the same as the original, so I was able to play through and theorize about what the original Ringen was like.
Back in September, two articles dropped on the site spillhistorie.no (run by Joachim Froholt) about rescued Norwegian games, both written by Robert Robichaud. The first was on SVHA Adventure (which I’ve now played) and the second was about an authentic version of Ringen in Norwegian. The game originated in 1983, not 1979, and was originally by Halvor Nilsen, not “Hanson”. There’s quite a lot of detail to the article and I am going to give a shorter summary here; the important thing to point out right away is there’s actually four versions: the original on mainframe, a port made to C64 done direct from the mainframe source code by Pål-Kristian and Per Arne Engstad, another port to DOS, and finally the leap to the MUD systems. Enough survives of the mainframe version it may eventually be restored, the C64 version is lost, and the DOS version is the one I’m about to play.
One curiosity about the title screen above is that it refers to Lord of the Rings using the title of the second translation of Lord of the Rings into Norwegian (“Ringenes Herre”), which came out in 1984, after the first version of the game Ringen. In 1983 the only translation available was one by Nils Werenskiolds in the early 70s (“Krigen om Ringen”) which was written in an old-fashioned “riksmål” style and is considered inferior.
From TolkeinGuide, the trilogy without dust jackets.
The University of Tromsø was the fourth university established in Norway (1968) after Bergen, Oslo, and Trondheim. All four obtained computer science programs. Of the four, Trondheim had more an engineering focus (with their MIT and Norsk Data links, see SVHA Adventure for more), Bergen emphasized numerical analysis, and Oslo included theoretical work on programming languages (with their first professor, Ole Johan Dahl, co-inventing the first object-oriented programming language). University of Tromsø was singular for, if nothing else, their location, still the farthest north on Earth of any university.
Their far-north position made them an optimal place to do astronomy and geophysical research (with phenomena like the Aurora Borealis); the Department of Physics is where their computing first started. Their computer science was hence of a pragmatic sort, working hand-in-hand with science, and through the 1970s leaning towards engineering. For example, they did work on the Tandberg line of terminals.
They were always small, and failed to break out as their own graduate college separate from math and science; according to a paper from History of Nordic Computing:
The department was the youngest and smallest of the four departments of the Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. As a result, it was constantly in the minority when the voting for lecturing capacity had taken place.
In the Fall 1983 term, a student named Halvor Nilsen decided to write an adventure based on Lord of the Rings, using Norwegian for the game rather than English.
It was mostly to test what I had learned during my studies on a “proper” project, partly because I was interested in both Tolkien and computer games.
The game was finished and popular by December; so popular that Nilsen added a time-limiting function in a January version.
Welcome text, via the mainframe Ringen source code.
Word of the game spread outside the school, and Pål-Kristian (age 15) and Per Arne Engstad (age 14) had heard about it. No story of stealth this time, they just asked for and got a login:
Getting into the University computer room was pretty easy. I just asked, and they gave me a username. Everything was fine as long as I behaved, was quiet, and let the students have their space if they needed it.
Having played it and wanting to have it on their home computer, they ported it to C64 (based on printed Pascal source code) and again later to DOS; they considered professional publication, but:
I was fifteen in the fall of 1985, and my brother was 16. At that time, the internet didn’t exist. There were no real game companies in Norway, I think. Who should we have turned to? In addition, it was never, at least as I remember it, the intention that we would make money from this. In any case, I was driven by the fact that it was incredibly exciting, both with the programming itself and also that it was possible to make games in a fairy tale world. We could have contacted Halvor to get something together, but we never did.
You can see the exact details on Rob’s post, including how it got ported to MUD systems. Regarding game companies in Norway, spillhistorie.no has a story about the Norwegian version of The Quill, but it is true they did not have a regular “gaming industry” making things easy like with the bedroom coders of England.
From spillhistorie.no, and we’ll return to this in 1984. The start of The Quill (English version) is coming soon to this blog.
The main difference between the mainframe and DOS versions is (allegedly) an exploration section cut at the start; the DOS version instead starts right in the action, as you’ll see in a moment.
To get into the DOS version the program asks for your name (and for it to be your real name, not something silly) and a date (which the game emphatically states must be a real one) in the format MM/DD-YY, with the “/” and “-” characters exactly. This might not seem like a challenge, but the Norwegian character set is needed to play (there’s a SETUP.BAT that will do that for you) which means the keys are changed. Shift-7 gave me a “/” and “/” gave me a “-“. I also found after some fiddling:
; gives ø or Ø ‘ gives æ or Æ [ gives å or Å
The game really does need the characters; you can type “på” (that is, “on”) to wear the One Ring if you have it, and “pa” does not work. If you are a Norwegian speaker, you may think “of course, pa is an entirely different thing, you wouldn’t treat that the same” but there are games like Skatte Jagt from this era that just ignore non-Latin characters. The spelling-substitute of “paa” doesn’t work either.
Letter blocks from Etsy including the three Danish/Norwegian characters.
The fortunate thing (from my perspective) is that the game contains a relatively complete verb-list in the instructions.
`Nord’,`Sør’,`Vest’, `Øst’,`Opp’,`Ned’: directions, first letters work so you can use “Ø” for east
`Av’, `På’: Wear or take off the ring
`Bruk’: Use (according to Rob’s article, this gets used generally for most objects)
`Kast’: Drop
`Se’: Look (get room description)
`Si’: Say
`Ta’: Take
`Undersøk’: Examine
Unlike the game Ring Quest where the player was essentially every character at once, Ringen squarely identifies the player as Frodo. You’re with the Fellowship, about to pass the Misty Mountains, when you are attacked by trolls and separated from the group; you lose the One Ring in the process. The action picks up with troll soldiers in hot pursuit; your goal is to enter Moria, find the One Ring, and escape on the other side (I will assume with a Balrog encounter somewhere).
Du er fanget mellom trollsoldatene og den glatte, kalde fjellveggen! Trollsoldatene beveger seg veldig raskt opp fjellstien du brukte for å flykte. Trøst og bær hvis du ikke kan komme deg unna!!
You are trapped between troll soldiers and the slippery mountain wall! They are moving quickly up the path you used to escape. Say your prayers now if you can’t get away!
I was stuck here for a bit; the player has no inventory and none of the directions work. I needed to catch on to the fact that the game lets you examine things embedded in descriptions (rather than separated as “items”); in this case, you can examine the mountain wall (“fjellveggen”).
Still checking vocabulary with image searches. Source.
Doing this reveals a message: “Ennyn Durin Aran Moria: / pedo mellon a minno. / Im Narvi hain echant: / Celebrimbor o Eregion / theithant i thiw hin.” Translated in Norwegian:
Durins Dører, Herren over Moria:
Tal, venn, og tred inn.
Jeg Narvi gjorde dem:
Celebrimbor av Eregion
risset disse runene.
This is the famous “say friend and enter” door. Unlike the MUD’s door where I needed to say “mellon”, this one uses the word “venn” (friend in Norwegian).
>si venn
Sakte deler fjellet seg foran deg, og en stor port glir utover. Innenfor kan du se ei mørk trapp. Plutselig skjer mye på en gang. Opp stien kommer trollsoldatene i stor fart rett mot deg ! Du rygger inn i porten, og i det samme smeller den igjen med stor kraft !! Du er fanget inne i fjellet !
Slowly the mountain splits before you, and a large gate slides open. Inside, you can see a dark staircase. Suddenly, everything happens at once. Up the path, the troll soldiers rush at you with great speed! You back into the gate, and it slams shut with great force! You are trapped in the mountain!
The game is fairly open from here, and I’m fairly slow at playing it (see: Norwegian, although it is close enough to Danish this isn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be). I’d like to share the first couple rooms just to get a sense of what the game is like.
Dette er et stort rundt rom.
En stor, støvete gang går mot øst, mens en liten, ubetydelig gang går nordover. Det er mange sprekker i taket; noen er små, mens andre er store nok til å krype inn i. Hullene er dessverre alt for langt oppe for at du skal klare å nå dem.
This is a large round room.
A large, dusty corridor goes east, while a small, insignificant corridor leads north. The ceiling has many cracks; some are small, others are large enough to crawl into. Unfortunately, the cracks are too high up to reach.
Heading east:
Steinkammeret.
Det er steiner overalt her inne. Dette kammeret må en gang ha blitt brukt til vaktrom, til tross for at det nå bare ligger gråstein på bakken her. Det er bare en utgang; mot vest.
Du hører lyden av lette fottrinn, og i den ene øyenkroken ser du en utydelig skygge som beveger seg langsomt.
Stone Chamber.
There are stones everywhere. This chamber must have once been used as a guard room, even though there is only grey stone on the ground. There is only one exit, to the west.
You hear the sound of footsteps, and in the corner of your eye you see a vague shadow move slowly.
I tried examining the shadow but was told everything I needed was in the text; it isn’t permanent so I’m not sure what’s going on here. Maybe examining the mountain to get the riddle was a one-shot thing.
One more room for good measure; back to the start and then north:
Sørenden av et langt, lavt rom. Østveggen er overgrodd med fin, hvit mose, mens vestveggen er glatt og
trist. Gulvet her er nydelig utskjert i berget, men taket er ruflete og svært fuktig. Det er noen hull i øst- og vestveggene, og på ei steintavle nedfelt i gulvet står det risset med noen dvergeruner:
“Død over den som våger å røre Durins hellige øks!”
Du ser:
En liten vanndam.
Ei lita stridsøks tilsmurt med blod !!
South End of Long, Low Room
The east wall is overgrown with fine white moss, while the west wall is smooth and dull. The floor is beautifully carved into the rock, but the ceiling is ragged and quite damp. There are holes to the east and west walls, and on a stone tablet embedded in the floor there are written some dwarven runes: “Death to anyone who dares to touch Durin’s holy axe!”
You see:
A small pool of water.
A small battle axe smeared with blood!
You might think taking the axe would be Bad somehow but taking it doesn’t seem to have any effect. (Yet? Or maybe this isn’t the axe the message is referring to.)
Lots of exploration next time, and likely a big map. I’m going to approach this from scratch first before I compare with my original Ringen map (which already is very different, given the MUD had a large outdoors section).
Last time I wrote about Polynesian Adventure, an entry into the Falsoft contest for Tandy CoCo adventure games. It was written by an older couple, whereas today’s selection was written by a 15-year old. The REM statements in the code mention this was written in “early 1982” so we have an idea of the lag on this one (the game was written before the contest was announced).
Justin Paola, a 15-year-old high school student living in Berkeley, Calif., is a frequent caller of his local computer bulletin board systems with his 64K, 2 disk Color Computer bulletin board system. His interests include computer graphics, movie special effects, and adventure games.
I’m assuming the blurbs are honest (unlike the Captain 80 Book which made biographical details up) as this was part of a running magazine as opposed to a one-shot book.
This game has some similarity with the previous game (being set on an island) but also strong contrast (being much more dangerous). Our goal is to land on a jungle island and find a ruby chalice deep underground, avoiding “head hunters” along the way. It’s like if Invincible Island didn’t have as many biomes (and was smaller and easier to solve).
The plane that we land on can be used for escape with the chalice (just type FLY here) although there’s a completely different method of escape available as well. I don’t know why. Playing a weird prank on our pilot?
You start, helpfully, with some supplies. The gun is useless, but not for the typical reason in adventure games (that it is meant as a red herring and violence isn’t the answer). Rather, sometimes at random you’ll get attacked by a WILD CAT and need to SHOOT CAT, but the game doesn’t bother to check if the gun is in your inventory when you do this.
I suppose finger pistols were sufficient.
The SNAKE BITE KIT is for moments where you might randomly get bitten by a snake, although I’ve gone through an entire trip without the bite happening (it’s rarer than the cat, at least). The MAGNIFYING GLASS as far as I can tell is 100% useless, and the MATCHES are used for lighting a torch which happens to be just west of here.
Weird the torch is out on the island, not in your supplies. For the cloth: THE CLOTH IS VERY INTERESTING – YOU BETTER KEEP IT.
The map is wide open from here.
There isn’t much in the way of empty space: it’s one object or interesting thing per room. Just nearby you can scoop up a GOLD NUGGET, JADE NECKLACE, COIL OF ROPE…
…TRANSLATION BOOK, KIWI FRUIT, a WATER JUG (as long as you have the torch lit, it is in a dark part of the jungle) and a SPEAR WITH STRANGE LETTERING.
For the spear, if you are carrying the translation book you can read the spear.
Remember, our only goal is to get the ruby chalice. That might make the jade necklace and gold nugget seem puzzling — there’s not even a score — but one room as “head hunters” and they demand a treasure if you wander in.
The bizarre thing is this isn’t a real obstacle — the map is wide open and you just can avoid this room. Essentially, the game includes a method of preventing death as long as you are trying to get as far as possible without reloading, but via the normal practice of playing adventures there’s no reason someone wouldn’t just mark the map square and never go to the spot again.
To the far north there’s an AIR CYLINDER and a RAFT; holding both lets you INFLATE RAFT (we’ll come back to that). There’s also a ROCK SLAB which “LOOKS LIKE IT HAS SLID OPEN AND CLOSED MANY TIMES” but is too heavy to move.
Solving this took a moment of cross-genre thinking. Maybe we’re in a fantasy game, or at least one where there’s much higher technology than it appears? Using the word XYKO from the spear opens up a cave.
This is the only other section of the game.
Just to the south of the entrance are some hieroglyphics; with the translation book in hand you can read that you ought to be carrying that ancient cloth from earlier before going east of the vipers.
The “written recently” aspect is interesting and puts more credence into the idea that the voice recognition was high tech rather than “magic”.
The aforementioned vipers are hanging out at a pit with a conveniently placed hook.
You can TIE ROPE in order to snag the hook, the SWING ROPE to go across.
There’s a boring corridor next, at least boring if you are holding the ancient cloth. If you aren’t, then you die.
And finally … the chalice! No more tricks, you can just take it and go.
You can then make a beeline back to the plane and win.
Alternately, for reasons I don’t understand, you can inflate the raft, use it on the river at the start, and float out to the ocean.
It’s clear the author (Justin Paola) was thinking of this more as “simulate a region using my computer” rather than a tightly threaded narrative. (A good comparison is Johnson’s Castle Dracula which was designed as a series of scenes fishing for particular reactions from the player.) The editors of Rainbow Magazine had enough fun that they gave it a co-award as runner-up (in the non-graphical category) with a game called Lighthouse Adventure we will play sometime in the future.
There’s a tree you can climb purely for the scenery.
If you’re thinking of your text adventure as world-simulation more than a series of scenes, it makes more sense to have gratuitous mechanics like the head hunters and the raft. (And technically also the water jug — if you’re fast enough you don’t need to bother, but the game comes with a thirst timer.) A scene-minded author like Peter Kirsch would never allow loose ends like that.
From the Falsoft book, an image printed with the source code.
Oddly enough, this may have manifested in Mr. Paola’s later career. After graduating high school, he went to Berkeley (Electrical Engineering, Computer Science) and then to the University of Arizona (remote sensing). He then worked on imaging-related projects like LANDSAT and other geographically linked technologies.
I developed multiprocessor image processing algorithms in a UNIX environment. These included terrain data algorithms such as slope, shadowing and incidence from elevation, and land-use classification from multispectral and SAR imagery. Responsible for terrain delimitation overlay production for large aerial regions in support of DARPA contract efforts.
Thus, his game reflects “simulate a geographic area” more than “create a story”. “Authors whose text adventures reflected on their later careers” might be a bit too niche, but we can also toss the recent Crypt of Medea in there with Arthur Britto’s tricky copy protection and maybe … Strange Adventure and the author going into astronomy? I’m drawing blanks here.
I’ve finished the game. Given it was a 7k-byte type-in, it seemed inevitable, and it turns out there are almost no puzzles, but I had trouble anyway due to a particular decision by the authors. (And it is authors, plural, I’ll get into that later.)
The general pattern, from the starting point, is to hop on the Love Boat, then visit six islands in sequence, then go back to the start. If you ride the boat yet again you’ll go through the sequence as many times as you like. This pattern of a treasure-hunt where you rotate through the destinations has shown up in Alaskan Adventure but given that was in a December issue of Softside it is unlikely to have had an influence. (Also, unlike that game, this game doesn’t necessarily require a repeat, although for the one puzzle there is a good chance you’ll need to loop around.)
The main destinations are marked, although it is unknown where the player starts. I also didn’t work out exactly where the Maori village of the game might be in New Zealand.
Before plunging ahead, I should also highlight that the treasure hunting feels uncomfortable this time around. “You are in Maori Museum. You see: *valuable relics*.” Taken in a literal sense, this is a story of visiting some islands on a tourist boat and stealing their stuff. However, I don’t think the authors designed it in that sense. Rather, this is meant to be a light visit to some destinations and the presence of “treasures” in an abstract way of making it a game. (Think of them as replicas being found as part of a scavenger hunt, if that helps.) If the game was written later when puzzle-less was established more as a genre, I suspect they might instead make something like The Cove from 2000, which is purely all about exploring an environment and finding neat animals.
Picking up from last time, I was stuck with the parser command for filling a car with gas. It turns out that the game is fishing for a noun not mentioned in the text: FILL TANK. The really big issue is that if you try FILL CAR the game says you don’t have everything you need yet, leading players down the wrong path. This is a strong demonstration of how important unambiguous errors messages can be in making a parser game manageable.
The trick I was thinking of last time would have worked — you can jump to the boat with the PICK command, where it chastises you for picking flowers and teleports you to the boat. However, you do need to move the Trans Am in order to get back to the start.
READ PASS (from the boarding pass in the car) gets the message
YOUR CABIN NUMBER IS G7 AND YOUR TABLE NUMBER IS A1
and while at the tables, you can GO A1 to arrive at a table; while at the cabins you can GO G7. (Again, the error message you get otherwise isn’t super helpful, and I just took a shot in the dark at the specific letter/number being odd to mention.)
The table, A1, has some *silverware* which is the first treasure. (Again, the treasure collecting is super odd if we try to imagine it’s a “real” narrative.) I used this place as my stash point for treasures as I collected them whilst traversing the six islands.
By entering the cabin, G7, the boat starts to move. When you disembark you end up on the next island in the sequence. Here’s all of them, and the sequence is left to right then top to bottom:
At the first destination, Samoa, you can:
try to take the pink hibiscus you see and then get kicked back on the boat for breaking rules
go to a “Council House” which has a “basket full of pearls” you can freely take
see a fire knife dancer; there’s no text message, just a musical ditty which implies you are watching the dancing
I have the music in the clip below. Note that the “beep” that happens upon entering a room happens upon entering every single room of the game, every single time.
There are no obstacles other than avoiding the flower-based rules. The combination of parts is why I say it doesn’t seem like you’re doing a robbery; it’s showing off brief elements of place like it was a virtual travel tour or the clues of a Carmen Sandiego game (although baskets are associated with more islands than just Samoa).
Next is a Maori Village where you scarf valuable relics from a museum, and visit a Meeting House and a Lagoon while you are at it. (The closest I could find to this description is Whakarewarewa, video below.)
Next is a Fiji Village where you can find some Tongan coins (used later automatically — I never figured out where, they just disappeared) and a “diamond headed spear” in a “chief’s house”.
Next comes Tahiti, where the *Tahitian orchid* and *carving of a fish* count as the two treasures, and you find Boy Scouts singing for some reason.
…a Queen’s Bedroom (with a bird of paradise) and a Queen’s Bed (with a *beautiful woven mat*).
Last comes the Marquesas Village, which lands the player at an “active volcano” and has a guest house…
…a warrior’s house (with treasure)…
…and a cooking house, with a knife that is too hot.
The knife is the only real puzzle in the game (past the pesky parser business at the start). I realized the can that held the gas might hold water too, but got stuck for a while because I assumed the “waterfall” was the right place to fill up. Hence I started trying more and more outrageous parser messages, before finally realizing the “lagoon” from earlier could also have water. FILL CAN worked there; then I was able to POUR at the knife.
Then the remainder of the game was ferrying the remaining treasures back to the start.
I tried to check if the words earlier (like HA’E TOA for WARRIOR’S HOUSE) were from some actual indigenous language. If the only option was Marquesan, the answer seems to be no, but there’s multiple languages and dialects to account for and this is the sort of thing online resources are pretty bad at. It’s worth checking because this might represent the first time an indigenous language is represented in a computer game. (It is also of course possible the authors made those parts up, but that seems like an odd thing to make up.)
Earlier I mentioned there were two authors. The REM statements of the BASIC source mention Don and Linda Dunlap of Reynoldsburg, Ohio. The contest book only mentions Don Dunlap. I’m not sure if there was some one-person rule they were using but I’m going to change my links to mention both people.
From the perspective of the Falsoft people running the game, I could see how they perceived this as a “cute” sort of game which is a bit different from the norm so worth printing (“It is an enchanting land of adventure, charm and intrigue that seems apart from the rest of the world.”); they maybe also realized the HELP function worked to mention the FILL TANK issue that I was stuck on. Maybe they were more impressed with the sound than I was (at least, there are tiny bits of music throughout that substitute for visuals, albeit in a crude-old-computer-speaker way — the Boy Scouts singing and the Hula section are both included).
Coming up: another contest game from the book, followed by the recently-unearthed Tolkien game in Norwegian which has long been one of my Holy Grails.
Congrats to Ben Jackson who wrote the IFComp 2025 winner, Detritus, which received the highest voting average of any game entered in any of the years of the competition (as far back as data exists).
To recap from that post about Rainbow Adventure, text adventure creation competitions have long been a feature of the computing world (the previously mentioned IFComp has now run every year starting in 1995); the very first one came from publishing company Falsoft for their platform of choice, the Tandy Color Computer. While there had been plenty of adventures for TRS-80 (with Scott Adams leading the charge) there were less out for Tandy’s color machine (with less text resolution). Scott Adams hadn’t made it yet to CoCo, so when Lawrence C. Falk of Falsoft went to play an adventure game on his own system after seeing one on others, he didn’t have any choices.
I had just finished reading Byte’s Adventure issue of December, 1981, and seen one of Scott Adams’ famous Adventures on an Apple computer at my not-too-friendly local computer store. Just the day before I had discovered how to get by the snake in the Colossal Cave. But I wanted to play an Adventure on my CoCo.
The gaping hole led him to writing his own, but it was a private game, not a published one.
When Falk started publishing the Rainbow, there were some adventure submissions, and it led him wanting to have an entire book of them: hence, a contest. There were thirteen winners declared (that were printed in a compilation book); results were announced in the January 1983 edition of the Rainbow. As confirmed by L. Curtis Boyle, the Rainbow’s cover month matched the publication month, so January is correct (no shift back by a month); it does mean also that likely all the Falsoft contest games were written in 1982, even ones that don’t have a date listed in their comments.
Scott Adams and Infocom did finally make it to Tandy CoCo, but not until later in 1983 (Release 30 of Zork I was compiled in March). So at this point in time, the adventure universe was still very small for this system, and the book added a substantial new library.
Based on the magazine copy this seems to have been an honest to goodness contest and not just a situation where they published everything that was sent: “We’ve painstakingly whittled down the numbers to settle on a baker’s dozen.” (This may have been exaggerated.) Other than the two winners (one text game and one graphical game, which landed in that January 1983 issue of Rainbow on top of being in the book) the entries were not sorted but instead listed by alphabetical order.
GREGORY CLARK of Syracuse, New York, for Sir Randolf of the Moors
DON DUNLAP of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, for The Polynesian Adventure
CHRIS HARLAND of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, for The Deed of the York
ROBERT W. MANGUM. II of Titusville, Florida, for Horror House
JORGE MIR of New Berlin, Wisconsin, for Dreamer
JORGE MIR of New Berlin, Wisconsin, for Oneroom
JUSTIN PAOLA of Berkeley. California, for Search for the Ruby Chalice
GREGORY RICKETTS of Columbus, Ohio, for Dungeon Adventure
JEAN ROSEBOROUGH of New Berlin, Wisconsin, for Door
STEVE SHERRARD of Normal, Illinois, for Dungeon Adventure
SCOTT SLOMIANY of Downer’s Grove, Illinois, for Dr. Avaloe
RICK TOWNSEND of Bettendorf, Iowa, for Escape from Sparta
CHRIS WILKINSON of Larchmont, New York, for Lighthouse Adventure
The order is different in the book, and I’m starting with the first one in the book, Polynesian Adventure. The winners are in the middle, so again, no “ranking” logic. I’m not playing fully in sequence because some games group well together, but the start of the book seemed as logical a place to begin as any.
Each game includes a brief biography; here’s Don Dunlap’s:
Don Dunlap has been a professional programmer for 17 years. He is president of his employer-based computer club with nearly 350 members. He teaches BASIC, and also serves as a volunteer computer consultant and speaker for area schools, libraries, and civic groups.
This presents a puzzle if all 17 years were from Ohio (which may not be a correct assumption). The first computer science department in Ohio didn’t even start until 1969, with Bowling Green. My guess would be he worked for Nationwide Insurance and commuted to Columbus; although I don’t know what their computing was like, insurance companies did get on the programming bandwagon early. (If he moved or even just changed companies, there are other options out of Ohio in 1983, the most prominent being Compuserve.)
Color seems to be a major feature of the game so I didn’t switch to black-and-white this time. All that really happens is that colors switch randomly every few turns.
Our goal is to go over to a boat and find treasures, bringing them back to the Polynesian House at the start. I have found zero treasures, and you’ll see why in a moment.
Gameplay starts in a small set of rooms (seen above) where the goal simply seems to be to get in your car (a Trans Am) and drive over to where you’ll find the boat. The car is lacking in gas.
To the west is a discount store with an empty gas can (you can just grab it) and to the east is a gas station (FILL CAN works) but then try as I might I can’t put the two things together. Nor does DRIVE CAR work (I assume because of the gas). There’s a GLOVE COMPARTMENT with a BOARDING PASS for the boat, but in this area that’s as far as I’ve gotten. FILL CAR while at the car holding a filled gas can just gets the response YOU’RE MISSING SOMETHING.
I did my usual verb list…
Incredibly small, and I’ll go into SMELL and PICK in a moment.
…to which I can add DRIVE, but not REFUEL or SIPHON; I suspect FILL really is the right verb, but what could I be missing given the absolutely minimalist constraints? There’s no descriptions. The discount store is just YOU ARE IN DISCOUNT STORE with nothing else implied.
From here I might be tempted to hit the source code already, but I made some progress in a bizarre way. While testing my verb list, and reaching SMELL, I had a strange response about being stung by a bee and being sent back to the boat. This wasn’t replicable either. (Maybe some bug put me in proximity of the “flowers”?) I also had a weird reaction with PICK, which usually says I DON’T UNDERSTAND (verb known, but doesn’t make sense in the room) but I was able to (while in the car) get it to give me a response about not being allowed to pick the flowers, and I got sent back to the same boat.
Love, exciting and new / Come aboard, we’re expecting you
I hoped this would open up the main part of the game so I could play (with the caveat that maybe return is impossible) but alas, this only opens up another small four-room area.
I took some stabs in the dark, like GO TABLE in the dining room or GO CABIN in the cabin area, but no dice.
Again, by now I’d normally be plunging into source code, but the weird glitch has me interested enough to try stabbing at the problem a while longer. If anyone wants to take a shot themselves, you can download the game here and then use XRoar Online (link in the upper right) to run the file.
Renga in Blue 
