Last time, I came across a hole in the center of a maze.
>LOOK
The hole, being the absence of anything, is impossible to inspect.
The hole turns out to be incredibly useful; you can pick it up (!) and wear it (!!). You can put it down wherever you like; usually, it then connects to some random spot on the map, so you can use it to move items when you normally can’t.
For example, there’s a “Fog Bank” …
The fog is so dense you could cut it with a knife! There is nothing but whiteness in every direction!
… where you can take the text quite literally and >CUT FOG WITH KNIFE:
>cut fog with knife
The fog quickly thins out.
Flat Rock Shoal.
A light fog mists about as you find yourself at a small, flat-top rock rising a few feet above the water. The rock extends somewhere to the north, and although the fog is light, you cannot see very far in that direction. Water lies all about in other directions.
I can see the following:
Boat, which contains:
a Sail
Once you’ve done this, you can find a safe with a black pearl. The safe is unlocked (so easy to open) but if you take the pearl you are unable to move (undoubtedly some mystical security system the game fails to clarify). If you have the hole dropped in the safe location, you can just DROP PEARL IN HOLE and safely make your escape.
The hole is an appropriate item to start this post since my general theme has been “finding things beneath other things.”
…
Mayan Room.
A large disc, covered with ancient Mayan inscriptions, dominates this display. The disc is made of solid rock, and if I remember my ancient Mayan history, it’s probably some kind of calendar. There is a door to the west, and the museum continues to the north.
I can see the following:
Stone Disc, which contains:
a Green Emerald
a Red Emerald
a Blue Emerald
Curator’s Door
>LOOK EMERALDS
Green Emerald
The emerald is a rich, traditional shade of oceanic green, and is perhaps the size of a small golfball.
Red Emerald
This emerald is unusual in that it is a brilliant hue of ruby red. About the size of a walnut, it glistens in the light before your eyes.
Blue Emerald
A sky-blue emerald, extremely rare! Maybe 19 millimeters across, and undoubtedly worth a king’s ransom.
This place is in the museum; a long while black I blogged about a cryptogram which translated as THIS PASSAGE UNLOCKS ONLY TO HE WHO SOLVE THE SECRET OF THE STONES. I’d been hacking at this puzzle in frustration for a long time before Roger Durrant mentioned something about rubbing the emeralds. I had tried that, I thought to no avail:
>RUB BLUE EMERALD
The Blue Emerald does nothing.
While the Blue Emerald “does nothing”, one of the other emeralds changed.
>LOOK EMERALDS
Green Emerald
The emerald is a rich, traditional shade of oceanic green, and is perhaps the size of a small golfball.
It is glowing intensely.
Red Emerald
This emerald is unusual in that it is a brilliant hue of ruby red. About the size of a walnut, it glistens in the light before your eyes.
Blue Emerald
A sky-blue emerald, extremely rare! Maybe 19 millimeters across, and undoubtedly worth a king’s ransom.
Notice the “glowing intensely” now attached to the green emerald. There doesn’t seem to be any logic here — this is a straight-up maze were you transition from state to state of various emeralds glowing, with the goal of having all three emeralds be glowing. The full move list is
RUB BLUE EMERALD
RUB GREEN EMERALD
RUB RED EMERALD
RUB GREEN EMERALD
RUB GREEN EMERALD
RUB RED EMERALD
RUB RED EMERALD
You can then PRESS DISC to get
As you press, the disc slowly slides back into the wall, revealing a long, musty staircase descending down into the unknown.
The underground includes a “Batcave”, which is too weird to describe, so I’ll just quote it:
This cavern appears to be all that’s left of a long-lost television series. Bats hang from the ceiling all about you, and the floor is sticky with bat guano. Across one wall you can see the remains of what looks like a large computer, and near the other wall there is a large city map labelled “GOTHAM”.
I can see the following:
63 Chevy
>LOOK CHEVY
Oh, wow, man. Complete with dingle balls in the windshield!
>BOARD CHEVY
The doors have been welded shut and all the dingle balls hanging in the windows make it impossible for you to put more than your arm into the car.
>GET ALL FROM CAR
Framastat taken.
>LOOK FRAMASTAT
It’s a small metal cube with octagonal indentations on each face.
There’s also a section with a tiny maze where you can only go east and west:
Room with Two Exits.
You are in a small, featureless room with cold, grey stone walls
A crude rock slide leads up the way you came, but you cannot climb it. You have available two passages carved from the stone, one the east, and one to the west, both mirror images of each other.
(Note: Exit with WEST. WEST. EAST. WEST.)
This is followed by a “Monitor Lizard” guarding a Jade Egg.
Lizard Den.
You find yourself inside a small alcove that was probably once the home of a large reptile. Shedded skin and unfamiliar bones litter a small earthen hole worn a few inches into the ground. The only way out is back to the north.
I can see the following:
Jade Egg
Monitor Lizard
A huge lizard seems to be following you.
It is hissing threateningly!
The lizard seems to become a permanent follower after this encounter and comes with you all about the map, including if you go sailing in the ocean. It is possible to temporarily “lose the trail” (which gives you enough a window to go back and get the Jade Egg) but eventually, it seems like the lizard will always find you. I’m saving this to be one of my last treasures; even if the lizard does nothing but watch, it’s still a constant irritant, kind of like the beeping sounds in Zelda when you’re down to one heart. (Here’s an hour-long loop of the aforementioned beep.)
Getting out of this area was one of the niftier puzzles of the game, because I had to realize how the various bits of geography related. I had reached this room, which seemed to be the end of the line:
Cliff Ledge.
You are standing at the brink of a sheer rock wall, the ocean swelling and churning far below you. A large opening in the face of the cliff is to the east, and you can hear band music playing somewhere far above your head.
However, the band music was a clue to the location; this had to be below the northwest corner of the Warp map.
This led me to realize I could tie a piece of rope to the pine tree at Land’s End (see on the map above) which would let me climb to and from the Cliff Ledge area.
…
One of the enemies I’ve passed mentioning last time was a Mad Doctor. He attacks more or less like a Zork enemy.
>SHOOT DOCTOR
>BANG!<
You deal a swift attack! The doctor trips …
You feel a tightening in your throat and gasp for air as the doctor whips his stethoscope around your neck!
Unlike a classic Adventure or Zork enemy which disappears in fog, this one leaves a corpse.
You issue a final blow, and the doctor slumps dead to the floor!
This is a clue the corpse is useful. You can go to a nearby graveyard and bury it.
If you do so you get a Devil’s Trident (a treasure) which you can then use to access an “Underworld”.
This is still part of the overall Warp map. You end up in “river zone” between the town and the desert.
Within this region, there’s not much other than a Shrubbery, a Monty Python joke …
The shrubbery is just a small inconspicuous bush. If you had another one, you could brace it alongside the first shrubbery, but a little bit lower to get a two level effect with a path running down the middle …
… a ride down the river with a bathtub …
Boiling Headwaters. (in tub)
The rushing waters of the Great Rift River boil and churn about you. Steam fills the air as it rises from the waters below to from a dense fog overhead.
… and a very strange bit with an Obelisk. I really don’t know what to do here.
Lost Civilization of the Implementors.
Around you stretches the expansive remains of some now lost civilization. Rectangular obelisks of varying height and size march in all directions in a pattern that appears to be circular in nature and centered about one large obelisk in particular. Shadows cast by the sun create a landscape dominated by light and dark contrasts, permeated with the sound of flowing water echoing and reverberating throughout the area.
I can see the following:
Ebony Obelisk
>i
You are carrying the following:
Carpet
Yellow Diamond
Crystal Sphere
(Side note: The “Carpet” is a flying carpet that seems to be the only way to leave this area.)
>enter obelisk
… you begin to hear a low hum …
>look
Lost Civilization of the Implementors.
Around you stretches the expansive remains of some now lost civilization. Rectangular obelisks of varying height and size march in all directions in a pattern that appears to be circular in nature and centered about one large obelisk in particular. Shadows cast by the sun create a landscape dominated by light and dark contrasts, permeated with the sound of flowing water echoing and reverberating throughout the area.
I can see the following:
White Obelisk
>enter obelisk
You feel a short heatwave.
The humming has stopped.
>i
You are carrying the following:
Ebony Cube
…
Finally, there is a pyramid in the southeast corner of the desert.
It’s possible to land inside randomly via hole teleport, or if you stick a hole right on top you’ll be able to get inside that way.
Antechamber.
You find yourself in the antechamber of the Great Pyramid of Warp. The room about you is fairly barren, with huge sandstone walls and only one apparently continuing passage to the north. Ancient heiroglyphics decorate the walls in a lost language of signs and symbols, but are now largely obscured and unreadable due to many years of senseless vandalism by scores of would-be grave robbers.
I can see the following:
Stone Button
Stone Pedestal
>n
Inside the Pyramid.
You are somewhere inside the Great Pyramid. A door is to the north.
I can see the following:
Stone Button
Stone Pedestal
It’s a gimmick maze that’s very hard to describe, but I’ll do my best. The map has an “Antechamber” at the center and “spokes” leading out.
The only direction you can go at any point is “north” if you keep going north eventually you’ll rotate back to the start of whatever section you’re in (assuming you have access, this means you keep returning to the antechamber).
“North” on this map is the starting rotation (at least the one I saw). If you push the antechamber button, you’ll rotate clockwise one step. So for example, if you push the antechamber button twice, you are in the Antechamber-chamber-chamber portion of the map with three linked rooms. If you push it five times (so you are “facing the southwest” on the map above, even though you’re going north) then heading north from the antechamber just loops back to the antechamber with no extra rooms.
If you push a button in one of the regular chambers (as opposed to the center room) things start to go really crazy. I haven’t been able to even begin to scratch the surface of the puzzle, but it seems like there are rotating walls that get moved around, but I haven’t found any configuration that works consistently.
For example, on the map above, if you go to the chamber “south” or “southeast” of the opening room and push the button, the map changes to the one below:
I’ve tried a couple methods of mapping and all of them have given me a headache.
…
While I think I’ve hit most of the thresholds of the game, I’m starting to reach my exhaustion point. I may have to do the unprecedented step (for the All the Adventures project) of taking a second breather from Warp before I finish it, unless I have some kind of major breakthrough soon.
With IFComp, I’ve managed to plow through about 10 Twine games and 0 text adventures. Warp occupies enough headspace that I have trouble fitting anything similar in, but other interactive fiction seems to occupy a different brain category. (I will probably do reviews, but as a “compilation” where I will compare a bunch of games at once.)
A “majestic Spanish Galleon” which patrols the seas. If you’re swimming, it doesn’t bother you; if you’re sailing, it fires cannons. Warp has the largest amount of ASCII art I’ve seen in an adventure game. Both mainframe Zork and Stuga included a handful, but I’ve seen something like 30 pictures in Warp so far.
I’ve opened up quite a bit of map and found many more treasures, although I haven’t done a run yet where I’ve gathered them all at once. Part of this has to do with a nasty discovery Roger Durrant made.
I had (without too much difficulty or fanfare) discovered that in the Bank of Warp, the vault opens at a particular time (hinted at by a note in the Director’s office). I was then able to sneak in and grab some gold bullion, delivering it to the display case in the Warp Museum and netting a total of 35 points. Roger subsequently tested out the same solution and found he couldn’t do it; essentially, if you miss the time window near the start for entering the vault, you have broken the game.
I am hence somewhat paranoid about other potential softlocks, and since Warp is fairly open, I’ve got various save games running in parallel as I thwack at the various mysteries and puzzles. Most notably, there’s a lamp with a battery having limited time, just like Adventure/Zork/Acheton, and I’m worried once all the uses are taken into account the time limit is tight. I still remember in the last part of Acheton having to walk through darkness to the endgame (saving repeatedly and restoring when I fell into a pit by chance); with Warp I have no such way out, because if your lamp gives out in darkness you die right away.
My major lamp use went into mapping a maze.
I first thought this was going to be a “well-behaved” maze where directions go back and forth in the direction you expect, and indeed the first portion of my expedition went that way. The map was laid out in “micro-floors” with up-and-down stairs connecting a little randomly, but each floor being normal. There was a treasure which took a little effort to find, I mopped up most of the available directions, and that was that.
However, in one of the last exits I checked (in a pair of rooms marked “Kilroy Was Here” and “Kilroy Was Here Too”) the micro-floor idea continued, but there were now many more “punishment” one-way exits. By that I mean if you went the “wrong way” you were sent far off course, essentially guaranteeing there was no way to find a good route at random. Structurally, this seems intended as a fake-out — trying to coax players into giving up at finding the first treasure and assuming the maze has nothing else to yield.
Secretarial Pool.
This is a large room with a high ceiling, glass walls, and a large, deep, swimming pool in the center. There is a sign next to the diving board that reads
WARP BUILDING SECRETARIES ONLY!
(Executives Forbidden)
Please Wash Toes Before Entering
the Pool.
There are two ways out, to the east and back to the north.
I can see the following:
Fins
Swimming Pool
Secretary
Postage Stamp
Incidentally, JUMP IN POOL is death.
You gracefully execute a perfect swan dive into mid air. In your great haste, however, you failed to notice that the Warp Building Maintanence crew has drained the pool to keep it from leaking into the Operating room below. But they are efficient, and will undoubtedly scrape up your remains before refilling the pool …
In an adjacent room there’s a hole that you can pick up, and move to other places (!). I haven’t worked out the full mechanics of how this works. I was too busy otherwise trying to map out the ocean.
Haunt’s 7 by 7 by 7 cube of water was technically larger, but this still trumps anything I’ve previously played in terms of elaborateness. You can swim out alone (although if you are out more than 3 turns, you get attacked by sharks). There is the occasional stable position which resets the “shark counter” — like a fog bank — so I was able to use those to do produce quite a bit of the map.
Some locations are just too far from shore and you need a boat. There is a boat sitting out in the open and I’m fairly sure using it wasn’t really intended as a puzzle, yet it’s very easy to miss how to launch it. You can go DOWN and find another room.
You find yourself in the main cabin of the boat. The walls here are dark paneled, and there is a well-used bunk along the port side. A small wooden cabinet is built into the wall at the bow end of the bunk. At the aft end of the starboard wall is a large closet, and the remainder of the room sports nothing of interest other than a few shelves. A few short steps at the aft end of the cabin lead back up to the main deck, while next to them another short stairway leads down, apparently to a lower deck.
I can see the following:
Bunk
Wooden Cabinet
Closet
There’s a sail in the closet; take it upstairs and RAISE SAIL and the boat will become mobile.
While reefs are no threat while swimming, they smash up the boat if you hit them while sailing. I find the dual-meaning to the locations intriguing. (There actually seems to be triple-meaning because diving underwater seems to be possible, although I haven’t tested it yet — hopefully next time.)
So, IFComp 2019 is about to hit, and I do intend to play and even possibly write about some of the games, but I also wanted to keep my momentum going on 1980. What better contrast to a bunch of small games than a very, very, very large one?
From >READ POSTER in an early room in Warp.
I will try to keep my Warp posts to a more-or-less weekly pace, and put my IFComp posts in between.
You may want to read my old entries, but the summary is: Warp was an attempt one-up Zork developed all the way from 1980 to 1985, and made gigantic in the process. The sole objective is to gather all the treasures and get all the points (1216 of them). Even though I have my old map, just looking at it scares me.
Even given the amount of work I put in, I barely made any progress. This is one of those wide-open puzzle games where there are far too many things to work on at once and I’m not sure where to start.
I often have this sort of “game paralysis” with strategy games — I’m on move 3 and there’s lots of choices already, and I’m worried that the wrong direction will screw my game up at move 40 (because sometimes, it has) so I end up just losing interest. If I can overcome this kind of start and get immersed, the game can get going. I’ve never come up with a good coping mechanism for strategy games (I’ve only got through the start of every Six Ages game I’ve played and it’s been on my phone since release day).
With adventure games, sometimes it helps for me to list everything out. Both for my benefit (given my last “real” Warp post was over 3 years ago) and so y’all fine people see what’s going on, I broke the giant map into five regions.
THE WARP BUILDING AND NEARBY ENVIRONS
Central Plaza.
You are standing in what appears to be the central plaza of a small seacoast resort. There is a large fountain in the center of this square, and the plaza extends quite a distance to both the north and south. You can see the ocean in the distance to the west, and to the east there is a large building on which there is a sign that reads “WARP BUILDING”.
The game starts right outside the “WARP BUILDING”. Nearby the building is a place with a video game (I have no coins for it) and a police station. The police officer wanders the area and will arrest you if you are carrying a weapon.
It is unclear what the building is used for. After getting by a security guard (with a nametag out in the PARK area) there’s an abandoned kitchen and dining room, an two elevators with three buttons each (one which is “out of order” and kills you if you use it), and a “mad doctor”.
Operating Room.
This is a very clean, sterile-looking room with white walls and chromed stainless-steel fixtures. There is a large operating table in the center of the room, and various pieces of machinery surrounding it. There are exits to the north and west.
I can see the following:
Bag
Mad Doctor
Suddenly the doctor produces a huge syringe, and quickly flings it at you.
You feel a painful sting as it sticks in your leg!
The mad doctor runs rather like a Zork battle with random messages; I haven’t experimented with fighting back yet.
Other items: Round peg, Digital watch, Digital scale, Banana.
The banana is considered a weapon, and the policeman will arrest you if you have it.
THE PARK
You’re standing in the northeast corner of Warp Park. The grass in green, the sky is blue, and you can go almost any direction. There is one particularly large tree growing nearby.
There’s a silver flute here which counts as a treasure (and makes a high pitched “dog whistle” sound), a nametag (used in the Warp building), a sign which warns you not to dig on the grass, a crank and well, a random fig tree and pine tree, and a “bathing ugly”.
There’s also a koala bear high in a redwood which also counts as a treasure, although it eats through your inventory if you’re carrying it around. Also, if you try to put it in the display case for treasures (see the next area), it wanders off, so I’m guessing I need some sort of sedative-laced food.
THE MUSEUM
Just east of the park is the museum, which has a wandering curator and a display case for storing the treasures of Warp.
Curator’s Office
This is a large office with a musty smell. The walls are lined with rows and rows of books. Numerous stacks of paper and partially restored objects are piled about the room. A large desk with a leather-backed chair stands in one corner of the room. The only exit is through the door to the east.
I can see the following:
Display Case
The display case has a lamp (which the curator doesn’t mind if you take). The curator does mind if you abscond with anything else; there’s a Mayan Room with an odd disk (with a cryptogram I’ve written about before), a gemstone room with “Leeverite”, a Sarcophagus Room with a casket, a dinosaur room with a Warpasaur.
THE LIGHTHOUSE
To the west of the park, if you dive through the ocean and swim, you can find an island and a lighthouse.
You’re standing in a gently sloping meadow, surrounded on three sides by steep rising cliffs. To the east, there is a small sheltered cove, its waters placidly lapping near your feet. A rickety boat dock extends somewhat out into the water. You can go most any direction.
There’s a cave entrance but it is dark inside and I haven’t been able to get the lamp from the display case over because the ocean washes away any items I try to carry.
Other items: hardhat, rusty shovel, ruby lense. (Spelled that way in the game.)
THE DESERT AND THE MALL
To the east of the Warpian building is an area with a mall, an alley, and a desert.
You’re at the northeast corner of the Cobblestone Square, where before you looms a magnificent statue of Miles A. Weigh, one of the most famous of the Warpian explorers. The cobblestones stop, but the square appears to continue to the north.
The alley has a mugger who is Warp’s equivalent of the thief from Zork, and is keen on stealing all your treasures.
The mall has a bank and a subway station, which I haven’t quite worked out how to use even though I have a “transit pass”. I assume I can reach another new large section once I get in.
Heading east from here there is a “desert” with a sign warning of falling rocks, and if you keep going east you die via a rock randomly falling out of the sky on your head.
Immediately after making this list, I went over to the “hardhat” (which required swimming over the ocean in the far southwest of the map), wore it, was able to get through the ocean without dropping it (since I was wearing it) and used it to scoot through the desert safely and make it to a region beyond, which looks like it might also be big. This game just keeps going and going.
I have marked the location of the hardhat and the place where it solved a puzzle, just to give an idea of what kind of back-and-forth is required in this game.
Joining the ranks of teenage entrepreneurs Greg Hassett, Joel Mick, and Charles Forsythe is the team behind Software Innovations; according to the article above, it was founded in 1980 via “$100 investment donations from parents and the selling of shares in the company for $25.” The employees listed in the article above are
Evan Grossman, aged 16: stock, advertising, company catalog
Roy Niederhoffer, aged 14: orders and mailing labels
Steve Sanders, aged 16: treasurer
Tim Binder, aged 16: mailing lists and printed company material
The physical tape (marked copyright 1980) only mentions it is by Software Innovations, and the article states “All the executives pitch in to produce the company’s marketable software” so I’ll credit it to the company label.
One thing you may notice is missing from the advertisement above is the overall goal of the game. This isn’t the first ambiguous objective I’ve hit during this era, but it previously hasn’t been a hindrance in my gameplay; eventually, I’d find some treasures lying about or otherwise run across some kind of directions. Here, I genuinely reached a point where it seemed like I was “done” but I wasn’t done. More on that (and the odd reference to “Interludes”) later; you start, as in common in Your House Games, in a bed:
Any direction leaves the bed, which does make sense, yet this is the first adventure game bed I’ve seen with such a setup.
While they later became a plague of the text adventure enthusiast community, in 1980 Your House Games weren’t even a genre yet. Out of the all the adventure games up to 1980 (including the ones I haven’t written about yet) the other only ones that seems to start with “you in your house” are Pirate Adventure, Lost Dutchman’s Gold, Dracula Avontuur, and Will ‘O the Wisp.
There are no fantasy elements at all in the opening to City Adventure; the obstacles are along the lines of finding your glasses (you feed your Doberman and then get them to FETCH), getting exact change for a bus (you have a five-dollar bill and the driver needs $1.10), turning off an alarm system, and unlocking the front door.
I’m unclear why there would be a code needed to unlock the door from the inside. Maybe we’re still playing The Prisoner.
While in this section the game drops hints about various locations at city intersections.
The reason why becomes very clear after you finish wrangling the bus change; you get dropped off in the city.
Going north reduces the street number, south increases it. Going east reduces the avenue number, going west increases it. This system isn’t purely mechanical either, as “Lexington” is squeezed amongst the low-numbered avenues. To find the locations of the game, you have to get to the right intersection; for example, 44th and 5th has a bank. (This is similar to Thomas M. Disch’s Amnesia, but six years early.)
For a not-many-K TRS-80 BASIC game, this does effectively deliver the illusion of a big environment without the coders having to add many more rooms. The problem is the MUGGER as seen in the screenshot above. The mugger is quite aggressive and has (according to the source code) a 1 out of 7 chance of stealing something at any particular turn. While you can find the stolen items later, there’s a bug where the act of an item being stolen reduces your inventory capacity. After not too long I had the hilarious scenario of carrying no items at all yet also not having room to pick anything up.
If you bring the Doberman with you to the city, the mugger stays away, but there’s a 1-in-50 chance of the Doberman running away, and once that happens, the mugger visits start in. I eventually resorted to the tried-and-true method of “edit the BASIC source code”.
159 IFO(15,0)=-1THENF2=F2+1:IFF2>25ANDRND(50)=1THENF2=0:O(15,0)=-2:PRINT”DOG BARKS AND JUMPS DOWN”:O(143,0)=R:GOSUB6
Rather than stopping the mugger code, I just changed the dog code above so RND(50)=1 became RND(1)=9, meaning the dog will never run away.
As a note from the house indicates, “Suzy” is waiting at 45 & 6 NY. I’m not sure how to express GO ON A DATE, and the game didn’t seem to either; all I could do was TAKE SUZY and cart her around (so the adventurer is toting around both a dog and a girlfriend).
I found a SCRAP of metal and a place nearby I could wash it; it became a SHINING MAGIC RING.
IF YOU BY CHANCE SHOULD SAY MY NAME, I’LL TAKE YOU BACK FROM WHENCE YOU CAME!
A “magic shop” at a different intersection had the clue to this:
Typing “SAY ONE” teleported me back to the bed. (I guess riding the bus back was too hard.) However, I haven’t been able to end the game here. It’s possible to KISS SUZY while at the bed, but the game says “THIS IS FUN! BUT YOU HAVEN’T COMPLETED YOUR ADVENTURE!” Studying the source code, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere the “date” can go to (maybe being in town was the date). There is a computer store (the player avatar’s workplace) where the TRS-80 program INTERLUDES resides, which was famous in 1980 as an adult computer program (the manual comes with suggested activities). The player’s home does have a TRS-80, so I imagine the goal is to then run the program, but I never worked out a syntax how. Checking the source code, the end message is then
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE COMPLETED YOUR ADVENTURE!
(BUT I CERTAINLY HAVEN’T COMPLETED MINE!)
MOVE OVER A BIT THERE, SUZY!
I’m 95% sure I just need to puzzle out the parser issue to attain the endgame message, but I’m fine bailing out early on this one.
I escaped, although I left a lot of cryptic things behind. That seems to be the intent, really; The Prisoner feels meant to be an experience as much as a game.
Once I got my score up from last time, I went back to the Theater and tried to make contact with the people whispering; I suspected perhaps my “notoriety” or whatnot was up and they would recognize me.
I CAN VOUCH FOR HIM
I’VE BEEN WATCHING HIM
SEEMS SUSPICIOUS TO ME
LET US TAKE A VOTE
THE MOTION IS CARRIED
WE ARE THE BROTHERHOOD
WE ARE DEDICATED TO OVERTHROW
OF THE ISLAND
ARE YOU WILLING TO JOIN US?
Why YES, I would.
GOOD. ARE YOU WILLING TO GIVE YOUR LIFE, COMMIT MURDER
COMMIT ACTS OF SABOTAGE WHICH MIGHT
CAUSE THE DEATHS OF INNOCENT PEOPLE
CHEAT, FORGE, BLACKMAIL
DISTRIBUTE HABIT FORMING DRUGS
FOR THE CAUSE OF FREEDOM?
Also YES, and also a not-unexpected 1984 reference (see also the game cover above). “You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases—to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party? If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face—are you prepared to do that?”
They then wanted to give me an assignment which I believe involved the Carnival; fortunately, I was able to pass and get a different assignment instead, to change the headline at the newspaper to DEUS EX MACHINA.
If you get paper and the General Store, and then answer PRINTING when the newspaper proprietor asks if you want anything else, he “takes you to the back” …
… whereupon there is another mysterious machine. After some experimenting, it looks like the numbers you can enter are just ASCII codes, so start with 68 for D, then type 69 for E, 85 for U, etc.
After finishing I was sent back to the “maze” location at the start and had to trudge my way through again. I went back to the theater and they congratulated me.
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR SUCCESS
YOUR REWARD IS THIS CLUE FOR ESCAPE
THE ISLAND IS A MACHINE
Uh, thanks?
One of the things I’ve been trying is saying various catchphrases to the Caretaker and the Priest. (I never got anything useful out of the Priest.) THE ISLAND IS A MACHINE didn’t seem to do anything useful either, as the Caretaker (picking up on “ISLAND” I’m guessing) responded NO MAN IS AN ISLAND.
Well, maybe it’d help to be more specific?
THE ISLAND IS A COMPUTER
I found out after the fact (via Andrew Plotkin) that the instructions are the method of “cutting and pasting” on an Apple II, so you’re really just typing the [=] symbol if you follow the instructions.
This is followed by an animation which looks like a computer getting unplugged.
Ha ha. Ha ha ha. Nice try, game. I typed some nonsense.
This is not quite the end of the game but let me make a few asides before I get to that.
What Happened to The Prisoner 2?
I did mention in my first post I would try the “sequel”, but I rather quickly concluded it was much different than the original.
The opening maze has a first-person aspect, and there was a key in one part. Trying to visit the Caretaker, I was told YOU NEED A KEYHOLE.
In the Rec Center, the pit now has moving platforms.
The overarching idea and the 20 buildings of the Island are the same, but given the changes to the puzzles, I can’t really consider it the same game — I’m kicking it up to 1982 where it belongs.
Further Reading
If all this makes you want to try the game/experience, I would say go for it now; if you’d rather watch from a safe distance, then I highly recommend Jimmy Maher’s writeup from 8 years ago (!) which includes comments by both David Mullich and one of the founders of Edu-Ware. There’s an entire scene I missed involving “escaping” but having the whole thing be a ruse. I’m guessing it comes about from finishing the business with the loan and the slot machine but I never was able to get a cross.
I also don’t have anything to add to his analysis, or those of others who have tackled the same game. It’s not often gameplay and theme blend so perfectly. The downside of playing a game in a paranoid and confusing environment is that you are playing a game in a paranoid and confusing environment. Instructions are intentionally obtuse; controls are intentionally finicky. This is more a game for Art rather than Enjoyment but that’s ok, especially considering how little of this sort of thing was about in 1980.
You might incidentally wonder (as Andrew Owen does in the Maher thread) if this was the first game with meta-tricks. Dr. Livingston (1980) has a pretty good death fake-out; Acheton (1978) requires you die once at a prompt where most people would restore their saved game. There’s a very old game (1968) which has what might be a bug, or what might be considered meta — I’ll have to report back on it in some future post.
The Thing I Was Most Disappointed In Missing
I heard about this trick secondhand a long time ago, but I had to check the source code after finishing to find it.
In the “Free Association” test at the Hospital, if you type a word like FREEDOM or the like, you get this message:
Notice there is no THIS IS NOT A DECEPTION message here. On an Apple II the usual thing is to LIST 417 to figure out what went wrong, but in this case, it very much is a deception.
Yes, 417 was the resignation code.
The End?
So the endgame screenshot I produced above (“HAVE YOU NOT ALWAYS BEEN IN CONTROL”) is more or less the same one as Jimmy Maher’s. You end at what appears to be the “Apple prompt” where you can type directory commands and so forth. However, if you try to go ahead and type something, the game intercepts your input and instead types:
The game keeps a running score, but given its predilection for flashing messages like YOUR SCORE IS 4 OUT OF 8 I wasn’t really sure what to believe, until I noticed something on the Carnival (that place that was crashing my game) — the “SCORE” in the corner seems to be accurate. If I do something that is Island-friendly, so to speak, the score consistently goes down.
Fortunately, typing EXIT leaves this place safely without crashes.
I found this testing out the hospital; each visit costs 20 points.
Additionally, at the slot machine where you enter a “piece of yourself” to spin, each spin costs 1 point.
After a number of other tests, I found that if you “discover” the clone room in building #19 (just push “L” for left, then type “NO” about knowing about cash) you earn 40 points. This action can be repeated over and over and over for 40 points every time. Fairly soon I was looking at 767 points.
These sort of wild swings suggest to me that perhaps score is entirely meaningless and just another red herring meant to keep you trapped on the Island. At least I managed to “discover” something, though?
Where I’m really stuck is still finding a cross. I get trapped whenever I enter the church. If someone knows the way out and can ROT13 me a line, I’d appreciate it. (No hints if I’m barking up the wrong tree entirely, though — that’s part of the experience, I gather.)
but where you only see 2×2 chunks at a time so you might be standing next to 15, 20, 11, and 16. Also, sometimes, a building is missing for no apparent reason.
It’s not as if building #13 is gone permanently — later in the same game it was building #12 that was missing. I have no idea if this is a bug or not. The nature of this game is such that bugs might be intentional.
I have organized the buildings by Slightly Off, Quite Curious, Downright Bizarre, and The Carnival.
Slightly Off (2, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 20)
The Caretaker (#2) was the building from last time (or least, I think so, based on process of elimination). I haven’t been able to get anything useful from the conversation, but I suspect there might be some key phrase or word that will later trigger a hint.
#6 is where the game starts (The Castle with that invisible maze), and you can go back there if you like; I’m not sure if there’s any use. I did somehow reveal the resignation code (417) once while in the maze and I’m not sure how, but I got this message:
It’s possible to just die elsewhere, but you get a different screen — so I really did divest the resignation code somehow.
#7 is the Island Mutual Savings and Loan. If you want a loan — and it looks like you do, for reasons I’ll get into, you need a gold watch, a black tie, a diploma, a cross, and a percolator.
#10 is the general store and includes a percolator (one of the needed items I mentioned).
#11 is a NEWS STAND. You’re asked which newspaper you want, but get told the only one available is THE ISLANDER. It seems to have vague hints, like “THE ISLANDER LIBRARY NEEDS CONTRIBUTIONS OF BOOKS”.
#13 puts in you in a “class” run by a machine.
The machine plays a game of Simon with you. It gives short sequences of numbers that you need to memorize and type back. Fairly deep into the game (I’d say several minutes) one of the sequences included 4, 1, 7 right in the middle. I was able to avoid the trap. I suspect the diploma is available here (I didn’t quite finish the minigame — I was still mapping and just wanted to look around).
#15 is a church.
It involves a dialogue (like the Caretaker) where the priest/pastor/whoever starts with “DON’T WORRY. ALL IS KEPT IN CONFIDENCE IN THESE CHAMBERS” and responds to any text I’ve tried with vague platitudes like “A SMOOTH SEA NEVER MADE A SKILLFUL SAILOR” and “HE THAT IS DISCONTENTED IN ONE PLACE IS SELDOM HAPPY IN ANOTHER”.
For the sake of experiment, I tried 417, and the game ended. So much for all being kept in confidence. I’m sure the cross I need is here.
#16 has a clothing store, where you can get (among other things) a black tie, a clown suit, and a clone suit. I haven’t tried the clone suit yet, but the clown suit lets you get into building #5 (The Carnival, which I’ll discuss last).
#20 is a casino.
Using “A PIECE OF YOURSELF TO PLAY” doesn’t seem to extract anything other than displaying a random three-digit number. I have the feeling if you play too many times the three-digit number will be 417.
Upon leaving the casino, I had someone mention escape was through slot #1, and they could sell a silver dollar for 5000 credits (hence the need for a loan). The mystery person then said THE BROTHERHOOD LIVES when I left.
Quite Curious (1, 3, 9, 12, 18, 19)
The Hospital (#1) gives you a “test”. It shows five random characters and you press a button and the characters change. You are then told you are adjusting nicely.
The Town Hall (#3) gives you control of the island.
You can tweak the numbers up or down. I tried turning GATES down as far as I could go and I was told security was fixing the gates. I never was able to get “DEATHS” to go up. Eventually, I gave up and was given a gold watch for doing a good job.
#9 is the Theater.
After watching … something happen for long enough, a conversation started:
WE ALL KNOW WHAT THE ISLAND IS
ALL WE HAVE TO DO IS PULL THE …
SHH, WHO’S THAT!
WE’VE BEEN DISCOVERED!
WHO ARE YOU
I answered “2”.
WE DON’T KNOW A ‘2’
GET RID OF HIM
The Library is #12. If you bring two books (you can get them at the general store) you can play some sort of “preference game” where you choose between two options (two types of toothpaste, say) and after enough time, you get a rating.
Then you can “play a game” which rolls a random number. I don’t know if the random number needs to be low or high or what, but I “won” once and got a hint
DON’T UNDERSTAND THE GAME
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
#18 is the Recreation Hall, where there’s a pit you can fall in (it’s game over if you do).
On the map shown above you just walk on the letters and get through, but then you get another pit:
I’m not sure how to get through. If you disobey instructions and “walk on the sides” an invisible wall blocks you.
#19 is the Gemini Diner. You can buy nondescript food, but if you step “left” while there you find a “cloning machine”.
The proprietor says you can clone yourself for 10000 Credits.
Downright Bizarre (4, 8, 14, 17)
Building #4, I have no idea.
Sometimes by pressing buttons I got the number to change. I don’t know.
If you enter building #8 you find yourself in “court” prosecuted for “rebellion”.
The “plead his case” bit involves a very fast string of BASIC code. The Prosecutor and Defense both do one, and then you play a game of hangman. I got up to _ A P T U R E and then was booted from the building being told THE VERDICT IS NOT GUILTY. I have not been back.
#14, The Cat and Mouse: you can order gin for 5 credits. I tried walking in but got stuck with being asked repeatedly if I wanted gin, and strange sparkling rectangles kept growing in different parts of the room.
I had to quit. This may or may not have been a bug.
Building #17 involves a change in perspective. You suddenly are no longer the prisoner, but someone electrocuting the prisoner, trying to ferret out the secret resignation code.
The Carnival (5)
You can’t enter the carnival without a costume. Getting the clown suit from the costume store and entering, I found this screen:
I can’t even begin to tell you what’s going on. I was able to type WT to “add weight” but after doing it a few times, I got this message:
Then I was told my current score was 4 out of 8, and asked (by a message that blinked almost too fast to see) if I wanted a hint for 10 points. Then the game exited with BE SEEING YOU.
A great deal of news has hit recently so I thought a summary was in order.
…
Little Misfortune is out today. It’s by Killmonday Games, the same company that made Fran Bow (link to buy the game). One of the authors, Natalia Martinsson, was the keynote speaker at NarraScope 2019 (video of the keynote here).
Led by her new friend, Mr. Voice, Misfortune ventures into the woods, where mysteries are unraveled and a little bad luck unfolds.
…
Yesterday saw the release of AI: The Somnium Files, by Kotaro Uchikoshi, the same director as the Zero Escape games. (link)
In a near-future Tokyo, detective Kaname Date is on the case of a mysterious serial killer. Date must investigate crime scenes as well as dreams on the hunt for clues.
…
Last week, Ryan Veeder released Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing, a parser-based text adventure. It has a world that changes over time so if you play over multiple days you’ll see events like weather changes. (link to play here)
I call Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing a “game,” but it’s not the kind of game that has conditions of failure or success. And it’s not really a proper story, with a beginning, middle, and end. I like to think of Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing as a place you can visit once in a while, to get away from whatever other stuff you have going on. I hope you’ll play for a while today, and maybe come back tomorrow, and then go on visiting as often as you care to, until you don’t care to any longer.
…
Also last week, Kate Willaert published an article about The Sumerian Game from 1964, the “lost predecessor” of Hamurabi. The project was initiated by Bruse Moncreiff, written by Mabel Addis, and programmed by William McKay. Unlike the stripped-down Hamurabi (which was written later based on a description of the original), it has a strong narrative “voice” …
I lean heavily upon your wisdom, Luduga, but I am also here to help you. Tell me, if your population is increasing, would you expect the quantity of grain fed to your people to 1-increase 2-decrease?
1
Of course it should increase. Forgive me if my questions seem simple. It is my duty to urge you to see the relationship among the items in your Steward’s reports.
… and had a slideshow with voiceover meant to be played before starting!
The article also includes a link to a final report giving a full description of the game (full enough someone might be able to recreate the original, sans some of the colorful text and slideshow). As a bonus, if you keep reading, there are more games from the same series; after The Sumerian Game came The Sierra Leone Game (authored by Walter Goodman):
… he felt that the economic problems of newly-independent African countries were important for pupils to understand. Sierra Leone in 1964 seemed like a representative African state where political factors were less critical in determining economic developments than in other African lands. We were also fortunate to have Frank Karefa-Smart from the Sierra Leone U.N. staff avaiable for consultation.
…
Over the Alps is an 80 Days-style game for iOS that is coming soon to Apple Arcade with writing by Jon Ingold (Heaven’s Vault, Make it Good) and Katharine Neil (Astrologaster). It is set in 1930s Switzerland. (link)
Uncover a hidden family history and play your role in a classic story of espionage, double-crosses and adventure.
Avoid leaving footprints, and drop diversions in your wake to stay one step ahead of the Swiss Police who are hot on your tail.
…
This is “old news” (it came out in May), but out of the adventures I’ve played this year so far, my favorite has been Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders. (link)
A thrilling point-and-click adventure game where you play as Di Renjie, ancient China’s most famous and gifted investigator, as he tracks a serial killer in the heart of the Tang Dynasty’s capital city.
I’m including the video of this one because the music is great.
…
Finally, the Interactive Fiction Competition 2019 is fast approaching; the games come out October 1st. This is the 25th running of the competition. There’s still time to donate money or prizes.
I’m not typically big on landmark numbers, but excluding Before Adventure and my non-chronological entries, this is my Game #100.
Consequently, I decided to try a game that I’ve been looking forward to playing ever since All the Adventures kicked off in 2011.
In the 1967 TV show The Prisoner, the unnamed main character (played by Patrick McGoohan) has resigned a mysterious organization, and he is kidnapped and taken to “The Village”. He is given the designation Number Six and referred to that way by others in the Village — a fully working, albeit creepy and conspiratorial seaside town. Throughout the TV show, various people (all of designation Number Two, and a different person in almost every episode) try to wrangle free the secret of why he resigned.
David Mullich had been programming freelance for Edu-Ware when he mentioned his intent to create a game based on the TV show mentioned above:
However, I didn’t intend to make a direct adaptation of the TV series; I just wanted to make a game that explored some of the same themes. But Edu-Ware thought that they needed to at least loosely tie the game to the TV series to sell it. So, I wrote a game about the player being imprisoned on a place called The Island (instead of The Village), which is run by an authority figure called The Caretaker (instead of Number 2). As with the TV series, the game’s goal was to find a way to escape without revealing why you had resigned from your former job.
By 1980 Edu-Ware had already seen legal trouble; the year before, without permission or licensing, they made the games Space and Space II which were essentially computer versions of the Traveler role-playing game by Game Designer’s Workshop. They stopped production and settled out of court. It’s interesting they decided to risk the same unlicensed angle on The Prisoner, but as far as I’m aware they got away with it this time without even the thought of a lawsuit.
I’m a large fan of the TV show, and I’ve had to resist the temptation to do a Jimmy Maher-style Parts 1 to 3 giving the history of the show before making it to the game. (I will say you can watch the whole thing for free on the Internet Archive, if you want.)
Rather appropriately, the game is very, very, strange, and has as its central idea something exceedingly rare for computer games. In most games, there is some action you want to accomplish. In The Prisoner, there is an action you don’t want to accomplish.
Right at the start, you receive a three-digit code. If you at any point divest the three-digit code you lose the game.
The game tries very, very, hard to get you to divest the code. More on that in a later post.
After getting the code, you are given a list of cities to fly to, but in the middle of typing, the screen stops and you (represented by a # mark) find yourself in THE CASTLE, #1 ISLAND SQUARE.
This is a maze where the walls are initially invisible, but you can bump into them to reveal them. U, D, L, and R move the character up, down, left and right respectively.
Once reaching the right of the maze, you are asked WHO ARE YOU (with one choice, predictably, being the forbidden 3-digit code) and then told THE CARETAKER WANTS TO SEE YOU AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE, #.
The top-down view is maintained, but the keys U, D, L and R don’t work anymore. It took me a while to puzzle the keys are N, S, E, and W once outside. There are no instructions for this, and it seems to be quite intentional.
The “C” shapes are buildings, and they are given numbers as you walk by. You start in building #6. Heading directly north (you can scroll to another four buildings) I found the buildings #1, #2, #16, and #17.
Nothing is labeled; you have to go in a building to find out what it is. I tried building #2.
Below this message you can type free-form messages in a prompt. I tried out some nonsense, and the game encouraged me to GO ON and that what I said was SPOKEN LIKE A TRUE ISLANDER.
I have no idea what building #2 is. I love it.
Now, I’m not sure if I’ll keep loving the game going farther on… ? I will say I had to crank up the speed rather a lot, because on original Apple II speeds this game runs ludicrously slow. As in, I’m fairly sure that getting to the first room would have taken 10 minutes of waiting. (I’ll go back and time it later.) So this isn’t the true original experience, and I’m ok with that.
There is, incidentally, an “improved” version of The Prisoner called The Prisoner II released in 1982. I have heard it is “essentially the same game” and I will test it a bit alongside the 1980 version. My guess is this will be a game about information so it will be helpful to have a second source.
Renga in Blue 