Many of the British product samples remained at the company. We tested as hard as we could but didn’t dare sell any hardware that was obvious crap. The British were more relaxed about that kind of thing than the Danes.
In late 1980, the Danish journalist Svend Garbarsch made a fateful call to Clive Sinclair, regarding a ZX80 he had seen in a British magazine.
By that time, Denmark certainly had a tradition of computing in general dating back to Regnecentralen (funded directly via Marshall Plan money for reconstructing Europe after WWII) with the companies Christian Rovsing and Danish Data Electronics later big contenders. None really tried to enter the consumer space. Regnecentralen modified a Data General Nova mini-computer to be the RC 7000 in 1970…
…and then transformed it into the RC 3600 as a business/school computer. Christian Rovsing also focused on mini-computers; the latecomer DDE made their first computer in 1975 for “data collection, process control and monitoring”.
An ID-7000, the first computer from Danish Data Electronics.
Arguably the most interesting early stab at Danish home computing was the ICL Comet. (ICL we’ve seen before: essentially Britain’s counterpart to IBM, with the I in the name meaning International.) As their computers generally used CP-M as their operating system we won’t have any Comet-specific software in this Project’s future; the important point is that it still tended to be targeted at the higher end / hobbyist audience, along with various computer kits like the Nascom. Even the Commodore PET was considered more of an expensive business machine.
What all this means is when Svend Garbarsch made his call from Denmark to England, a “cheap” computer for the masses in Denmark had yet to be introduced. Somehow in the process of the conversation with Clive Sinclair, the salesman-CEO talked the journalist into forming a distribution outlet for ZX80s: hence the founding of ZX-Data. According to his nephew Rolf Ask Clausen, the first test computer came at Christmas 1980 through the post office, and he had to “explain to the customs officers what the ZX80 machine was, and thus how it should be cleared through customs.”
In their first ad, the Sinclair ZX80 was dubbed “Folkedatamaten” — “The People’s Computer” — and orders started streaming in. According to his nephew Rolf Ask Clausen who was there from the beginning, he “worked day and night” trying to keep up. After a month they had to increase their warehouse space and hire more people.
Note this is after the ZX81 already launched elsewhere! One might suspect leftover product being handed off, especially given the failure rate sometimes went to 10%. ZX-Data did switch to shipping out ZX-81s by November 1981; the ZX Spectrum (where the failure rate finally calmed down) filtered down to Denmark by 1983.
Now, I need to back up the story a little. Today’s game, while written by a Dane in Copenhagen, was first published (as far as we know) in February 1981, which is before the ZX-Data launch. To explain, let’s go back to a pivotal moment in 1980–
The Australian Tim Hartnell had floating through multiple jobs, including news reader for a TV station, before landing in London as a journalist working for the Australasian Express; his writing was of the “nerdier” inclination and included a mathematics column.
The photo above was taken in April 1980 outside Madame Tussaud’s. Tim was puzzling over the ZX80 which had launched two months before. He had obtained a book on BASIC programming that he is shown reading here, specifically having trouble with the chapter about For/Next loops. According to Young:
It was while he was reading this chapter that Tim realised that if he was having difficulty understanding this programming stuff, then other people probably were too. This photo virtually shows the instant that Interface Publications was born.
He swerved his journalist career towards computers, writing one of the very early books for ZX80, Making the Most of Your ZX80.
This particular book was put out by Computer Publications (later well-known for the magazine Sinclair User) but Hartnell went on to form his own publisher, Interface (co-founded with Robert Young); he also launched a ZX-80 club which quickly got “thousands” of members.
Citadel on the bottom. Labyrinth is from Hartnell’s ZX80 book and is even more marginal as an adventure game, but I’ll still visit it sometime.
Ole Noerregaard of Copenhagen was a regular contributor starting in 1980, so he somehow got a hold of a ZX80 anyway despite them not having an official distributor in Denmark. (There’s always either talking past or smuggling through customs!) With the caveat that this is only a quasi-adventure game, it’s the first of its type we know of from Denmark. It was written in English. (My next game, which involves a completely different story, will get into the first one written in Danish.)
The game did have some “professional distribution” but the word “professional” earns those quote marks.
If you think that’s bad, look at the inside:
The publisher is not Lion. The publisher is the exceedingly obscure CDS Micro Systems. Lion is the one who made the tape, and CDS flipped it over and slapped CITADEL on it and called it good. CDS does have a few other games (all ZX80) and two of them (Andromeda and Timestar) are sort-of adventure games (with Wumpus-style navigation) but they don’t seem to have any connection with Ole Noerregaard so we’ll pitch studying them for some future time.
To summarize:
a.) Tim Hartnell launched a club and publication in the UK after discovering the ZX80 as a journalist.
b.) Denmark in general didn’t get any kind of distribution until a different journalist (Svend Garbarsch) called Clive Sinclair and got talked into founding ZX-DATA, which started distributing mid-1981.
c.) Prior to that, it was still possible through other means to cart hardware between countries, and Ole Noerregaard not only expanded his computer to 16K but was an enthusiastic contributor to Hartnell’s publication Interface, getting a SUPERGAME published starting early 1981 with some extra distribution by the dodgy CDS Micro.
Commentor Rob (who clued me in on the game’s existence) sent a less-damaged picture of a later issue of Interface with a blurb.
16K SUPERGAME: Make the most of your new, expanded memory with CITADEL. In the remote land of Destaphnya; shrouded in mist at the peak of Mt. Nganra, stand the CITADEL. For a thousand years, men have sought to find the secret hidden in the citadel, to possess its power. All have been repelled by the Dark Agents of Protection. Will you succeed where the others have failed? Can you storm the CITADEL? If you have a 16K RAM pack, you need CITADEL.
The game’s lore involves the titular Citadel “existing in many dimensions”; your job is to get as much treasure as possible.
You can carry four objects at a time, and bring them back to the start in order to “place” them in your home dimension, getting points. You are given three items at the start (none of which are explicitly treasure, but any item in the game gets points when stored as a treasure). The instructions give a goal of 1200 points. Commands are all single-letter.
(As an aside, regarding the ZX80, I think it’s notable we haven’t seen attempts at parser games, Planet of Death aside. It isn’t like the expanded version is really that much different from the ZX81 in a BASIC-code sense, but rather, the screen-blinks-at-every-keypress when typing long commands gets very grating. The issue is mitigated with single letter commands. If you need to see what a parser game looks like on ZX80, this link will take you to a playable version of Planet of Death.)
Room descriptions in the citadel are randomly generated, and not in a consistent positional way. That is, the room description changes every turn, even if you stop and “look” while hanging out. While some descriptions are genuinely vivid the overall effect is to make them be ignored; there is no “exploration pleasure” in finding a vivid new scene.
Both this and the previous room are the exact same room, the second screen obtained but using Look.
The map is randomly generated each time, making a 7 by 7 map. I have one of them fully rendered here, where monster encounters are marked with a danger symbol.
Notably, the map is not just a single path, but has some merging, meaning that you could technically avoid monster encounters if you knew where they were ahead of time. Alas, with no save game feature, it’s a matter of spinning the dial at random.
There’s no running away: each encounter requires you ATTACK with your choice of inventory item (like POLE ARM) and as far as I’ve been able to find by squinting at the source code the choice of weapon does not matter: it’s random if you have anything good happen or not.
Usually combats end by the enemy running away, either delivering a blow (as shown above) or having a draw with no damage given (a good result). You have a LIFEFORCE that starts at 400 and goes down by 100 on a good hit.
The one (1) time that I managed to kill a monster was on a skeleton. One of the “weapons” was a silver cross so you might think that might give an advantage in undead-combat but no: this was with a pole arm, and there seems to be no effect to the choice of weapon.
I did eventually scrounge out by luck what I think is essentially a max score. However, the game never acknowledges such and still claims there’s more treasure in the Citadel (there wasn’t).
This hence doesn’t rise to the level of an adventure — no real exploration, object choice doesn’t matter — but it isn’t an RPG either, as there are no stats other than the overall life force going down. So it’s in that weird in-between space that happened in early games where it isn’t a recognizable genre at all. Clearly the author put a lot of effort into the map generator and had some legitimately colorful room descriptions to match, but simply rose to the level of a “slot machine game” and stopped there. This was still worth playing as it will make an interesting comparison with the other ZX80 “quasi-adventure” specimens out there; for now, we’re going to switch to Danish, and look at their first “real” adventure.
The enormous chess board is my favorite of the random descriptions.
POSTNOTE: There’s a version of Citadel called Catacombs of Morglim that was tweaked by Trevor Sharples of the ZX80 club. It was published as actual source code in the pages of the Interface, but with the map generator taken out. A follow-up article by Sharples mentions methods of tweaking the source code; weirdly, the follow-up talks about having it generate a new cave each time, putting a generator back in. And no point during either article is Citadel mentioned as the original. This still seems to be in the hacker-code-sharing mode where “ownership” was very loose. Or maybe Catacombs of Morglim was the first version (only distributed “person to person” so to speak) and Citadel was the enhanced version? Citadel started being published first, but that doesn’t mean it was written first.
Thanks to Jeremy and Matt W. in the comments nudging a bit more at the game, humanity has been saved.
Placement of backspace and space on the ZX-81 keyboard specifically for this game.
I had made my way to a computer room which needed blowing up, and already had an escape vehicle in place, but actually placing the explosive was eluding me. The magic word for step one was PRIME.
This automatically combines the detonator and explosive together, and if the explosive is now dropped, it blows up.
As I theorized, TURN DIAL does now work (previously just saying YOU CANT), but it’s still a serious pain, because it asks
TO WHICH SETTING???
and I flailed for quite here. I was in the middle of my next post (which involves the same emulator that this game is on) and inspiration occurred to me:
I had actually tried THREE SETTING first, thinking about the unused THREAD verb that Matt mentioned — it’s a four-word parser, so it could have just been THREE as a verb — but that didn’t work. I immediately followed up with swapping the order to SETTING THREE.
PLACE EXPLOSIVE will now set everything to blow up.
I booked it to the escape craft…
…then pushed (I mean, pressed) the button to indicate my mission was over, and failed.
The explosive takes too long to blow up. This explains why the dial was needed in the first place! At setting THREE it is possible to walk your way to the exit, but I had pre-emptively solved what I think may have been intended as the central puzzle: make the timer tighter (TWO) and you can still escape by intermediate ship (not by walking!) and it will blow up before the patrol robots discover it.
Without the parser issues this is a short and well-designed vignette. You’re on a mission you’re actually well equipped to start, there’s some brief visit to a city which is minimal but vivid, you find the robot fortress and need to experiment to use their elevator, there’s some robot blasting with a LASER GUN, and the final part where you need to set a quicker timer to avoid the bomb being discovered (meaning you need a quicker exit) is genuinely satisfying. The problem is the “without the parser” exception, which dragged the game out to a week.
I have an idea what the CODEWORD is referring to: it might be used for a contest when the game was released. Computer Input from November 1983 mentions a contest for one of the other Antarctic Software games…
…so I could see an entry consisting of giving the codeword.
This game did not make much an appearance outside New Zealand; the only reference I’ve seen otherwise is from a truly puzzling mention in the UK Computer and Video Games magazine, August 1984. This comes from the column (common amongst magazines at the time) with people asking for help with their adventure game troubles.
The surreal cover is due to the adventure game based on the TV show Dallas.
New Zealand reader, Colin Foster, from Levin, is playing Antarctic Computing’s Robots on Terminus IV. He says it makes Espionage Island look simple and he can’t unseal the door in the spaceship, nor go near the pub. The fruit machine doesn’t seem to do much and he’s certain he has to go down the well, but can’t. Quite a daunting list, Colin, and unfortunately about а game I have never heard of. Are there any ZХ81 users out there who can cast light on these problems?
How did the door get sealed in the first place? Why would they have trouble entering the pub? Why would you be putting the fruit machine down the well (which only served as a landmark to help with mapmaking)? How did they pick up the fruit machine in the first place? If intended as a guerilla ad of sorts, why would it be in a UK magazine (where they would not have been able to get a hold of the game in the first place)?
ADD: Combining comments from ScienceBall and Gus Brasil, it appears the letter writer is not talking about leaving the ship but the armory. If you don’t get the armory open there’s no laser gun, and in order to enter the bar safely you need the gun (I never tried this) meaning no coin so no lever from the fruit machine. The author mentions the fruit machine and the well together but they’re just two separate dilemmas. Note he mentions Espionage Island (Arctic Adventure D) but Artic Adventure C (Ship of Doom) has a very similar puzzle to the armory one (POINT to use a device).
Coming up: The curious tale of how Clive Sinclair managed to kickstart the low-cost personal computer market in Denmark by a combination of charisma and accident.
I suspect I am near the end but am unable to find whatever magical parser combination is needed to win. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords, who will no doubt get confused whenever they have to play chess against an Atari 2600.
Via Brian Blackie.
Continuing from last time, I had left off on a monolith where I was unclear how to interact with it. The monolith is the entrance to a secret robot facility, with an invasion force of spaceships you’re supposed to stop.
The right command is PRESS, either PRESS RED or PRESS BLUE. Except red summons a robot who shoots you so you should choose blue.
Inside is an elevator, which switches the verb from PRESS to PUSH. I’m generally a fair hand at experiencing such oddities, but I can imagine another player getting hard stuck right here.
Red makes the elevator go up, green makes it go down. You can go up to the top of the monolith but there’s nothing there (other than confirming the logic behind the elevator); down one floor is death because of a robot that shoots you on sight, but down two floors is safe.
There are still robots around, but you can shoot them with the LASER GUN from back in the armory.
To the west is an “underground launch area” with “hundreds of spaceships”. You can (after blasting a robot guard) hop in one, and find it is broken because of a hole in a control panel.
The hole is easily fixed by the lever from the slot machine; you can then pull the lever to zip over to the spaceport where your own vessel is (and back).
LEAVE CRAFT is needed to exit, even though you enter by walking SOUTH from the ship bay.
There’s also a store room with a PINCH BAR (another robot, again blastable) and a vent that can be unscrewed with the loose screwdriver from back at the original spaceport. This leads through a vent to a COMPUTER COMPLEX.
I am 99% sure the idea here is to then set the detonator to blow up the computer center, make a beeline back to the ship via jury-rigged slot machine lever, and save the galaxy. The problem is I have no idea how to get the explosive device to work. The EXPLOSIVE is described as having a dial, and dropping the explosive creates a bug in the inventory where the second line mentioning the dial is still listed with the I command. There’s additionally a DETONATOR whose operation is mysterious.
The unfortunate thing here past some of my prior games (like Danger Island requiring GET IN) is that this involves multiple items, so it is possible I need to do things with very specific object placement or command sequence; maybe TURN DIAL is a correct command (otherwise it gets YOU CANT) but only at the right moment.
I do appreciate the author going with “secret base in an inhabited area” rather than another barren planet; I also thought the atmosphere of the robot base came off well. The parser simply is not good at supporting whatever it is the author planned for the last steps.
I am incidentally still having to say “the author” even though I have a little more documentation on the company Antarctic Software. Other than this game they wrote The Caves of Time, Detention Center on Nebulon, and Intelligence Service Adventure, all lost media. I don’t know if they did more; they were officially founded as a company on 18 May 1983 so I suspect the 1983 date is right, and lasted all the way up to July 1989 in a commercial address suggesting it was run as a computer store for its lifetime (rather than the games being just from an ambitious “bedroom hacker”).
Address via Google Maps. Now a hair salon, not someone’s house.
We will be seeing more of New Zealand, as 1983 also saw the launch of the Sega SC-3000. The computer got crushed in other territories, but companies like Atari weren’t paying much attention to New Zealand, giving Sega an opportunity to become enmeshed in the cultural fabric.
Back page of November 1983 issue of Computer Input.
For now: a return to Europe, and the country of Denmark, another new visit for the project.
Today, this blog’s first encounter with New Zealand.
It might not seem surprising offhand New Zealand had to wait until 1983 — their population in 1982 was about 3 million, ranking it between Armenia and Papua New Guinea — but they had a computer economy out of proportion to the population.
Their first computer, in a technical sense, dated all the way back to 1949 with the MONIAC, an analogue computer with a name that invokes the ENIAC. It was designed by Bill Phillips (he of the Phillips curve relating inflation and unemployment, the source of “inflation targets” in modern economies) in order to do macroeconomics via measuring the amount of fluid in various containers.
Philips with the MONIAC, sometime between 1958 and 1967.
They had their first personal computer club in 1977 (Brian Conquer in Auckland, who read about similar clubs in the United States) so they weren’t even that late to the scene, relatively speaking, and there were multiple home-grown attempts at computers: the MDL series, the Poly and the Aamber Pegasus. They all failed for related reasons that are useful to go into, as they reflect the general trouble New Zealand hobbyist computing had in the early 80s.
The first attempt (or rather series) was via MDL; John Lovelock founded Micro Processor Ltd. in 1978. They started with engineers and hobbyists in mind, but by the MDL-3 model tried to get into the educational market (due to the government looking to pouring a great deal of money getting into every classroom); notably the computers had a shared hard drive.
They never really stretched into “personal computing”; their MDL-4 model sold about 200 units before they ended trying to make computers altogether.
Second up is the Poly-1, designed in 1980 and entering production in 1980; it was named after Wellington Polytechnic where the designers Neil Scott and Paul Bryant worked, and launched with a many-thousand-NZD price tag. The government was making moves to put a computer in every classroom (like the UK) and the duo designing the Poly tried to make a computer specifically for that need, with the most notable feature being a proprietary networking feature connecting 32 of the computers together at once. Quoting Scott:
The original design was to create it, get it working properly, and then leave it. The network was completely automatic. You didn’t have to do a thing.
From Classic Computers NZ.
The government promised $10 million in sales to fill classrooms but only $64,000 in orders came in, as the overall order got nixed from above as overspending.
The third homegrown attempt was the Aamber Pegasus, by Technosys Research Labs. This time the commercial market was more in mind, but the price tag was still high: $1000 NZD (about $900 in historical USD; enough to buy a Commodore PET at launch). Via the manual:
The machine that we are offering, while being approximately half the price of competitive products, offers much more capability in terms of expansion and ease of use. Initially we are supporting four languages with the Pegasus, these being ASSEMBLER, BASIC, FORTH and PASCAL.
I’m going to be honest: despite the effort to put a variety of computer languages by default, the hardware (default 4K memory, and see video below) seems undercooked for the price.
It did even worse than the MDL systems or Poly: “There is uncertainty as to the number of computers manufactured, estimates range from a few dozen to around 100.” It tried to get into the educational market just like other companies did — adding on network capability — but all three got crushed by the same outside force: Apple.
The offer consisted of an Apple II plus computer, one Apple disk drive, the monitor III 12in green screen with integral stand, and 30 BASIC programming tutorial manuals all for $1200. The cost to schools is usually $4812.
They were cheaper than the alternatives (and flat-out better than the Aamber), and by 1982 had 89% of the high school market. It essentially held the same position of dominance in New Zealand schools that it did in the US, although some of the cheaper machines (like the ZX80) held position when a cheaper model was needed.
Polycorp (the most plausible of the three local competitors) tried to stop Apple with a protest to the government in regard to “dumping”, so a duty of $820 was added, which simply resulted in Apple increasing the price to $2020 (as the duty was written to apply to the “dumping price”, it no longer applied to the higher price tag).
Janie McKenzie, education manager at Polycorp in 1982, quoted as saying “we intend to be around for some time”. Not long after, the company collapsed.
The $820 add-on — and the fact New Zealand never grew their own low-cost computer — is actually the most important point of all the events above when it comes to understanding their home computing market. The whole period from 1975 to 1984 with the government at the time (led by Sir Robert Muldoon) was one of protectionism:
By placing high tariffs on imported items, the government provided protection to fledgling industries. The strategy was quite successful. Nonetheless, high tariffs made many imported goods expensive to consumers.
So, the “cheap end of the pool” hobbyists that flooded the UK had trouble getting started in New Zealand; a postmortem of sorts was written in 1987 which notes:
In New Zealand the sales tax priced the microcomputer beyond the reach of many potential hobbyists and it was not until the tax and licensing regulations changed that products were more readily accessible to the low end user.
The same postmortem (titled “Memo: Atari US. What plans for NZ? Reply: Ask Australia”) also highlights the other interlinked issue: the country was sort of an afterthought to Australia. Essentially, New Zealand received their computers and parts last compared to the larger markets. An Atari supplier who severed ties with the US is quoted as saying:
We were having trouble getting stock from the USA. At the moment we are still importing parts until another dealer takes over, but we are not importing either hardware or software. Existing stocks are being sold off and we are caretaking for spare parts.
All these elements put together mean despite the signs of a vibrant scene…
…it isn’t terribly shocking we have to wait until (probably) late 1983 for the first adventure game from New Zealand we can play. Specifically, Robots on Terminus IV by Antarctic Computing.
The “probably late 1983” there is because it the first ad we have for the game is from a December 1983 issue of Computer Input, a NZ-specific magazine without many copies available. There’s an ad in the November issue for only one game (the currently lost Detention Center on Nebulon) but the general sense I get is that there’s more ads dating back farther we just haven’t seen yet.
Photo provided by Brian Blackie.
Brian Blackie (who has the game on his site) actually has it marked at 1982 but he doesn’t have anything on the tape or packaging indicating that date; it’s certainly plausible. The ZX81 version (the only one extant of any of Antartic Computing’s products) is slightly quirky, with a period mark doing space and Z doing backspace; the ZX81 keyboard requires two button presses for backspace and I can understand trying to do something symmetrical to type a space, but it took a while for me to get used to playing.
We have landed on a planet to do a mission, I assume involving robots; I have no idea what “our mission” is. However, we have access to an armory on our ship with some heavy duty machinery, so I assume it involves killing robots somehow. In inventory is a “remote control” device to start, and there is a door with a sensor downstairs; the right action is to POINT DEVICE to open the door.
POINT is one of our rarer verbs, so it’s useful to pull open the verb list now (this is made by hand, not studying source code):
Enough of these words (THREAD, PLACE, UNSCREW) live on the rare side that I expect there will be some surprise “isolate” verbs I haven’t run into on any game yet.
After some pointless searching for a space suit I realized this is a planet with a regular atmosphere we can just step out onto; the city is a regular city with regular aliens in it.
Disembarking, there’s a SCREWDRIVER at the landing bay, and to the north is a city street with a few venues, like an art gallery, a casino, a pub, and a department store. I guess we’re in Space Vegas.
The department store has some sand shoes we can just take (nobody seems to mind), and the gallery has what looks like a hint for something we will see in the desert. The pub is filled with creatures I haven’t been able to interact with and a coin that can be picked up; the coin can be taken over to the casino and the FRUIT MACHINE, but trying to pull the lever after inserting a coin causes the lever to break off.
Is the whole purpose of this scene to get a lever?
Finally to the north is a desert maze (again just like Vegas)…
…and the main result (other than a suspicious dry well along the way) is a mysterious monolith.
I have been unable to interact with the monolith in any way, but it doesn’t help that I’m not clear what noun is intended here (four letter parser, so “HUGE”, “STON”, “MONO”, “JEWE”, “RED”, and “BLUE” are all possible). There’s no walkthrough or other documentation, and I don’t have a good way of looking at source code, so there are likely a lot of brute-force attempts in my future. I certainly am intrigued; usually our planets have been completely abandoned, Space Vegas is a new setting.
I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed to understand this one.
Via POPCOM June 1983, The Palms being advertised alongside the import game Pinball Construction Set.
Before continuing the events of last time, two points to hit:
1. I breezed past this screen fairly quickly from the kidnapping at the start…
…but just to be clear, this is showing the protagonist getting hit on the head by a coconut, where they wake up to find their girlfriend kidnapped; this is not them getting walloped by the kidnapper.
2. There was a cave where I tried to enter but I didn’t know why I died. Kazuma Satou in the comments mentioned a message about a Moray eel killing us. I have now experimented multiple times and found sometimes the eel response shows and sometimes it doesn’t. The game here seems to be outright buggy (mind you, it might be an emulator issue). Even when it does give the eel message, there’s a delay of a turn (and the game then gives just the “keep trying” message) so it is easy to be confused. For the events that follow with any deaths, I’ve seen similar behavior: sometimes an explanation appears, sometimes it doesn’t. Fortunately there’s nothing like the timed deaths at the start where I was genuinely unsure if my character was falling into the ocean somehow (as opposed to the girlfriend left waiting too long).
Continuing the story, there was a small HOLE I was unable to interact with but somehow I hadn’t tried LOOK, which displays a zoomed-in screen showing a crab.
Unfortunately, the crab turns out to be, while not quite a red herring, mostly useless anyway. If you open the door with the octopus on the wrecked ship, you can appease it with the crab, but you don’t make any “progress”; it just prevents you from dying. This is the sort of mechanic that makes sense in a gamebook (amulet of protection, good for one bad choice) but in an adventure game with a frequent save-reload cycle happening anyway the whole sequence ought to really just be ignored.
Speaking of the wrecked ship, the only reason to go in there is to find the bar, procure the wine…
…and then bust out via BREAK WINDOW. The NAILPULLER gets lost on the last door so I’m not sure what we’re using to bust it open; I assume our fist.
That’s almost everything missing from the big ocean area, except for one spot back at the ruin (which I didn’t find until later).
Over on the west wall there’s what looks like a hole; I tried LOOK HOLE with no dice, but found the right action was LOOK WALL. (In retrospect, there’s tiny writing too.) The “1983” will show up again near the endgame.
To escape the ocean section entirely requires going to a large rock to the west of the eel cave (far NW of the map).
Kazuma Satou’s comments ended up being helpful again, and I’ll just quote verbatim:
Given the circumstances, linguistic ambiguities may be throwing you off again, so let me just mention that the word ROCK is referring specifically to only ONE of the three rock-like objects that you can see on screen. Try using some synonyms to interact with the other two! (This likely comes down to semantic nuances between the words 岩 “iwa” and 石 “ishi” that didn’t transfer 100% cleanly into the context of an English-based parser).
I had run through a good chunk of my verb list previously, but I was merely referring to the ROCK (the big rock). I was instead supposed to be referring to a STONE (one of the smaller … er, rocks). 石 is “small rock” explicitly; while English does tend to imply “stone” is something smaller, it also uses rock as a straight synonym.
Trying to MOVE STONE asks which one; you pick the right one (no particular logic, but there’s no punishment for starting with left) and this reveals the most curious lost-in-translation piece of the game.
The exact text is
ｽｲﾄﾞｳﾉ ｺｯｸ(COCK)ﾉﾖｳﾅﾓﾉｶﾞｱﾘﾏｽ｡
and I don’t think the authors meant a ribald joke, nor does that look like a rooster, so I’m guessing they meant something like a faucet handle that can turn left or right.
TURN COCK then requires you to say WITH LEFT (not TO LEFT or just LEFT) in order to open a passage. I admit I had enough confusion and concern at this point I peeked at a walkthrough.
This leads to a new dark area, where you can go up and find an underwater city.
(More Micro Cabin Mystery House vibes going on.)
From here you can go south, west, or north. West straightforwardly leads back to the ocean (in case you’ve missed something), but south and north are messier: I hit the Parallel Universes problem. Since it’s been a while since the Problem has surfaced, an explanation: you are playing an adventure game, and manage to go from place A to place C, no problem. On a second trip through the game (for whatever reason) you try again going from A to C but now get stopped by some obstacle that wasn’t there before! You are in a parallel universe where a puzzle you previously didn’t even know was there has now appeared, and sometimes it takes effort to realize what changed.
Here, fortunately, the change was very slight, but let me narrate my first pass-through: I went south first, and found some statues.
While there, I started thinking that since I’m no longer underwater, I should be able to ditch the DIVINGSUIT, so as an experiment I tried DROP DIVING and it worked. Then I went back to the corridor and tested the north exit next, finding myself in a forest with a guard.
We’ll address the guard in a moment: the important thing is I ended up needing to go back through the same section on a different save, and found that I could no longer go north into the forest as seen above. But why?
Quite simply: dropping the diving suit at the statues solved a puzzle (pressure plate of some sort on the destroyed statue). My second time through, I dropped the diving suit as soon as I got to the underwater city since I knew it was safe, not realizing that it would create a parallel universe! This also indicates I got Very Lucky in accidentally solving what could have been a very difficult puzzle.
Back to the guard! Fortunately not a hard puzzle: I (almost) immediately tried GIVE WINE and it worked.
(The “almost” is because I tried directions first, and the game said NO!!!! like we were back in Mystery House again. That message appeared all the time as the default “you can’t do that” message.)
It’s easy to miss that you can also TALK GUARD after plying him with wine; he’ll mention the word HUMMINGBIRD (which, like 1983, will come up later). Exploring the forest now, to the east there’s a rabbit you can just nab…
…and to the west is a boat that is deadly. Just ignore the boat: it’s a red herring.
Heading north lands the player in a city; wandering around a bit I found a key…
…and another guard.
Using GIVE doesn’t work here but you can DROP RABBIT and the guard will be distracted and chase it. This lets you get past the bridge to an ARENA, with a door that can be unlocked with the KEY.
That’s a lion coming after us, and fortunately, I had been dutifully testing SHOUT everywhere I could; here it is finally useful, and it causes the lion to run away.
(This is close enough to Scott Adams Adventureland and the bear that I wonder if they’d had exposure to that game as well. I didn’t cover it here, but Adventureland did have a graphical version for Apple II by this point so I could see Hummingbird playing an import.)
Next up a SANCTUARY is visible in the distance but our way is blocked by BARRACUDA, but we’re also pretty low on items. The right action is to THROW BOTTLE — the one from the skeleton in the ocean.
Now we’re almost down to nothing, and I admit I had to check the walkthrough again to SHOUT HUMMINGBIRD. This reveals a door…
…and I had to check the walkthrough yet again, but in my defense the walkthrough author had a lot of trouble here too. The keypad suggests you’re supposed to enter 1983, but the right sequence is PUSH BUTTON followed by PUSH 1983. We’re almost done!
Further onward is a room with a RING, a HANDKERCHIEF, and a wall that has a smudge. WIPE WALL is sufficient to reveal a hummingbird.
Then you can PUT RING and find yourself mysteriously back at the beach.
You are restricted from doing anything other than picking up that coconut from the start of the game we weren’t allowed to touch before. And voila:
The game leaves the interpretation up the player, as this follows directly with credits.
(Scrolling, so I’ve concatenated some screens together.)
Rob did some sleuthing in the comments to help narrow down who everyone is. First off, 1983 is the year a different company (Starcraft) started publishing translations of the Sierra On-Line games into Japanese (including Time Zone with all the screens redrawn!) They also later re-did the Sirius games Kabul Spy and Blade of Blackpoole, and on the packaging for Blade of Blackpoole there’s some helpful information:
This discusses Masanori and Etsuko Takano, a team of programmers the profile compares to Ken and Roberta Williams. It mentions that after their first two games (The Palms and Knight of Wonderland) they formed their own company so they could work from home. Knight of Wonderland has a more straightforward list of credits:
Directed by: ｱｯﾄ ﾏ-ｸ
Program by: DR.KASARI
Graphic Design by: Hiroshi & Etsuko
Color Design by: Etsuko & Yuta
Coopelation: Ryuchan & Masako
Mamoru, founder of Humming Bird Soft, almost certainly was the producer of both games, so he was “ｱｯﾄ ﾏ-ｸ”, that is, “at mark” or “@”. Hiroshi, the brother, also wrote the scenario; he’s listed as working on Graphic Design in the credits for The Palms (maybe the scenario too, but uncredited?). Dr. Kasari must be referring to Masanori and Etsuko Takano; Etsuko is also given as working on graphics, and “Yuta” who is cited as doing color design must be Yutaka Kawamura (the one who was art director on Knight of Wonderland).
There’s some more clearing up to do, but I figure it can wait until Humming Bird returns again in 1983 with Knight of Wonderland.
Even if it was terrible to play, it would hold a novel place as really being Japan’s first game in the absolute style of the Apple II imports (excluding, again, The Odyssey which arrived slightly before). However, I generally enjoyed myself despite the language difficulties and the gauntlet of parser issues near the end.
While I’ve mentioned both Sierra and Micro Cabin references, this game also clearly points to Omotesando Adventure as well. What Omotesando established is a very in-joke sort of game where the player is dealing with the company that made the game; here, the Hummingbird references start from the very first screen and the player is clearly infiltrating “the temple of the Hummingbird” in the same manner as sabotage in Omotosando. It still comes off as the Japanese industry in their final “learning phase” and things are going to get much stranger as we get deeper into 1983. For the most part, because I already have them sorted, I will be trying to follow the history chronological by month.
If you’d like to jump ahead, the Game Preservation Society in Japan did a writeup of the game Recapture, a game that diverged from fantasy into satire.
The protagonist, a researcher at Fly Pharmaceuticals, is a young man who is putting all he has into a “100% Perfect Male Contraceptive” (according to the manual). He succeeds and creates the male contraceptive “Kondoh-Muyo” (literally “condomless”). However, rival company Mosquito Pharmaceuticals will not take this lying down and steals the research files from our protagonist while he is out drunk while celebrating.
Also, special thanks to the folks at Gaming Alexandria who helped me through some language troubles.
Last time I left off having trouble with getting both the ring (for the girlfriend) and a diving suit (apparently needed due to the kidnapping). The solution is off the verb list…
…but unless I missed something (more likely than usual given the circumstances) it isn’t clued that this is even possible.
The right word is RENT. You can BUY RING and then RENT DIVINGSUIT and then move on from there. (The player starts with 95 credits; you can BUY DIVINGSUIT for 95 and not have any for the ring, but this causes the timed loss like avoiding giving the ring altogether eventually does.)
Immediately after the kidnapping, you can WEAR DIVINGSUIT and then go north into the water.
Before exploring, I wanted to highlight something that’s been showing on the images I haven’t pointed out yet: notice in the lower right there’s a N or a S. This is showing which way the player is facing. Just because the game is trying hard to be a Roberta Williams Hi-Res Adventure (and you’ll see more of this in a moment), doesn’t mean it went completely without other inspiration; I’m fairly certain the reason “facing direction” got added was influence from Micro Cabin Mystery House, which is done in a first-person view akin to Wizardry.
One other thing to highlight is that death has been ambiguous. Nearly all the adventure games we’ve seen (including the Japanese ones we have played) have been explicit about what has caused player death, and sometimes have been even gleeful about it, such that the main plot is in the death scenes (see: The Domes of Kilgari). For the early deaths, the game just cuts things short and gives the equivalent of a “keep going!” message (頑張ろう, that is, ganbaru) while warping the player back to the start.
The first time I died I thought maybe I got swept in the water, not that the girlfriend’s scene was timed. Maybe it’s not even meant as a death but a “time reverse”? Either way, part of my early confusion was just realizing what was wrong. The first event trigger (if you don’t enter the shop) allows some time; the second (enter the shop, but haven’t bought the ring) is short; the third (after you have the ring) gives a little more time again. After the kidnapping there’s yet another timer running for getting the DIVINGSUIT and going in (now fairly short, and again with no detail why you just lost).
Again, using the same vibe from Roberta Williams, we have a grid where only some of the squares are important. Again, I have mixed feelings on this; one surely would expect underwater to be big and contain some locations that are empty of anything more than fish.
Especially for a player of this era, just moving around an environment and seeing graphics change as you move can be an engrossing experience.
Still, the actual game effect is to make the player treat the map as a lawnmower, mopping up each square, sometimes using alternate lives if one dies for inexplicable reasons. Still, the density isn’t too bad; this is maybe halfway between Time Zone and The Dark Crystal in terms of number of “interesting” rooms. (To be clear, The Dark Crystal wasn’t out yet; I’m just trying to describe the feel.)
Heading immediately east is a knife. (If you haven’t noticed yet, all takeable items are drawn in a white square.)
Tracing around the border and heading due north, eventually (five turns later) you’ll find a skeleton with a bottle.
Keep turning and there’s a cave to the north; try to enter and you’ll get another one of those vague, unclear deaths. (Is it simply a trap to avoid? Will it work if I get a light because I’m bonking my head? Or is it more like a creature I can’t see?)
West and south from the above area is a RUIN. You can go in and find an altar with the Humming Bird Soft logo and a blue ring that looks like it matches the red ring. It looks like the kidnapping may have been due to magic afoot in the antique ring we bought, rather than coincidental circumstance.
South a bit and there’s a SHARK. Fortunately, the KNIFE picked up earlier works to KILL SHARK (it prompts with what, you need to type WITH KNIFE). If you just try to hang out with the shark, eventually you’ll die, and again — no description of being chomped, you just get told to MAKE MORE EFFORT.
With the shark out of the way you can see the thing behind, which is a SLATE. I think it is meant to deliver the clue we are supposed to SHOUT somewhere to scare something off?
This has been moving in a spiral, so let’s mop up the last “interesting” spot which is just north of the starting point; I haven’t been able to get anything to happen here but it does invoke the English word (ROCK) which seems like a hint something ought to happen.
Finally, spiraling a bit more, we arrive at a shipwreck.
Entering is one way (as far as I can tell, there may be some parser nonsense).
The layout ends up having five doors, three which can immediately be opened while using the nail remover. (The double room aspect is again reminiscent of Micro Cabin rather than Sierra.) To the immediate west of the entrance is an octopus (the knife doesn’t work this time, and before you ask, yelling/shouting doesn’t help either, we are in a diving suit though):
To the east is a dark room which the game refuses entry; in this case I assume it has to be a light source issue. (The text just says you can’t go that way.)
At the end of the hall the west and north doors don’t open, but the east one goes into a bar where you can find wine in a CABINET, but you’re still stuck (I can’t even get out of the bar, let alone the wrecked ship).
Despite the Japanese text, this does give me the vibe of a lost Sierra On-Line game, with the same quirks and absurdities. Roberta Williams was never afraid to describe deaths, though, but at least with a shark or octopus I can guess what happens.
I’m lacking access to Takara B. D. Adventure (Micro Cabin again, same month as Diamond Adventure) and Odyssey Part 1 (Prosumer, squeaking in right at the end of the year and written for PC-88 with a Kanji ROM). One day!
While Diamond Adventure and Takara have notable connections with both Omotesando and Mystery House, and there are a few games (like The Spy) from 1983 that are linked, the industry mostly moved in different directions. Today’s game reflects that, completing an origin trilogy of sorts for Japanese adventure gaming.
Via Giant Bomb.
1980s Japan had a “bubble” in real estate, especially in the city of Tokyo; in 1990 the Harvard Business Review pointed out that just (in terms of real estate value) the ward of Chiyoda-ku alone could purchase the entire country of Canada.
The other city typically cited as benefitting from the bubble? Osaka, home of the real estate company M・A・C.
Mamoru Imanishi was in the Computer Division, and significantly, a son of the CEO. While he got his start in computers with a TK-80 kit…
…his true beloved was an Apple II; he ran a club devoted to the system and was familiar with import games. He somehow wrangled (see: son of CEO) a separate store and software line in late 1982 called Humming Bird Soft; they started with some PC-88 and Apple II graphics and utility software. Joining Mamoru Imanishi was his brother (Hiroshi Imanishi) and a small team.
The best scan I have at the moment of a February 1984 article in ASCII. It looks like today’s game has credits in the data file but I don’t want to poke too hard at it until I’ve finished.
They made their big splash in January in 1983 with The Palms for Fujitsu’s FM-8 (later FM-7).
Source. The FM-8 was Fujitsu’s first fully built computer but it was thought of as a “business machine”. Hence, a bifurcation happened after with Fujitsu’s follow-ups, the FM-11 being the business computer and the FM-7 being for general consumers. The NEC PC-88, Sharp X1, and FM-7 are the three 8-bit Japanese computers “casual” retro-gamers will likely run across.
The slow rendering speed on the PC-88 (and similarity between Fujitsu’s and Apple’s CPU) led them to make this hardware choice; what was even more daring was that they made the game solely for disk. Quoting Mamoru Imanishi:
I was anxious. After all, it’s a world where you can’t see the future. And I wondered: what extent would there be a demand for disks? I was unsure until the very end if cassettes would be better.
Omotesando introduced adventures, Mystery House introduced graphics, but The Palms goes back to the source — the Apple II Sierra On-Line games — and set a technical standard by a.) being in color and b.) being written for and only published on disk.
(What about the Odyssey game by Prosumer? It landed only a month before, and was in color, but worked on cassette and was allegedly quite slow. I will investigate whenever I get a copy, but for now just note it did not have the same impact The Palms did.)
We are at a seaside village for our girlfriend’s birthday. She’s been wanting a ring at the local shop; we’ve arrived with money saved from hard work. She awaits under a palm tree, but something is about to go wrong.
(Text above: “I’m in front of a seaside shop.”)
The village is laid out like a Sierra-style grid; the only directions are the cardinal ones and up and down (no diagonals).
While I’m at it, in addition to the directions I just mentioned, here’s the entire verb list (as extracted from the data file) — still following my policy of giving myself verb lists early on games in languages I’m not good at.
Ignore the appointment and wander around and you’ll eventually lose; the right thing to do is go into the shop, which offers a RING and a DIVINGSUIT…
…then BUY RING, and find the palm.
Giving the ring…
…is immediately followed by a kidnapping.
I haven’t gotten much farther than this. One last item is a NAILPULLER out in the open…
…but the only other item I’ve found is in the shop, and there’s not enough cash remaining to buy the diving suit.
There’s also a church with a locked door…
…and two cliffs, neither of which want to be climbed.
It looks like our destiny is to chase the damsel in distress under the ocean and have further shenanigans from there.
Just getting oriented has been slow going; it doesn’t help that the font is stylized in a way that seems designed to give headaches. On that last screenshot, the character before the period is a タ (“ta”). I sort of see it after the fact, but it’s taken puzzling above and beyond the adventure game puzzles created by the authors. Fluent Japanese readers are welcome to chip in with how readable they’ve found the text.
Fortunately, the pictures generally are clear. I’m essentially in the reverse position of the early Japanese pioneers playing import Apple II games with dictionaries by their side, scrounging in wonder at a new art form.
I finished on the Amstrad version, which runs a little faster and does seem to be nearly identical (comparing against the walkthrough by Garry Francis). Even that ancient manuscript I mentioned counted for essentially nil: there are no glasses to read it. I’m not sure why the author even added it in, other than a general love of red herrings; the dog, hammer, dynamite, bulldozer, and rubbish bin all signify nothing other than the debris of the British countryside.
Cover of the magazine the game first appeared in, via eBay.
My two issues (the missing treasure, and the heavy lid I suspected hid a treasure) both had their solution nearby. The lid straightforwardly opened with the “sharp sword” at the mansion, no hammer or dynamite needed.
I don’t know what the “sorry” is about, sometimes the parser printed that randomly.
I mentioned mushrooms I was not able to pick up last time. This is an Amstrad-specific bug. The game does not let you type GET MUSHROOMS or even GET MUSHROOM (it just re-displays the room over again). You need to type GET MUSH or GET MUSHR. I assume there’s some length limit I’m hitting. (The Oric does not have this problem! I’d consequently say the Oric is less buggy but Garry may have fixed the mushroom while he was busy fixing the general can’t-pick-anything-up bug. It’s all just a mess, let’s just leave it at that.)
With the mushrooms, er, MUSH in hand, you can deliver them to the gamekeeper nearby. Again, GIVE MUSHROOMS fails, it needs to be GIVE MUSH.
This is the only place a spacesuit is mentioned. I don’t know how the kissing worked.
That puts us at a full list, now it’s just a matter of getting all the objects over in one save file. This was slightly tedious but made somewhat less so by the discovery that PRAY rotates through locations a bit at random; after making a delivery I did PRAY until I was close to my next targets. I did still have to tote a BOAT all over the map twice.
Item pile in progress.
I didn’t even get to drop my last treasure, this displayed with the camera still in my inventory. I wonder if the game is bugged so you leave one treasure behind you can still win the game.
There’s no puzzle for entering the spaceship. I suppose the power of friendship was within us all along.
This was a lot of words for a type-in (mind you, that’s the style of this blog) but it’s worth a close look for if nothing else not only did Steve Lucas publish many games, he published at least two “how to write adventure games” books, one for MSX and one for Amstrad. If his style evolves over time we need his starting point accounted for. I’m hoping over the process I can shake a few more biographical details loose (what was his past background? what happened to him during the 90s?)
But for now: our first Japanese game for 1983, one considered a landmark work.
From the cover of Games Magazine November 1984, with the Amstrad version of Space Traveller / Visitor from Space, although this particular illustration is meant to go with a different game, Interplanetary Miner. Mind you, I think they’re just pulling from the same stock archive of space pictures for both.
As promised, I went through the Amstrad version of the game, with some places having expanded text. I don’t think any of the text helped me with puzzle-solving, but it did make combing over the map less repetitive since things looked slightly different.
Just west of the start. The original just describes it as a field, without the extra textual hint about digging; if I hadn’t found the treasure already this would be a case where the expanded text was helpful.
No busker (or Beatles reference) in the original.
Outside the warehouse, previously with no mention of dark glass.
There was one genuine change in content (that I’ve seen so far): an ancient manuscript in the warehouse (seen above) which originally just had a box. Like the newspapers and poetry book, it can’t be read without glasses.
I guess you can also count the Oric in the computer shop changing to an Amstrad; would expect that one.
I did reach two new areas, but before describing those, two quick treasure finds, the first being right at the opening with the pebbles. EXAMINE PEBBLES reveal a zirconium nugget.
Additionally, back at the bus stop, if you WAIT at the queue you will eventually be able to get on, and while on the trip there will be a roman coin you can scoop up. (This incidentally takes you to the north part of the map without praying. The other option — adjacent to the bus — is a taxi where you can GO TAXI to do the same thing, but no coin on the way.)
So treasure count wise, that makes five so far: silver bar (dug in the field), zirconium nugget (pebbles), roman coin (bus), gold pen (teacher), and rocket fuel (hut, using key). The rocket key ends up not counting towards the ten treasures (despite it having asterisks) but I’m counting it anyway meaning we’re at 5 out of 11. I’ve got 4 more secured, plus 1 probable location, so I’m close to the end, but close isn’t all the way.
First, let’s go back to the lake by the hut, where I previously did ROW BOAT. Checking each room carefully, I realized SWIM was also a verb that could apply there, and it led me to an entirely new destination.
The landing point is a beach with sunbathers. Back at the store (in the Amstrad game it is described as a “Tesco”) there was a lighter at a store that couldn’t be grabbed because it was by the register and our alien visitor has no Earth money; however, farther away in the same store there’s some suntan lotion and baked beans that are apparently out of the eye of any watchful cashiers. GIVE LOTION to the sunbathers and you’ll get a CAMERA (treasure #6).
Just to the east there is a dead body, just because this is a gonzo adventure and tonal shift is just its thing.
Dying alone and unnamed. Searching reveals nothing. Oddly, unlike the boat trip which is one way, you can just swim back across the lake.
The cliff I’d been looking for! With the parachute (first getting chastised by the parser for trying WEAR PARACHUTE, it just assumes you have it on implicitly) I was able to land safely.
Just to the east is a crab (taking it gets you chomped: death); a few rooms away in a “dark forest” is a “gnome” that is, I quote, “the sort they sell at Woolworth’s”. GET GNOME:
In the middle of a dark forest, putting us back in On the Way to the Interview for a moment.
Between the gnome and crab is a “sandy cove” with a “driftwood” that is hiding a diamond ring (treasure #7).
To get out of the region (without PRAY) there’s a narrow ledge which requires a ROPE. The implication here is that walking through the section takes up two inventory slots already (parachute + rope) so getting the ring + the driftwood requires two separate parachute runs through (maybe the driftwood doesn’t do anything, but I don’t know that yet!) If there’s some way to handle the crab and/or gnome it requires bringing in objects to test one at a time.
Now is a good time to mention the three-item limit is an incredible pain. Either the boat (alone) or the parachute and rope (together) are needed to move from the north to south side of the map, so in a practical sense the inventory limit is either 1 or 2, and so testing any theory about bring an item X to a spot Y requires a lot of shuffling. The size of map really does influence the level of suffering involved with a small inventory limit; a good recent example of this is Mystery House II, where the two-item limit applied in all versions. In the MSX version it was irksome (the entire house was always accessible) but more workable in the versions split into multiple volumes (as they only involved a smaller portion of the house).
Moving past all that, I mentioned I found a second area. Down at the farm there’s a “pigsty” which I thought was merely a dead end, but it is possible to GO IN.
The way to get by the pig is simply to PUSH PIG knocking it over, cow-tipping style.
Past a long tunnel is a mansion. I have yet to use the sword for anything.
This is followed by a fairly dense area where I doubt everything ends up coming into play, but let’s do bullet points:
a garden with a gate and a “garden snake”
a “gamekeeper” in a clearing
some mushrooms in a woods (they don’t seem to be takeable)
a platinum bar (remember that trolley from the farmer who liked poetry? you need it to pick up the bar)
a lead casket (you need something to open it; dunno what yet, see inventory limit)
a woman in a field (trying to KISS this one results in getting slapped, I guess this isn’t Earth Girls are Easy)
a large monument with a radio transmitter, another treasure
Finally at the end (drumroll) there’s the spaceship! Except I don’t know how to get in. Forgot my remote and the app stopped working, I suppose.
In the end all the puzzles have been straightforward (except PUSH PIG was pretty odd) but the spread out nature of the map makes things hard to test. I still need to check: blowing things up with dynamite (and can the lighter be taken somehow?), dealing with the dog outside the store, taking various objects like the hammer over to the lead casket, seeing if the gamekeeper will take something, nudging at the mushrooms some more, and even more things I’ve lost track of. This is a lot more work than I expected from an Oric type-in.
I have been sent on a difficult and rather dangerous mission to a distant planet called EARTH. My mission is to locate ten items of treasure and bring them back to my spaceship. I will, in addition, need to locate some rocket fuel for my return journey.
My random roll has landed me on the works of Steve W. Lucas, perhaps best thought of as Britain’s answer to Peter Kirsch. That is, a wildly prolific author who wrote reams of slightly janky BASIC code but with flashes of creativity just naturally from cranking out bucketloads of content. He has 41 hits on CASA but some of those are duplicates — when porting from one system to another he would often change his game’s title and only sometimes change his content. It’s unclear how many distinct games he wrote and it may even depend on your definition of “distinct”; there’s a long thread at CASA that tried to tame the chaos but there still seems to be some confusion. The other comparison with Kirsch of note is how he worked with a wide variety of computers: MSX, Oric, Amstrad, and BBC Micro.
With Journey of a Space Traveller, it first appeared in Oric Owner (Aug./Sept. 1983) but got changed to A Visitor From Space in a 1984 printing for Amstrad, with some expansion of the text. The intro at the top of this post is from the Amstrad version; the Oric version instead starts “I have been sent on the first flight from my planet to the planet Earth” which I think has less punch than “rather dangerous mission to a distant planet called EARTH.” However, I’ve been playing (up to where I’ve been stumped) the Oric version; as is tradition with multi-version games, I might poke at the Amstrad version to see if there’s any tweaks or textual hints to help (allegedly the walkthrough is the same, at least).
The Oric is a new system for this blog. I’m not going to do a system history right now, but I’ll say it is Tangerine’s much more successful follow-up to the Microtan 65 and was particularly well-received in France as it didn’t need an adaptor for their SECAM television format.
It is likely his first published game but I’m not 100% certain; it is his first to appear in Oric Owner, at least, but he also published some BBC Micro software through Silverlind; the first ad for that I’ve found in November, with a “call for games” back in May.
From the Oric magazine original.
The other distinctive thing about his games — specifically the Oric Owner ones but maybe some of the others as well — is how buggy they are. None of the ones printed in Oric Owner work directly as printed; Garry has a patched version that’s needed to get past even the first command. This is the sort of thing I’d normally blame on the magazine rather than the author but it’s odd for it to occur multiple times; the author has two games in the December/January issue with the same problem.
Games Computing, November 1984, with a slightly higher art budget. Well, higher art budget for printing, but given the art has nothing to do with the game I think it was “borrowed” from elsewhere.
The instructions helpfully give the verbs (this seems to be common across all the Steve Lucas games) so I’ll give them, just as they were printed:
GO IN, GO OUT, GO TAXI, OUT, N, S, E, W, WAIT, SING, SAVE, WEAR, SCORE, ROW, SAIL, THROW, LIGHT, GET, TAKE, GRAB, CLIMB, DOWN, READ, **** OFF, TIME, DIG, HELP, SEARCH, DROP, LEAVE, GIVE, OPEN, PHONE, QUIT, LOOK, KISS, PRAY, LOAD, CLOAD, PUSH, PULL, EAT, ATTACK, HIT, KILL, EXAMINE, SWIM, USE, INSERT, UNLOCK, WEAR, JUMP, INVENTORY, BUY, CRACK, COOK, SORRY, SAIL, ROW
(****, OFF not required, gets “how dare you speak to me like that? What do you have to say for yourself?” and you need to respond SORRY before proceeding on.)
It’s a traditional treasure hunt, but with the twists that a.) you are an alien and b.) you’re treasure-hunting on modern Earth. Adventure-behavior — especially without regular communication with characters — is typically a bit non-standard, so I like the idea of the mute protagonist poking and searching every room (digging random floors, hitting walls, trying to climb everything, etc.) being explained away by their alien status.
I don’t know where the spaceship is; part of the goal is to find it. This is a major pain in that the inventory limit is three (weak alien arms, I guess we’re used to lower-G) so I have no idea where to stash things so they’ll be close for their inevitable unloading into a cargo bay of some sort.
Right to the east of the starting point are some pebbles and a shovel…
The Amstrad version adds “The pebbles hurt my feet!” but I haven’t gone past this room.
…and the shovel can be used just to the west to dig up some SILVER bullion, our first treasure. Nine to go!
Heading to the east, there’s a quarry with a hammer, and nearby is some dynamite and a parachute. I have yet to blow anything up (I think it needs a lighter I’ll show off later) nor have I found the right place to apply the hammer and parachute (…presumably not at the same time). There’s additionally dead ends with a Sheer Rock Face and Bulldozer but I haven’t quite worked out yet if this is an “everything is important” style game or some parts are just scenery. I’m leaning to the latter.
A rope is at a bridge (again, haven’t used) leading to a “primary school”. The school has a secretary which you can kiss (the game says she likes it, indicating we’re an alien counterpart to Riker) and a head teacher who has a GOLD pen, another treasure. Examining the teacher reveals they like singing (alien senses, I suppose) and SING will utilize the Oric’s speaker to play a tune, after which you can get the pen. Eight more to go.
Leaving the school (swiping a book of poetry for later, we can’t read it because we need glasses) and proceeding westward we can find a locket hut at a boat. I’ll mention right now there’s a key laying out in the open later used on the hut which contains *ROCKET FUEL* (seven to go); the boat needs to be carted a short way to a lake where ROW BOAT can be applied. Note that the three-item limit applies neutrally, so a LARGE KEY is the same size as the boat in inventory.
The trip over water landing at the Footpath (see upper right of above map) is one-way; the only way so far I’ve found to return to the start area is PRAY, which warps you over for some reason. (Religious miracles: alien technology all along!) The PRAY is quite relevant insofar as just to the west you can get lost in a forest that’s an endless loop, and as far as I know PRAY is the only way to get out.
Proceeding in a direction that isn’t a trap passes through a warehouse with a box (nothing in it), and that leads to a carpark, and then a bunch of directions from there, like a bus station complete with queue…
Only in a Britgame.
…a computer store with software you can LOAD…
…a fish and chip shop…
…and a closed newsagent place with newspapers that can’t be read because you still need your glasses. (If this was logical you’d have left them on your spaceship by accident, but I can’t rule out some random passerby’s reading glasses working just as well.)
Nearby all this lurks a LARGE KEY at an intersection which goes back to that hut with the rocket fuel; as I already indicated, the only way I can find so far to head back there is to PRAY.
Moving on to the west, we can pass by a rubbish bin (seemingly containing nothing!) near a supermarket.
To the west of here is a lighter at the cashier. I can try to BUY LIGHTER but the game asks “with what?” Maybe use one of the treasures and get it back later somehow? I still need to experiment.
Lurking outside the supermarket is a dog; no idea what to do here yet…
…followed by a bunch of rooms leading to a farm complete with tractor and a farmer. The farmer wants a book, so if you hand the poetry book over he’ll give you a trolley, because this game is following gonzo logic.
To be fair, the “I’m an alien” does a lot of the work in making the narrative seem semi-normal for an out-of-control treasure hunt. However, I am up on my limit now at only three treasures.
I’m not going to list every obstacle because I don’t know which ones are “real” and which ones are for scenery. Does the forest have a different escape? What can you do at the bus station? Does making the dog happy lead to treasure? This might be the extent of the map and I’m just supposed to mop things up (akin to Invincible Island) or I may have only seen part of it. Given the parachute (and distinct lack of gaping chasms) surely there’s at least a bit more to go. Maybe the supermarket is secretly the alien spaceship.
Renga in Blue 
