Erect and sublime, for one moment of time,
In the next, that wild figure they saw
(As if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm,
While they waited and listened in awe.
From the original printing of The Hunting of the Snark.
To continue directly from last time, I need to do a slight correction, as Paul Ingerson pointed out I missed a hint. I thought the wand’s effect was unclued, but it is described as having “mystic runes”, and you can READ it:
The runes on the wand say:
“Though bold in name
They flee in shame!”
Since kobold has the letters “bold” in the name, that is supposed to hint at the wand’s effect being to make kobolds run in fear.
As Hamil is a game without an EXAMINE verb, I wasn’t thinking of getting more information off a particular object. (Also, “mystic runes” I usually don’t think of as English letters!)
Now, let’s rewind to the start, where I had found a slab written with O’GRAM, and dropped into a crypt…
…as Paul (again) surmised, this was meant to hint at CRYPTOGRAM. (This is a puzzle I solved last time but I wanted to see where it was going before I reported in.) Specifically, the crypt looks like this:
You are in a crypt below the chapel, a dank and musty chamber. Sinister passages lead to the east and west, and there is a hole in the south wall. There are some steps up here, but they lead nowhere.
On the wall is scrawled the following legend:
TPM WNLLZSAY HL YAMNY
That’s a rather short cryptogram to solve straight out (and I confirmed there was no simple Caesar shift going on) and in fact I ran about the map a bit before coming back to it, but I found that just to the east there was a major hint:
> E
You are in a short passage, which enters from the west and terminates in a large metal door with no obvious means of opening. The door bears the legend
HE WHO WISHES TO PROCEED FURTHER MUST SPEAK THE PASSWORD
This was a major enough hint I immediately realized the message had to be THE PASSWORD IS … something. Y was D, A was R, M was E, and N was A, so the word was DREAD, and saying it caused the door to open. This word is incidentally randomized on new playthroughs.
This led to a room where, oddly, the only thing I could find was a large tapestry (too big to carry, even) where picking it up opened a window to the sun outside.
You pull down the tapestry from the wall, exposing a small window, far above your reach, through which the sun is shining and a refreshing breeze is blowing.
Where realization struck is that not far off was a coffin with a vampire (the one depicted on the cover above).
You lift the lid of the coffin to reveal an elegantly dressed corpse.
Its eyes snap open and it smiles thirstily at you. The vampire (for such it is) then leaps from the coffin, drops something it was carrying, and moves towards you with fangs bared.
The vampire starts chasing you. The trick is to having the password-room open but have not yet pulled the tapestry; then get the vampire chasing, lead him to the sunlight room, and let him have the full blast.
A ray of light hits the vampire, who emits a ghastly screech and then literally crumbles into dust, which is dispersed by a draught from the window.
Heading back to the vampire’s coffin, I found some documents in a language my avatar couldn’t read, and the documents were notably not a treasure. I stashed them away and merrily did some more mapping / puzzle solving before running across their use more or less by accident. I happened to have them in my inventory when I was exploring an open court next to a “museum”.
You are at the western end of the court. There is a portal leading out at this side,above which are inscribed the words:
THE RIGHTFUL HEIR TO THE KINGDOM OF HAMIL
WILL BE KNOWN BY HIS DEEDS
A lowered portcullis blocks the exit.
> W
The sentries see at once that you are carrying the deeds to castle Hamil, bow respectfully to you, and raise the portcullis.
You are in the entrance hall to Castle Hamil, which is filled with knights who greet you as their lord. To the north there is a passage into a small vault.
The vault is where the treasures go, although for some curious reason, there’s a garlic stashed there already (not a treasure, and I’ll explain where it’s useful later).
The whole court/museum area is pretty dense with interesting items and puzzles.
Location 1 has a huge egg which hatches into a dragon; there’s a forest area to the south with a cave blocked by “an impenetrable mass of undergrowth” and you can deposit the egg there, and find later the dragon has hatched (and burned away the undergrowth) but won’t let you by. You can alternately be there when the egg hatches and find the dragon wants to be friends with you, except that being friends is also fatal:
Suddenly the egg you are carrying gives a loud CRACK, the shell splits, and a baby dragon emerges. It purrs happily at you, unfortunately giving you third degree burns in the process. In fact the dragon’s attempt to make friends merely results in your demise.
My suspicion is that being at the cave with egg hatching is correct, but you need to survive friendship (at which point the dragon will let you by into the cave), but that’s only 60% confidence or so.
Location 2 has a talisman which says OBLIVION. OBLIVION is an understood verb but I haven’t gotten it to do anything (with or without the talisman). The talisman also has the odd effect of randomly being “left behind” when you go a particular direction, meaning you need to backtrack and pick it back up if you want to keep it. I’ve found two uses for it I’ll get into later.
Location 3 has a hard-to-pick-up treasure
There is a huge marble statue by Michaelangelo here!
where getting the statue indicates “You can’t take that!” I assume the hugeness is the issue here. Perhaps some magic will allow transport into the vault, or perhaps it can be shrunk down? I don’t think this is a puzzle I’m ready to solve yet.
Location 4 has a easy-to-pick-up treasure
There is a large curved object here, elegantly carved by skilled craftsmen from the wood of the sacred tree of Hamil!
and it may just be there for stuffing into the vault, but it feels mystical enough I get the intuition this doubles as a useful object somewhere. (It does not seem to be secretly a boomerang, or at least, THROW WOOD doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary.)
Location 5 has a jackdaw flying around with a shiny object. I haven’t been able to grab its attention. (Also, in my current playthrough it is in the east court rather than center, indicating either I made a mapping mistake or there’s something random about the positioning.)
Location 6 leads down to the Snarks.
You are in an east-west passage. There is a sign reading “TO THE SNARKS” and an arrow pointing east.
> E
The passage comes to a dead end here, but there is a hole in the floor.
> D
You are in a curiously constructed room. There are steep passages leading down from here in all eight horizontal directions, each labelled “TO THE SNARK”. There is also a hole in the roof, through which you will have no trouble returning.
The directions all lead to downward stairs, where a message is revealed slowly, Burma-Shave style.
You are in a steep twisting passage. On the wall is daubed the word “UNFORTUNATELY”.
> D
You are in a steep twisting passage. On the wall is daubed the word “SNARKS”.
etc., leading to UNFORTUNATELY SNARKS HAVE TO BE KEPT DEEP IN THE GROUND. Going down one more time is then death.
> D
In the room there is a Snark burbling frumiously to itself. As you approach, it roars like a Bandersnatch. “Oh no, it’s a Boojum!” you gasp, as you softly and suddenly vanish away.
(I like how my spellcheck understands Boojum but not frumiously.)
The only major observation I’ve made is that all eight directions seem to lead to the same set of downwards stairs. Normally I would have trouble being sure of that, because dropping items cause them softly and suddenly vanish away, but the talisman from earlier is an exception: if it drops on its own, it doesn’t count as regular dropping, and then you can confirm by hopping into other directions that you’re going down the same set of stairs to reach it. (That doesn’t mean there isn’t some weird flag set by doing some trick with the eight directions, but resolving whatever is happening doesn’t get fixed by just being in a specific set of rooms.)
Speaking of the talisman, let’s get down to the other use I spoke of, which is at the same forest area as the baby dragon that can burn the entrance to a cave.
To the south is a sleepy-time grove. I don’t know what it’s useful for.
You enter a luxurious grove in which the atmosphere is so heady that you fall asleep almost at once. You awake shortly afterwards with no (apparent) after-effects.
You are in a luxurious grove which contains an abundance of beautiful plants. The sun is shining, birds twitter, bees hum… in fact the whole atmosphere is soporific in the extreme. Now awake, you find it difficult to remain so. The only exit is back to the north.
To the east is the previously mentioned cave, and to the west is the nastiest maze of the game I’ve yet encountered.
Three spirits appear in front of you. They claim to be the servants of the Maize Goddess, Mecohuatl, and promptly bear you away as a sacrifice to their deity.
It’s a maize maze, and for a long time I kept getting attacked by spirits as shown seemingly at random. After a lot of experimentation I finally realized the oblivion talisman gave protection, as long as you either carried it or it was in the current room. That means if you’ve dropped the talisman, you’re safe as long as you can go right back to where the talisman was. The maze, unfortunately, is the irregular kind where directions back are not obvious, and you can’t even use the in-game command BACK (“I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how you got here!”).
It’s hard to convey how distressing the whole experience was. Some exits jump back in the “path” by two or more rooms, so you really want to be dropping extra objects in rooms so you can keep track of Room 1, Room 2, etc. Also, the only way to save is to backtrack out of the maze entirely.
Let’s just say an “enormous” number of clone bodies were sacrificed before I reached the end, which was just a treasure (a Van Gogh painting). Once you actually have it settled, the procedure is to try to walk through with the talisman, and every time you drop it, go back to the previous room and pick it up.
There’s still also a few other scattered puzzles through the map, either addressed or unaddressed. In one room an enchanter seduces (?) you, Odysseus style, but kills you in the process. The proper procedure is to eat garlic beforehand (remember from the vault?) so she is repulsed, and then you can grab the emeralds she leaves behind.
Other random bits and bobs include: a six-legged creature who is crying for their mother, and who you can pick up; a “fish room” with “pictures of fish of every description… turbot, halibut, you name it”; a wall of fire; a bottle with a “djinn” that offers to help “if it be in my power” when set free, but I’ve yet to see an effect; a pit with a “furry arm” that comes out and kills you if you try to jump over; a rocky plain that is “heavily cratered” and trying to walk in any direction results in the earth opening up and swallowing you.
Then there’s this bit, which quite irregularly has a bicycle wheel, and more ominously, has randomization:
> SE
You are in a small room with exits to the southeast and northwest. The whole of one wall is taken up with a large painted mural, which shows the explorations of Columbus and Peary.
There is a bicycle wheel here.
> SE
As you leave the room, a disembodied voice whispers ‘Do not pause!’
You are in the large orbicular chamber.
The mural in particular is randomized. It changes the explorers upon entering the room, or even just has one explorer; it could be, for example, Captain Scott and Marco Polo. In a 90s game I might think this was just a way to add flavor, but in a Phoenix game, this is most definitely some kind of hint, probably connected with “do not pause”. I’ve tried to connect this even with the snark but still haven’t had any luck.
Another Hunting of the Snark picture for good measure.
One last piece of irritation before I close out; it’s something I’ve run across since the beginning of the game, and have finally decided has no logic to it at all other than to kill me personally. If you stay in the same room too long you die.
While you are wondering what to do next, a giant centipede scuttles in and gives you a poisonous bite in the leg.
There are various other deaths, including via anteater. I thought things couldn’t be that simple and perhaps there were “safe zones” or the like, but no, this seems (as far as I can tell) to be a consistent effect found everywhere in the game. I guess the idea is to encourage moving forward, but usually when this was originally hitting I was just organizing my inventory or trying to test out room exits. I have learned now when checking exits (that is, double-checking going, say, northwest is really is blocked off, even though it’s not in the room description) to leave and come back to the room I’m testing every so often in order to stave off death by anteater.
In most normal play the death doesn’t come up, but my pattern of hanging out in a room and fiddling with each of my inventory objects in turn or just trying random verbs is usually what I do when I’m stuck, so the main effect of the feature is to throw me off my groove. Still, I’m managing to hang on without hints so far, but I suspect the latter half of the game will have at least a few demons as puzzle somewhere.
They formed their own ecosystem of sorts, where none of the games were yet visible to the commercial public. The were only played by the small group of mathematicians making them in the first place. 1982 is the year that self-containment changes, with works starting to be published by local company Acornsoft.
1982 was also the year that Johnathan R. Partington (who worked on Acheton) went on a prolific streak with three games in one year: Avon, Murdac, and our choice for today, Hamil.
This game is allegedly easier than the cranium-crushing puzzle-fests of the prior games, but given this is being assessed relative to the hardest quartet of adventures I’ve ever seen, “easier” might mean still on the medium-tough side.
Image from the Acornsoft version of the game, via Every Game Going.
While I’ll be sharing some images of commercial versions (the one by Acornsoft I’ve already mentioned, and one published later by Topologika) I’m playing the direct port of the mainframe version as ported into z-code. (Here’s a link for direct on-line play.) The major obvious difference between the earlier mainframe version and the commercial versions is in the intro, which in the original is short and enigmatic…
You have discovered that the outside world is dangerous. Pursued for many days and nights by hordes of hostile beings, you have arrived, breathless, at a sanctuary. It seems that you are trapped, as it would be foolhardy to venture outside again. However, there may be more to this place than you think…
You are at the western end of a primitive stone chapel. Light streams in through the windows, which are set high above your reach in the entirely featureless walls of the building. A plain arch leads northwards to the world outside which, as you know from experience, is extremely hostile.
…but the intro is rather elongated in the commercial versions, primarily to note that while you are the “rightful heir” of Hamil, and that “you have only just discovered your birthright.”
Silly things like “motivation” and “plot”, bah. Here, I like the enigma more. You start in a small, three room church, with just a bicycle lamp, a rod, and an ancient piece of steak (?) to keep you company.
You are in the middle of the chapel.
There is an extremely heavy stone slab set into the floor here.
It bears the name O’GRAM.
Knowing what I was up against, I went straight for my “try all the verbs off my standard list” method.
SHAKE and FISH seem to be referring to nouns, not verbs, but I marked them down anyway.
This was productive right from the start because (referring back to the O’GRAM slab) while you can’t GET SLAB, PUSH SLAB, PULL SLAB, MOVE SLAB, or HIT SLAB, you can LIFT or RAISE it. This is one of those “yes, I can see why you’d logically only take those two verbs, but you should still acknowledge the other ones” sort of moments.
You succeed in prising the slab from the ground with the aid of the metal rod. A flight of steps beneath is revealed, and you therefore prop the slab up with the rod, leaving a gap through which you should just be able to squeeze.
Going down leads to the rod snapping and the slab closing shut, leaving you underground in the world of Hamil.
A most definitely incomplete map in progress. Starting room marked on top, the “hub” is the marked oval.
The design reminds me of Acheton, with a hub of sorts that branches into a plethora of relatively self-contained areas. (The hub room itself contains a magic wand, which we’ll get back to later.) The overall effect is sometimes akin to a “jukebox” puzzle game like The 7th Guest where an area is self-contained and exists primarily to dispense a treasure. (Oh yes: just like all the other four games, there’s treasures, although it is unclear yet what happens to them. I would assume if you gather them you’ve proved your heirdom, hurray, but I don’t know for certain.)
Here’s three puzzles I’ve solved as examples:
The simplest maze to start. The game intentionally forces you to ditch your inventory.
As you leave the room there is a violent earth tremor and a mighty rushing wind, which between them force you to drop all your possessions. Moreover a large rock falls, narrowly missing you and cutting off the way you came in.
You are in the Maze of Hamil. Light streams in through many gaps in the rocks. There is the constant sound of rockfalls, distant and not-so-distant.
The gimmick here is that there’s coins in each of the rooms, and you need to visit all of them before the end room (which I have marked as “fares please”). As you leave a room it gets destroyed, so you have to create your path to visit all the rooms before the exit.
You are in a small valley surrounded by unclimbable rocks. The only exit, to the west, is blocked. A mighty voice intones “FARES PLEASE!”
The whole purpose of this is to get a Crown of Hamil, a treasure marked with an exclamation mark (!).
You are in the Quaternion room. On the wall is scribbled a selection of obscure algebraic formulae, none of which seem particularly relevant at this juncture. There is a narrow exit to the south.
The ancient crown of the Kings of Hamil is here!
This one’s not hard once you realize the premise, but a second area that has a similar premise but ramps up the difficulty.
To get to the Lost World zone, you have to go back a sleeping T-Rex who then wakes up and starts chasing you.
As you pass the Tyrannosaurus, it stirs uneasily and then wakes, stands up and begins lumbering towards you. You run through the exit and find yourself on the slopes of the Lost World – a vast plateau criss-crossed by a network of boulder-strewn paths and populated by beings long thought extinct. From this point it is also possible to descend to the centre of the plateau, from which a large flock of pterodactyls is taking off in perfect formation. Meanwhile, the Tyrannosaurus is still galumphing towards you, having already caused a small avalanche which has blocked the path back into its cave.
There’s a specific number of pterodactyls taking off, and the idea is to kill enough time so that when you enter the center, it is pterodactyl-free. This means getting chased as long as possible, but this time the paths get filled up by earthquakes, not the rooms.
The T.R. follows, causing an avalanche to block the path you took.
You are in the Lost World.
A Tyrannosaurus Rex is lumbering towards you.
So our goal ends up being to visit every single path and return back to the center. In mathematician lingo the first puzzle is is a Hamiltonian path (visit all the rooms) and the second puzzle is a Eulerian path (visit all the edges connecting rooms). And yes, the name “Hamil” of the game does not seem to be coincidence.
Realizing the gimmick took longer than the solve, but still, this felt very much in The 7th Guest zone, of basically using the rooms like a giant board game with its own rules as opposed to being “in the universe” of the adventuring world.
Not like there still isn’t normal adventuring things — while you get a bust of Conan Doyle as a reward for solving this puzzle, you also get a whistle which helps solve a side puzzle off the hub.
You are in a small room which is furnished as a living room, though evidently for an inhuman being, to judge from the designs on the walls. These depict different ways of cooking human flesh. I hope you have more taste.
There is an antique silver goblet here!
There is an old lady here, sitting on a rock. Even in this light, there appears to be something odd about her.
> BLOW WHISTLE
Phthui!
An enormous alsatian appears, snarling and foaming at the mouth. It is about to set on you but sees the old lady as a worthier opponent and fights a fierce battle with her, eventually tearing her limb from limb. It then slopes off, exhausted.
There is an antique silver goblet here!
The mangled remains of an elderly female hobgoblin are here.
For the third area, it is a more “traditional” maze, and the old ultra-evil of the prior Phoenix games surfaces.
Specifically: going in any “wrong” directions results in meeting an enemy, like a dwarf with an axe, or a mummy. You then have a turn to react, followed by death.
You are in the labyrinth.
> N
You are in the labyrinth.
There is a mummy here, shambling towards you.
> KILL MUMMY
The mummy throttles you to death.
Oh dear! You seem to have passed away.
You scored 53 points out of a maximum of 300.
Do you want another game, oh heroic one?
It appears the majority of the enemies are entirely unkillable, and you’ll notice the pattern is to have two exits per maze room — you can drop items and do relatively speaking the normal mapping, except for having to die repeatedly as you test exits. (Also, the game disables saves while in the maze; fortunately you can drop items to help map it out, pop back out to save, then go back in again and nothing has happened to the dropped items.)
Where I got puzzled was the last room, which appeared to be a dead end — you could enter, but every exit had monsters, including a “kobold” which weren’t in prior exits. I vaguely suspected the usual pattern was being thrown off here, so I experimented with trying to kill the kobold, and notably using the wand:
> E
You are in the labyrinth.
There is an angry kobold here.
> WAVE WAND
The kobold suddenly shows signs of terror and runs away from you at top speed!
Yes, despite all the other enemies being unkillable (probably) there’s one that isn’t, and there’s also no indication that this is the wand effect in particular and the only way to find out is to test the wand. While I did technically solve the puzzle about the best way one could (I had nothing resembling an offensive weapon, so honestly the wand was the only thing that occurred to me as a possible solution) I can still mark this moment as thoroughly, unrepentantly evil.
The reward for solving the puzzle is a golden crozier which may end up not being useful (other than for stashing in some room I haven’t found yet).
I’ve only prodded lightly at other areas, like a museum that has a statue of Michelangelo’s that is marked as a treasure but is too big to carry, and some woods with a mysterious location that temporarily puts you to sleep, so I’ll write about them next time when I have a better grasp of what’s going on.
Oddly, despite its association with point-and-click games, humor has been very sparse in our journey so far. We’ve experienced some satire (“Hunter Thompson is here with eyeshade, cigarette holder, and intensity”) but I don’t think any games we’ve seen yet just tried to embrace being outright silly, or as the article that presents today’s game emphasizes, “zany”.
From 80-US Magazine, January 1982. Jon J. Waples is yet another one of those folks who wrote one and only one adventure game.
Hog Jowl Mansion brings back the type of game we got swarmed with in 80-81 and still hasn’t died out, the TRS-80 type in. However, this time the memory is doubled from 16K to 32K, so the game can be a little freer with the text (it is possible to squish everything into 16K by cutting all the spaces out of the source, but it is still interesting this is our first designed-for-32K TRS-80 game).
Our job is to gather 13 treasures and put them in a special place; so far, so typical. The catch here is that we’re actually a “repossessor”, come to collect on the debt of the defaulting Lord Hog Jowl, and treasures including a Ginsu Knife and a plastic flamingo.
The “special place” the treasures go is zany, indeed, although the game does the gimmick of not giving you access or even giving a hint as to where it might be at first.
The streetcar has been downgraded.
You can take the DAISY SADDLEPAL BB GUN and shoot the BUSDRIVER with it, getting a DEAD BUSDRIVER, but there’s otherwise no way to interact with them. The gun is more specifically useful in front of the mansion, where there’s a ravenous dog guarding it.
This happens with any item you happen to throw at the dog.
Sorry, dog lovers: the right move is just to shoot it dead with the gun. You can also poke in Lord Jowl’s mailbox and a “postage due” of 42 cents attached via paperclip to a postcard.
DEAR LORD,
HAVING A GREAT TIME, WISH YOU WERE HERE.
This is one of those open-treasure style hunts, where at least half of the 13 treasures are out in the wide open and you can gobble them up like Pac-Man (except, again, where to put them isn’t immediately obvious!)
The structure has three floors, at least initially all available via dumbwaiter. The problem is that the dumbwaiter does not let you carry any items up or down.
Richard Nixon’s watch, as seen in the basement. You can’t take this back up the dumbwaiter.
What’s interesting is that the dumbwaiter is essentially a “preview vehicle” for seeing parts of the map early, because there are alternate ways to get both above and below.
For the upper floor, there’s a secret hatch that lets you find yourself at the top of a christmas tree on the ground floor. It turns out all along you could CLIMB TREE to get to the upper level, but that isn’t obvious at all before entering the other way.
For the lower floor, there’s a locked door you can find with the dumbwaiter, and it’s pretty clear the paper clip might help pick it, but even the paper clip is too large to take along with you on the trip down.
There’s a double-secret (first, move a bookcase, then, move a desk in the secret room you’ve found) that leads down to the door on the other side, and then lock-picking is possible.
Just to be clear about all this, here’s a meta-map:
This configuration allows most of the map to be open, while still requiring some puzzle-solving to fully travel the geography.
I’m reminded a little of the “map preview” you could take with Burglar’s Adventure by setting off an alarm and exploring anyway, but in this case it’s not a game over.
Speaking of game overs, this game has unlimited resurrection as long as you don’t go the wrong direction in New Jersey. I put the umbrella death at the top of this post; going North goes to safety. Going down, you find … Carl Sagan?
Did Mr. Waples find the series Cosmos upsetting?
You can also die in a refrigerator or blow yourself up with dynamite. I did the latter trying to get rid of a “elderly cow with morning breath”.
You can’t get through the door, this bit is a red herring, although I wonder if it’s more along the lines of “the author decided to stop” as opposed to an intentional move.
There’s a piggy bank with a dime that is not a treasure, but if you go all the way back to the bus terminal with a locked water closet, you can INSERT DIME and get inside. The toilet is where all the treasures go.
“Zany”. But also “grisly”. The gold fillings you get using pliers on a dead IRS agent that had been trapped behind a locked door upstairs.
In a historical sense — despite Jon J. Waples vanishing from adventure history as quickly as he came — this does indicate a wider familiarity with the treasure hunt genre, and a willingness to deconstruct to the point of absurdity as opposed to just copying the Crowther/Woods formula directly. A second-order copy, so to speak. This sort of humor eventually will get tiresome — by IFComp this sort of thing would deservedly land an entry in the bottom 5 — but this was relatively fresh and interesting by 1982 standards, even if a bit harsh on dogs, Richard Nixon, and New Jersey.
I’ve finished Deadline, and while I’ll give my usual disclaimer you should read all my posts in order, I will also disclaim since this is a mystery game, there are extreme spoilers. If what you’ve seen up to now makes you interested enough to try playing Deadline yourself, you should veer away now.
I’ll also make the disclaimer early I needed hints for two major points in the game. Picture from an eBay auction.
I think my major breakthrough was to stop thinking of this as a Poirot-type mystery, with all the clues being collected and assembled together in a final group scene (as gets parodied in Death Off the Cuff, where you are tasked with pulling off such a scene without knowing who the murderer is). No, the best model for a detective here is Columbo. The moment you get incriminating evidence, find the person it incriminates, pester them with it, ask them to explain what it means, and get them to fall off a mountain of their own lies and/or have them panic and make a mistake.
The sequence of interrogation can also matter — you want to give people a chance to walk into an inconsistent story. For example, last time I had come across a letter from a “Steven” to Mrs. Robner that indicated an affair and listened in on a suspicious phone call (“But we couldn’t have planned it better. You’re free.”) The next step was to confront Leslie Robner with both these things, but to make sure to ask about Steven before showing the letter with his name.
>ask robner about steven
“I don’t know who you mean. I have no friend named Steven.”
Then show the Steven letter and ask about the phone call.
>show letter to robner
“You have certainly stooped to a new low, Inspector. Opening people’s mail. I think there are laws against that sort of thing, but I guess you wouldn’t know. I suppose you also know that Steven is my lover and that we were planning to marry. Don’t look so melodramatic: I didn’t kill my husband. You think my talk of divorce may have driven him to it? Why don’t you leave me alone!”
>ask robner about call
“I guess you know it was Steven. I admit we were lovers, and we planned to marry if I could get a divorce from Marshall. He refused to consider it, the divorce I mean, even though he had no time for me anymore. He was married to the company, and he refused to see my side of things. Steven was suggesting that now we could marry. I told him I thought the timing was poor, or at least I would have if you hadn’t eavesdropped.”
If you show the letter first, without the extra lie adding spice, she’ll just talk about him as a “dear friend”.
Incidentally, all this means Mrs. Robner is a dead end — there’s nothing more to extract here. I still had threads leading to George (being written out of the will) and Mr. Baxter (with the business merger that it appears Mr. Robner didn’t want) to pull at. With George, I showed the calendar which I had flipped to the entry about sending a new will to Mr. Coates.
>show calendar to george
George tilts his head in thought (or perhaps surprise) but recovers quickly. “All I know is that Coates is my father’s personal attorney.”
The only reason this seemed notable is nobody else reacts to the calendar, including, oddly, Mr. Coates. (I was actually stuck for a while here due to the lack of reaction from Mr. Coates, but he doesn’t have reactions to much at all — he’s there to read the will and then leave again.)
If you do the showing, then George, which is normally happy and sedate at the will reading, gets somewhat disturbed.
George, now looking quite upset, starts for the door.
“I’ve…got to be going now. I’ll see you later,” George says. He starts to leave.
You can follow George upstairs. He ducks into his room, cranks up his stereo, then (assuming he doesn’t see you) goes into the library and:
George walks purposefully toward the bookshelves. He looks around, but you react before he can see you. When you peek out again, George is fiddling with the shelves. His right arm reaches into the shelf and, to your amazement, the unit of bookshelves on the left rotates away from the wall, revealing a darkened room behind. George enters it, trembling with barely controlled fear and excitement.
followed by:
A dim light in the hidden closet comes on. In the faint light, you can see George motioning with his right hand. All at once, the shelf swings shut!
I managed to get this first try because of my attempts to eavesdrop on Mrs. Robner’s call earlier; I knew the command HIDE was recognized even though it generally says there’s nowhere to hide, but in the library the game says “You might hide on the balcony.” Given the special status I figured there had to be a library-hiding scene, although I wasn’t expecting a secret passage out of it.
The part right after is where I got stuck enough to need the Invisiclues. Before I get into detail on that, I need to go back to the eavesdropped phone call briefly.
>listen to phone
You can hear Mrs. Robner and a man whose voice you don’t recognize.
I tried, after getting this scene, timing my phone listening in all sorts of different ways, and found no matter what minute I attempted (as long as I was in the game’s “window” of the call going on) I always had the same conversation. So I figured that was how the game worked: even though there was a “real time” element, there was a stretched window where you could accomplish certain tasks and they’d always come out the same way.
OK, back to the George scene. If you go back in and check, there’s a book that’s been moved revealing a black button. You can press the button to find George trying to get into a safe:
The leftmost shelf quietly swings out against the balcony window.
As the bookshelf swings open, you see George carefully dialing a combination into a large wall safe. He turns in panic and, with an exclamation, knocks you down and bolts out of the library.
I tested, just like the phone call, a few different timings, and the scene always ran this way: interrupting the safe-opening in progress. I figured that was that, and there was no better way to run the scene.
I was quite wrong about this: there’s a magic time — one specific minute, maybe — that you can catch George right when he has opened the safe, and he has the new will in his hands.
As the shelf swings open, George spins to face you. His expression, first seemingly wild with happiness, changes to one of panic and horror. He jerks around, trying feebly to conceal a piece of paper in his hands. He jumps toward you, then recoils in fear. Finally, sobbing, he crumples to the floor, clutching the paper beneath him. A large combination safe, imbedded in a wall, is lying open. You enter the hidden closet.
The new will entirely disowns George, as threatened. (The third way the scene can run is that you let George go through the whole process without interruption. George will then make a beeline for the lake and toss the will in. You can retrieve it but it then is just a soggy paper.)
Inside the just-opened-safe — and this is the only way to get at it, since George is the only one who knows the combination, there’s no secret piece of paper or word puzzle to solve —
Leafing through these papers, it becomes obvious that they incriminate Mr. Baxter in wrongdoings regarding the Focus scandal. They document funds which were embezzled by Baxter and tell how the scandal was hushed up. This evidence would be sufficient to convict Mr. Baxter in the Focus case.
Oh, this is a good time to go back to the fragmentary message on the pad:
I had trouble the first time, but I was trying too hard assuming the blank space would line up perfectly with the number of missing letters. Without that, you can get something like:
Baxter,
For the last time, I insist that you stop the merger with Omnidyne. Otherwise I will be forced to (show? produce?) the documents in my possession which implicate you in the Focus scandal. Stop before it is too late!
Marshall
This is enough to get a strong reaction out of Baxter, but not quite enough to nail him on the crime. He could have easily been the person with the ladder doing the swap with the cup (he said he was alone at a concert, but that could just be a lie). However, this doesn’t explain how the crime was able to happen in the first place.
(George isn’t ruled out here yet technically, but it didn’t make sense to me George’s plan would involve going outside with a ladder, it just didn’t fit the sequence of events that well.)
But!… speaking of the ladder, it was worth a second check at the holes and did SEARCH NEAR HOLES. And for some reason, rather than “tiny pieces of a hard, shiny, substance” I found a piece of porcelain! This must be the piece of cup I suspected Baxter dropped out on the way out. I think this didn’t actually happened for any timing reason, it’s just random what you find perhaps? Intensely frustrating, to be honest, but at least I worked it out.
Analyzing the fragment led to the knowledge that it had tea, but also some unknown substance the lab wasn’t able to figure out due to there being too many possibilities. I immediately jammed through my list of substances and kept sending the piece of cup to Duffy: Allergone, Sneezo, LoBlo, Ebullion. I got misses on the first two, but analyzing for LOBLO got a hit, and a full lab report.
Dear Inspector,
In response to your request for analysis of the ceramic fragment, we have found evidence of a drug called Methsparin, which is usually sold in this country under the name “LoBlo”. It is a blood pressure lowering agent used primarily in Europe, which explains the oversight in our blood analysis of the deceased. A double check reveals a high blood level of Methsparin. While the amount of Methsparin in the blood isn’t dangerous in itself, a strong reaction between it and various other drugs has been well documented. As you may have gathered, one of those drugs is Amitraxin (Ebullion). The effect of Methsparin is to displace Amitraxin from protein binding, leaving more free in the blood and simulating an overdose.
Your new evidence leads me to conclude that the cause of death was Amitraxin toxicity secondary to ingestion of Methsparin and Amitraxin in combination.
Sincerely,
Arthur Chatworth, Pathologist
Sweet! So somehow the LoBlo ended up in the tea, and then separately Baxter took away the evidence.
LoBlo’s perscription is to none other than … Ms. Dunbar, the secretary, who had not been on my radar previous to this point. Of course, following the Columbo Process™, the next step is interrogating her about the pills, and showing the report. She rather quickly tries to finger George:
>show report to dunbar
She seems stunned but recovers quickly. “He didn’t commit suicide, then?” she says. “But LoBlo, that’s a pill I take for my blood pressure.” She pauses. “I can tell what you’re thinking, but I didn’t, couldn’t have done it. Why should I? Someone must have taken them, maybe George. He knew I used them.”
I wasn’t able to get anything concrete, but I noticed that shortly after, Ms. Dunbar (who was resting in her room when I found her, and I knew from previous playthroughs normally hung out there for longer) suddenly started wandering the house. I did some following, sort of, but really just got lucky being in the same room as this happening:
>s
Front Path
You are at the Robners’ front door, which is open.
You can walk around the house from here to the east or west. To the south a rolling lawn leads to the entrance of the estate.
Ms. Dunbar spots you and stops. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a cigarette. As she does so, what appears to be a ticket stub falls out of her pocket and floats to the ground. She checks her pocket again, apparently for a match, but finds none and puts the cigarette back in her pocket.
What was rather unlucky is I hit some sort of bug so the game didn’t recognize the ticket stub as being in the room. It took a restore and a bit of fussing about before I finally was able to get a hold of the stub that was dropped.
>ask dunbar about ticket stub
“Oh, I…well, I guess I should tell you. You see, Mr. Baxter and I, we go together to concerts, only occasionally, you understand. We went that night, the night Marshall died. Then he took me home and that’s it. I should have said something before, but I just didn’t think it was important, and, well, I didn’t think that the others should know we were seeing each other socially. Our…nobody knows about it, you know. Please don’t say anything!”
Ms. Dunbar eyes you nervously.
As long as you do this while Mr. Baxter is not present, running the same ticket stub by him gets a different story.
>show stub to baxter
“Ah, that must be Ms. Dunbar’s ticket stub. I should have told you earlier. Ms. Dunbar was with me at the concert on the night that Marshall killed himself. She became ill at intermission and hired a car to take her back home. You see, Inspector, I know that Ms. Dunbar appreciates classical music, so I occasionally ask her along to my subscription series. I really should have told the other detective, but I didn’t think it mattered.”
Gotcha! I had the motive — the business blackmail — and the method — getting Ms. Dunbar to poison the tea with LoBlo, which was easy since she was the one that gave it to Mr. Robner in the first place. I figured I could ARREST BAXTER, and… failure?
I am sorry to report that Mr. Baxter was acquitted yesterday of the murder of Mr. Robner. In speaking to the District Attorney, I gathered that the jury was almost convinced of Baxter’s guilt, given that he had both motive and a means to enter the house using the ladder. However, the theory had a number of serious flaws, including the means by which Baxter could have administered the drug either without Robner’s knowledge or without a struggle. I must confess that I too am baffled. I am convinced that Baxter is guilty, but I fear we will never know for certain.
I was deeply, deeply, puzzled here, and this is where I needed to reach for hints again (not even Invisiclues, a straight-up walkthrough). I had been assuming, upon arresting Baxter, that all the evidence I had connecting him with Dunbar would come up and her connection would be clear, especially since it seemed like ARREST PERSON was the only possible syntax. But no: it turns out you can arrest two people at once. I needed to have Robner and Baxter in the same room at the same time and then ARREST ROBNER AND BAXTER.
Text of a letter from Police Commissioner Klutz dated September 5:
Dear Inspector,
Congratulations on your superb handling of the Robner case. As you have probably heard, a jury convicted Mr. Baxter and Ms. Dunbar today of the murder of Mr. Robner. Thanks to you, the murderers will be behind bars, possibly for the rest of their lives. Thanks for a job brilliantly done. Which reminds me of another fascinating case I would like to assign you to…
Coming soon: Another INTERLOGIC Mystery from Infocom
This would have annoyed me more, except I was pleased that I managed to nail the entire story the game gives after, explaining all the details of the crime.
Mr. Robner’s work was his life, as pointed out by a number of the principals. George knew that his father had lost control of the company, and a story in the newspaper indicated that Baxter intended to sell the company to a multi-national conglomerate, presumably to advance his career. Baxter admitted to the merger plans, but indicated that Mr. Robner was in complete agreement. This is contrary to what George and Mrs. Robner said. The note pad found in the library was Robner’s last, desperate attempt to save the company, in which Robner threatened to expose Baxter’s involvement in the Focus scandal. Baxter denied getting the note, but it was not in the trash. The papers detailing Baxter’s criminality in the scandal were kept locked in a safe in a hidden closet near the library. Only George and Marshall Robner knew the whereabouts of the safe.
Baxter planned to murder his partner, aided by the fact that Robner was known to be depressed, even suicidal. He enlisted the help of his lover, Dunbar, one of whose medicines was found to interact fatally with the pills Robner was taking. The relationship of Baxter and Dunbar was kept quiet, although Mrs. Rourke had an inkling of it. After the concert in Hartford which both Baxter and Dunbar attended, they returned to the Robner estate. Dunbar placed some LoBlo in Robner’s tea. After Robner died, Baxter used the ladder from the shed to enter the library and exchange the incriminating cup for a clean one (counting the china in the kitchen reveals that a cup is missing). Coming down the ladder, Baxter presumably dropped the cup and inadvertently left one piece on the ground in the rose garden, near the ladder holes that McNabb found while tending his roses.
The only bit I didn’t have down was noting that Baxter must have seen the note from the note pad since it didn’t end up in the trash. (I’m not sure that’s ironclad, given there was a time delay and the waste basket could easily have been cleaned, but I appreciate the game did another “clue in the negative space” for good measure.)
Despite the stumble at the end, this game was staggeringly good. Jimmy Maher talked (in his historical intro) about how it used global state. We’ve had other games with global state (like Savage Island Part 1, or Philosopher’s Quest) but this game leaps rather much farther than that, with characters that not only have schedules, but schedules that modify on the fly based on the actions of the player and who happens to be in the room at a particular time.
It keeps track of the knowledge that the NPCs have about what you know. Did you catch them in a lie based on their prior statement? Then they’ll modify their dialogue accordingly. If Robner originally denies knowing Steven, it’s harder for her to claim he’s just a “dear friend”. If Baxter hears Robner’s story about the ticket, he tries to be consistent with his own lie. I can’t even think of many modern games that do this, let alone ones from 1982.
Jon Ingold recently gave a GDC talk about the difficulties of detective games — how it’s hard to “prove” you made a deduction, how subtle hints like the count of the dishes are hard to express as any kind of game verb without giving things away — but Deadline’s format really manages to handle things just fine. Some of the sub-clues are good for leading to the bigger ones — I really might not have searched the holes again if I wasn’t absolutely sure there had to be a substitute cup, for instance. I don’t think the “you have lost” text after a missed arrest is always explanatory enough, but I never felt “cheated” out of the ability to put the pieces together, or felt that what ought to be a complex series of inferences ever got reduced to a simple object puzzle.
I haven’t even talked about the multiple endings. Apparently there’s a way to have Baxter be onto you in such a way that he tries to kill Dunbar, with a gun? And you can do an arrest after the second murder, or even get murdered yourself if you try to stop him en route? I’m not sure how that sequencing goes (my arrest came very shortly after my ticket stub find, so there was no time for anything like that to happen).
I’m honestly not sure, 100 years from now, if anyone will still be playing Zork, but I predict Deadline will still be considered a classic.
The two most significant clues I gathered since last time were from things I didn’t find.
…
Deadline runs into a design paradox when you look at the outside of the Robner house.
The official map of the Robner Estate, from the Invisiclues for the game. I carefully avoided the maps of the inside but I figured the outside was safe.
You want realistic terrain, like above (as drawn by Steve Meretzky, who spent time in the construction industry) and you want to not have many superfluous rooms, like Time Zone did. How would you make the map so as to not be confusing? Well, not like this:
Given I was getting lost trying to make sure I had every outdoors room accounted for, I really did need to figure out how everything was tangled. In multiple cases there are one-way exits, so you can go from (for example) Among the Roses to the West Lawn but not back again.
Another spot with confusing one-way directions. I got lost here figuring out how things were oriented.
Even if the obvious “glitches” are fixed, it’s unclear what you’d do for a circumstance like this:
Yes, if you’re West of the Front Door, it should be possible to move, SW, S, and SE, and yes, the South Lawn is the only logical room to send the player to, but it still is confusing. You could add more South Lawn rooms so the convergence isn’t quite this heavy, but that would go counter to the goal of not having many superfluous rooms.
I remember when I first played Infocom games with a map like this I would simply ignore most of the “extra” exits — just connect the South Lawn to the Front Door and be done with it — but that leads to potentially missing something, and indeed it took me a while to realize that West Side of House was a reachable room (it can only be entered in two different ways).
There’s a fence to the north which is the reason for the restriction.
I mentioned last time the “tool shed” which has a ladder in it. To get to the library window you have to go to the garden area, and it appears that the window is directly over some roses.
>s
In the distance you hear “Hey! WHAT? You, there!” and other choice words muffled by a strong Scottish burr and a stiff breeze. Now, standing at the edge of the garden, can be seen the person of Mr. Angus McNabb, the gardener. He advances, looking crazed and gesticulating wildly. With each carefully chosen step in your direction, a barely visible wince of pain comes to his deeply-lined face. He regards you as you would regard the man whose car just ran over your little puppy dog.
Among the Roses
You are among rows of roses. The ground is soft, and your footsteps leave a rather bad impression as many poor seedlings are trampled underfoot. A safer place to admire the flowers lies to the north. A window to the south allows a view into the house.
There is no way into the house from here.
Mr. McNabb is here. He seems pretty angry about something.
That’s the gardener, Mr. McNabb. As the game kicks off he’s tending to the North Lawn, pulling weeds. He liked Mr. Robner — they’d “talk for hours” about gardening — but didn’t care much for any of the other residents of the estate, and says “I barely know which is which”.
McNabb will happily talk about gardening with you if you ASK MCNABB ABOUT ROSES, but will get upset if you’ve done a visible bout of squishing:
“I dinna give a hoot about you or your questions! Now, begone! Steppin’ all o’er me roses. A crime, it is! I’ll call the police is what!” He seems pretty angry.
If you wait until 9:59, he’ll move to the East Lawn. At around 11:10 he’ll shift to the Garden Path and start cutting flowers. If you keep hanging with him until 11:20:
All of a sudden, Mr. McNabb starts talking to himself quite loudly about his poor roses being ruined. He walks up to you and says “You canna believe the holes someone’s made. Crushed my roses. It’ll take me plenty a time to set it right. I just canna believe it!” He shakes his head dejectedly.
You can then request MCNABB, SHOW ME THE HOLES and he’ll lead you there. Since he’s leading he doesn’t get furious at you for entering the rose area, but rather:
McNabb grabs your arm and leads you to a spot deep within the garden and near the house. You might never have found this place alone. He points at the ground, where you see two holes in the soft earth.
The holes measure two by four inches and are three inches deep, rather like there was a ladder placed there! SEARCH HOLES yields nothing unusual, but SEARCH NEAR HOLES yields paydirt:
You are making quite a mess, but you do run across some tiny pieces of a hard, shiny substance, which drop from your fingers and back onto the ground.
I think I know what the substance is, but I’ll get back to that later. I think this is a good time to pause and talk about Deadline’s special commands, as I’ve already been using some, and there’s a lot of them.
…
Deadline essentially invented a large number of new “standard commands” wholesale.
ACCUSE (someone) OF (something)
ARREST (someone)
ARREST will end the game (if you have enough evidence) and show the result. I’m curious what possibilities (something) has other for accusing other than murder: theft, perhaps?
ANALYZE (something)
ANALYZE (something) for (something)
EXAMINE (something)
FINGERPRINT (something)
SEARCH (someone) FOR (something)
SEARCH NEAR (something)
Lots of analyzing and searching commands. If you ANALYZE an item, Sergeant Duffy (who otherwise doesn’t appear in the game) will come scoop it up.
>examine saucer
The saucer is hand-painted with a mythological scene. It has a couple of small areas of brown discoloration.
>test saucer for allergone
Sergeant Duffy walks up as quietly as a mouse. He takes the saucer from you. “I’ll return soon with the results,” he says, and leaves as silently as he entered.
Not every item can be tested, and sometimes an item can be too big or not portable (“With all respect, I don’t think I can take THAT to the laboratory!”). I oddly haven’t got a lot of hits from testing, although something important did come up once which I’ll mention shortly.
ASK (someone) ABOUT (someone or something)
SHOW (something) TO (someone)
SHOW ME (something)
WHAT’S WRONG?
WHERE IS (someone or something)
ASK was in Zork (kind of) but even it doesn’t get regularized until here. SHOW ME you got to see with the gardener; the fascinating thing with that command is I didn’t actually remember it was a special command, but just thought SHOW ME THE HOLES was the natural response to McNabb’s complaint, and the game responded appropriately.
TIME
WAIT FOR (someone or some amount of time)
WAIT UNTIL (time)
Also fairly novel; you had time play a small part in Warp, and a big part in Savage Island Part 1, but otherwise needing this level of control was unheard of in 1982.
…
In an alternate universe where I didn’t spend the entire span of gameplay goofing about outside:
>knock on door
You hear footsteps inside the house. Mrs. Robner, dressed in black, opens the door and greets you.
“Hello,” she says, “I’m Mrs. Robner. Please come in. I’m afraid I really can’t help you much. This is surely a terrible waste of time, not to mention upsetting, having all these police marching around the house. This has been a trying time, as I suppose you can understand. As I told Mr. Coates and the other detective, you may look around but you must be out by 8 o’clock at the latest. Oh, I almost forgot…Mr. Coates will be reading my husband’s will at noon in the living room. You may attend if you wish.”
Mrs. Robner leads you into the house and closes the door behind you.
One of the interesting aspects is why we have a deadline: here it is given to us by Mrs. Robner. It’s odd we agree to this given Mrs. Robner is one of the suspects.
I do think it fair to say the “case will be closed” so to speak if the day passes without an arrest (given the death already got declared a suicide) but the deadline of 8 pm still felt odd and casual.
The realism-issue with outdoors doesn’t happen in here: everything at right angles. It’s curious how spare and simple everything is, and how the game is quite willing to even toss “useless” rooms on the map just for geographic integrity.
Upstairs Closet
The closet is rather shallow and has some shelves full of assorted linens, towels, and uninteresting toilet articles.
Downstairs, the first place of interest is the Living Room, where the will is read at noon.
Living Room
This is a large and impressive room, whose furnishings bespeak the great personal wealth of the Robners. The south side of the room is a large bay window, now closed, which looks out onto the front yard. A wood pile sits beside a huge fieldstone fireplace. A double doorway leading to the main hall is the only exit. Pictures of Mrs. Robner’s colonial ancestors line one wall. The room contains formal seating for at least fifteen people, in several groups of chairs and couches. Tables and cabinets, all of the finest mahogany and walnut, complete the furnishings. On one of the tables is a telephone.
I already described the will-reading last time — the fortune is split evenly between the wife and son, and George seems rather happy. Despite filling in the details above I’m unclear if anything else is important. It feels like someone might have tried to burn something in the fireplace (…or will try in the future) but nothing came up from searches, and the tables and cabinets have no further description. The telephone is notable; at one point there’s a phone call for Mrs. Robner from an unknown voice on the phone (you can listen in as it happens on a different line). Even if you aren’t listening, Mrs. Robner goes upstairs to the master bedroom to resume the phone call. You can try to HIDE there but it doesn’t work (the verb is recognized, the game just says there’s no good hiding place) and listening at the door is too muffled (although the game lets you try!) The way to hear is to pick up the line while the call is in progress:
>listen to phone
You can hear Mrs. Robner and a man whose voice you don’t recognize.
Robner: “…much too early to consider it.”
Man’s Voice: “But we couldn’t have planned it better. You’re free.”
Robner: “Yes, but it will…Wait a second…I think…”
“Click.” You realize that the call has been disconnected.
While we’re at it poking at incriminating material, there’s also a letter that arrives during the day, that you can snag and read assuming you are fast enough (first time around, I put the letter back in the envelope and returned it to its original spot, and later it was gone).
“Dear Leslie,
I am sorry to learn that Marshall has been despondent again. His obsessive interest in business must be causing you terrible anguish. It doesn’t surprise me that he talks of suicide when he’s in this state, but the thought of the business going to Baxter after he’s gone will keep him alive.
So George has finally gone too far? It’s hard to believe, after all those empty threats, that Marshall actually followed through. It serves that little leech right, if you ask me. This means that, should the unthinkable happen, you will be provided for as you deserve.
I’ll see you Friday as usual.
Love,
Steven”
I’m not sure what to make of this; the phone call indicates a plan of some sort that was being carried out, but it would be to Leslie’s benefit if George was written out of the will (so her preference would for him to be dead after it was made, not before). Was it Steven on the other end or yet another third party?
There’s (unfortunately?) less incriminating material on the business partner, Mr. Baxter (although interestingly enough, you can show the letter above and he’ll tell you “this fellow is quite off base about the business”. There’s a pencil and empty writing pad at the murder scene where you can RUB PAD WITH PENCIL and get something of a message…
…but Mr. Baxter says he doesn’t know what it is getting at, and I’m unclear as well. I’m most interested in the line
plica y Focus s
where “plica” could be… replica? replication? I don’t know what would make sense in the context here.
Speaking of the murder scene, let’s visit up there now:
I’ve marked it in red.
This has the most complex description of the game.
This is the library where Mr. Robner’s body was found. It is decorated in a simple but comfortable style. Mr. Robner obviously spent a great deal of time here. A wide executive desk sits before tall balcony windows which lie at the north of the room. A telephone is sitting on the desk. The east side of the room is composed of three large bookshelf units containing numerous volumes on many topics. The floor is carpeted from wall to wall. The massive oak door which blocked the entrance has been forcibly knocked off its hinges and is lying by the doorway.
A pencil is lying on the floor near the desk.
Beside the desk is a large collapsible tray.
Sitting on the tray is a bowl containing a white powdery substance.
Alongside the desk is a wicker wastepaper basket.
The wastepaper basket contains:
A bunch of crumpled papers
Lying on the floor, overturned, is a beautiful saucer.
Turned onto its side, lying on the floor, is a beautiful teacup.
Lying atop the desk is a pad of white note paper.
A desk calendar is here, open to July 7.
There is a bottle of Ebullion here.
The desk calendar has a July 7 appointment listed with Baxter at 2 pm, and on July 8, after he died, he has listed a 9 AM appointment to “Call Coates: Will completed”.
The wastebasket has a shopping list, stock prices, and start of a letter to the Board of Directors of the Robner Corp which has no details at all.
The carpet has no visible stains but has mud leading from the balcony to the desk (remember the ladder holes, also).
The bowl with a “white powdery substance” is sugar (and as far as Duffy has found, nothing else).
What’s quite interesting is the cup and saucer. They both have brown substances but I haven’t found (from testing, again) anything other than tea. The fingerprints, on the other hand, were very interesting: the saucer and fingerprints from Ms. Dunbar (who delivered the tea, according to her testimony) and the deceased. The tea cup, which should also have fingerprints from both had … absolutely no fingerprints at all.
This was the first negative space clue. It suggested to me that this was a different tea cup than the one Ms. Dunbar delivered upstairs. Maybe the Ebullion overdose was delivered in the tea where the capsules were essentially dissolved in beforehand, and the tea cup was swapped to hide this fact from analysis?
Where this gets to be more of a homerun is the second clue, from the kitchen back downstairs.
Kitchen
This is the Robner kitchen, quite large and with a full complement of appliances and labor-saving devices. On one wall, a beautifully-crafted shelf unit contains rare china, a unique hand-painted family heirloom depicting scenes from Greek mythology. The china consists of many place settings of plates, teacups, and saucers. There are several cabinets which likely contain silverware, glasses, and the like. To the east is a pantry.
Not much here to prod at, still, and searching the china was no use, but I remembered back from my Zork I days that COUNT was a word Infocom knew about.
>count china
There are eight large and small plates, seven saucers, and six cups.
We should expect the same number of saucers and cups, but there’s a cup missing!
I think the substance at the bottom of the ladder may have been slight shards of cup, but I’m not so certain. Even without that, this was my most promising clue. Alas, I haven’t found much else yet of deep value. There’s a newspaper delivery at some point — it just mentions philanthropy work of Mr. Dunbar. I feel certain I’m missing things but most of the rooms in the game are genuinely minimalist, so it’s hard to find things to pick at. There are a couple medicine cabinets with potentially hazardous substances…
Mrs. M. Robner
Take 2 tablets every 4 hours as needed for allergy symptoms. Do not exceed recommended dosage.
Rash Labs / Allergone Tablets
May cause extreme drowsiness. Do not use machinery or drive while taking this medication. Combination of Allergone with alcohol is dangerous. In case of overdose consult a physician promptly. Keep out of the reach of children!
…but I haven’t detected any of them in what I’ve looked at so far. Maybe the missing cup is still on the property somewhere and I can test that? I thought perhaps the saucer residue might have a clue (since that wasn’t replaced like the cup) but none of the tests I ran came up positive.
I still have to rigorously track everyone’s schedules and see if any more items like the letter pop up, so I’m not ready for hints or the like, but I’m still somewhat skeptical I’ll be able to beat this one without at least a few nudges.
On July 7, 1982, Marshall Robner worked late into the night, last being seen alive at around 11 PM. In morning, he was found dead of an apparent intentional overdose of medication.
The initial investigator on the case, G. K. Anderson, did a number of interviews of the people in the house with the deceased. First came the wife, who testified she woke in the morning to find her husband was not in bed; she assumed that he had fallen asleep working in the library, but he did not wake when she knocked at the library door. Eventually, Mrs. Dunbar (the housekeeper) and George (the Robner’s son) were awakened by Ms. Robner’s attempts to awaken Marshall. Eventually the police was called with axes. The police broke down the door to find the body of Mr. Robner.
ANDERSON: Did your husband ever talk of suicide?
ROBNER: He did, actually, though I never took it seriously. He would talk about how everything would be easier if he were dead, but when he would start again talking about how he was going to have to keep the business going. I’m…I’m stunned, really.
ANDERSON: Mrs. Robner, do you know of anyone who might have wanted to kill your husband?
ROBNER: Why, no. Of course not. He wasn’t a very friendly man; he was very quiet. But he was a great philanthropist, you know, and everyone that knew him respected him. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt Marshall. Do you really suspect he didn’t commit suicide?
ANDERSON: I don’t suspect anything. I just want to understand what’s happened
The coroner’s report noted a bruise on the left temple, “consistent with falling to the floor from a chair”. There was a blood level of 27mg% for Ebullion, with a fatal dose being from 10-20mg%, and no other “common” drugs were found. (This incidentally suggests “uncommon” drugs are still possible.)
There was massive liver damage (which corresponds with an Ebullion overdose) and 10mg of Ebullion in the stomach. Time of death was sometime between midnight and 2 AM.
There’s a photograph of the crime scene, and I see two things of concern:
Issue #1: the placement of the china. The idea, theoretically, is that Mr. Robner turned around and fell over, and the china fell down along with himself and the chair. Somehow, the saucer ended up underneath the chair, and doesn’t look like it suffered any damage. Was it placed there?
Issue #2: the coroner report mentioned the front left temple. Assuming he turned around and fell forward, hitting the furniture as shown (the chalk outline actually goes underneath, slightly) it seems reasonable he’d have some manner of temple injury, but unless I’m misunderstanding, wouldn’t the damage be to the right temple?
The actual events of the day before, July 7, seem to be (according to the testimony of the housekeeper) that Mrs. Rourke was settled down in her room at 10:30 PM, with everyone on the second floor of the estate except for the secretary Ms. Dunbar, who had just arrived. At around 11 PM Dunbar brought up tea, and was the last (that we currently know of) to see Mr. Robner alive.
DUNBAR: Why, yes. I brought him some tea at about I 1 PM that night. On nights when he expected to work late, he would always expect tea at that hour. I brought him the tea and he asked me to leave. That’s all.
ANDERSON: Did Mr. Robner seem at all upset?
DUNBAR: He did appear quite nervous, but he had been upset for some time, as you know.
Regarding “being upset for some time”, Mr. Robner’s business he had founded was doing badly, and according to an interview with Mr. Baxter (Mr. Robner’s business partner) there was a “drastic plan” to save the business. Jumping ahead a smidge to my first playthrough, Baxter goes into more detail what this means when asked:
Before Marshall died, we agreed that the only reasonable way to protect our interests was to be bought out by a larger company which could then provide us with capital for expansion. I had been talking to people at Omnidyne and we agreed in principle on the terms for such an agreement last week. I’m hopeful that we can close the deal quickly.
Other than the wife, business partner, and secretary, there was an attempt at interviewing the son (George) who was apparently quite wasteful with money and the week before the death Mr. Robner had said he was going to rewrite his will and take George out of it. This had been threatened before but this time was different? Except no new will has surfaced at the time of the start of the game. (This irregularity with the will is why we, the Chief of Detectives, have been summoned in the first place; this was as a favor to Mr. Coates, the lawyer for Mr. Robner.) The interview didn’t go well.
ROBNER: Look, I don’t get what you’re driving at. You find the poor guy dead in his room. The room was locked. His bottle of medicine is nearly empty. What sort of detective are you, anyway?
ANDERSON: I’m doing the asking, if you don’t mind.
ROBNER: Then ask someone else.
By the Laws of Mystery Plots, the most suspicious person at the start is not the one who did it. Even if we back up and ignore the meta, the locked-room plot does seem to be a little past George working alone.
The big problem is: how did the medicine get in Mr. Robner in the first place? A fatal dose was found in the stomach so he really did ingest a lot of the substance, but given only the one (oddly-placed wound) it seems unlikely he could have been “forced” into taking the pills. The tea was detected as clean from Ebullion. Is the substance dissolvable, somehow? I get the impression from what little I’ve played a great deal of the mystery is in howdunnit, and that once that gets entirely resolved, the suspects will get narrowed down by themselves.
Then there’s the locked-room aspect itself. Assuming the housekeeper was telling the truth (admittedly a big assumption in a mystery) then past the secretary delivering the tea, nobody went up or down the stairs past 10:30 PM as they were very noisy. The only possibility would be out the window of the library to a balcony, possibly down a ladder. There is a shed outside the estate with a ladder but it didn’t have an obvious place for fingerprints; this is something I’m still investigating.
A “meta-map” of the estate.
Even if we assume an entrance via ladder, that doesn’t work consistently with what happened — Mr. Robner would no doubt be quite alarmed by an intruder from the outside. This suggests that perhaps the criminal was hiding in the room somehow (it’s a small library, though) and only left by ladder as opposed to climbing in that way. That of course still requires some coordination to manage correctly.
This squeezed everything I could out of the starting documents. I did get through an initial play, but it was a very non-narrative playthrough when where I was creating a map and testing out verbs; there’s a slew of special commands for the game. I’ll save talking about all that for next time, but let me add one thing, a central event. At noon there is a reading of the will from the lawyer who summoned our protagonist.
Mr. Coates begins: “This is an awkward situation. Mr. Robner told me five days ago that he wanted to execute a new will, and promised to call me when it was completed. As I never heard from him, I must assume that he either changed his mind or did not complete the new will. Therefore, the one in my possession must be considered the most recent testament.”
From the corner of your eye, you catch George nodding his head, as if in approval, and smiling broadly.
Continuing, Mr. Coates says: “Naturally, should a more recent will exist and be found within a reasonable period, the present one will be voided. I will proceed with reading the will here in my hands, which was executed three years ago last month.” He reads the will, simply written and direct, leaving equal parts of the estate to his son, George Arthur Robner, and his wife, Mrs. Leslie Phillips Robner.
Again, the game seems to be pointing out George as an obvious suspect, probably too obvious. I’ve made a couple of extra discoveries but I want to fill in some more background and create a narrative for next time. Still, the “more recent will” line sounds ominous, sort of a Chekov’s Gun for information (Chekov’s Clue?) Is there anyone other than George that would have benefited from the new will going missing, assuming there is one?
(Thanks to Drew Cook for providing a scan for the photograph with enough resolution for me to make some zoomed-in shots.)
Imagine: instead of passively reading your favorite detective stories, having full control over the investigation. Infocom, the creators of the unexcelled Zork adventures, has made another major advance in the development of the electronic novel.
— From the New Zork Times Summer 1983 Catalog
Sometime late in 1981, Marc Blank (after having worked on Zork I and II) embarked on a new game entitled Was It Murder? premised, in its very title, with a murder mystery (or as the History of Zork called it, “Zork: the Mystery”).
From a printing of the manual, for C64.
The game was eventually published in April 1982 and is honestly flabbergasting. While we’ve technically had mysteries before in the Robert Lafore line (notably Local Call for Death) this game rolls out a cavalcade of invention in both technical and design elements.
You, Chief of Detectives, have been summoned to the Robner estate to investigate a suicide. It seems open-and-shut: Mr. Robner was found locked in his room having taken an overdose of the anti-depressant Ebullion, all the people involved have been interviewed and accounted for, and Robner was depressed with his business failing. But since a whole game has been written about it, something more sinister must be going on.
The game included a passel of real-life materials prepared by Infocom’s ad company Giardini/Russell: a bag of pills as physical evidence (I think someone tried them once and it was candy, but I can’t find the post verifying that), a photograph of the scene, transcripts of interviews. This was Infocom’s first set of “feelies” and it really does add to the mood, especially since — despite them having the best technology for text games at the time — they were still fighting against the same computer limits everyone else was.
Yet, they managed to stuff a game into those limits that was (according to a 1983 account) akin to “playing with a wonderful dollhouse or a model train set”. You have 12 hours to solve the crime and not only does time move forward of its own accord but all the characters do as well, and the impression (based on the very short amount of game I’ve tried so far) is poking at a holodeck in text form.
Regarding “very short amount of game” — yes, this is the first time I’ve tried this. I’ve owned it since grabbing Lost Treasures of Infocom Volume I but just never have gotten round to it, so y’all get to see me react to things for the first time. I will likely get terribly stuck and make wrong inferences and those of you who know the mystery already can be amused.
If you really want to “read ahead”, Jimmy Maher has a terrific history rundown and what appears to be a long series on what playing the game is really like — I haven’t read anything past the history, of course.
Please do note, as I already confessed with The Colonel’s Bequest, I have in the past been very bad at mystery adventure games. I’ve still haven’t totally isolated why, but I have a theory I may have been playing them wrong. I’ve usually thought of adventure games as, despite the presence of softlocks, arranged with the sort of story where a sufficiently smart and lucky protagonist can get all the way through without trouble. That doesn’t seem to be what this sort of game is wanting. There are supposedly timed events where you have to be at the right place at the right time. There’s the possibility of analyzing evidence where nothing is found. It really seems to be an investigation made by multiple clones through time in order to form a “final run”, not something where I can keep a save file called Good which I think is composed entirely of “good progress”. Progress is with information more than with solving puzzles.
I also do have a request for anyone who has a physical copy, especially anyone who had one in the 80s: are the pills supposed to be “clean” or are they supposed to have brown spots? I’ve seen other pictures (like here) with the spots. I would guess it’s just degradation over time and a zoom in the picture above reveals relatively normal pills, but if they are supposed to look tea-stained that would technically be a hint.
Explore the tortuous forests, dark caverns & castle dungeons. Beware the maze of twisting tunnels and the desert wastelands. Outwit the predators. Rescue the PRINCESS and carry off the treasures.
Lucifer’s Realm, two games ago, was wildly untraditional in setting. Castle Fantasy, the last game I wrote about, was wildly untraditional in gameplay. I figured since they’re hanging out on my list and need to be fit in sometime, I should try a game that’s the opposite direction, and super-traditional in both respects. Enough so that the actual name of the game is Adventure, as written and programmed by a mysterious J. Spilsbury.
The traditional-ness held for about halfway through the game until things started to seem a little awry, eventually landing on an absurdly meta puzzle which stretched the relationship between player, avatar, author, and narrator past its breaking point.
Micro Power was another one of the software publishers in the UK that operated out of an independent computer store (the last one we looked at was A & F). In this case they had a shop in Leeds and was run by the Managing Director Bob Simpson (you can see a picture of him here). An interview by Richard Hanson (who published with them before going on to found Superior Software) notes that
Bob was one of the first people in the UK to appreciate that home computer software was going to become a very big profitable industry.
Early on Micro Power published games as the label Program Power before eventually just slapping Micro Power on everything. They started by specializing in programs for the Acorn Atom, before expanding to the Acorn Electron and BBC Micro once those computers were available. Adventure was released for all three.
Art from the cover of the Electron version of the game, via Acorn Electron World.
The most unusual thing about the packaging — and may be it isn’t so unusual for UK 1982, but I just haven’t played enough games from the year yet — is that at least the BBC Micro version came with an insert meant to be slipped in the keyboard, for hotkeys on some commands.
Otherwise everything was presented as very standard — you need to collect 7 treasures, plus princess — and at least some printings included “hints”, possibly to forestall people getting stuck, akin to how enough people got stuck at the maze in Wizard of the Princess that On-Line Systems included a hint card just for that puzzle.
Stories that you should read during your adventure include Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves and Aladdin.
Rats are afraid of owls. Owls are afraid of the light.
I did dutifully try out the very first version, for the Acorn Atom…
Asking if you are a wizard is a tribute to the original Crowther/Woods Adventure only allowing play during “off hours” on valuable mainframes: “Only wizards are permitted within the cave right now. Are you a wizard?” The original let you type YES and a password. This game also asks for a password, but there is (according to people who have looked at the source) no password that works, so this is just a goofy tribute.
…but ended up settling on a version for the BBC Micro with some fixes to the text by The 8-Bit Tinker (so it wraps properly, and uses case) and the addition of an actual end state; the game normally doesn’t recognize you’ve won. I’m honestly fine with all uppercase, and I’m fine with just realizing I’ve won rather than the game telling me, but having words wrap over improperly is a pain in the neck to read, so I’m grateful for the modified version. The added end state part affects the meta-aspect I was talking about (affecting the “message” of the game), but I’ll discuss that when the time comes.
Moving on! As shown above, just south of the starting place is a “lost luggage office” with keys and a lamp outside. I went through most of the game without realizing IN worked as a command, and in fact tried to futilely drop treasures outside the lost luggage office and be baffled at my score going down. There have been, in very few cases, were IN and OUT count as standard directions like N/S/E/W, but this game didn’t do a great job of announcing that. Notice how the strip of paper setting hotkeys only has the cardinal directions.
Just north of the office is a closed-off cavern.
You are near a closed cavern entrance. A road runs off south into the distance
Moving farther gets the player into a forest maze, which is just as tiring as ever. There’s an axe hiding within, as well as a precipice which sticks the player there forever, unless they try the command GO BACK. (In other words, not a puzzle as so much as an oversight / bug.)
A bit more wandering let me to think I wasn’t missing any exits, so I circled back to the cavern entrance and remembered the explicit hint given by the packaging (as well as Time Zone using the same command).
Some definite weirdness here: the game should already know I have a LAMP in inventory, why did it need to ask? And if you say NO, it tells you to check your inventory, indicating it already knows. Going north again leads to a frog:
Given the Roberta-Williams-style fairy tale reliance (thinking perhaps the princess was a frog), I immediately tried KISS FROG.
Oh yeah? you are thrown out of the adventure by order of the wizard.
I marked this as an odd little joke and moved on, toting the little frog on for maybe a magic potion or eating a fly or some such.
Adventure-tribute signals continued, like the cage for catching a bird in, so I dutifully picked it up expecting a bird.
Look, oil. That’s for filling our lamp when it runs out, just like Adventure 500, right?
I had in the back of my head — keeping in mind the hint about Aladdin — that RUB LAMP would be useful somewhere. I had the good fortune of this being the first room I tested it out in, it just felt like magic had to happen here. The rubbing turns out not strictly necessary; it lets you skip navigating a maze, but you have to go in the maze anyway to get one of the 7 treasures of the game.
A very random and obnoxious one, as well, where I found the only treasure quite early (a pearl) but still had to map the rest to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. There were additionally many more rooms than items so I had to do exit-testing on unlabeled rooms in the hopes that I would be able to figure out where they were relative to other rooms I was able to mark with objects (that is, test to see if south goes to a room I was storing, say, a glass slipper in — if so, then I could assume it is the same maze room as a previous one I had found where going south also led to a glass slipper).
I found a ming vase (a treasure from Adventure, again, it breaks if you DROP it, but LEAVE works, and why are these British games assuming DROP means “drop violently”?), a hostile rat, and a “cobwebbed lair” with an owl that flew away from my lamp. I tried in vain to turn off the lamp before entering, but you fall in a pit and die if you attempt that. The owl flies into the maze and I was able to after some experimentation have the owl “run away” but randomly locate itself in the room I just entered. Then I tried to CATCH OWL or TAKE OWL or USE CAGE or the like but kept getting rebuffed by parser errors.
A bit more wandering led me to a “castle of a black wizard”. It had wine in a bottle and a plant underneath a hole, and original-Adventure style, I was able to drink the wine
Thanks. Thersh an old mill by a shtream, nellie….Hic!
and fill the now-empty bottle with water (from back where the frog originally was) and use it to grow the plant into a beanstalk. I could then climb the beanstalk to find a diamond, another one of the 7 treasures, and an empty bedroom.
The black wizard castle was otherwise mostly empty, no wizard. Adjacent to the castle was a sleeping dragon; going farther led to a “rocky landscape” and a maze of desert that turned out (I found out later) to have no exit and was entirely meant as a trap.
My confusion went for a while longer, but I think now is the best time to mention that in addition to the desert being useless, the cage I tried to trap the owl in is, in fact, also utterly useless. The oil is useless, the lamp goes on forever. The scarf from the start of the game is useless. And the frog, that I got booted for kissing earlier? The right action was to KILL FROG.
The green frog turns into a beautiful princess and runs off
The princess runs to one of the empty bedrooms at the Dark Wizard castle so you can pick her up. If you drop her she just runs back to a bedroom again.
To handle the owl, you don’t take it at all. You can go to that hostile rat I mentioned earlier, turn off your lamp, and HOOT.
I found this whole sequence baffling since there was no room past. Was this a useless puzzle? I eventually found out IN works here (notice “near” a peculiar little room) even though typing IN gives no feedback until you LOOK.
For all this being lost, I was eventually able to acquire 6 of the 7 necessary treasures and get back the princess. While doing so, the parser started giving off strange messages in the middle of everything, like:
You are a persistent little…
or
Let me think about that…
Dear me! I dozed off
the latter which pauses until you hit a key. It went (upon taking a treasure)
Your next move is so obvious that I shall not mention it
even though the game had already not been stating anything upon picking up an item from the very beginning of the game. In other words, the game had to specifically program itself saying something when it would by default be saying nothing!
All this weirdness affects the very last puzzle, which I don’t think is solvable without poking at source code. Instead of just using GET to take a treasure, you need to at some point STEAL one.
This is the only way to get to this room! If you have the keys on you from the start you can easily let yourself out. This is the only method of getting the golden ring.
If we just interpret what’s going on in the physical space, there’s no way to distinguish GET versus STEAL: the player is just taking the item. The only way to get the send-to-Dungeon flag to trigger is to declare intent as if this was stealing happening, like the Wizard is watching from behind the electronic screen but normally gets too sleepy to pay attention to what’s going on except if you use the magic word STEAL.
I mentioned the port I was using fixing the ending. In the version I played, dropping the princess at the lost luggage area gets:
The princess gives you her heartfelt thanks for rescuing her from the clutches of the Black Wizard, and invites you to a banquet to be held in your honour.
CONGRATULATIONS!!
but remember, this only occurs in the ported version! If you drop the princess in the published version she just runs back to one of the bedrooms. Given that she runs “into the dark” this was probably just a bug, but it still felt weirdly apropos to have the princess be, strictly speaking, impossible to rescue as if she doesn’t want to be rescued.
I really got the impression that the wizard was the narrator the whole time, and this was some sort of lark on his part.
You can get out of this by typing WAKE UP.
The puzzle with the owl definitely indicated some sort of intention on the author’s part to be wry rather than just lazy (although I still suspect some element of “I’m out of my 12K of space, this is good enough”). And while the “wizard” has the say most of the time, the programmer does poke out once themselves, if you try to swear.
As of 2022, Matthew Stepka is not only on a lecturer at UC Berkeley, but he previously was Vice President of Business Operations & Strategy for Google working on philanthropic efforts and opening new offices in Africa. He has studied both computer engineering and art, has a law degree from UCLA, and was a founder of one of the world’s first cyber-cafes.
So quite logically, today, we’re going to look at an essentially unfinished game he wrote for Atari 8-bit computers when he was a sophomore in high school.
I was highly tempted to skip it — it only barely counts as an adventure, it uses a quite broken randomization system — but realizing this took so much effort I was invested, and I managed to hack at the BASIC source long enough to at least get a notion of what the author was aiming at.
1 REM CASTLE FANTACY REVISION 1.0 BY MATT STEPKA 3/30/82
(Yes, that’s the spelling in the comments. It is done correctly in the PRINT statement giving the title, though.)
I’m not clear how the game escaped into the wild. Mr. Stepka has put two of his later pieces of Atari work on his website (Shark! and OS II: The Sequel) but not this, yet somehow the BASIC source for this game ended up on both Atarimania and as an entry on CASA Solution Archive. I wonder if it would be possible to estimate how many student efforts (finished and unfinished) are lost to time.
The game is undecided as to whether it intends to be an RPG or an adventure and never quite settles on either. The “class” seems to be randomly determined and the idea — assuming the game had been finished — might have been to have a “thief”, “wizard”, “warrior” and so on with different starts. As it is the default is to give a map and a sword.
The map (displayed with the MAP command) shows in ASCII form like the above. It’s interesting for adventure format; I don’t think I’ve ever seen something quite matching. To borrow terminology from The CRPG Addict, the two possible map types (generally) for games on grids are razor walls and worm tunnels. Castle Fantasy, as seen on the map above, uses worm tunnels. We have seen a few adventure games use the razor walls model:
A sample from Deathmaze 5000.
The map in Deathmaze 5000 is still stored on a grid, like a CRPG. However, based on the original Crowther/Woods model, adventure games tend to be something else, and follow the concept of “nodes” from graph theory. We can even trace this back to Caves and Wumpus; Caves in particular felt like a pedagogical exercise in computer science trying to illustrate what a tree structure is like from the inside.
An example from Asia 1400 AD in Time Zone. With a worm tunnel model the entire grid would be stored in memory or on disk somehow, and there would be a “0” or “-1” or the like marking the three empty spaces shown. With the adventure game model, those rooms simply don’t exist in any sense at all.
Where I think the worm tunnel model might have some purpose in adventure games is coherent destructibility. By which, I mean, there have been games (like The Public Caves) that have tried to allow expanding the map, but due to allowing the players to name the directions anything they want — hence not being physical directions really, but nodes of graphs — it’s hard to convey a sense of physical position. (Enchanter did manage to do this with a puzzle, but thinking in terms of edges between rooms rather than the rooms themselves.) Whereas if all walls have a physical relative location to rooms, they can be easier to remove and possibly used that way in puzzles or as a way to work within a adventure-roguelike system with randomization.
This is all theorizing about admittedly a much better game, so let’s get back to Castle Fantasy. The verb list is wildly limited, and is simply composed of:
ESP, UNLOCK, XXYZY, HOLD, LOOK, QUIT, MAP, N, S, E, W, TAKE, DROP, KILL
Yes, XXYZY instead of XYZZY. That helps reveal secret passages in particular locations (which teleport you elsewhere). HOLD shows your inventory. I’m still foggy on what ESP does.
Returning to the game proper, you start in a narrow arrow of “open passages” and “dark forests” blocked by a gate that needs a key, and my first time through there was no key nor a way to get a key. There aren’t any secret passages either (based on my testing XXYZY on every room).
Some poking at the source code reveals that the key is just the variable K, so I tossed a K=1 in on initialization and re-ran the game to explore a little farther…
…only to fall into a pit where there wasn’t any way out, nor any method of avoiding it. I would guess there were ladders or some such planned but never implemented.
Resetting the game “properly” without hacking myself to gain extra items, I tried a different random setup and found no gate blocking my entrance, but I still was stuck later by a gate down one corridor and and a pit down the other.
You start on the left, and the impassible rooms are marked in red.
What the game reminds me most of is Wumpus 2, specifically the String of Beads map. In that particular level, items, enemies, and obstacles are randomly placed (just like Castle Fantasy) but the particular geography means that it is possible to get into an “impossible start” where you are completely blocked off from reaching the Wumpus. At least in that game you only had the one objective and could send arrows sailing over pits; this game has no such consideration.
The only mitigating factor is the odd behavior of QUIT, which you might think starts a new game, but actually just restarts you at the start in the same “world” holding anything you’ve picked up. So you can get out of a pit that way, but it still puts the obstacle there.
Even if there’s some method past the pits (maybe ESP holding a particular item?) sometimes parts of the map are just blocked off at random. That is, there isn’t even an obstacle to get by, it’s just what the map shows to be an open corridor is in fact just a wall.
There are three different enemies: green dragons, dwarves, and “worlocks”. I only ran across dwarves and green dragons. Dwarves I managed to kill where the only choice was whether I wanted to keep fighting.
Any attempts to attack green dragons with my sword failed.
This screenshot is from when I had a torch. It lets you see what is in all adjacent rooms, so you don’t have to wander into a pit to find out it is there.
I made multiple earnest attempts to “play well” — there’s at least a SCORE function going on — and where each time I did a full reset of the game (that involves breaking out and typing RUN in BASIC, remember that QUIT doesn’t actually quit) I had maybe a 60% chance of starting with a completely impossible situation. My “best” run I managed to find a key early and a secret passage shot me off to an area without many obstacles, but the experience really emphasized how much the whole situation was a slot machine rather than something resembling skill.
The concept of milking the Wumpus-model of randomization still I think has some untapped potential and fits cleanly into the adventure-roguelike style I’ve referenced before, but Treasure Hunt back in 1978 managed a much more pleasing and coherent experience, even if it was apt to have impossible situations of its own.
The UK edition of the game, from Retrogames. They’ve tossed Mussolini in the lower right, there. Despite the mention in the ad copy Mussolini shows up nowhere in the game.
I left off last time in a forest, which is a (mercifully small) maze.
Out to the west you can find the Prince of Peace himself, Jesus.
There’s a little bit of a catch with the whole “Satan sets you free” arrangement, you see — your soul has still been damned by your actions and Heaven won’t let you in. So the whole idea with meeting Jesus is to get absolution. His hint is to go back to the well of Beezlebub (?!) and try the vapors again. This doesn’t toss you in the dreamlike state again, but it does give a hint:
The verse in question here is “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” You need to go back to Jesus and CONFESS SINS.
Now you’re almost ready to take on Satan, but there’s one really nasty puzzle remaining. Going the other direction from Jesus on the other side of the maze you can find a crack in a wall.
The crack does not let you take an inventory items in. If you drop everything and go forward you find a stone door (which doesn’t want to open) and Judas the betrayer himself.
The silver coins seem like an immediately obvious bribe (it also seems like a wondrously appropriate hell-punishment for Judas to be wandering in eternity gathering more and more silver coins) but the crack makes it impossible to bring the coins over. I admit to being completely stumped here and had to look at hints.
Specifically:
a.) the word LUCIFAGE lets you open the stone door and get into a cave, which contains nothing
b.) to get the cave to contain something, there is one exact room in the forest you can drop items which will teleport over to the cave, for no clear reason
Part b does have a clue of sorts. At the start of the maze there is the message
OFFICIAL SAVEGAME SITE..NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR LOST ARTICLES!
which sort of hints at this might be something that happens. The appropriate room to drop things is at the very end of the maze but by then I was out of objects to drop and had figured out the form of the maze was mostly regular, anyway. If I had mechanically put something down and kept on moving I might have run across the trick by accident.
The trick with the magic cave let me grab the coins for Judas, and the crown from Hitler I still hadn’t used yet.
I finally arrived at a “SATANIC PALACE”…
…where I was able to KNOCK to be let in.
I mean, Jesus dropping by to absolve a sinner, sure. But an angel (that’s still angelic) opening the gates of Satan’s palace? Nuh-uh. The “angel” asks you to drop the crown.
It’s a trap!
No, you can just ignore the angel and move on to Satan himself.
If you give him the crown he will meet his end of the bargain (better than Hitler, that way) and let you free, and assuming you’ve made yourself proper with Jesus, you can ascend to victory.
Well, sort of? Satan getting his crown back allows him to kick Hitler’s army out of hell, but they still have the Deecula statue (remember us helping Hitler activate that?) And so… they try to invade Heaven instead.
It’s a 1982 game, so it won’t be terribly long (I’m estimating 3 months or so) before I get to the The Paradise Threat. Text-only this time, alas, but I’m still interested in having a final showdown with Hitler.
…
It’s not often that I invoke deeper themes here — as lovely as all the games have been, we’re still scratching the surface of artistic achievement. I thought The Institute had a promising setup that didn’t follow through; it vaguely indicated something about father issues and had a couple nice dialogue bits with the psychologist but the vast majority of it was a random glob of puzzles.
While Lucifer’s Realm still suffers some in a gameplay sense, I’d say it doesn’t have the same complaint: it sticks the landing on trying to say something with its story. Our protagonist has evil unmentioned deeds that go unremarked, but they (us) are clearly willing to go to extremes to help. What point is someone past saving and what point does redemption make sense? The encounter with Jesus indicates that, in some circumstances, past deeds can be forgotten.
At a simultaneous level, the whole plot involved helping the Prince of Darkness. Is this a paradox or reconcilable?
Is Judas, still desiring more silver coins even in Hell, essentially causing his own punishment?
Was giving Hitler the final piece to the Deecula statue worth it; that is, by helping a great evil, have we caused too much unintended consequence?
Or if you want to approach from the ludic angle, what was the significance of the final obstacle being a demon pretending to be angel trying to steal the crown from Satan?
…
Don’t forget Will Moczarski has been playing along the same time as me here, using the text-only TRS-80 version. I haven’t seen his final post but I was curious if any puzzles would come out differently, and if he had any different reactions in general to the events of the game. A few quotes of interest:
It took some time to get the parser to cooperate in almost every situation and so far I’m not exactly fond of the game.
It’s about as fussy as the previous Jyym Pearson parsers, but the thing I found trickiest was the occasional inconsistency. For example, at the very start, when you land in hell, you CLIMB down to a room with water and then pull a drain. (You can’t GET DRAIN either, it says you can’t see that here.) This automatically send you down a level. If you go back up again (absolutely necessary for the game, since the starting room requires the sunglasses to see LUCIFAGE), trying to CLIMB down and then CLIMB DRAIN just goes back up again rather than in the drain. The command is ignoring the noun. You have to GO DRAIN in order to keep progressing. There’s no real logic why the verb is different. Just one extra piece of friction to keep moving. (I believe the TRS-80 version is different again here, although I’m not remembering the exact commands; I tested it when I was first booting up the game.)
It works but he asks me why. I really don’t know, so I say “kill him”. Eichmann doesn’t react to this but the game tells me “You’re too kind.”
If you try to kill Eichmann in the Apple II version, he vaporizes you. Relatedly, Will had a lot of trouble getting past:
My next task will be to find the exact right words to get past Eichmann. I try “join him”, “warn him”, “aid him”, “talk to him”, “give him something”. Nothing works. “Join his army” does, as I find out after quite a while. “O.K., tell them I sent you”, says Eichmann, then leaves. It’s a bit ludicrous but I’m happy to finally be able to move on.
JOIN ARMY is the first phrase I tried (it seemed strongly implied by the poster). Just a matter of luck, really, but it makes for two rather different play experiences.
I can’t figure out what to do with the well and assume that I need to either smell the vapours (which doesn’t work) or drop something down the well (I might be missing the right item). Oh well.
SMELL works in the Apple II version, Will had to come across BREATHE.
I’m in doubt for a moment. Shouldn’t I be helping Satan instead of Hitler?
From the department of pair-of-sentences-I-wouldn’t-expect-anyone-to-write.
Looking reveals a smiling snake. I try talking to the snake and it gives me a hint to drop the crystal here. Or is it a trap? Anyway, I drop it and the snake swallows it. I have a bad feeling about this!
Because I’m unable to save my game I don’t try to proceed without feeding the snake. If you want to give it a shot and report back in the comments, by all means: please go ahead! Or maybe Jason smelled a rat and avoided dropping the crystal?
I think the picture helped here. It looks like the sort of snake aching to have its belly cut open and dug through.
As it turns out, that’s not exactly how it went — the snake disappears when you kill it at the crystal goes back to where it came from — but that was at least my thought when the snake ate the crystal, not that I had made a mistake, but that I commenced on immediate plotting to cut it open to get it back.
There was, on the opposite end, a spot where a picture hurt rather than helped. There was a spot (next to John Wilkes Booth) where using SMELL led to a rock, and there was an opening under you could get into. Will’s issue when he was playing is he had found the dark area below before he had found a lamp. My issue was knowing that you could even go in the opening in the first place:
That does not look like you can just crawl under the rock and go in; I have vague suspicion there might have been miscommunication with the artist here.
Speaking of the artist, yes, I’m in general agreement with the comments that Rick Incrocci’s artwork is fabulous, especially compared with Time Zone and other works we’ve seen of late. Some of this is technical: he had access to the Penguin drawing software (first published in 1981) whereas Time Zone was in development before it came out, and I don’t think anything else we’ve seen (other than The Institute) has had a chance to use it, either. Of course, the raw skill as an artist is in play here as well, and don’t be too sad about the sequel to Lucifer’s Realm not having art; he worked on other games that we will be getting to in due course, like Masquerade, which (due to the author Dale Johnson publishing an early version in 1982) we will be arriving at later this year.
For now, though, I have a couple of curious one-offs to get through (including an ultra-obscure adventure-roguelike), before we arrive at Infocom’s first game of 1982, a detective game I have never played before. Much excitement!
Renga in Blue 