Today, this blog’s first encounter with New Zealand.
It might not seem surprising offhand New Zealand had to wait until 1983 — their population in 1982 was about 3 million, ranking it between Armenia and Papua New Guinea — but they had a computer economy out of proportion to the population.
Their first computer, in a technical sense, dated all the way back to 1949 with the MONIAC, an analogue computer with a name that invokes the ENIAC. It was designed by Bill Phillips (he of the Phillips curve relating inflation and unemployment, the source of “inflation targets” in modern economies) in order to do macroeconomics via measuring the amount of fluid in various containers.
Philips with the MONIAC, sometime between 1958 and 1967.
They had their first personal computer club in 1977 (Brian Conquer in Auckland, who read about similar clubs in the United States) so they weren’t even that late to the scene, relatively speaking, and there were multiple home-grown attempts at computers: the MDL series, the Poly and the Aamber Pegasus. They all failed for related reasons that are useful to go into, as they reflect the general trouble New Zealand hobbyist computing had in the early 80s.
The first attempt (or rather series) was via MDL; John Lovelock founded Micro Processor Ltd. in 1978. They started with engineers and hobbyists in mind, but by the MDL-3 model tried to get into the educational market (due to the government looking to pouring a great deal of money getting into every classroom); notably the computers had a shared hard drive.
They never really stretched into “personal computing”; their MDL-4 model sold about 200 units before they ended trying to make computers altogether.
Second up is the Poly-1, designed in 1980 and entering production in 1980; it was named after Wellington Polytechnic where the designers Neil Scott and Paul Bryant worked, and launched with a many-thousand-NZD price tag. The government was making moves to put a computer in every classroom (like the UK) and the duo designing the Poly tried to make a computer specifically for that need, with the most notable feature being a proprietary networking feature connecting 32 of the computers together at once. Quoting Scott:
The original design was to create it, get it working properly, and then leave it. The network was completely automatic. You didn’t have to do a thing.
From Classic Computers NZ.
The government promised $10 million in sales to fill classrooms but only $64,000 in orders came in, as the overall order got nixed from above as overspending.
The third homegrown attempt was the Aamber Pegasus, by Technosys Research Labs. This time the commercial market was more in mind, but the price tag was still high: $1000 NZD (about $900 in historical USD; enough to buy a Commodore PET at launch). Via the manual:
The machine that we are offering, while being approximately half the price of competitive products, offers much more capability in terms of expansion and ease of use. Initially we are supporting four languages with the Pegasus, these being ASSEMBLER, BASIC, FORTH and PASCAL.
I’m going to be honest: despite the effort to put a variety of computer languages by default, the hardware (default 4K memory, and see video below) seems undercooked for the price.
It did even worse than the MDL systems or Poly: “There is uncertainty as to the number of computers manufactured, estimates range from a few dozen to around 100.” It tried to get into the educational market just like other companies did — adding on network capability — but all three got crushed by the same outside force: Apple.
The offer consisted of an Apple II plus computer, one Apple disk drive, the monitor III 12in green screen with integral stand, and 30 BASIC programming tutorial manuals all for $1200. The cost to schools is usually $4812.
They were cheaper than the alternatives (and flat-out better than the Aamber), and by 1982 had 89% of the high school market. It essentially held the same position of dominance in New Zealand schools that it did in the US, although some of the cheaper machines (like the ZX80) held position when a cheaper model was needed.
Polycorp (the most plausible of the three local competitors) tried to stop Apple with a protest to the government in regard to “dumping”, so a duty of $820 was added, which simply resulted in Apple increasing the price to $2020 (as the duty was written to apply to the “dumping price”, it no longer applied to the higher price tag).
Janie McKenzie, education manager at Polycorp in 1982, quoted as saying “we intend to be around for some time”. Not long after, the company collapsed.
The $820 add-on — and the fact New Zealand never grew their own low-cost computer — is actually the most important point of all the events above when it comes to understanding their home computing market. The whole period from 1975 to 1984 with the government at the time (led by Sir Robert Muldoon) was one of protectionism:
By placing high tariffs on imported items, the government provided protection to fledgling industries. The strategy was quite successful. Nonetheless, high tariffs made many imported goods expensive to consumers.
So, the “cheap end of the pool” hobbyists that flooded the UK had trouble getting started in New Zealand; a postmortem of sorts was written in 1987 which notes:
In New Zealand the sales tax priced the microcomputer beyond the reach of many potential hobbyists and it was not until the tax and licensing regulations changed that products were more readily accessible to the low end user.
The same postmortem (titled “Memo: Atari US. What plans for NZ? Reply: Ask Australia”) also highlights the other interlinked issue: the country was sort of an afterthought to Australia. Essentially, New Zealand received their computers and parts last compared to the larger markets. An Atari supplier who severed ties with the US is quoted as saying:
We were having trouble getting stock from the USA. At the moment we are still importing parts until another dealer takes over, but we are not importing either hardware or software. Existing stocks are being sold off and we are caretaking for spare parts.
All these elements put together mean despite the signs of a vibrant scene…
…it isn’t terribly shocking we have to wait until (probably) late 1983 for the first adventure game from New Zealand we can play. Specifically, Robots on Terminus IV by Antarctic Computing.
The “probably late 1983” there is because it the first ad we have for the game is from a December 1983 issue of Computer Input, a NZ-specific magazine without many copies available. There’s an ad in the November issue for only one game (the currently lost Detention Center on Nebulon) but the general sense I get is that there’s more ads dating back farther we just haven’t seen yet.
Photo provided by Brian Blackie.
Brian Blackie (who has the game on his site) actually has it marked at 1982 but he doesn’t have anything on the tape or packaging indicating that date; it’s certainly plausible. The ZX81 version (the only one extant of any of Antartic Computing’s products) is slightly quirky, with a period mark doing space and Z doing backspace; the ZX81 keyboard requires two button presses for backspace and I can understand trying to do something symmetrical to type a space, but it took a while for me to get used to playing.
We have landed on a planet to do a mission, I assume involving robots; I have no idea what “our mission” is. However, we have access to an armory on our ship with some heavy duty machinery, so I assume it involves killing robots somehow. In inventory is a “remote control” device to start, and there is a door with a sensor downstairs; the right action is to POINT DEVICE to open the door.
POINT is one of our rarer verbs, so it’s useful to pull open the verb list now (this is made by hand, not studying source code):
Enough of these words (THREAD, PLACE, UNSCREW) live on the rare side that I expect there will be some surprise “isolate” verbs I haven’t run into on any game yet.
After some pointless searching for a space suit I realized this is a planet with a regular atmosphere we can just step out onto; the city is a regular city with regular aliens in it.
Disembarking, there’s a SCREWDRIVER at the landing bay, and to the north is a city street with a few venues, like an art gallery, a casino, a pub, and a department store. I guess we’re in Space Vegas.
The department store has some sand shoes we can just take (nobody seems to mind), and the gallery has what looks like a hint for something we will see in the desert. The pub is filled with creatures I haven’t been able to interact with and a coin that can be picked up; the coin can be taken over to the casino and the FRUIT MACHINE, but trying to pull the lever after inserting a coin causes the lever to break off.
Is the whole purpose of this scene to get a lever?
Finally to the north is a desert maze (again just like Vegas)…
…and the main result (other than a suspicious dry well along the way) is a mysterious monolith.
I have been unable to interact with the monolith in any way, but it doesn’t help that I’m not clear what noun is intended here (four letter parser, so “HUGE”, “STON”, “MONO”, “JEWE”, “RED”, and “BLUE” are all possible). There’s no walkthrough or other documentation, and I don’t have a good way of looking at source code, so there are likely a lot of brute-force attempts in my future. I certainly am intrigued; usually our planets have been completely abandoned, Space Vegas is a new setting.
I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed to understand this one.
Via POPCOM June 1983, The Palms being advertised alongside the import game Pinball Construction Set.
Before continuing the events of last time, two points to hit:
1. I breezed past this screen fairly quickly from the kidnapping at the start…
…but just to be clear, this is showing the protagonist getting hit on the head by a coconut, where they wake up to find their girlfriend kidnapped; this is not them getting walloped by the kidnapper.
2. There was a cave where I tried to enter but I didn’t know why I died. Kazuma Satou in the comments mentioned a message about a Moray eel killing us. I have now experimented multiple times and found sometimes the eel response shows and sometimes it doesn’t. The game here seems to be outright buggy (mind you, it might be an emulator issue). Even when it does give the eel message, there’s a delay of a turn (and the game then gives just the “keep trying” message) so it is easy to be confused. For the events that follow with any deaths, I’ve seen similar behavior: sometimes an explanation appears, sometimes it doesn’t. Fortunately there’s nothing like the timed deaths at the start where I was genuinely unsure if my character was falling into the ocean somehow (as opposed to the girlfriend left waiting too long).
Continuing the story, there was a small HOLE I was unable to interact with but somehow I hadn’t tried LOOK, which displays a zoomed-in screen showing a crab.
Unfortunately, the crab turns out to be, while not quite a red herring, mostly useless anyway. If you open the door with the octopus on the wrecked ship, you can appease it with the crab, but you don’t make any “progress”; it just prevents you from dying. This is the sort of mechanic that makes sense in a gamebook (amulet of protection, good for one bad choice) but in an adventure game with a frequent save-reload cycle happening anyway the whole sequence ought to really just be ignored.
Speaking of the wrecked ship, the only reason to go in there is to find the bar, procure the wine…
…and then bust out via BREAK WINDOW. The NAILPULLER gets lost on the last door so I’m not sure what we’re using to bust it open; I assume our fist.
That’s almost everything missing from the big ocean area, except for one spot back at the ruin (which I didn’t find until later).
Over on the west wall there’s what looks like a hole; I tried LOOK HOLE with no dice, but found the right action was LOOK WALL. (In retrospect, there’s tiny writing too.) The “1983” will show up again near the endgame.
To escape the ocean section entirely requires going to a large rock to the west of the eel cave (far NW of the map).
Kazuma Satou’s comments ended up being helpful again, and I’ll just quote verbatim:
Given the circumstances, linguistic ambiguities may be throwing you off again, so let me just mention that the word ROCK is referring specifically to only ONE of the three rock-like objects that you can see on screen. Try using some synonyms to interact with the other two! (This likely comes down to semantic nuances between the words 岩 “iwa” and 石 “ishi” that didn’t transfer 100% cleanly into the context of an English-based parser).
I had run through a good chunk of my verb list previously, but I was merely referring to the ROCK (the big rock). I was instead supposed to be referring to a STONE (one of the smaller … er, rocks). 石 is “small rock” explicitly; while English does tend to imply “stone” is something smaller, it also uses rock as a straight synonym.
Trying to MOVE STONE asks which one; you pick the right one (no particular logic, but there’s no punishment for starting with left) and this reveals the most curious lost-in-translation piece of the game.
The exact text is
ｽｲﾄﾞｳﾉ ｺｯｸ(COCK)ﾉﾖｳﾅﾓﾉｶﾞｱﾘﾏｽ｡
and I don’t think the authors meant a ribald joke, nor does that look like a rooster, so I’m guessing they meant something like a faucet handle that can turn left or right.
TURN COCK then requires you to say WITH LEFT (not TO LEFT or just LEFT) in order to open a passage. I admit I had enough confusion and concern at this point I peeked at a walkthrough.
This leads to a new dark area, where you can go up and find an underwater city.
(More Micro Cabin Mystery House vibes going on.)
From here you can go south, west, or north. West straightforwardly leads back to the ocean (in case you’ve missed something), but south and north are messier: I hit the Parallel Universes problem. Since it’s been a while since the Problem has surfaced, an explanation: you are playing an adventure game, and manage to go from place A to place C, no problem. On a second trip through the game (for whatever reason) you try again going from A to C but now get stopped by some obstacle that wasn’t there before! You are in a parallel universe where a puzzle you previously didn’t even know was there has now appeared, and sometimes it takes effort to realize what changed.
Here, fortunately, the change was very slight, but let me narrate my first pass-through: I went south first, and found some statues.
While there, I started thinking that since I’m no longer underwater, I should be able to ditch the DIVINGSUIT, so as an experiment I tried DROP DIVING and it worked. Then I went back to the corridor and tested the north exit next, finding myself in a forest with a guard.
We’ll address the guard in a moment: the important thing is I ended up needing to go back through the same section on a different save, and found that I could no longer go north into the forest as seen above. But why?
Quite simply: dropping the diving suit at the statues solved a puzzle (pressure plate of some sort on the destroyed statue). My second time through, I dropped the diving suit as soon as I got to the underwater city since I knew it was safe, not realizing that it would create a parallel universe! This also indicates I got Very Lucky in accidentally solving what could have been a very difficult puzzle.
Back to the guard! Fortunately not a hard puzzle: I (almost) immediately tried GIVE WINE and it worked.
(The “almost” is because I tried directions first, and the game said NO!!!! like we were back in Mystery House again. That message appeared all the time as the default “you can’t do that” message.)
It’s easy to miss that you can also TALK GUARD after plying him with wine; he’ll mention the word HUMMINGBIRD (which, like 1983, will come up later). Exploring the forest now, to the east there’s a rabbit you can just nab…
…and to the west is a boat that is deadly. Just ignore the boat: it’s a red herring.
Heading north lands the player in a city; wandering around a bit I found a key…
…and another guard.
Using GIVE doesn’t work here but you can DROP RABBIT and the guard will be distracted and chase it. This lets you get past the bridge to an ARENA, with a door that can be unlocked with the KEY.
That’s a lion coming after us, and fortunately, I had been dutifully testing SHOUT everywhere I could; here it is finally useful, and it causes the lion to run away.
(This is close enough to Scott Adams Adventureland and the bear that I wonder if they’d had exposure to that game as well. I didn’t cover it here, but Adventureland did have a graphical version for Apple II by this point so I could see Hummingbird playing an import.)
Next up a SANCTUARY is visible in the distance but our way is blocked by BARRACUDA, but we’re also pretty low on items. The right action is to THROW BOTTLE — the one from the skeleton in the ocean.
Now we’re almost down to nothing, and I admit I had to check the walkthrough again to SHOUT HUMMINGBIRD. This reveals a door…
…and I had to check the walkthrough yet again, but in my defense the walkthrough author had a lot of trouble here too. The keypad suggests you’re supposed to enter 1983, but the right sequence is PUSH BUTTON followed by PUSH 1983. We’re almost done!
Further onward is a room with a RING, a HANDKERCHIEF, and a wall that has a smudge. WIPE WALL is sufficient to reveal a hummingbird.
Then you can PUT RING and find yourself mysteriously back at the beach.
You are restricted from doing anything other than picking up that coconut from the start of the game we weren’t allowed to touch before. And voila:
The game leaves the interpretation up the player, as this follows directly with credits.
(Scrolling, so I’ve concatenated some screens together.)
Rob did some sleuthing in the comments to help narrow down who everyone is. First off, 1983 is the year a different company (Starcraft) started publishing translations of the Sierra On-Line games into Japanese (including Time Zone with all the screens redrawn!) They also later re-did the Sirius games Kabul Spy and Blade of Blackpoole, and on the packaging for Blade of Blackpoole there’s some helpful information:
This discusses Masanori and Etsuko Takano, a team of programmers the profile compares to Ken and Roberta Williams. It mentions that after their first two games (The Palms and Knight of Wonderland) they formed their own company so they could work from home. Knight of Wonderland has a more straightforward list of credits:
Directed by: ｱｯﾄ ﾏ-ｸ
Program by: DR.KASARI
Graphic Design by: Hiroshi & Etsuko
Color Design by: Etsuko & Yuta
Coopelation: Ryuchan & Masako
Mamoru, founder of Humming Bird Soft, almost certainly was the producer of both games, so he was “ｱｯﾄ ﾏ-ｸ”, that is, “at mark” or “@”. Hiroshi, the brother, also wrote the scenario; he’s listed as working on Graphic Design in the credits for The Palms (maybe the scenario too, but uncredited?). Dr. Kasari must be referring to Masanori and Etsuko Takano; Etsuko is also given as working on graphics, and “Yuta” who is cited as doing color design must be Yutaka Kawamura (the one who was art director on Knight of Wonderland).
There’s some more clearing up to do, but I figure it can wait until Humming Bird returns again in 1983 with Knight of Wonderland.
Even if it was terrible to play, it would hold a novel place as really being Japan’s first game in the absolute style of the Apple II imports (excluding, again, The Odyssey which arrived slightly before). However, I generally enjoyed myself despite the language difficulties and the gauntlet of parser issues near the end.
While I’ve mentioned both Sierra and Micro Cabin references, this game also clearly points to Omotesando Adventure as well. What Omotesando established is a very in-joke sort of game where the player is dealing with the company that made the game; here, the Hummingbird references start from the very first screen and the player is clearly infiltrating “the temple of the Hummingbird” in the same manner as sabotage in Omotosando. It still comes off as the Japanese industry in their final “learning phase” and things are going to get much stranger as we get deeper into 1983. For the most part, because I already have them sorted, I will be trying to follow the history chronological by month.
If you’d like to jump ahead, the Game Preservation Society in Japan did a writeup of the game Recapture, a game that diverged from fantasy into satire.
The protagonist, a researcher at Fly Pharmaceuticals, is a young man who is putting all he has into a “100% Perfect Male Contraceptive” (according to the manual). He succeeds and creates the male contraceptive “Kondoh-Muyo” (literally “condomless”). However, rival company Mosquito Pharmaceuticals will not take this lying down and steals the research files from our protagonist while he is out drunk while celebrating.
Also, special thanks to the folks at Gaming Alexandria who helped me through some language troubles.
Last time I left off having trouble with getting both the ring (for the girlfriend) and a diving suit (apparently needed due to the kidnapping). The solution is off the verb list…
…but unless I missed something (more likely than usual given the circumstances) it isn’t clued that this is even possible.
The right word is RENT. You can BUY RING and then RENT DIVINGSUIT and then move on from there. (The player starts with 95 credits; you can BUY DIVINGSUIT for 95 and not have any for the ring, but this causes the timed loss like avoiding giving the ring altogether eventually does.)
Immediately after the kidnapping, you can WEAR DIVINGSUIT and then go north into the water.
Before exploring, I wanted to highlight something that’s been showing on the images I haven’t pointed out yet: notice in the lower right there’s a N or a S. This is showing which way the player is facing. Just because the game is trying hard to be a Roberta Williams Hi-Res Adventure (and you’ll see more of this in a moment), doesn’t mean it went completely without other inspiration; I’m fairly certain the reason “facing direction” got added was influence from Micro Cabin Mystery House, which is done in a first-person view akin to Wizardry.
One other thing to highlight is that death has been ambiguous. Nearly all the adventure games we’ve seen (including the Japanese ones we have played) have been explicit about what has caused player death, and sometimes have been even gleeful about it, such that the main plot is in the death scenes (see: The Domes of Kilgari). For the early deaths, the game just cuts things short and gives the equivalent of a “keep going!” message (頑張ろう, that is, ganbaru) while warping the player back to the start.
The first time I died I thought maybe I got swept in the water, not that the girlfriend’s scene was timed. Maybe it’s not even meant as a death but a “time reverse”? Either way, part of my early confusion was just realizing what was wrong. The first event trigger (if you don’t enter the shop) allows some time; the second (enter the shop, but haven’t bought the ring) is short; the third (after you have the ring) gives a little more time again. After the kidnapping there’s yet another timer running for getting the DIVINGSUIT and going in (now fairly short, and again with no detail why you just lost).
Again, using the same vibe from Roberta Williams, we have a grid where only some of the squares are important. Again, I have mixed feelings on this; one surely would expect underwater to be big and contain some locations that are empty of anything more than fish.
Especially for a player of this era, just moving around an environment and seeing graphics change as you move can be an engrossing experience.
Still, the actual game effect is to make the player treat the map as a lawnmower, mopping up each square, sometimes using alternate lives if one dies for inexplicable reasons. Still, the density isn’t too bad; this is maybe halfway between Time Zone and The Dark Crystal in terms of number of “interesting” rooms. (To be clear, The Dark Crystal wasn’t out yet; I’m just trying to describe the feel.)
Heading immediately east is a knife. (If you haven’t noticed yet, all takeable items are drawn in a white square.)
Tracing around the border and heading due north, eventually (five turns later) you’ll find a skeleton with a bottle.
Keep turning and there’s a cave to the north; try to enter and you’ll get another one of those vague, unclear deaths. (Is it simply a trap to avoid? Will it work if I get a light because I’m bonking my head? Or is it more like a creature I can’t see?)
West and south from the above area is a RUIN. You can go in and find an altar with the Humming Bird Soft logo and a blue ring that looks like it matches the red ring. It looks like the kidnapping may have been due to magic afoot in the antique ring we bought, rather than coincidental circumstance.
South a bit and there’s a SHARK. Fortunately, the KNIFE picked up earlier works to KILL SHARK (it prompts with what, you need to type WITH KNIFE). If you just try to hang out with the shark, eventually you’ll die, and again — no description of being chomped, you just get told to MAKE MORE EFFORT.
With the shark out of the way you can see the thing behind, which is a SLATE. I think it is meant to deliver the clue we are supposed to SHOUT somewhere to scare something off?
This has been moving in a spiral, so let’s mop up the last “interesting” spot which is just north of the starting point; I haven’t been able to get anything to happen here but it does invoke the English word (ROCK) which seems like a hint something ought to happen.
Finally, spiraling a bit more, we arrive at a shipwreck.
Entering is one way (as far as I can tell, there may be some parser nonsense).
The layout ends up having five doors, three which can immediately be opened while using the nail remover. (The double room aspect is again reminiscent of Micro Cabin rather than Sierra.) To the immediate west of the entrance is an octopus (the knife doesn’t work this time, and before you ask, yelling/shouting doesn’t help either, we are in a diving suit though):
To the east is a dark room which the game refuses entry; in this case I assume it has to be a light source issue. (The text just says you can’t go that way.)
At the end of the hall the west and north doors don’t open, but the east one goes into a bar where you can find wine in a CABINET, but you’re still stuck (I can’t even get out of the bar, let alone the wrecked ship).
Despite the Japanese text, this does give me the vibe of a lost Sierra On-Line game, with the same quirks and absurdities. Roberta Williams was never afraid to describe deaths, though, but at least with a shark or octopus I can guess what happens.
I’m lacking access to Takara B. D. Adventure (Micro Cabin again, same month as Diamond Adventure) and Odyssey Part 1 (Prosumer, squeaking in right at the end of the year and written for PC-88 with a Kanji ROM). One day!
While Diamond Adventure and Takara have notable connections with both Omotesando and Mystery House, and there are a few games (like The Spy) from 1983 that are linked, the industry mostly moved in different directions. Today’s game reflects that, completing an origin trilogy of sorts for Japanese adventure gaming.
Via Giant Bomb.
1980s Japan had a “bubble” in real estate, especially in the city of Tokyo; in 1990 the Harvard Business Review pointed out that just (in terms of real estate value) the ward of Chiyoda-ku alone could purchase the entire country of Canada.
The other city typically cited as benefitting from the bubble? Osaka, home of the real estate company M・A・C.
Mamoru Imanishi was in the Computer Division, and significantly, a son of the CEO. While he got his start in computers with a TK-80 kit…
…his true beloved was an Apple II; he ran a club devoted to the system and was familiar with import games. He somehow wrangled (see: son of CEO) a separate store and software line in late 1982 called Humming Bird Soft; they started with some PC-88 and Apple II graphics and utility software. Joining Mamoru Imanishi was his brother (Hiroshi Imanishi) and a small team.
The best scan I have at the moment of a February 1984 article in ASCII. It looks like today’s game has credits in the data file but I don’t want to poke too hard at it until I’ve finished.
They made their big splash in January in 1983 with The Palms for Fujitsu’s FM-8 (later FM-7).
Source. The FM-8 was Fujitsu’s first fully built computer but it was thought of as a “business machine”. Hence, a bifurcation happened after with Fujitsu’s follow-ups, the FM-11 being the business computer and the FM-7 being for general consumers. The NEC PC-88, Sharp X1, and FM-7 are the three 8-bit Japanese computers “casual” retro-gamers will likely run across.
The slow rendering speed on the PC-88 (and similarity between Fujitsu’s and Apple’s CPU) led them to make this hardware choice; what was even more daring was that they made the game solely for disk. Quoting Mamoru Imanishi:
I was anxious. After all, it’s a world where you can’t see the future. And I wondered: what extent would there be a demand for disks? I was unsure until the very end if cassettes would be better.
Omotesando introduced adventures, Mystery House introduced graphics, but The Palms goes back to the source — the Apple II Sierra On-Line games — and set a technical standard by a.) being in color and b.) being written for and only published on disk.
(What about the Odyssey game by Prosumer? It landed only a month before, and was in color, but worked on cassette and was allegedly quite slow. I will investigate whenever I get a copy, but for now just note it did not have the same impact The Palms did.)
We are at a seaside village for our girlfriend’s birthday. She’s been wanting a ring at the local shop; we’ve arrived with money saved from hard work. She awaits under a palm tree, but something is about to go wrong.
(Text above: “I’m in front of a seaside shop.”)
The village is laid out like a Sierra-style grid; the only directions are the cardinal ones and up and down (no diagonals).
While I’m at it, in addition to the directions I just mentioned, here’s the entire verb list (as extracted from the data file) — still following my policy of giving myself verb lists early on games in languages I’m not good at.
Ignore the appointment and wander around and you’ll eventually lose; the right thing to do is go into the shop, which offers a RING and a DIVINGSUIT…
…then BUY RING, and find the palm.
Giving the ring…
…is immediately followed by a kidnapping.
I haven’t gotten much farther than this. One last item is a NAILPULLER out in the open…
…but the only other item I’ve found is in the shop, and there’s not enough cash remaining to buy the diving suit.
There’s also a church with a locked door…
…and two cliffs, neither of which want to be climbed.
It looks like our destiny is to chase the damsel in distress under the ocean and have further shenanigans from there.
Just getting oriented has been slow going; it doesn’t help that the font is stylized in a way that seems designed to give headaches. On that last screenshot, the character before the period is a タ (“ta”). I sort of see it after the fact, but it’s taken puzzling above and beyond the adventure game puzzles created by the authors. Fluent Japanese readers are welcome to chip in with how readable they’ve found the text.
Fortunately, the pictures generally are clear. I’m essentially in the reverse position of the early Japanese pioneers playing import Apple II games with dictionaries by their side, scrounging in wonder at a new art form.
I finished on the Amstrad version, which runs a little faster and does seem to be nearly identical (comparing against the walkthrough by Garry Francis). Even that ancient manuscript I mentioned counted for essentially nil: there are no glasses to read it. I’m not sure why the author even added it in, other than a general love of red herrings; the dog, hammer, dynamite, bulldozer, and rubbish bin all signify nothing other than the debris of the British countryside.
Cover of the magazine the game first appeared in, via eBay.
My two issues (the missing treasure, and the heavy lid I suspected hid a treasure) both had their solution nearby. The lid straightforwardly opened with the “sharp sword” at the mansion, no hammer or dynamite needed.
I don’t know what the “sorry” is about, sometimes the parser printed that randomly.
I mentioned mushrooms I was not able to pick up last time. This is an Amstrad-specific bug. The game does not let you type GET MUSHROOMS or even GET MUSHROOM (it just re-displays the room over again). You need to type GET MUSH or GET MUSHR. I assume there’s some length limit I’m hitting. (The Oric does not have this problem! I’d consequently say the Oric is less buggy but Garry may have fixed the mushroom while he was busy fixing the general can’t-pick-anything-up bug. It’s all just a mess, let’s just leave it at that.)
With the mushrooms, er, MUSH in hand, you can deliver them to the gamekeeper nearby. Again, GIVE MUSHROOMS fails, it needs to be GIVE MUSH.
This is the only place a spacesuit is mentioned. I don’t know how the kissing worked.
That puts us at a full list, now it’s just a matter of getting all the objects over in one save file. This was slightly tedious but made somewhat less so by the discovery that PRAY rotates through locations a bit at random; after making a delivery I did PRAY until I was close to my next targets. I did still have to tote a BOAT all over the map twice.
Item pile in progress.
I didn’t even get to drop my last treasure, this displayed with the camera still in my inventory. I wonder if the game is bugged so you leave one treasure behind you can still win the game.
There’s no puzzle for entering the spaceship. I suppose the power of friendship was within us all along.
This was a lot of words for a type-in (mind you, that’s the style of this blog) but it’s worth a close look for if nothing else not only did Steve Lucas publish many games, he published at least two “how to write adventure games” books, one for MSX and one for Amstrad. If his style evolves over time we need his starting point accounted for. I’m hoping over the process I can shake a few more biographical details loose (what was his past background? what happened to him during the 90s?)
But for now: our first Japanese game for 1983, one considered a landmark work.
From the cover of Games Magazine November 1984, with the Amstrad version of Space Traveller / Visitor from Space, although this particular illustration is meant to go with a different game, Interplanetary Miner. Mind you, I think they’re just pulling from the same stock archive of space pictures for both.
As promised, I went through the Amstrad version of the game, with some places having expanded text. I don’t think any of the text helped me with puzzle-solving, but it did make combing over the map less repetitive since things looked slightly different.
Just west of the start. The original just describes it as a field, without the extra textual hint about digging; if I hadn’t found the treasure already this would be a case where the expanded text was helpful.
No busker (or Beatles reference) in the original.
Outside the warehouse, previously with no mention of dark glass.
There was one genuine change in content (that I’ve seen so far): an ancient manuscript in the warehouse (seen above) which originally just had a box. Like the newspapers and poetry book, it can’t be read without glasses.
I guess you can also count the Oric in the computer shop changing to an Amstrad; would expect that one.
I did reach two new areas, but before describing those, two quick treasure finds, the first being right at the opening with the pebbles. EXAMINE PEBBLES reveal a zirconium nugget.
Additionally, back at the bus stop, if you WAIT at the queue you will eventually be able to get on, and while on the trip there will be a roman coin you can scoop up. (This incidentally takes you to the north part of the map without praying. The other option — adjacent to the bus — is a taxi where you can GO TAXI to do the same thing, but no coin on the way.)
So treasure count wise, that makes five so far: silver bar (dug in the field), zirconium nugget (pebbles), roman coin (bus), gold pen (teacher), and rocket fuel (hut, using key). The rocket key ends up not counting towards the ten treasures (despite it having asterisks) but I’m counting it anyway meaning we’re at 5 out of 11. I’ve got 4 more secured, plus 1 probable location, so I’m close to the end, but close isn’t all the way.
First, let’s go back to the lake by the hut, where I previously did ROW BOAT. Checking each room carefully, I realized SWIM was also a verb that could apply there, and it led me to an entirely new destination.
The landing point is a beach with sunbathers. Back at the store (in the Amstrad game it is described as a “Tesco”) there was a lighter at a store that couldn’t be grabbed because it was by the register and our alien visitor has no Earth money; however, farther away in the same store there’s some suntan lotion and baked beans that are apparently out of the eye of any watchful cashiers. GIVE LOTION to the sunbathers and you’ll get a CAMERA (treasure #6).
Just to the east there is a dead body, just because this is a gonzo adventure and tonal shift is just its thing.
Dying alone and unnamed. Searching reveals nothing. Oddly, unlike the boat trip which is one way, you can just swim back across the lake.
The cliff I’d been looking for! With the parachute (first getting chastised by the parser for trying WEAR PARACHUTE, it just assumes you have it on implicitly) I was able to land safely.
Just to the east is a crab (taking it gets you chomped: death); a few rooms away in a “dark forest” is a “gnome” that is, I quote, “the sort they sell at Woolworth’s”. GET GNOME:
In the middle of a dark forest, putting us back in On the Way to the Interview for a moment.
Between the gnome and crab is a “sandy cove” with a “driftwood” that is hiding a diamond ring (treasure #7).
To get out of the region (without PRAY) there’s a narrow ledge which requires a ROPE. The implication here is that walking through the section takes up two inventory slots already (parachute + rope) so getting the ring + the driftwood requires two separate parachute runs through (maybe the driftwood doesn’t do anything, but I don’t know that yet!) If there’s some way to handle the crab and/or gnome it requires bringing in objects to test one at a time.
Now is a good time to mention the three-item limit is an incredible pain. Either the boat (alone) or the parachute and rope (together) are needed to move from the north to south side of the map, so in a practical sense the inventory limit is either 1 or 2, and so testing any theory about bring an item X to a spot Y requires a lot of shuffling. The size of map really does influence the level of suffering involved with a small inventory limit; a good recent example of this is Mystery House II, where the two-item limit applied in all versions. In the MSX version it was irksome (the entire house was always accessible) but more workable in the versions split into multiple volumes (as they only involved a smaller portion of the house).
Moving past all that, I mentioned I found a second area. Down at the farm there’s a “pigsty” which I thought was merely a dead end, but it is possible to GO IN.
The way to get by the pig is simply to PUSH PIG knocking it over, cow-tipping style.
Past a long tunnel is a mansion. I have yet to use the sword for anything.
This is followed by a fairly dense area where I doubt everything ends up coming into play, but let’s do bullet points:
a garden with a gate and a “garden snake”
a “gamekeeper” in a clearing
some mushrooms in a woods (they don’t seem to be takeable)
a platinum bar (remember that trolley from the farmer who liked poetry? you need it to pick up the bar)
a lead casket (you need something to open it; dunno what yet, see inventory limit)
a woman in a field (trying to KISS this one results in getting slapped, I guess this isn’t Earth Girls are Easy)
a large monument with a radio transmitter, another treasure
Finally at the end (drumroll) there’s the spaceship! Except I don’t know how to get in. Forgot my remote and the app stopped working, I suppose.
In the end all the puzzles have been straightforward (except PUSH PIG was pretty odd) but the spread out nature of the map makes things hard to test. I still need to check: blowing things up with dynamite (and can the lighter be taken somehow?), dealing with the dog outside the store, taking various objects like the hammer over to the lead casket, seeing if the gamekeeper will take something, nudging at the mushrooms some more, and even more things I’ve lost track of. This is a lot more work than I expected from an Oric type-in.
I have been sent on a difficult and rather dangerous mission to a distant planet called EARTH. My mission is to locate ten items of treasure and bring them back to my spaceship. I will, in addition, need to locate some rocket fuel for my return journey.
My random roll has landed me on the works of Steve W. Lucas, perhaps best thought of as Britain’s answer to Peter Kirsch. That is, a wildly prolific author who wrote reams of slightly janky BASIC code but with flashes of creativity just naturally from cranking out bucketloads of content. He has 41 hits on CASA but some of those are duplicates — when porting from one system to another he would often change his game’s title and only sometimes change his content. It’s unclear how many distinct games he wrote and it may even depend on your definition of “distinct”; there’s a long thread at CASA that tried to tame the chaos but there still seems to be some confusion. The other comparison with Kirsch of note is how he worked with a wide variety of computers: MSX, Oric, Amstrad, and BBC Micro.
With Journey of a Space Traveller, it first appeared in Oric Owner (Aug./Sept. 1983) but got changed to A Visitor From Space in a 1984 printing for Amstrad, with some expansion of the text. The intro at the top of this post is from the Amstrad version; the Oric version instead starts “I have been sent on the first flight from my planet to the planet Earth” which I think has less punch than “rather dangerous mission to a distant planet called EARTH.” However, I’ve been playing (up to where I’ve been stumped) the Oric version; as is tradition with multi-version games, I might poke at the Amstrad version to see if there’s any tweaks or textual hints to help (allegedly the walkthrough is the same, at least).
The Oric is a new system for this blog. I’m not going to do a system history right now, but I’ll say it is Tangerine’s much more successful follow-up to the Microtan 65 and was particularly well-received in France as it didn’t need an adaptor for their SECAM television format.
It is likely his first published game but I’m not 100% certain; it is his first to appear in Oric Owner, at least, but he also published some BBC Micro software through Silverlind; the first ad for that I’ve found in November, with a “call for games” back in May.
From the Oric magazine original.
The other distinctive thing about his games — specifically the Oric Owner ones but maybe some of the others as well — is how buggy they are. None of the ones printed in Oric Owner work directly as printed; Garry has a patched version that’s needed to get past even the first command. This is the sort of thing I’d normally blame on the magazine rather than the author but it’s odd for it to occur multiple times; the author has two games in the December/January issue with the same problem.
Games Computing, November 1984, with a slightly higher art budget. Well, higher art budget for printing, but given the art has nothing to do with the game I think it was “borrowed” from elsewhere.
The instructions helpfully give the verbs (this seems to be common across all the Steve Lucas games) so I’ll give them, just as they were printed:
GO IN, GO OUT, GO TAXI, OUT, N, S, E, W, WAIT, SING, SAVE, WEAR, SCORE, ROW, SAIL, THROW, LIGHT, GET, TAKE, GRAB, CLIMB, DOWN, READ, **** OFF, TIME, DIG, HELP, SEARCH, DROP, LEAVE, GIVE, OPEN, PHONE, QUIT, LOOK, KISS, PRAY, LOAD, CLOAD, PUSH, PULL, EAT, ATTACK, HIT, KILL, EXAMINE, SWIM, USE, INSERT, UNLOCK, WEAR, JUMP, INVENTORY, BUY, CRACK, COOK, SORRY, SAIL, ROW
(****, OFF not required, gets “how dare you speak to me like that? What do you have to say for yourself?” and you need to respond SORRY before proceeding on.)
It’s a traditional treasure hunt, but with the twists that a.) you are an alien and b.) you’re treasure-hunting on modern Earth. Adventure-behavior — especially without regular communication with characters — is typically a bit non-standard, so I like the idea of the mute protagonist poking and searching every room (digging random floors, hitting walls, trying to climb everything, etc.) being explained away by their alien status.
I don’t know where the spaceship is; part of the goal is to find it. This is a major pain in that the inventory limit is three (weak alien arms, I guess we’re used to lower-G) so I have no idea where to stash things so they’ll be close for their inevitable unloading into a cargo bay of some sort.
Right to the east of the starting point are some pebbles and a shovel…
The Amstrad version adds “The pebbles hurt my feet!” but I haven’t gone past this room.
…and the shovel can be used just to the west to dig up some SILVER bullion, our first treasure. Nine to go!
Heading to the east, there’s a quarry with a hammer, and nearby is some dynamite and a parachute. I have yet to blow anything up (I think it needs a lighter I’ll show off later) nor have I found the right place to apply the hammer and parachute (…presumably not at the same time). There’s additionally dead ends with a Sheer Rock Face and Bulldozer but I haven’t quite worked out yet if this is an “everything is important” style game or some parts are just scenery. I’m leaning to the latter.
A rope is at a bridge (again, haven’t used) leading to a “primary school”. The school has a secretary which you can kiss (the game says she likes it, indicating we’re an alien counterpart to Riker) and a head teacher who has a GOLD pen, another treasure. Examining the teacher reveals they like singing (alien senses, I suppose) and SING will utilize the Oric’s speaker to play a tune, after which you can get the pen. Eight more to go.
Leaving the school (swiping a book of poetry for later, we can’t read it because we need glasses) and proceeding westward we can find a locket hut at a boat. I’ll mention right now there’s a key laying out in the open later used on the hut which contains *ROCKET FUEL* (seven to go); the boat needs to be carted a short way to a lake where ROW BOAT can be applied. Note that the three-item limit applies neutrally, so a LARGE KEY is the same size as the boat in inventory.
The trip over water landing at the Footpath (see upper right of above map) is one-way; the only way so far I’ve found to return to the start area is PRAY, which warps you over for some reason. (Religious miracles: alien technology all along!) The PRAY is quite relevant insofar as just to the west you can get lost in a forest that’s an endless loop, and as far as I know PRAY is the only way to get out.
Proceeding in a direction that isn’t a trap passes through a warehouse with a box (nothing in it), and that leads to a carpark, and then a bunch of directions from there, like a bus station complete with queue…
Only in a Britgame.
…a computer store with software you can LOAD…
…a fish and chip shop…
…and a closed newsagent place with newspapers that can’t be read because you still need your glasses. (If this was logical you’d have left them on your spaceship by accident, but I can’t rule out some random passerby’s reading glasses working just as well.)
Nearby all this lurks a LARGE KEY at an intersection which goes back to that hut with the rocket fuel; as I already indicated, the only way I can find so far to head back there is to PRAY.
Moving on to the west, we can pass by a rubbish bin (seemingly containing nothing!) near a supermarket.
To the west of here is a lighter at the cashier. I can try to BUY LIGHTER but the game asks “with what?” Maybe use one of the treasures and get it back later somehow? I still need to experiment.
Lurking outside the supermarket is a dog; no idea what to do here yet…
…followed by a bunch of rooms leading to a farm complete with tractor and a farmer. The farmer wants a book, so if you hand the poetry book over he’ll give you a trolley, because this game is following gonzo logic.
To be fair, the “I’m an alien” does a lot of the work in making the narrative seem semi-normal for an out-of-control treasure hunt. However, I am up on my limit now at only three treasures.
I’m not going to list every obstacle because I don’t know which ones are “real” and which ones are for scenery. Does the forest have a different escape? What can you do at the bus station? Does making the dog happy lead to treasure? This might be the extent of the map and I’m just supposed to mop things up (akin to Invincible Island) or I may have only seen part of it. Given the parachute (and distinct lack of gaping chasms) surely there’s at least a bit more to go. Maybe the supermarket is secretly the alien spaceship.
I’ve beaten the game, and unfortunately both puzzles involved were terrible. I still will give some latitude because the combining-message mechanic was so satisfying, but let’s get to the end first–
Continuing directly from last time, I needed to get a parchment from the native without resorting to violence. I had tried to GIVE every single item I could possibly bring over. (The SKULL I could not bring, because it triggers natives attacking when it passes by the other native.)
Every GIVE gave a variation like the one above: “what?? I don’t think the native wants it”. The text here clearly implies the game is understanding, and simply rejecting this option.
Instead, no: GIVE NECKLACE was right. But it has to be typed as GIVE NECKLACE TO NATIVE in order to be understood.
I’ve never done relative ranking, but this likely would my in top 3 most deceptive parser messages of all time.
Fortunately this was near the end of the game because otherwise my mood would have significantly soured. I did not come across as “solving a puzzle” as much as “making a meta-leap based on my past experiences, given we know the character has the parchment, the verb list is minimal, and GIVE is on it”.
Knowing the GIVE syntax, I went back to the first native and tried giving an item that hadn’t a use before: the FOOD. The results in the native trading a PHRASEBOOK.
With the phrasebook I could go back and read the two messages previously untranslated, at the sign and the altar.
The first simply indicates to follow the path rather than digress, where the second one might be intended as a hint for the endgame but I’m still massively unclear about it (you’ll see in a moment).
when the page is complete look and you’ll find, west of the sun and the ancient temple,amongst the bones of our ancestors
I still hadn’t used the SPADE yet, but now was the time: I dug starting at the three pillars and going west. Just east of where the skull was I found gold.
Once the gold is revealed, natives immediately appear and start to chase. It’s a little more time than what happens with getting spotted with the skull, but not enough to do anything useful.
Trying to hide in the well. You can jump in the cave but you just get killed in the dark.
If it hadn’t been for the GIVE issue I would have spent a bit longer on the puzzle, but I was grouchy and worrying I might be running into another parser issue. It isn’t a parser issue at all, and just as an experiment, I’m going to pause before revealing the answer. Try your best guess at how to pick up the gold and survive all the way back to the boat; maybe you’ll spot something I did not.
Via eBay.
Did you come up with… be holding the skull while picking up the gold?
Despite being attacked earlier because you had the skull, now you are attacked when you don’t have the skull. I assume there is some logic about a taboo going on but I couldn’t come up with any rationale, nor any way to pull the altar’s clue into the puzzle (assuming it is relevant at all).
With the skull providing safety, you can now walk back to the boat. The boat still needs to be light enough to sail, and you’ve got a bunch of gold, so you need to drop the skull before leaving, but there’s ample time after to sail away.
The puzzles overall were essentially straightforward (coat for the cold, foot pump for an inflatable boat, key for a door) and the wide-out exploration and slowly growing parchment made for a satisfying middlegame. Just it failed to stick the landing. I surely am missing some clue on the skull, right?
I’m going to save Urban Upstart for a little bit later (but not too long, I want to have the “feel” of this game fresh in my mind) and my projected third Britgame also needs to be maneuvered a little, so after I finish writing this I’m pulling out some actual dice to see what comes next. Exciting! Then we’ll be off to one of the first Japanese adventures of 1983.
I have seen all seven parchments put together and even solved the puzzle, but I don’t quite have them all permanently yet.
Strident mentioned the prog band in the comments: The Speedy Bears. Pete Cooke on keyboard. Source.
Progress was mainly a matter of getting comfortable with the game’s norms. For example: last time I mentioned the canary I hadn’t tested yet. Bringing the canary in the “coal mine” (not actually a mine) the canary fell over dead after two steps.
This reflects the “you can’t breath” rooms, but is this letting us know about a potential timed danger, or is there a further puzzle here where we have to make it to place X with the canary surviving? With one of the “every item matters” games like from the Cambridge mainframe (Hezarin, Avon, Quondam, etc.) I would be on red alert until there was further resolution; with this game, the canary is just meant to give the information above, and then you can move on.
Similarly, there’s a part with a “native”; I found that if you pick up the skull and bring it to the same room, a group starts to gather and attack. In some games, this would indicate you’re supposed to find a sneaky way to get the skull by, or eliminate the threat; here, the norms are such that not only is the skull meant as a “trap” (like the stones over the bridge) but the native no longer needs to be considered as a puzzle element (I don’t need to sit around using GIVE on every item in the game or trying other verbs.)
In a more practical sense, I’ve discovered that while the parser is mostly two-word, there’s spots like right here you need four words: use WITH SWORD at the end is how you avoid just using your fists to fight.
Additionally, I was thinking there was going to be more map, but what I had last time was nearly all of it. I have marked the positions, and the six new rooms are in the upper right corner.
The first parchment and second parchment I had already found, in the underground area (SW) and island (NW) respectively. I had made a guess about the chest with the snake and the green potion that turned out to be correct: after drinking the green potion the snake’s bite has no effect (it doesn’t say “you feel cured”, you just don’t die); in addition to the trap the chest has the third parchment.
This is just the piece from the chest. After picking up multiple parchments, they automatically merge together, so you don’t need to visualize cutting and pasting.
The fourth parchment I was very close to having, with both a box I was not strong enough to open and an axe. I even tried BREAK BOX (“what with? your bare hands?”) and tested a follow-up WITH AXE on its own parser line. This was before I realized sometimes the parser wanted four words, so BREAK BOX WITH AXE all together does the trick.
I had mentioned the pits before, where one of them is fatal to enter. I hadn’t gotten around to testing the other two yet; both act entirely differently. One is fatal in an identical way…
…but the third reveals the fifth parchment straight off the bat.
Some games would have the norm that similar looking pits would have similar rules (see Probe One: The Transmitter for an example) but here all three pits are different.
My last bit of confusion involves the second fatal pit, two screenshots back. The game specifies you can go “down” and I somehow interpreted that as the same as entering the pit; in reality that’s just an area I missed.
With the anorak from the camp it is possible to climb a mountain and get the sixth parchment from the top without freezing from the cold.
Death soon after. I knew instantly what object I needed but I was curious what would happen if I moved on. This is a “death preview” moment and we’ll see another of its type shortly. See Burglar’s Adventure for more discussion of this idea.
Past the mountain is a pagoda; it is locked with a red key (which is just out in the open from the temple earlier).
The wild thing about the encounter in the pagoda is you can kill the native (with the sword) and get the seventh parchment. The death doesn’t happen until a few turns later, long enough to view the unified seven parchments altogether.
This is a cryptogram. Avoiding the automatic solvers on the Internet, I went to a site that has tools for playing them on a computer (I like them, but find them a pain to keep track of on paper). I swapped unused letters for symbols to get:
The puzzle fortunately falls fairly easily to “the most common letter is E” and “the second word is probably THE” as a start.
when the page is complete look and you’ll find, west of the sun and the ancient temple,amongst the bones of our ancestors
I assume this is back at the skull, but since all parchments are needed for the final area (at least according to the decipherment) I still need to figure out the legit way of getting the final parchment piece from the pagoda. I expect it will be either the last puzzle remaining (if finding the treasure is just a glorious “you win” section) or the second to last (if getting out after finding the treasure is still going to be a problem, like in Calixto Island).
Apologies: after a bit of research I’m going to visit Invincible Island first and Urban Upstart second, as they represent the first two text adventures by Pete Cooke in the order he wrote them. (The latter was picked via random number generator to be my next game, rather than anything systematic.) Both were written for the ZX Spectrum.
Pete Cooke is another one of our math-teachers turned programmers, although he started (after graduation) trying to make it work as a piano player in a progressive band; the band failed (he blames punk rock) so he ended up doing degree-work in order to teach math to 11-to-14-year-olds in Leicester.
While their department received a text-only RM 380Z…
A machine developed in 1977, targeted at schools in the UK. From vt100.
…where he really caught the computer bug was the ZX81, where he “sort of lunged at it” and got using one as soon as he could. He ended up making programs that he showed to his students, and:
Eventually I wrote a simple text adventure and showed it to some of the students who said it was seriously good and thought it was better than some of the stuff in the shops!
He sent it to Richard Shepherd Software (previously: Super Spy) and they offered 1000 pounds to buy it, twice his monthly salary as a teacher.
[Adventure games] were interesting, and it was the idea you could explore somewhere. Also, I didn’t have the skills then to design 3D or animated graphics, although I’d been reading about AI and language parsing. It could also have been the influence of games such as The Hobbit, or maybe just the freedom appealed to me. I wrote it from scratch with bits in BASIC and tiny bits in assembler, but essentially hand-coded.
Noteworthy to highlight in the quote is the emphasis on “freedom” and “exploration”. This game has one of those wide-open maps more closely aligned to Roberta Williams than Scott Adams; this was not converted from ZX81 but rather written directly for the ZX Spectrum, along with its increased resources. (There’s a 2022 backport to ZX81 which converts the 48K original into 16K but even with modern resources and cutting out all the graphics, part of the original game was omitted.)
The loading screen has a ripple effect through “Invincible Island” so I wasn’t able to get a shot where all the text showed at once.
We’re back to being on a Treasure Hunt. Sort of.
WELCOME TO INVINCIBLE ISLAND
In this adventure you are an explorer stranded on the remote island of the XARO.
Your only guide is a letter you received from a Dr Chumley several months ago in which he said that he believed that islanders had hidden a massive treasure somewhere on the island.
Unfortunately, Dr Chumley did not live long enough to find the islands secret.
You have arrived on the island in a small boat, your aim is to find the treasure and escape alive.
Hmm. Since they’re hiding a treasure, I guess we have the right to scarf it? (It has come up before, but I want to emphasize that “claim stuff in the name of the British Empire / your wallet” is not common amongst these games despite so many Treasure Hunts. I still think the best instance so far has been making the deal with the demon in Zork II.)
What makes this game unusual compared to regular Treasure Hunt plots is something mentioned on the packaging, about “seven parchments” regarding the treasure. I have found two of them and they give parts of a message intended to be mashed together, so there’s an extra dose of intrigue in a game-mechanical sense beyond finding some “BARS OF GOLD” or a suitcase full of cash under a big W. It still is also possible the final “treasure” isn’t a normal treasure but “the friends we made along the way”.
The island is, as I implied already, pretty wide-open, but before I show off the map, here’s the verb list:
This ends up erratic; notice no READ verb, and there are at least two bits with writing (not even counting the parchments), which gets looked at with EXAMINE instead. PUT is actually WEAR. There’s no way to SWIM, and no way to HIT objects; so there is an AXE early on which I have not puzzled out how to use. CROSS gets used to launch a boat over to a small island.
For the map, I’ll give the whole thing at once to start, then break it into pieces.
For the opening area, walking along to the east is a deep pit; going in is death.
There are at least three pits that look like this on the map, so I assume there’s some aspect I’m missing and this isn’t just a trap.
Further are some STONES, which are something of a trap, but they only kick in later. Yet farther is a hut with a necklace.
Headed the other direction, there’s a RUSTY KEY nearby a chest that the rusty key conveniently opens. Unfortunately, doing so is, you guessed it, a trap.
I realize as I type this there is a mysterious “green potion” nearby which might be the antidote. I only tested it alone and nothing happened.
Moving farther along, just lying about on the ground is some FOOD, an AXE, a TORCH, a SPADE, an ANORAK (that’s a polar coat, maybe the top of the island is really high) and a caged yellow CANARY.
Before anyone asks, I have tested DIG with the spade in every location accessible so far with no luck. Near the same area is a “native” — the only one I have run across so far — and anything I’ve tested so far with GIVE (the only character-action verb that isn’t just KILL) has been rebuffed (I have not tested every item in the game thus far, though).
Turning east, there’s multiple rooms that are a “dark forest” where there are the occasional eyes peeking out, and more than a few turns in the forest turn out to be deadly.
There’s a BOX at the end of a path, but my character isn’t strong enough to open it.
Swinging back over to where the canary was, you can light a torch and go west into a “maze” except it’s a 4×3 set of rooms.
There are two rooms where you have trouble breathing — I assume the canary is somehow important to these rooms, but I’ve been able to just pass on by so I haven’t tested this yet — and spread out you can find a SWORD and one of the pieces of parchment.
The only way out of the “maze” is to the north…
…where there is a small area of “barren plain” including a SKULL, but soon after there is a river and lake.
One point requires crossing a bridge, and this is where the stones from earlier are a trap: if you’re carrying them the bridge collapses. Other items seem to be safe.
You can wrangle up a FOOTPUMP and a DINGY over to where there is a visible island on the lake, and the CROSS over to find another piece of parchment.
I’m wondering if the inflatable boat is from Zork. Infocom was never huge in the UK (lack of disk drives) but we saw at least one case of clear influence from 1982 (Goblin Towers).
I’m assuming all the fragments combine to make a cryptogram that needs solving, but it’s hard to tell with just the two.
Finally, past the native (who does not block your way, despite appearances) there’s a path leading to a temple and altar. The altar has writing that you can’t read and a red key but otherwise I have found nothing else of note.
I still have things to test (like using GIVE on more objects, seeing what happens with the canary, and seeing if the potion is an antidote) so I’m not stuck yet, but I also am unclear where more rooms (which clearly are out there) are going to come from, as I don’t have any clear navigational blocks except for the pits. Maybe this is a “multi-level maze” where we go underground, then go back up again elsewhere? In any case, with only two out of seven fragments so far, this is looking to be a meatier game than I originally expected.
Renga in Blue 
