The people involved with today’s game are Nick Hampshire and Carl Graham, both who have important parts to play in the history of technology.
Nick Hampshire’s early college experiences (1970-1975) bounced around a bit as he went from Zoology to Computer Science and moved between college studies in England, Sweden, and the United States. He followed this with some technology work in San Francisco; using the S-100 bus (the backbone of the Altair and many other early computers) he made his own 8-bit computer he called the System 8, then went back to the UK to try to sell it in 1977.
From Personal Computer World, August 1978.
In order to promote his new system (and other S-100 bus systems he became a dealer of), he made his own magazine he called Computabits. This ended up determining his life trajectory as the System 8 completely failed (I can’t even find it even mentioned in any of the usual “museum of obscure computers” sites) but Computabits as a magazine did quite well for itself, being swept into the early magazine Practical Computing as a “magazine within a magazine” starting in its second issue; Hampshire was later listed as “technical editor” and was set on his career as a writer. He ended up writing 9 books between 1979 and 1984, some being (relative to the market) best-sellers; Vic Revealed made it to 400,000 copies worldwide.
ASIDE: Of his early Computabits articles, the most relevant for today is one he wrote on “epic games” where he discusses textual compression techniques (similar to those Infocom and Level 9 would come up with) like using single characters to represent whole words. He also theorizes about extending the “epic game” into an “electronic novel” where “no longer does the reader identify himself with the hero — he or she is now the hero.” Jack Pick read the article and inquired for further help on text compression, trying to apply this to his mainframe game Adventure II. (Also, keep in mind that February 1979 issue, as we’ll come back to it for something else later.)
Mr. Hampshire still tried his hand at hardware for the Commodore PET, but really had more success with his publishing ventures, including the launch of Commodore Computing International in 1982.
One of the employees throughout 1982-1985 was Carl Graham, listed as a “programmer”; he was a “staff writer” in the sense of being focused on writing type-in code for Commodore BASIC to be printed in each issue. Carl Graham himself was also quite hardware-minded, with earlier projects starting in the 70s including rewiring a Texas Instruments calculator in to be a digital timer (“looking at thin films of water breaking up into beads on glass using photo sensors to measure propagation speed”), making a Z80 assembler in BASIC, and and making his own plotter for his TRS-80.
Today’s game, On the Way to the Interview, is a type-in starting on page 14 of the magazine above where the article (not game) title is Anatomy of an Adventure, another one of the articles allegedly teaching how to make an adventure game. This sometimes is an excuse for a sub-par adventure game. This one is just … unusual.
It is written in Commodore BASIC and supports the line in general (PET, VIC-20, C64), although I ended up playing the BBC Micro port in the Nick Hampshire-edited book BBC Programs Volume 1.
Your goal: make your way through streets to your scheduled interview at Slave Driver International. Your starting inventory: a CHEQUE, presumably from your last job. Perhaps winning is losing in this game.
The graphics shown are an automap. The reason the game can do this is the entire thing is oriented on a grid.
Even more unusually, the way the game’s data is stored is by roads. That is, each road is listed and the elements of that road are listed in sequence, but from the player’s perspective a road is a whole sequence of rooms.
There are nearly no puzzles. If Pythonesque and Mad Martha are British degenerate games (where one goes about an urban environment causing havoc) this is an anti-degenerate game. The goal is to be a “responsible citizen”. The route — starting at 24 on the map, winding over to the northeast — consists mainly of things you need to ignore, lest you throw off this title. For example, early on there is a shopping bag you pass by, otherwise it will kill you.
The game keeps track of minutes passing in real time. You need to make it to the interview in less than 7 minutes. With this screenshot, I had left the emulator running overnight.
Later there is a TRAMP. Simply talking to the tramp (ASK TRAMP) ends the game. (“I’ve just had a bad experience with a tramp.”)
Just a bit farther is a GUN, which has all sorts of game-ending possibilities. First off, you can simply try backtracking and shooting the tramp, but it doesn’t even let you operate the gun (“I’m not having anything to do with shooting things.”)
There’s a policewoman later that will arrest you if you’re holding the gun in the open. You can just have the gun randomly go off while holding it. There’s a bank along the way where if you step in with a gun they’ll think you’re doing an armed robbery.
The right thing to do in the bank is, responsibly, CASH CHEQUE (yet another “isolate” verb I haven’t seen yet, but I had my eye on the source code by now in my playthrough for reasons I’ll get into). This gives you MONEY, and lets you later pass through a private park.
Once through the park, it’s a straight shot to the interview, making a beeline for the northeast corner of the map.
Ending, with an exit to the operating system. You don’t even find out the result.
Here’s the full route, with the side trip to the bank marked in green:
Again, this is a “learning game” so there’s some latitude for simplicity, and the article actually does try to make the layout of the source code crystal clear. It’s still a very curious model given that most action besides movement is bad, really, and how many adventure games are on grids like this? (Very, very, few. Even Asylum and friends use “razor walls” as opposed to having a grid with blocks filled in, also known as “worm tunnels”. The only other example we’ve had here is the unfinished/unpublished game Castle Fantasy.)
I still haven’t gotten yet into the worst part of the game. Every once in a while, at random, you get run over by a bus.
It doesn’t matter if you are on a road, in a park, or in a police station: the bus will come. There is absolutely nothing you can do about the bus. This is essentially a slot machine game. Perhaps the RNG on Commodore is better, but on the BBC Micro version, I could not beat the game: I consistently got run over before reaching the park. I had to cheat by changing the source code and modifying my starting location. This admittedly enhances the feeling of being hapless (as opposed to Fighting the Machine) but is a deeply odd choice to make for a learning game.
We’ll see both authors again in 1984, as there was adventure custom-written for the BBC book (one that looks on the face of it slightly more traditional, but I know never to trust Britgames to stick to normal). As that will take some time to reach, I should mention both had distinguished careers after; Hampshire kept writing books and doing journalism, as he “contributed to magazines such as Personal Computer World, PC Magazine, Byte, Interface Age, as well as newspapers such as the Times, FT, Telegraph, and Mail”. While Graham left games for a while (making database software from 85-90) he eventually picked up a job at Argonaut.
You may know them better as the makers of the FX Chip for Super Nintendo games; Graham was a coder on the original Star Fox and has a long list of credits after.
Regarding the unusual grid, I do have one suspicion where it might come from. I said I would come back to the February 1979 issue of Practical Computing. Earlier in the same magazine there is an article by T. J. Radford which doesn’t present a full game, just an “idea” which spans two pages (early computer magazines sometimes had this, I assume they had trouble filling space). It involves creating a D&D-type map as part of the theorizing:
Long shot, I know, but it gives me the same crossword-grid-like feel, and I wonder if Hampshire internalized it as a possible way to make an adventure game map.
Coming up: The somewhat-related but much more substantial escape-from-British-suburbia game, Urban Upstart.
I have finished the game, using the time-old technique known as “reading the source code”. I am fairly sure I would have made zero progress otherwise. This just gets absurd, and not due to bugs.
I’m not going to sequence in order of how I “solved” things or in narrative order, but rather from most to least reasonable.
Money from under the big W.
Let’s start with the treasure under the trees I couldn’t get to. As I suspected, it was a straight parser issue.
Things that don’t work: DIG, DIG TREES, DIG UNDER, DIG BETWEEN, GO TREES, DIG W, FIND SPOT, FOLLOW MAP, DIG SPOT, DIG TREASURE, FIND TREASURE, LOCATE TREASURE.
The game was fishing for GO W, and then DIG.
This was the treasure with no name originally, hence the fix calling it MYSTERY TREASURE. Now I know the context, there’s a fair chance this was intended as SUITCASE OF CASH.
Not terrible for a work in progress, but it still stuck me entirely. To grab from the source code, I used software called Scottdec:
141) 1 56 [GO W] /* MISSING STRING */
? PLAYER_IN (13 = *I’m on the west shore of a deserted island)
? CLEARED_BIT (22)
-> 1 = PRINT(OK)
-> 58 = SET_BIT (22)
This is much cleaner than trying to read off the database file directly, which has “1 56” on its own without the verb and noun linked to it. The “missing string” comment is supposed to go somewhere else, but it looks like something in the sequence of comments is out of sync.
Next up is the cave, with the tiny hole and the chisel.
I had additionally tried LOOK HOLE, FEEL HOLE, RUB HOLE, and pretty much anything on my standard verb list that seemed reasonable, but unfortunately, the game uses a brand-new verb I have never seen before in a text adventure: REACH HOLE.
This isn’t done yet! Despite the diamond being a treasure with asterisks, the treasure can be made into two treasures, via CUT DIAMOND / WITH CHISEL.
If you get greedy and try to get yet more treasures by repeating the process, the diamond gets ground into dust.
The really wacky thing here is that one is not necessarily more valuable than the other (except in a black-market sense, except we aren’t going to make it that far). No, it’s simply taking the fact that the game wants, abstractly, 7 treasures, and can only get all the way there by turning one distinct treasure into two.
There is incidentally a “clue” earlier about the diamond, but it is a complete red herring clue (in the Ferret sense of being actively misleading).
There is no boat. BOAT is listed as a noun so I wonder if the author considered this, changed his mind, and never got around to cleaning up the clue (work in progress!) as opposed to creating an intentional red herring.
Nearly to the end now, to the most absurd jump of all. I knew from the start of the Scottdec file what the goal was:
TGoal: store 7 treasures in room 24
Room 24 is a HUT, but we haven’t seen one, because you’re supposed to make it. With the leaves from the trees and the string from the dead body, you can (on the west side of the island, at the W) use the command MAKE HUT.
Now, you can GO HUT and deposit treasures. We’re one short, but after a little time here is a “quick flash of red light”; LOOK LIGHT reveals a RUBY. Amusingly, it doesn’t even need to be picked up, just revealed.
Oh, on the darkness: from the source code I found there is an overall light timer, so it wasn’t the flashlight turning off the sun, just the game being mean. It gets so dark at night you literally can’t see anything at all.
Like Strange Adventure, we are king of an island at the finale with no visible way off. Enjoy your two diamonds!
If this was a published game, the hut puzzle would enter the all-time most absurd list; it gets an asterisk due to the work-in-progress nature of the game, since the author may have had some plan in mind before running out of space.
I do think, now, regarding “why this was unfinished”: it was a matter of running out of memory space. In order to fix the TAKE commands, the code went up to 19k, and that’s excluding items like the screwdriver and leaving in numerous other erroneous parts that the author clearly intended to get back to later. The game doesn’t seem large/impressive but Watt did try to write a list of features that started to extend past the game’s reach. SCREW is intended as a verb (unused); the BOAT is listed but doesn’t show; there’s ICE and a BOOK for some reason. I tried to cross-correlate with other Scott Adams games (in case one served as a template and these are “vestigial words” left in) but no dice: I’m pretty sure everything listed is something the author intended eventually. Hitting a wall like this from an original plan is bound to be frustrating for development and it is a miracle at all the game was left close to a state that could be played all the way through.
Coming up: Three Britgames, followed by games from Japan, New Zealand, and Denmark. This will be our first 1983 game in Japanese, and neither New Zealand nor Denmark have appeared on this blog before.
I’m not done with the game yet. It is a unique experience in that I normally would be wildly upset at the number of bugs if this was a published product — it has more than even our worst offenders — but as-is, I consider something of a window in time. In terms of history of game design: what limits did authors have they were running into? What was the fault of bad design and what was the fault of authors just working with what they had? What concepts did they have that ended up undercooked just because of technical issues? My most comparable other playthrough was Irvin Kaputz which was a game abandoned because of running out of memory space, where adding even one more character to the text causes a crash; the author there had some ambitions of object-modeling that were rare for the time, but the fact this extra detail caused failure is a good lesson in why bare-bones was more the norm.
Scott Adams stated with Adventureland the reason the game has the span it does he kept writing until he ran out of space (versions vary of the data file, but they all are around ~16000 bytes).
I’m not sure if the memory issue applies here. Mr. Watt certainly had access to 32k (see: his Microsoft Adventure copy program) but he may have still had 16k as a target goal. There are actually two versions of the data file for the game, one at 12576 bytes and one at 15588 bytes, the former having spaces taken out for compression purposes. This suggests he realized he was reaching his limit and did a pass, but was still running short accounting for everything else to make this feel like a polished product. I’ll study the issue more once I’m done with the game.
After Kim Watt went to Texas, Super Utility was published in partnership with Powersoft. Cover of catalog via Ira Goldklang.
My progress essentially involved combing over everything seen and finding extra items along the way. To start with, when grabbing the seat as a floatation device from the plane, it turns out LOOK PRESERVER reveals some batteries. Of course, the batteries don’t let you TAKE them (of course) so you can be in the middle of the ocean and have it happen and they’re just floating there. Don’t worry, they’re ok!
A flashlight turns out to be nearby as well. On the first beach I had done DIG to get the response
With what?
I don’t have a shovel.
Quite often this means a shovel is coming later, but Rob in the comments suggested trying HANDS anyway.
——-^ Tell me what to do? WITH HANDS
OK
So “With what?” is meant to be a parser prompt! Also noteworthy: unlike some games that include the WITH syntax, you have to get the DIG-prompt first for the WITH HANDS to work. So there’s also a diggable item on the next beach you come across (a rusty knife) but I originally just tested WITH HANDS and only discovered later DIG was required first.
Back to the first beach, digging gets a hole and the hole has a flashlight. I took the flashlight back to the ocean and was fortunately about to LOAD FLASHLIGHT / WITH BATTERIES and it worked. The unfortunate thing is that this starts the light timer (…sometimes?…) and when the timer goes off, everything goes dark, including if you are outside in sunlight. The better thing to do is to wait for until you are next to the cave later to LOOK PRESERVER so the batteries get dropped close to where they are used. (Having said all that, one of my test-playthroughs the flashlight timer just didn’t seem to cut off at all even after many turns. The timer is just busted generally.)
That’s still not everything in the first area; in the ocean where you land you can DIVE.
OPEN CHEST results in
I can’t
it’s locked.
Getting stumped here, I got around to making my verb list. Notice neither LOCK nor UNLOCK are understood verbs.
Having noting in the way of HIT verbs, I kept trying around things until I realized the game lets you refer to LOCK as a noun (…just assuming a visible lock on the locked chest…) and CUT LOCK / WITH CUTTER works to pop it open, yielding *GOLD COINS*.
All this being done while floating in the middle of the ocean since you can’t take the chest, of course.
Just to recap, I had newly-found: FLASHLIGHT (from beach), RUSTY KNIFE (from other beach), and GOLD COINS (from chest). The progression is to land at the first beach, swing through the jungle to the second beach, then go into the ocean again, where yet again DIVE works to find something.
The smeared map, if you wait enough turns, will clear up enough that it dries out and you can read it. (I think the smearing would not undo itself? It felt clever anyway.)
Unfortunately, DIG doesn’t work like it did before. I have no idea what parser command to use here.
It’s pretty clear what movie is being referenced, though. From It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, near the ending under the “big W” where the treasure is buried.
As implied earlier, the flashlight/batteries now allow entrance into the cave on the south side of the island.
There’s a large cavern with hole (that you can enter), a small cavern with a hole (that you can enter), and a tiny cavern with a hole (that is too tiny to enter). In the third room LOOK AROUND reveals a CHISEL (not takeable). I haven’t been able to use the chisel on anything. It is possible there is a HAMMER that goes with it but I haven’t found it.
I still have had no luck getting by the quicksand or overgrown bush in the jungle, or the floating jelly in the lake. I suspect I am not far from wrapping things up but the game is not even close to playing fair.
Anyway, here’s this skinny blonde kid, around 6 feet tall, wearing silver Ray-Ban sunglasses, driving a royal blue Formula Firebird that says he’s Kim Watt! Can you believe it? Oh well, he sounds like he does on the phone, so I guess it’s him.
I got a surprise in my comments when El Explorador de RPG mentioned he got the game — previously completely non-functional — into a fully playable form. It works all the way to the end, and I have a download here. (Run ADVENTUR, then pick 2 when prompted for which adventure to play.)
Via Ira Goldklang.
Kim Watt was a pre-med student in 1978 when he got his first computer, a TRS-80, and started to build a consulting service around it. He eventually dropped out of college altogether to focus on computers. He became well-known as a “genius” and never did outlines, simply writing directly from his brain to assembly language.
While he started in Michigan (and lived there in 1980, when today’s game was likely written), he later moved to Texas and took on a look to match:
To underscore his reputation as a renegade guide through the wilderness of home computing, Watt has wholeheartedly adopted the role of Software Cowboy. It is not unusual to find him at computer shows throughout the country, dressed in a ten-gallon hat and boots, signing autographs and counseling his followers. Though he is originally from Michigan, he looks the part. He has steel-blue eyes, disheveled hair, and a serpentine tattoo on each bicep. His demeanor is also on target; the strong, silent type, he is wary about discussing his work. His comments and answers are clipped and guarded, expressed in a quiet monotone.
Kim Watt is mostly remembered in the TRS-80 community for his utility software like Super Utility, used for salvaging data off broken diskettes or even copying protected disks (Super Utility itself was protected, and refused to copy itself; it was eventually pirated anyway). Watt later wrote a book disclosing the secrets of Super Utility for an eye-popping price tag of $500; those who would buy it (including MIT, the Navy, and Radio Shack employees) would discover the secrets of Watt’s methods. Although:
Watt points to a stack of computer printouts, almost two feet high, on a bookshelf on the other side of his office. “Couldn’t fit all of it into the book,” he says.
In his early days he worked on multiple games, mostly arcade action, and even had one published by Adventure International (Scott Adams’s company) in 1980.
The curious thing about this is that the same year, Watt also wrote his “Intercept” program which essentially broke the copy protection that Scott Adams started applying to his adventure games. This seems to be before his generalized copy-program, meaning Scott Adams games were essentially a testbed for the ideas that went into Super Utility. He gave a similar treatment to Microsoft Adventure (that is, the Microsoft port of Crowther/Woods for TRS-80).
As part of all this, Watt wrote a game in the Scott Adams database format, Marooned. Similarly: Pyramid of Doom was written by Alvin Files who simply figured out the format himself and sent the game over to Scott Adams. Allan Moluf described the file format in 1980 and used that as a basis for an editor program; this was expanded upon by Bruce Hanson and published commercially as The Adventure System the next year.
The game starts by asking for which adventure you want to play, 1-9 (this is standard for Scott Adams interpreters 7.8 through 8.5) but by typing in 10 we can start Marooned, which describes itself as adventure 10. Less glamorously, you can type 1, because it only is taking the first character. (Also, as I already mentioned, if you’re playing the fixed version, pick adventure 2.)
This is not a game damaged from a bad tape read, like Mystery House II; rather, this is a game that had development abandoned midstream, and one of the treasures you’re required to collect didn’t even get a name (the fixed version calls it a MYSTERY TREASURE, although I haven’t gotten to it yet). It is buggy far out of proportion to other games we’ve played, and El Explorador had to manually add the commands to pick particular objects up; in an effort to make minimal changes, only items that are needed to be taken are takeable.
Before getting to any treasures, our hero(ine) needs to get past their immediate dilemma, which is a crashing airplane.
Action starts in a very restrictive 3-room area, the place I was stuck at 7 years ago.
To the south is the “tail end” of the plane with a broken cable, knapsack and toolbox. The knapsack turns out to be a parachute, but you can’t pick it up, you can only WEAR it (and while taking inventory, it has no name, you just get “being worn” message by itself). The toolbox has a wrench, screwdriver, and cutters, but you can only take the cutters.
If he had finished debugging the game, I would guess the other two items would be takeable but remain as red herrings.
For some reason, you can PULL the cable, but only while holding the cutters (?) and this reveals a knob. TURN KNOB then reveals a secret door, and you can OPEN DOOR to find some *TOP SECRET PLANS*, the first treasure of the game.
To escape, the sequence is truly bizarre. Back in the center of the plane, you can LOOK AROUND to find a RING on the ceiling. (Not LOOK UP, which we have at least had a few times. LOOK AROUND is brand-new for this game.) Then — I assume some descriptions never got done — you can CONNECT CORD/TO RING resulting in “ripcord attached to ring”. OPEN DOOR will then jerk you out of the plane; if you want to, you can DROP PARACHUTE before leaving and somehow survive anyway as long as you’ve done the ripcord action.
Neither the geese nor plane have a description, because what is supposed to happen (assuming you still have the parachute) is that this is a “timed view” room which doesn’t allow any commands, but just sends the player down to the ocean.
I was stuck for a while until El Explorador mentioned I needed another item for swimming, and I realized that for some reason TAKE SEATS back on the plane in the starting room yields the player a floatation device. (No description when looking at the seats — again, I assume the author bailed before even getting to that part. Remember, taking items doesn’t even work at all, this had to be fixed.)
With the floatation device, you can bail on the parachute and then SWIM multiple times to reach a shore.
This leads to a progression through a Forest, where every directions loops; you can climb up a tree, then LOOK AROUND (that new command again) to see a VINE, and SWING VINE reaching another forest, with one more SWING VINE reaching a new beach (I assume on the other side of the same island).
From the new beach you can dive into the ocean again and SWIM until reaching a slightly more elaborate island, and this is where I am stuck. My map so far:
The west shore has a coconut tree (top: coconuts + leaves) and palm tree (top: dates + leaves) and in both cases only the leaves are takeable, and you can take both of them, meaning Leaves. and Leaves. are both in inventory.
This doesn’t mean the coconuts and dates are useless, but whatever happens to them has to happen on the spot.
To the south is are branches to a Jungle and Cave. The Cave is dark and I have no light source, while the jungle has overgrown brush (which suggests it can be whacked away) and quicksand (which is a one way trip and quite possibly another red herring).
To the east is a lake and going in there is some floating jelly which is described as “awfully slimy” and trying to get it is fatal.
Finally, to the north is a dead man. Trained by other painful games, I used FRISK to find a STRING and used MOVE to reveal a BAG. While the bag cannot be taken, EMPTY BAG reveals some *PEARLS*.
Given the number of other issues with the code (it isn’t even a “private game” as I usually have defined it but a “work in progress”) I would normally follow this with code diving or even assuming the game can’t be finished, be El Explorador has now played all the way to the end, so I’m going to treat it as a “real game” for a bit longer and try to solve puzzles as if most of the item descriptions weren’t missing.
If anyone else wants to join in, perhaps they can have the glory of being the first person (outside El Explorador who had to modify the code) to finish the game, ever. This includes the original author! When I finish I’ll dive down into the technical layer and try to diagnose why this happened.
You may have noticed a general pattern with my 1983 picks:
January 1983: S. S. Poseidon by Bill and Debbie Cook January 1983: The Final Countdown by Bill and Debbie Cook Might be 1982 or 1983: Cauchemard-House by Anonymous 1983, based on a game written much earlier: Nosferatu by Mike Taylor and Myles Kelvin January 1983: Caveman Adventure by Dave Carlos Intended for 1982 launch but slipped to 1983: The Dark Crystal by Roberta Williams
In other words, I was writing about games with at least a foot in 1982. I do not have a complete month-by-month breakdown of all 500ish games for the year and I never held the restriction that I have to be chronological by month, especially in cases like today’s game where I don’t know what month it was published, or if it was published at all. (Kevin Bunch at Atari Archive tries to get more exact dates with his chrono-playing, but even though the Atari 2600 had much wider audience base than any computer from the time, he still sometimes has an error bar.)
It notably uses the TRS-80 with 32K-of-memory only. This is non-trivial as the Model I generally went to 16K.
A 32K expansion interface for the Model I. They started being sold in 1978, and allowed plugging in more memory boosting the original 16K of the TRS-80 to 48K, but you would never assume a standard user had one of these in 1978 or even 1982. The Model III could be expanded internally. Source.
The instances we’ve had before of the 32K TRS-80 have nearly all had alternatives; for example, Asylum had 16K and 32K versions (with notable changes to the text) and while Hog Jowl Mansion was printed as a 32K game, it gave specific advice for condensing the code to fit on a 16k computer. Stuart Rush’s 1982 game Survival was intended to have two versions of the room descriptions printed in the magazine, except an error led to both of them having the “short versions” and the full code wasn’t printed until David Ahl’s Big Computer Games from 1984. Xenos (published in the tail end of 1982) is the big exception.
From a 1983 catalog. Both of these are 16K models, with $50 for each additional 16K. To adjust for inflation to 2025 money, prices should roughly be tripled.
In other words, authors have been struggling against the limits of their computers — or at least computers they expected their target market to own — but 1983 is when authors of home-computer adventures just might have a little more space to work with generally. The ZX Spectrum — with greater default capacity — now will notably be much more prominent than the ZX81.
In this specific case the increased space’s effect is less in allowing longer sentences and more in allowing a bizarre coding style, but we’ll get to that.
The text of the intro is clearly cadged mostly wholesale from the text in Scott Adams games, including, ironically, the bit about piracy. Such a line would normally indicate this game was sold commercially, and while I think this is possible, I haven’t found any print-magazine ads. It is also possible this was “aspirational” writing, although in this case, there is a second game in the Herrick Venture series (Land of Odysseys) and that second game mentions a third (Ghosttowns of Nevada). No copies of the third exist so it may be vaporware; still, on top of that there’s a second version of Escape, re-titled The Building and written in machine code. I stuck with the BASIC original to start, but then switched to machine code later for reasons I’ll get into later.
I have been unable to narrow down who Richard E. Herrick Jr. is from multiple candidates. It’d be fun if he was related to Richard J. Herrick, the first person to get a kidney transplant (with a donation from his twin brother in 1954; the surgeon Joseph Murray later won a Nobel Prize) but alas.
You are trapped in a building and your objective is to get out.
The start is fairly brisk. The door is locked and the rug is nailed down; checking the shelf (twice) reveals a SAW and HAMMER. The hammer can be applied to remove the nails, allowing removing the rug and revealing a hole in the floor.
This leads to a cellar (see above) which seemingly only has a brick wall, but some bricks can be taken, revealing both some planks and a key. The hole above is too high to reach but assuming you kept the saw, hammer, and nails from upstairs you can put together a LADDER with the parts, allowing egress back up the hole.
This leads to a wider-open space, but not too wide because this is a escape-building game and not a Roberta Williams landscape. There are multiple holes and passages that open up, but I’ll give the version of the map without any of those first:
You stumble from the ROOM out into a hallway and then a LOBBY with a PADLOCKED DOOR and STAIRS.
The machine language version adds a bricked-up door intended to represent the front door.
Wandering around the easily accessible spots: there’s a BEDROOM to the west with a CLOSET to the north and a BATHROOM to the south. The closet has an ELECTRIC CAN OPENER, the bed has a PILLOW and BLANKETS, and the bathroom has a sink, tub, and toilet, which all seemingly at first glance did nothing.
Upstairs, there’s a supply room (MATCHES, TIN CAN) and a maintenance room with a KEROSENE LANTERN and a window. You can BREAK WINDOW (the game asks WITH WHAT? and you need to respond WITH BRICK, using the ones from the cellar).
You can step outside to find some broken glass (not useful) and a security badge (useful later). You can also try to jump and die (I attempted to use the pillow and blankets to soften the landing, no dice).
Heading back downstairs, the padlock isn’t too hard to deal with using a tool from the start: SAW PADLOCK. This breaks open a library with a bookcase. After some parser struggle I managed to PULL BOOK, revealing a lever.
The book mentions A COMPUTER NEEDS POWER TO RUN (hint for something in the next room) but also says TRY HERRICK VENTURE #2’LAND OF ODYSSEYS.
The secret passage leads to a COMPUTER ROOM.
Doing FLIP SWITCH has no effect; doing MOVE DESK reveals a frayed cord and plug, but trying to insert the plug electrocutes you. While I’m at it, I should mention GO DESK lets you see a DRAWER which you can open to find a DISKETTE (grr things you can clearly see that the game refuses to mention unless you are positioned in a particular way).
Making progress now requires more unconventional thinking, or at least “I assume nothing is a red herring, so what haven’t I used yet”. For example, there’s a whole “room” dedicated to the bed: why? Well, because you can SLEEP, and then for no logical reason whatsoever, some insulated gloves appear.
This isn’t exactly “moon logic”, although it does hover near my prior definition (where effect doesn’t derive from cause). The author’s thought process seems to be that the player should try all things that seem linked to regular behavior (like sleeping in a bed); even if the cause isn’t immediately apparent it doesn’t seem that outrageous someone would do the action in the first place.
Keeping that in mind, there are three things you can do in the bathroom:
a.) RUN WATER to turn on the sink. This will spill out not water but some oil-like substance. If you take the can opener, use the plug at the computer to operate it, and open the can, you can fill it with oil.
b.) RUN WATER again while in the tub. Some keys come out. I needed to disassemble the source code to figure this one out.
c.) FLUSH TOILET will cause the toilet to lift up revealing a hole. The hole goes under the manhole in the street (seen earlier through the window) and it leads to freedom, with the small catch there are bolts at the bottom of the manhole.
So to recap, we now have: insulated gloves from the bed, oil from the tap (fracking, I guess), keys from the bathtub, and a way out which requires removing bolts. Now back to the computer room, where the gloves work to plug the computer in.
Pressing ENTER causes a secret door to swing open. Upon trying to enter, the game locked up, and I ended up restarting and retracing all my steps with the machine code version of the game in order to get farther. Past the secret door is a room with a lift.
You can SHOW BADGE (from up on the windowsill) to trigger the next part, but the machine isn’t quite working.
The lift has a gauge indicating it is empty of fluid. It took a lot of parser fussing to realize I could FILL LIFT (POUR OIL just pours it on the floor) and then the door will open, allowing entrance to the last room.
The final obstacle is simply a room with a file cabinet. It simply requires the SECURITY KEYS, and for some reason a WRENCH is inside. I did not have the miracle of trying RUN WATER in the tub, hence the source diving.
(A = 9 is the bathroom, and 3420 displays a message about oil coming out of the sink, so I knew the command here was RUN WATER. Hence this told me I needed to RUN WATER while in the tub, room 10.)
With the wrench in hand, you can head back to the manhole, GET BOLTS, then PUSH COVER to go out to the street… and get hit by a car.
YOU FORGOT TO CHECK FOR TRAFFIC AND I GOT HIT BY A CAR!
The computer DID say to check for traffic. Unfortunately, in the machine code version of the game, the victory display at the end is confused:
It’s supposed to say
CONGRADULATIONS! YOU HAVE ESCAPED!!!
with that exact spelling. Having the hard lock crash and the mangled text suggest to me this wasn’t a commercial game but just aspirationally oriented that way, but it’s hard to know for certain without more information. I’m going to save off moving forward to game 2 (World of Odysseys) a bit just in case a magazine ad magically pops up.
Regarding what I said about the unusual source code earlier: it is structured with a bunch of manually-applied synonyms early on…
The idea is that then all the messages are sorted together in a big list.
3520 PRINT@PP,”AND THEN GOES OUT.”:RETURN
3530 PRINT”LANTERN IS GOING OUT. KEROSANE IS LOW.”:RETURN
3540 PRINT”LANTERN WENT OUT.”:RETURN
3550 PRINT”LANTERN HAS NO KEROSANE.”:RETURN
3560 PRINT”I CAN’T, IT WON’T IGNITE.”:RETURN
3570 PRINT”LANTERN IS FILLED AND READY FOR USE.”:RETURN
3580 PRINT”WITH WHAT?”:RETURN
3590 PRINT”IT DOESN’T SEEM TO WORK.”:RETURN
The indirection made the code quite tricky to follow, and quite notably “wasted” a lot of characters. Rather than just printing LANTERN HAS NO KEROSANE where it ought to go in-game, there’s an extra four characters used for jumping to the appropriate line, characters are wasted at the start of the line, and then the code needs a “:RETURN” after the message is displayed. It’s more common (and tighter on character count) to avoid the jump. It appears the author was enamored with Scott Adams, all the way up to how the messages get sorted together in a Scott Adams database file, but didn’t know how to copy the implementation so just simulated the same thing with BASIC source code. There’s still some savings because of re-used messages, but sometimes parts you would think you’d re-use a message (and Scott Adams surely would) but there’s repeats of text nevertheless:
3240 PRINT”I’M NOT THAT STRONG!”:RETURN
3250 PRINT”I ALREADY HAVE IT.”:RETURN
3260 PRINT”I CAN’T, I’M NOT STRONG ENOUGH.”:RETURN
This is the sort of luxury of space only enabled by working with 32K of memory rather than 16K. Rather than thinking of the fact that items could now be described in fuller prose more akin to Infocom, the author copied what they knew; that is, the original system that was written to fit a particular technological form now had its form outdated, but was being mimicked anyway.
Coming up: The proprietor of El Explorador de RPG has taken some broken source code from a game I wrote about 7 years ago and fixed it. It happens to also be in Scott Adams format, so I’ll cover the history of what I think happened.
From the 1983 Sierra Hi-Res Adventure catalog, via Sierra Chest. The Dark Crystal is the last of the series.
Last time I had jumped into the chasm/the last disk side of the game.
I’ve also watched the movie now, so I can compare a little: figuring out to jump here would have been easier from the movie. There was a vague hint in the game about the wings from the prophecy wall, but the graphics didn’t make it super clear; I had originally just thought it would end in a “you landed on X fantasy critter which let you fall safely” result. It’s not much better in the movie, though! The wings appear for the first time in the falling scene, and when Jen asks about why he doesn’t have wings and Kira does, Kira points out of course he doesn’t, he’s a boy. And that’s the only time the wings appear and that’s all that is said about them. (I’m jumping ahead a little, but by the end I wasn’t thrilled with the game generally, and while I think while some of this is the fault of Sierra, some is the fact that the movie they’re adapting often just has things happen. It’s non-optimal for an adventure conversion where understanding the circumstances is key to figuring out puzzles.)
The movie’s design had unexpected lore pop up whenever it was needed. It’s fair to treat this as a stylistic choice, but it’s hard to cope with in adventure game form.
Landing, Jen and Kira are at a stone face. You can circle around the castle (east or west) to find a second stone face. The choice of face is simply based on the symbol seen on the prophecy panel.
Wrong.
Right. Just differentiating a binary choice doesn’t make for a great puzzle.
Things get worse from here, as there’s a locked door that can’t be reached because of some bars.
THE “TEETH” OF THE STONE MONSTER ARE ACTUALLY THE METAL BARS OF A GATE. JUST OUT OF REACH BEHIND THE BARS IS A CLOSED DOOR.
This is the worst puzzle in the game. At least conceptually I got what to do next: we can’t reach through the bars, but we’re holding someone small (Fizzgig) so they should go through instead. However, no command I attempted worked to try to get Fizzgig in (see the growling on my second screenshot). I finally gave up and checked hints again, and found the right command was SEND FIZZGIG.
Argh! Again we have an “isolate”, a verb I’ve never seen before in an adventure and there’s a fair chance I will never see it again. The troubles aren’t over yet, though.
WHERE DOES JEN WANT TO SEND HIM?
You can’t type IN BARS (like the manual specifies) or BARS. You have to instead type SEND BARS. This is the most absurd parser command in the entire Hi-Res Adventure catalog. It’s not over yet, though! Fizzgig comes back with a key, but the door is described as “just out of reach”. UNLOCK DOOR? No. UNLOCK BARS? No. You need to USE KEY, then OPEN BARS.
This is followed by a set of tunnels that serve no purpose other than filling space.
This was fairly standard for Time Zone — and sometimes even kind of worked to give a sense of atmosphere — but here, despite the graphic quality, this really comes off as designed for a different game.
Expressive hand-drawn characters encountering a dead end.
Once in the right spot, things are back on track with the movie as the Chamberlain appears, who drops rubble on Jen and takes Kira.
Heading south (now alone) again follows the movie as Jen encounters a Garthim nest.
Again, the parser is highly irritating here. I tried all possible directions (N/S/E/W/U/D) and failed to escape. I finally broke down and checked hints again (my resistance being much lighter by now) and found out RUN is now suddenly special, and is given without specifying a direction. (I want to emphasize RUN otherwise says IN WHICH DIRECTION DOES JEN WISH TO GO?, strongly implying it isn’t really understanding the word.) The Garthim smash a hole that Jen can then escape out of (GO HOLE).
In the movie, while all this is happening, SkekNa, the Skeksis slave master, is trying to drawn Kira’s life essence in a room full of caged animals; Aughra is in the same room (also caged up) and encourages her to talk to the animals, who escape and attack, eventually causing the downfall of SkekNa. By my subjective opinion (just rewatching it yesterday) it is the best moment of the movie, having one of the characters (Kira) use an ability that was fully introduced earlier (talking to animals) combined with help from another character.
None of this happens in the game. Aughra is tied up and Jen can untie her, but there’s no particular drama here:
Again, to be fair, Jen doesn’t do much other than run from things, so with the game switched to his perspective only, that’s about all that’s possible. Past Aughra is another scene where you need to RUN…
…and after a couple more steps evading Skeksis, you can come across a SCEPTER which will be useful shortly…
..and the Skeksis, eating food.
GO CURTAIN (fortunately strongly implied) lets Jen get close enough to hear, where for some reason they talk about a secret passage in a tower. The tower in question is not that far away, and as long as you’ve heard the conversation, a panel will be available. In order to reach it, you need to LOOK SCEPTER, then refer specifically to the HOOK, because why not put yet another parser headache in at the end of the game.
USE HOOK reveals a passage to the Great Conjunction ritual with the Skeksis and Kira.
Following the movie (and fortunately clear even just playing the game) the right command is JUMP. Ads for the game even show Jen sitting on the crystal so it is a fairly iconic pose.
The crystal goes flying, and Kira goes to throw it back, but the RITUAL-MASTER warns Kira she will die if she throws it.
The right response here is to say NO. Kira throws the crystal to Jen, gets stabbed, and Jen can now insert the crystal…
…causing the Skeksis to transform into the urSkeks, and Kira is dead, or well, “dead”. The final command to win is KISS KIRA.
In the movie, things make a little more sense: early on, the Mystics all travel together slowly to the castle, clearly driven by some sense of ritual. They arrive right at the Great Conjunction and when the crystal is healed they merge back into the Skeksis, which is how the urSkeks get made.
From the Dark Crystal Wiki.
The two races have been separated since the damage to the stone, the Mystics (the urSu) moving to the Valley of the Stones to seal themselves in safety for a thousand years. I have some issues with the movie but this cycle ends up being suitably epic; it’s hard to understand what’s going on with the game without the context.
This isn’t quite the weakest of the Hi-Res games, but I think it is the weakest of the ones designed by Roberta Williams. Her style really lends itself to a more exploratory structure, and the part of the game I enjoyed myself most was the middle section where I was discovering new things in the landscape; with the highly linear series of events loosely following the movie, it most ran head-first into the twin issues of boring puzzles and the bad parser. There were some high aspirations; Cerf called the player both the “hero” and “a kind of movie director”. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough flexibility for that to really hold out, and I struggled to find any extra “fun” actions or extra routes to take.
The only moment I could find in the later part of the game.
I don’t think the movie adventure-game concept is untenable; Lucasarts with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade did a serviceable (even excellent) job of it, but Indiana Jones is full of both action and the possibility of alternate routes. When Indy fails to bluff the butler at the castle and punches him instead (movie version) you can do the bluff successfully. When Hitler signs the Grail diary (in movie), in game you can trick him into signing a travel pass instead making later parts of the game easier. It’s possible to get the Grail back to the Grail Knight at the end without any destruction. I don’t think Roberta Williams would have knocked things out of the park given easier-to-work with source material (not Jen Runs Away From Things: The Movie), but The Dark Crystal may have been just the wrong outlet for a movie game (or at least following the script — maybe a prequel would be better, along the lines of the recent Age of Resistance series on Netflix).
While The Dark Crystal was being wrapped up, IBM was already in contact with Sierra and work was starting for a new project for the upcoming PCjr computer: King’s Quest. Not long after, Sierra would take another whack at a movie game (The Black Cauldron) so we’ll see if King’s Quest’s environmental style makes for a more compelling delivery method.
The front door of the Williams’s custom-built house made around the time of the game. I’m not sure it’s accurate to say they were apathetic about it given the stained glass. Source.
To continue directly from last time, I had unearthed a spiral but with some confusion as to what to do with it.
One of my readers (RavenWorks) suggested GAZE off my verb list, referencing the odd reaction where Jen was refusing to look at it closely.
This was easy to miss, and someone who later is trying to solve the riddle “legit” (by thinking what normal word might be an answer) would get incredibly frustrated.
From here I got stuck for a very long time and I ended up breaking my streak on Roberta Williams games: I looked up a hint. (I beat Mystery House, Mission: Asteroid, and Time Zone without needing any. Alas.) It turned out that back where the lily pad could be cut (we’ll use that shortly) there is another secret.
I had tried GET FLOWER and got the same response I had gotten in some other locations that mention flowers, namely:
JEN PICKS A FLOWER AND SAVORS ITS LOVELY FRAGRANCE. NOTICING NOTHING ELSE REMARKABLE ABOUT IT, HE DROPS IT.
I was still slightly suspicious of the flowers, but I had treated “chattering” as a mere metaphor (like a “babbling” brook). I should have done TALK FLOWERS.
To be fair, just to the west there is a scene with “THE CHATTERING OF FLOWERS AND CALLING OF CREATURES IS ALMOST DEAFENING”. LISTEN FLOWERS also gives the message (in both rooms) “WITH THEM ALL TALKING AT ONCE, HE CAN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY ARE SAYING.” I guess it’s a “fair” puzzle but it was a very strange one (in terms of narrative momentum) to be stuck for several hours on.
Taking the advice to listen to the brook:
This is just directions. Normally going EAST and then EAST again has the path blocked by foliage, but after hearing from the brook, the path is open.
Trying to go farther north (following the directions of the brook) the game says “THE SWAMP LOOKS DEEP AND DANGEROUS” and that it appears suicidal to attempt a crossing. I had already tried RIDE PAD earlier with the river; this is the real place to use it. After using it to swim across it floats away (one less inventory item to test everywhere, good).
Going north and then west gets the player stuck in a bog; that’s a good place to go, but it’s too early. You’re supposed to instead go north and east (the last part of the directions) and get caught in some vines.
After several moves, Aughra appears.
You can SAY YES followed by typing MOON DAUGHTER. Imagine being stuck at this point!
She leads you/Jen north to her observatory, where she asks what you want. Hopefully players paid attention during that info-dump at the start so they know to SAY SHARD. She will put four colored shards up on the table, and say that she doesn’t know which is the real one. Finally, my obsessive playing of the flute pays off.
I vaguely recall something like this happened in the movie, but I don’t recall detail. I’m still waiting until I finish the game to go back to rewatch.
That’s three puzzles in a row that require a piece of information or item from somewhere that isn’t trivial to get:
a.) first, the lily pad for swimming obtained by cutting the stem
b.) then, the riddle answer obtained from an extremely random spot in the game (the spiral hidden under moss), where it seems like you ought to answer the riddle normally
c.) then, the flute which is buried and which I got via luck.
The linear structure with secret requirements is rather different from the previous Roberta Williams games. You could argue the entirety of Time Zone was a treasure hunt intended to allow making it through a long linear set of puzzles in the finale, but it is clear from the start you’re going to need to build up a collection; here, it is unclear if such a hunt is needed in the first place. This really comes into focus with the next puzzle: after you get the shard, the observatory is attacked. You have one move to react.
I tried some natural and intuitive ways to escape, but failed to have any luck, so I spent some time combing over locations for yet another missed item. (What’s especially suggestive is that the eye-bat shows up when you land after passing through the swamp using the pad; I thought maybe I needed to kill the bat so the enemies wouldn’t show up after, leading me on a fruitless hunt for slingshot ammo.)
It turned out an early command I tried (CLIMB WINDOW) was right. I was just supposed to type GO WINDOW instead.
Since the pad is gone Jen can’t swim back, so the only choice is the bog where Jen gets stuck. Fortunately, there’s help this time.
I knew immediately this had to be Kira, but assuming someone who hasn’t seen the movie at all, they’d have trouble here because her (and her pet Fizzgig) don’t get mentioned in the text. I imagined I was a player who didn’t know her name and finally hit upon LOOK GELFLING.
After the rescue: “I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY LIVING GELFLING. BUT THEN, I GUESS YOU MUST HAVE THOUGHT THE SAME THING!”
The remainder of my gametime has Jen and Kira travelling together, and all commands affect both of them. This is very, very, unconventional, although it works; I never got confused because of the dual-person controls, although I was a bit boggled by the fact that all the previous scenes (barring the opening area blocked off) get re-rendered with both characters in them.
This is emphasized by the very next act, which requires flipping a shell, and the game states it is too heavy for just Jen to move, and both Jen and Kira need to work together to FLIP SHELL. This reveals a pouch of “SMOKE SEEDS”, and the shell itself can be used as a boat.
The two land in the village from earlier, and while the scene shows merriment, a bat also shows up; the player needs to type EAST or WEST (or some direction to leave) quickly enough and they’ll be able to escape. When they come back the village is destroyed.
I could make fun of how blasé this is (especially with the commands just being one to leave, one to go right back), but track back to all our previous adventure games (1982 and before): when have any tried to do a moment like this? Nobody — not even Infocom, yet — had previously had a main character have everyone they grew up with suddenly get suddenly wiped out (or at least captured). The closest I can think of is Saigon: The Final Days. So while to modern eyes this seems clumsy, I do want to emphasize it was getting into new game design territory (in order to follow the plot of the movie, I assume).
For some reason, having Kira with us makes the Landstriders friendly enough to ride, but before I show that, I want to mention one of the other scenes has a difference:
A Skeksis appears and says he is tired of killing and wants peace, and says to follow him south.
Ha ha no of course not. Fortunately you can just avoid going south and you won’t have the death scene (alternately, do the ruin viewing before the chaos starts).
Hopping on our new rides (no explanation is given why they are fine with being ridden now, I assume Kira helped):
The Landstriders easily make it over the chasm. This then leads to a long and I think empty span of rooms.
This seems to be reaching back to Time Zone rather than forward to King’s Quest. The art is atmospheric, at least.
Fizzgig looks unhappy.
Eventually you come across a combination castle/ravine that you can circle all the way around if you like, but must eventually approach.
Approaching results in another Gathrim attack, and then you only have one turn to react. If you do poorly, you get a front-line seat at the Great Conjunction.
Maybe I can call this BAD END and end the game here?
It took me a beat to realize Jen and Kira are near the ravine so the right action is to JUMP. This causes a disk swap to the final side.
I assume this will be the final stretch, so … one more post? Two? It depends if I have to talk to any more flowers.
Since we’ve run into a Skeksis in-game now, I wanted to show this. The illustration comes from Leonard B. Lubin, via a book of Lewis Carroll poems. This was Jim Henson’s original inspiration in 1975. “It was the juxtaposition of this reptilian thing in this fine atmosphere that intrigued me.”
I have attracted a few readers who are interested in The Dark Crystal (the movie) and maybe don’t know about The Dark Crystal (the game) and are new to this blog. So to clarify for their benefit: I am doing a playthrough where I blog about every step; because this is an adventure game, sometimes I make a lot of progress, sometimes I make very little, but I still find documenting either is important in that it encompasses the real experience of playing adventure games circa 1983. This is still before Sierra had official hint books.
I did not make much progress, but I still have a lot of details to go through and theories.
The first thing I tried was simply to replay from the beginning to see if there were any details I missed. The stones that I ended my post with do have a description…
…and that description is meant to indicate the tree is something important.
I’d like to say I thought through in the same direction as Roberta Williams, but in the end I was simply using my regular adventurer reflexes built over time. While in the cave mucking about with the urSu scene again I tried DIG just in case there was some secret item left over, and the game responded:
USING THE SHALE, JEN DIGS IN THE GROUND FOR AWHILE, BUT FINDS NOTHING.
Huh. Sometimes “you dig around a bit and don’t find anything” is just the author’s way of putting off a common verb, but in this case specifically holding the shale enabled (for me, inadvertently) the act of digging, so that meant digging had to be relevant somewhere. I thus went about digging every single room I had accessible in the game, and as part of that I hit that tree.
The shadow graphics even kind of point at the digging spot.
The flute from the start of the movie! I had been wondering where that ran off to. I do want to emphasize I solved this purely by lawnmowering and only realized a clue was intended after the fact.
I think I’m otherwise finished with the starting area, but I can’t be 100% sure. However, for now I went to the area past and tried DIG and PLAY FLUTE in every single room, with no use at all. Still, I eventually unearthed some interesting spots on the map, which I have marked below.
Blue indicates points of interest. Green marks points of interest where I haven’t gotten anything to happen.
The southmost point is at the lily pad I was suspicious of: “VERY THICK STEMS” where “TRY AS HE MIGHT, JEN CANNOT TEAR ONE OF THE PADS LOOSE.” I realized not long after hitting “send” on my last post that the shale is described as sharp, so I ought to be able to apply it to cut the pad.
This landed a LILY PAD in my inventory that is described as having a “THICK, RUBBERY FEEL”. I thought briefly it might work as a raft on the flowing river but no verb I tried worked, even though FLOAT is an accepted verb.
While I’m at it, I should mention I did create my verb list. The game boots on the first side of the first disk (1A), the early area and the wilderness before the Pod Person town is on the back side of the first disk (1B). The disk swap then requires flipping to 2A (second disk, front side), and I assume 2B has the end parts of the game. I mention this because in Time Zone the verbs were not consistent between the disks, but here I think they might all be from the same set:
I tested every verb on the list; green means they were understood by the parser. The oddball I have marked in blue — UNTIE — seems to be a bug:
JEN SHOUTS, “HELP!” UNFORTUNATELY, HIS CALL IS NOT ANSWERED.
You can get the same result from HELP.
While some of the verbs are clearly “fake” (CRAWL, ENTER, JUMP, and LEAVE all ask what direction, but the game is just steering you to the fact it wants cardinal movement directions) this is still a quite substantial list. Working my way up to where the SLING is just lying on the ground, I went through all the possibilities to try to get the sling to work with the shale, but no dice.
IT LANDS HARMLESSLY SEVERAL YARDS FROM JEN’S FEET
I tried this on the flying eye in particular (which really seemed begging for a good sniping)…
…but I always got the same result. With a little noun-hunting (trying to GET items that aren’t there to see if the parser at least understands them) I found this game has the existence of a PEBBLE, but I have no idea where it is.
(And yes, Jen comes from the Valley of the Stones. No good-sized pebbles around? This is worse than the quest for a ladder in Time Zone; at least in that game, one gets a sense that you have to follow the unspoken “rules of the time machine” for it to operate properly which is why you can’t just swing by a store and pick one up.)
The Village of the Pod People, incidentally, gets a few interesting reactions:
You can TALK PEOPLE and get the information that the name they call themselves is APOPIAPOIPIDIAPPIDIDIAPIAPOH, which translates into “master gardeners who live in bulging plants”.
This is the only place I’ve found (so far) DANCE will work. (“WHY NOT? ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKE JEN A DULL GELFLING.”)
This is the only place I’ve found (so far) SING will work.
Maybe it’s just here for color. Would Roberta Williams do that? (Given the amount of empty space and red herrings in Time Zone, yes she would.)
To the west of the village is a mossy rock, where you can de-moss it (GET MOSS) while holding the sharp shale to reveal an interesting spiral.
Rather cryptically, looking at the spiral then just gets the response that Jen “GLANCES BRIEFLY” at the spiral but “LOOKS AWAY WHEN HE FAILS TO NOTICE ANYTHING SPECIAL ABOUT IT.” The boulder is too heavy to move and you can’t take the spiral with you. Maybe it’s a hint to a direction puzzle later.
Just south of the boulder are the ruins I was having frustration with before. The room seemed significant (including two flat stones) but I couldn’t get any verbs to work. I returned with my full list in green and tried every single one before hitting paydirt with RIDE STONE. Hah! (Yes, SIT STONE works, it just counts as a synonym, but I found RIDE first.)
Examining the hieroglyphics gives mention of a two-pronged flute, a crystal shard, a female Gelfling, a castle, and a triangle in a circle. I suspect the triangle/circle combo will somehow be used later (I am already trying PLAY FLUTE in every single room so if it’s a clue as to where it gets used, I’m going to sweep it up by default anyway).
I got curious if this had an equivalent in the movie, since this seemed like a weirdly specific room. I’m still avoiding spoilers, but I managed via Internet search to hit a page on the official Dark Crystal site that explained:
When the Skeksis began to take Gelfling, as well as Pod People, as slaves, the Gelfling were dismayed. For once they thought of the future. The Gelfling sought to know if the Crystal might be healed and if the Skeksis rule must continue. They lit the fires of prophecy and took counsel from the flames. Seven circles of seven Gelfling lay on the hilltops all night; their faces to the stars. Their dreams were made of stone; the Wall of Destiny still stands.
In a history of game-design sense, I’d like to point out despite this first seemingly the Big Empty Grid passed down from Time Zone, this is much more dense, and in fact I’m started to be reminded more of the layout of the King’s Quest games (which all the way up through I to V had the landscape divided into a grid). Again, we seem to be closing in on the standard point-and-click layout, partly enabled by the use of Henson’s artists allowing for somewhat richer landscapes.
In terms of me being stuck, well, hmmf. I’ve still got the Landstriders who don’t want to be ridden…
The sound at the end is a Garthim barging in. I’ve started to suspect the Garthim attacks are evadable in a real time sense, that is, if you go in a direction fast enough you get away, and if you wait, you won’t. Which is sadly again like King’s Quest 1.
…and the eye that stubbornly refuses to be sniped, and the river that doesn’t want to be crossed, and the chasm, and the spiral (maybe), and the village. I still feel like I’m missing a piece. Even if I summon up the missing PEBBLE, will what I get from shooting down the eye really help with the other puzzles? I need to comb through the rooms again to check if I’m missing a detail.
One of the great challenges of designing The Dark Crystal was to create a world that had never been seen and yet could be instantly accepted as a real place with a history and an ancient philosophy. I created a cosmology with meaningful symbols that could penetrate the very fabric of the costumes and the film’s architecture, every visual element important information of this particular world’s past, its ideas, and its destiny. It had always been our intention to create a tale with the weight of myth; a story that felt as though it had been told many times before to another land.
— Brian Froud from The World of The Dark Crystal, 2020 reprint
Jim Henson had his initial concept for the feature film The Dark Crystal start to form in 1975; through the rest of the 70s he did world creation and visualization with the artist Brian Froud, and made a initial script while waiting out a snowstorm. He made the feature film The Muppet Movie first, and was only able to get initial funding on The Dark Crystal by agreeing to make a Muppet film follow-up (The Great Muppet Caper). Work from co-director Frank Oz on The Empire Strikes Back also intervened.
A thousand years ago the Dark Crystal was damaged, starting an age of Chaos; during this time the world was ruled by lizards known as the Skeksis. Jen, an orphan from the oppressed race known as Gelfings, is sent on a quest for the missing shard in order to save the world. Poster source.
These delays meant shooting didn’t happen until 1981. It’s tempting to think, then, that the production was “tortured” — especially given the technical hurdles of a live-action movie made entirely from puppets — but it’s more accurate to say it was a slow burn due to financial priorities. Still, the final movie was and is polarizing, somehow being declared magnificent and terrible at the same time. I think the best explanation of what happened can be seen with an excerpt from the test-screening voice track to the movie. The video lasts two-and-a-half-minutes and while it’s usually just fine to breeze on by whenever I drop a video clip, in this case I highly recommend a watch before moving on.
The clip has the Skeksis — the villains of the movie — gathering around the dying Emperor. All the dialogue is hissing in the Skeksis language, with no subtitles. This was Jim Henson’s original vision, and it is the one that showed in the “first edit” that played to an audience in Washington, DC. Henson wrote in his journal:
First preview Dark Crystal in Washington DC – not great.
He had already been warned beforehand that trying to have the Skeksis only talk in their own language without subtitles (with people understanding it “like an opera“) was not going to go well, but the baffled audience of March 19th, 1982 reinforced this; the script underwent a round of edits to have English dialogue added to dub over the fantasy language, where the words had to be lip-synched the best the team could.
Annotations by Jim Henson (on top) and Frank Oz (on bottom).
Still, these changes happened after the scenes were filmed, meaning the essential action was already locked into place. Given that the goal was to have the scenes understandable without knowing the words, the scenes were already done in an “elemental” way, and the dub-over process could not help being awkward. Perhaps more importantly, it was well within Jim Henson’s vision to have parts of the movie understood only partially, where the mood and the world universe was more important than individual lines of dialogue. (If you want to try the original March 1982 experience, there’s a fan reconstruction online called The Darker Crystal.)
Even after these changes the studios involved still wanted modifications, and Jim Henson ended up buying the movie outright with his own money (obtained via Muppet merchandising) for $15 million so he could release it on his own terms. Still, just based on the limits of feature-film length, the deep backstory didn’t really make it to the film as intended; Froud notes what ended up on screen was only “a fragment of this other world.”
Jen the Gelfling, from the original movie.
At the same time as the original test screening, Sierra On-Line finally came out with Time Zone, a game intended for the prior holiday season. That was Roberta Williams’s attempt at a magnum opus, a game that would go on forever. (Concatenating my time spent, I beat it in 24 hours, but it was over a period of two months.) During this same time Sierra was trying to reach past their free-wheeling early years into something more “professional”.
The first few years of Sierra could be described as total anarchy. It is easy to survive (and, thrive!) when you have no competition and your customer base is experiencing explosive growth. And, to be fair, at the very beginning, most of Sierra’s employees were barely out of high school. The party atmosphere was probably appropriate to the time.
By 1982, it was obvious that the “free for all” craziness of Sierra was not going to work. We needed discipline.
— Ken Williams, Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings
While the growth of the emerging market competitors was scaring Ken Williams, he was also spooked by a lawsuit with Atari. In 1981 Sierra had released the game Jawbreaker for Apple II, one of the many many Pac-man clones, and Atari went after clones with a giant legal hammer. Sierra won on the basis of differentiating themselves from the “look and feel” of Pac-Man; in order to justify this they brought a full-sized Pac-Man machine in court along with giant Pac-Man posters to compare with Jawbreaker’s branding.
To be fair, I think Sierra had a point. Pictures from Mobygames and eBay.
It’s been real expensive to fight Atari. I don’t know whether I would do it again. If they decide to come after me with appeals, at some point I might have to lie down and die.
which is a frankly odd admission to be making in public, but I think gets a good sense that Ken knew there was the potential for tangling with larger forces on the horizon.
In the spring came a call from Jackie Morby of Boston-based TA Associates offering a million dollars for a percentage of the company and a place on the board. Roberta Williams was hesitant at the possibility of losing some independence, but as Ken writes:
I, on the other hand, thought that it would be good for us. There was a side of me that knew that, for the company to realize whatever potential it had, it would need to stop just being “kids behind a print shop” and take steps to become a real company. Also, Ms. Morby was promising something I dearly needed; someone to talk to about business. I would be free to pick her brain and to speak with the heads of the other companies she invested in.
Ken also mentions, somewhat ominously: “Once we had accepted venture capital, it became like any other drug. No one stops after the first hit.” Even more ominously, quoting Jackie Morby from 1984: “There are investments that only double in value: they aren’t very exciting.”
Jawbreaker got an Atari 2600 version already by the end of 1982, but through a different publisher; Sierra started making their own cartridges in 1983. This ended up being right when the market crash started so while profit doubled the year before, the whole fiasco ended up almost sinking the company with unsold cartridges, but that’s a story for another time.
The elevated profile of Sierra On-Line also extended to film companies. For The Dark Crystal, the instigator of contact was Christopher Cerf, longtime songwriter for Sesame Street.
Trivia: Cerf got named in a lawsuit over the song above when the Beatles catalog was owned by Northern Song of Australia (desired payout: $5.5 million) but then Michael Jackson bought the company and the lawsuit was settled for $500.
Cerf was an Apple II superfan and by 1979 had already given the Apple II bug to Jon Stone (writer for Sesame Street) and Jerry Juhl (writer for The Muppet Show); both started using a word processor for their scripts.
It became a familiar sight to see Jon Stone on the set directing a “Sesame Street” episode with a rolled up copy of the latest script, hot off his Epson printer, in his back pocket.
Cerf had a professional connection to Sierra as the publicity firm he worked with also had Sierra as a client. He convinced the Henson group to connect with Sierra On-Line for the project, and flew to California with Mary Ann Horstmeyer (project manager for Henson) to meet Roberta Williams directly. Cerf called the resulting product “interactive fiction”.
Quoting from a 1982 TV interview with Ken and Roberta:
Roberta Williams: He [Jim Henson] has a new movie coming out called The Dark Crystal and it’s coming out in December and him and a few of his friends have played my adventure games in the past and really liked them a lot and they thought that they wanted an adventure game based on their movies. So they’ve been working with me on the design of this game. Their artists have been doing the pictures, and they’ve supplied me with all the information I could ever ever need, and it follows the storyline of the Dark Crystal really really close.
Three points from that last sentence worth isolating:
a.) Their artists have been doing the pictures
We no longer have Roberta Williams herself or a lone 19-year old producing a gigantic amount of art. Quoting Williams from a different interview:
This adventure isn’t like any we’ve done before. Jim Mahon, the art director at Henson Associates, sketches each page of the action and sends it to me. My people translate the sketches onto the Apple with graphics tablets.
Then the hi-res pages are sent to Jim Mahon for his approval and suggestions. Actually, everyone in New York helps out. Harriet [Yassky], Mary Ann [Horstmeyer], and Chris [Cerf] all review each screen and make suggestions
This is good to highlight because you will see a marked jump in quality compared to Sierra’s previous work.
b.) they’ve supplied me with all the information I could ever ever need
As I’ve already alluded to, Henson Associates created truckloads of backstory; and Sierra got their hands on it. Ken Williams was “shocked at the number of binders full of drawings that provided the minute details behind the movie.”
A Skeksis from the cover of The World of the Dark Crystal, a book by Brian Froud of conceptual art.
Ken also writes that:
Every character had a character sheet providing a full description of the character, their back story, illustrations of how they would look in various clothes and animations, and even samples of how they might speak.
The important thing to highlight (for our story) is that there was more to draw on than what made it to screen, which ties into…
c.) it follows the storyline of the Dark Crystal really really close.
In the same interview Roberta returns to the idea of “how close an adaptation is it”.
…it is primarily based on the movie. The storyline is there and you definitely get the feeling of the story and what’s happening just like in the movie, but a lot of the time there are puzzles that I added that weren’t in the movie but still have the same feeling of the story. There might be things that did happen in the movie but I changed them around a little bit so the same the basic stories there but but obviously we didn’t want them watching the movie and then just come home and play the game and solve it.
Christopher Cerf again:
You run into all the characters from the movie, and you can reply to them in different ways. But you can do things differently than the way they happen in the movie. Your game can end differently than in the movie. You can try out other possibilities. You can say, “What would happen if I tried this.”
While The Dark Crystal was not the first official movie-tie in game (both Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. for Atari 2600 came out in 1982, and you can extend an argument to Superman from 1979) it was the first one on a platform where it was possible to follow the plot of the movie in a step-by-step way; this turned out to be an overarching concern, either spoiling the movie plot by playing the game, or having the game follow the movie plot closely enough to be spoiled. Henson Associates were agreeable to the idea of modifications to the story, but given how early this is in videogame history, this isn’t an obvious standpoint to have. Two years later, this became a giant pain point with Disney as Sierra was working on their adaptation of The Black Cauldron.
A week later Al [Lowe] and Roberta received back their design, with major portions of it removed. Many of the removals were because they had included things that “didn’t happen in the movie.” For example, if there was a ladder in a room, and in the movie the central character never climbed the ladder, then Disney’s representatives didn’t understand why they should be able to do it in the game.
All this became relevant for my playthrough. Roberta Williams claimed it was fine to either watch the movie first or play the game first. My memory of the movie is from 25 years ago when I last saw it, so I don’t remember internal details; I remember being confused, or to paraphrase one review, it felt made up as it went along. Hence, I’ve sort of both watched and not-watched the movie at the same time. I refreshed my memory up to where the main character Jen gets his quest, but I’ve stopped there by the theory the game is supposed to be solvable without mimicking what was seen on screen. This may end up being a bad idea, but it’s the sort of thing I’m here to test.
…you will become Jen, hero of “The Dark Crystal.” You must find and restore a shard to its rightful place in the Crystal before the Great Conjunction of the Three Suns. Fail, and the world is doomed to live forever under the rule of the ruthless Skeksis. … The computer becomes your hands and feet, eyes and ears.
This game marks, importantly, the Sierra shift to a third-person perspective. Jen is visible in all scenes. All that’s needed is more direct character movement and a more zoomed-out perspective (akin to Castles of Darkness) in order to arrive at the King’s Quest 1 style perspective that would remain the paragon of standard point-and-click games ever after.
No flute, even though Jen has one at the start of the movie.
No matter what you type, the next scene is forced:
That’s all the directions you get. I originally thought we’d have a linear design from here (like Mission: Asteroid) but this is back to Roberta Williams doing a wide-open space, and it is quite easy to go the wrong way.
You start in a 3×3 area where as far as I can tell all of it is scenery…
It’s not obvious there’s an object here, but you can take some shale.
…but if you go farther north (and it isn’t marked this will happen) you end up taking a one-way trip (“JEN FALLS HEADS OVER HEELS DOWN A STEEP SLOPE”).
If you avoid seeing urSu long enough the game will end because he will not pass on the important knowledge about stopping the end of the world, but you’re already softlocked if you’re past the one-way arrows anyway. (His “counterpart” is skekSo the Emperor, the Skeksis who died in that no-English-or-subtitles scene I linked earlier. According to the official site, the lore goes that urSu “allowed himself to die” because this also would kill the Emperor.)
After enough alternate-Jen lives I mapped things out and found out I was supposed to be going due west (no hint, really!) to find the cave which also shows up in the movie.
You can LOOK BOWL to see an image of a crystal, but TALK URSU is needed to get an explanation. It’s in all-caps Apple II style, so I’ve made it a little more readable:
urSu sighs and says, “At the time of the Last Conjunction, or coming together, of our world’s three suns, the evil Skeksis gained control of the Great Crystal that rules our destiny. The Crystal cracked and darkened. And Dark it will remain until a piece that broke off — the Crystal Shard — is restored.
“There is a prophecy that the shard can be replaced only by Gelfling hand, and only at the time of the next Great Conjunction. If this prophecy is not fulfilled, the Skeksis will grow even more powerful, and their reign will last forever.
“Jen, to you has fallen the task of healing the crystal. And it is time for your quest to begin, for very soon the three suns will once again be joined in a Great Conjunction. You will find Aughra, Keeper of Secrets and Watcher of the Heavens. She may have the shard you seek.
We’re not done! Next screen:
“Gelfling, I leave you with a final puzzle: what do the Sun Brothers quarrel about?”
“Find the answer to this mystery and present it to Aughra. Only then can you gain entrance to her observatory.”
“And now Gelfling, our roads must curve apart. We may meet in another life … but not again in this one …”
With these words, urSu dies, and his lifeless body vanished from the sleepframe.
This doesn’t come off that bad written out on a normal screen, but on an Apple II — to my modern eyes — it looks like an info-dump. I’m unsure if there was a better way to handle the scene, though.
I haven’t found anything else in the starting area, but it’s easily possible I’m missing another object like the shale. However, moving on for now, the only way forward is past the one-way barrier on the map.
The purple markings indicate disk swaps. Not only are we in another open area, but rather arbitrarily the game instructs you to swap from disk 1, side B over to disk 2, side A, and while exploring this might mean flipping back and forth multiple times in quick succession.
When entering the Village of the Pod People, I wanted to immediately turn around and go south again, resulting in a disk swap back. I incidentally have found nothing yet I can do here. Maybe the movie would help but we are past the point (roughly 7.5 minutes in) I stopped watching.
There are two monsters that appear, in the style of Roberta’s beloved Crowther/Woods adventure. First is a Garthim, a creature that serves the Skeksis.
You can flee the first encounter safely, but not the second.
Second is a crystal bat with an “eye” that follows. You wander a bit and it goes away. I’m not sure if it has a particular effect in a particular room, or if you’re meant to leverage it to help with a puzzle.
The only item I’ve found (other than the shale) is a sling. You might think the sling would help with either encounter; I can SHOOT SHALE but either “IT LANDS HARMLESSLY SEVERAL YARDS FROM YEN’S FEET” (with the bat) or “TOO LATE!” (with the Garthim; I suspect you can only run).
It may be that both encounters are meant simply to be avoided. With things mapped out it isn’t necessary to hang out long, but I truly am stuck so I don’t want to discount anything. My only two potential points of progress are a chasm…
…and a GREAT RIVER with a SWIFT CURRENT that may not be traversable at all.
There are a couple more places where I am suspicious there is more to do, most primarily a hill with LANDSTRIDERS. You can type RIDE LANDSTRIDERS and the response is “THEY KEEP THEIR DISTANCE AND WON’T LET JEN APPROACH”.
This also shows the bat, which is following along.
There’s also some ruins with two flat stones that look like they ought to mean something but stubbornly refuse to be helpful.
You can try to CLIMB TREE in some places, and I’ve also found spots where TAKE FLOWER and TAKE LILY work, but none have been helpful either.
This is suspicious, at least.
I won’t discount a random seemingly-bland filler room containing a secret item (like with the SHALE) so I need to comb over everything again carefully. Despite the negative parts (bizarre opening where you can get lost and lose right away, rapid disk swaps from just moving around the landscape) the art is genuinely pleasant at times and I do get the vibe of Weird I got from the original Dark Crystal. Mind you, I could just keep the movie playing and it’d get all the way to the end without me understanding everything, and here that likely is not the case.
Hopefully over the chasm next time!
Still noticeably Sierra with the occasional jank, like the Pod People faces from earlier, but the professional artists help immensely.
This post is mainly to announce that after an immense amount of work, a group at Gaming Alexandria (mainly gschmidl, ftb1979, bsittler, and eientei) have managed to repair the damage to the NEC PC-6001 version of Mystery House II to the extent that the second part is now playable. I have a version (with emulator) here. Just drag and drop one of the three save states onto the executable to play either part 1, 2, or 3.
The starting screen of the second part.
I did play through parts 2 and 3 but first I need to get some inside baseball out of the way, abstruse enough it won’t make sense unless you’ve read all my previous posts on Mystery House II. So much effort was expended trying to work things out it is at least worth recording as reference, especially because some pieces are still missing (like the first volume of the MZ-2000 version of the game).
Just which versions are out there?
To start, we can put together the information from the I/O Magazine ad I’ve shown already…
The first version, written by Dr. Moritani (the dentist) seems to have been for MZ-80B. The system Sharp sold had cassettes by default with floppy disks an optional purchase. The ad clearly states the “FD” version was by Moritani so that’s likely the original platform, meaning this was written without any kind of volume-splitting. The cassette version was then made by Ohyachi (computer store owner, and collaborator on Mystery House I). This is where there are two volumes that get listed as separate purchases. This is all confirmed by the catalog as well.
The MZ-2000 is extremely close to the MZ-80B so there was likely minimal work done to create a port; we do know they were sold separate, though.
From Giant Bomb, uploaded by bowloflentils.
As shown in an image from one of my earlier posts, the cassettes ended up also packaged together in a later printing, while floppy disk had MZ-80B, MZ-2000, PC-8801, and FM-8 (Fujitsu Micro 8).
There’s also copies of the game for FM-7 (shown below, and the FM-7 came out after the FM-8)…
…PC-6001 (our recovered one, although technically for the Mark II), Epson QC-10 (QX-10 in the West), and MSX. My playing sequence:
1.) I started with the MSX version from ARROW SOFT, which is not only dumped but has a fan translation into English. It is significantly changed from the other versions and can be treated as a different game.
2.) I then moved on to start the PC-6001 version — broken into three parts rather than two, although the “volume 2” tape contains parts 2 and 3. This turned out to have a corrupted tape and some damage over part 2.
3.) Because I had a copy of MZ-200 Vol 2, I switched to that version, starting on the second floor of the house. Unlike the NEC version it ends after part 2 and there are puzzle differences (which I’ll explain a little later).
A chart, just to keep everything straight:
Both the tapes and the program parts are called “volumes” but I tweaked the terminology to keep things clear. I have no idea the differences between the versions I haven’t touched (other than I highly suspect MZ-80B and MZ-2000 are quite close). Did someone care enough about the obscure Epson QC-10 to make a custom port with its own puzzles?
What changes were made in the NEC PC 6001 version?
The map looks the same at the start, but if you turn right, while formerly there was a slightly surreal elevator, taking you to a “garden” and a dark area with the safe/key-to-exit…
…the NEC version has a bedroom.
Turning south there’s a part with a floor that looks fragile, and you can KICK FLOOR in order to open it up. This will get used later.
Additionally the bed is next to what the game calls a RACK, which can be searched to find some tobacco and a matchbook (that was in a fireplace in the other version of the game).
The layout otherwise starts out the same, with a memo in a frame in the same position as before.
Different content, though. MZ-2000 here talked about setting a clock to 1 o’clock. We already got a clock setting in part 1 (which said to use 3 o’clock) and this spot has a clue for the safe instead.
The fireplace which previously had matches now has a rope.
Climbing up to the third floor is mostly the same (except the HATCH is now a DOOR). The windows which oddly give numbers when opened (corresponding to the safe) are mostly gone, except for one that just doesn’t open (we already got the code from the memo in the picture).
Still a SCOOP. One of the windows in the MZ-2000 version was straight ahead.
ADJUST TIME to 3 rather than 1.
PUSH BUTTON instead of PLAY MZ2000.
The MEMO at the end gives steps for digging, just like the MZ-2000 port.
However, the way to the garden previously in order to dig was the elevator. There’s no elevator this time. That rope from earlier can be tied to the balcony (which was just scenery before) in order to climb down.
The DIG GROUND mechanics work the same (no Microcabin logo this time) yielding the treasure. In order to escape, you need to take the rope (previously tied to the balcony) now over to the bedroom and the hole, and tie it there. If you try to go down without matches the game will ask if you have any (this is the same “enforce the world-state” trick we saw in part 1). Assuming you have them, you can go down and enter part 3.
Part 3 is very short. You are in the room with a hole and the rope, and need to get down in the cellar to get a key. You can go DOWN, the LIGHT MATCH to see in the darkness. There are five matches and they last a random amount of real time.
You can go west now — one-way trip — to the spot underneath the hole you previously busted way back in part 1. You can move a ladder and climb up to get out, but you need to grab the key first, which you can find by turning to the right to see a safe.
Using the code from memo 3. I assume the game forces you to stay in part 2 if you haven’t gotten the memo yet.
You still have a 2-item limit and you’re holding the box/jewel from the garden, so you need to ditch the matches to take the key. Basically, you need to a.) wait for the match to go out b.) LIGHT MATCH c.) CAST MATCH d.) grab the key and book it to the ladder while you can still see. (In the MZ version, casting the match automatically made it go out.)
This basically says now you’re wealthy, so you should buy more Microcabin software.
Is Isao Harada anybody?
Yes. He also worked for a NEC port of Dream Land, which is Dr. Moritani’s third game (from 1983, so we’ll see it sooner rather than later). His Mobygames list of credits is here although I don’t know how complete it is.
I do think it quite possible he worked on the (disk-based) PC-8801 version first, then had the same split-program issue as other Micro Cabin people did in order to get it onto cassette, except because he fiddled with removing the elevator (too Willy Wonka, I guess?) and giving the game a different ending section the game landed in 3 parts rather than 2.
My first new official update comes next week, as we embark on 1983 once more!
Renga in Blue 
