First off, a brief correction: The PC-6001 version I’ve been playing (at least up to a certain point, for reasons I’ll get into) is on tape, not disk, but everything on one tape. The files, found if you CLOAD multiple times, are
AUTO 1
MYS1
AUTO 2
MYS2 2
MYS2 3
where the double-auto files (meant to load on boot) suggest to me that this is the same copy as the two-tape version I mentioned last time, just someone copied everything together.
As far as why there’s MYS2 2 and MYS2 3, that’s because there’s three volumes! Or rather, there’s two tapes (each called a volume) and three program parts (each also called a volume) at the same time. That is…
Volume 1: has volume 1 on it
Volume 2: has volume 2 on it
Volume 2: also has volume 3 on it
…and all this took a long time to detangle. (Implicit thanks everywhere to the Gaming Alexandria discord, which helped out enormously.) I regret to inform you it gets worse, but let’s see what happens in gameplay context.
Disk from the FM-7 version via Oh! FM-7. I do not have access to this version. The screenshots make it look like it’s based on the Sharp/NEC map. I don’t know how the multiple volumes are handled.
Last time I left off with a cryptic message from a stairway about finding the entrance to the basement. Someone with eagle eyes might have spotted what to do next here, but in this case it was Kazuma Satou from the comments realizing that there was a map/hint page on Mobygames.
The basement and third floor are not shown.
The room in the lower left of 1F — where I found the book hiding the memo — also has a CARPET.
That double black line along the wall.
Some noodling about led me to MOVE CARPET, revealing a locked trapdoor.
This still isn’t enough to finish! You also need to USE HAMMER to bust open the door. Then you completely ignore the door for now and can leave up the stairs.
Trying to go down kills you, and I spent a while trying to survive going down before checking the stairs again.
That’s the end of Volume 1! Volume 2 is an entirely different program on an entirely different tape and doesn’t even carry any variables over. The game requests you reset the computer to move on.
The sequence in volume 1 was intended to get you to bust open a trapdoor before moving on. The reason this is important is that in volume 3 you return to the same room from below and the game assumes you’ve already busted the trapdoor (in a different kind of game, this might have a softlock because you didn’t prepare the trapdoor beforehand).
I want to re-iterate how completely odd and bizarre this is. I’ve never seen a game work this way; the closest I can think of is Savage Island (Part 1, Part 2) where there was an item you might be holding at the end of Part 1, and if you are holding the item you get one password, and if you are not holding the item you get a different password. Since the item is required to make progress in Part 2 early you can get softlocked from the previous game.
Earlier I mentioned “it gets worse” as far as the multi-part situation goes. You see, that NEC PC-6001 file? … is also corrupted. While the 3rd part of the game loads (you have found the jewel and are back on the first floor, now escape), there are damaged lines in part 2. In other words, to keep playing I had to switch computer systems over to the Sharp MZ-2000, where I have the second tape but not the first one. You start with no inventory, so the game assumes you’ve used CAST on the hammer or any other objects from the first floor.
(The Volume 1/2/3 situation still has yet another twist but let’s save that for the end.)
At least this version is likely adapted directly from the MZ-80B original.
The controls now go with the original “type verb and noun separate” system. It’s not as bad as I experienced with Mystery House 1 because there’s no screen swapping, although I quickly found reading memos and taking inventory to be cryptic until I got some source code assistance.
15230 IF D$=”ﾓﾁﾓﾉ”THEN12000
This line in the source code (which is protected from LIST and required shenanigans to break open) is the one that jumps to taking inventory. “ﾓﾁﾓﾉ” is Japanese for, essentially “belongings”, and makes a decent synonym for “inventory”, but is the only command in the game delivered in Japanese rather than in English. There is, fortunately, a function key (F3) which will type the same thing.
This screen will show objects on top (except the player isn’t holding any right now) but also is the only screen you can read memos from. You have to hit F4, which types out READ MEMO (as a whole command, not split!) and then pick the number of the memo. F5 types “RETURN” which will exit from this screen.
Now, a map:
I’ll save the elevator for last. Rotating west, going forward, and entering the door to the south, you get to a room with a picture. The picture has a memo.
The memo says the clock needs to be set to 1 o’clock for the door to open. (Remember back in Volume 1 of the NEC version of the game it said 3 o’clock. More on all that later.)
Going back to the starting position and north leads to a room with a fireplace. Searching the fireplace yields a match.
In the same “room” (it’s another 2 by 1 setup where you see across the long room) there’s a “RACK” partly underneath a “HATCH”. You can MOVE RACK so it now is fully underneath the hatch, then OPEN HATCH to get access to the third floor.
The third floor has what the game calls a SCOOP lying on the ground (shovel) and also windows that mysteriously open to reveal a number.
Just to be clear with a map:
To the north of where the shovel is there’s a rectangle on the wall that looks like it should have a door, but it isn’t. After a bit of struggle I came up with PUSH WALL which opens the passage.
The next room has a clock. This is where the first memo (set to 1 o’clock) comes into play, as you can ADJUST CLOCK and then say you want it at 1. This opens yet another secret passage, this time through the tiny door in the clock.
The next room (and last room of floor 3) has a computer, specifically an MZ-2000 in this version of the game.
RUN MZ2000 will print a memo that you can then take.
マイクロキャビン マーク カラ W ニ 2:S ニ 1
This indicates you’re supposed to start at the Microcabin logo and go west by 2 and south by 1. We’ll need this shortly. Let’s go outside by heading to the elevator.
The mechanics here are weird. You need to press and hold W to leave, or press and hold E to approach the buttons. No other keys work; you aren’t typing on a parser prompt. Wild inconsistency is the most consistent thing about this game.
There’s 3 buttons; the second one kills you, the other two are helpful.
One of them takes you to a garden outside. You need to specify DIG GROUND, at which point the game will ask you for how many steps west and south; this is where the memo comes into play.
The inventory limit of 2 still applies, so you need to cast off one of your items after doing this in order to get the BOX, or TRUNK.
If you try to then saunter through the exit — and you can go down the stairs, you just can’t walk around the first floor otherwise — you’ll find it is locked. You also need a key, which is where the other button on the elevator comes into play.
This leads to darkness, which you can dispel with LIGHT MATCH. (According to the source code, the amount of time the match is lit is tracked in real time. This is very rare for a turn based game but we’ve seen it once in a while, like in how Devil’s Island you needed to wait in real time for a guard to show up.)
The safe lets you enter the 7474 from the window (rather, ADJUST / SAFE, 7, 4, 7, 4) revealing a key inside.
Again you might need to worry about your inventory limit. If you got the BOX first you’re in trouble because you can’t discard the match! The best order is to do the key first and then get the box.
With the key and box in and (with possibly some trouble as mentioned in the caption) you can now officially saunter outside to a win.
With scrolling text.
Now, you may be wondering — hey, Mr. Blog Author, didn’t you say something about needing to bash open a hatch with a hammer in volume 1, how did that come into play? And what about the hole with the rope? Yes indeed: it turns out the MZ version of the game only has two volumes and whatever happened in volume 1 must be different from the NEC version, despite it looking like the same game from the video. I could technically try starting in volume 3 of the NEC version and beating it from there, but I am honestly fine passing for now. (The good folks at Gaming Alexandria are still trying to work out how to rescue the data from the tape for NEC volume 2. I’ll keep everyone posted. My theory is a divergence at the very end allowing for the third volume.)
The start of Volume 3.
I think the multi-volume gameplay mess demonstrates a case of “flying too close to the sun” that many of our authors have suffered, where they need to follow-up their previous game with something more ambitious. (As touted in the ad, “the program size has now doubled, making the adventure even more exciting.”) Still, I found it interesting how reasonable the MZ (volume 2) version of the game was relative to everything else I’ve seen: the only hard part is realizing, for example, you’re looking at a HATCH on the screen and need to apply the parser accordingly. I also got stuck a while figuring out how to work the elevator given it doesn’t even use the parser! So our original author-dentist seems to have kept to reasonable ambitions (apart from the volume-splitting) but the later people who made ports started to get unreasonable, like with the carpet puzzle on NEC or the confusing design elements of the MSX version.
Mystery House II running on a Sharp MZ-80B2 (a slight variant of the MZ-80B, the original platform for the game). Via bowloflentils.
Yes, I arise from my slumber for at least a little while. This is the sequel to Japan’s first graphical adventure game, using the same first-person-with-directions view as the previous game. (If this isn’t ringing bells, you probably want to read my posts on the game first. The important thing to emphasize is that despite the name and opening graphic clearly coming via the Roberta Williams Mystery House, the Japanese game entitled Mystery House goes in an entirely different direction in both gameplay and content, and the sequel follows suit.)
I have already technically finished Mystery House II in one of its ports — the MSX version, which has an English translation patch — but I had enough disappointment that I mentioned I would return to tackle the NEC PC-6001 port, which I knew from testing was very different.
The situation turned out to be even more complicated than I expected.
“Mystery House is now 200% more powerful … The program size has now doubled, making the adventure even more exciting.” From I/O Magazine, May 1983.
Parsing the ad above, it mentions versions for cassette selling for 3800 yen and for disk selling for 9800 yen. The big catch is that cassette (due to size) was sold as volume 1 and volume 2. In other words, this game was split originally into two entirely separate parts. Volume 1 involves the ground floor (and possibly the basement below); Volume 2 involves the upper floors. You can’t get to the upper floors without finishing everything below, and the way this is enforced is extremely cryptic (I thought for a while I was running across a bug, for reasons you’ll discover).
The PC-6001 version that I did my playing has all the pieces on one tape, but I also have (with the help of the Gaming Alexandria discord and gschmidl) a copy of Volume 2 (and only Volume 2) for Sharp MZ-2000. The “volume 2” version of the game starts on the upper floor of the House; if you walk down to the ground floor, you can only see the room at the bottom of the stairs (identical to the first part of the game) but can’t walk anywhere.
We have seen a trick like this before, with Robert Arnstein’s Haunted House from way back in 1979, as published by Radio Shack. It was made when 16k wasn’t quite as common for TRS-80 so it was stuffed into 4k instead, meaning to get a little more content there’s a tape swap upon arriving upstairs (and the trip is one-way).
There was a cassette version of PC-6001 as well, except both volumes were sold together. Via eBay.
This is very different from the MSX version which had quite a bit of trekking up and down — made painful by an inventory limit of two. The inventory limit carries on here but there’s less space to travel around in. I’m still quite stuck, though, and this is without a walkthrough to consult this time.
The opening graphic is still essentially cribbed from Roberta Williams.
The NEC PC-6001 version is fortunately like the FM-7 version of Mystery House 1 in how it controls. You type commands in regular English VERB NOUN form; this is unlike the MZ versions which have you type each as a separate line. If you are facing a direction like EAST typing the same direction will move forward; if you aren’t facing that direction it will turn you that way. Chronologically Gaming managed to land a copy of the MZ version with volume 1 so you can watch some of the opening of that version here:
It has a major difference you can see by going NORTH, turning EAST, walking EAST, and then turning NORTH.
That’s a MEMO on the ground, not present in the MZ version. You can TAKE MEMO and then READ MEMO, at which point the game prompts you for a number (there are memos 1 and 2 at least, I think up to 4).
That is
メモをさがせ
ちかしつのいりぐちにきをつけろ !!
2Fへまわれ
Search for the memo.
Be careful of the entrance to the basement!!
Go to the second floor.
Just to reinforce the idea I’ve mentioned before that the “VERB NOUN” form is strange for Japanese, from left to right, the first line メモをさがせ can be parsed literally as メモ (memo) を (is the object of action) さがせ (action is search for, imperative form).
Heading in further…
…the first room is a kitchen. Of the items to the south, the only one I’ve been able to refer to is a REFRIGERATOR which has a CUP. To the north is a CABINET, although rather than OPEN CABINET you’re supposed to type SEARCH CABINET.
Both the CUP and CABINET are part of the later MSX game; the TOWEL was not part of it, but the KNIFE did get used for an identical purpose to this game.
Before going on, I should point out while the CUP was referenced in the Japanese text that went with the picture, the CABINET wasn’t, and of course translations can differ so even when at item gets named like the cup was it can be a pain to figure out the English word to type in the parser. Fortunately, the game has a HELP command that gives a fair amount of the needed words:
The game is written in BASIC so normally a list could also be obtained via the method of listing the source code, but the game has some sort of memory-protection preventing this. There’s an emulator (iP6+) that allows dumping the memory into a file, and I used this while the game was on to get a 100% complete list of understood words.
Moving on, to the west is a 2-section room of the type seen multiple times in the original Mystery House.
Trying to ADJUST CLOCK (like was possible with the MSX game) gets the message that the clock is broken.
Attempting OPEN WINDOW on the first window (the one to the east) just gets the response that it won’t open; the window after is subtly different:
“Because the window latch is so stiff, it’s difficult to open.”
USE KNIFE works here. I complained about this in the MSX version being arbitrary. The text is a strong clue; the text wasn’t quite so explicit in that version.
After this I dropped the knife because of the stringent inventory limit of only 2 items at a time. It goes back to the cabinet (by “magic”) if you need it again. The verb the game uses for dropping items is CAST.
The scene here doesn’t let you turn; you can only go SOUTH which will put you back in the house. The hammer is used in the MSX version to bust a hole in a wall and there’s also a SCOOP (shovel) later which can be used to dig.
Moving on, south of the two-space room with the clock, there’s a four-way door intersection with stairs.
The south is the front door (locked). Trying to go east leads to a hole going down…
…and trying to go down kills you. (I assume the ROPE mentioned in the object list is used later.) Just like the outside section with the hammer the scene here is “locked” and you can’t turn.
Heading west instead leads to a room with windows to the west and south (OPEN WINDOW just gets “NO!”) and some books to the north.
When trying to TAKE BOOK you are prompted with which book you mean; the game wants you to type a digit from 1 through 6.
Being prompted for a digit. My first time through here I had the CUP and HAMMER which was too many inventory objects, and I was confused why the game wasn’t letting me take a book.
Each book is identical except for one (chosen randomly at the start of the game, I’ve had it be book 2 or book 4), which includes an extra surprise.
Memo 2 says to enter a door at 3 o’clock (3時のとびらをくぐれ). I assume this matches the MSX puzzle of setting the clock, but as I indicated earlier, ADJUST CLOCK just says it is broken, so something is different in the sequencing.
Finally let’s get around to those stairs. Trying to go up them right away, the game asks if you’ve found the second memo. Trying to go up them after finding the second gets the message
ちかしつのいりぐ ちを、あつけましたか?
or something like “did you figure out how to get into the basement?” (Maybe? I could use a Japanese expert to confirm here.)
I mentioned earlier I thought maybe this was a bug; I had no idea why going up stairs would provoke these kinds of “hint” messages (first indicating to find a memo, then pointing to the basement). Once I realized this was a “split” game (unlike the MSX version) the logic clicked into place. It also clicked into place why the MSX version might have changed things around; I can say that the “view” still is far superior in this game as you can see what’s going on to the left or right. You can even see changes in the distance; going back to the two-square room, notice how while looking west you can see the window open to the far right, which is not a detail the MSX version had at all.
I’m technically not on the hook for finishing this version of this game; I’m satisfied enough knowing why the different versions came out the way they did. I’m still interested if anyone has any helpful suggestions for progress. I have a copy of the game here; boot the emulator, pick option 2 for BASIC 32k, say you want 2 pages, type CLOAD, right click and pick Tape->Insert followed by the Mystery House file, then type RUN.
There is, first off, what even “counts” as a personal computer; if we bypass all that argument to the minimum, the first personal computer was Simon, which could not be purchased in a store but where plans for making one were printed in the magazine Radio-Electronics starting in October 1950. It was the brainchild of Edmund Berkeley (co-founder of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery) and cost north of several hundred dollars to make (in 2025 currency, at least $3500). It only had 32 bits of memory.
Based on the price, having the plans be meted out in a magazine, and having the entire thing require self-manufacture: it did not have much historical impact. It was, however, only Berkeley’s first attempt bringing something resembling computing to the home, as he had a much better price point with the Geniac (co-designed with Oliver Garfield) of $20 in 1950s money.
Eventually, this sort of “physical computer” was made even cheaper at $5 with the Digi-Comp I, a finite state machine powerful enough it also has been dubbed “the first personal computer”.
Certainly both devices could be programmed as if they were real computers; both devices included guides to programming Nim, an obligatory rite of passage for any 50s/60s computer.
These later devices had relatively widespread use — the Digi-Comp I had an estimated 100,000 in sales — unlike the Simon which remained a novelty. All these products were the logical outgrowth of Berkeley’s attempts to reach the masses with computing, which started even before Simon, in 1949, with his book Giant Brains, or Machines that Think.
These new machines are important. They do the work of hundreds of human beings for the wages of a dozen. They are powerful instruments for obtaining new knowledge. They apply in science, business, government, and other activities. They apply in reasoning and computing, and, the harder the problem, the more useful they are. Along with the release of atomic energy, they are one of the great achievements of the present century. No one can afford to be unaware of their significance.
This is all relevant for today’s story…
THREAD 2: Joseph Weisbecker
…as one of the people who read the book was Joseph Weisbecker, where (according to his daughter Joyce), “he saw for the first time what an electronic computer could do, but, more importantly, how it worked. Binary logic, flip-flops, switching circuits – very simple elements combined in subtle, clever ways resulted in surprisingly sophisticated behavior from a machine.”
Joseph Weisbecker was only a teenager when he read the book; by age 19 (in 1951) he had built his own Tic-Tac-Toe machine. During the 50s he joined RCA, not only working on chip and memory design projects but making lower-end educational toys (akin to the Digi-Comp) intended to bring computers to the masses. He had a special contract with RCA that let him sell his inventions to outside companies, like Think-a-Dot (sold by E.S.R, same company who made the Digi-Comp).
He was in the odd position of being involved with a vast number of the RCA computing initiatives all the way through the 1970s but also being ideologically opposite in a way; RCA cared mostly about large business where Weisbecker kept the flame alive for smaller computing. He put forward a proposal for mini-computers in 1960 (a level between giant mainframes and personal-computers) that was ignored (when this market emerged with the DEC PDP-8 in 1964, it became huge). Where this really became clear is when he went on to make his own personal computer system called FRED, developing it from his home in New Jersey.
Knowing RCA’s apathy to the idea, he didn’t even bother pitching FRED (which eventually became the basis of the 1802 chip) until after RCA had a collapse of their mainframe computer business in 1971; according to Joyce Weisbecker he’d already been working on it for two years on the side. Later in the 70s he bypassed RCA entirely and wrote a series for Popular Electronics in 1976 and 77 that laid out the design for a personal computer, the Cosmac Elf, with the full 1802 chip design. This computer was essentially the fully-developed version of the FRED.
It isn’t like the 1802 would have gone to waste without the personal computer connection; the chip was the first CMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) chip and consequently had low noise and low power consumption. Both are essential aspects in spacecraft and so an 1802 has found its way both in the Galileo probe launched in 1989 (giving a close-up view of Jupiter and its moons) as well as the famous Hubble space telescope launched a year later (see image at the top of this post).
Mosaic of Europa, from the Galileo probe.
The 1802 also found its way into the short-lived RCA Studio II console, off and on the market in a year. It is notable for having none other than Joyce Weisbecker (as quoted earlier) implement some games, making her one of the first female programmers in videogames.
For our purposes, the important thing to take away is that despite RCA being heavily corporatized, the Cosmac Elf was in a way “liberated” from it, as part of the movement to bring computing to the masses. Speaking of bringing computing to the masses…
THREAD 3: Tom Pittman
…we now need to move from New Jersey to California and the Homebrew Computing Club of Menlo Park.
Are you building your own computer? Terminal? T V Typewriter? I/O device? or some other digital black-magic box?
Or are you buying time on a time-sharing service?
If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with likeminded interests. Exchange information, swap ideas, talk shop, help work on a project, whatever…
They were founded quite shortly after the launch of the Altair computer, another candidate for “first personal computer” (more properly here, first commercially successful personal computer). While plenty of hobbyists had already made their own systems through arcane means, here was a computer kit that seemed to break things open, 256 bytes of default memory and all–
If it was even possible to get a set. The makers, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) out of New Mexico, had a story featured in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics; it was a Hail Mary by the founder, Ed Roberts, after they got their calculator business destroyed by Texas Instruments and friends (it cost more to make a ship a calculator than it did to buy it). They were not prepared for the influx of orders, some made to products mentioned that didn’t even exist yet.
Steve Levy’s book Hackers mentions how one person (Steve Dompier) drove all the way to Alberqueue and “had left the office only after Roberts had given him a plastic bag of parts he could begin working with, and over the next couple of months more parts would arrive by UPS, and finally Dompier had enough parts to put together an Altair with a serial number of four.”
This atmosphere of just touching the edge of the technological revolution was when the Homebrew Computing Club kicked off in the garage of Gordon French, co-founder of the group with Fred Moore. They both had links through the People’s Computing Company which for a brief time had one of the only working Altairs at the time (sent directly to the director, Bob Albrecht, who sang its praises in their newsletter) and that Altair landed in the garage for the first meeting.
We arrived from all over the Bay Area — Berkeley to Los Gatos. After a quick round of introductions, the questions, comments, reports, info on supply sources, etc., poured forth in a spontaneous spirit of sharing. Six in the group already had homebrew systems up and running. Some were designing theirs around the 8008 microprocessor chip; several had sent for the Altair 8800 kit.
Even with hardware there was the problem of software; coding in assembly was quite error-prone and slow, and the PCC already had good experience with using BASIC. Salvation seemed to come in the form of a version of BASIC made by Paul Allen and Bill Gates (with Monte Davidoff) which was sold by MITS…
…but it started selling at $397, and eventually landed on (after price reduction!) a price of $200, far more than what many of the computer enthusiasts were used to paying for software ($0).
A “Caravan” also known as the “MITS-Mobile” was travelling from town to town demonstrating the wonders of the Altair, and in June 1975 the Caravan arrived in Palo Alto, California.
The Homebrew Computer Club visited and there was an (early, buggy) version of Allen/Gates/Davidoff BASIC running on one of the computers, expanded to 4K. “Someone” swiped a paper tape which turned out to be a copy, which eventually landed in the hands of Steve Dompier, and from there this copy spread to the community.
All this led to this to the “Open Letter to Hobbyists” printed in the newsletter of the Homebrew Computing Club, February 1976, written by Bill Gates, outlining how it seemed nearly everyone had the pirated BASIC, and given the numbers of how with royalties paid, their time spent developing the product was “worth less than $2 an hour”.
Many hobbyists groused about this; a follow-up letter in a later issue opined that perhaps Gates was directing his ire at the wrong people, and that
I’m sure that if I were MITS, I’d be chuckling all the way to the bank over the deal I got from you.
Some of the Homebrew Computer Club decided the best response was to make their own BASIC. Tom Pittman, in particular, had been a member since the first meeting, and he was one of those who had made his own computer prior to the Altair — using the Intel 4004 chip, with only 4 bits as opposed to the 8-bit chips that came after (the 8008 which was used in the Canadian MCM/70 and the French Micral N, and the 8080 used in the Altair). He took up the challenge. While not the first to do so, Tom Pittman wanted to try charging for it, but a nominal fee only:
Gates was moaning about the ripoffs, and people were saying, ‘If you didn’t charge $150, we’d buy it.’ I decided to prove it.
Tiny BASIC was a variation of BASIC developed to be as simple as possible to fit in small-capacity computers; Pittman made his BASIC conform to the Tiny BASIC standard (and then added in some extra just because he could), and importantly, only charged $5. Rather than for the Altair this was for a different chip (the Motorola 6800) and he eventually sold the interpreter to a company for $3,500 (while retaining the rights to sell to $5 to hobbyists).
The 6800 wasn’t his passion, though, nor the MOS Technology 6502 he also wrote Tiny BASIC for (even though the 6502 showed up in everything from the Apple II to the BBC Micro to the Nintendo Entertainment System). The chip he truly loved was the 1802.
…the microprocessor is even more elegant than Joe Weisbecker intended. This microprocessor is so good that even RCA is not really aware how good it is. The 1802 is a complete and symmetrical microprocessor.
The Elf II was the commercial-kit version of the original Cosmac Elf design, sold a year later for $100. Source.
And now we finally get to why the threads all tie together, and why they are here on All the Adventures. Pittman’s book of Tiny BASIC programs includes Tiny Adventure, source for a full adventure game.
The instructions specifically mention Crowther/Woods Adventure “provided the inspiration”, but this game has significant differences. It feels very alien to play.
INTERLUDE
Some quick notes if anyone else wants to try this out in an “authentic” way. You need a Cosmac Elf emulator; I used Emma 02. Under File -> Configuration -> Load I picked Netronics Tiny Basic -> Serial I/O and then bumped the clock speed up slightly before starting the emulator (I used 6.5, any farther and BASIC has trouble loading).
I then took the source code for Tiny Adventure, copied the whole thing to clipboard, and pasted it to the emulator screen. This is very slow. I let it run in the background for 15 minutes before it was finished, and then played. There’s some “save” buttons on the emulator which I would assume makes the process faster thereafter but I was getting corruptions trying to get them to work, so I had to cut and paste every single time I was starting the emulator anew (which given this game took me multiple days to beat … well, let’s just say I feel like I was getting the authentic 70s/80s experience).
I tried finding another BASIC interpreter that would work, but even the one marked as TinyBASIC compatible gave me issues. I think there are some unique aspects to the Elf implementation of BASIC that haven’t been ported over. (Despite there being a “standard”, there are quite a few variants as discussed here.) I have no doubt there’s ways to clear up the issue but playing on a historical emulator gave the 1981 flavor, and so worked for my purposes.
THE GAME
Tiny Adventure is set in a fantasy world. There is no quest given. (“…unlike the original game, TA keeps no score; you play for the pleasure of exploring, or set your own goals.”) There isn’t even a specific treasure goal mentioned. We are just told to wander.
So far that’s unusual but not shockingly so, although if you study the instructions above carefully, they also specify you are only allowed to carry one item at a time in your hands. You can store items in your knapsack, but you have to juggle items and put them in and out again if you are trying to use something that’s stored.
Commands are not given in a regular parser fashion. Initial letters are used instead of words. (Usually. Often the game gets fussy if you go past one letter, sometimes it doesn’t.) There’s Take, Putdown, Keep (put in knapsack), Go, Look, Inventory, Help, Open, Close, Attack, Drink.
Look and go do not work like you normally expect. This game involves relative direction. Not only that, it involves relative direction where the paths you travel along don’t necessarily go straight back and forth. This is absolutely unprecedented so let me clarify.
In a game we played recently, The Maze, while it had relative direction, it also gave a first-person view of a maze so it wasn’t confusing. Still, it meant that rather than going north, south, east, or west, the directions were generally left, right, and forward (with “A” for “turn around”). The “tank controls” that happened in the late 90s for some games like Resident Evil were a similar concept.
There’s also been relative direction with text-only games but it has been much rarer. Mystery Mansion had the inside of the mansion start out with relative directions until you found a compass; you’d see in the room description what was to the left, forward, and right, and if you turned to the right and went forward, you would expect to return the way you came by turning around 180 degrees and moving forward again.
Map from Mystery Mansion, showing turning right and going forward, followed by turning around and going forward. The design on this part of the map is in a grid to make this a little easier to manage. It still was a hassle to play.
Tiny Adventure has relative direction, and one-way exits, and directions that turn. It took me a very long time to work out what was going on. An example from the very start of the game:
Essentially, what happened above is
a.) I went forward from the starting room. (G F = “go forward”, and the game requires you to use letters like that)
b.) I used LOOK to turn to the left twice. (L L = “look left”, which both turns the player and describes what is ahead of them, it took me a long while to even realize LOOK doubled as a turn command)
c.) I went forward again, landing me in an entirely different room (G F), except it doesn’t appear to be that way and the only way to realize this issue is to rotate around all four directions and spot something is different.
You might also expect the turning-passage to rotate the direction the player is facing, but no, if you’re facing “north” you’ll still stay facing north no matter what when you arrive at the next location. In the end this makes things easier to map but it was difficult for me to realize this was how the game was working. (You can imagine a player sashaying sideways as their head stays fixed in the same direction.)
To make a map, upon arriving at a new room I would “L R” (look right) four times to get a description of what was in each direction, notating all four on the map. To move around, in order to be careful, I always looked in the direction I wanted and did G F (“go forward”); while you can go back, left, etc. and essentially skip a step, I found it extremely easy to get disoriented if I did any shortcuts.
Perhaps the issue could be mitigated with dropping items? Alas no: there is, for example, a rock to the “west” of the start, where the same rock is in two rooms at once. I think the idea is the rock is equidistant “between” them so the rock could be taken at either place, but goodness the game is already confusing enough as it is. For extra inconsistency, there’s also items you can also see while looking in a particular direction.
I tried my best to map the outside but I honestly gave up trying to make it accurate and just made it accurate enough for me to get through. The really important object on the outside is the sword, which you can use to whack at the two enemies (dragon and troll).
The “fall” drops you in a dark place and I never got around to experimenting with the lantern there.
There’s a cottage with a locked door; the way to get inside is to open the window.
I gave up here on any kind of tracking of left/right. Only the connectivity is accurate. I was making full spins every time I stepped in a new room.
The starting room (bedroom) has a chest with keys, as shown in an earlier screenshot. You can also go in farther to find a flask of “dragon’s tears” and a “lantern”. (The dragon’s tears turn the player invisible. I never found a good place to use them, but since this game is a language tutorial with no set goal the author likely was just tossing in what he thought was neat.)
Down some stairs is a wine cellar with a locked door; using the keys from the bedroom on the door leads to a tunnel. (I’m making this all sound straightforward, but I didn’t find the keys right away because of the look-relative-position issue — I didn’t realize until very late it applied to a chest that could hold an object.)
At the far end of the tunnel is a dragon. If the dragon is sleeping it is easy to dispatch with a sword. According to the source code the dragon can be awake (and wander between rooms) but I never experienced that.
Part-way up the tunnel is another locked door leading to a “troll’s den”. There is a “maiden” in the den that you can rescue.
Another exit in the tunnel leads to a cave with an axe (presumably an alternate weapon — again weird for a regular game but not for a tutorial one), and then out to an island with a boat. When I reached the island the game crashed.
Again, the game gives no specific goal; I figured killing the troll and rescuing the maiden was good enough for me, but the book gives some interesting suggestions:
Can you rescue the maiden and her jewels without killing the troll (leave him locked in his den)? What is the least number of turns to do this?
There are two ways into the dragon’s lair, but you cannot get back out by one of them. Can you find it?
Can you discover what the “magic dragon tears” do for you? Can you undo it? Can you get more, after you use them up?
This is a hard one: If you get lost in the forest, can you get out? Hint: You need to head off in the direction of the ravine, but you must get your bearings before you get lost. Crashing through the underbrush of the forest tends to get you turned around, and you usually end up going around in circles.
Once you solve the forest problem, you might want to take the maiden on a moonlight boat ride around the island. Watch out for the riptide!
How many turns does it take you to visit every place? There are 17 places in all, counting both ends of the tunnel as one place. Usually you can tell you’re in a different place if the scenery is different, or if something you Putdown is no longer visible.
The troll will under certain circumstances, wander around on his own. Can you coax him into the bedroom? Harder yet, can you lock him in the bedroom without the maiden being there to look on?
The relative-movement system is so much like wading through sludge I’m not going to make an attempt at these, but others are welcome to try. That does leave one open question I am intrigued by…
How did this happen?
…by which I mean, why did what is essentially tutorial code in a book end up being designed like it was from an alternate universe? (Not just the movement style, but the lack of goals, and the inventory where you can only hold one item at a time and need to specifically say you want to stuff items in your backpack.) I think there’s some flavor of The Hobbit here (made by a quartet of computer scientists) where seeing how systems play out was considered more interesting than any kind of destination. Regarding relative movement, though, there’s a strong hint in the book:
One common complaint I’ve heard from several people who played this game is that it does not follow standard Euclidean geometry. That is not true. A map (on a flat piece of paper) was drawn of the area before a single line of code was written, and it is faithful to the map. What happens is that in crawling, climbing, or otherwise moving from one place to another, you got turned around, and the way out may not be behind you. Or, the divisions between places (such as rooms) may not fall on cartesian boundaries. This is true to life, and the game is consistent.
That is, the author was trying to create a modeled universe, again with an engineer/computer science bent, and if the player doesn’t have a compass, of course they would be confused and turned around sometimes! And of course you realistically wouldn’t be holding that much, just like a real person! This game was written with the realism-model approach without the consideration that because we are being conveyed the model via text, no matter what happens there is an element of unrealism anyway. Certainly my stumbling around a tunnel felt very different than any kind of being lost in real life I’ve ever experienced; this game is what would be like if you completely bypassed all thought of player convenience. As he states on his own webpage, he “doesn’t play games”; this was a true outsider work.
Which is interesting! I feel like I stumbled across a microcosm of innovation that started and ended where it landed. Pittman is still around and working in computers, but after one more game (Grand Slam Tennis for the Emerson Arcadia 2001) he went on to teach and write about compiler design, work on an automated Bible translation project, and finally (in the present day) teach programming to middle and high school students.
Coming up: I’m taking a break for the remainder of June! Sort of. I have a number of behind-the-scenes things to finish, including some posts that won’t show up until a future date (mystery!). I can say for now the game I have next on my list when I return is a graphical game for Apple II.
CREDITS NOTE: Very special thanks to Kevin Bunch, who is working on a book on RCA and graciously shared some of his research. If you’d especially like to hear him talk about the RCA Studio II at length, he did an interview with the Hagley Museum you can find here.
Dave Carlos is another one of our authors who transitioned from teaching to computers, like Peter Smith or the authors of Dragon’s Keep. Peter Smith went on to make educational software and Dragon’s Keep was educational software, so it isn’t a shocking transition; Dave Carlos, similarly, had a foot in educational software, culminating with a co-written book in 1985 titled Writing Educational Programs for the BBC & Electron.
This book is not meant to be for a child directly; the aim is to teach and encourage parents, teachers and other interested people to write worthwhile and appropriate educational programs. We hope the book will be appropriate to those involved in every sphere of educational enterprise, from nursery level to postgraduate, from special to public schools, and in all disciplines from arithmetic to zoology. This may seem a daunting task but we have made life a little easier by presenting a text which not only contains programs which are ready to run and may be used as they stand or adapted in any way you wish, but also contains the building blocks from which other such programs can be constructed.
Carlos first caught the computer bug in 1980, when a parent asked if he could teach his children about programming his new ZX computer; the article says ZX81, but that wasn’t out until 1981, so either the date is off or the computer is off. Either way, the result was that Carlos bought a ZX computer for himself followed by a BBC Micro, eventually taking a computer job over the weekends while still teaching at Micro Power (a company we’ve explored the history of before).
Meanwhile, he started writing articles for magazines (A&B and Home Computing Weekly), with general advice columns (“This month we consider the important – and difficult – decision of which disc drive to choose”, “How to format discs to work on 40 and 80 track disc drives”) and also printed source code, like Stupid Cupid printed in February 1984.
1984 was also the year he quit teaching altogether, being disillusioned with recent changes in education with the reforms of Margaret Thatcher.
I felt that I couldn’t be the kind of teacher I wanted to be, and I didn’t want to be the kind of teacher that turned up every day, took his pay, and went home with no further thought.
Not long after this he founded his own PR firm, Mediates Ltd, using his publishing connections to aid companies in networking; this company eventually turned into the mail-order company Special Reserve, selling games throughout the 1990s.
Dave Carlos on the left giving out an oversized novelty check as part of a contest for the company Domark.
For adventure game fans, the company is of special interest as they had the Official Secrets adventure game club, and one of the Magnetic Scrolls games was only released as a promotional to members of the club.
All this is much farther along than today’s game, which is marked on the source code as being “Version 10” and completed on “12th January 1983”; in other words, this was written when he was still a teacher, and had just started getting deeper into the computer industry.
Caveman Adventure was published by Micro Power / Program Power, the original company Carlos took a part-time job at. Similar to how the author of Eldorado Gold (Dave Elliot) neglected to include his weird early text adventure while discussing his work, Caveman Adventure doesn’t get mentioned in any of the histories including Dave Carlos; his work in publishing, PR, and advertising have been far too significant in comparison.
Via the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. For fans of the history of weird box art, there’s a blog post by an artist (Chris Payne) who worked to try to make the Program Power art less Weird.
And … I’m going to be honest, I understand the omission. This is an erratic game. I was originally going to chalk elements up to him being a teacher and trying to write something for students, and maybe that was the goal, but: this is both too simple and too hard at the same time.
You are a caveman. You have been alone, but your goal is now to find your old tribe, while gathering treasures on the way. You can drop treasures in the starting cave or carry them with you.
As a caveman, the player’s commands are quite limited: TAKE, LEAVE (drop), DESCRIBE (examine), and USE. I’m being handwavy about whether the player is “roleplaying a caveman” or “controlling a puppet that is a caveman” because the game takes things both ways at once. You are prompted for the name of your caveman (I used “Bob”) and then start in your cave.
Notice: “this is the cave you have lived in for many months” followed by “What should Bob do now?” The closest comparable game I can think of that has been featured here so far is Mad Martha, which talks about “you, as Henry Littlefellow” and then asks what you (using your own name) want to do; it’s clearly a “role-play” situation in the text. That seems to be what the author was going for here but having both “you” and “Bob” emphasizes the disjoint between player and avatar even more.
To explain what’s going on with the game (and another aspect that’s highly unusual) I’m going to start with a “reduced” map which only shows what’s accessible without solving any puzzles.
Again, very reduced verb-set: walking, picking stuff up, looking at stuff, and using. The structure is such that some rooms will have death-exits, and it made me think possibly these were exits that could never be entered; that is, the game was going to be more of a labyrinth where you avoid certain exits rather than a heavy puzzle game. This isn’t actually the case.
To the west, there’s a room with a mouse and a roof that looks like it is about to collapse. If you go west, and then back east again, the roof does indeed collapse.
Heading west says “you need something sharp”. You would think the spear would work, but USE SPEAR gets no reaction. I’ll return to this puzzle later, but I do want to observe right now that this is a game where the obstacles are in the connections between rooms, rather than in the rooms themselves. We’ve seen this before with the game Seek … and that’s pretty much it. Seek was also published by Micro Power so almost certainly was an influence. (Seek additionally had the only-USE system for objects this game does.)
To the south is a bend where there are “flying creatures” blocking the path west; to the east there is a trickling sound of water followed by death.
Turning north from the starting cave, there’s a bearskin just coming out (just treasure, but every single item in this game counts as a “treasure”), followed by a plain with a “bone”.
Try to head north and the game says you’re too thirsty. (This is the problem with the Seek-style obstacle exits; why would Bob be thirsty specifically right there? Bob can wander about with no thirsty issues otherwise.) Going west gets Bob killed in a stampede.
Heading to the east from the plain, you pass by a deadly lion…
…and then going farther you can veer north to the top of a mountain and then die of starvation, as any exit from the mountain is death.
Veering south instead, there’s a waterfall (if you have sound on, there’s a water sound) with a “woman” there. I met the woman before I knew about the restricted verb set so tried TALK WOMAN and ended up taking her instead.
DESCRIBE WOMAN gets “She seems friendly and kind.” Using TAke on her is the right thing to do as she counts as a “treasure” and you can leave her at the cave for points.
There’s one more encounter going east, where you can land in a “raging river” and get a whole “cutscene” of described actions, but I think this might be either randomized or a bug because usually Bob would get “lost” and then inevitably die. (Getting “lost” as a method of death is also fairly unique but shows up in Seek.)
I’ll discuss this more later when it’s actually supposed to happen.
One last element early in the game is that there’s a thunderstorm, and about seven moves in the player’s items will get randomly scattered around. The most effective method of handling this I found is starting the game by wandering back and forth until the storm happens so you don’t lose any items at all.
This doesn’t move the player from the room they were in, although you have to LOOK to confirm this.
With that done, I fruitlessly tried to use the spear on various things — not realizing it was a complete red herring yet — and somehow neglected to DESCRIBE the BONE, which is
A very sharp bleached old bone.
That is, this is exactly what the first puzzle in the game needed. What, exactly, we are doing with the sharp object is unclear; I assume removing undergrowth somehow? (….with a bone?)
Hard work doing… something. This screenshot was taken during an iteration where I had items scattered from the storm.
Moving on…
…there’s simply a sequence of items to scoop up: log, vine, stick, dog, and net, while avoiding the one exit that makes the player/Bob “lost”.
This opens the previous obstacles, although some brute force use of USE may still be required (I still kept trying to use the spear until near the end of the game). Via lawnmowing, while adjacent to the lion, you can USE NET:
This shares Seek’s problem of uncomfortable treatment of space. There is no lion described in the room, yet you can catch one because it is in the next room over.
With the lion caught, you can do the mighty caveman thing and TAKE LION. He’s now your buddy! You can carry the lion and the woman and the log and the burning stick all at the same time. (I know infinite inventory has long been a thing, but not in this era.)
Going back over to where you would normally get stampeded, you can pre-emptively create a stampede, Lion King style, and clear out what turn out to be buffalo.
You don’t find out they’re buffalo until this very moment.
A map update:
While also doing USE STICK to scare off some vultures, you can scoop up a carcass, a tusk, and a coconut; note that if you re-enter the buffalo area from the west you have to scare them off again with the lion.
The coconut is sufficient to quench thirst in order to head north from the plain (still a mystery while taking that route is when it triggers, and you somehow pre-emptively know about the thirst). This enables a side route up the mountain picking up a “skin”, although you still need to deal with getting hungry at top of the mountain.
Uncooked vulture-tested carcass, yum! This admittedly felt caveman-ish. The whole point of getting here is to pick up the flint.
With all that done, we can get back to that raging river. I still am not sure how I got in early (random or bug?) but you’re supposed to USE LOG while at the waterfall that the woman was at (who at this point I had stored at the cave because I needed to inventory space, along with the lion). The river is a series of messages narrating the trip, with no interactivity.
At the end you can arrive at “shallows” where you can USE VINE to get to dry land. I am unclear how this works (are you lassoing something?) but USE can work with the power of brute force.
A dense jungle after requires cutting with the flint. (What were we doing with the bone, then?)
Finally you can reach an “open area of scrub” and get speared and die.
I mean, USE TUSK, which turns into a gift to guards that you can’t see without being killed by them.
I appreciate how the game tried to do something different with Seek’s “exit obstacles”. (It even repeats Seek’s issue where you need to repeat an action every time you go through an exit, but having buffalo and vultures and lions return to their original spots didn’t feel quite as weird as murdering a whole crew of dwarves over and over.)
The one contemporary review I’ve found (Micro Adventurer, November 1983) noted a bug I didn’t spot — the item-dropping from the storm does not reset your inventory counter, so you can end up being unable to carry anything after it happens. (“CAVEMAN Adventure is intended as an introduction to adventuring, and is therefore not too arduous a trial. But it is very well presented, and pleasant enough to play.”) Otherwise the review was fairly positive and mainly gets annoyed at the number of sudden deaths.
and I am inclined to agree the whole thing felt narratively stilted and awkward, although I appreciate the attempt to do something different with the tone, setting, and somehow writing in second and third person simultaneously.
A crucial aspect of living and its enjoyment is the ability to use the senses that we find at our disposal. The ability of a computer to involve a human being in an interactive way depends upon those senses also. This tends to mean the full involvement of sight and sound in the programs we like and use.
Educational programs have a place for such considerations. We sometimes glibly say that a computer is a wonderful motivator for children, especially those who have experienced failure using traditional methods of learning and teaching. What we mean is that a computer can be a motivator if the programs being used are carefully written and involve the child totally in the experience of using the machine. Poor programs can have the opposite effect upon the child, making them as reluctant to use the computer as they may be to use other learning methods. There is nothing inherently motivational about a computer at all; in fact you could argue that a ‘QWERTY’ keyboard is a huge disincentive to use one. If we want to have a positive effect on a child, it is up to the software writers to take this into consideration at the time they plan their programs.
— From Writing Educational Programs For The BBC & Electron by Dave Carlos and Tim Harrison
While we’ve had games with excess verbs that don’t do anything in the game, this didn’t seem like the sort of game to do that. I might normally say such verbs “put space to waste”, but it isn’t necessarily a waste; Countdown to Doom at least accepted EAT and SWIM to let the player know they weren’t going to be doing this on an alien planet, and sometimes in a modern Inform game it comes off as restrictive and awkward not to be able to THROW something even if it turns out throwing isn’t useful.
Speaking of throwing, that is one verb (other than wait) that hasn’t been used yet! I had already found the axe worked last time and went through all the other objects in the game and found none of them wanted to be thrown: “I can’t throw (insert item here)”.
The message in the forest about TREES ARE RESERVED FOR COFFINS seems to be here to explain why CHOP only works on the thicket but not here.
So what could we throw an axe at? The locked door had resisted my attempts at violence with CHOP DOOR — which you think would be the right way to bust in (especially given the lack of being able to HIT / SMASH / etc. even though the player has a mallet) — but I hadn’t tried THROW AXE.
Not “moon logic” exactly but the game should have accepted some alternate hitting methods. Limited space on a 8K VIC-20, though!
The inside has a sharp stick and a spade.
We now have and mallet and a wooden cross in addition to a sharp stick, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any “stake a vampire” verb in the set; what’s going on here? You’ll see in a moment. To recap, we also have the magic word unused (OVYEZ) as well as the lamp and the gold coins.
The spade, as I suspected, goes over to the sunny field.
I was storing my items here because of the “Crusifix”.
DIG is a little hard to operate; you can’t DIG CRUSIFIX but rather need to DIG HOLE, at which point a pit will appear you can go in.
Going out requires the ladder, but be careful because the ladder follows similar rules to the rope and will collapse if you have too much in your inventory.
The tunnel leads to a “subterranean cavern” and a seeming dead-end…
…but the THROW AXE is useful again (at least this time throwing seems the most natural thing!) This opens up a cave and nearly the last part of the game.
I had the lamp lit by this point; I don’t know the exact threshold it is needed.
Nosferatu! If I hadn’t spent my time investigating my verb list beforehand, I would have spent a while here uselessly trying to stake the vampire; he’s active rather than fully asleep and if you don’t have the wooden cross, he “rises from the altar, and bites my neck!”
The stick and mallet are complete red herrings. (The presence of a red kipper earlier at least hinted at the possibility.) The right thing to do here is to use magic.
According to the author’s web page, this doesn’t kill Nosferatu, it just gets him out of the way.
We can then grab the Bloodstone and retreat (being careful to drop most everything but the Bloodstone to climb up the ladder without it breaking).
This still isn’t quite the end of the game. The gold coins come in handy, as well as the very last unused verb: wait. You can go over to the bus stop and wait for a bus, and then pay for a ride in gold (!!). I guess he didn’t need exact change.
The author seemed somewhat down on this game…
If all of this leaves you with the impression that I don’t think much of the game, I suppose that’s true. But I still regard it with affection because, well, I was fourteen. Cut me some slack.
…and yes, there were a fair number of irregularities I already pointed out. I enjoyed myself more than some of our other games marked “haunted house” just because it did feel incredibly earnest; also, the fact we were not here to defeat the big bad racked up a few points on my imaginary scoreboard. I will say I could see a player getting incredibly frustrated by the ending and the useless mallet and stake. Although it makes perfect sense to me in a narrative sense why they wouldn’t work, it still would be better a design to acknowledge attempts at using them (along with textual hints suggesting that they’ll never work). This would have made a better overarching theme — sometimes the goal shouldn’t be destruction — that would go along with what happened to the witch (who we didn’t have to beware at all).
Some questions to the author, since he’s been in the comments:
1. What was the logic behind the fake-out with the stick and mallet?
2. Which puzzles were from Myles Kelvin, in the previous co-written game? (Also, was it such that you feel like you should both be on the credits?) What elements carried over and what changed?
3. What happened to the “HIDDEN GROVE” from your original working map?
…we [Myles Kelvin and Mike Taylor] went together to a conference in Manchester organised by Terminal Software. That made us feel very grown up at the age of fourteen or fifteen! Ah, the thrill of being allowed to drink beer!
This will be the last we’ll see of Taylor for 1983. He did have another game (The Final Challenge, aka Cornucopia) but it is lost:
Unlike the other games in this series, it required a VIC-20 with not 8k but 16k expansion – and since I didn’t own a 16k board, I had to borrow one from a school-friend, Richard Monk, in order to write it. Seems strange in these days when 4M of memory is considered woefully inadequate. [Meta-note: I wrote that last sentence in 1997 or ’98. As I write now, in 2001, 4M is truly laughable – most people now consider 64M unusable. No doubt by the time you read this, people will look sniffily on any computer whose memory is so tiny as to be measured in something as piddly as megabytes. Plus ca change.]
Of all my games that have been lost to posterity, this is the one that I would most like a chance to play again. I remember it somehow being invested with a strong sense of atmosphere, and having more-interesting-than-average puzzles. I have often tried to recapture elements of the plot to Cornucopia, as it rather bizzarrely ended up being called, but I have never succeeded to my own satisfaction. I particularly remember a tricky initial portion, necessary to get into the caves where the game took place, and a huge underground cavern with trees growing in it.
He’ll return in 1985 with the ambitious multi-player adventure Causes of Chaos.
Terminal Software was started, in a sense, by accident.
RW Stevens, aka Reg Stevens, was working at ICL in Manchester (the business computer company, home of Quest). He had started writing games for the VIC-20 over Christmas 1981:
…I wrote my first game, which was a computer version of [the tabletop game] Connect 4. I wrote it in BASIC and I made it look at the board and work out every possible combination and choose the best move from the criteria I’d coded in… which meant it could take five minutes to make a single move! Any player would get fed up waiting so I did the algorithm which worked out the computer’s next move in machine code. That made it as immediate as a human opponent.
He took it to show a colleague of his at work, Andy Hieke. Hieke thought the game was good and that Stevens should sell it, but Stevens replied he couldn’t be bothered; Hieke offered to do it instead. This would become what was published as “Line-up 4”, and it had only very modest success, Stevens at first getting a check for 20 pounds. However, Hieke got interviewed for a piece that landed in The Times and as part of the interview he mentioned an upcoming version of Scramble for the VIC-20.
There was no upcoming version of Scramble for the VIC-20, or at least not yet. Hieke called Stevens and said he needed to write one. This is the first he’d heard of the game’s existence (Stevens was 40 of the time and did not frequent arcades).
I did have my little computer, though, and was finding it fun to program, so I suppose I saw it as an intellectual challenge and rose to the bait. I said I’d have a go, so I took the kids to Blackpool one day to do some research and see what the arcade game looked like.
The game was successful enough to be well-remembered after; the author wrote that
Skramble! was probably my finest moment, although Super Gridder on C64 was probably at least as addictive. The amazing thing about that VIC20 Skramble! was that it was entirely hand assembled.
I wrote it in machine language, but had no assembler or machine language monitor- so I converted the instruction codes into numbers (using the data book for a 6502 CPU) and ‘poked’ them into memory from Basic!
The game got licensed by MicroDigital out of Webster, NY…
…although I’m not seeing the company at New York’s corporation registration site and I don’t have any information how that licensing agreement worked. Stevens did write a text adventure later for Terminal (Rescue from Castle Dread) so we’ll see him again, but today’s game involves a different author, Mike Taylor, who we previously saw here with Magic Mirror.
Nosferatu was written a different process; Taylor had based it on an “unnamed and unpublished game” he’d written with a friend (Myles Kelvin) the year before. Nosferatu was written from scratch with some of the same puzzles as the previous game, and was originally, like Magic Mirror, a “private” game. Once Magic Mirror was published he offered it Terminal and it became his second published game.
He was familiar with (but had not yet played) The Count by Scott Adams, and had not heard of any of the other vampire games we’ve seen here already. The goal is much different than the usual “kill Dracula” goal, as the printed instructions just say we need to “get home from Nosferatu’s castle with the precious bloodstone.”
I made my usual verb list, and none of them suggest we are killing the vampire, although I may be missing some special case.
Kill, stab, stake, and hammer are not included. (Note, no violence at all! Although there’s an axe you can THROW.) As my ambiguity above suggests, I’m not done with the game yet, although as a VIC-20 game (using the 8k expansion) it surely can’t be too much larger than what I’ve seen?
It starts with a mysterious in medias res moment:
How did end up here? Did we somehow get smuggled into Nosferatu’s castle this way? Did we get attacked and deposited here? I thought briefly (before checking the manual’s objective) that we were playing as the vampire, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The opening areas yield up a “bottle of whisky”, a “rope”, and a “7-pound mallet”. In the same room as the rope there is a locked door. A bit farther is a Graveyard with a “newly dug grave” and a warning about needing to BEWARE THE WITCH…
I’m unclear why it turns from a grave to a cave.
…followed by a … bus stop? Hey, there was one in Haunt. Turning south, there’s a sarcophagus that is too heavy to open, although drinking the whisky will give a boost of strength and allows the player to open it.
Inside is a corpse that turns to dust if you touch it (no idea if the dust is helpful) and a wooden cross (which I haven’t used yet).
Heading east from there is a library, with an Atlas, book of Magic, and book of Games.
The book of Magic has a word that seems like it’d be helpful (see above) but I’ve tried it in every accessible room so far to no effect. The atlas mentions a cesspit near a oak forest (which you find anyway even without the atlas) and the book of Games just says:
Bored with this game already, huh?
I mean, it could have booted up Skramble? On an 16K VIC-20?
Moving on, heading north there is a rail at a balcony, and you can tie the rope to go down, finding a brass key and a red kipper. The author is sheepish that a similar puzzle shows up in The Count, and indeed two other vampire games also have this moment, but it almost doesn’t seem like a puzzle as much as a natural action; at least I didn’t feel like there was anything stale going on.
If you carry too much down the rope it snaps and you die.
With the brass key you can unlock the door back up north and open a large new area.
Up first are a “sharp axe” and a “ladder”; this is followed by a pond with a shark and I have no idea if you can do anything with the shark. I’m not even sure how to die from the shark.
What I am sure you can die from is a little farther where there is a “flimsy bridge” and it will collapse if you have too many items. Past the bridge is a hut that is locked and the brass key doesn’t work; I have yet to get in the hut.
I guess it’s implied the shark gets us?
Past that is a “sunny field” with a “crucifix” on the ground (spelled wrong) and I suspect the DIG command goes here but I don’t have any digging tool yet (which might be in the hut! which I haven’t gotten in yet!) What I can do is go around to a “cesspit” which has some gold coins, and use the ladder from earlier to climb out.
An easy softlock. This doesn’t have a save game feature.
There’s a “cliff” with a backwards sign….
…which indicates you’re supposed to use the axe to chop the thicket.
Past this are two rooms at the edge of a chasm, a “safety match”, and a “fountain of youth”. You can use the bottle from earlier (with the strength boost) to scoop up the water from the fountain of youth and take it back to the witch, trading it for a lamp.
(I kind of like how I was expecting some sort of battle confrontation but this was just a trade puzzle!) The match works to light the lamp but I haven’t found anything dark enough for it to have an effect. To recap:
a.) I’ve got a hut I can’t get in
b.) I don’t have a way of digging
c.) I don’t have a way past the chasm (if that’s even supposed to be a thing)
I’ve already visited both sides of the brick wall so I’m not sure if it’s really meant to be a puzzle.
I get the intuition this is going to be the sort of game where I just have to resolve one puzzle and then the rest will be a straightforward progression. But I have to find that one puzzle first!
I have won the game, by some relativistic value of “won” — I needed to check the walkthrough a few times due to communication issues, but also one wildly unfair spot.
I will try my best to convey first what any future potential players might need to have a better chance before getting deep into spoilers. Before any of that, a little more detail on how the game was discovered:
Specifically, this happened on the Sinclair ZX World forums. A user named “willinliv” posted about a set of his father’s collection of “about 30” ZX81 tapes, some of them commercial and some of them hand-made.
One of the tapes from the collection, “GMSave”.
Our tape of particular interest was marked “Jeux 16k” (Games 16k).
I have been trying to get a better capture of the tape ‘Jeux 16k’, which seems to be a collection of software that my Dad traded with a ‘pen pal’ from France. Some of these are pirated copies of mainstream releases but some I kind find any info about or copies online. Unfortunately there are audio drop-outs recorded into the tape, particularly on Side B, and also my expertise is minimal.
Nightmare House was on the side B and did suffer damage. As XavSnap writes…
The wav file is broken and i had to rebuild the Basic file in binary (Bits rotations, bad basic length…).
…also pointing out the source code was explicitly based on the Trevor Toms code.
All objects, conditions and moves are located in the VARs memory segment, but this part don’t match in the P file [that’s the file used by the emulator]
After some significant work after the code was reconstructed. This is important in that it is faintly possible one of the odd behaviors you are about to see was related to the reconstruction, but after thorough enough testing I don’t think so: the game is really meant to be very linear with lots of death options.
If you plan on playing the game yourself, note that:
a.) On the two occasions where there are multiple things — the buttons on the recorder and the three trains — you’re supposed to refer to them by digit. So PUSH 1 or PUSH 2 or ENTER 1 and so forth.
b.) INSERT is used for both putting a thing in another thing as well as for typing.
c.) The way to wait is NOTHING. This might seem rather cryptic from the Apple version which just says “Command?” but the original more explicitly asks “what do you do?” As a conversational response, NOTHING (RIEN) makes sense, but I’ve almost never seen this before in an adventure game, where quite typically there’s an implicit “I WANT TO…” placed before the command; this gets fiddled with on rare occasion (DON’T PANIC from Hitchhiker’s Guide, for instance). The “almost” never is because this command also shows up in Folibus, which I think makes it pretty clear the author was deriving their code directly from Brégeon’s magazine article rather than from the Trevor Toms book.
With that out of the way, here’s the entire map.
Not large, yet somehow it manages many many ways to die. From where I left off last time, I had trouble with an acid bottle (just ignore it) and some trains. As I hinted at earlier, you’re supposed to ENTER one of them; trains 1 and 3 kill you (either by explosion or electrocution). This is hinted at in the previous room, which had an unplugged speaker; if you PLUG SOCKET (not the speaker, and no, the socket isn’t in the room description, even in the French version) you’ll get a hint about “always taking the second”.
With ENTER 2 you enter into darkness and where I got stuck again:
The train here has stopped in darkness. You can’t go any of the cardinal directions, and going down kills you (falling down). This is the moment where you need to do NOTHING.
The train moves along farther and ejects you into the room seen above. There is a beam going from north to south (the little squares in a column), an “electronic eye” next to a door to the west, a “black box”, and exits otherwise to the north and south. Trying to exit either way — at least my first time through — disintegrated me. I checked the verb list and there was nothing along the lines of sliding under the beam or jumping over it (like I did recently in the German game Geheimagent XP-05).
This was the part that I wasn’t stuck on due to the parser, but just being generally unfair. At the very start, there were some tools and a laser gun; you’re not supposed to pick up the gun.
That’s the only difference! You can’t even drop the gun once you’ve arrived at the beam room, you have to have left it behind. There is no indication that the weapon is the issue.
From here, you can go north into a room that looks fairly tantalizing, which has a “hole with a riveted ladder”, and a “window overlooking the sea with a lever”.
You’re supposed to ignore both those things (unless you want to die) and instead pick up the bottle (GOURDE) and cassette (CASSETTE). The bottle can be drunk but there’s a fun death later if you don’t drink it so let’s save that, and take the cassette back to the player at the intersection.
Putting the cassette in the player and using PUSH 2 (again I had to look up the interaction mode here) causes the previously-closed door to the west to open.
Inside is a lamp and a door with a keypad.
There’s also UNE MACHINE QUI RONRONNE, where “ronronne” can be either purring or a hum. I think purring is funnier.
You can’t open the door yet, but you can grab the lamp, turn it on, and jump back on the 2nd train. You will see a code for the keypad in the darkness.
It doesn’t give an explicit number, it just says there is one.
Circling back to the intersection you can then INSERT CODE (or rather, INTRODUIRE CODE) and reach the final room of the game.
There’s a mummy, a lever, a button, and a screen; there’s also a “controller” (or as the Apple game says, “stick”) to the west. The lever, button, and screen are all tantalizing, but again, death maze: push the button and the mummy wakes up and murders you.
If you haven’t drunk the bottle before entering:
You catch the plague. You die.
If you are holding the black box from the room with the beam.
The bomb explodes. You too.
You should ignore everything except for the stick, and pull it:
x
This gives the message
UNE TRAPPE S’OURVRE
VOUS VOUS RETROUVEZ DEHORS. VOUS AVEZ GAGNE.
which translates to
A TRAPDOOR OPENS
YOU FIND YOURSELF OUTSIDE. YOU HAVE WON.
I do want to emphasize that this exact style is fairly specific; we’ve had plenty of games with multiple options to die, but the sheer overwhelming preponderance of death-options here is high enough to form its own mood, akin to a Choose Your Own Adventure where more than half the options lead to a BAD END.
Be an Interplanetary Spy: The Red Rocket, from 1985. Source.
Eventually in 1983 we’ll reach The Manor of Dr. Genius for the Oric, by a known company (Loriciels) but with the same general flavor as Folibus.
As observed in my posts on Folibus, the ZX81 had a stronger impact in France than in its country of origin (the UK); while the competition landscape was one likely factor, a major one was the French SECAM format for televisions worked with the UK’s hardware in black and white (ZX81) but was a pain for color (ZX Spectrum). (SECAM’s main difference from PAL and NTSC is that PAL and NTSC have color signals sent by amplitude modulation — how “tall” the electromagnetic waves are — whereas SECAM uses frequency modulation — the “width” of the waves.)
This ramification of this was that the French-translated version of the The ZX81 Pocket Book by Trevor Toms had more an impact than the English original, and La maison du professeur Folibus became the “origin adventure” of France even though it literally wasn’t the first.
Just like how Omotesando’s early status led to further Japanese adventures in building break-ins, the “death-maze house” design of Folibus had a little cloning. By death-maze I am not just meaning a game with lots of ways to die (like, say, Time Zone) but rather that the plot follows a restricted path where one action is right and most others lead to death.
Today’s game is such a clone, and we don’t have a year or even an author.
It was rescued by French ZX81 enthusiast XavSnap off an old tape and may have been a “private game” originally meant for family and friends. It seems extremely likely is was made somewhere within a year of Folibus but there’s no way to be certain.
Plot: the protagonist has been kidnapped by a maniac and put in a house full of traps.
The title, as shown above, is Cauchemard-House (Nightmare-House) so that’s what I’m using, but the “d” is a typo; when the good folks at Brutal Deluxe Software ported the game recently to Apple II they not only added an English version, they also changed the title to Cauchemar House.
While this is a Folibus offshoot, there’s one innovation straight away:
That’s a top down view! That’s us (the “o”) with two arms (“(” and “)”). The text just says
YOU ARE IN AN EMPTY ROOM
THERE’S ALSO:
– LASER GUN
– TOOLS
WHAT DO YOU DO?
Scooping up the items and heading north, er, NORD:
No death yet! But soon. There’s no “room description” (I suppose the image is the description.)
THERE IS AN UNPLUGGED SPEAKER
A TROLL APPEARS.
TO THE EAST THERE IS A DOOR WITH A TAPE RECORDER WITH TWO BUTTONS AND TO THE SOUTH THERE IS A RED BUTTON
THERE’S ALSO:
– SUIT
Trying to go NORD results in
UNE FLECHE VOUS TRAVERSE
that is, “an arrow goes through you”; the same result happens in any other direction (other than west, where you just get stopped). You can push the button and the game says it’s just a “projection”; push it again and then the arrows stop happening, although only east is available.
This is a mini train station with three wagons, and an acid flask. Guess what happens if you pick up the acid?
The bottle was leaking, your hands are eaten away, you immediately catch leprosy (LA LEPRE).
For a game to be a death maze it needs death with this kind of frequency. Catching leprosy somehow from a flask of acid is optional.
And … now I’m stuck because of the parser. I’ve been alternating between the French ZX81 version and the translated Apple version (both are on Github) and I haven’t been able to refer to any of the wagons, and I’m still puzzled by the room with the tape recorder (it refers to the recorder having buttons, but I haven’t been able to press either). I also can’t find a way to refer to the troll (although the troll is gone if you go in the wagon room and then come back).
There’s a walkthrough provided by the Apple version so I can certainly muscle through but I’d like to try to puzzle things out a bit longer. While I suspect this is more a parser battle than an object-based one, I’ll still take suggestions in the comments if anyone has one.
In 1974, Donald Sherman ordered a pizza on the phone, making history.
Not that it was the first delivery pizza ordered by phone — pizza delivery had been around for many years by then and Domino’s had popularized it — but Donald Sherman couldn’t talk, having a type of facial paralysis from Moebius syndrome. He used a system at Michigan State University which pronounced words for him, and we have the moment caught on camera.
His first call (Domino’s) hung up, thinking this was a prank call, but he finally got cooperation on his fifth call, this time to Mike’s Pizza, ordering a large with pepperoni and mushrooms.
For this to work, a Control Data 6500 computer nicknamed “Alexander” was paired with a Votrax synthesizer. The Votrax was originally developed by Richard Gagnon of Troy, Michigan (about an hour east of Michigan State) in 1970. He was working for Federal Screw Works at the time but had developed a talking chip in his basement, and when he showed his prototype to his bosses the put him in charge of a new Vocal Interface Division (eventually spinning off to its own company). Just like Sherman he used it for accessibility, having it dictate words from a computer monitor as his eyesight had trouble.
This all resulted in the commercial SC-01 chip unveiling by the end of the decade from the newly dubbed Votrax, and you might have heard one before if you’ve played Gorf or Q*Bert. While Gorf used the chip for taunting the player with a well-timed “got you, space cadet”…
…Q*Bert used it for its own unique language.
The SC-01 was licensed out to companies to make voice synthesis hardware in the early 80s like the Mockingboard, the Alien Group Voice Box, and — relevant for today — the Spectrum Voice Pak for TRS-80 Color Computer.
The Spectrum Voice Pak ($70 for CoCo 1 and $80 for CoCo 2) does not seem to have made much a splash as I have found very little software that’s used it, but page 16 of the catalog for Spectrum Projects — in addition to the Spectrum Adventure Generator and a bingo game — has The Final Countdown. While The Final Countdown had the same JARB Software and Dragon Data releases as S.S. Poseidon, it also had an extra one later specially designed for the Votrax.
From World of Dragon.
I unfortunately do not have a copy of the talking version of the game, nor do I have an emulator that supports the chip. Here’s one more video to give an idea what it sounded like, applying a table of 64 phonemes encompassing units like “the oa sound of board” or “the tt sound of butter”.
Hence, I’m just going to load up the Dragon version again, which like last time, has easy, medium, and hard difficulties (affecting the turn limit).
The JARB ad also credits both Bill and Debbie Cook but I do have an early 1982 version of the game with no difficulty levels that just mentions Bill Cook, and the Talking version of the game also only mentions him in the credits.
Also like last time, the game is relatively straightforward, but with two curveballs thrown in.
There is an insane general who wants to launch a nuclear missile, and your job is to stop him from destroying the world.
You start near a van with a 2-way radio and a uniform; examining the uniform also reveals a stun gun and some PAPERS.
Heading south gets you in a desert with a rattlesnake and there’s no point in going there (it doesn’t have a puzzle this time, but just like Poseidon it feels like a “side scene” rather than a typical red herring).
To get inside you go by a camera at the front gate and show the papers from the uniform.
You’d think they could detect a fake general. Maybe we’re a real general and this is our actual uniform and we’re here to slap some sense into the wayward lower-star upstart.
Once inside, if you veer left into the C.O. Office, you can have one of those “side scenes” I just mentioned but this time with a minor puzzle. There are monitors and three buttons; if you press the second one it starts showing I Love Lucy, and if you press the third it sets everything on fire.
A “fire bottle” is in the room next door but you need to have picked it up first. This essentially identical to the Poseidon scene, and there’s no reason to press any of the buttons.
I wandered around the map after that. There’s a BULLETIN BOARD warning about tripping on stairs, and a message about an evacuation being complete, and a direct phone to the White House that’s very unhelpful…
…but other than that I was unclear. To the northeast there’s a cabinet that’s locked — no key yet — and intuition struck me given the mention of stairs so I tried moving it.
I have no concrete logic here but I did ratiocinate myself into doing this rather than hitting the interaction via brute force, like I did with Time Warden.
This leads to the second (and only other) part of the game.
The passage goes through a “command center”, “radar tracking” (with wire cutters), and a “strategy room” before arriving at a “maze of hallways”.
In the meantime, THE GENERAL starts showing up, kind of like the dwarves in Crowther/Woods, and you can use a charge from your stun gun to chase him off. This is clearly on the Dr. Strangelove end of the spectrum.
It’s not really a maze, though, because going through a loop enough times eventually reveals a secret passage.
Heading west from here goes to an elevator that you can take as a one-way trip back to the first floor (this is very much like Poseidon’s structure) whereas going south leads to a LAUNCH CONTROL CENTER.
Of the three buttons, ONE does just a click, TWO is not recognized by the parser even though it gets mentioned, and THREE is described as doing nothing. It does something, just not yet. (I was expecting an accidental premature launch, but apparently not; the rocket countdown is already happening).
The way to win is slightly cryptic. To the north, where there’s the observation window, you can BREAK WINDOW using the FIRE BOTTLE (the same one that was used before in the “scene” — interesting moment of intercross there!)
For reasons I’m unclear about, if you now go south and press THREE this reveals a panel.
This reveals a wire, and while CUT WIRE doesn’t work, USE CUTTERS does and you can win the game.
I regret not being able to find out how the voice sound gets used. Does the wandering general taunt you, perhaps? I’ll get another chance to find out when I get to 1984 as that’s the release year of the Spectrum Adventure Generator which also uses the same chip.
Unfortunately that’s the last we’ll see of the Cooks; they didn’t drop off the map as Bill Cook later wrote wrote the application Write III for the CoCo 3, but this was their only experiment with adventures. They do feel like they were written from an outsider perspective, and I am especially wondering why they had the “scenes” with very light puzzles as part of their games.
By 1980 in the United States, the TRS-80 had still vastly outsold the Apple II, with 200,000 units to 35,000. The Apple II was the outlier expensive machine while TRS-80 was “for the people”. There was no strong indicator at the time that by the late-80s the Apple II would form the “Oregon Trail Generation” and become a bond gluing together an entire group of children growing up in the United States.
(Side note: Commodore, Tandy, and Apple originally all had the chance to be joined up rather than battling rivals. Tramiel of Commodore originally went to Tandy for selling the PET but he also demanded a calculator purchase on top of that which caused Tandy to balk. When Jobs of Apple was looking for initial funding — $300,000 — he went to Tramiel, who only offered $50,000; Jobs found the money he wanted elsewhere.)
Tandy’s follow-up machines — the MC-10 followed by the Color Computer series, 1 to 3 — are even more elusive in general historical memory. Tandy unfortunately never disclosed sales numbers, with only vague statements like
Each year, Christmas sales of the Color Computer break the previous year’s record.
— Ed Juge, head of Tandy marketing, 1984
to go on. Rather than making up a number, let’s go with ones we know: The Rainbow (a Tandy Color Computer magazine I’ll discuss shortly) hit their peak subscription number of “over 50,000” in 1984, the year of the quote above. I searched for a comparison number and found Antic (for Atari 8-bit machines) hit “over 100,000” readers in 1986. That Atari number comes from after Atari as a company imploded so the comparison isn’t perfect, but it still gives a ballpark proportional estimate in terms of community reach.
(ADD: From the comments, L. Curtis Boyle points out some more exact data, and to compare the same year as Antic’s number, they had 31,789 subscriptions in December 1986.)
As I’ve already mentioned in regards to the TRS-80, Tandy was fairly insular and didn’t make strong connections with other companies. You could buy mainstream games for the Color Computer — Sierra On-Line put out their AGI games, so they got the Kings Quests up through IV — but oftentimes they had an air of second-hand-ness to them.
The community was (again like the TRS-80) its own ecosystem. What I want to emphasize is that while we’ll see more Tandy Color Computer starting in 1983, and despite the machine not making lasting connections with the wider gaming community, in terms of reach and popularity it also isn’t just an obscure sidenote. In a way, because Tandy became no longer dominant, the Color Computer community was even more outsider than before; Softside, the magazine we’ve featured here many times before, eventually had monthly disks for Apple II, TRS-80, Atari, and IBM compatibles, but never Color Computer.
The magazine center of this ecosystem was The Rainbow. The founder, Lawrence “Lonnie” C. Falk, was originally a journalist who had (by 1980) switched to working public relations at the University of Louisville. When the TRS-80 Color Computer came out became fascinated with it and started printing his own newsletter, with The Rainbow Volume 1 Number 1 being marked as July 1981.
Most of us are among the first to be the proud owners of a TRS-80 Color Computer. And, if you are like we were, you were attracted to TRS-80 in the first place by all those great programs available for the Models I, II and III.
But, where did that leave us? Except for some programs in the manuals — and the e-x-p-e-n-s-i-v-e ROM Packs offered by the Shack — there just isn’t a great deal out there right now. Oh, it is coming. But the wait seems long and there are a lot of things the COLOR computer can do that its big brothers can’t.
The comparable CoCo specialist magazines were Hot CoCo and Color Computer Magazine, but The Rainbow outlived them both.
Lonnie Falk, when The Rainbow — and the company Falsoft — were a bit larger. From CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy’s Underdog Computer.
Nearly from the start — not issue 1 but issue 2 — JARB Software (Imperial Beach, California, just south of San Diego) gets a mention, in a review of JARBCODE. The review has “Joe Bennet, chief programmer” working along with H.D. Stow; the product is for code-making (cryptograms, it seems). JARB started put in advertisements and sending in source code soon after and became one of the main independent publishers for the Color Computer.
The title screens give Poseidon a date of 1982 and Final Countdown a date of 1983; we could normally use the one-month-difference rule to put both games in December of 1982 but the Rainbow’s newsletter origins makes this ambiguous; direct mail would more typically land on the month on the cover. JARB’s December 1982 ad has “COMING ATTRACTIONS” that are “all available by December 1982” but without Poseidon listed. As another example of breaking the one-month rule, Commander magazine started off sending issues on the marked month, but right when they switched to newsstand they skipped a month in order to do the usual off-by-one arrangement — that is, they had one issue marked December 1983/January 1984 even though they were a monthly.
Commander Magazine died in 1984, so the increase in demand apparently didn’t last long.
(ADD: L. Curtis Boyle confirms that printing by The Rainbow happened on the month printed until they skipped May 1983 so they could be a month off for newsstands.)
I haven’t been able to unearth anything about Bill and Debbie Cook specifically, although I should highlight something I don’t always linger on: one of the authors is a woman. That hasn’t been common; I’ve counted about 4% of the games we’ve had so far have had at least one identifiable woman. Mind you, this doesn’t account for people with initials as first names, or people who aren’t named in credits at all, or people who transitioned, but it’s still a low percentage. At least in the US, about 30% Computer Science degrees were going to women at this time, so it doesn’t match the general population.
I’m still not sure as to why. I don’t think sexism quite explains it, although computer science had/has it as a problem. Even in 1983 there was strong awareness of women getting pushed out of the field; to quote some examples from a 1983 paper:
Following a technical discussion over lunch with a faculty member. I was asked for a dinner date. I was left wondering whether the faculty member went to lunch for the intended technical discussion or for personal reasons.
When I was a teaching assistant, one of my students missed the lecture and saw me later. He said, “Will you come sit on my lap sometime and tell me what I missed?”
“Why do you need a degree for marriage?” — a male colleague.
For my question — why less women making adventure games — I’m referring here to a comparative proportion, that is, double-digits in computer science versus single-digits making games. My current suspicion is that games were not thought of as “serious” work; Veronika Megler, who we just read about with The Hobbit, only passed by games on her way to a database-focused job with IBM. That is, sexism was involved, but in a lateral way: the women getting expertise at this time leaned to more “secure” areas like business and finance and large mainframes; they felt less able to experiment in a field more likely to have companies go bankrupt.
I still feel like the story is incomplete, just because so many of the games we’ve played have been pure hobby endeavors.
Enough theorizing, let’s flip a boat:
Just like Eno/Stalag/House of Doom, the Cook games were picked up by Dragon Data to publish in the UK. Picture from World of Dragon.
S.S. Poseidon is yet another game based on the movie The Poseidon Adventure, involving a cruise ship that gets flipped upside down at sea and the attempt from survivors to escape.
I couldn’t find this game in Tandy CoCo form so I’m playing the Dragon version.
There are three difficulty levels but they seem to only affect the time limit. I picked easy because I was not interested in optimizing. The game is straightforward enough it likely doesn’t matter.
You start with a three-room vignette:
The starting ballroom (similar to the movie, but only barely) has just a singular chair; to the west there’s an entrance blocked by DEBRIS and doing LOOK DEBRIS reveals a FLASHLIGHT.
To the east there is an entrance with a sign indicating SOME OBJECTS MAY BE USED. Being that there are no other exits and the only items are a chair and flashlight, I tried USE FLASHLIGHT, revealing a CABLE.
This is wildly unusual; most flashlight use has been in explicitly dark rooms, but here the flashlight finds a hidden object in an otherwise lit room. The only other adventure I can think of offhand that does this is Espionage Island but that still explicitly has a “dark corner” in the room.
The cable is incidentally out of reach, but you can drop the chair and use it to get extra height, and then CLIMB CABLE. This exits the introduction.
Many of these rooms aren’t “useful” but they’re not all exactly “red herrings” either. For example, to the south there’s a COMMUNICATION CENTER with a broken ham radio and a message saying SOS. The player is blocked by a fire trying to escape; you can get by the fire with an EXTINGUISHER from a nearby room.
Although if you don’t have the extinguisher first this is a softlock.
Despite this seeming like a small “puzzle”, it is entirely unnecessary! It’s just a “scene” essentially.
Why is this here? Conceptually it’s interesting.
Elsewhere, there’s a hatch where if you open it, sea water blasts in. If you are wearing a life jacket (again just lying around) you can survive the encounter, so again it counts as a small puzzle, and again there is no “reason” for it other than having a colorful scene.
I never found a use for the razor.
The only item that will become important shortly (but not this very moment) is a LOCKED CABINET in a TOOL ROOM.
Otherwise, to escape further: up in the Dispensary, in addition to an upside-down picture (again just for color, no safe behind or anything) there’s a beaker with vitamins. You can drink the vitamins to get stronger, and open an otherwise stubborn metal door to get to the next level.
The third level is the last section of the game.
It kicks off with three directions leading down shafts that deposit you back in level two; going east leads to a pool of oil on fire.
There’s a rope in the room where you can TIE ROPE. It asks “TO WHAT?” and despite it not being obviously an “object”, I tried “TO LEDGE” and it worked.
The rope stays tied in the room just past; you can drop it and grab the crowbar to find a “metal plate” which is the escape spot for the ship, except it is bolted in such a way it needs a wrench, not a crowbar.
You can fortunately take the crowbar and swing back on the rope back across the flaming oil, then slide a shaft to the second level and find that LOCKED CABINET I mentioned offhand earlier. The crowbar is sufficient to bust it open and get the wrench that’s inside.
The wrench then can be carted back over to the plate at the hull of the ship and to victory.
Related to the puzzle-augmented scene style, one last novelty: there’s JEWELS in one of the rooms…
…which you are welcome to take with you, but the game never acknowledges in the end if you have them, either by rewarding or punishing you. It’s simply a personal plot choice.
The game was not substantial or difficult, so in the modern context of me simply loading up and playing it I don’t have much to complain about. I’m not sure how I would have felt spending $14.95 on a 20-minute game, though. (About $48 in 2025 money accounting for inflation.) It fits together enough with the style in Eno I do wonder if the two games influenced each other (at the very least, they were sold on the same page together).
Next up: The other game by the Cooks, The Final Countdown.
Renga in Blue 
