Well, the z-code version of this game is broken (I neglected to mention I started with that version so I could play on my phone), because while playing the TRS-80 version I got a message I hadn’t seen before.
In the distance you hear a dull thud; as if someone fell or dropped something heavy.
A bit of searching led to a dead saboteur, with quite an inventory.
(Also, I guess the tape recorder didn’t self destruct, he or she took it while I was away from the starting room of the game.)
Note: still no keys, and the map is shredded beyond use. The twist is intact!
In any case, even with my newfound loot, I wasn’t able to get anywhere until I started messing with the buttons in the room above (via hint nudge from Andrew Plotkin, belated thanks). There’s “-red white blue yellow-” buttons in order. My initial notes had these as the button effects:
Red: makes the bomb detector angrily buzz; pushing the button again causes the bomb to detonate.
White: gives a “click”
Blue: is locked
Yellow: is locked
Unfortunately and rather nonsensically, the useful thing to do is push red and then white immediately after.
CLICK!
There’s a Bright flash & I hear something fall to the floor.
I can’t see what it is from here though.
My bomb detector
politely beeps…
Getting off the chair, you find a photo pass marked “visitor”. I’ve been racking my brain on this one and I _think_ the intended button operation is “red: open camera” “white: take picture” but the saboteur rigged the red button to do Bad Stuff, although I have no clue at all why the white button would then cause the bomb to defuse again. If this was a moment of nonsense on a fast-paced TV show, I might let it pass, but being forced to tangle with the setup as a puzzle made me overly grumpy.
The puzzle is made doubly bad by the fact I’m guessing 95% of people who solved it lucked into it by simply pushing all the buttons in order. (I’m a rebel, I like to start in the middle.)
Grump grump. Ok, with the visitor pass it’s possible to get into one extra room (past the white camera on the map from my last post). Unfortunately I’m stuck again.
I am in a large white visitors room. Visible items:
Plate glass window with embeded red wires.
Panel of buttons -white green-. Tv camera mounted over window.
TV camera is powered down.
Somehow I think I need to activate the camera so I can wave the saboteur’s pass at it, but I’ve been so restricted in possibilities I don’t know what to do.
Solving puzzles in Secret Mission is an interesting contrast with Warp. In Warp when I can’t find an approach to a puzzle I can just work on mapping more: checking for exits I missed, swimming in the ocean, and otherwise doing things which while they don’t feel like puzzle solving do feel like productive movement.
The feeling of stalling is a large part of why people turn to hints so often in adventures in the first place. If there’s some productivity going on (if nothing else seeing interesting new failure methods) forward momentum is maintained. With a game as tight and apparently linear as Secret Mission there is so little exploratory leeway that 10 minutes of “nothing happened” messages gives the same mental impression as staring at the screen blankly for the same 10 minutes.
Scott Adams has previously been featured here with Adventureland and Pirate Adventure. Both games feature the virtue of feeling compact (by necessity for packing into a TRS-80) and hence the next in the series makes a good counterpoint to the gigantic sprawl of Warp.
Scott Adams allegedly tried to get a license from shamelessly rips off the TV series Mission: Impossible for this game, with an opening reference to “Mr. Phelps” (the main character for most seasons of the series) and a introductory recording which self-destructs. [ADD: Jimmy Maher makes an interesting comment about this.]
Picture via Ebay. The “IMF” on the cover stands for “Impossible Missions Force”, another reference to the TV show.
Unlike some “what is the objective, even?” games I’ve played lately, this one starts with energy:
Someone came in the room, he saw me and ran out!
WHAT SHALL I DO? play recorder
Good morning Mr. Phelps. Your Mission (should you decide to accept it) is to prevent this automated nuclear reactor from being destroyed by a saboteur’s TIME BOMB! The saboteur (who also rewired the security system) is a heart patient. He plans to SUICIDE with the reactor! He is still loosein the building. You’ll find Security keys & a map in the manila envelope lying next to the tape player.
WHAT SHALL I DO? inventory
I’m carrying: Surgically implanted bomb detector glows green (bomb’s -safe-)
In what might be the first “narrative twist” of interactive fiction, there is no envelope. I like how this uses the world and player participation to convey the twist rather than highlighting the fact in text as a traditional narrative would need to.
Unfortunately, I’m stuck pretty early. There’s someone who keeps running in the room, seeing me, and running out. There’s also three doors with cameras where
Metallic voice says: ‘Show authorization please’
and all I’ve got is an empty pail. I tried covering the camera with the pail but no dice. Perhaps I’m supposed to set up a trap for the running person but I can’t even think of how I’d do that with a pail in real life, let alone a two word parser.
I went old-school this time with the map.
This is only a fraction of the overall map.
(3 out of 49 treasures found, no idea where to stash them!)
There’s a lot of sameness to the rooms to enough an extent I normally associate with MUDs, not single player games.
>w
Easy Street.
You’re in the middle of a long north-south street. To the west you can see the ocean in the distance, and to the east you can see a large building.
>s
Easy Street.
You’re in the middle of a long north-south street. The ocean is in the distance to the west, and a large building can be seen to the east.
>s
Wall Street.
You’re in the middle of a long street, extending primarily to the north and south, but also at this point there is a side street going to the east. The ocean is in the distance to the west.
>s
West Bridge.
This is the famous West Bridge of Warp, known primarily for no reason at all other than the fact that Warp needed a bridge and this was a convenient place to put one. The road extends to the north and south, and there is a river below running east-west.
>s
Easy Street.
You’re at a point where a north-south street meets an east-west street. To the south you can see what looks like a large park.
In a MUD, there needs to be some space so not everyone is crowded in small spaces, and even the most neutral of rooms can build up character if events occur in them throughout inter-character interaction (Battle of the West Bridge, say). Unfortunately, Warp is a single player game. The currently roaming NPCs just aren’t that impressive yet (I keep getting followed by a mugger with “A sordid individual is following you.” being displayed, which is far less interesting than anything in Adventure or Zork.)
I did manage to solve one puzzle (getting into the Warp Building by wearing a nametag) but otherwise my gameplay has consisted entirely of mapping.
Unfortunately I’ve also had crashes. Remember I playing by logging into an HP3000 terminal and the experience is much flakier than I’d like; while I haven’t built up a game yet and am simply in the gathering info phase, if I want to be serious about attempting a win I need to work out how to get a little more stability.
I haven’t played with the new parser features much other than to try a macro.
>DEFINE X
DEFINE X
(Define X)
=E LOOK @1
LOOK @1
(X defined)
>X PEG
X PEG
>LOOK PEG
Round. Made of wood. Not very big.
The command above reroutes the command “X” which is normally unrecognized into “LOOK”.
One last random observation before I sign off: I’m finding the “reject a command” response grating.
>s
Park.
This is part of the lush grounds of Warp Park.
I can see the following:
Fig Tree
>climb tree
That makes no sense.
>u
>FLAP FLAP FLAP< I think it's hopeless.
shake tree
"Shake" is Danish to me. Try English.
This is made worse by the existence of a nearby tree that you can climb (by going up). I know authors sometimes try to be colorful in their error messages, but it is highly unlikely the reason a player’s command is unrecognized is a lack of being in English. It’s like the game is expecting the player to apologize and not the game itself.
WARP \`wo(e)rp\ n 1: a series of yarns crossed by the woof 2: a mental twist or aberration 3: a computer fantasy simulation of adventure and intrigue ~ vt 1: to deplete weight by expungance of existance 2: to become warped
— via the WARP user manual
…
Rob Lucke and Bill Frolik’s Warp is a tricky game to date because it never had a “release”, and kept getting developed all the way to 1983. Work seems to have started very late in 1979 (and arguably people other than the authors weren’t playing until 1980). Hence I would normally save this game for later in my sequence, but
a.) The only way to play it is via logging in a HP3000 mainframe via telnet. The authors were very canny about not releasing their source so it never has had a modern port. Having this sort of circumstance makes me paranoid the game will disappear forever so I’d like to play sooner rather than later.
b.) Due to the long development time it is very large, with 49 treasures and 1216 points possible. I hence likely will be spreading it out amongst shorter 1979 games.
c.) I have had people reach this blog searching for Warp specifically so there’s at least one person out there waiting for this one.
So, random anonymous Internet person, here you go.
(ADD: I later moved this up to 1980. This makes Warp more consistent with my other mainframe games which start at when the game was first playable by others; I also had gotten worn down at my first attempt. My prophecy that the telnet server would disappear came true, but fortunately there’s a way now to play offline.)
Despite Warp being described as a “fantasy” above, it appears to be generally set in contemporary times. The objective seems to be to collect treasures about the world and put them in a “curator’s case” although I haven’t found any such case yet.
Central Plaza.
You are standing in what appears to be the central plaza of a small seacoast resort. There is a large fountain in the center of this square, and the plaza extends quite a distance to both the north and south. You can see the ocean in the distance to the west, and to the east there is a large building on which there is a sign that reads “WARP BUILDING”.
I can see the following:
Fountain
Round Peg
>GET PEG
Round Peg taken.
>E
Warp Building Lobby.
You’re standing in the lobby of the Warp Building. On the door to the north you read “MEN”; similarly, on the door to the south, “WOMEN”. There’s a security desk between you and the corridor to the east. The only other exit is to the west.
I can see the following:
Security Guard, who possesses:
a Gun
>S
Women’s Room.
Welcome to the women’s room. Looks a lot like the men’s room in many respects, except that there’s only one exit — to the north. A message carved into the wall says: “Call 333-2583”.
I can see the following:
Digital Watch
The digital watch is the first treasure of the game.
There’s a wandering mugger who will take your treasures and stash them in an alley, and a wandering policeman who will take your “weapons” and stash them … I’m not sure where, exactly. There’s a police station but I didn’t find anything there.
“Weapons” seem to include the round peg and a banana. Someone could slip!
I have just been trying to get the feel of the land, which includes dying:
Columbus was wrong.
You’ve floated right off the edge of the known world. All around you lie the remnants of past explorers and their vessels, coffins of worthless hulks. High above you, the waters of the ocean spill down from the world’s edge and splatter like grandiose raindrops all about you.
You begin to thrash madly in the waves as the shark fins come nearer. Your thrashing, however, only serves to send the man-eaters into a feeding frenzy as they home in on you. You hear the crunching of bones as the first shark removes your leg. Suddenly, everything grows dark around you …
You sense yourself leaving your physical body — A spiritual entity in a black haze. The bleakness begins to clear, however, and you begin to recognize familiar things, only everything appears in various shades of grey.
Cemetary.
This small cemetary appears to serve the City of Warp, but it does not have room to contain many graves. Small simple grave markers show the location of those in eternal sleep. A large fence prevents you from going east into a very deep ravine.
I can see the following:
Tombstone
Noteworthy is that even that you are *not* resurrected (“>DIAGNOSE” returns “You are dead.”) you can still wander around and look at things, although you can’t pick anything up. I don’t think I’ve hit another game with this feature before.
There’s some interest in Warp past obscurity and massive size; it’s got some monster ambitions for the parser which includes an attempt to make it “smarter than Zork”. It has: backtracking (letting you type BACKTRACK 4 and retrace your last four rooms, for instance), macros (letting you define a set of actions as one command) and conditionals (“IF SEE THE BEAR THEN LOOK AT IT. GO NORTH”). I’ll explore these (and the rest of the game, of course) and report back next time.
With the exception of more Wander games (which I will rotate back to) I am technically done with 1978 for the All the Adventures project. I will be diving into 1979 soon, but I did find some versions of Adventure from 1977/1978 I missed for various reasons.
In two cases I had compilation issues and in one case I can’t find any related files. Can anyone help?
…
Jim Gillogly, 350 points, 1977. A literal port into C. Given there are no changes I can skip this one.
Bob Supnik, 366 points, 21st of October 1977. While the original source is not available, Stephen Lidie’s port is. Unfortunately it is intended for MacOS and I have not been able to compile it on my Windows Fortran compiler. (Also, this Adventure Family Tree is currently wrong — Lidie’s is 366 rather than 365 points, and it is derived from the Supnik version which isn’t listed at all.)
David Long, 501 points, 1978. Fortran IV source is available, but nobody seems to have compiled it due to it being not compatible with modern Fortran.
Gordon Letwin, 350 points, available by August 1978. This was apparently not a literal port as (for instance) Carolyn VanEseltine reports remembering “an African gray parrot in a pirate aviary, accessible by a rubber raft”. It was available on the Heath personal computer as opposed to a mainframe.
I took the map I already had from Greg Hassett’s game King Tut’s Tomb, used Trizbort’s feature to export source, and made a “game” out of it, but “dadaist art experiment” might be more accurate.
Download EGYPTIAN WALKING SIMULATOR
Play EGYPTIAN WALKING SIMULATOR
Greg Hassett has already graced this blog in Journey to the Center of the Earth Adventure and House of the Seven Gables. The former felt incomplete and had only one real puzzle, and the latter had a few more puzzles but was still a goofy pastiche. They held in common a highly tenuous relationship with a work of literature (essentially just ripping off the title).
King Tut’s Tomb instead riffs off a Steve Martin routine. (Click the image to watch the video.)
It is clear the author meant this because there is a Steve Martin poster in one of the very first rooms.
So, the gameplay, such as it is, involves plundering treasures from a tomb 19th century archaeologist style. There are nearly no obstacles; it’s grab, tote-to-entrance, and drop.
(Click for a larger map.)
There was a mummy…
+=+= HOLY BANDAIDS!
SUFFERIN’ SUCCOTASH!
AN ANCIENT MUMMY WALKED IN TO TERMINATE ME!
-> WHAT SHOULD I DO? BURN MUMMY
THE MUMMY BURNS TO THE GROUND.
…and a snake that can be tamed with food.
As far as I can tell from studying the source, a 100% score is impossible, but erratic scoring would not be unusual for a Greg Hassett game.
…
That’s a wrap! There is almost nothing I can think of to say here, unless I wanted to compare the reckless cultural plundering of this game to the majority of grab-the-treasure adventure games.
So, I made something extra which I’ll post about in a moment!
Or rather, finished one ending. According to the source there’s three endings, but they require an action in the winning path that crashes the game. I’ve worked out enough to describe what happens, though.
(Click the image above for the full map.)
First, how I escaped the forest, which had the odd attribute of being acutely unfair in a game system but would make some sense in real life.
You’re in a dark and dreary woods with dense foliage in all directions.
Splashing sounds and bird calls seem to come from the east.
There is a shovel here.
TAKE SHOVEL
Done
E
The way is blocked by a deep river.
Woods
S
This spot looks awful familiar.
Woods
W
You’ve made a circle.
I am not ashamed to say I had to check the source for this.
GO UPRIVER
West end of bridge
I suppose if this was an episode of Survivorman and not an IF game, I could see this being the logical course of action, but “upriver” isn’t even a noun mentioned in the text. Even with that added, it’s hard enough to convey in text-form the thought “it looks like if I stay close and follow the river it will lead somewhere” that I suspect most people would not attempt it at all. (FOLLOW RIVER would have been ok, but it doesn’t work.)
…
A few minor puzzles later and I reached the titular Castle. It’s kind of an odd map in that there are a lot of rooms for “geography’s sake” that don’t get used for much. There’s multiple routes to different locations, including secret doors via pushing buttons that lead to places reachable from different directions. Other notable aspects:
1.) There’s a sack of potatoes inside. Once eaten I had no more problems with hunger.
2.) There’s a “true maze” of cells in the basement, but it is totally possible to ignore it. I only partially mapped it above because it was clearly not leading anywhere.
3.) There’s a missile silo which lets you launch at the portcullis to blow it up. Obviously the game didn’t have a lot of concern about sticking to a particular time period of technology.
…
As I already mentioned, there are three endings.
DAMSEL ENDING: The damsel is in a room named “Rapunzel’s Tower”.
You’re high above the castle in the east tower; in fact, you are so high up that you can see clouds outside the window. A spiral staircase leads down.
Oddly, doing “take damsel” results in
Don’t be lewd! (This is neither the time nor the place)
and some guessing the verb leads to instead
CARRY DAMSEL
The damsel gratefully climbs into your arms and whispers
“take me to the cross-roads and I’ll repay your kindness!”
You hear a sound like stone grating on stone.
Unfortunately, the sound indicates the staircase being blocked off. Escape requires an item from another tower:
There is a 30 foot long wig here.
Trying to CLIMB WIG results in
You get 9 feet down and find a little tag that says
“Made in Hong-Kong, Inspcted by no 1” — the wig starts to shred!!
You frantically scramble …
and just manage to get into a window as the wig falls apart.
I am very uncertain of the physics of this situation: How were you lugging around a giant wig? How would anyone wear such a wig anyway? What is the wig attached to as you’re doing this? How are you carrying a damsel at the same time?
In any case, after this rescue there’s a clear route back to the opening room (the “cross-roads” the damsel mentions) at which point you are taken to “nirvana” and win the game.
FROG ENDING: Getting to the frog ending seems to require using the missile silo I already mentioned, but also smashing a chain with a mace (which lowers the drawbridge). The bit that involves getting a mace is what crashes the game. I’ll just reproduce the raw source code.
#44 Armory
“You’re in the castle armory. There are suits of chain mail, maces, lances,
swords, suits of armor, axes, etc, etc here. Most seem to be made of either
crude metal, perhaps iron, or a smooth grey substance; all of them, even the
wooden lances, appear to be held to the wall by some magnetic, (or is it
magic?) force. A small black and yellow sign is posted on the wall.
A small doorway leads to some stone steps going up and down.”
e 51
up 52
down 58
read\ sign m=”The sign says: \”Danger — Shock Hazard\””
#44.0
take m=”You can’t budge anything, the strange force is stronger than you are.”
drop t?%INP_OBJ% s=44.1 o+mace o+%INP_OBJ% m=\
“clank … … K A B O O M ! !
The slight shock seems to have detonated some plastic explosive!
“
In any case, getting through both leads to a frog, which can be carted back to the Crossroads just like damsel. He then turns into a prince and you are taken to Nirvana to win the game.
DAMSEL AND FROG TOGETHER: Yes, the game is socially liberal enough you can both rescue the frog and damsel. You will all go to Nirvana together.
…
I’m not sure I’m ready for “final thoughts” here — I think I need to try the other offerings from the Wander system before I decide.
As a game, I found the parts after reaching the castle to be the most interesting, and I theorize they are also the parts designed before the influence of Adventure. The multiple routes simply suggest the author was trying to design a layout, and the opening linear-route-of-puzzles section was attached later to make it more of a “game”. This is pure theory, though, and it won’t be resolved unless the 1974 version written in BASIC is located. (And it’s perhaps too tempting a theory, knowing that before the original Crowther source for Adventure was located people assumed it was a pure cave exploration crawl with no magic, but this turned out not to be the case.)
The parser system in Castle is a little too erratic for me to recommend it just as a game, but it’s worth a try based on historical merits. The online version located here is the easiest to get to, although my original post has links to compiled versions.
Well, I’ve made progress, but the hunger timer is so tight that gameplay feels like an IF version of Paranoia where I send out clone after clone to die, each time using knowledge from the last clone to get a little further.
My suspicions from my last post were correct: I just needed to move the boat. and it was a silly verb issue.
CARRY BOAT
You can’t do that now.
GET BOAT
You can’t do that now.
TAKE BOAT
Done
Silly in that I had already discovered earlier that TAKE was the way to get objects, but somehow that knowledge didn’t transfer to the boat because it was entirely plausible to block taking the boat from sheer size.
Getting the boat moved led to getting a rope, and getting the rope led to getting some keys, and getting the keys led to access to a balloon and a ladder.
The balloon let me cross the bridge which had earlier stopped me due to a weight limit
W
You’re at the east end of a rickety wooden bridge crossing over a deep river. A road leads east toward a shallow valley filled with wildflowers. There is a large, official-looking sign here.
W
It must be helium in that balloon because you now weigh only 17.9 qwerts
You’re at the west end of a rickety bridge crossing a raging river.
at which point I found a shovel in a forest that I think I’m supposed to take back to the well (there’s a message “can you dig it”) but I seem to be 100% lost in the forest, and not in the maze sense — any direction loops me back to the same room. (It is possible the twisty-room type maze is purely a Crowther invention.)
There’s a river blocking one side of the forest I’m lost on, but trying to take the boat through results in:
As you start to cross the bridge you hear a loud groan and feel the bridge sag. You drop the boat and rush back just in time to see the boat and the bridge collapse into the river and get washed away.
Perhaps there’s a more clever way to get the boat safely to the right location, or another way to escape the forest with the shovel. I’ll report back when something happens.
In David Craddock’s book Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games he uses the term “convergent evolution” to describe a phenomenon where multiple independent people (or groups) invent the same gameplay genre independently. In the case of roguelikes, Beneath Apple Manor (1978), Rogue (1980), and Sword of Fargoal (1982) all had some uncanny similarities that we now sort under “roguelike” but the creators weren’t aware of each other’s work. (In the case of Beneath Apple Manor, sales were low and the game remained obscure. Rogue was still restricted to a university mainframe while Sword of Fargoal was being developed.)
More recently, the games Scoundrel (2011) and Donsol (2015) both used the idea of a deck of cards as the basis of a dungeon crawl, and ended up so eerily similar they seem like clones. However, Scoundrel never had a digital edition, and the designer of Donsol (Devine Lu Linvega) had never heard of it until after Donsol came out. (More details on this story from The Clone That Wasn’t.)
All this means is that when Peter Langston designed the Wander system starting in 1974 (or possibly as early as 1973) the fact it is similar to Crowther’s Adventure is not without precedent. It indicates, instead, that perhaps there was something natural and inevitable about the act of moving a character around a world with verb-noun commands.
In any case, after the opening above there’s very little direction and no treasures to find. (I recall something about rescuing a princess, but that’s only from an external source.)
However, there are puzzles. There’s a locked door, a river which is raging too fast for a boat, a wire fence, a bridge with a weight limit (dropping everything doesn’t make you light enough), and a well that needs a rope.
The parser doesn’t feel as solid as Crowther’s. For example, at the bridge there’s a sign where you can “read sign”
The sign says,
DANGER!
CONDEMNED BRIDGE
Load limit : 18 qwerts (max)
cross at your own risk
You’re also holding a guide to playing, but if you are in the room with the sign:
READ GUIDE
The sign says,
DANGER!
CONDEMNED BRIDGE
Load limit : 18 qwerts (max)
cross at your own risk
That is, the verb is caught in a location-dependent way, and if the verb is usable in the location the parser gives it top priority and ignores the noun.
There’s a hunger timer, unfortunately, and it is possible to die of starvation. Upon death, rather than exiting the program, the game just displays this message over and over in response to any further input:
You have starved!
You Are Dead.
The general feeling is something similar to but slightly alien from Crowther’s world. I should point out this particular version was a later revision (1977-78 is the estimate) because the original ’74 source is lost, and hence it does have awareness of Adventure:
XYZZY
Nice try, but that’s an old, worn-out magic word.
In any case, despite the small size of the area so far I haven’t made any real progress. I do wonder if I’m missing something, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of possibilities to hack at. I’m particularly suspicious of the boat, which I might be able to move further on land with just the right verb. I’ll report back when I have something actually solved.
Renga in Blue 