I’ve finished the game, and it turned out to be much more elaborate than I expected for a tiny-space computer. I also have more history to report; this continues directly from my last post.
First off, a little more history. Remember that Micro Video took over from Interact once they went under, right at the end of 1979. In Micro Video’s own newsletter, I found an article from Cori Walker from 1981 supposedly giving more of an inside story on the rise and fall of the original company Interact Electronics. I say “allegedly” because right away there’s some description of Lochner that seems a bit off (I would call him more a developer on the Dartmouth time-sharing system rather than one on BASIC, even though interfacing with BASIC was involved), and it also doesn’t match with the story as told by Barnich, the engineer at the company who developed the system. Walker specifically claims development started in 1976 only to finish in 1978. Barninch gives the development date starting at 1978. Both have “receipts”, Barnich in form of the actual master board design (with dated photograph) and Walker in the form of a prototype that landed with Micro Video.
You’ll notice no keyboard! According to Walker the system originally had 4K of ram and was meant to be a “console/computer” more along the lines of the Bally Astrocade.
Post-launch, Walker blames “marketing” and “quality control” as issues leading to the company’s downfall. They provided “virtually no support for the machines once sold”; essentially, they were a hardware company with very little experience with manufacturing or marketing (speaking of the CEO, this matches with Lochner’s past experience focused on services for corporate machines).
New products were, announced when they were in little more than the “idea” stage, months before they realistically could be delivered. A user newsletter was talked about, but never produced. Customer letters, inquiries, and phone calls went unanswered, promises were made that were not kept, and Interact came to be viewed as completely unresponsive to the users needs.
(Note she’s not blaming anything about inadequacy of the hardware — trying for too much capability at too low a cost, as I mentioned last time — but she’s also with the company still trying to sell it.)
I think the two stories (development as early as ’76, or only starting in ’78) can be reconciled, given Walker’s reference to new products talked up while in the “idea” phase. My guess is Interact was in some kind of development phase during at least ’77, but spinning their wheels with “idea” meetings trying to land a perfect cost-effective product, resulting in “prototype box” shown earlier. By ’78 they were needing to get something just out the door so landed an experienced engineer (Barnich) to get what was now a “computer” done fast, keeping the same external design.
Micro Video was originally founded in June 1979 looking for ways to use the Interact for promotional displays and businesses. Interact’s slow fall led to their essentially taking over mid-stream; Walker even mentions completing “the software Interact had left unfinished”.
Dave Ross, president of Micro Video (shown above), discusses the software process in the same newsletter as the history capsule.
Some programs, like EZEDIT, were started at Interact before it went out of business, and Micro Video finished them. Some, like Earth Outpost, are patterned after popular arcade games. In this case, it’s a space war type game. Some, like STAR TRACK or our new Troll Hole Adventure, were inspired by games popular on other, larger computer systems. The best source, however, is user requests. The MONITOR, for example, was developed because many people asked to have machine language access.
Regarding Troll Hole specifically: he later mentions programs “submitted by outside programmers must meet certain criteria” so not everything was internal, but his particular phrasing from the long quote above implies Troll Hole was made internally, and there’s something from the content of the game itself (which I’ll get to later) which implies the same. So I think “Long Playing Software” was an attempt at a “company sub-name” for a particular branch of game, leveraging the common ads for adventure games that tout how many hours they take to play. If so, they only used the name once, and when published Mysterious Mansion in 1982 (made by what seems to be the same programmer) it just is given as being by Micro Video.
Heading back to the content, I really did not have many rooms left to find, but I still found the game tough to crack, as the density of object use (and re-use, and the ability to use something the wrong way) was high. I also didn’t have a conception of just how much physical modeling the game was using.
Marked rooms are new.
This is only missing the maze, which I’ll show later but turns out to be a simple grid (and manages to bump up the room count for the ads).
I’ll describe puzzles in more or less the order I solved them, although this involves jumping around the map quite a bit. To start, I had some VITAMINS that were TOO DRY to eat, and while the jug of milk was described as TOO SOUR I still thought it had to apply somehow. I realized the game lets you simply empty the milk and re-fill it back at the pond with water, making the vitamins edible.
With the increased strength I was able to pick up the “stone chair” from the living room, freeing up the Persian rug to get moved over to the treasures. Also, as I suspected, it allowed for dropping the “fragile” treasure (the orb) without it breaking.
I also incidentally realized that the jug of water used for the vitamins had a second use and could be poured at the greenhouse, but I was told that it needed nutrients. I figured (at the time) I needed to wait for an object later.
I also managed to work out the both the ELF and the “singing sword” which was giving electric shocks. The ELF, for mysterious reasons, will be happy if (while holding the cereal, the TROLL CRUNCHIES) if you FEED ELF and drop an animal call. The WELCOME MAT that was hiding the key will COVER THE FLOOR if you drop it…
…and you are safely able to pull out the sword, turning it from a SINGING SWORD into a SILENT SWORD (but still at treasure).
The mat is not described as rubber, so this requires a leap of abductive reasoning both in terms of the composition of the mat and the mechanics behind the sword (not just “magic”).
Poking at the various obstacles left, I was stuck for a while. I managed to realize I could LOOK (CEREAL) BOX again in order to find some PIECES OF GLASS (trying to eat straight out of the box is the only way in the game I’ve found to die, so at least it gets hinted) and they are described as lenses.
I had a paper tube and had been itching to find somewhere to use my BUILD command, so I tried BUILD TELESCOPE and it somehow worked.
Unfortunately, that still didn’t get anywhere on the parts I was stuck: the cobra, the nutrients, the screwed-in cover, the orc, the gold nugget that doesn’t fit through the door. I had vague suspicion perhaps I was softlocked, and in fact I was: every single puzzle I listed was now unsolvable.
Thinking in these terms (what items did I have in the past where maybe I burned something I shouldn’t have?) I realized the screw might be the kind where a dime would work just as well as a screwdriver. The dime I had spent on the pay toilet (in order to get the paper tube) but what if I used it to UNSCREW first?
Indeed this works, and it reveals a button leading to a new room, a DEN.
Now it is safe to spend the dime.
The ANIMAL CALL I had from the ELF I had tried in every single room (BLOW CALL) with no luck, but since this was a new room I tried it here.
Taking this hint back over to the piano that I couldn’t open, I tried not PLAY PIANO but PLAY MISTY. It unlocked the piano, revealing a GOLDEN FLUTE.
Already suspecting I needed a flute for the cobra, I went and played the flute and found that the COBRA DANCES.
That isn’t helpful by itself, but the game is tricky with its item use again: if you take the SILVER BASKET from back at the greenhouse and drop it before playing, the cobra will crawl inside, snake-charmer style.
The cobra can then be toted over to the ORC and released, where it will chase the orc away, sort of a sideways variant of bird-vs-snake from Crowther/Woods.
This allows grabbing the crown for another treasure ticked off, plus access to the cave. The cave only leads to one place, though, a canyon view with a BILLBOARD. I had the telescope already (trying to use it everywhere to no effect) but I instantly knew here is where it applied.
Remember the fertilizer? Now is when that part stops our progress. Using the same logic as with the dime, I realized I had dumped the milk somewhere random, but maybe sour milk could potentially be helpful in gardening? (Can anyone confirm or deny this one? Sounds suspicious.)
This causes flowers to pop up that can be thrown at the canyon rim. (By the way, if you’re keeping track, yes, this involves a fair number of game-restarts. Fortunately the whole area is small.)
The bat that takes the flowers straightforwardly drops a PEARL, one of the treasures.
That’s still not everything yet! Back by the den there was a rope with a balloon, where I found by popping the balloon I could get the rope. Having gotten this far with no use for a rope (including at the canyon) I was starting to get suspicious, and keeping my eye on my verb list, tested out UNTIE ROPE (fortunately this one didn’t need a game restart because I was already in a restart after a restart and I hadn’t bothered to deal with the balloon yet).
The rubber glove let me pick up the frog, which I had noted long back was described as being too slippery, but I had no use for it. I ended up needing to refer to a hint left by Gus Brasil in the comments (thanks!) about how there’s a secret passage from the living room. That had to refer to the picture, but the picture was highly resistant to my efforts to MOVE PICTURE and PUSH PICTURE and so forth. The description is 2 EVIL EYES STARE BACK AT YOU and that message the mirror revealed from long back said PICK 2. I guess they’re supposed to go together, because you can PUSH or POKE the eyes specifically.
This is a second-level noun. I’ve referred to this concept before (see Inca Curse), but just to recap, this is a noun that’s mentioned inside the description of another noun. When game prepares ahead for this, it makes for richer interaction (or in the case of Earthquake San Francisco 1906, a shaggy dog joke). With Troll Hole this is the only place the trick occurs, but I’ll give it a little forgiveness in that
a.) nearly every item is important, so it’s curious for the picture not to be, meaning I had an eye on it still
b.) it has the PICK 2 hint
The SOMETHING that is THERE is a new passage leading to a new room: a spider with a golden web.
Being low on resources — just the frog really — it wasn’t hard to put the two together.
While the GOLDEN WEB counts as a treasure, taking it also opens another passage to a maze. Every room in the maze allows you to go N/S/E/W/U/D and there are 16 of them, but realizing the gimmick makes things go faster:
The edges of the grid wrap around; I have not marked up/down exits as they are more irregular, but the only one that is important is the one that escapes, going down to the POND. It is in a room with a NOTE.
The note also says YOU PROBABLY THOUGHT THIS WAS A MAP BUT IT ISN’T! It’s just a “thank you for playing” type note, but it solely gives credit to MICRO VIDEO. This suggests to me it was written for Micro Video and the LONG PLAYING SOFTWARE name that shows at the start was added as an afterthought meant for marketing.
The maze route is what’s needed to get out the gold nugget (otherwise there are no treasures / useful items). And that’s all ten!
This turned out to be far more satisfying than I expected. I wasn’t originally playing with “rich object properties” in mind due to the 8K memory space, but everything is modeled properly as opposed to being faked (unlike, ahem, certain recent games we’ve seen on more capable systems). The softlocks are irritating but they are also part of what makes the difficulty of the game work; having a DIME immediately where it gets used makes it quite likely a player will use it up quickly and not even think about it for the other obstacle (unscrewing a cover). In other words, the old-school design finesse at least has a rationale, and creates a puzzle that is hard to duplicate otherwise.
The ad in a French magazine at the top of this post starting selling the game in English before it was even translated; it did get a translation in 1982, which was notable just for the sheer scarcity of adventure games translated into French available. Tilt from January 1983 calls out the shortage and mentions La caverne des lutins in a multi-page spread about the format, but because it doesn’t have enough text adventures, it talks about things like Atari 2600 Adventure and the Intellivision game Swords and Serpents.
So this game ended up being wildly obscure in the United States (rare computer, even rarer cassette, only dumped quite recently and found thanks to Gus Brasil) but still ended up being seminal elsewhere due to the happenstance of Mr. Coll’s purchase of Interact’s design. (At the Computer Adventure Solution Archive, while La caverne des lutins has had an entry since 2011, as of this writing The Troll Hole Adventure isn’t mentioned at all.)
Unfortunately, this didn’t happen with Micro Video’s 1982 game (Mysterious Mansion). I don’t know the circumstances of why, but I think it may be even more obscure than Troll Hole; I will investigate when I return to the Interact soon.
When Kenneth Lochner was hired by Dartmouth away from Montana State College as a programmer in 1964, he had been working in computers for four years. Lochner in particular had been teaching FORTRAN and had been having a miserable time, not due to FORTRAN itself, but due to student experiences in using punch cards:
Returning to the motivation for this system, let it be noted that anyone who has taught a symbolic system to beginning programmers is aware that syntax and logical errors abound in the programs they produce. One can visualize the standard scene in a [IBM] 1620 installation: a group of students loading the assembler, loading and unloading the punch hopper, entering the object deck, watching the typewriter anxiously, and then staring in increasing bewilderment at a machine which has halted, cleared or is in an infinite loop.
Lochner was integral to helping develop Dartmouth’s legendary time-sharing system, where a large computer could have its time divided into slices, and multiple users could then access the same machine simultaneously using terminals (as opposed to slow batch punch cards and their resulting infinite loops). Notably he developed “communication files” which were essentially an early version of UNIX pipes, gluing together the output of one operation/command to become the input of another.
As Lochner wrote in an article describing Dartmouth’s progress, “The main purpose for developing the System was to provide for teaching computing to almost all Dartmouth students, including those concentrating in the Social Sciences and Humanities. A second purpose was to tap the hitherto unrealized wealth of small computer problems related to the everyday research activities of a college faculty, small problems that would never be initiated if the turn-around time were as long as a single day.”
The explosion of computing at Dartmouth that followed led to a fair number of important early programs that later showed up in David Ahl’s books like ANIMAL, but for our story today we need to keep following Ken Lochner, as he became restless at Dartmouth, first helping Ford develop their own time-sharing system using a Philco 212…
…and then in 1969 he went over to the newly founded Cyphernetics in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a company focused on commercial time-sharing services. They were successful enough to be bought by Automatic Data Processing in 1975, and two years later Lochner left to found Interact Electronics to work on an entirely new project: the design of a personal computer.
Master Artwork, Interact Model One Home Computer, April 10, 1978. Source.
The Interact Model One aka Interact Home Computer aka Interact Family Computer was designed during 1978 in Lochner’s now-home turf of Michigan. Lochner hired Rick Barnich as the lead engineer (the picture above is his) and was keen on keeping the price tag low, or as Barnich later bluntly stated, “Cost targets dictated the design.” The price managed to stay under $500, making it cheaper than any of the Trinity (PET, TRS-80, Apple II) and even capable of color.
I haven’t seen any interview with Lochner specifically about the restrictions given, but it seems like the goals for the base model were:
a.) cheaper than the three major competitors
b.) color graphics
c.) enough memory to handle a reasonable-sized program (8K RAM, 2K ROM, not dropping to, say, 1K like the initial ZX80)
maybe with the same populist goals in mind as the Dartmouth Time Sharing system had, making something capable enough for both programmers and artists. The sacrifice led to a “chiclet” keyboard, low-res graphics, and a very chunky text mode.
Unfortunately, putting the three main goals together without compromise flew too close to the sun. Interact tried to be generous with their software line (they gave thirteen tapes away on new units; tapes of course were super-cheap) and at the time, Lochner was quoted as saying:
Software is the pivotal point in the mass marketing of a personal computer.
Apparently, it wasn’t, as the machine more or less flopped in a year, selling only a few thousand units (compare to the Commodore PET breaking 200,000). The only reason it became notable is because of Michel Henric Coll, who picked up the technology and re-tooled it for the French market (switching, for example, to an AZERTY keyboard). Letting him take over the story:
I discovered the Interact Model 1 during a trip to the United States in July 1979. It was as simple as can be. I had read a description of it in an American technical magazine. Upon arriving in Ann Arbor, I called Interact and explained that I wanted to sell their product in France. James Scotton, Interact’s general manager, sent a white Cadillac to pick me up at my hotel and devoted the entire day to me. The deal was quickly concluded.
He signed an agreement in September (not long before Interact collapsed and the stock was liquidated), and then:
Having obtained the right to sell Interact under my own brand, I immediately renamed it Victor Lambda. It was during a group brainstorming session organized during a business development internship I attended at the Toulouse business school from January to July 1979 that I discovered the name. We had already decided on the first name, Victor, thanks to the computer’s help. We were looking for the name. Tired, someone blurted out: is it really important to spend so much time on this research to sell a standard computer to a standard customer? [“Standard” or “typical” being “lambda” in French.] It clicked. We had found it.
The Victor Lambda was renamed in a later iteration the Hector. Rather unusually for a program on an obscure system, today’s game has a French translation, and the reason why is the success of the Hector (which took a lot of its software line from the already-existing US line).
Coll showing off disk drives for the Victor II in 1983, a peripheral not available with the Interact base model.
When Interact Electronics folded a year after their hardware launch, they had their stock bought and product continued via Micro Video (a company technically started when Interact was still alive, but only by a few months) and NCE/CHC (a mail order house). While the number of units sold never passed “thousands”, they kept the flame alive for die-hard fans all the way through the 80s.
With die-hard fans come fan groups, one of them being based on out Detroit; from 1980 and 1982 they distributed their Interaction newsletter. The December 1980 issue mentions two adventure games.
This first is a port of Chaffee’s Quest done by Dave Schwab; not trivial due to the font size, and the fact the Interact uses one-dimensional arrays and the original Quest used a two-dimensional array. It is notable mostly in that Schwab got permission from Chaffee for distribution; most of the authors we’ve seen do ports didn’t bother to ask.
The second is a brand-new game specifically for the Interact. It is by “Long Playing Software” with no author given.
The “at last” suggests this is another manifestation of the strong desire for authors to put some form of Adventure on absolutely every system. Despite the enlarged text size, this manages to feel like a “normal” adventure game, just with highly clipped text. Since the memory capacity is higher than the VIC-20, there’s a bit more depth in description than, say, Hospital adventure.
Can you get the priceless ruby from the King Cobra? What does that strange inscription say? Why do evil eyes watch your every move? Can you solve these and the many other mysteries of THE TROLL HOLE ADVENTURE??? Will you come out rich? Will you come out at all?
and as it implies, this is another Treasure Hunt where we gather all the treasures in the world and put them in a central location. (The line about being “rich” implies we are absconding away with the treasures this time. The troll probably is smelly and deserves it.)
The sign is here just to inform us this is where the treasures go.
To the east there is a pond with a frog (ITS SLIPPERY)…
…and otherwise that’s all of the above-ground. Heading down into the titular Hole leads to an ENTRY WAY.
The front door is locked, but the ENTRY MAT hides a key so that is a quickly-resolved problem. The issue for me starting was the lamp, which refused to light. Mucking about with the shovel I found that DIG back in the starting location revealed a BIC LIGHTER, but even with the lighter in hand I was unable to get the game to understand any permutation of LIGHT LAMP I could think of.
This game does let you plunge ahead and interact with things in the dark — there’s no grues — but you need the light first to know what the items are.
I resorted to making my verb list; fortunately, the game was fairly polite, giving one response (H U H ! ! !) for when it understood a verb but was otherwise confused…
…and a different response (WHAT?) for when the verb is missing from the game’s vocabulary altogether. This let me use my usual list, which was a relief given the number of games lately I’ve been playing with broken bespoke parsers.
However, this still wasn’t enough! Not every verb available is on the list, and I finally found FLICK LIGHTER is what the game wanted (this will be the first time I’ve used FLICK in an adventure game). Just for completeness, I have also found UNS(CREW) but have not been able to apply it yet.
I’ve only found 15 rooms and there’s allegedly 30, so there’s still a fair amount of game to go. At the start there’s a LIVING ROOM with a STONE CHAIR (too heavy to move), a PICTURE, and a PERSIAN RUG (a treasure). The rug has the stone chair on it, so I have been unable so far to retrieve that particular treasure.
Further west is a CEREAL BOX with some CEREAL (TROLL TOASTIES), and a jug of milk that is described as SOUR if you try to chug it.
Turning south, there’s an ARMS ROOM that has an ELF and a SINGING SWORD. I have been unable to interact with the elf; the sword gives a shock when trying to take it, and is described as being stuck in a stone.
Nearby is a BATHROOM with a PAY TOILET and a MIRROR. You can take the MIRROR revealing VITAMINS and a DIME, then INSERT DIME to get into the toilet and find a PAPER TUBE. I have not found a use for the tube. Upon trying to eat the vitamins the game says they are TOO DRY. If you try to BREAK MIRROR you die from it shattering.
Further on to the east is a Vault with a ORC GUARD, CROWN (treasure), and CAVE. The orc prevents taking the treasure or entering the cave. I assume the sword gets used here.
Returning back to the sword and turning south, there’s a TEA ROOM with a CRYSTAL ORB (glowing softly) and an INSCRIPTION. The inscription seems to be written “backwards” and you can read it if you are holding the mirror from the bathroom. (IT SAYS PICK 2, and I have no idea what this is referring to yet.)
No idea if breaking the mirror here is bad, but there’s an inventory limit so I need to keep juggling.
Adjacent is a closet with a BALLOON ON ROPE and a COVER; the balloon has “GOT BUMPS” and the cover is “SCREWED IN”. You can break the balloon leaving a rope but I haven’t found a use for the rope, and it is possible the balloon needs to be used first.
Back where the TEA ROOM was there’s one last branch leading down to an ALTAR with a cobra and a ruby. I have not managed to defeat the cobra but the game does recognize FLUTE as a noun. (I should also note from the verb list that MAKE and BUILD are both verbs, so we may just need to gather supplies and make our own, that is, MAKE FLUTE. The paper tube was suggestive but just holding that wasn’t enough to cause it to work.)
Rewinding back to the kitchen with the sour milk, heading west leads to a room that is too bright to see if you’re holding the lamp. If you’re not holding the lamp, the room is totally dark. The solution is to drop the lamp off before entering and bring in the orb instead, which will give a light enough glow to be visible.
There’s a gold nugget in the room but it is too big to bring up the troll hole. There must be another route to the start.
The are rooms past this, so after noting the HALLWAY on the object list, the right procedure is to grab the lamp, step back into the room with it being too bright, but GO HALLWAY anyway since you’ll keep moving forward.
Not much of note in either room yet. You can pick up a HANDFUL OF DIRT in the greenhouse.
This turned out to be surprisingly complicated and dense. None of the treasures are giveaways; even the crystal orb I haven’t scored yet (dropping it smashes the orb, just like the mirror). To recap the obstacles…
there’s an orc guarding a cave and a crown
a cobra guards a ruby
a gold nugget can’t be brought up the hole to where the treasures go
the rug can’t be removed from under the stone chair yet
the crystal orb can’t be dropped (probably getting the rug will fix this)
the singing sword can’t be pulled
the cover can’t be unscrewed
…on top of objects like the sour milk currently remaining unused. I’ve been finding myself thinking more in terms of a standard adventure rather than a minimalist 8K effort. I’m tempted to try the French version (La caverne des lutins, released 1982) to see if the changed text gives any different textual hints that might help me out. I will take any suggestions people have, and I’ll even take spoilers if someone has beaten the game (in ROT13 format only, though, please).
I don’t think my success had anything to do with getting better at figuring out Dale Johnson’s logic; even with some intentional softlock (aka “walking dead”) points, everything is genuinely clued better here than his other games.
Via the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities.
Last time I was puzzled by a boulder I couldn’t move and a cave blasting wind. I had neglected to LOOK BOULDER, having “CARVINGS” on the side:
After some contemplation, I decided “total” strength was referring to not having your strength be split by holding items in inventory, as the “single” man is alone. Dropping everything and pushing the boulder worked.
With the wind stopped, while it meant the cave couldn’t be entered from this direction, over by the cliff it mentions you might be able to “jump” down and there no longer is any wind interfering.
Giving a full map from here:
The slope you land on goes a long way down, with a lifejacket, an ax, and a crank findable along the way. At the very bottom is a boulder (the same boulder you pushed earlier) and when trying to push it from the other side the game indicates you need some leverage. It also has some extra writing.
Going back up, I didn’t have much to noodle with other than the catapult, so I tried INSERT CRANK on catapult and found that it fit. I was then able to TURN CRANK before pushing the button again, leading to landing in a different (safer) spot.
I had already tried using the ax in various places with no luck, but at the bottom of the tree it clearly is intended to be used except the game says it isn’t sharp enough. Oho, so that was what the grinder is for! One restored save game later and re-creating the catapult jump:
The hole lets you jump back in the long sloping passage, but obnoxiously, the pole can’t come up as it is too big. However, it gets used specifically for going down and getting leverage on the boulder. This results in what would normally be a fatal plunge into water except we’ve got the lifejacket now:
SWIM a few times and a trading ship will appear.
I tried walking away and got thrown off the ship, with a message that indicated I could have traded something (on the trading ship, d’oh). You lose everything but the lifejacket when plunging into the water, so that’s the only thing you have to trade. It fortunately works:
The thread left over from sewing up the green uniform works to STRING LUTE (…pretty sure that wouldn’t work in real life, but I’ll accept the cartoon logic in a toon-game). I then took the lute over to the stage with the merry men, and found singing a song put them to sleep.
I was stuck a bit until I remembered that doing DANCE earlier changed their description to ROWDY (also, LOOK ME indicates we are covered with tomatoes). Doing the rowdy-dance first and then playing lute was the right sequence to keep the crowd from falling asleep prematurely:
Marion had indicated we weren’t charming enough, so the charm was clearly the right item to get to her next. (Except she doesn’t like the tomatoes; you need to go back to the POOL and CLEAN ME first.)
From here I was very stuck trying to work out she went; everything including the wedding chapel was empty. Of course Tuck had left prematurely when I gave the penny, so I re-did the sequence while holding on to the penny and found both Marion and Tuck at the chapel once I finished. (For a beginner player, this still seems like the thing mostly like to stump them, because it’s a softlock that can happen from an action long before the final result.)
Marion disappears, and the only obstacle left seems to be the Sherriff of Nottingham. The telescope clearly was pointing the way through, though, and the description mentions a mounting bracket. The only thing complicated enough to hold a mounting bracket was the catapult.
With the telescope mounted, you can TURN CRANK again to get the catapult to zero in on a different target. (This feels vaguely off since you could have technically turned the crank a second time before, but I think the implication is you are implicitly using the telescope to help aim, and otherwise it would be too exact a shot.)
I did PUSH BUTTON expecting some kind of dramatic showdown, but that turned out to be the very last action of the game.
Honestly, it worked for me? I liked the idea of taking a classic story but telling a story about the story, rather than what everyone would normally be expecting. The fact regular characters could be used allows for the “fan fiction shortcut” (like we saw with Trek Adventure) where a complex character can be painted with broad strokes, meaning Friar Tuck walking off with money isn’t surprising, nor the Merry Men being a bit temperamental about what constitutes a good performance. The textual hints were quite good at nudging actions the right direction and if it weren’t for the softlocks I’d be perfectly chipper handing this game off to an absolute beginner; as things stand, I’d probably start them with something like Transylvania but this would land early on the list.
At least the graphics were good while they lasted Dav Halle had developed his own system called Zoom Grafix which partly explains why they somehow lept ahead of Sierra to be alongside Polarware in terms of quality. I’ve been having trouble articulating what artistic direction I’d give to Sierra (assuming I could be alongside their past-artists). Consider an average shot from Time Zone.
The face is bizarre in a way that never gets glanced upon in Sherwood. Depth is particularly flat (notice the bricks). I do wonder if this was partly a technical restriction; if you go back to the finale screen of Sherwood, you’ll notice both characters are made up almost entirely of curves, while the vector-line aspect of the Time Zone thief above is hard to avoid.
In the end it was likely just about professionalization and technical issues. Both Sherwood Forest and Masquerade dealt with real artists, while Time Zone had most of its art cranked at speed by a fresh teenager. Sierra did what they could with their resources, and both Polarware and Phoenix represented the next level of advancement in the software. The combination was enough to cause a vast gulf in the look between the games (not even bringing up how Mask of the Sun had a dedicated team of artists at work).
By 1984, the software world has changed significantly. Very large companies such as Disney and Hasbro were starting to get involved in publishing, and advertising rates were going up. It was difficult for a small company like Phoenix to compete.
They did make it a little longer under the name American Eagle, even publishing another Dale Johnson game, FrakTured FaebLes, with art by fan favorite Rick Incrocci. Unless some new information is unearthed we’ll need to wait until 1985 to get there.
My prediction is still even looking ahead to just 1983 the art will be on the higher-quality side, but we need to make it there first. So coming up: a computer that failed completely in the United States, only to be given a second life in France.
Sherwood Forest is from Phoenix Software. We last saw them with The Queen of Phobos and Masquerade; the latter was written by today’s author (Dale Johnson) before Sherwood Forest but wasn’t published with final art until much later (1984). Today’s game has a different artist, Dav Holle (he is in the “thanks to” credits of Queen of Phobos).
This is the last time we’ll see Phoenix for this blog.
Unlike the Robin Hood game we’ve looked at already (or Sierra On-Line’s take) we’re not re-creating all of Robin Hood’s adventures in his battle with the Sheriff of Nottingham, but rather just trying to get married.
Welcome to Sherwood Forest. Robin needs your help. He doesn’t seem to remember who he is or that he was supposed to marry the beautiful Maid Marion today. It must have been that nasty bump on the head he took while fighting the Sheriff of Nottingham the other day.
From what I have gathered so far, the famous elements of Robin Hood are in but they are getting used in a much sillier way (Little John guards a log bridge, but rather than wanting a quarterstaff fight, he is looking for Robin Hood, since somehow he doesn’t recognize you, and you need to make a green uniform first … look, we’ll get there).
I did the drawings, and the image compression and decompression, the disk bootloader, and animation and data input code. Dale would get the text strings from my data input, and would parse the text and come up with the text response. His code would also tell me what location should be drawn and what objects or characters should be drawn in the scene, and my code would draw that stuff as needed. All of Sherwood Forest was written in assembler.
The difficulty of Masquerade was listed as Class 5; this is Class 3 so is allegedly easier. I say allegedly because Johnson games always tilted fairly hard; at least the opening was reasonable to do.
Regarding the graphics, notice how the title screen refers to animation. The screen above animates the eyes. The first room has an owl which also has animated eyes.
There’s nothing as extensive here as Sands of Egypt with screen scrolling or Temple of the Sun of a complete motion; it’s all small spots like a banner moving, but it complements the overall cartoon style.
You start out in a quite open area where you’re free to wander. To the immediate west is a pond that has a “grindstone”. To the east there’s a haystack where the text suggest it can be burned to find something inside.
Giving out the full starting map…
…let’s start our tour by going west to the Castle. There’s a taxman on the way, where Robin Hood can do his thing and ROB him.
Robbing the taxman yields a bag of gold dust we’ll be using shortly.
The Sheriff of Nottingham at the castle is pointing at the poster as shown above. It’s supposed to be “you’re going to land in jail” but it’s curious in how it could simultaneously refer to the (future) couple being royalty somehow.
Turning north, down a “well traveled road”, up next comes a Faire.
The gold dust goes to the beggar at the entrance (probably, Johnson isn’t above using “wrong” routes for items).
HE SAYS, “THANKS! HERE’S SOMETHING YOU MIGHT NEED.” HE TAKES THE GOLD, DROPS A SMALL FLINT, AND DISAPPEARS.
The west there’s a dock with no boats (I assume this is for a story event later)…
…and to the north is Maid Marion at a kissing booth.
If you go for KISS MARION, though, she says “SORRY HONEY, BUT YOU JUST AREN’T CHARMING ENOUGH.” (It’s like an amnesia plot, except everyone except the main character has forgotten who he is.) I’m not sure how to deal with her yet, but I’m guessing I won’t have the item(s) needed until the end of the game.
One of the main mechanics to try in every room is LOOK, because it seems to be fairly well behaved about telling you what is genuinely interactable; it may not always be obvious from the initial room description and picture. Here, LOOK reveals and awning — the green awning above the booth — that you should take.
One last place at the Faire I haven’t figured out yet is a stage, with some “Merry Men” watching. You can hop on to the stage and DANCE or SING and get some tomatoes thrown in your direction but I don’t know yet the use of this, other than the MERRY MEN change to ROWDY MERRY MEN.
Circling around the map some more, there’s a tailor and a blacksmith in the center of town. The blacksmith has a broken grinder but while holding the grindstone you can FIX GRINDER. I don’t know the use of this yet. Rather more helpfully it has some STEEL you can pick up.
Before doing the tailor, let’s do a quick stop back at the haystack, because flint + steel means we can now MAKE FIRE.
(The smoke is animated.) In addition to finding the needle in the haystack, if you LOOK ASHES twice you can find some THREAD followed by a penny. Take the thread, needle, and green awning back over to the tailor.
The tailor is out but there’s a note indicating you can drop things off if you want. Dropping off the green awning, thread, and needle, and then leaving and coming back:
This happens immediately, there’s no realistic time passing. I had left the penny for payment but it turned out not to be needed. I guess we have an account.
Circling around our tour further, there’s a wedding chapel with Friar Tuck who talks about “quickie service”.
I gave the penny over and he said he would “put it in the offering plate next Sunday” then left. I assume there’s some important ramification to all this later (either that or I did something wrong).
Little John next! (Again, sort of a “reverse amnesia” plot.) The green uniform is enough to convince him to leave opening the way through…
…although I should point out if you just try to attack him, it results in a death (my first of the game; I thought maybe we needed to wrestle rather than use quarterstaffs).
On to the cave he mentioned! Here I am mostly stuck. First off comes a catapult:
There’s a button on the catapult. If you push it the game automatically assumes you are climbing on before pushing, and it launches you to death. I don’t know if there’s some syntax for launching an item, but I’m guessing the game is fishing for the player providing a method of safe landing.
Further on, there’s one branch over to a “cliff” with heavy winds, where jumping also leads to death.
Finally, there’s the warned-about cave with heavy winds, in addition to a boulder too heavy to be moved.
Trying to GO CAVE results in “A TREMENDOUS WIND” catching you and blowing you to a “ROCKY GRAVE”.
To summarize, I have as open problems the Sheriff, the boat dock, kissing Maid Marion, the merry men at the stage, the catapult, the cliff, and the cave. I don’t have any unused items other than the grinding wheel (which can’t be moved). Unlike Time Adventure, Johnson is the sort of author willing to re-use items, but I get the intuition I’m missing something simple here with what I have. No hints though, please, this has been enjoyable to play so far!
Since nobody has a picture of Time Adventure’s cover as of this writing, here’s another game by the company from the same year. Zombie Island is a top-down game in the style of Robots/Chase, the same style that eventually inspired Deadly Rooms of Death. Source.
To recap, I had (but hadn’t used yet) a sack of coal, a frog, a glowworm, some cheese soup, some matches, and a life boat. I was facing a tiger, a prickly bush, and a “lazer beam” (what turns out to be the only place you can die in the game!)
The general theme of the parts I was stuck on last time can be summed as two parts confusion with the parser and one part personal blindness. Tackling the face-palm first:
I missed entirely — despite it being clearly listed — an exit to the south here. This leads to a “rubbish tip” with a “small white mouse” that will take the cheese soup. The mouse could be considered another Hitch-Hiker cameo.
The key doesn’t get used until later (and it is fairly obvious when it comes up) so I was still flailing. I went back and tested the frog some more; I had tried KISS FROG both while having the frog on the ground and while holding it, and neither seemed to have an effect. The word “seemed” is applicable, as KISS FROG while holding it turns it into a princess, but with no message whatsoever. The only way to find out is to take inventory afterwards. Here’s three screenshots with the whole sequence:
This is doubly tricky in that the response of nothing also tends to happen with other special commands that do nothing (like if you PUSH or PULL or USE where it doesn’t apply, which is most places) so the player has to just guess something happened.
That still doesn’t give progress though! (The princess is used much later.) The last issue was halfway between my fault and the game’s, because I had definitely tested burning the prickly bush with the matches, but I had tried it with USE MATCHES. In general, despite DROP being used for many things, it has always been used in way it still makes sense (giving the whiskey over to the doorman is DROP WHISKY, but you could visualize the act of handing it over being like dropping it). I had no such visualization with matches so I didn’t try the obvious thing of DROP MATCHES. (Implicitly, they’re being lit first, then you drop them.)
This opens a large new area with rooms described as a mixture of “small dark cave”, “dark smelly cave”, and “large underground cavern”.
Within are Terry Wogan’s smelly socks…
Mainly known as an interviewers for the BBC. I don’t know if this is a reference or just being goofy.
…a can opener, a golden statue, and a hungry dragon.
Gameplay is mostly a matter of testing DROP THING with all the various objects, although there’s a few wrinkles. The dragon responds well to the sack of coal.
Further on is some whalemeat, suggesting again this is something of a cross-over from Hitch-Hiker; there’s also a rockfall blocking the way, and a “nasty dwarf”.
The nasty dwarf runs away from the smelly socks. (This would annoy me in other contexts, but given the game’s setup, it isn’t too annoying to test and experimentation comes across as part of the point, as opposed to being moon logic.) This opens up a room to some mirrors, which can then be dropped at the lazer beam in order to go past safely. There’s no message saying the way is now safe, you just have to take the leap of faith; this is one way a wrinkle gets tossed into the usual “drop object to solve” scheme.
We don’t have the right item yet to handle Maxa Merlin. Keep in mind the enemies are all passive so you can hang out and try dropping every item laboriously just to see if, say, a glowworm causes an adverse reaction. (It does not. As far as I can tell the glowworm is useful for nothing, unless it passively activated in the cave somewhere I didn’t notice.)
While out of the cave, it’s a good time to use the whalemeat:
This opens the path to a “cinema” containing some “shrink spray” for no clear reason. This can be applied back at the rockfall (USE SPRAY, not DROP)…
…opening the way to Dracula.
The golden statue which I referenced briefly earlier comes into play here. It is not a statue you can pick up (unlike the game we just played). It is one that PULL works on instead:
This opens a route to a tin of canned blood, and given we just saw Dracula, it’s pretty clear where it goes:
Somehow the can opener gets used here but I’m not sure the setup (there’s no specific command to open it, so it just gets used passively). This opens a route to a locked door, but that key from way back at the mouse who wanted cheese soup can open it (“The door opens with an eerie creak”) leading to a “hallmarked golden ring”.
There’s one more route leading to an “angry prince” but I didn’t find it until later (personal map confusion again) so let’s save that for later, and take the ring over to the magician.
Again, found via random experimentation, and again I wasn’t as annoyed as I might be in a traditional game. The one-to-one mechanic (where each object gets used only once) is so well-established it doesn’t feel as gameplay-breaking to have less-intuitive connections between item and puzzle.
Past that the lifeboat finally gets used, where we can board the passenger ship known as Queen Elizabeth 2. This leads to a small area with a radio and the final location (a time transporter).
From here I needed to comb back over things before finding the cave section I missed, where the princess could finally be happily delivered.
The ruby is what drops at the teleporter to activate it, winning the game. The Brit-games love to play Rule Britannia in chiptune form and this game is no exception; it even does it twice (“and once again”).
I was reminded a bit of Seek; in that game, the particular design decision of putting puzzles in between rooms made the gameplay almost seem like a board game. With Time Adventure the design was tilted so heavily in one direction — one item to one puzzle, most of them dropped to be used — it started to feel like a different style of game than a regular adventure, opening the route in particular to making it seem not so absurd to defeat a dwarf with smelly socks or defeat a magician by dropping a gold ring.
I don’t think the style would sustain for too many games, but Peter Smith isn’t going to return here until much later, when he’s working for BBC Games (the first-party games arm of the public broadcaster BBC). While he has no more adventures listed on CASA, some of his educational games look like they might cross over, so they’ll need some checking out when we reach those future years. For now, coming up: let’s visit the last graphical Apple II game of 1982!
This is one of those unfortunate cases where the developer of a game can’t decide what the name of a game is; the advertising and cassette cover both say Time Traveller, the BBC Micro information screen upon boot-up uses Time Travel Adventure, and the actual title screen says Time Adventure. I’m going to assume the author Peter Smith wanted what was on the title screen (Time Adventure).
Both of those contain the historical background so we can dive right in the game itself, with the open question: does this game borrow specific elements from obscure games just like the other two games did?
The game is mostly new. One of the characters that went from Supersoft Hitchhiker to Peter Smith Hitch-Hiker lands in this game; otherwise everything else seems “original”, following two style points that carry over:
a.) the map is laid out on a grid, without any turning exits, extended-length skips of room connections, or overlapping
b.) the “enemies” are “passive” and block the way, but don’t actively attack while you’re in a room with them
Point a.) turns out to be very important for an innovation this game includes. It isn’t visible from the very start…
…but it is visible as soon as you start moving around.
An automap is very rare at this time. The television show The Adventure Game had one on their high-end computer meant for TV display, not as a product for customers. Nellan is Thirsty had one, likely due to it being designed to teach children. I don’t know where Smith got the inspiration, but it certainly helped he already was using a grid-style, and keep in mind he was also a teacher so may have been thinking pedagogically.
It isn’t quite as lovely as you might think because the map extends past the north-south area available to be displayed, and as soon as you step “off screen” the map reset. If you go back again, the map needs to be redrawn; there is no map memory. It still ends up making navigation faster than normal, even though I had to also make a regular map.
The plot, as shown on an earlier screen, has the player caught in a time warp we need to escape by searching 110 rooms. They start blocked in a castle by a drawbridge, but fortunately there’s a lever nearby so it’s not too hard to bypass.
This opens up to the outside, but you quickly get blocked by a tyrannosaurus rex. In case you were wondering, “time warp” doesn’t seem to mean you get sent to a particular time, but rather things from all times (including you) get sent to the same place.
Here’s my own map of the opening area, with blue marking everything before bypassing the Rex:
The difficult part — not difficult so much in figuring out what to do, but wrangling with the parser — was in a raging fireplace.
Trying to go north.
Elsewhere there’s a bucket and a rusty tap, so it seemed like a natural thing to try to FILL BUCKET. Unfortunately, the game just gives a blank prompt and it isn’t clear the rust needs to be cleared up.
Past the drawbridge is a candle-maker shop with some grease which you can take back to the tap and DROP to take care of the rust problem, but even then the parser is finicky; you need to DROP BUCKET, then FILL BUCKET. However, I had to restart my game the first time around because it wasn’t letting me drop the bucket! (I assume I hit a bug in one of my attempts to fill it that caused it to stick to my inventory.)
With the bucket full of water you can extinguish the fire and get to a new set of rooms.
The object list from here (in addition to bucket & grease) now has a large crossbow (must be called a “bow” in the parser), bottle of whisky, and a bundle of arrows. Before taking out Rex, I should note there’s still a “prickly bush” I haven’t dealt with; I think the game might be fishing for shears, but the object selection starts to get esoteric enough I might be missing something else.
Moving on:
This opens a new area with a “bubbling fountain” next to a “narrow alley” containing a glow worm (hasn’t used yet) and a path to a zoo containing a coin followed by a suntiger. The tiger is the same one from Hitch-hiker; it was defeated in both versions via reading a book of Vogon poetry, but my guess is there’s no bad poetry in this game so it requires a different action.
To the north of the fountain there’s a doorman that appears thirsty, so I dropped the whisky (just like Hitch-hiker, giving is done with DROP).
This opens up the last area I’ve managed to reach so far.
Immediately after is a frog, and despite KISS being on the verb list, KISS FROG doesn’t work.
The room selection tends to the truly random — story-wise I find it best to imagine a bunch of rooms from various time periods got zapped in — like a coal mine with a sack of coal, a Hypermarket with a drinks dispenser (the coin from the zoo path works to get cheese soup)…
…a workshop with a “life boat”, and finally a mad scientist’s workshop with a “lazer beam”. Heading north kills the player, and this is the first time I realized this game even had death.
The inventory limit is stuck at three, and the rooms also have a maximum limit of three, so it’s been irritating to tote things around and test possibilities. I tried shooting the tiger (no luck) and dropping the cheese soup in various places (no reaction). I have the feeling there is only one (1) puzzle available for me to solve right now and whatever comes from that will lead to a chain reaction, but I’m not clear where that puzzle is. I will take suggestions in the comments for anyone who hasn’t played or looked at a walkthrough.
So far on All the Adventures we’ve seen a wide variety of “borrowings” between games both extreme and mild.
At the most egregious end are people who try to repackage someone else’s game as their own (Example 1, Example 2) but it doesn’t need to be that extreme; an author might start with someone else’s code — or at least initial layout — and remix it to be its own thing. In the case of Eldorado Gold, the remix may have been done directly on the original source code; in other cases like PLATO Adventure it is clear a total rewrite was needed. With derivatives from mainframe Adventure or Zork, the games can be clearly considered “tributes”, and even Woods himself made one of the “derivative” versions of Adventure. When the game being borrowed from is a less well-known commercial product, ethics get hazier.
Hitch-Hiker by Peter Smith, which we looked at recently, bizarrely did a partial rip-off of the Supersoft version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Some (but not all) items and puzzles were seeded from the game.
With that opening, perhaps you should sense danger. Perhaps.
Via World of Dragon.
The Romford, Essex mail order house later known as Software for All started as Syntax Software in 1981, selling ZX80/81 software and books.
The J. Gibbons mentioned in the ad above is Jack Gibbons, and in an issue of Format Magazine he recollects his experiences with them. I’m going to quote a little longer than necessary because he gives a delightful capsule into the UK coding experience in the ZX80/81 period.
In the summer of 1980 I was attracted by this advertisement in one of the ‘dailies’ for a home computer costing less than £100 that was so powerful that it could run a power station. Well, I didn’t have a power station handy but I was suitably impressed — particularly as you had 14 days to get your money back if dissatisfied. So I thought that I could try and see if I was clever enough to be able to drive the thing, without risking a 100 notes (it was worth a lot more then!) …
Not to be put off by size as they say, I quickly powered up my new acquisition and started pressing a few keys to see what it does. I say ‘keys’ although I meant that I pressed pictures of keys on the circuit board. Having burnt the midnight oil for two weeks and managed to type in example programs and make them run, if not understand them, I was convinced I was making headway, the beast was to stay.
Gibbons gets the “16K ram pack” that expands the base unit from the miniscule 1K, noting “it was renowned for wobbling around the back of the ZX80 and now and then forgetting everything it was supposed to be storing”.
He realized, after balancing his checks (and noting how he “always makes mistakes with arithmetic”) that he wanted to write a Bank Account program, and after finishing tried to get it published.
I tried the computer groups and also a few software companies (there were only a few then). Eventually, by March 1981 I had a call from Syntax Software in Essex.
Syntax Software then went “silent” before finally throwing up the ad shown earlier, and this led to Gibbons eventually getting an invite from Mike Johnstone to the first of multiple legendary ZX Microfairs (September 1981).
But back to Syntax Software! Their name change to Software for All happened a year later and they expanded their line to include BBC, Dragon, and Commodore.
The first ad I’ve found for Danger Island is from a Your Computer dated January 1983; based on the at-least-one-month delay of print magazines, that places the game’s publication right at the end of 1982.
This game clearly takes elements from the 1981 game Pirate Island by Paul Shave in order to make a “new” Dragon 32 game. The Shave game was not on my radar originally as the premise here is simply to find a treasure chest and escape; Pirate Island has multiple treasures. Still, as soon as I took one step from the initial room, I had an uncanny feeling.
The well/ladder is meant to be a gag. “WHAT A WASTE OF A GOOD LADDER. THE WELL IS 500 FEET DEEP.”
Just south of the start.
The antidote being 2 gold coins in particular set off my memory. Here’s a shot from Pirate Island:
Just like Pirate Island, the natives throw you in a pot if you try to take the idol/statue, and just to the south there is a monolith with a magic word that helps you escape.
YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT THE MEMORIAL STONE. ENGRAVED ON THE BASE IS THE WORD ‘-SABU-‘ WHICH MEANS HELP IN THE NATIVE TONGUE.
The word in the original teleports you to the monolith (and can be used to escape from multiple situations); in Danger Island it can only be used at the pot scene, and it teleports you to the north part of the island in a Sandy Cove.
The Forest has some randomness to its exits so it isn’t fully mapped out.
There’s plenty of aspects that are different or missing, so it resembles Hitch-hiker in that style, but it is deeply odd the author felt obliged at all to do this kind of copying. Maybe they saw the Acorn Atom game and tried to recreate it on their own machine (since they didn’t have an Atom), and sometime later decided to sell it?
Moving on, in order to obtain the antidote, there are two gold coins laying about just to the west next to some quicksand (more on that shortly). Playing requires buying the antidote right away because you are constantly bitten by snakes while on the island. (As opposed to being hit by poison darts in the Shave game. One fortunate difference here is that there are unlimited applications of the antidote.)
Just past the quicksand is the treasure we need. You can cross right away as long as you don’t have any inventory. The treasure is too heavy to carry back so you need a different way across.
I like how we can see our main treasure objective almost immediately, even if we can’t take it away yet; that’s more of a modern design move.
Wandering around, it isn’t too hard to find: some cheese, a gold ring, an empty bottle, a knife, a box of matches, a lamp (in a forest), some oil (in a broken paraffin heater). The latter three can be combined together to make a light source.
I first used the light source to explore some caves to the south (again just like Pirate Island, but slightly different contents).
To the west of the second location above is “WHAT USED TO BE A PLACE OF WORSHIP” which has a plank. If you try to take the plank and get out, sometimes the thing making the noise reveals itself:
But only sometimes; once through I didn’t see it at all (bug?) If you do get confronted you need to give it the cheese (killing it is fatal because the monster screams and causes the cave to collapse).
THE MONSTER GOBBLES THE CHEESE AND GOES AWAY.
With the plank you can go back and PUT PLANK OVER QUICKSAND. By some miracle I figured this out without checking the source code, especially given a.) the parser is otherwise two-word and b.) just typing PUT PLANK merely gets the response YOU CAN’T. (This wouldn’t be the first parser to veer away from an apparent two-word parser, but still, guess-the-phrase is extraordinarily difficult.)
With the plank in place you can safely nab the TREASURE (call it TREASURE, not CHEST) although now there’s the matter of escape. Down at the beach there’s a boat just sitting there but some magic is keeping it from moving:
YOU CANNOT TAKE THE BOAT.IT IS HELD BY SOME MAGIC SPELL.
I tried some “logical” actions but had no luck (I don’t think the gold ring is used for anything):
There’s one other item back at the north of the island; a building has a “aerosol can” in a dark room (fortunately you can give the lamp a refill with the oil — another difference with Shave’s game).
THERE IS A LABLE ON THE CAN IT SAYS ‘SLEEP INDUCER’
This can be used to knock out the natives and take their golden statue. Assuming that breaks the magic, I made a beeline down to the beach but found the natives waiting.
So that solves the problem: GIVE STATUE will make it so you can GET BOAT and then LAUNCH BOAT and then (if you’re me) get horribly stuck.
Any subsequent attempt to enter the boat resulted in I CAN’T. I assume either this is a guess-the-phrase moment or a bug (would not be out of bounds, remember the non-appearing monster; also, there was a bug at the plank once where I couldn’t go west for no reason at all and had to restore a game). I went with the ultimate strategy:
That’s me manually setting the location variable to the last room of the game.
ADD: Thanks to Matt W. doing an astute analysis in the comments, we now know the missing command was GET IN. Everything works exactly as shown in my screenshots otherwise. Earlier in the game just the word IN worked to enter a building, but the game decided here to go for an extremely specific phrasing that reuses another standard verb (GET) for a different purpose.
While I’m not sure what Mr. Shave’s opinion would be, I wasn’t terribly grumpy about the re-purposing here; the puzzles ended up going in different directions, and it was especially different to have the sleep-can scene followed by returning the statue in order to break a spell. (The original involves distracting the natives with a clock from a crocodile. The statue is then one of the treasures for points. This version treats the natives a little less naively.)
What I find especially curious is the relation to Peter Smith’s Hitch-Hiker. It isn’t just that Hitch-Hiker’s also does re-purposing, but that the second 1982 game by Peter Smith was published by Software for All! This makes me wonder not only if the people involved were all part of the same friend group, but also if the game we’ll be playing next (Time Adventure) does the same schtick of adapting another game.
Back when I’ve discussed “bawdy games”, one of the issues that has come up multiple times is the difficulty in advertising. Chuck Benton of Softporn Adventure had the good fortune of being discovered by Ken Williams of (Sierra) On-Line. Some games advertised instead in The Dirty Book, but that book itself had trouble advertising in other outlets.
Interface Age does not feel that the submitted advertisement conforms with the magazine’s standards.
Another option was simply to go via public domain, like with Porno Adventure and Drive-In. Today’s games, however, did not go that route.
(The obligatory not safe for certain work environments warning applies to anything after this point. Also, there’s a somewhat rude word for a drunk person.)
Kettering near Dayton, location of today’s company.
I’m not sure how Bob Krotts of the Softcore Software Company managed, but all the way through 1982 and part of the way through 1983 he put a significant number of ads out for his adventure game products, Misadventures 1 through 7. (The first six came out in ’82, and the seventh came early in ’83.)
As far as why the ads got through, my guess is a combination of
a.) chutzpah on the part of Krotts; notice in the ad below he tried to sell the game in Tandy’s book (this was a book collecting what essentially was ads for third-party software) and bragged about it not getting in. (As further evidence, albeit from later in life, one might consider he later became known as “Dirty” Bob Knotts, ran an adult video store, and is current co-chair of the X-Rated Critics Association.)
b.) chutzpah on the part of the magazines, which were TRS-80 specific ones like 80 Micro, H & E Computronics, and 80-U.S. While one could quantitatively prove this by counting ads or the like, my qualitative sense upon reading these magazines is that they had a more hobbyist bent to them and didn’t try as much to be family oriented.
…may I mention that I have three young teenagers who read your magazine and I find the ad from The Softcore Software Co. offensive.
It seems that people involved with personal computers should be above this “tacky” behavior. Adult book stores and X-rated movie houses are available to those with sexual hangups. Why degrade your magazine for the relatively small amount of revenue from this advertising?
…and following that, I haven’t found any reprints of the ad in the same publication, although I might be missing something. So at the very least there was actual pushback. On the other hand, one of the columns had an extended riff in their November 1983 issue on the first Softcore adventure (Madame Rosa’s Massage Parlor) making a fictional story. The true interpretation might be that the author simply decided to send his ad budget elsewhere.
I’m taking down the first three games (Madam Rosa’s Massage Parlor, Wet T-Shirt Contest, Sewers of Moscow) in order. I’ll handle the other three from 1982 in a separate post.
Misadventure 1: Madam Rosa’s Massage Parlor
Our task is to “discover the hidden photographs of the politician’s beautiful daughter” while looking for a speakeasy at the wharves, avoiding “deadly alleys”, “the bouncer” and “other characters of questionable reputation”.
The game follows the standard Scott Adams-style split window, but without any of the advantages and all of the drawbacks. There’s no object or direction list; there’s just the room description on top, and you have to test exits in every room to figure out which directions you can go. This really would go better with a standard scrolling window.
The parser is one of those which ends up chastising the player most of the time (and not in a fun way). I got “TRY SOMETHING ELSE” and “WRONG” many times in an attempt to do actions.
For example, the response here to SEARCH TRASH is TRY SOMETHING ELSE.
The map is one of those with lots of repetition; south of the locations just mentioned are three that just state “THE ROAD GOES NORTH AND SOUTH.”
This is followed by more rooms that are either “ROAD”, “WHARF”, “ALLEY”, or “DEAD-END” in some variety.
At the far south end is a door with a peep-hole. You can knock, and a bouncer asks if you are old enough, then requests your I.D.
I had no I.D., or even method of checking what my character’s inventory was. On a hunch, I checked the manual of Misadventure #5 (which I had from the earlier link) and found it mentioned the command EXAM. Not EXAMINE (which doesn’t work), but EXAM. I took it back to the pile of trash at the start:
EXAM WINO leads to finding out the wino has some money and and I.D. card. Taking the card back to the door, I was able to break into the speakeasy.
WELCOME TO MADAM ROSA’S SPEAKEASY BAR & GRILL! THE PLACE IS FILLED WITH PEOPLE, MUSIC, AND LAUGHTER! AN OPEN DOOR IS EAST. AN ELONGATED BAR IS FILLED WITH DRINKERS AND BOOZE.
To the east is a poker room with an open seat. You can sit down but this leads to death:
AFTER PLAYING FOR AWHILE, YOU NOTICE A MAN ACROSS FROM YOU WHO IS CHEATING! YOU ACCUSE HIM!!! HE PULLS A GUN AND SHOOTS YOU BETWEEN THE EYES – YOU ARE DEAD!!!
There are seemingly no other exits, but you can go back to the bar and BUY DRINK, whereupon the bartender will ask if you would like to meet some “WILD WOMEN”. Saying “YES”:
A LARGE BOUNCER BLOCKS THE HALL!
I used BRIBE BOUNCER and was able to proceed on.
THE STEPS LED TO A DIMLY-LIT ROOM. THE WALLS ARE ALL OF PLUSH CRUSHED VELVET. A SMILING SCANTILY-CLAD LADY AT A DESK INVITES YOU TO ENTER THE OPEN NORTH DOOR.
Heading north leads to an intersection where a naked lady is running away from some scene to the west. Checking in, there is an “OLD MAN” who is dead but “MUST BE HAPPY – HE IS SMILING!!!”
There’s another scene with an “UGLY” woman with an “OLD WOMAN”, a “LOCKED DOOR” with “MUFFLED BREATHING”, and a room with “OLD MEN” in raincoats looking through peepholes.
Bypassing all this, there’s a door that leads to a stairway up to a new floor.
To the north is a room with trapezes:
THIS APPEARS TO BE A ROOM FOR VERY AGILE PEOPLE! THERE ARE MANY TRAPEZES HANGING FROM THE HIGH CEILING. HMMMM..
You can SWING TRAPEZE but it will cause the bar to collapse; for some reason, EXAM BAR will now reveal the photos.
You can’t go back directly to the previously floor; exploring around leads to a series of rooms with scenes of varying level of questionable-ness (like THE MAYOR OF THE CITY in a hot tub who is PLAYING WITH A RUBBER DUCKY while a girl is in the tub with scuba gear) although the one you want has a book case; TAKE BOOK opens a secret passage to the last section.
The final challenge is a hallway where some of the exits are traps where a bouncer finds you (see above); I didn’t test if you could get the photos back by repeating the trapeze scene. Finally I came across a room with a window that seemed promising:
THE PASSAGE DEAD ENDS IN A CORNER ROOM. AN OPEN WINDOW IS NEXT TO AN OLD BED. YOU ARE SIX FLOORS UP!
A rope is visible through the window and you can climb down and escape:
Well, that was awkward. Before moving on to the next game, I should point out absolutely everything is bespoke. There is no way to take inventory because there is no inventory (if you take the card from the wino, that sets a flag, but it doesn’t have any special world-model attached). The way special commands are given is by room; in the window room at the end, EXAM WINDOW is special-coded to work there:
That means other than directions, the entire game is waiting for exact phrases in exact rooms. It is a wonder it hangs together at all.
Misadventure 2: Wet T-Shirt Contest
We are in trouble with a crime boss and need money fast. The logical solution: winning a wet t-shirt contest. Sure?
IT IS ALMOST DUSK. YOU ARE SITTING ALONE IN YOUR HOTEL ROOM.
THERE IS A LOUD KNOCK AT THE DOOR!!!
(after OPEN DOOR)
3 TOUGH THUGS ENTER THE ROOM. THEY BEAT THE CRAP OUT OF YOU!
YOU ARE INFORMED THAT – IF YOU DON’T PAY THE BOSS THE HUNDRED DOLLARS YOU OWE BY TOMORROW – YOUR ASS IS GRASS! THEY LEAVE THROUGH THE EAST DOOR.
Stepping outside, there’s some trash near the hall with a fish wrapped in a newspaper, doing EXAM PAPER (yes, it’s doing the EXAM thing again):
From here, the city is yours to explore, or mostly wander empty roads in:
The important places are marked: the club where the contest happens (yellow), a science building (blue), an arcade (brown), and a coin (green). You can try visiting a bank and getting a loan (they make fun of you and escort you out) or visiting the IRS (they arrest you for tax evasion).
It doesn’t look terrible but the “skips” in various spots led me to get lost; I was hoping I didn’t have to map, but the coin in particular turned out to be fairly elusive, and it turns out you need to find it first. With the coin in hand, you have enough money to play a game:
The game explodes, leaving only a screen, which you need to take. (Remember, there’s no real “inventory” in a general sense, just a variable flag.)
With the screen in hand, the next stop is by the science building, with an elevator of DEATH.
The elevator has 21 floors, and there’s no information on the game which floor is helpful; you just need to test them all. Keep in mind this is a game with no saved game feature! (Normally, I used save states.) Here’s a full table:
21 – stuck in 3×3 area
20 – electrocuted
19 – electrocuted
18 – killed by dogs
17 – electrocuted
16 – scientist / secret door
15 – stuck in 3×3 area
14 – stuck in 3×3 area
13 – no 13th floor
12 – electrocuted
11 – alarm
10 – killed by dogs
9 – killed by women
8 – electrocuted
7 – scientist’s lab
6 – electrocuted
5 – killed by dogs
4 – stuck in 3×3 area
3 – scientist / secret door
2 – electrocuted
1 – lobby
The “3×3 area” is just a small set of rooms that do nothing and the only thing to do is to leave. The “scientist / secret door” involves a scene with a scientist leaving through a secret door and farting. The “killed by women” is, um, kind of like a scene from Softporn Adventure but a bit darker.
KNOCK-OUT GAS COMES OUT OF THE VENTS…
YOU AWAKE TIED TO A BED. YOU ARE NAKED!
5 BEAUTIFUL WOMEN ENTER AND RAVISH YOUR BODY!!! WOW!
UH, OH…YOU CAN’T TAKE IT! YOUR HEART GIVES OUT!
Maybe you’re the “old man” from the first game. The floor that you actually need is 7 (lab) although it too is extremely deadly. There’s a series of hall intersections where if you choose wrong you will die: lots of killer dogs plus a trap floor.
THE FLOOR GIVES WAY! YOU FALL TO YOUR DEATH!
The correct sequence (w w n n w n w door s s w) can only be found by trial and error.
I first came across this scene before even finding the coin (I was still hopeful I could avoid making a city map); if you do the coin-screen sequence first, you can GIVE SCREEN in order to progress the scene forward:
The whole gimmick is that you can then push a button to switch to the body of the woman.
YOU ARE IN THE BEAUTIFUL WOMAN’S BODY!
THE PROFESSOR SAYS THAT YOU WILL REMAIN THIS WAY FOR 1 HOUR!
YOU ARE NOW ALONE IN THE ROOM (EXCEPT FOR YOUR BODY IN THE CHAIR). THE SCIENTIST HAS LEFT.
The rest of the game is pretty straightforward as far as actions go, if a bit icky plot-wise. You need to follow the same steps it took to arrive at the lab, just backwards, then hoof it back to the club near the start of the game.
You win due to your (the other person’s) “transparent” shirt. With $200 in hand you can hike it back to the lab, where you’ll transfer back and win the game.
I guess you could think of this as a degenerate’s version of Savage Island Part 2. Technically speaking there was a lot more death than bawdiness to the game. Let’s jump ahead now to….
Misadventure 3: Sewers of Moscow
We’re now a superspy, meant to stop some catastrophe or another gallivanting around Moscow. What we’re stopping is unclear because we’ve lost our memory. The ad copy still the obligatory low-key mention of smut…
THE BEAUTIFUL SPY YOU FIND TIED SPREAD-EAGLED TO A BED HOLDS THE KEY TO THIS MISADVENTURE. BUT BE VERY CAREFUL WHAT YOU DO TO HER.
…but to start with, we awake with our memory gone, and:
I just changed them to RETURN and the game was able to play all the way through. Maybe they’re for the sound shenanigans the game’s title screen mentions it has.
You start in a forest having an unfortunate parachute accident, and once again, the parser is bespoke in an almost unique way.
The key here is to CLIMB TREES — ok, that part’s not too bad — finding yourself in tree branches. The key phrase then is CLIMB N.
Not swing, or just movement, or even CLIMB NORTH; it has to be specifically CLIMB followed by the abbreviation N. I suspect this is the kind of game the author only tested themselves. (Unlike Softporn Adventure!)
Past that, there’s a set of very plain rooms with descriptions like “CLEARING”, “NOTHING”, and a “NOTHING” where you also need to “BEWARE OF THE ANTEATERS!”
Sadly, no anteaters appear in the game.
There’s a few death-exits in this area, but it isn’t death-at-every-step like the science building in Misadventure 2 (that’ll happen later). The key to moving on is to go to a VERY DARK VALLEY and type the word FEEL alone. Just the word FEEL.
Just to be clear, yes, I checked the source code for the CLIMB N and FEEL-word-by-itself parts.
With the shovel in hand, you can go over to a NOTHING where the floor is DAMP and DIG. This drops you into a maze with a mean trick.
It’s a “normal” maze with no loops, but going east leads to a whole section which is all dead ends, whereas going west is a very short trip to the exit. It’s essentially the maze equivalent of a shaggy dog joke.
There’s also this elongated description in every room.
Past that obstacle, you can climb some stairs to find a mysterious door, where a “SHORT MAN WEARING A GREY OVERCOAT AND HAT” ushers you in a room and points out a panel. Pressing a button in the panel triggers a message:
After this enlightenment returns:
YOUR MEMORY HAS RETURNED!
YOU REMEMBER THAT:
YOU ARE AN AGENT OF THE U.N.
YOUR MISSION – ONCE DROPPED DEEP INTO SOVIET TERRITORY – IS TO ELIMINATE THE POSSIBILITY OF WW III.
You are supposed to enter the number just received into a phone. Unfortunately, this is a “suicide mission” and you’ll die in the process of ambiguously stopping WWIII.
This is followed by a “death building” fairly similar to the science building…
…except going the wrong direction gets you gunned down by secret police:
A LOYAL MEMBER OF THE MOSCOW SECRET POLICE SPOTS YOU, PANICS, AND SHOOTS! BETTER DEATH THAN TORTURE…
Eventually one route leads to a locked door; to get through the locked door, you need to pass through a dark area and finally reach the hinted-at smut.
If you examine the gag, you’ll find a key; if you free the spy (UNTIE ROPES) she kills you.
FOOL – I AM REALLY A DOUBLE AGENT!!!
SHE REACHES UNDER A BED, GRABS A KNIFE, AND STABS YOU IN THE HEART – YOU DIE!!!
With the key in hand you can go back to the locked door and find the promised room with the phone. I think the code is randomly generated — mine was 196 — and typing CALL 196 triggered the end of the game.
So despite the advertising, Misadventure 3 really had no smut whatsoever, as well as a grim fatalist ending. Not even stopping WWIII, just delaying it!
Brief Introspection
We’ve seen a fair number of authors “cheat” with specific moments of bespoke parser use; it is very rare to essentially make that an overarching coding style, up to and including making it so there isn’t even really an inventory to speak of. To make a comparison I have to go back to something like 1979’s Jungle Island:
400 PRINT”THE VINE BREAKS!! YOU HEAR WARRIORS APPROACHING!”
401 INPUT V$
410 IF V$”RUN” GOTO 220
420 PRINT”YOU’RE RUNNING AS FAST AS YOU CAN!”
430 INPUT T$
440 IF T$”N”,”S”,”E”,”W” GOTO 310
450 PRINT”IT IS NOT ADVISABLE TO RUN THROUGH THE JUNGLE”
The cases here aren’t quite as bad as that game; the Misadventures have a centralized “hub” of commands in each area, and that perhaps informed the author’s style of making big tangly maps for everything. This all has the odd effect that unexpectedly, I thought the bawdiest of the games (Misadventure 1) was the strongest. There’s not really anything going for this author in terms of puzzles, and certainly the parser can’t handle anything stressful, so all that’s left is exploration; at the very least the sequence of naughty scenes showed some variety (…and creative use of margarine). With Misadventure 3, the most interesting room was one literally called NOTHING with a side reference to anteaters.
We’ll visit the other Misadventures soon and see if this trend of non-naughty naughty games continues (the ones available; Misadventure 4: Casino of Pleasure is lost) but for now, coming up: two Britgames, and the very last regular graphical Apple II game of 1982. We are getting close to the end!
By 1892, the Dalton Gang — only formed a year before — had gotten a reputation for outrunning the law while performing a string of train robberies.
Of the founders Bob and Emmett Dalton, Bob previously had filled his father’s shoes becoming a lawman, and was familiar with the issues in Oklahoma: a fragmented group of sheriff services with only the U.S. Marshals having jurisdiction over the whole. They recruited a group based mostly on people they grew up with, and the gang ended up having a rotating roster with the brothers at the core. The two other brothers, Bill and Grat Dalton, were imprisoned at the time but Grat later managed to escape and join the group and Bill was acquitted.
Their exploits included a near-miss at Red Rock. The gang was eight strong at the time and they planned a heist on June 1 at the arrival of the Santa Fe, with the train scheduled for 10:00.
A train did arrive, but the lights were out. The station agent went inside and Bob sensed something was off, telling the gang to hold off and wait. Indeed there was a trap, as deputy marshals awaited inside. The plan of the heist had been learned of, but Bob’s sense of danger meant the gang waited for the first train to leave and the next train — the expected one — to arrive. The haul ended up not being much for the size of crew (at most around $10,000) but that’s because the first train was carrying the majority of the money, at 6 times that amount.
The famous end of the Dalton Gang came upon an attempt in October (with Bill Powers, Bob Dalton, Grat Dalton, Dick Broadwell, and Emmett Dalton) to enter the history books by robbing two Kansas banks simultaneously in daylight. This is the event most dramatized in media, not only for the wild gunfight with marshals and the citizens of Coffeyville, but because Emmett Dalton (the only survivor) survived to write two books and spread the mythos about the group, re-painting them in a Robin Hood light.
Today’s game is essentially a revised version of that pitched battle, where you fight against the brothers solo, although the “slippery between the hands of the law” aspect that the brothers held comes into play.
Peter Kirsch returns! No prologue this time like The Deadly Game: you’re got 0 DOLLARS OF CASH and a SIX-SHOOTER to your name, you’re on a street, and there’s a sign telling you about a vacant job as sheriff.
As usual with Softside, there are Atari, Apple II, and TRS-80 versions of the game. I picked TRS-80 straight off the bat this time given my experience with The Deadly Game. Yet again that’s no guarantee it is the best version, and for reasons I’ll get into later there are some advantages and disadvantages to the Atari version.
However, by random chance, I started exploring the opposite way, forestalling the encounter. The town is laid out roughly west-east with a turn in the middle, and the mayor is on the far west side.
To speed things along, though, let’s imagine I followed the author’s script and went to the mayor first (even though there’s no way of knowing the mayor is there until you map out and find the office).
The $200 on a “PERFORMANCE BASIS” turns out to be a huge pain for me later.
With a STAR in hand I wandered and checked out the rest of the town. The sheriff’s office has a cell but no keys; you’re supposed to apply your six-shooter to the desk and shoot out a lock, revealing the keys (they won’t get used until later).
I guess this makes it feel more like a Western.
Adjacent is a saloon (we’ll save that for later) and a general store that is closed (which we’ll also save for later).
Yet further is a stable with a BLACK STALLION (ours, but it needs a saddle) followed by a newspaper office.
I immediately guessed (correctly) this was a clue to a maze.
Next along the row is a rain barrel (empty) followed by a bank (also nothing there for the moment); at the end of the line is a “golden rattler” blocking the way.
You can try to shoot the rattler but you’ll get stopped by an Indian.
I wandered a bit in this state, also finding a path leading to a “creek” going to the west side, before I finally went to visit the saloon last (I had already seen it once before becoming law enforcement).
Kirsch is essentially combining an open style with triggered events, like his game Robin Hood. This is a location-and-condition trigger; you have to be the sheriff and have entered the saloon for the bank robbery to start. Sometimes this works well, but for my game it was awkward to explore a town all the way over twice before anything kicked off.
Heading back to the bank…
…the robbery has ended but there is a shootout. (Your gun, by default, is holstered, so you need to either TAKE GUN or DRAW GUN; be sure to holster it again before entering a store or they’ll kick you out.) Waiting too long here is lethal; Emmett and Bob aren’t in shooting range. The one Dalton that you can get a bead on is Grat.
Back to the west a little there’s a rope ladder leading to the roof of the newspaper office. You can backtrack and climb up to get a different angle on the scene:
If you head back to the Mayor’s Office, the clerk reports to you the mayor has been kidnapped. I did not find out this way — more on that later.
After the shootout, the general store is now open:
The mayor gave us $200 to spend (remember another $200 comes later). You cannot buy everything at once; I had to reload my game multiple times to figure things out, and while there are technically multiple options, you at least need to get the CANTEEN and the SADDLE. (AMMUNITION is good too. The six-shooter needs reloading after 6 bullets.)
The food and pouch of tobacco, incidentally, go to the east side of town where there’s the GOLDEN RATTLER. You can give the food to make the snake happy, and then past that there is an Indian with a pipe. Trading the tobacco:
According to Dale Dobson there’s some part of the code that indicates it works as a dowsing rod, but the water in the game is quite easy to find and I was never able to get the stick to work. Neither puzzle gives any points.
(I should mention, as an aside, there are 8 points total in the game revealed by typing SCORE. Taking down the first two Dalton brothers led to 1 point each. This will be important later.)
With the saddle you can put it on the STALLION and ride it around (just using normal directions, you don’t have to RIDE SOUTH every time or whatnot).
The horse doesn’t make you go “faster” and you have to get off every time you go in a building (DROP HORSE). I still found it gratifying to ride around in an atmospheric sense.
I was stuck from here for a while before I realized back at the CREEK on the far west side of town it was possible to GO CREEK, moving past to a new area. (It is unclear why there wouldn’t be a compass direction for that.)
Just past the creek. As the message implies, you can’t go farther from here without using the horse.
Past the creek is a pasture (see above) and then a desert.
The desert is a maze but the “SEEN NEWS” message from the newspaper office is intended to indicate directions. While in the desert, you start getting thirsty quite quickly (be sure to GET WATER from the creek before entering the desert; this is why the canteen is the other necessary purchase) and there are rattlesnakes that randomly appear.
You need your gun out and loaded, and you can shoot the rattlesnakes as they appear. Following the SEENNEWS route and using the gun several times on the way, a “dusty trail” comes up next.
This is where the Daltons are hiding, but once again I didn’t quite do things in the right order; first I went south and found a “dusty trail” with a “hill” and a “mine”. Alert because of my creek issue, I treated both as possible directions, and tried GO HILL first:
This is how I found out the mayor was the extra person the Daltons was getting away with (never mind the mayor was all the way on the other side of town at the time of the bank robbery). I also realized I was softlocked and needed to bring the ladder in for a rescue; this got me a point, for 3 points out of 8.
There’s a “secret” path that loops back directly to the mayor’s office so you don’t have to do the desert route back.
The “mines” are a maze, this time not one with a gimmick.
I thought Kirsch had shaken off doing such things, but alas.
The only room of interest had a wooden floor:
The game decide to be annoyingly resistant to my attempts to refer to any of the nouns described, so I decided to move on. Instead of heading to the hill/mine area, I went northwest to a CABIN; this is where the Daltons lurk.
Oops! So, if you hang out at the cabin for long enough, or go in some bushes to hide (which requires dismounting the horse) the Daltons spot you and gun you down. The visible horse here is the problem. (According to Dale Dobson’s walkthrough I checked later, in the Atari version you can ride the horse into the bushes; that doesn’t work here.) You might think to go elsewhere, ditch the horse, and then walk over to the cabin, but the horse will take off if you leave it somewhere and it happens to resurface right at the cabin. (There is no explanation why the cabin serves as, er, horse catnip. What’s a thing that attracts a horse?)
To the south of the cabin is a small tree. The idea is you can dismount here without the horse taking off right away (for some reason) which gives you time to TIE HORSE. Given the other non-cabin locations have the horse make a bolt for it, this was tricky but not impossible to figure out.
With the horse tied away — presumably not making suspicious horse noises outside the cabin causing the outlaws to notice — you can head back to the cabin and hide in the bushes.
No matter which brother you aim for, they both scatter to different locations. Emmett goes to town and Bob goes to the mines. The cabin itself is completely undescribed on the inside other than it has a crowbar you can pick up.
Taking down Bob first, he’s lurking at the room with the wooden floor.
Occasionally Bob would fire a shot; my shots back always missed. I realized — upon needing to reload — that I might be able to heed the words of Dirty Harry.
“I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ To tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I lost track myself.
“But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?
Bob did not fire every turn, but I waited (rather, typed LOOK) until Bob had fired exactly six shots, then dived in the room safely. With a clear shot, SHOOT BOB worked, and then the crowbar worked (after many attempts) via the command GET BOARDS. (Note for Atari version: it uses GET BOARD, singular, instead.)
The sack of cash is able to go back to the bank for another single point, bringing the score to 4. Shooting Bob did not give any points (ominous music).
Emmett turns out to be out back in town hanging by the bank. If you just try to walk (or ride) down the street to him he’ll take off.
The key here is the second paycheck from the Mayor. I admit I was baffled for a while discovering this, but it turns out that the moment where the Daltons scatter from the cabin is also the moment the powers that be decide you can get an extra $200. Curious how that works.
The extra money is enough to buy all the remaining items from the general store, including the disguise kit (which normally was too expensive after buying just the saddle and canteen). If you dump your lawman badge and wear the disguise, you’ll be able to safely make it up to Emmett without him getting spooked.
You can then shoot him dead, and I admit this is where I started to think something was fishy. I was able to get return the bank’s cash but I was otherwise stuck with nothing to do and two dead bodies — the Dalton gang are taken care of, where are the fireworks? I had incidentally tried ARREST and was not understood, and I didn’t have any handcuff-items either, so I still assumed that violence was the answer, but no: you can GET EMMETT. I guess the player is holding rope in their inventory that doesn’t get mentioned? (Atari version again: ARREST actually works as a verb.)
You can cart each Dalton back over to the jail, and use the keys from the gun-blasted desk to lock them in (if you don’t lock the door they won’t stay). Each Dalton captured is 2 points.
In my “winning run” — I had to restart to fix the softlock — I ended up dealing with the mayor last, meaning the game ended while still in a pit:
Once again I find myself appreciating what kind of ambition Kirsch had in exploring all the genres — and different iterations of event-based gameplay — while being frustrated by technical limitations. The game anticipates more than you might expect, with the horse mechanics and is-your-gun-holstered check, but I still had moments like applying the crowbar which give a reminder this is still a monthly series of games rapidly cranked out in BASIC.
I also appreciated the alternate routes in terms of either shooting arresting the last two Dalton brothers, even given the unfair implementation. I would very much have preferred some extra indication the game goes to an unwinnable state if either brother is a corpse!
(For books, I used Daltons! The Raid on Coffeyville, Kansas by Robert Barr Smith via University of Oklahoma Press, and Into the Sunset: Emmett Dalton and the End of the Dalton Gang by Ian Shaw via the University Press of Kansas. The former aims to dispel the Robin Hood mythos and expose the Daltons as gang mostly interested in stealing and giving the money to themselves; the latter establishes a little sympathy or at least understanding to their situation.)
This has absolutely nothing to do with the game but the panel is cool. From Doctor Who Magazine.
I’ve observed before that sci-fi has often fared better than fantasy when it comes to early adventure games (the opposite is true of CRPGs). Fantasy objects tend to be designed without any kind of rules, meaning that the magic pendant that needs to be waved somewhere needs to be waved everywhere since there’s no method to work out what’s going on. Science fiction tends to be better-behaved in that respect, and even with interdimensional teleportation etc. the authors seem to feel more obliged to make it clear how various gizmos operate.
That’s not the case here.
To continue where I left off, I had a locked door I couldn’t get by and a box I couldn’t open. It turns out the lake (that I filled the flask from) was the culprit.
I had tried a number of ways to “dive” into the lake with no joy. I tried taking the heavy gold brick and jumping in the lake while holding it before using it on the wall (there’s a puzzle like this in Sunset over Savannah). I thought maybe that’d have an effect since jumping into water with the powder causes them to explode so maybe this was tracked as well? … but no, that wasn’t it. Despite the game insisting repeatedly it doesn’t know the word DOWN, it does, in that exact spot: you can SWIM DOWN.
The silver key is sufficient to both open the box (crystals full of energy) and unlock the door.
To the east here is a Store Room with a lever where I struggled for a while trying to push or pull it, when you’re just supposed to TAKE it. I don’t know what it does; I carried it the rest of the game, and I assume it got used passively somewhere. The note will be useful shortly, but the next leap is to realize that the beam of light is not some sort of functional thing you’re supposed to interrupt to cause an effect; instead it means there’s another exit you can take, that is, GO BEAM.
Typing INSERT CRYSTALS will cause THE WHIRR OF MACHINES SOMEWHERE. Somewhere is just back in the storage room (with the mysterious lever) where an opening appeared; past that is a wire fence.
CUT FENCE (or SNIP FENCE) works here — it turns out SNIFF was really SNIP, which I think is a new one. Then there’s a room with a safe, and the safe has a dial that turns from 01 to 20. 0519 backwards can’t be 9-1-5-0 (there’s no 0 on the dial) so the appropriate way to read it is DIAL 19 followed by DIAL 05:
That’s essentially it except for one last parser struggle. Taking the key all the way back to the HOLE at the start, I tried INSERT KEY, PUT KEY, etc. with no luck; it turns out I needed REPLACE KEY.
I have no idea what the lever was for, or what the button on the bracelet that we’d been toting around the entire game was for. The whole romp was only loosely connected and only made sense as some sort of challenge delivered by an Evil Entity (maybe Human Resources thought we’d been slacking on the whole Time Warden job thing).
This almost could have been a satisfying game still, but the time I spent with parser troubles — especially the game deceptively claiming it didn’t know the word DOWN — really knocked it out of proportion. I can ignore parser issues if they’re light as a percentage of gameplay; say I spend only 2% of my time thinking about the parser (maybe it’s a long game, so there’s still somewhere I get stuck a while, but it doesn’t linger as the main gameplay). Here, the overarching puzzles were simple enough that the majority of my time was spent on parser trouble.
The biggest issue is the violation of trust: the first time the parser does a horrible hiccup, I start to have my doubts about if patience is worthwhile: should I treat the puzzles as puzzles, or is the next one I get stuck on going to be equally more the fault of the game than myself?
Still, this game was unpublished; would some of these elements have been tweaked on their way to market? At the very least the bottom bar would have been changed to read BUG-BYTE (like The Scepter did); maybe the person responsible for checking if the tape loaded correctly would have fixed a typo or two while they were at it. Since Bug-Byte rejected the game outright it’s impossible to know. One certainly gets the impression of the cheaper-end cassettes of this period that the goal was to do as little testing as possible.
If nothing else, when we see Wadsworth again he’ll be with an entirely different company on an entirely different computer. Certainly his later games feel like much slicker productions, so maybe the technical freedom helped.
Wadsworth had already hopped over to Artic by the end of 1982 as they published his game Invasion Force for ZX Spectrum. This is essentially a variant of the “boss fight” stage in the arcade game Phoenix. Screenshot via Mobygames.
Renga in Blue 