Even the winged birds and the two-footed and four-footed, o silvery
Dawn, have set forth following your regulations of time, from the ends of heaven—
For, dawning forth with your rays, you illuminate the whole luminous realm.
— Rig Veda, I.49 Dawn
I was stalled by, once again, spelling. But in a different way this time! (For my previous antics, see my writeup of Circus.)
You see, I was somehow mentally shelving this game having as a three-letter parser, I think because of the spelling “albotross”; ALB was fine for me mentally, ALBO or ALBOTROSS slightly broke my brain. So I went through what turned out to be correct (KILL) but typed it as KILL ALB and not KILL ALBO (whereupon you must specify throwing the knife).
The manual’s hint specified flying; looking at the dead alb– grr, let’s say, “bird”, the game says it has a hole. Miraculously, probably form playing too many Sierra games, I quickly came up with
LIGHT MATCH
MELT WAX
WITH MATCH
which was sufficient to plug the hole.
THE WING IS NOW SUITABLE FOR FLIGHT.
So just to be clear, we’re toting around a dead bird and using it to fly. Sure? You can then go back to the cold lake and fly your way across, but before showing you the next spot, I should mention this is probably the part closest to the Vedas. The gods can “fly like birds” and get constantly compared to them. In a portion on the Maruts (storm deities):
With your chariots fitted with lightning bolts and with spears, whose wings are horses, accompanied by lovely chants, drive here, o Maruts.
Fly here like birds, with highest refreshment for us, you masters of artifice.
In the literature from this period generally there’s enough references to flying and magical Vimānas (flying palaces or chariots) that modern conspiracy theories have developed around them. The 20th century book Vaimānika Shāstra claims the magic is in reality advanced technology; UFO enthusiasts go on to make claims about ancient astronauts and/or aliens depending on their inclination.
My wondering about a random American in the Midwest picking this as a topic could be resolved by this mythology, as it is one of the most famous pieces of cultural lore to come out of the Vedas. It still easily could be by accident but the moment of grabbing a gigantic bird from the sky and using it to fly did feel just a little bit like a moment of the gods (fly, not glide, we’re launching from ground level).
Across the lake is a narrow island. In the middle a soldier blocks the way.
The soldier has armor so you can’t just use KILL; a quick item roll call:
cup with water, knife, matches, shovel, dead bird, two Vedas, coin
I didn’t have the water before, but while frustrated by the bird I tested TAKE WATER at the lake and it worked. The coin came from looking at one of the Vedas (a bookmark, I suppose) and can be given to the soldier who will take it as a bribe and leave. This is followed by the other end of the island, where you can fly yet again.
No more lake: you’ve landed in a desert, which is fairly empty except for a cactus in the center. I tried various attempts to apply the KNIFE to the cactus before simply attempting a DIG instead.
This leads to an underground chamber and the Yagur Veda.
A bit further is a locked door; the game lets you PICK LOCK and specify you want to use the knife. I appreciate the amount of item re-use this has had.
Then comes the last obstacle, a TOMB ENTRANCE with a zombie and some burning leaves. I didn’t have much to work with but I was still carrying water; pouring it led to the leaves being extinguished and the zombie disappearing with the leaves (??).
Finally the fourth book can be claimed.
The locations for all the Morgan games have generally lacked depth, including this one, although somehow the format of a quasi-mystical challenge made it more playable; I had an easier time than Miner 49’er, certainly, and only got stalled by the bird.
Part of the Yajur Veda, via Wikipedia.
I finally made a breakthrough on the mysterious ASD&D. I was poking about in this catalog which has the RPG Wizard’s Domain mentioned, and the name Thomas Johnson. This ended up being a much better lead than Scott Morgan, and I eventually landed on a timeline page which supposedly has a full story:
A Third-Party software house owned by Tom Johnson and run out of P.O. Box 46 Cottage Grove, MN 55016. The company seems to have surfaced in 1981 and disappeared in 1984, shortly after the 99/4A was abandoned by Texas Instruments. Among the dozen or so BASIC and Extended BASIC educational and entertainment products the company manufactured, perhaps the most remembered were Wizard’s Dominion and Entrapment. Wizard’s Dominion was an extremely popular fantasy adventure type game written by Johnson himself. Entrapment, another Tom Johnson creation, was a Mini Memory assembly language coded game that was so well written Texas Instruments had decided in early 1983 to pick it up and market it. Unfortunately, the big “bailout” of October 28th, 1983 took place first and Entrapment never came to market under the TI banner. It did surface through Tenex Computer Express in 1986 however.
The October date is when the TI-99/4A was discontinued.
There’s no sourcing on the connection and I haven’t been able to unearth anything definitively saying Johnson owned the company, but I’ve found enough products with Johnson’s name attached I’m comfortable saying the paragraph is mostly accurate. Previously I speculated
Still, I get the vibe we’re dealing with a 2 or at most 3 person operation here.
which is right, it’s just there’s really only one person (Johnson) who published Morgan’s work.
Now the Lord of the Sacred Formulation proclaims the mantra worthy to be spoken,
in which Indra, Varuṇa, Mitra, Aryaman, and the gods have made their home.
Just that would we speak at the rites—the faultless mantra that brings good fortune, o gods.
And if you gladly receive this speech, o noble men, it will attain all things of yours worth winning.
— Rig Veda, I.40 Brahmaṇaspati, Jamison and Brereton translation
Scott Morgan of Eden Prairie, Minnesota produced a series of six games for Texas Instruments computers in 1982 published under the name American Software Design and Distribution (ASD&D).
I am not clear on the intended order. I started with the “beginner” game (Aqua Base) which said at the end to play Haunted House, and the ending of Haunted house said to play Miner, and the end of Miner said to play Vedas, so I’m just following the chain. I should find out at the end of this game whether I’m playing Fun House or Stone Age next.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
In Search of the Four Vedas is one of the two games (along with Fun House) marked as “advanced” although at least the start of the game is straightforward.
During this adventure you must find the ancient books that your tribe lost many years ago. They contain great knowledge of magic and the past.
Your goal is to find the four Vedas of Hinduism: the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda and the Atharva Veda.
I don’t think there’s world-verse integration like we had with El Diablero; it’s just the four books form the “treasures” of the game and are a little more interesting than the usual *RUBY*, *DIAMOND*, and *GOLD NECKLACE*. I am not sure why a random American in the Midwest latched onto the Vedas as a good goal, but I appreciate the variety.
A 450-year old copy of the Rig Veda written on bark. The Rig Veda is the oldest of the four, with it being passed orally from somewhere in the second millennium BC. It includes mantras which allegedly are linked to the creation of the cosmos.
The action kicks off on a beach next to a lake too cold to swim in.
The anchor can be nabbed, the X can be dealt with later, and tree can be climbed.
The manual hints about flying a bird, and FLY ALB says “CAN’T FLY…YET!” so I assume there’s some way of setting it up. Here’s the remainder of my currently accessible map:
While quite small I already have two of the Vedas! The first can be found by retrieving a rope from a nearby cave, tying it to the anchor, and then throwing the anchor while next to a “very large tree”. This allows entering a treehouse.
The shovel can then be carted over to the beach where the X sits; digging reveals a chest and the second of the four treasures.
That went rather quickly, but perhaps the treasure distribution is “imbalanced” and the third and fourth will raise serious difficult. As things go I am stuck as there is not much to noodle around with. The Rig Veda had a coin inside; a hut had matches, wax, and a cup. Other than those I still have the shovel for digging as well as a knife, but that’s it. There doesn’t seem to be any places for secret exits, and the “albotross” is not cooperating with any verbs I’ve tried to throw at it. My guess is, structurally, the bird takes us to Part 2 and that’s where things get complicated or at least Advanced.
About now is when I’d trudge through my verb list but the parser treats every valid command in a bespoke way, so there’s no way to find out (say) LASSO is a valid word without testing it in context.
In 1988, a contest was run by the Adventureland BBS out of Lexington, Kentucky called The Great American Adventure Search.
ADVENTURELAND, the largest public domain Adventure base in America, is looking for a few good adventures. And we are offering a prize for the best! From September 1, 1988 to October 30, 1988 we’re offering a prize for the best adventure uploaded! What sort of a prize? How about the Adventure of your choice? Want a copy of Ultima IV? How about Kings Quest III? You might choose a paid-up license for the Adventure Game Toolkit. Any adventure game you’d like (up to $70.00 in value) can be yours IF the adventure YOU upload is chosen as the best!
It seems to me that there have got to be others out there in modem country who have adventure running around in their heads. If you are like me, you are brimming over with plots, and just can’t fathom how to code them. Well, since I started writing adventures in 1981, I’ve learned alot about how to code.
The tutorial package I just mentioned includes, as a sample game from the author, The Case at KAXL. We played that game here already; it’s notable for trying to model a “real” environment as opposed to a puzzle-laden one, with locations that only exist because they’d be part of a real radio station and not in service of a story. At the time I didn’t have any other information on the author, but I now can say not only was Douglas C. Rogers responsible for all the BBS activity above, he was the one who wrote today’s game, Drive-In. My suspicion of his involvement with radio was correct; while running the BBS he was a professor at Eastern Kentucky University in Communications.
A news story where Doug Rogers discusses campus radio. Source.
Drive-In is a much different game than The Case at KAXL. It is, as The Adventurer’s Guild calls it, smut. In fact, I’m going to drop a not safe for certain work environments warning.
Beware of anything past the magazine cover below.
Adventureland BBS gets a mention in this 1992 magazine for being a member of Fidonet, a communications network for BBSes with different communities.
As Rogers was rather dedicated to the public domain model of adventure distribution, Drive-In didn’t need to follow the same path as Bawdy Adventure with sales in a New Orleans-published book; rather, Rogers himself could simply distribute the game on his own BBS once it got started.
Well, here it is! The big evening
Your buddy Arnie set you up with this little number named Andrea, and here you are
a 1987 version for Coleco ADAM by “ADAMafic Software”
a PC port in 1987 (almost certainly by the author himself, as he ported his other C64 adventure game Nectar of the Gods using the same company name, Program Dynamics)
a port by Alan Pilon in 1988 called Passion Pit with a randomized female companion
a shortened 1990 version called Crusin
I went with the Rogers ’87 port. (The C64 original has a moment mentioned in the Adventurer’s Guild writeup that the author clearly re-considered.)
Before moving on to “the big evening” I’m going to interrupt with a question: is this also “the first” text adventure smut? Not exactly: first of all there’s all the mainframe games we’ve now visited, like Castle ending in a three-way, or Haunt’s “touchdown”, but there’s a general lack of detail. The other early candidate is a game called Porno Adventure (1981) which I haven’t written about yet, and probably isn’t worth a post on its own, so here’s the sidebar–
This game is more a “simulator” than an adventure game and has serious customization involved as the player is able to have a “UNINHIBITED, UNCENSORED ADVENTURE” with “ANY WOMAN THEY CHOOSE”. Unusually, the game lets you swap who you are giving commands to, so while start as a man having an uninhibited adventure with a custom woman, it is possible to change to the woman at any time by typing “0”.
SINCE THIS IS A FREE ADVENTURE, WE SPARED ALL COSTS AND PROGRAMMING SHORTCUTS TO BRING YOU THE PROGRAM IN THE CHEAPEST, QUICKEST WAY POSSIBLE. THEREFORE THIS PROGRAM NILL NOT RECOGNIZE ANY ABBREVIATED COMMANDS.
You are then asked the woman’s name, measurements, clothing, what she calls you, where it takes place, and some other details. You then have a selection of items like “Vaseline”, “priest robe” and “whip” you can pick up before entering the scene.
GENTLY, I TAKE INSERTNAMEHERE’S FACE IN MY HANDS AND DRAW HER TOWARDS ME. SHE TREMBLES AS I PRESS MY MOUTH AGAINST HERS, THEN PARTS HER LIPS, INVITING MY EAGER TONGUE TO EXPLORE THE WARM AND SENSUOUS WETNESS OF HER SOFT MOUTH.
The reaction to KISS is shown above. Sex scenes are also possible. If you swap perspectives, the actions are still done from “I” perspective — it’s just you can specify the command UNDRESS or whatnot and see the result.
Again, this is really a “fantasy simulator” and anything you try succeeds (if the parser understands it). While you are still “in a world” delivering commands like an adventure game, it doesn’t play like one. I’m also unclear if Otto Bresser is a pseudonym. A DOS port in the late 80s changes his name to Dr. Otto Bresser. It does, for certain, qualify as “smut” far more than other games we’ve seen; I think the distinguishing factor is that there’s no “movie cut” past whatever scene gets initiated, and you instead can describe a sequence of actions in detail.
Drive-In is firmly an adventure game. Just like “Dr.” Bresser’s creation it has the player describe actions in detail, as they visit a drive-in with Andrea and attempt to score a touchdown. Very much unlike the Bresser game, you can’t just do whatever you want.
You are in the front seat of your car
You see: ANDREA, wearing halter-top and shorts. loudspeaker. radio (OFF).
Trying to turn on the radio led to a curious response.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO ? TURN ON RADIO
ARE YOU TRYING TO DEAL WITH THE LOADSPEAKER OR THE RADIO? YES
TRY A NOUN-VERB COMBINATION INSTEAD OF VERB-NOUN
The parser here wants LOUDSPEAKER OFF, RADIO ON, or RADIO OFF. The game comes close to understanding the command, it’d be nice if it went all the way! The game hints (when typing HELP, which I relied on quite a bit) that you want to switch from the movie sound (loudspeaker) to music, so the right acts here are LOUDSPEAKER OFF (“I dropped it out the window…”) and RADIO ON. You are then instructed you can HOLD HANDS…
SHE SLIDES CLOSER TO YOU.
…at which point the HELP feature gives no further direction. My other attempts at interaction were either not understood (the game does not understand conversation at all) or lightly rebuffed, so I got out of the car and went searching. (I thought possibly the game was one-room up to that point; the variation Crusin I mentioned puts all the action inside the car.)
You are Outside, next to YOUR car
You see: YOUR car.
YOU CAN GO: NORTH EAST SOUTH WEST
The map is essentially a straight north/south line. You can wander away from it but that either lands you in a VACANT space or LOST, at which point you are stuck there forever until you restart the game. I always like a little existential dread with my dating simulators.
Again, most locations let you go east or west but reach a vacant location or LOST. Once I found a not-useful broken speaker.
There’s a playground along the way with a slide, and on top there is a note via Arnie (who set up the blind date) saying “I forgot to tell you! Andrea is NOT on the pill! BE CAREFUL”; this is an indication a condom is needed.
To the far north is a “snackbar COUNTER” and I was unable to read the sign or find out any kind of menu. (It kept repeating the message on the note from the slide.) The player avatar has a billfold with a dollar and popcorn costs 50 cents, but that’s just by guesswork, I’m sure they have other items.
YOU ARE HOLDING:
shirt which you are wearing.
slacks which you are wearing.
briefs which you are wearing.
billfold.
.50 in CHANGE.
popcorn.
The change is enough to go outside, go to a men’s room (deceptively as a drawn arrow, but going “west” is VOID, sorry, you need to GO MENS) and buy a condom from the machine (except the game only understands RUBBER, by this point I was checking the walkthrough).
After all that, I had nothing left to do but go back to the car. Based on the walkthrough I was missing PUT ARM after HOLD HANDS; the parser is very finicky.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO ? PUT ARM
AROUND WHAT (1 WORD)?
The player is now free to start kissing. FACE isn’t a recognized word. Andrea isn’t into going for the lips right away, but she’s fine with neck kissing. From there the player can move into blowing into her ear, and then she’s fine with kissing lips.
Any further steps mention it getting “cramped” and the idea here is to (without any real mention this even counts as a location) GO BACKSEAT followed by CALL ANDREA.
From here I’m not going to go into intricate detail on each step after. I’m unclear how fixed the walkthrough is and how much is simply “freestyle” choices. (At least some choices the HELP command comes back, at least.) The idea behind the game is to avoid messages like “pushing you away” eventually finally getting to use the rubber. I found it interesting how many different body parts were accounted for (and how easy it was to nonetheless run into an error parser message with an unrecognized part) but the parser made it very difficult to get any progress.
The Case at KAXL was a much better game, but that was a game where the action all clearly fell within the parameters of standard text adventure commands; here, the author was trying something relatively new. The game opened up — due to its nature — a wide potential list of actions, but only understood a fraction of them.
You could point at Crowther’s participation in a Tolkien-based D&D campaign and say nearly all adventures games are spawned from Tolkien. However, for direct attempts at adapting Tolkien, we’ve so far only had
Cracks of Doom based around the Mordor area at the end of Lord of the Rings.
Firienwood is a name reference only so doesn’t count. What does count is today’s game, Arkenstone, which has the Misty Mountains, Mount Gundabad, Mirkwood, Lake Town, Wilderland, and Lonely Mountain. What’s truly perplexing is how those are represented by a grand total of eight rooms.
Map from the Lord of the Rings movies, art by Daniel Reeve. Erebor on the right side of the map is Lonely Mountain, source of the river Running, occupied by Smaug the dragon. Mount Gundabad is in the upper left; that’s a hike!
The source of our minimalism today is the unmodified VIC-20, the same type of computer Victory Software dealt with. It comes from the book ZAP! POW! BOOM! Arcade Games for the VIC-20, written by Mark Ramshaw.
It was published by Interface Publications in the UK. The book was later merged with the spectacularly named Symphony for a Melancholy Computer by a different author (Tim Hartnell) to form the US version of ZAP! POW! BOOM! Arcade Games for the VIC-20.
We’re caring about Mark Ramshaw’s book as it included a game called Adventure which got re-dubbed Arkenstone upon its US debut. (I went with the easier-to-search-for name, at least I had an option this time!) I played what was technically the original version (download here) although it appears there is no difference between the two.
The code is short and consists of only one more page.
In order to cope with the tiny memory size of the VIC-20, Ramshaw does a very unusual trick with the parser. Each word is typed on a separate line, with ENTER pressed between, and the last word needs a period. So to pick up a spear, you type
pick
up
spear.
It’s exceedingly surreal to do this. We have experienced a separate-line parser with two words before (like with Chou’s Alien Adventure) but not more than two words, and never with the period mark convention. If you hit enter nine times the game says you are being “Too verbose” so it clearly is aspiring to understand long sentences.
The commands as given in the book are go or move, catch, skewer, fill. kick, pick, swing, inventory, listen, drop, and throw. Recover is a special command for claiming the Arkenstone after rescuing it.
The last part of the source code.
You are the “intrepid hero” and start out in South Mirkwood where there are trees and a bucket.
Your job is to make your way to Lonely Mountain where the dragon sleeps and nab the Arkenstone, the long lost treasure of the dwarves.
Regarding the amusingly compressed map, there is at least a little precedent for that (see, for example Caves of Olympus); here the idea is stretched to its limit as each step takes a matter of days. At least functionally you can still treat the rooms like they were all next to each other.
You might think, given the size of the map (and the fact there is nothing blocking your way) it ought to be possible to just saunter east three times, north once, and then nab the Arkenstone for victory. I did in fact do this once.
The problem is that it was very lucky: usually what happens at the start is the dragon wakes up and then hides the treasure if you wander into the dragon’s location while awake and without any defense, you die. So let’s ignore this as a bonus ending (STEAM ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: THE DWARVES HIRED A REAL BURGLAR) and figure out how to cope with the dragon.
It’s … not much more complicated. Just to the north there is a spear. You should start by going to pick it up (even if the dragon wakes up right away, you have time).
Then defeating the dragon is just a matter of using “skewer/dragon/with/spear” when you see him.
That works if the dragon is awake or asleep! Now you can again just go in and grab the Arkenstone and use “recover”.
You can do a little bit more: you can take a “cage” over at Mount Gundabad, take it to the Misty Mountains (which is south of the Wilderland for some reason) and catch an eagle. (!!) Then it can give hints. (!?!??)
2015 Print”The eagle says:”
2020 Print “What is best axe or spear?Why not quench the worm’s thirst”
2025 Print “There is something special in Mirkwood”
The axe is where the dragon as sleeping, and you can take it to Mirkwood to SWING AXE AT TREES
That was clever — some trees fell down
but other than that message the trees do nothing. And of course it is so simple to take the spear to the target why bother with any of that? I suspect this was a text adventure in progress that got tossed into print without smoothing out the rough edges.
Regarding Mark Ramshaw, who wrote the game, and Tim Hartnell, who wrote the VIC-20 book that combined with Ramshaw’s, the most complete information I’ve found on them is from a book they co-wrote in 1983, Getting Started on Your Commodore VIC-20. Tim is described as founder of the “British National ZX Users’ Club” and its magazine Interface — that is, his club did the publishing.
But what about Ramshaw? He is literally described as a “schoolboy” with “an active interest in VIC games”. This suggests to me he was a teen-aged author like many others we have had, who knew Hartnell from his computer club activities. Ramshaw kept his publishing connection and went on be a journalist for magazines in the UK such as PC Review.
Tom Sato, also known as Toshiyuki Sato, was a Japanese national whose interest in computers started as a child:
I watched the film of men landing on the moon, and I was fascinated by the computer in the film.
He moved to London at the age of 14, eventually going to college to study physics and astronomy while teaching himself programming. He went to work for Microsoft right out of college while also writing for various magazines, focused on the MSX computer (being a Microsoft product). His writings include a 1985 article on the history of MSX Basic and technical books on the platform.
A book Sato collaborated on; the front cover uses Toshiyuki and the back cover uses Tom. From the Internet Archive.
Reversing back in time back to around when he graduated college — 1982 — he kicked off his own company, Orchestrated Computing, later renamed to Program Direct. (Orchestrated Computing seems like a better name to me. At least it’s easier to search for!) He started with no company name at all, posting a classified ad in Popular Computing Weekly 5 August 1982:
Just selling a conversion of Star Trek with “extra asteroid storm and others”.
This is before the existence of the MSX, so he was working with the BBC Micro. The second package listed has an Adventure as the main program with — as a bonus — the programs INVADERS, PONTOON, and LUNARLANDER. The last three games have been lost, but Adventure was recently found on a C90 tape stuffed with other games (Lords of Time, Castle of Riddles, Bumble Bee, Planetoids, Cruncher, Danger UXB) and rescued in 2023.
Enter the DUNGEON at your peril but you have been warned: you are likely to get killed if you don’t use your imagination. Use your weapon, magic, food and treasure efficiently or else. Don’t enter the RANDOM MAZE or you’ll be shouting for help.
Despite the name being Adventure, this is not an adventure game; this is quite directly an RPG. It took enough work to confirm this I decided to plow ahead, but there are zero puzzles: this is mainly a game about fighting enemies in the right order relative to one’s stats, and making sure to eat enough food to rejuvenate.
The game at first appears to have a parser, and it took me a while to realize it was mostly only looking at the first one or two characters of what I was typing. I ended up checking the source code to find:
N/S/E/W/U/D = Directions
F = Fight
G = Get
I = Inventory
O = Open
T = Trade
Q = Quit
EA = Eat
DR = Drop
ST = Status
So if you type G for Get, it then asks another prompt what it is exactly you are getting; if you type GET DIAMOND the game will prompt what you mean to pick up because the entire text “ET DIAMOND” got ignored.
My struggle in picking up a CERAMIC TIGER.
ST, or STATUS, provides STRENGTH, CONSTITUTION, DEXTERITY, DEFENCE, WEALTH, and EXPERIENCE.
I’m not sure what the max is for Strength and Constitution, I would guess 255. All four stats including Dexterity and Defence both can get damaged by enemies; all four stats can be brought up by food (Meat is the best, giving +2 to Strength and +1 to Constitution).
Before showing off the map, and discussing how combat works, I should mention this is a branch of a Wizard’s Castle style game. (The original is from 1980; in the 80s I played the DOS version for many hours off some random public domain disk.) I’m not going to go into intricate detail as the CRPGAddict already has, but the general idea of this small mini-genre is having a small set of mini-floors (generally 8 by 8). These games generally give a “lamp” or some other method of seeing ahead so you don’t have to fight monsters if you don’t want to, and the strategy tends to be to soak up all the treasures possible, convert them into money to buy potions/level-ups for stats, then either go on a monster rampage after or just kill the small selected set of monsters needed to win the game.
Leygref’s Castle (1986), via Mobygames.
Now, the top floor of the map (there are three of them).
Again, 8 by 8. You start in the upper left. All blue squares are treasures, all red squares are monsters (some are randomly placed, some are not). Green represents a “merchant” where you can (T)rade and either sell treasures you’ve found or buy things like food and weapons. The easiest way to buy things is to simply go to the town in the upper right corner which has shops.
You start with 50 wealth so there’s really no reason not to buy the best weapon (mace) and shield right away.
The version I downloaded, by the way, has an error in line 830 checking if the player has a shield — you need one to fight. I just replaced the line with PRINT “”, putting an extra blank line at the start of fights. It looks like the line had a corruption in the dump.
In retrospect, after studying the code, I think OSCLIOSCLI represents two bytes, and that should be =0.
In addition to the weapon and shield you can get a KEY (for opening doors, it doesn’t get used up and it is cheap, again: just buy one), a CROSS, and a WAND. The latter two are for magic; I used one of the two once in the entire game.
The main difference between this game and a regular Wizard’s Castle clone is that it tries to describe all the rooms. Some of the descriptions are minimal, sometimes Sato has added slight touches.
Dwarves are the lowest form of enemy, only giving one experience point each. This is followed by goblins at 3 experience points and centipedes at 4.
Each combat starts with a monster description which may or may not suggest some strategy. I found the descriptions a nice touch, although of the different moves possible…
…most of them aren’t really needed. I did, upon fighting a difficult scorpion, try using Backwards to change the distance to the enemy hoping to reduce damage; you can then Throw from safety assuming you have multiple weapons. (If you throw with only one weapon, you get a game over: “You silly fool! You haven’t got anything to fight with”.)
However, other than the very early fights I found no difficulty just plowing through with Hitting everything with my mace. I think there’s the vague promise of a system here but it falls apart almost immediately as the player gets experience points. Every 10 experience points gives the player a “level” (not mentioned in the text, but I poked at the source code to check) and after about four levels as long as the player keeps some food around they’ll generally be safe.
An early combat where I died. You might notice A is not on the list of commands. I was typing ATTACK without realizing how I was supposed to attack. I’m pretty sure this game came with instructions; after enough times or realizing I was causing no damage, I hit the source code in order to get the full list of valid moves.
This game has the problem a lot of Wizard’s Castle clones do: you can play it far too safe. Most enemies do not attack on sight (the scorpion, dragon, and troll do, I didn’t find any others). So you can wander and hoover vast amounts of treasure, trading it in for cash, and buying meat. You can then eat vast quantities of meat to pump your Strength and Constitution up to high levels and stomp any enemies afterwards.
There’s exactly one spot with a trap I found (a pit) and otherwise it’s just mundane mapping, with the occasional one-way exit.
Yes, there are gaps — my map is likely incomplete. I managed to win without finishing.
By “win” I mean there does not seem to be an end condition, but looking at the rankings the top is GRANDMASTER where you attain a wealth of 450 and experience points of 250. The wealth of 450 turns out to be mostly trivial (amusingly, you can get a rank of GREEDY COWARD by getting lots of treasure but killing almost nothing).
Getting 250 experience points did require trying to mop up everything I found. This includes the only “puzzle fight” against a ghost, where the text specifies physical attacks won’t work.
20 experience points is fairly substantial; killing a DRAGON only gives 10.
The dragon is only interesting as being one of the few enemies that forces a fight, rather than just letting you walk by.
The big hunt monster is to find T-Rexes. I found two of them and each gave 70 experience points. They were just as easy as any of the other enemies (by that point, I had eaten enough meat to even make a competitive eating champ turn away in disgust).
Once I was over the thresholds (which I should emphasize I only learned about by checking source code) I typed Q to quit the game and arrive at victory.
The author typing in room descriptions did give this a little more interest than your standard WizCastleLike, and the map shows “sections” with structures that pass over to multiple rooms. For example, the third floor has a “Chamber of Horrors” you can fall into (the only trap) and a one-way exit from the Chamber leads to a Library. My Library had one of the T-Rex fights in it. (I don’t know if was fixed or random.)
However, there’s enough spelling and map errors that it throws off the enjoyment. One of the treasures is a SILVER FULTE; another unfortunate typo is arrived at by dropping a letter from JEWELRY. There were many spots with a “door” that didn’t exist, or a “brick wall” that nonetheless could be walked through (and was clearly not intended as an illusion). I just had to start ignoring what the rooms said about available exits and try them.
The “random maze” the ad copy warned us about. You can get here by moving to the third floor, then going up to the second floor in a “gap” which is otherwise unreachable. Unfortunately, all this room seems to do is send you to a random spot on one of the three floors.
I enjoyed the original Wizard’s Castle near the beginning, before I realized the power-strat was to avoid monsters altogether; in that game, you are forced into fights often if you aren’t careful. In this game, the monsters are so passive it becomes blatantly obvious you aren’t supposed to fight them until you’re ready, so while the author attempted to add some “crunchy” parts like distance, it fails to sustain interest as a system.
I appreciate the attempt at adding some room flavor; it seems to have been Sato’s attempt to modify and enhance the original Wizard’s Castle just like his version of Star Trek added asteroids and a secret weapon. Given the very recent rescue off an obscure tape, I doubt it made for many sales. Just like The Desecration from last time, maybe the most lasting effect of the game was to give Tom Sato business experience; at least that’s his own claim:
That experience taught me about the process of developing a program and commercializing it.
Tom Sato (left) pictured with his long-time business partner Tetsuro Eto (right). Source.
Soon after Sato wrote the MSX book on the top of this post, he was offered a transfer to work for Microsoft Japan, and was the product manager there for Windows 2.0 and 3.0. Eventually Sato left Microsoft and found his way to Silicon Valley; he now works on connecting companies in Japan with companies in the US.
I did get a victory screen, and I am surprised because I thought the whole game was going to collapse in a mess of bugs before I got there. I had Dunmark Pykro in my inventory when I won the game.
Continuing directly from last time, I had a robot guard where I was unclear what to do. Part my of issue is that using OPEN on the PURSE gives an error, and I had already been able to nab the food from the grocery store; combining the two facts, I assumed the purse was being implicitly used somehow. No: the purse is opened by using LOOK on it, at which point you find some GOLD. You can then GIVE GOLD which is effective on the guard, and even the main character is confused that the puzzle solution worked.
This opens up a new section of the game.
To the east of the guard is a “sewer entrance” and a “thiefs lair” and as far as I can tell you never get your objects stolen so the lair is just for color.
This might genuinely just be for atmosphere.
To the north of the sewer (… not even going to bother with the forward/backwards/left/right thing anymore …) there is an armory with a robot de-activator. You can cart the de-activator back over to where the ROBOT DOUBLE was and use it to fry the robot, leaving behind a robot hand.
Behind the fried robot there is a universal communicator, which you can take over to the alien — the one that was our informant but we couldn’t understand — to get the password for the keypad.
If you go back to the start which had a side entrance with a keyboard, trying to use the password just gets you tossed into jail.
I should give some attention to jail, as it is entirely optional — you just avoid anything that gets you caught — but it does something clever. The first time you’re caught, you end up in a “low security” cell where you can CUT MATTRESS (how? don’t know) and reveal some SPRINGS, then use the springs to PICK LOCK and escape. This deposits you at the LOCKERS and you can LOOK LOCKERS to retrieve all your stuff you had in your inventory. (This includes, still in my case, a TECH GUN, ROBOT GUARDS, ALARM, and SECRETARY. This will become important later.)
If you get caught again (in addition to the door trap, typing SLEEP will get you picked up) you land in a medium-security cell. This time there are WALLS you can look at to find a BOLT, and USE BOLT will free you (it is unclear what is being done with the bolt, but I assume it’s PICK LOCK again except there’s no lock object to refer to).
If you get caught yet again you land in a high-security cell, which you can escape with the power of your mind via THINK. The text clues it pretty well (I had also made my verb list by now and I knew THINK was on it).
Get caught a fourth time and you die. The “upgraded accommodation” trick I ended up finding the best part of the game (there’s shades of a similar trick in Legend of Kyrandia 3 but it is still uncommon).
Returning back to the action: the password needs to get stored under our hat for now, and fortunately there’s still another route to go, as heading east from the sewers will reach a Urr-Beast. The Beast blocks exits to the north and east but you can still go south to find a BEAST KEEPERS ROOM.
The side room has a GROOMING KIT; taking it back north, you can GROOM BEAST and it will purr happily and go to sleep in the corner. This opens access to a data library with a MANUAL…
There’s a MAGTAPE also that can’t be referred to. This game has a nasty tendency to put objects in the room description that don’t exist with respect to the parser.
…and the manual can be read in order to learn operation of a ANTI-ASSASSIN COMPUTER and shut it down.
I never found out what grisly death this prevents.
Back at the guard which was bribed with gold, there’s an exit to the west (I had the accidental fortune of finding it after I finished all the events above). There’s a palm scanner and you can use the robot hand from the double in order to activate it.
Now comes the hardest of the three minigames, as after you cross the bridge over the spikes you get swarmed with droids. They appear on all sides, and you move with the keys right, left, A (up), Z (down), with space for shooting.
This game is genuinely original. It feels somewhat like Solar Fox as far as flying around a middle space section and avoiding things from the side, but I can’t think of an exact equivalent. You’re still getting shot at just like the previous mini-game and once again you have to defeat all the enemies twice.
This was by far the hardest of the three mini-games due to having to keep track of all four directions. If you hit a wall you bounce, so there’s no wrecking on the sides, but it is very easy to keep trapped with no way out by a rogue bullet. It was possible to be trapped in the first mini-game but only at the very start with the initial volley of bullets all coming at the same time.
You can afford to get hit twice, and there’s colorful narrative text going along with the hit. This is another fairly novel idea but it gets tiresome when you are playing the arcade game on repeat, which you will be unless you make liberal use of save states.
Moving on to the third part of the game, it goes fairly linearly. First, there’s some toxic gas (wearing the breathing apparatus works to get through).
This is followed by a uniform storage closet.
You need to wear a uniform, as well as nab the makeup kit from the lockers and use that as well, so you appear like one of the regular guards. This lets you get past a security checkpoint…
…and a secretary (which our protagonist wants to skeevily hit on, 1930s noir style).
Just walking past takes you to a transport tube, where there’s another keypad. This time you can type the password (PYKRO RULES) without getting caught.
Finally our hero reaches the Dunmark Pykro’s office, and things go very strange indeed both at the reality level and at the game-bug level.
The cut-off part of the text says he’s SURE ACTING KINDA’ KINKY. I have no idea what the evil business overlord gave us, because it never appeared in the room or in my inventory. In fact, Dunmark Pykro isn’t in the room at all. (I can at least reassure you that no WHIP object exists in the game.)
Baffled and strongly suspecting the game might be unfinishable, I tried going LEFT and found myself back at a steel door with another keypad. Trying to use the password again got me caught and tossed into jail (I hadn’t burned all three iterations on this save file) so I broke out and looked over every location I visited in case something new had happened. Indeed:
That’s back at the beast keeper place, where there was also a newly-added pile of junk. The Dunmark Pykro object somehow got teleported over here, and furthermore, I was able to TAKE him and carry him in inventory the rest of the game.
Heading back to the steel door, you can just ignore it and move on to find an intersection. Off in one direction is a SMALL ARMORY with a spacesuit…
…and in the other is a spacecraft you can escape with.
Again, Pykro was still in inventory when I did LAUNCH. I did try to KILL PYKRO but the game said
IT DIDN’T WORK FOR SOME REASON.(!?)
and no other verb from my big list had any effect at all. It doesn’t matter because launching the spacecraft leads to the third mini-game, followed by victory.
Almost identical to the first mini-game, but the two rows of ships are moving in opposite directions and you’re shooting from the bottom.
As before, the ships move faster when there are less on the screen. Unlike before, you need to beat the screen four times — that is, after everything is killed, it resets and you have to do it again — before reaching victory.
Adventurecade #2 coming soon, eh?
Let’s check out of this by asking the question: why did the company disappear? First of all, as you can probably tell, the quality was wobbly; despite some clever moments, I would take any of the Sierra On-Line games over this one. The mini-games were not fun to play and tilted annoyingly hard, especially given the screen repeats. I will give the game the benefit of the doubt as far as the bugs go; like most Apple II games, this one needed to be “cracked” to be played due to copy protection, and it is possible something broke which caused a SECRETARY to show up in the player’s inventory immediately upon finishing the first mini-game.
Still, for Apple II circa 1982, it had a fighting chance in the market, especially because the graphics genuinely hovered around “decent”; all the people were clearly of the squished-head Sierra variety, but the environmental graphics shows some genuine artistic thought.
Mind you, even Sierra was struggling to sell their graphics starting in 1983 (when The Desecration finally hit general distribution) so possibly it was a game made a little too late.
Additionally, the Mind Games duo (Greg Segall and Gil Beyda) went entirely on their own: they turned down distributors at Applefest (which was, in retrospect, a mistake). A September 1983 profile from the magazine L’Ordinateur individuel notes they have “d’entreprise bien américain” and how it was admirable that they did everything up to and including distribution to retailers. The article claims it is “un exemple à suivre” (“an example to follow”) but I suspect low sales led to their downfall. I have never seen a copy of this game for sale so it is likely quite rare.
In my comments, Rob had found a Japanese article from 1979 involving a visit to Los Angeles and their computer stores. This picture is from Computers Are Fun in central LA, where Gil Beyda was working. The article notes the store mostly specialized in Apple II products but had trouble making their rent of $400 a month. (Image assistance from eientei and ftb1979.)
Maybe it was good for the experience. While I don’t know about Greg Segall, Gil Beyda at least went on to a successful career in technology and now works as a venture capitalist.
Coming up: Some small non-sci-fi games, just for a change of pace, including another early Tolkien game.
When I wrote about Dragon’s Keep, I discussed an event called Applefest that happened in December of 1982. (If you haven’t read that post, I recommend reading it before this one.) The company Sunnyside Soft met Ken and Roberta Williams there, leading to Sierra buying them out and Al Lowe eventually going on to write the Leisure Suit Larry series.
There was another software company at Applefest I’d like to discuss today, one rather less famous: Mind Games. It’s completely understandable if you haven’t heard of them, because they only published one game.
The Softline interview indicates that Segall and Beyda had met 8 years before (aged 11) at a Los Angeles Boy Scout troop; both were up for a “promotion” to a troop rank but the two decided to share the position rather than compete for it. They consequently became friends.
They joined the Beverly Hills computer club and did pranks with the DEC-1170 system (as the interview notes, it was one of the only high schools in the country with such a computer); they followed this with computer jobs at early ages, as Beyda got a job at a computer store at 15 (leading to contacts and consulting work on educational software) while Segall got a job at 14 working for Farmers Insurance (also helping Beyda with the consulting).
From Wikipedia.
In 1981 they got the urge to write a game. They wanted something “more complex” than a two-word parser while avoiding the “rigid conventions of the traditional adventure”. Quoting Segall:
Forget this North, South, East, West stuff; I just wanna go through the door!
They wanted multiple responses to commands that have “nothing to do with the adventure” and writing “like a pulp thriller”. Then as a “hook” they decided the game should be “the first adventure to have serious arcade-game levels”. Quoting Segall directly again:
You don’t want to do the obvious rip-offs — walk into an arcade and see what’s hot and copy it — but take an idea, or several ideas, and make a twist on them. So we put arcade games inside an adventure.
It started with Segall working on plot and design and Beyda doing the programming, but they ended up sometimes swapping responsibilities. The process took 11 months working out of their garage, and then they tried shopping it around to distributors with no takers. They decided to pool the rest of their money to get a booth at Applefest.
At Applefest there’s a story which intercrosses with the Dragon’s Keep one. Mind Games had “distributors” ask for copies of the game, who supposedly were told:
You sent back the one we gave you.
Going back to Dragon’s Keep, and the quote from Hackers about Ken Williams:
Ken tried to throw himself into the spirit of the show, and took Roberta, looking chic in designer jeans, high boots, and a black beret, on a quick tour of the displays. Ken was a natural schmoozer, and at almost every booth he was recognized and greeted warmly. He asked about half a dozen young programmers to come up to Oakhurst and get rich hacking for On-Line.
The adventure-game portions of The Desecration have a strong resemblance to Sierra in visual look. Given the prominence of Sierra in California, and the fact they recruited Sunnyside because of Dragon’s Keep being close in look to Sierra products, it seems almost guaranteed Mind Games was one of the companies that Ken Williams talked to; the exact “you sent back the one we gave you” line may have been spoken directly to him.
Mind Games has been Apple-oriented up to this point, but the company is now looking into Atari and Commodore systems to “see what they can be used for.”
“Programmers are coming to us, now. We give them their freedom because we want them to have the same freedom to create that we had.”
I’m not clear what caused this ambition to unravel, but this game is the only evidence I found of Mind Games publishing anything. Ads starting showing up in 1983.
We’ve seen mini-games before, but the ones here genuinely are more extensive than previous ones; the game is fully half arcade and half adventure. (The closest we’ve seen to that is Mad Martha from the UK, created roughly the same time as The Desecration.) The adventure and arcade sections alternate.
Our job is, according to the game, INTERGALACTIC ASSASSIN. Our assignment is to go to Pykron 9, part of the Pykro Corp. Mining Empire, and kill the chairman, Dunmark Pykro, as he has been “KNOWN TO HAVE AN EYE FOR EASY EXPANSION OF HIS CORPORATE EMPIRE.” Some of his “targets” have pooled money together to hire you for “your usual fee” of 10,000 galactic sovereigns.
Action continues directly after receiving the message.
The interview was fussy about games using NORTH, SOUTH, etc. for navigation, so as exact equivalents this game uses RIGHT, LEFT, FORWARDS, BACKWARDS (abbreviated to R, L, F, B). We’ve had authors thinking “but why compass directions” all the way back to Empire of the Over-Mind and Battlestar. As this game maps them as exact equivalents — you don’t have “relative directions” where entering a room from the opposite side means “forwards” is now “backwards” and so forth — I mentally just thought of them as the usual N/S/E/W.
The TRANSPORTER ROOM mentions transporter controls but as far as I can tell there is no way to examine them or refer to them other than KICK CONTROLS. This is equivalent to activating the transporter. Not a great start.
The opening is relatively short — you can make your way over to a ship, but when you try to sneak it you get caught and tossed in a jail.
It’s a laser door, there’s a mirror, and you can USE MIRROR to get out.
There’s a cell where the main character wonders if he should free the locked-up alien. This is what happens if you try.
LAUNCH SHIP is the right action to take off, leading to the arcade game. Before going there, I should point out two things:
a.) As I already alluded to, the parser is miserable; it seems to be completely not only location-bespoke but also looking for exact phrases. That is, it isn’t using a world-model as opposed to just hand-coding each individual scene; you can, for example, go back in the cell, and the mirror is back to where it was.
b.) The authors seem to have written their room descriptions with a particular sequence in mind, as you can turn south (I mean, “backwards”) instead of going straight to the field to find the cell area, and the description implies you are in the middle of making your escape from the cell (when you haven’t been thrown in yet).
Onto the arcade game!
This is, straightforwardly, horizontal Space Invaders. (So much about avoiding taking actual games from the arcade.) The screen above shows one of the vehicles already vaporized; you drop bombs and they shoot up at you while moving left to right. The start is the hardest as the screen is completely filled with projectiles, and as more enemies die while they move faster, there are gaps that you can sneak your spacecraft between. (If you’re playing on keyboard, note you can double-press to scoot over faster. I think the original intended control was paddle.) Here’s Highretrogamelord attempting to get through:
Note that both this walkthrough and the one from AppleAdventures give up at this mini-game, and both imply they somehow give a complete walkthrough of the adventure portion.
You have to not only kill all the enemies once, but twice. It is definitely a pain but it is possible to get a rhythm in after surviving the initial volley. You can die twice and still continue before hitting a game over.
Why did both video walkthroughs cut off there assuming they had seen the entire game? Well, it starts with a menu where you can choose the three mini-games to play individually. I’m guessing they thought there were four discrete sections, adventure-arcade-arcade-arcade, and not an alternating arrangement where if you pick “adventure” you get the “full game” with the arcade games interspersed in a longer experience.
Even I originally thought this might be four separate games where the adventure game is only at the start.
So with the enemies defeated, we can move on to the Dome City wherein our target awaits.
I added the second shot here to show off more of the writing, where they were aiming for “pulp”. It has the feel and quality of written-by-teenager but I appreciate the effort in giving the main character some attitude, which was not common in 1982.
Our inventory has an I.D. card for getting into the dome, but also, weirdly, a TECH GUN, SECRETARY, ALARM, AND ROBOT PATROL. I assume that’s a bug (it may be a cracking-the-disk bug rather than an “authentic” bug).
Heading down from here leads to a STEEL DOOR with a keyboard which I don’t have a password for yet. However, ahead there are doors where the I.D. card can be used to enter the main complex.
To the left (west, whatever), there’s a person with a “purse” you can steal in order to get some food from a supermarket…
…a breathing apparatus lying about a storage room…
…and PYKRO’S ROBOT DOUBLE. I am unable to interact with it in any way.
To the right (east) is a sleeping police officer and some lockers, which are describing as holding STUFF THAT BELONGS TO THE INMATES. Again, the game’s writing assumes a particular sequence, as it says I BET MY STUFF IS IN HERE SOMEWHERE.
To become an inmate, you go back to the main doors and head forward (north). There is a INFORMANT MEETING PLACE but this person is not the correct informant, so if you try to SMILE as the message at the start of the game suggests, you get arrested.
No progress here, and no luck applying any verbs to the mattress.
If you bypass the first “informant” and head north, there’s a second one talking in an alien language. That’s the real informant, and if you SMILE you get some KEYS.
Past that is a robot guard, and it implies there’s something past the guard, but I have (again) yet to get any verb I’ve tried so far to work.
Almost nostalgic for that dodgy Dark Star parser after playing this for a while. I’ll still keep persisting, for if nothing else, two adventure-walkthrough-makers have already made an attempt and fallen.
Bomb #20: The only thing that exists is myself. Sgt. Pinback: Snap out of it, bomb. Bomb #20: In the beginning there was darkness. And the darkness was without form and void. Sgt. Pinback: Umm. What the hell is he talking about? Bomb? Bomb #20: And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness and I saw that I was alone. Sgt. Pinback: Hey…..bomb? Bomb #20: Let there be light. (Explodes.)
— From the ending of the movie Dark Star (1974)
There’s what might be a Dark Star movie reference in the game; I know have a couple of fans watching. It’s hard to tell, because it’s mashed up with the Blake’s 7 reference.
First, a theoretical side tangent. Text adventures have tended to always have diegetic and non-diegetic commands; diegetic commands are ones that translate to something the avatar does in the world, while non-diegetic commands involve affecting the game program itself: SAVE, RESTORE, QUIT, and so forth. Some games blur the difference (Quondam infamously having the save feature not work in the first part of the game because the player gets beaten up by mobsters) but the general ramification is the player does not reach across the aisle unless some alteration to the program state is needed, and furthermore, it is expected by the player there won’t be some diegetic effect to a non-diegetic command. (The big issue games from this era have is advancing time even upon saving or loading a game.)
HELP has always been an oddball between the two groups; Crowther/Woods adventure clearly is giving a non-diegetic explanation of the game’s setup…
I know of places, actions, and things. Most of my vocabulary describes places and is used to move you there. To move, try words like forest, building, downstream, enter, east, west, north, south, up, or down. I know about a few special objects, like a black rod hidden in the cave.
…but Fortress at Times-End had HELP be the necessary starting command of the game, as for some reason it caused a drawbridge to open. Between the two we’ve had the command sometimes give a piece of information that is absolutely essentially to playing the game (a parser command that is impossible to guess, for instance).
Dark Star turns out to fall in that category, because pressing the buttons at the self destruct area is wrong. The game wants the code formatted in a very specific way, one that can only be worked out via typing HELP.
ENTER GREEN/YELLOW/BLUE AS’CODE GYB’
This is slightly cheeky not only in requiring a command that might make a player feel like they were giving up any kind of personal “no hints challenge” but also the three button colors are green, yellow, and red so the combination doesn’t make sense.
There’s only six combinations so it is easy to simply guess, but there is a way of getting the information otherwise. Back at the ORAC you can type CODE.
Why the player would even know this syntax works is unknown. (I just got it later from the source code.) Also, as shown, it doesn’t actually work: if you type HELP the game lets you know ORAC needs you to be polite, so the correct command is CODE PLEASE.
The Orac was a bit messy to converse with in Blake’s 7, so this could simply be a reference to that, but the actual refusal followed by the “leave me alone” feels more along the lines of talking to Bomb 20 in Dark Star. I’m still going to say the reference is accidental, but I’m going to leave the surfing picture anyway just for fun.
With the self-destruct stopped, the game enters a new phase, the “second mission”. (That means my mucking about the planets was “virtual branching” — I got to see ahead before figuring out the “puzzle” of realizing the HELP command was being mildly abused.)
Another timer! It turns out the complication is not from the life support timer but the fact the space suit (which you need to wear during all the planetary visits) starts running out of oxygen.
Back at planet THREE, there was an ORB, a HOOK, a ROCK, and a KEY.
The ORB simply blows up if you try to teleport it away, so that’s clearly a red herring, but out of the other three items only one of them is useful. You can take the HOOK over to the “green planet” with the fishing, nab the rope and pole, and CATCH FISH. However, you just get a fish, and that’s it. It does nothing. This is a red herring on the level of Ferret, letting you actually solve a puzzle but it turns out to be completely the wrong thing to do.
I was also thinking I might need to use the shininess of the coin as a lure, but that’s not necessary.
No, the item you need is a KEY, which I’ll show off in a moment. You also need to get the box over to the cave and nab the stalactite (as I showed off before) and do the SHOOT STALACTITE (as I also showed off before). SHOOT incidentally doesn’t even bother to check what noun you use, so the only reason I knew for sure it was applying to the stalactite was the brokenness of the parser.
For whatever reason, if you step to the cliff one step to the east and do the SHOOT over there, the dissolving ice will make some vapor and get TWO CRYSTALS from the rockface. I don’t think there’s a clue to this other than it seems like the command ought to do something.
This, plus the KEY, are what’s needed to win the game. Flying back to the Dark Star, I went back to the chamber with two spots missing on a cube. There I had an epic hour-long struggle with the parser.
The two commands that work — which I eventually had to pull straight out of the source code — are REPLACE CRYSTALS and COMPLETE CUBE. For “complete”, I suppose that makes sense, but this is the first and will probably be the last time I’ve ever seen that verb in an adventure game. For “replace”, the crystals go in empty spaces — we’re not replacing anything! I tried PLACE CRYSTALS as one of my first attempts with no joy.
However, even with the right command, I was stopped by a “glass dome”. You cannot refer to either the GLASS or DOME so I tried taking over the heavy stone from the crater planet and using it for smashing purposes, but I just got gnarly default messages.
I finally realized the LOCK just outside did not correspond to the ID card door as I previously assumed, but rather was its own independent thing. Typing USE KEY (more fun with the parser!) will cause, the game reports, nothing to happen, but we’ve seen that trick already.
The key-use opened up the dome, so now it is possible to COMPLETE CUBE.
This suggests either Mexican Adventure was written earlier or the games were made together. Haunted House also references Mexican Adventure. That’s the one game from the Sharpsoft Class of ’82 that I haven’t reached yet, but it’ll have to wait for another time, because I need a breather from their particularly ornery parser…
…and possibly cope with another ornery parser, as coming up: we’re staying with science fiction and visiting an unusual Apple II graphical game, a deep enough cut it did not make my 1982 list.
I’m in the curious position of figuring out how to fuel the starfighter and visit other planets, but still with the Dark Star self-destruct timer ticking down. I don’t even know if stopping the self-destruct is the end of the game or you get missions after. There’s three structural possibilities for what’s going on:
a.) I’m “looking ahead”, like how Burglar’s Adventure lets you keep playing after setting off an alarm to see what’s coming, even though the game is already lost. This can help understand what some earlier objects in the game might be for and/or help get a notion of what kind of patterns the game follows (for example, how many items are red herrings?). This idea really could use a name. “Virtual plot branching” maybe?
b.) The timer is incredibly tight and you’re genuinely supposed to fly off to get resources before coming back and stopping the self-destruct sequence.
c.) This is a Ferret-style game, where you clearly and intentionally have to go murder your virtual selves finding out some information which will then get applied back in the “main plot”. There’s no realistic way your main character could learn that information other than referring to things learned from their doomed-to-death clones. This is like if in the game Outer Worlds, instead of there being a time loop, your character just dies over and over and you somehow happen to know the information from your dead selves; that is, it is functionally identical to a time loop, but the game-world ramifications are grislier.
I’ve been keeping an eye out for any references to the movie Dark Star (1974) but other than the name of the game I haven’t spotted any. It’s a title that easily could be made independently. The Dark Star in this game is a space station, not a ship, and I wouldn’t call the exploding a movie reference unless we start talking to a bomb. Image via a video about the Dark Star miniature work.
Continuing from last time, I was able to grab: ID CARD, CHART (mentioning “DILUS DC”), TEA STRAINER, SPACESUIT, METAL SUIT (radiation protection), GREEN SUIT, COMPASS, DETECTOR (of radiation), BOX (polystyrene, trying to open it says “it’s not that easy”), PHASER, COIN (for a pinball table).
For open problems, other than the mysterious box (the one thing I’ll resolve later), there’s an ORAC computer that might be a red herring, there’s an alien in the vent (you’d think the phaser works, but it is rigged to not be able to fire while in the space station), two suspicious “blank walls” (again the phaser would be nice to use, but alas), a crystal cube “without two blocks” in the engine room, and three buttons (yellow, red, green) that supposedly disable the self-destruct sequence. Trying to press any of the three buttons is rebuffed by the game.
PRESS YELLOW: I DON’T SEE THE POINT IN THAT!
PRESS RED: IT WON’T WORK!
PRESS GREEN: I DON’T SEE THE POINT IN THAT!
I gather, given the differing error messages, that red is the first button in the combination, but something is stopping the PRESS. Since the crystal cube is in the same room, I suspect fixing the crystal cube is the hang-up.
Returning back to the room with the starfighter, there’s a “TAP” and a “HOSEPIPE”, and turning the tap causes fuel to flow out of the hose.
The right command here is tricky to find; if you try to take off with starfighter the game says it needs REFUELING, and that word specifically needs to be used here: REFUEL STARFIGHTER. Unfortunately if you try to then take off it doesn’t work:
(I’m starting to imagine, plot-wise, that we did an “emergency long distance teleport” over to the bridge of the Dark Star when contact was lost, and it’s such a difficult/dangerous procedure only one person could be sent. That explains why we aren’t familiar with what the buttons on the bridge do, and also suggests some lore questions: What happened to the crew? Why was the fuel sabotaged? Why is the crystal cube broken? Why did the self-destruct sequence start? Where did the alien come from?)
Going back out and checking the fuel, you see it is LUMPY. The TEA STRAINER works to fix this (!!) by typing STRAIN FUEL. Doing REFUEL STARFIGHTER with the fix now allows you to take off.
The procedure (given on a note earlier, combined with information from a chart) is to set COURSE DILUS and then type DRIVE.
This changes the starfighter’s location, closes the exit “down” (to the Dark Star) and opens an exit south, to a “hold”.
The belt is a GRAVITY COMPENSATOR BELT and the bracelet allows for teleportation. You can then hop in the alcove and find five buttons corresponding to the three planets in the viewscreen. And yes, those numbers don’t match, so PRESS FOUR and PRESS FIVE result in an unfortunate demise:
As an aside, this is where Rob was getting stuck and thought the code needed changing in order to introduce the digits 1 through 5, as the buttons are described that way. PRESS 1, PRESS 2, etc. previously didn’t work at all because the game doesn’t even let you push the actual buttons. Quoting Rob:
When I originally got to that area, I naturally assumed that, since the game says “the buttons are numbered 1-5” that you had to use the numerals. When it became obvious that you couldn’t, I tried typing them out but the game kept responding “nothing happened!”. Since not being able to enter numerals was clearly a bug, I immediately reported it.
This is not the first and certainly will not be the last bit of early-80s text adventure jank that gets mistaken for a bug. (Certainly by modern standards it is a bug — why would you mismatch display and input like that?)
With fairly high efficiency (I’m off by 1 or 2) I was able to get to the alcove safely with everything worn (space suit, bracelet, belt) in 27 moves.
Given the space station explodes at 50, this does not seem like enough time to do everything and come back. For example, here’s the map upon pressing THREE:
It’s just a straightforward grid, exploring a crater.
In addition to the KEY from the center there’s a HOOK (“fishing hook”), ORB (“made out of an unknown element”), and STONE (“heavy”) lying out in the open.
Picking up all three items and returning to the start (at the “monolith” that allows teleportation) takes 17 turns. Given the 27 moves at start (let’s say 25 with perfection and no typos, and yes making a typo counts as a move) that’s 42 moves used up already on only one teleport destination. Even if it turns out one or more of the items are red herrings, I think option b (explore planets, then rush back to stop the self-destruct) it starting to seem unlikely.
Jumping over to planet ONE, it is just two rooms (so far):
The stalactite might make a tempting phaser target, but shooting it is a bad idea:
Nabbing the phaser from the Dark Star takes even more extra moves, but given it doesn’t work on the space station, it seems necessary. However, we have had plenty of games before where weapons are a red herring.
You can try to take it but the game says you need an “INSULATED CONTAINER”. This turns out to be the BOX from the Dark Star, but taking it results in yet more moves being wasted.
TWO leads to a “green planet”, which is again small.
The LONG STICK at the opening room is described as “bamboo”. The pool to the west has FISH, and if you try to CATCH FISH the game says you need a hook. If you bring the hook over from the crater it turns out you’re still missing something.
If it turns out you then also need a pole after finding tackle, the bamboo one probably qualifies.
To the north there are three “cliff” rooms with ROCKFACE objects (“crystalline”). Trying to CLIMB (even while holding the rope, or dropping it in the room) is rebuffed.
Trying to SHOOT ROCKFACE (with the phaser) gives the response
YOU DO NOT HAVE THE STALACTITE!
and bringing the stalactite along gives this screen:
As efficient as possible getting to this screen. Right after this the Dark Star explodes.
It’s hard to experiment with the planets because the background timer keeps going off quickly; while it is still very faintly possible the player is just supposed to move very fast, I can’t imagine doing all the steps to make a fishing pole and do whatever it is the stalactite needs and grabbing at least the hook from the crater and still be under fifty.
I suppose playing this game is a little like talking Bomb 20 out of exploding, but only by coincidence.
Next time I’m going to take another stab at the Dark Star itself, as I get the nagging feeling it’s the bespoke-command parser that’s really tripping me up here (am I even pressing the buttons on the self-destruct control in the right way?)
What happens if you try to skip getting the space suit before visiting planet ONE.
As the links above imply, we’ve played two of them, and have two more to go. I’m still unclear if these were listed in the order they were written or not. Having played Dark Star a little, I can say the parser feels better than Haunted House but worse than Secret Kingdom. However, that’s not really proving anything, and it could even be the case (given we’re dealing with two different authors) they were developing games in an overlapping way.
Both A.J. Josey and Geoff Clark remain mysteriously resistant to my attempts to find them even as references in computer magazines. The closest I found was that there was a person named Geoff Clark who worked as a camera supervisor on some Classic Doctor Who episodes; it would be lovely to find out it was the same person (especially as I know one of the readers of this blog also worked as a camera supervisor for Doctor Who) but there’s absolutely no evidence for that and there’s enough Geoff Clarks out there I can’t call it anything more than coincidence.
I didn’t find much else on Sharpsoft either other than a profile of Michael Opacic who wrote them word processor, spreadsheet, and database software, and “sold full rights — no royalties” with “the attitude that a bird in the hand is worth several in the bush.” A different contract paid out 15% royalties so the company was clearly giving both options; I still have no names associated with the founder or founders.
I originally had this game farther down on my list, due to a technical issue commenter Rob discovered; while you are required to type numerical digits later in the game, the program (in the MZ-700 format we have) doesn’t let you. It is literally impossible to win without modifying the source code.
What’s happening here is that the game is restricting what the player types to certain ASCII codes. The ASCII code for “0” is 48, and the code for “A” is 65. The first line restricts input to letter characters (anything less than 65 in ASCII is left out), leaving out the needed digits. By changing the value to 48, “0” through “9” are now included.
While it certainly is possible for a unfinishable game to hit in the 80s for no particular reason at all, in this case the game was originally written for MZ-80A before getting moved to the MZ-700. While this more or less just adds color, I could easily see a change like the bug above also slipping in.
The game starts with music, which I’ve dropped a video of below.
Despite the Star Wars theme, the game feels (so far) like an amalgam of Star Trek and Alien. You’re in the Dark Star ship and you are the only one aboard (except for, as you’ll see later, an alien); the closest aspect to Star Wars is a “starfighter” that’s on board, but maybe that gets later to shoot down TIE Fighters so suddenly the theme will be appropriate again.
The most interesting part of the instructions is the notice that this game has no score as it is “mission” based and “you either make it or you don’t!!”
You start in the control room of the Dark Star. There’s no options other than to SIT DOWN. That alone took a bit of time to work out. The command SIT is bespoke and only works in this room in this context (that is, somewhere it is hard-coded to check for “SIT DOWN” as a phrase rather than the command SIT being considered a verb on its own). It (and some other commands) evaded my verb list:
The evasion can be pretty bad; just typing SIT alone gives the message I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN BY THE COMMAND ‘SIT’, which suggests this is entirely the wrong thing to be typing; SIT SEAT gets equal confusion, and the parser doesn’t even let you type SIT ON SEAT (it will stop you from putting in a space after a second word — the same kind of hard enforcement that led to the bug where numerals couldn’t be typed in).
Sitting down successfully results in a blank screen, a red button and a blue button. Pressing either button just states NOTHING HAPPENS! which is slightly frustating because something happens in both cases. With the blue button, it turns the screen on and reveals the player’s mission: the ship is about to blow up and the self-destruct needs to be de-activated.
You starts with a WATCH in case you need to check how long until death. The clock is ticking even before you’ve seen the message, so my first game through I had the amusing scene of flailing wildly trying to get into a seat, baffling over buttons that do nothing, reading the destruction message, and dying shortly after.
The red button invisibly opens an exit to the north, where you can find a map which gives the overall ship layout in glorious ASCII.
Before going on to explore the ship, I want to point out how incredibly odd the opening is in a meta-sense. Surely if we’re here, and we’re the only one, we’re meant to be here — that is, the avatar ought to already know the function of the red button and blue button, so saying that nothing happens is doubly curious? In 1982, the amnesia trick still hasn’t been rolled in much yet to cure player-vs-avatar-knowledge disjoint (Ferret and El Diablero have been the only two); most games from this era seem to just pretend it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to deal with, though; Kirk in a Star Trek adventure game surely should know his own ship’s layout, yet the player needs to map it out.
Following the same order as the ship’s map:
2 is the recreation room, which has a pinball machine and a table. The table has an ID card which will be needed later, and a chart which talks about a star system DILOS DC. I have not used this information yet.
The pinball machine is described as a Captain Fantastic which is a real pinball game from the 1970s (it was the follow-up to Wizard by Bally and sold immensely well; it helped for Bally’s finances that Elton John — whose likeness was used — took his payment in pinball machines).
Moving on to 3 is the research lab, which has a radiation detector, a polystyrene box, and an Orac (a fictional computer from the show Blake’s 7). Sure, let’s toss all the sci-fi shows in there.
4 is the flight deck with a starfighter. You can hop on but the starfighter lacks gas. So much for escaping self-destruct the ignoble way.
5 is the galley (that’s far southeast on the map) which has an old tea strainer.
Stepping into the larder reveals an air vent; you can go in the air vent to find a “blank wall” and going any further results in death-by-alien.
Moving up to 6 is the cargo hold, with multiple suits: a spacesuit, a “metal suit” (which turns out to be radiation protection) and a green suit (which I don’t understand yet). Hidden within the suits are a COMPASS and a NOTE, the latter explaining that the starfighter — the one we saw earlier that needs fuel — responds to spoken commands.
With the ID card back at the recreation room you can get into 7, which is a armoury. It has a phaser (which can only be set to kill) and a coin which goes back at the pinball table.
Playing pinball has the game respond YOU’RE WELL ON THE WAY TO A HI SCORE WHEN THE MACHINE TILTS!
Finally there’s 8, which can be reached by starting at the control room and going due north. If you just do that right away you die.
The metal suit back at the storage is sufficient for protection.
The control panel has three buttons (yellow, red, and green) with the note that they disarm the self-destruct in the right combination. Why don’t we know the combination? Maybe we’re raiders and there’s a missing manual insert. Just to emphasize why the “bespoke command” feature is dodgy, here’s my attempt at reading the inscription that goes with the colored buttons:
I picked the wrong noun on READ first and it told me the command READ wasn’t understood! This very much implies to stop using READ, and I only persisted because I already observed the response was deceptive.
Once I got past the rough starting command the game became fun to explore. I’m not even “stuck” yet, but I had enough enthusiasm from people who wanted to play along I figured this was a good place to stop.
Renga in Blue 