Believe it or not, we are getting close to the end of 1982. This is my final list. If any games show up after this point they can go on my float-list. That doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily wait, but I don’t need to finish them for 1982 to be “done”.
I am excluding games that are lost media or I am unable to play at the moment for whatever reason (if Testament shows up, for example, I’ll be bumping it up in priority, but it isn’t on this list).
These are more or less in alphabetical order.
…
Arkenstone: minimal type-in for the VIC-20 with some Tolkien inspiration.
Arsène Larcin: French game from Québec for the Apple II.
Bedlam: The other 1982 game by the author of Xenos.
Circus: The last of the Mysterious Adventures from 1982.
The Colonel’s House: First of a supposed series from Rabbit Software, but it looks like only the first game was written.
Cornucopia: One of the Brian Cotton games, although I need to play Witch Hunt Goblin Towers from 1981 first. (Update: have played it, now free to play Cornucopia.)
Crystal Caverns: Hayden’s other text-only Apple II game, other than the buggy Crime Stopper.
The Curse of the Pharaoh: Kirsch, while not busy cranking out Adventures of the Month, also did a graphical adventure that got tossed on one of the Softside special disks.
I was actually near-done with the town. I had mentioned finding BREAK working as a verb for the crowbar, but I hadn’t tried it yet at the sheriff’s office desk drawer (I think I did in my head but hadn’t actually gone through with it).
One of the keys (the small one) goes to the gun chest, and lets you get the shotgun. I immediately went to try it in the desert and it worked:
However, the monster is kind of like the dwarves in Crowther/Woods; that is, there’s more than one, and the shotgun only works twice. The other shotgun target was the snake, so I didn’t have to bother with all that “antidote” nonsense.
The shovel then can dig up the big sand pile I mentioned, and find a storm cellar. Nobody in the storm cellar, but there is dynamite, because (???).
I tried goofing around the town more (you can blow open the bank vault, it’s the wrong use of the dynamite) but really that’s everything: the tires and truck are a complete red herring, as is the bottle, and the water, and even the food. I discovered while mucking about the desert you get a fairly generous timer so I figured all I needed to do was puzzle out a route and I wouldn’t even need to bother.
There are random loops and bits of geography that don’t make sense in the desert, but I did finally manage a path:
Midway there’s a stop with a dead alien.
(The cube is useful, the rod does nothing as far as I know.) From there there’s a path with “crawl marks” so it isn’t hard to then find the crashed alien spaceship, which I knew had to be there because it’s on the cover of the game.
The whole purpose of the town section is to give the player the dynamite and the shotgun (I had the monster chase me to the end, here, and used my second shotgun blast so I could deal with the UFO entrance without fuss.) The dynamite is fussy to use: it gives the parser command STRIKE FUSE, but my process of
DROP DYNAMITE
STRIKE FUSE
EAST
in order to get away just blew me up. It took a while (after the fact, really) before I understood the game was implicitly picking up the dynamite again in order to “STRIKE” it even though that never gets said outright in the text. THROWing the dynamite didn’t work either.
The actual sequence is
STRIKE FUSE
DROP DYNAMITE
EAST
which is irritatingly specific. With the boulder blasted, you can go in to a brand-new area which feels like a Part 2 to the game.
(It’s not clear at all from the text, but LEAVE OUT from the entrance of the UFO lets you leave again — it felt for a while there I was trapped in.) Compass directions now get dropped: you’re supposed to PUSH X BUTTON followed by ENTER OVAL to go anywhere on the ship. The overall impression is slightly tedious and would be triply irritating for a slow typist.
The strange room descriptions do get cleared up later, but (I suspect for most players) pretty late, as in after the entire map is done being made.
Important rooms marked in color.
There’s a lot of rooms with weirdly-described cylinders and I admit I appreciated the atmosphere of feeling alien as opposed to, say, Menagerie, which clearly was a thinly-veiled Earth-type zoo. The odd movement reinforced this even though it got irritating by the end.
To get in at all you need to fill a hole with the cube from the desert; that causes to buttons to start working. Then deeper in there’s a “grey cube” that gets used on another machine to form a “white cube” and finally on a third machine to make it so you understand the alien language. Nothing is labeled and all three are somewhat distant from each other so it really is just luck for things to happen.
With the final effect, you can understand what rooms are and what the messages mean.
The particularly interesting room is the weapons room.
The white button pops up a viewscreen, and the green button (while the white button is active) gives instructions on how to shoot things. You can pick your target.
Being a loyal Earthling.
With the mothership destroyed, the overall threat is gone, and you can escape the way you came all the way back to the entrance. I had a monster chasing me half the time, so it’s not like the desert is entirely peaceful, but I guess the Air Force can roll in now with guns blazing for the rest.
This game has some vivid memories. Some of this just comes from the distribution influence (Tandy really did not sell much other than Tandy product in their stores, so TRS-80 players often only saw the “official” games like this one) but there is a certain vivid haunting-ness to the environment that I found appealing. From Figment Fly:
I could manage to kill one alien with the shotgun, but I never found a spaceship. I never knew what the game was about back then. One of my dad’s co-workers told me about a spaceship and all that, but I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not.
I could only remember one: An adventure game that began with “Xe…” It featured a dusty empty town, a hot desert, aliens, and a space ship.
Lately I had a yearning to complete the memory, and luckily I found your site. A few emulators later, I’m in Purgatory, and this time I shoot that rotten nine-foot diamondback snake in two. And finally I get past the boulder and get in the spaceship that has taunted me since the early 80s.
I didn’t know there was a UFO back then, until I found your website. I originally thought the game was going to be about ghosts or something like that because of the ghost town feeling in the first half of the game. I preferred the first half “old town” part of the game to the last half about the UFO. It was a lot of fun exploring the town, and the way it was written really made the town come alive for me in my imagination. I could almost hear the wind blowing and see the tumbleweeds moving through the desert.
I’m guessing not a lot of people played with their eye on the art cover. Like: they found it on a parent’s computer and the disk was copied third hand via a piracy network. The desert maze really is very stressful and there’s lots of spaces where you just loop around, and the whole time there’s chasing monsters + messages about dying from lack of food and water (and as far as I know, no portable way to carry water!)
Still not bad for a modern experience, although the parser remained horribly finicky to the end; having a straightforward error message is really so much better that what happened here. It’s one of those route-not-taken in UI history where I think it could have been turned into something special, but people were eyeballing Infocom (and eventually, Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls) as the model to follow, with only a few weird experiments (like Amnesia) otherwise.
One last comment on the title: it refers to the shotgun in the game. We have had, almost as a complete stereotype now, so many weapons fail to work on enemies; they get laid low via some roundabout puzzle instead. This is normal for adventure games. But the shotgun just works and starts blasting things and I had the brief pleasure that usually comes from playing DOOM or something where the hordes fall by the wayside.
3:08 a.m. RRRRIIIINNNNGGGG! At first, you bury your head under the pillow, hoping it will go away. But no…RRRRIIIINNNNGGGG! There it is again. What idiot could possibly be calling at this unholy hour?
You search your nightstand in the dark, clumsily grabbing the receiver. “Yeah?” you mumble at this nuisance of a machine, hoping to convey extreme crankiness and anger. “Dr. Sands?” the voice at the other end of the wire asks.
“Nah, it’s Mary Poppins. Of course it’s Dr. Sands! Who is this and what do you want?”
“Dr. Sands, it’s General Thatcher, U.S. Air Force, at the Pentagon. Sorry to wake you, but I have an urgent situation here.” The general’s voice sounds close to panic.
Xenos is part of a long saga for this blog, as the author Robert Arnstein first appeared in Tandy’s 1979 game Haunted House; I wrote that post 8 years ago. Haunted House is the same game that influenced Das Geheimnisvolle Haus; the fact it was distributed by Tandy itself meant it had more influence on the TRS-80 scene than its quality might indicate. Arnstein’s works after were stronger: Pyramid 2000 was a decent re-skin of Crowther/Woods Adventure, Raäka-Tū was an archaeology-raid game with creative traps, and Bedlam we haven’t gotten to yet but is another adventure along the lines of Asylum.
I’m not actually clear whether Xenos or Bedlam came out first but they both are solidly dated as 1982 so I’m not going to fuss over the order.
From Figmentfly. Notice the 32K of memory requirement: this is chunkier than the standard TRS-80 game from the time.
We play as Dr. Sands, who is tasked by the Air Force with investigating a “strange glow” in Purgatory, New Mexico. Some investigators were already sent in that didn’t make it out, except for one who lost their mind.
7:32 a.m. – You step out of the jeep, just west of Purgatory. Turning to the driver, you ask “Did the general give you any instructions to wait for me?”
“Are you kidding?” the edgy private squeaks. “I’m getting out of here as fast as I can!” The jeep does a 180 and roars off in the direction from whence it came.
Looking down the road you can see that you’ve made the mistake of you life. The air seems oppressive as you begin walking toward town. There are no signs of life — you should have known better than to get mixed up in this. “Next time I’m leaving the phone off the hook,” you say aloud, to be answered by the ominous howl of the arid wind.
I appreciate the plot setup which a.) has us exploring a strange area, as is exceedingly typical for adventure games yet b.) gives the framing an X-Files style setup which is unique enough that I feel from the start like I am entering a story rather than just a world.
Before diving headfirst into the game, I should mention the parser, which is different than any we’ve seen so far. It uses multiple words, and it will ask to clarify if you don’t type enough words for the game to understand something.
The word “which” is flashing.
In the screen above, I was holding more than one key (I had a skeleton key, a master key, and a brass key) so the game takes the line I just typed and modifies it, to put the word “which” in there as a gap. After the flashing concludes, the cursor is at the empty spot, and the idea is that you then type the needed word (“brass” or whatnot) to make it so the parser now understands you.
This sounds terrific conceptually and is unlike any modern game I’ve played, but it is too easy to get into a loop of misunderstanding. I often just completely deleted the line I was trying to type and moved on. For example, there’s a crowbar that shows up early, so I was trying to use it to get in some areas that were locked.
PRY MASSIVE DOOR WITH CROWBAR
Typing that led to the word ?VERB? showing up, and then the cursor landing immediately before the word “pry”. The problem is I didn’t know what verb to try that the game would understand, or even if I was in the ballpark where any synonym would work. I eventually came across
BREAK MASSIVE DOOR WITH CROWBAR
YOUR TOOL IS TOO SMALL FOR THE JOB.
but in other cases I simply had to abort trying to type anything at all, which required deleting the whole line by hand. I think there’s a possible UI direction here that really does work and completely sidesteps any old or modern norms; it would need to prevent the player from getting “stuck” and frustrated when they don’t have a verb or noun to fix things, or where the player forgets the exact colors of the keys in their inventory.
Back to the X-Files —
Rather than playing like an alien-game, what this really feels like is a Western akin to Ghost Town or Greedy Gulch. The player starts near the abandoned town of Purgatory and there is a large desert around, and crossing the desert requires food and water. The big difference is the monster; if you start by turning around and going west, you’ll have an immediate encounter:
You can run away and there will be multiple turns of the creature “following”. I suspect we might need to get somewhere in the desert first before dealing with the creature, but I haven’t got that far in the game yet.
The town is a big west-to-east street (again like Ghost Town or Greedy Gulch) and it will help visualize things to give a meta-map first:
This is not what things look like square-by-square, which is something more like this, although the map is incomplete:
Essentially there are “in between” squares so that the space in between each of the buildings is included.
The gas station is the first building the player will encounter approaching from the west. It has a crowbar, pump, and skeleton key. The skeleton key (as far as I can tell) only is used to unlock a bathroom on the east side of the station, and there is nothing in the bathroom. Around the back of the gas station there is a junkyard with a broken jeep that has a deflated tire, and an inflated spare tire next to it. The deflated tire is on the jeep and the game indicates it needs to be jacked up in order to get the item, but I have yet to find the right verb combination to make this work. (I also have yet to find the a place where I urgently need a deflated tire, so it hasn’t been a priority.)
Going farther east there is a saloon to the north, and a sheriff to the south. The sheriff is initially locked so we’ll go back to that later.
In addition to the radio which talks about how great you are, there’s a bottle with questionable brown liquid (and a label mentioning it will “help with what ails you” although trying to drink it just informs the player it’d make them sicker) and some water. I would assume the bottle gets emptied to fill with water but I haven’t been able to accomplish this given the parser.
Stepping farther leads to a grocery and hardware store. The grocery, straightforwardly, is mostly empty but still has some food. The hardware store contains a shovel in the back guarded by a snake.
This is a delayed-death so it may be a matter of finding a cure instead of fighting off the snake. To the west of the saloon is a giant pile of sand which requires some kind of tool for digging as is presumably where the shovel goes; there’s also a sign in the hotel which states “in case of tornado all hotel guests should meet at the west side of the saloon and enter the storm shelter”, so there’s definitely a location down there.
Moving further is the aforementioned hotel and a bank. I have not been able to get into the bank.
The hotel has a master key which can be used to unlock two rooms further in. One of the rooms is empty, while the other has a brass key in a dresser. The brass key goes back to the sheriff’s and can be used to unlock the main door.
Again like Greedy Gulch! Unfortunately I’m stuck here; two of the desk drawers are locked (and the third is empty); the cabinet also has resisted my attempts at opening it. This resistance may be because of the ornery parser where it is hard to rapidly test verbs out; I’ll hopefully make progress on that by next time.
Just to be clear, the issues open are: dealing with the monster in the desert, getting the flat tire (almost certainly a parser issue), dealing with the locked things in the sheriff office, dealing with the snake (potentially also a parser issue), and getting into the bank. This feels almost near to playing an Infocom game except for all the “potential parser issue” parts, even though the prose has been straightforward so far.
The game was mostly straightforward but there was one horrendously obscure part and two major bugs. My previous post is needed to understand this one.
This game was swiped by Keypunch on the same disk as the broken Cavern of Riches port; the one that made it impossible to score. Weirdly, the stolen C64 version of Castle Adventure might be less buggy than the original. Via eBay.
I had left off last time being captured and tossed in a cell with a “horny toad”. The most immediate obvious thing it seemed to try — given this was a princess-rescue expedition — was to try to KISS TOAD.
However, I had no method of getting through the locked door, so this was a dead end. The main catch to realize is that even though there’s a rope with grappling hook immediately adjacent to a place it gets used (arriving at the guard and then this scene) that doesn’t mean the rope gets used in that spot first! The right action is to grab the grappling hook, turn it around, and use it on the castle instead.
Doing this opens a significant amount of map since nearly the entire interior of the castle is now accessible.
New rooms marked in color.
You can technically scoop the rope up behind you as there’s a battle axe off in one tower that you can use to drop the castle’s drawbridge. I say “technically” because this was one of the bugs of the game: halfway through the drawbridge just disappeared for no reason and I had to restart.
Other fun items are the Baron’s best horse which you can steal away with…
…and some armor where the mere act of carrying it is enough to confuse wandering guards into thinking you are the Baron. (I assume it is passively intended that you wear the armor when you pick it up, but it still was funny the first time it happened.)
The bookcase here incidentally has two entirely different books, and both are needed. I got lucky and found one book on one playthrough and the other on a reset, so I knew they were both there, but this would be a case where it’d be quite easy to miss an item.
One book is a “horror” book that has a diamond inside which counts as a treasure, and the other is a rare edition of Scott which has the word “Ivanhoe” (as hinted at by the graffiti, so I guess it’d be fine to find the horror book first since there’s a hint that the second book exists, but I found them in the reverse order).
The “piano keys” are found by trying to play a piano. They get used later to unlock a door, because adventure game logic. The joke made sense in Kidnapped but not as much sense here.
The bookcase also hides a secret passage leading to a treasure room with gold bars and a silver cross. However, taking one of the treasure items causes the door to seal and lock (and not a lock openable via piano keys). What does work in the room is the word IVANHOE which teleports the player over to a dungeon area, but I wasn’t sure at first what use that was.
Another secret passage goes off of a fireplace (just ENTER FIREPLACE) and it leads into a family crypt with a talking skull.
The “vampire” being warned about is a little farther down, where there’s some rubies and the sound of flapping wings. At random, you might get bitten by the vampire bat and die (the silver cross offers protection, but it’s easier to just save your game and hope for the random luck, it seems like you get through about 90% of the time anyway).
The next move turned out to be slightly tricky: I had the means to escape the cell with the princess already. (You can try to attack a guard anywhere, like where the books are, and you’ll get sent there.) The guard is nice enough to send you to the cell while still holding a battle axe, so you can SMASH DOOR. It is unclear why smashing the door works there (and not any of the other locked doors); the three doors (guard in the cave, the door at the treasure room, and the cell) all have different methods of opening even though they look indistinguishable.
With the princess in hand you find yourself back in the dungeon, the same dungeon that IVANHOE works in to zip over to the treasure room. The problem is that the treasure room locks itself even if you don’t try to steal anything, so there doesn’t seem to be any escape. The trick (which I found out via walkthrough) is to wait around for a guard to appear, and then fight it. Fighting a guard before was useless other than to get captured, but the second time works out.
Now here’s the astonishingly bad part. Even though there’s no command to examine the guard further, and LOOK yields nothing new, you can still TAKE KEYS from the guard. I guess you’re supposed to assume he has some? This is so egregious I think it’s probably a bug. The keys from the guard work on the treasure room, so it’s now possible to escape (not only with the princess, but the gold bars and silver cross).
Almost done!
The last treasure is found back at the cave. The guard that was at a door is now unconscious in the dungeon, so you can open the door unmolested; this is where the piano keys work.
It’s a cute joke, but the game never previously established this kind of tilted-reality in the same way Kidnapped (which uses the same joke) or Mad Venture (where you pick up a “fork” in the road) does.
There’s a wrong route where you can end up LOST IN THE PET RAM (fine, there’s one other titled-reality moment), but the important part is the BARON’S SECRET STRONGHOLD.
The treasure just disappears if you try to get it, and I was past my patience at this point, so I just checked the walkthrough: the treasure teleported itself up to a previously-empty turret, so if you trudge up there you can pick up the chest (which I guess only has enough energy to teleport once).
This game had more charm than I think I’ve been getting across, but I really did have two massive bugs overshadow my gameplay and require resets. One was the previously-mentioned disappearing drawbridge (and it took a while to confirm that this was a bug, and not me messing up a puzzle); the other issue is the torch will suddenly start to run out of light, and then when it finally does rooms that previously don’t need a torch suddenly go dark. The torch is otherwise only used for a handful of cave rooms. Generally speaking, you can just drop the torch early in the game and ignore it and it won’t run out, so I feel like the author intended some kind of daemon which just broke hard.
Malmberg certainly kept it in mind because in 1987 he showed off his new AGT system with a game called Crusade, which is just a port of Castle Adventure.
You are in the midst of a thick woods. The ground is damp with dew. The night air is chilly and you shiver from the cold.
There are large trees all around you.
You see a crumpled-up piece of paper with writing on it.
(The paper is an ad for the AGT system.) One last noteworthy element that’s specifically in the AGT version: the author mentions the possibility of giving hints, but is emphatic that it should be done via letter. He is quite firm that you should NOT call his phone number, ever ever. This suggests the author had some unfortunate past encounters, given the number of exclamation marks used.
HOW TO GET INTO THE CASTLE, OR FOR SOME OTHER HINT!!! I will be glad to provide a solution, but I want to do it by letter, not by phone!!!
I have always been interested in adventure games — ever since I first played Scott Adams’ Adventureland and issued the command CLIMB TREE and I entered a whole new world.
Castle Adventure is another entry in the “early work of a person who would become notable” genre. Other examples include Temple of Disrondu, with two of the Magnetic Scrolls authors (Rob Steggles and Hugh Steers) in a team-up; Brian Fargo started his career with two adventure games including Demon’s Forge; the team for Dragon’s Keep included Al Lowe who would go on to pen the Leisure Suit Larry series.
David Malmberg was an executive by day, but would eventually become an important name in text adventures by modifying the GAGS text adventure system into the much more powerful AGT, Adventure Game Toolkit. In the late 80s and early 90s, for text adventure authors not using the older Quill or the more recent TADS, it was often the default game-writing system. It showed up in games like The Multi-Dimensional Thief (1991) and Shades of Grey (1992) which are still worth playing today.
After studying GAGS in detail, it became obvious that it was limited to very simple games with only a few verbs. I wanted to create Infocom-like games. GAGS in its current state would never make it. However, Mark had defined the essential data structures very well, e.g., ROOMs, NOUNs, and CREATUREs, but GAGS lacked flexibility in manipulating those objects. So I set about extending GAGS by adding what I called “meta-commands,” which really increased the power and flexibility of GAGS. These meta-commands allowed for an almost unlimited number of nouns, verbs, and objects (and synonyms for any of them) and the ability to manipulate them. It came close to my goal of creating games that were truly Infocom-like.
Malmberg’s interest in creating programming tools extended to making this LOGO/PILOT hybrid program for graphics, prior to writing Castle Adventure. Via eBay.
This impulse to extend an adventure-writing system did not come from nowhere; to make Castle Adventure, as published in the November 1982 issue of Micro, the author studied various articles by Scott Adams detailing how his own system worked.
Many of the ideas in CASTLE ADVENTURE, as well as other adventures that are widely available, owe a tremendous debt to Scott Adams. In the specific case of CASTLE, it uses a database structure and table-driven logic similar to those first described by Adams in several articles.
The articles in question are from Creative Computing (August 1979), Softside (July 1980) and BYTE (December 1980). According to this thread Malmberg took actual PET source from 1979 as a base (rather than just eyeballing the article) and Strident points out that there’s a biographical note from a year earlier that already mentions adventures…
David Malmberg is Director of Management Systems for Foremost-McKesson in San Francisco. He has a PET, as well as a VIC, and is interested in machine language utilities, strategy games, and writing his own “Adventures.” He’d like to hear from anyone who develops interesting VIC applications (with or without the light pen).
…meaning Castle Adventure may have existed in some form before 1982.
We are here to rescue a princess, somehow winning her hand in marriage in the process.
In CASTLE ADVENTURE you play the role of Godfrey de Goodheart, a bold, but impoverished knight. King Fredrick has dispatched you to rescue his only daughter, the beautiful Princess Fatima, from the dungeons of Baron von Evil’s castle. You have also been asked to capture the Baron’s treasures of gold, silver, and gems, which he enmassed by cruelly exploiting his serfs. If you can rescue the princess and return with all of the Baron’s ill-gotten treasures, King Fredrick has promised you Princess Fatima’s hand in marriage.
Oddly, despite the supposedly standard concept, princess-marriage doesn’t happen that often in early adventures. The prototypical example, Wizard and the Princess, doesn’t even give you half the kingdom. Dragon Quest at least gives the hero a pile of cash but they just get a kiss from the princess. Slaying the dragon in Treasure Hunt yields a “little black book with the addresses and phone numbers of every beautiful princess that lives in Vermont.” The princess in Program Power Adventure invites you to a banquet. Hezarin has a princess and a prince but not as the main goal, and where “only one offers their hand in marriage, but that ought to be enough for any normal Adventurer anyway. They can always marry each other if you don’t like the idea.”
What is quite standard is kicking off the proceedings in a forest.
Out of all games that start in a forest, this is one of them.
Don’t worry, though, the game gets abnormal again quite quickly.
Normally, the player starts with a knapsack containing some matches. However, the command JUMP will break your arm (!) and now you have a broken arm in inventory too. The broken arm has genuine effect; for example, you can’t CLIMB TREE with one (as suggested by Malmberg’s early moment of excitement in Adventureland)…
…nor can you go to a nearby cave, which has a torch at the entrance that can be lit by the matches.
If you hang around enough turns (15 or so?) the message YOUR ARM HAS HEALED appears and the adventure can resume as normal.
In addition to the above shenanigans, you can swim across the moat helpfully marked “NO SWIMMING — DANGER!” and hang out with some MAN-EATING PIRANHA. (In a nice detail, the matches go soggy if you’re carrying them in water.) If you’re just passing by you are safe, except past the moat is a raised drawbridge which isn’t too helpful. Hanging out with the killer fish results in YOU’VE MADE A TASTY MEAL! and a scene where you can try to pick the correct direction to resurrect yourself, early Scott Adams style.
Going the wrong direction leads to YOU ARE LOST IN THE PET ROMS and the game ending.
Weirdly, going through the death scene is how I first found the “treasure spot” of the game, as it is the landing point of a successful resurrection. Back at the cave (I showed a screenshot earlier where trying to go near is prevented by a broken arm) you can GO HILL to arrive at a new room. I’ve always hated this sort of “hidden exit” when it has happened, but at least there was an alternate method of finding the place!
Veering back to the cave, going in leads to a slight “maze” (just the author dropping some loops in), and a grappling hook with a rope right before a tall room where it gets used.
After climbing the rope, there’s a door with an angry guard. Doing battle lands the player in prison with a “horny toad”, and that seems like a good stopping point for now.
The Scott Adams influence is clearly showing up in gameplay already, with the “broken arm” scene, the matches that can go soggy, and the resurrection. As I’ve mentioned before, the “daemons” from the Scott Adams system add timing and condition elements; they tend to make games more complex than the norm, so I expect Castle Adventure to go above and beyond a typical type-in game.
We’ve fought dragons, traveled through time, explored futuristic cities, and raided Egyptian tombs. We’ve encountered some of the toughest puzzles ever written, and even conquered some of those without looking anything up. We’ve defeated a demon lord (twice) and re-enacted the “you shall not pass” scene with a balrog by destroying a bridge. We are now an ultimate adventurer, and we need an ultimate game to match.
We need a game where we face off against bears, sharks, squids, meteors from the sky, and we PUNCH THEM IN THE FACE.
Via World of Dragon.
Ultimate Adventure is by Phil Edwardson of Americus, Kansas, who studied printing technology in the 70s; this is his only amateur effort. It is another one of the games from tapemag Chromasette that ended up getting picked up by Microdeal for a Dragon port. (See: Mansion Adventure.) As a brief reminder, CLOAD was the very first tapemag and published for TRS-80, and Chromasette was a spin-off started after the Tandy CoCo became available.
From the May 1982 issue, in which Ultimate Adventure appears.
I also need to make a correction, as I previously implied CLOAD must have had better sales than Chromasette due to the rarity of the latter. According to the editor Dave Lagerquist, Chromasette actually exceeded CLOAD in sales (he estimated 3000 subscriptions at its peak, although he didn’t remember if it was 3000 for each publication or 3000 combined). In the same interview he mentions — relevantly for today — that CLOAD submissions had gone through a hobbyist-to-professional cycle as people started to master programming for the original TRS-80, so that by the time Chromasette kicked off in the summer of 1981, TRS-80 Model 1/3 programming had “matured” into complex machine code games; the Tandy CoCo’s debut in September 1980 essentially “reset the stage” so people were experimenting and writing hobbyist work again.
Also from the May 1982 issue.
Ultimate Adventure, despite the name, is only marginally an adventure. It belongs in the strategy-adjacent genre seen most recently with the Apex Trading Haunted House and not recently at all with Lance Miklus Treasure Hunt.
The goal is to obtain $1000, starting with $250. The starting money is because everything needs to be bought; there are no puzzle-solving items to be found “in the field”.
The small-ish map of the game consists of various biomes connected by “portholes”. These portholes are “teleportation portals” and normally just behave like rooms but there is a random chance one will send the player to a different location.
Yellow marked rooms are the “puzzles”. For example, you are unable to enter outer space without a space suit on. You are unable to dive underwater without scuba gear. The game is fairly polite about telling you what’s wrong.
Going back to that price list, the knife and the gun are weapons, some items help protect against a hazard which might or might not appear. Consider, for example, the “fur coat” which clearly goes to the arctic; you may simply not get cold in the arctic by luck, and even if you do, it will be a decrease of strength points penalty, rather than the end of the game.
Even if you don’t have a weapon, you can still try (as the game’s instructions suggest) typing HANDS and getting through via chutzpah. Here are two different results from punching a bear:
The CLUE will let you know where a treasure is hidden…
…and buying the shovel will probably do something useful? I never quite figured out if it helped with the treasures or not.
Other than random encounters with biome-appropriate hazards…
The game is prompting for an item here.
…the gameplay consists of visiting each one and typing SEARCH. This may or may not yield a treasure. A little “line moving” animation accompanies the search.
Multiple searches tend to be required. Each search is accompanied by a random chance of a bad hazard. For example, while searching underwater I found a treasure (SUNKEN TREASURE WORTH $224) but I got set upon by a giant octopus in the process.
The helpful thing — the thing that makes the game manageable — is that one of the rooms is an Infirmary. When you step inside your strength, which tends to get battered around by the various hazards of the game, gets restored to full. This place can be re-visited as many times as you like.
This ends up making the game more or less just a matter of patience. While it can be un-nerving to search through a mine field without appropriate protection, you can try to literally punch anything to get your way out of it.
Hazards can roll at any turn, and that can include right after encountering another hazard. So it is possible to get three polar bears in a row charging, and it likely is even more possible if the difficulty is cranked (it goes from 1 easy, to 5 hard).
I have no trouble with strategy, but Ultimate Adventure doesn’t really scratch that itch: it doesn’t have any interesting choices to make other than “do you push your luck searching, or go back to the infirmary now”. A very young me desperate for entertainment might try to scrounge the turn count down but again, the game is lacking in the ambiguous choice and multiple viable routes that really makes a strategy game work.
We did get to punch tigers! And landmines, somehow.
I have finished the game; my previous post is needed to make sense of this one.
Mind you, I’m not sure how much sense things really make. This game is, in a way, easier for beginners than veteran players: veteran players (ahem) might actually sit down and try to figure out the connections between the various rooms, and why some things appear or don’t appear at random, while a beginner might be satisfied wandering to the end without any such documentation.
I really did make an honest attempt at first at mapping…
…but I kept having connection not make any sense, and directions that went one way during one play-iteration go a different way on another. On top of that, testing exits always could randomly lead to being randomly walloped by a goblin with no chance of rescue, or even by a balrog (who appears at any time).
I found the general idea of the authors was to have hyperconnectivity. By which I mean: there would be two or three or even five ways to get between two points. This can be a fun and charming aspect to early games: Zork might drop the trapdoor after you enter its world at first, but gives quite a few ways to get back to the daylight (someone with more flexibility than others) and it gives the impression of a universe with lots of options; here, it feels more like the authors were just drawing in links at random. There’s a trapdoor that lets you wrap around back to the starting area. You can somehow land back where the boat is (and take the remaining set of items) with the boat never having left.
This only opens from the other side, which is dramatically interesting, but the other side is roughly six steps away and just as easy to get to as walking through the trapdoor, which is not so interesting.
Eventually I managed to randomly come across someone saying the word NEIRIF. This is a trigger to send you to another part of the map that is quite important.
No puzzle solving, just patience and luck I didn’t get walloped by a balrog this playthrough.
This lands you just outside a tree with a rope and some food; all you really need to do is grab one piece of food. Later, nearby, there’s a hungry person who will help you assuming you share.
With the wizard hat on from the starting area, the staff that the dog brought over works and you can WAVE STAFF to form a bridge (and then, with some parser difficulty, CROSS BRIDGE). This leads to a new area where you can just wander around until you find the golden bird, the whole point of the quest.
Hang out and a wizard will eventually appear. The word ZOOT previously just gives a rumbling noise, but here it actually wins the game, for some reason (and yes, I just got annoyed and looked this up rather than actually solve anything).
Referring back to the paradox of the two reviews, yes, I could see someone blustering to the end in a few hours and assuming (given that very little in the way of puzzle solving happened) that this was an easy game. I could also see someone impossible stuck for weeks because of the RNG going in weird directions.
The design intent clearly had the player whacking at monsters — you can get 10 point per monster, and you can use the staff to send down lightning bolts on things. But back even in 1982 we didn’t care that much about score and it was a mainly a way to notice “hey, you missed some puzzles”, not get a genuine feel of achievement the way a new record on Asteroids might.
Via Acorn Electron World.
I feel like the authors zeroed in on aspects they liked (hyperconnectivity, monsters, randomness) without thinking that the structure they’d be left with wasn’t fully sustaining. It’s the sort of game where since the designer knows their map they easily can get a different impression of play than an actual human who has no insider knowledge. I’m hoping they got some feedback which can be applied later, since this is only the first of four games, even if it is the only one of the authors that lands in 1982.
Brytta, 11th King of Rohan, was not to be given a peaceful reign, despite being beloved by all and given the name Léofa. The War of the Dwarves and the Orcs had caused numerous orcs to leave their realm in the Misty Mountains to find settlement in the White Mountains just south of Rohan. Brytta went to war to remove their scourge, and by his death was thought to have destroyed them; this was not so, as they were merely in hiding.
The next king, Walda, met unfortunate circumstances 9 years into his reign. As Tolkien explains in Appendix A of Lord of the Rings:
He was slain with all his companions when they were trapped by Orcs, as they rode by mountain-paths from Dunharrow.
Walda’s son Folca took up the task of vengeance for his father, and swore to never hunt a beast until all orcs were removed from Rohan for good. This task he accomplished by the age of 60, so he followed this up with a trip to the Firienwood (or Firien Wood, or Firienholt) on the border between Rohan and Gondor. It held a mighty boar, and while Folca the orc-slayer managed to defeat the boar, he soon died after from tusk-wounds.
Today’s adventure is from another British company (MP Software) where I have only been able to scrounge out the barest of information. Their adventure Firienwood first gets mentioned in the November 1982 issue of Personal Computing Today as “coming soon”, and I’ve been able to confirm it is listed as existing by the February 1983 issue (reaching the street January 1983) and the internal copyright date says 1982, so we’ll roll with that; if it didn’t quite squeak in being published by the end of ’82 it was close enough. (Thanks to Ethan Johnson who helped with my search.)
As far as I can tell Helen Seymour and John Hudson produced all the MP Software products; this is the first of four adventure games they made (later: Crown of Mardan, Sadim Castle, Woodland Terror). They were originally for the BBC Micro, but also ported (with likely very little change) to the Electron. The address listed (even on later printings) is a clearly residential area in Bromborough, Merseyside, suggesting the pair were yet another garage-operation (well, the houses don’t have garages, but you get what I mean).
From Every Game Going.
This is harkening back to the cavalcade of Crowther/Woods clones but adds an element which makes it almost uniquely painful. It’s easier to explain in context what I mean, so let’s dive in–
Our aim is to find a golden bird of paradise, and there’s a Wizard making things difficult. We are rather unusually told up front that monster kills are worth 10 points each, which is more like RPG than adventure behavior.
Our adventure, not shockingly, starts near the title forest, and if we try to go in we get tangled in and die via thorns.
The intent seems to be to funnel the player towards a boat at the very start, where you pick three out of six items (as you can’t carry more on the boat).
I already know the hambone gets used almost immediately, and I think the sword is necessary, and I’ve found use for the keys. This is not an absolute guarantee that this represents the set that must be chosen. Philosopher’s Quest had two gimmicks, one where a bonus item could be scrounged, and one where an item that doesn’t get taken nevertheless gets found anyway. So I could see (despite me using the keys early) another set of keys somehow surfacing, or maybe a way of putting them out forward. (Having said that, the most obvious action, tossing stuff in the river hoping it gets carried somewhere helpful, doesn’t get parsed.)
Taking the boat leads to a cave with a “vicious dog”. This is where the bone comes in handy.
Specifically, the dog suddenly not only becomes happy, but brings forth a “Wizards Staff” that “has many powers”. The only power I know of so far is that it lights up automatically in darkness.
From here comes the traditional cave-in-many-directions, and I’ll give a pair of screens which might explain my struggle:
Specifically, past this point in the game, a goblin can attack at any time. The goblin will have a random chance of killing you on sight. If it doesn’t kill you, you have a chance of doing KILL GOBLIN via the sword and having success, but then the goblin can still return at any moment. “Any moment” includes actions like “check if an particular direction has an exit or not” or “check if the passage that you entered from the east lets you go back the same way to the west, or if it is one-way”. This has one of those unfortunate twisty maps wherever everything everywhere needs to be checked but this is also combined with a high probability of death at any moment.
(Oh, in addition to N/S/E/W/NE/SE/SW/NW, LEFT and RIGHT are directions too sometimes.)
The very curious thing is that the two 80s reviews I’ve run across (not intentionally, just trying to find files for the game) both mark this as a “beginner game”. Both are reviews for the Electron, though, rather than the original BBC Micro version I am playing. I may switch it up if this gets too terrible and see if the authors lightened up the RNG death in the revised version. What I can’t do is simply hack BASIC source, as this is a machine code game.
Germany got a jump start on computing early. The earliest “real computer”, arguably, was via Konrad Zuse with his Z3 in 1941; fortunately for Zuse’s modern reputation, it failed to drum up much enthusiasm with the Nazis, and while it got used for some minor aeronautical calculations, the monster application of the war — codebreaking — was left to the Allies.
After the Nazis were defeated, post-war restrictions meant aviation and nuclear research were banned. So, while Zuse met Turing in 1947 and later founded a company (Zuse KG) and IBM had a presence (their German spinoff Dehomag was redubbed IBM Deutschland GmbH in 1949) it still took a while for computing in Germany to really be established. (I’m referring now to West Germany; East Germany went to the Soviets and has its own story.)
In 1955 the Allied occupation ended and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council) was founded. Computers quickly started to occupy universities, with half of them having mainframes by 1960. Local private companies started to face off against IBM. Siemens got on board early (1954, before restrictions were lifted) and went after big industry. The radio and television company Telefunken (parent company AEG) made a mark with the TR-440, dominating the university market, but AEG’s lack of enthusiasm eventually led to their large computing operations being sold to Siemens; Siemens kept up with the industrial-scale computers, while AEG focused more on mid-range business operations. A few more companies like Triumph-Adler focused on office settings.
Ludwig Zagler posing with his chess program written with Siegfried Jahn for the TR-440: Daja (1974). It could only be run at night. Picture from Der Spiegel, April 1976.
Missing from all this is home computing. Referring to a May 1980 issue of Mikro + Kleincomputer, the Schweizer Computer Club had access to Apple, Pet, Sorcerer, Superbrain, and TRS-80: none of those are from German companies. The big locals were still focused on business and industry; Triumph-Adler, which started to try their hand at the personal market with their Alphatronic, was never a consumer hit. (According to one author, they originally tried to “sell them like typewriters” in batches.)
The foreign companies of the Trinity, then, were the dominant force in 1980, although in a different order than the US: Commodore PET, Apple II, TRS-80. Commodore would eventually creep up to be dominant all the way to Amiga, but for the time of our story there was still a pitched battle. TRS-80 had a brief moment in the sun not in its original form imported from the US, but as a cheaper clone via a company from Hong Kong.
…
Hannover Messe was an “export fair” which had been running since 1947; in 1970 the fair added the Center for Office and Information Technology (Hall 1) which included computing devices.
In 1980, Fred Trommeschläger was at Hall 1. He had previously sold electronics (interrupted in the mid-70s by a foray into aviation), but he pivoted from electronics to computers when they became more profitable, forming Trommeschläger Computer GmbH. He sold imports of TRS-80s (via the Tandy headquarters in Belgium) but tried to undercut his competition on price. He was tipped off that there was a cheaper TRS-80 alternative showing. The machine was being sold was the Video Genie by EACA, a Hong Kong-based company that had been founded in 1970 by mechanical engineer Eric Chung (previously of Fairchild, the same company that eventually released the first home console that uses cartridges).
Trommeschläger sent his employees scouting, found the machine at the fair, and got an invite to a sales meeting. Negotiations happened in Holland with multiple companies vying for rights, and Trommeschläger managed to impress the representatives from Hong Kong — landing an exclusive deal — by arriving in his own plane (remember, he briefly had went into aviation!)
Sales blew up, with volume going by by a factor of five from 1980 to 1982. Volume went up in 1983 as well, but there was a catch: EACA imploded. Eric Chung was reported fleeing with a briefcase containing 10 million USD. One issue was simply Tandy themselves, which had brought up a lawsuit in 1981 for infringement; it was settled out of court, but it must have represented a significant financial hit. Additionally, while the Video Genie was a success EACA had also gone into other products like radios that were a failure, and then also decided to compound that with speculation on property (!).
This left Trommeschläger’s company in trouble, as they had already done more hiring and had already announced future product based on the EACA’s upcoming computers (now vaporware). They tried to adapt a different computer (the Ferranti PC) and re-dub it with the now-known-in-Germany Genie name, but it wasn’t enough, and his company went down in 1984.
The reason why all this is important is that it meant the Video Genie name became more well-known in Germany than the original TRS-80; while the US had magazines like 80 Micro supporting the TRS-80, Germany had Genie Data. Also, one of the copies of today’s selection (Das Geheimnisvolle Haus, The Mysterious House) is in a directory titled genie1.
I found this game while looking for another game, Geheim-agent XP-05, the existence of which had been sleuthed out by commenter Rob; it was thought to be lost. I dug around the far corners of the Internet and managed to find the secret agent game in a public German archive by checking every disk. XP-05 was on disk 5. From disk 7 I found this:
I had a copy of HAUS.BAS already, but variations can differ, so I opened the source code and hit paydirt:
21050 GESCHRIEBEN IM OKTOBER 81 VON UWE SCHUSTER
October 1981! My other copy mentioned Uwe Schuster, but not the date. This places it as the earliest German adventure game currently found. I will not give any guarantees there isn’t older; early German computer history still needs study. I can say that when Mikro+Kleincomputer did a review of Apple Adventure in February 1982, it was written as if adventures were a new idea. It explains that you communicate using commands of two words, and that you are searching for treasure, that there are “beinahe unendliche Labyrinthe” and you should make a map.
We have some clue as to Uwe Schuster’s influences, as while one copy contains a year and month, the other contains an author statement.
Dieses Programm erhielt seine Anregung von “Haunted-House”. Es erschien mir reizvoll, dieses Thema weiter auszubauen. Da mir die Abenteuer von Scott Adams gut gefallen, habe ich versucht, dessen Schema zu übernehmen, um ein lästiges Scrollen des Bildschirms zu vermeiden. Gewiss ließe sich das Programm noch weiter ausbauen, aber ich hoffe dass es trotzdem Spaß gemacht hat.
(Uwe Schuster)
The program was inspired by the game “Haunted House” and the author wanted to expand on the same idea, following the pattern of Scott Adams that avoided screen scrolling. While we’ve had multiple game titled Haunted House only one has been for TRS-80, the very early Robert Arnstein one sold by Radio Shack.
The instruction screen I gave earlier indicates shortcuts move around (N, S, W, O) take inventory (B) or redraw the screen (R). However, there’s also a full verb list, and following my procedure with Languages I Am Not Great At, I grabbed the list from the source code directly:
NEHME -> TAKE
NIMM -> TAKE
HOLE -> TAKE
GEBE -> GIVE (functionally DROP)
LASS -> LEAVE (DROP)
STELLE -> DROP
LAUFE -> RUN
GEHE -> GO
STEIGE -> CLIMB
SAGE -> SAY
SPRICH -> SPEAK
RUFE -> CALL
SIEH -> SEE
SCHAU -> LOOK
SUCHE -> SEARCH
FINDE -> FIND
BRICH -> BREAK
SCHLAGE -> HIT
BRECHE -> BREAK
SCHNEIDE -> CUT
TRINKE -> DRINK
GIESSE -> POUR
SCHUETTE -> SHUT
SCHLAFE -> SLEEP
WARTE -> WAIT
HILF -> HELP
OEFFNE -> OPEN
SCHALTE -> SWITCH
Despite being inspired by a haunted house game, this really is more of a “mysterious” house: there are no ghosts or other spooks to battle against. There is a little magic. Our goal is to escape with all the treasures (three of them).
The description follows the minimal format of “you are in a suchandsuch” and most of the rooms have one item in them, either takable or non-takable (above, a guest room, with a bed).
You’re in a living room, with a carpet. The carpet can be taken.
Balcony with railing, which can’t be taken.
Breakfast room with endless coffee cup, which can be taken, and mysteriously doesn’t count as a treasure.
The house is mostly wide open, and the starting approach should be something like Eno: break and smash and tear stuff looking for hidden objects.
For example, there’s a television set showing the Arabian Nights, and you can smash it into pieces with a hammer. You can also smash the coffee cup (not helpful) and a mirror (helpful, I’ll show that off shortly). A knife also gets use as you tear open an upholstered chair, revealing a diamond, and a coat, revealing a wallet.
That makes for 2 out of 3 treasures, suggesting this game will go quickly, but it turns out treasure 3 (which is needed to escape) was kind of hard to find. But let’s go back to smashing the mirror first:
The mirror breaks into thousands of pieces which immediately dissolve into nothing. Behind is a bottle of acid.
With the bottle of acid, and destruction still on my mind, my eye turned to the marble floor in the room immediately adjacent.
The acid dissolves the floor reveal a magic word: KERKY. Upon then doing SAY KERKY, I was teleported to the room shown above (“secret room”, with a “hole in the ceiling”) and was told that “all good things come in threes”. What this is hinting at is that the word only works three times to take you to the secret room, after which it will teleport you to random places, including a mid-air drop killing you.
I have fallen from the 13th floor! The adventure is over.
With my eye on the hole in the ceiling, I brought over a ladder from a nursery, and was able to climb to a roof.
I climb through the ceiling and get to the roof of the house. It’s very cold.
Going in a direction seems to randomly either kill you or land you in a room back in the house. It was here, at 2 out of 3 treasures, that I was very stuck. Just to list the inventory available:
key, cup of coffee, knife, bottle opener, jug of cognac, ladder, hammer, carpet, diamond, wallet
The jug of cognac is also auto-refilling and is essentially to opposite of the cup of coffee. I hadn’t found a use for the key but it turned out that I never would: it’s a red herring. Looking at the carpet, the game just states “a vacuum cleaner wouldn’t do any harm” so it took me poking inside the source code (it’s 10k, roughly the size of Raspion Adventure) to realize it could be transformed into a flying carpet.
But how? I tried various uses of the magic word, setting the carpet on the roof, plummeting off the edge while holding the carpet, whacking at the carpet really hard, and still no magic appeared. I finally broke down studied the relevant source portion rather than just glancing:
7100 IFX>23THEN7200:ELSEW1$=”B”:W0$=”A”:GOSUB12000:IFW0=1ANDCO=1ANDW1=1THENPRINT”DER BODEN LOESST SICH AUF UND EIN SCHILD WIRD SICHTBAR”:PRINT”DARAUF STEHT: MAGISCHES WORT “:D$(2)=”SCHILD MIT MAGISCHEM WORT”:M(2)=1:S$(3)=”SCHI”:S$(4)=”MAGI”:GOTO131
7110 W0$=”H”:W1$=”F”:GOSUB12000:IFCO=8ANDW0=1ANDW1=1THENPRINT”DER TEPPICH FAENGT AN ZU SCHWEBEN”:S$(11)=”FLIE”:D$(6)=”*FLIEGENDER TEPPICH*”:SC=SC+1:GOTO131
The first line 7100 is the result of pouring acid on the marble floor. I realized 7110 must also involve pouring a liquid of some sort.
The above depicts me on top of the roof pouring the jug of cognac while the carpet is sitting their waiting to absorb its precious energies. After this is done on the next turn (no matter what you type) you’ll fly off to safety.
The carpet floats up and away with me. I’m saved and have found all the treasures.
It is possible I am missing some subtle hint in German to this, or maybe there’s some mythology involving alcohol and flying carpets? The source code is here if someone would like to try a poke.
I found it interesting that while Mr. Schuster managed to pull off a two-word parser just fine, he stuck with a fairly grid-like map like the French Colditz game by Marcel Le Jeune. Most games from the US and UK insisted quite early on with having twisty maps, yet these two early examples of non-English adventure games eschewed cavelike-maze layout altogether. This may be because in both cases the influence came primarily from Scott Adams; while Adams had some mazes they were fairly small and didn’t really dominate in the same way the Crowther/Woods mazes did.
Or it could be that figuring out a parser from scratch (which both authors had to do) was complicated enough as it was, so they decided to keep the map aspect simple to keep track of.
Unfortunately I have not be able to unearth anything more about the author. His name shows up in a 1986 German magazine, but just in asking a question to the editors. While Marcel Le Jeune knows of the first-original-adventure-game-in-French status of his work, if this really is the first adventure game in German, I’m not clear if Uwe Schuster is even aware of it.
I was stuck on multiple things, but I went for the mini-game first. This involved water skiing in Miami, while passing to the left of green buoys and to the right of red buoys.
I had trouble with the game for a while, and had almost fully justified the game was impossible. My problem turned out to be essentially one of hitboxes. (These are the little boxes that register collision in video games, and they often don’t match graphics exactly in order to be “more forgiving” for players but also for ease of calculation.) The “front” of each buoy is only at a spot near the very start of the rectangle, and then you can pass clean through the graphic without issue.
So rather than thinking of the obstacle course as dodging to the left or right of things, I switched mentality to passing through the white-colored side of each of the buoys. I suddenly had much more success, although in some cases the turns are very tight.
The graphical settings are a bit off on this recording, but you can see what the sequence looks like, courtesy of AppleAdventures.
The whole point of the sequence was to win a beach towel. (Yes, this game has “dirt quests” just like Time Zone where you meet Julius Caesar only so you can steal his ladder. We had to carry chicken soup with us all the way from New York, and we couldn’t just obtain a towel from a store with money, we had to win it. The difference here is that the game is clearly taking a comedic bent to the whole approach.)
With the beach towel I could resolve one of my other issues, that of having the explosion at the boat. After GET GAS causes a spill, a simple CLEAN GAS and we’re able to take off at San Juan without blowing up.
This leads to an open ocean map and you can steer in the wrong direction and go forever. I knew from the tip in London that I needed to find St. Thomas, and eyeballing a real-life map it’s a bit east, so I just decided to try typing EAST multiple times, and fortunately it wasn’t long before I arrived:
St. Thomas isn’t large and consists only of one beach house. (That sort of simplification happened in Time Zone all the time, but here it’s just comedic representation of geography.) There’s a door where you can KNOCK ON DOOR and they ask who you are looking for. I tried RAND or MAJOR RAND (again, based on the London tip) with no joy.
My critical issue turned out to be this is the kind of game where learning information can open things up. Uncle Harry’s Will had a moment where you had to listen to a radio broadcast about an open route before a gate would actually be open; the causality doesn’t really make sense, but it’s trying to force a certain game-plot. Here, I’m not even 100% sure what the exact conditions are. I know on the save file I was using to get the screenshot I had not met the contact in London, so at the very least, this is a case of Major Rand not showing up until you are told Major Rand is going to be there.
I’m going to loop back to the things I missed (both London and Rome) and then return to St. Vincent shortly.
First, back to London. That Telex that stopped mid-word had more information.
I thought we were supposed to infer that this is convey that missiles are going to be used rather than bombs, and the rest is just unreadable. There are games where the player really is meant to just filling in the missing information themselves, but here you’re just supposed to SHAKE TELEX.
The message goes on to indicate the contact is at the bridge (so you don’t have to hit upon him randomly after all) and also a “CODEWORD” that is intercepted. It gives the letters SNE but then the screen goes black, and then the screen goes back on showing only the letters ED and the revelation you’ve had your (not-visible-in-inventory) money stolen.
You might recall the Krishna gave over money if we gave flowers, but I was confused why we needed to do that since the player has money from the start. This scene is why. Just make sure you get the replacement money after this scene.
Outside the telex there’s also been a “blunt instrument” left behind which turns out to be a telescope. I guess you just hit people with whatever’s handy.
With the telescope in hand, we can resolve the issue at Rome. You can’t ever go through the gate — fortunately I was catching on the vibe and didn’t waste too much more time here — but if you LOOK DOOR rather than LOOK GATE you can see a note.
Trying to look while not holding the telescope.
What happens if you are holding the telescope instead.
The bizarro thing about this sequence is we get told again shortly the exact same information. I assume this “unlocks” something in the sequence to follow, but it is nearly possible to skip Rome entirely. The only reason why not is that you pick up a flashlight at Rome (needed for a cave later), but I’m pretty sure they also sell those in airports.
With those gaps filled in — and with the key from Paris still unused in our possession — it’s time to repeat the Miami sequence, followed by the boat sequence, followed by arriving at Major Rand’s door.
We’ve found Rand, so we can ask about Stupertino:
The plot is deeply confusing. How do we know Major Rand wasn’t up to anything nefarious as opposed to Count Stupertino? Why is it that the energy company mentioned in the newspaper ties everything together in the first place? I assume the informant-shorthand conversation was meant to imply all these things, and for a bounce-from-one-place-to-another plot of Rungistan it’s fine to be brief about such things, but here the player genuinely needs to be investigating in the correct direction.
Nevermind: with this info in hand we can hunt for Martinique, again using the power of real-life geography. As far as I can tell there is absolutely no way to do this other than eyeball things, realize Martinque is southeast somewhat of St. Vincent, and do some guesswork.
I ran into Antigua first, which is north of our destination. I don’t know what other places are included, but I did run into a crash once so there’s clearly some bugs in the air.
From St. Vincent, 14 steps south with the boat, followed by going east until hitting landfall will work.
Stepping off on Martinque results in landing at a “topless beach”…
…and then eventually a cave.
Inside is where the “code word” gets used, combined with the idea from way back at New York where a door might respond to a voice command. Say SNEEZER.
This is the final area. There’s a giant gun on one floor, followed by the “evil Count Stupertino” on the next. He throws a dagger at you and you need to (in real time) type DUCK.
The Count runs away and you can approach the panel. The launch countdown is already going, but you can activate the giant gun from earlier using the key from Paris.
Then it’s just a matter of strolling back to the gun, waiting for the countdown, and playing a mini-game. You have to shoot down each one of the rockets as they launch (space bar to shoot, IJKM to move the crosshairs).
Get every single rocket and you’ll be victorious.
Yes, that’s it. No idea
1. What happened to the Count
2. Why the Count was shooting missiles
3. Why the fake-out with missiles instead of bombs
4. What connection this had with the energy company
5. Why one of the directors was dead but Major Rand was fine
6. Why the Count had no personnel manning the missile area other than himself
I still enjoyed this roughly as much as Rungistan, and it was even easier — it didn’t have anything like the safe puzzle, or the weird airplane directions, or predicting an eclipse. However, I can objectively recognize the plot doesn’t even make sense as a romp, and someone who was sincerely trying to keep notes of their investigation in the hope of putting the pieces together would be disappointed.
Rather than lingering on that, I would like to discuss a bit more the unique aspect to the game: the action sequences that happen without separation from the regular world. When the bomb arrives you need to pick it up and throw it, and there is no sense that the game mode has shifted at all; the same for responding to the thrown dagger.
When people talk about the leap made by Sierra with King’s Quest 1, the third-person view with character movement is often what gets referred to. But in essence, the real innovation is making the adventure “cinematic”, by adding real-time animations to everything and having the player respond in kind. While the scenes are limited, the Bob Blauschild games are a proto-version of that. A history of adventure games that starts with King’s Quest 1 is missing quite a lot — Sierra’s earlier text-adventure work, for instance — and I think the Blauschild games also form an essential building block, and the only reason the world isn’t animated even more is due to technical limitations. King’s Quest 1 could have worked (awkwardly) in first person, but King’s Quest 1 could never have worked at all if it was missing the connectivity between commands and dynamic animation.
Up next: our first German game of the All the Adventures project.
Renga in Blue 