While General Electric (the company originating with Edison in 1878) is not much remembered for computers now, they were involved quite early. They started a relationship with the Air Force in 1948 manufacturing jet engines (only a year after that branch of the military was founded); this relationship let to the OARAC (Office of Air Research Automatic Computer) being built by GE and installed in 1953.
The military computer’s success led some in GE to push for going into computers more generally, but it didn’t happen until 1955. Bank of America did a call for bids to develop an electronic accounting method; while GE put in a bid, they fully expected to lose to IBM, but instead came out with the win at $32 million (in 1955 dollars). This led to the development of the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition system, and at the same time, GE established a computer department in Phoenix, focused on business mainframes.
Through the 1950s and 1960s they producing a long line of machines: the GE-100, 225, 312/412, 635, and 645. Mainframe manufactures, with IBM being the “old man” of the industry, were dubbed Snow White (IBM) and the Seven Dwarves (Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, General Electric and RCA). I’m going to guess GE was Grumpy. RCA was a spinoff from GE in 30s, so they were competing against their own spinoff.
GE was heavily involved in operating system development (notably the GECOS for their GE-600) and time sharing (allowing many people to use alternating cycles of mainframes). The ground zero of timesharing, Dartmouth, used GE hardware and was a joint project between the college and the company; this was the same system where Dartmouth developed the first version of BASIC.
GE eventually started losing ground to competitors and sold their computer assets to Honeywell; however, they still kept their time-sharing services, and after a number of changes, they were dubbed the General Electric Information Services (GEIS).
This remained a business-only service, but the number of unused computer cycles led GE to make a commercial spin-off in 1985 that would serve as a competitor to the dial-in services of the time, CompuServe and The Source. GE’s long-standing time-sharing infrastructure — dating back to the very invention of the concept — enabled them to charge less than their competitors.
While CompuServe had Forums, where people of common interests would gather, GEnie had RoundTables. For our story today, the important RoundTable is the Tandy RoundTable; the TRS-80 community there became the big hub for online enthusiasts. One of the sysops, Tim Sewell, uploaded his public domain and shareware library of software (keep in mind “public domain” was a vague notion in the 80s); as a second outlet he created a disk distribution group known as the File Cabinet, so that people who weren’t on GEnie could get the same access. In a survey from 1989 he found only 10 percent of the people who answered even had a modem and only a small fraction of that group even used one. (To be fair, even with GEnie’s lower prices being online via dial-in was quite expensive at the time. Note the launch article touting $35 an hour primetime — essentially, day hours. Even by the 90s when things were slightly cheaper primetime use went for $18 an hour. That’s about $41 an hour in 2024 money.)
Whilst browsing, Raspion Adventure caught my eye as something I had never seen before and was not in any of my references. That File Cabinet link seems to be the only reason the game survives today. The BASIC source was entirely devoid of an author name or year, but the distinctive name led me to find an ad in 80 Microcomputing (May 1981).
This is the only reference to RanDob (P.O. Box 1662 out of Boca Raton, Florida) I’ve been able to pull up. It lists a second adventure game (It Takes a Thief) and it is one I’ve played before! Not only that, that game gives an author name: Randy Dobkin. Previously, it was a game I only knew about via mysterious index card, and I had thought it might just have been someone’s unpublished side project, but apparently the author tried to sell it at least a little.
While it is not guaranteed Raspion has the same author as Thief, by source code similarity I’m marking it as essentially certain. It Takes a Thief placed you as a criminal robbing a home, with no preface: you just start in your getaway vehicle and get to work. It didn’t really need any explanation. Raspion, on the other hand, is cryptic even after it starts progressing:
We’re supposed to “visit the deserted city and find Syl and its treasures”. This is a treasure hunt with asterisks around the names of treasures; so far, normal. The game even has a “your house” opening (the only useful item is a spade) and there’s a storage room where the treasures go.
Going out to the door, however, leads straight to the aforementioned city.
Is this …. a horror premise? Has our house been mystically tossed into a future city? The adventure-collection aspect suggests not, but the “no escape” is striking. I haven’t finished yet so I don’t know if there’s some plot turn.
Here’s a meta-map of what I have so far:
The city part has a park where you can find a keys and a book hidden in bushes. The book requires unlocking with the keys. The book gives various “key phrases” if you TURN PAGE but only one of them is useful.
Say Lymbar in tomb is the useful one. The “stop reading books” warning is literal and if you TURN PAGE again you will die.
Also near the park is a moving walkway (WAIT will cause the player to change rooms) and there’s a computer off the side; I’ll get back to that later. Let’s check out the Tower of Lorgon next.
The tower starts with a ground floor that has spinning mirrors, and if you are in the room for more than two turns, you get dizzy and die. This means you can safely pass through and safely pass back but can’t linger (otherwise you’ll die on the way back).
The tower leads up to a roof with a vent, which you can climb to find a stair described as “mile-long”. Again I get cryptic vibes, although the path down only lets you go a hundred yards before getting stopped.
The “impassable” stone has an inscription
There is a better way. Give my regards to the keeper of the records. — Ranon of Lymbar
which will come up later. I have yet to find a use for the hammer (even though SMASH is a verb).
Moving back to the park, on the far east side is the Tomb, which is where the clue from the book gets used.
This opens a route down to a subway that has a “Yttrium capsule” you can ride.
At the end of the line there are two branches. One leads to a desert where, so far, all I’ve managed to do is get thirsty and die.
The second branch goes to the “Caverns of Syl” which is a maze, at the end of which is a *synthetic ruby*.
This is the absolutely standard “drop items to map” maze, no gimmicks.
That’s the end of the line for my exploring, except I said I’d come back to the computer. This is if you ride the walkway at the park, where there is a side room described as a “computer archive” with a “computer keyboard/screen”. I tried very hard to locate a verb that would work for interaction.
This included using LOAD which tried to load a saved game I hadn’t made, causing everything to crash. Oops.
This is meant more as a riddle: there is no “normal” verb here. I did my standard verb search and found
and the right command is off one of those. Specifically, the message back at the tower told us to give our regards to the keeper of records. This indicate we should type GIVE REGARDS, and I have no idea what that would look like physically (“press F to pay respects”?) but it works, and I’ll provide the full animation:
“SLIT”, blinking. Is that supposed to be a reference to the double-slit experiment from quantum physics? It is not possible to repeat the action.
To summarize, I have a a hammer (not yet used), spade (not yet used, I’ve tested everywhere), the book and keys, and a synthetic ruby which counts as a treasure. My only obvious obstacle is a desert where I die of thirst and the only unused clue is a mysterious flashing SLIT message; I have not tried SAY SLIT everywhere but that’s the only thing I can think of. My point score is 100 out of 450, but the entirety of those 100 points comes from dropping the ruby at the storage room.
Regarding if this is “horror” or “science fantasy” or something else, I get the vibe this aligns with the 90s Myst-clone games like Obsidian filled with bizarre future devices (and no people because that would be too hard to handle technically). The ultra-minimalist style gives it a unique flavor and the game will just throw a “control room” out with no description and you’re just supposed to imagine.
This could be a scene out of L-Zone or Rhem. If this was a real 90s game that message from Ranon of Lymbar would have been rendered as a blurry QuickTime video.
I’ve finished the game. Just like Dungeon Adventure was an anti-Zork of sorts, this can be thought of as an anti-Starcross, both in a negative and a positive way.
Voltgloss and Rob helpfully dropped some hints in the comments. The big piece I missed was the shortage of oxygen, but before getting into that, some small pieces to wrap up:
1.) the silver wire is … simply there as silver, and counts as a treasure
2.) the box which a knob gave the messages BEAM ON and BEAM OFF allowed me to mess with the main tractor beam for the ship; I was originally quite confused because it seems like there’s a literal beam coming out of the box, but no, that’s supposed to be a voice message or psychic impression or something; it also is a source of a bug at the end
3.) the oven is ignorable (Rob’s hint indicated a “fish”)
4.) the flashlight is also ignorable
5.) the shielding is safe to get before you’ve started the power, and as predicted, it does turn into gold with the lead-to-gold machine
6.) as mentioned by The Larch in the comments, the color code is just the official resistor code; there are some transistors that otherwise are a “red herring” but they’re intended as a hint; this also really puts even more into question the “alien ship” thing
With all that taken care of, I technically had found all my treasures, but couldn’t get them back to the ship in time, even with strategic teleports. The cutting torch comes with a tank (and it needs the tank to work, and the tank will eventually run out of gas if you leave it on).
Gas for welding/cutting uses a small amount of oxygen but is generally other gases, and I already knew it was being actively used in the cutter, so it never occurred to me it’d be safe to hook up to a spacesuit. However, Voltgloss’s first two hints…
You already have another oxygen source available already.
But didn’t recognize it as such.
…led me to go…. wait….
The metallic spacesuit can hook up to the tank and it works as oxygen. I think I may have audibly yelled at the screen. Look, you can buy oxygen canisters as separate things, and apply them in the mix, but it’s not oxygen alone, it’s called oxy-acetylene for a reason!
(As KarbonKitty points out in the comments, it’s technically different gas for cutters and welders, even though the canister is labeled as for welding but gets used on a cutter; also, you’d have different composition for a helium environment.)
And yes, some future-spacesuit-thing could just extract the oxygen and filter out the rest somehow, but that’s getting into the realm of fantasy-physics. This is part of why I said it’s sort of an anti-Starcross; it sets up as if science helps (even tossing in the resistor code, which I didn’t know) yet undermines the science at a crucial moment. It’s not terrible but — you know Lebling would never put a puzzle like that.
There’s another reason why this is the anti-Starcross (the “positive” way I alluded to). In that story, originally titled The Gift from the Stars, the aliens set up a task as a way of intentionally giving away advanced technology. Here, we are just wholesale swiping stuff, up to sabotaging the engine room just for some lead. It could have the same title with quote marks applied: The “Gift” from the Stars. I don’t normally think of the fate of our protagonists after their stories, but I can’t imagine our unhinged protagonist with an immortality serum ready to sell is going to land at a healthy ending.
While I have a full score, I was undermined by a final bug. There’s a message along the lines of “BUT YOU’RE STILL STUCK HERE” if you haven’t turned off the tractor beam (using the knob) but somehow my game got confused and even with the tractor beam off it still thinks it is on. I confirmed with checking Dale Dobson’s final screen that I had done everything correctly, the game just decided to collapse in a pile of bad parity settings.
Yet again, Aardvark tries some astounding ideas in a crumbling technical framework. They still stuck around through at through 1984, when higher-memory-capacity computers were becoming commonplace; I wish they had taken the opportunity to revamp some of their games to be slightly less reliant on super-tight programming (like Bruce Robinson did). Of course, Rodger Olson wasn’t even willing to fix regular bugs, so it isn’t a surprise we’re stuck with what we have. For Bob Retelle, who I quoted earlier, this behavior caused him to leave and make his own company entirely.
The “sloppiness” was another reason I spun off and started up my own software company. I had a real problem with releasing buggy games, which meant my own productivity was far lower than a lot of what was available from Aardvark. After 15 revisions of my “Time Trek” game, Rodger took to tossing the cassettes with the new revisions in the trash, rather than fix the production “masters” to quash the bugs.
As far as Bob Anderson (the co-author of today’s game with Olson) goes, I’m not sure what happened. We have one more game of his to play (another Haunted House) and his Mobygames credits cut off.
From the July 1983 Aardvark catalog, via the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
We’ll have to save that for another time, as coming up next: two utterly obscure TRS-80 games, including one resulting from the recent “missing adventures” thread. Part 2 of the missing adventures list will likely show up next week, and then we’ll finally be getting back to Apple II, as Bob Blauschild tries his hand at a game in color.
I’ve now utilized the teleportation booths, visiting both an asteroid and an alien city. I haven’t found any way to extend my oxygen (or swap the helium that’s currently in the ship’s air with oxygen); with teleportation it may just be possible to go fast enough, but given I still have some puzzles to go I have my doubts.
All amidst a flurry of bugs, alas.
A preliminary NASA design for a 12-man module from ’69-’70. It normally is in zero-G but allows for rotation to test artificial gravity. This is smaller than the Derelict ship but with the same concept, connecting floors via a central shaft.
My first breakthrough was simply figuring out how to work the glass booths everywhere on the map. Saying both LOOK GLASS and LOOK BOOTH let to the game declaring they weren’t there, but for whatever reason GO BOOTH is special-cased to allow entering. Please note that this is different from every other object in the game; MAGNETIC BOOTS must be referred to as MAGNETIC (or just MA), not BOOTS; it’s using the initial part of the string, with no notion of which part is the verb and what’s the adjective.
Leaving is just a matter of GO OUT, but that’s not safe with the droid (who seems to always miss their first shot, but shots later have a random chance to hit). Trying to PUSH KEYBOARD leads to the game asking for a number from 1 to 99. Trying out “1” since there seemed to be no logical way to do better, as “YOU MOLECULES ARE SCATTERED”:
2 and 3 similarly lead to inadvertent exploration of the known universe; locations start at 4. I ended up just brute forcing all 99 options, although most led to death.
There’s a way to avoid at least some of the brute force (kind of, I’ll get back to that) and three of the locations — as marked in boldface — go to new areas, which I’ll also get back to. I originally didn’t have the colors on my chart but I teleported myself to SECURITY (23) to try to pop open the safe, now that the power was on. Remember, I had determined the safe was
SAFE: BLACK/PURPLE – BLACK/YELLOW – BLACK/PURPLE
but typing in PURPLE-YELLOW-PURPLE didn’t work, and I realized quickly the safe really wanted a numeric code. I realized I could triangulate the room colors with the teleport locations, leading me to find the base-10-using aliens had the code
black = 0
brown = 1
red = 2
orange = 3
yellow = 4
green = 5
blue = 6
purple = 7
gray = 8
white = 9
that is, the same order that’s on the chart from the communications room. So BLACK/PURPLE is 07 or just 7, BLACK/YELLOW is 04 or just 4, and BLACK/PURPLE is 7 again. The combination for the safe is 747.
Popping open the safe reveals a ring of keys, a phaser, and some coins. The coins are just a treasure, the keys go to the locked cabinet in the sick bay (which you’ll see shortly), and the phaser can be used to smite droids, specifically with the verb BLAST.
The two-letter parser means there’s a lot of nonsense here: the green verbs are real, blue verbs map elsewhere. I found out from the response to PLAY that PLACE has to be a verb, not on my standard list (but I added it), and BLAST (not listed) I figured out while playing around with the phaser.
Blasting droids is quite satisfying and since they seem to always miss their first shot the droid rooms are now completely safe.
Above, I’ve used the keys on the cabinet, with the debris of a destroyed droid close by. This reveals
a gray box with a knob (this creates a beam, I haven’t done anything useful with it)
a silver wire (I also haven’t done anything useful with it)
and immortality serum (!!). I tried every verb I had extracted to see if it was possible to take the serum and thus survive the oncoming lack of oxygen, but had no luck. I tested out DRINK with a response of O.K. but that just mapped to DROP.
I finally realized (by testing it at back at the ship) the serum is simply intended as a treasure and we can’t use it. I admit I was looking forward to some even-more-terrible ending message by testing out the teleport-your-molecules device whilst immortal, but alas the technical requirements of this game remain extreme (it uses 12k rather than 8k, at least) and I don’t think the authors would have wanted to custom handle that.
Returning to those new locations: one is supposed to be clued by the projector in the library, which shows a brown and black alien city so the teleportation code 10 matches.
I suspect most people who played got this already by brute force. The thing is: at least some death-testing is required to understand the code, the asteroid has no similar clue, and there’s no reason why the authors couldn’t have dropped yet another hidden teleport somewhere in the 80s or whatnot.
The puzzle is rescued by the fact that the safe really needs the player to have understood the code. I’m not sure if changing the puzzle to remove the brute force (by adding more digits, say) would have made it stronger.
The new locations are above; I marked the teleport destinations. The shaft is the buggy one, as there’s no glass booth in the room, and when you leave the booth to enter the room the booth disappears. There’s also no corresponding color (it’d be black/yellow, 04). That buggy room — which a player is most likely to come across first — is another reason why the brute force can only sort-of be avoided — even if someone spots the pattern early they get dealt a room that breaks the pattern! But it’s the only one.
The asteroid just has a titanium pickax (treasure) and some lumps of coal (not treasure, yet).
The city is more interesting; it has a “press” that you can PLACE the lumps in (…thanks goodness I randomly learned about that verb…) and convert them into diamonds, as long the power is going.
While I now can easily open the bay doors and drop the tractor beam for escape, there’s still the matter of getting the treasures. Things I have yet to puzzle out are:
The box that shoots a beam
The silver wire
A flashlight near where the diamond press is (you can turn it on, but why? there’s no darkness)
An oven with a bottle of cooking oil
A metallic suit, which can’t be worn at the same time as the oxygen is attached
Some “shielding” near the radiation sign
More details on the last point: the shielding is at the hyperspace drive, and I’ve successfully lit up a welding torch and managed to CUT SHIELDING. Unfortunately this simply kills the player.
(By the way, CUT on anything else has the game claim you don’t have a torch, even when you do. I have to keep alert with any parser message to determine if it’s saying something real or if it’s just a bug.)
The reason why you’d want the shielding is back at the lab: there’s a machine that indicates (via cryptogram) it is for turning lead into gold. So I imagine you can get gold shielding if you can just survive ripping it off from the engine.
I suspect I’m closing in on the ending, and I also even suspect I have all the verbs. I’m still probably getting stuck via some cryptic parser response without realizing it. If someone wants to check Dale Dobson’s playthrough, I’d appreciate any ROT13 hints (especially if it turns out I’m missing something outrageous).
I’ve got the layout now, and this is very similar to Starcross in that a complete layout of the ship is really needed before puzzle-solving can begin in earnest.
Just like Starcross, Derelict is set in a rotating cylinder with artificial gravity (given the same author made a Rimworld game the same year, this is not a shock). The directions are up, down, forward, aft, spinward, and antispinward. There’s a central shaft that links to multiple layers of the cylinder, and when inside the cylinder, travel “wraps around” going spinward or antispinward.
Although smaller than this; in two of the layers only two GO SPINWARD or GO ANTISPINWARD actions are enough to loop, and in the middle layer, only three steps are needed.
I’ve divided the central shaft into four layers…
…and I’ll give the map in four parts. My coloring is arbitrary and most rooms have a unique color combo that I’m sure is important (they also all have the mysterious glass booth). In the landing bay, the floor is red and the walls are green; all combos are unique.
That’s everything for the start. Note on the map I have a corner marked; I’m using that to indicate where all the droids are (there are droids #1 through #6). I also have north mapped to forward, south mapped to aft, east mapped to spinward, and west mapped to counterspinward.
(As simple as the above looks, it took me a little while to figure out because I didn’t have an item and the loop going down at the Central Shaft was counterintuitive. Dropping the magnetic boots gets you stuck in zero gravity, and of course dropping your suit or oxygen are similarly fatal. I eventually found out that the sign at the start of the game which tells you DROP TREASURE HERE is takeable so I used it for mapping purposes.)
Moving on to the next floor, the one I’m calling “Technical”:
Past the starting floor all names of rooms are given in cryptograms. I suppose this is meant to represent an alien language but if it’s just a cryptogram, doesn’t it mean they use English? If I keep the thought process going I’d imagine we’re looking at a human ship that’s been tossed back in time, but in all honesty this is almost certainly meant like “Hollywood English” in a movie set in a non-English country; we’re just supposed to get the feeling of translating an alien language without having to do it.
The yellow sign says IZWRZGRLM, or RADIATION. I have a feeling I’m going to need the “metallic suit” that’s in the storage room on the same level, although just passing through isn’t fatal. Also noteworthy is a CUTTING TORCH with a TANK (with a cryptogram on it that says WELDING GAS) as well as a transmitter with a ruby crystal in it (my first treasure) and a chart with more cryptograms.
…let’s just ignore the two bathrooms (is this really an alien ship?) and note the locked cabinet in the sick bay…
…a “library” next to a “rec room” where there’s some playing cards (aliens?!), some jeweled gaming pieces (treasure number 2), a platinum globe (treasure 3), a projector that needs power…
…and in the XZKGRZMH XZYRM (CAPTAINS CABIN) there’s a log book giving an encoded safe combination.
Using the crypto-translated chart from the communications room, that comes out to be
BLACK/PURPLE – BLACK/YELLOW – BLACK/PURPLE
or maybe just PURPLE-YELLOW-PURPLE if we’re ignoring the initial #.
(I should also highlight, referring back to the screenshot, one of the major annoyances of the game. Aardvark games always have had a tendency to give no response at all to particular commands, and this is true for many of the things you want to look at or read. In this case, READing a log book shows nothing, and you have to LOOK!)
Moving to the top:
The safe is right there (HVXFIRGB, or SECURITY) but it needs power; an oven has cooking gas, and a lab has a “large machine” which needs power as well.
Finally the very top is the control deck, where a CRT indicates there is no power, and there are three colored buttons.
That’s POWER, TRACTOR BEAM, AND BAY DOORS. Rather like Dog Star Adventure, it’s clear the beam and doors need to be operated before we get out. Pressing either one indicates there is no power, so that must be the right press?
The exit down gets cut off, and the droid (and I assume all the other droids) wake up.
Other than running out of oxygen (the oxygen is really tight but I don’t know yet if we get a refill) there hasn’t been any hazards in the game yet. The ship is waiting for us! This might end up being a “preparation puzzle”, one of my favorite kinds, where we have to pre-create a safe route before lighting things up. It’s too bad the Aardvark parser makes everything three times harder to deal with.
Aardvark is a company I’d never heard of before starting the project, but we’ve spent an awful lot of time with now. They originally wrote their games targeted at the ludicrously small-memory requirements of the Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P computer, and made some odd parser sacrifices to get there (like only understanding the first two letters of each word). Despite this they’ve been rather clever in terms of geography, with (for example) Bob Anderson’s Circle World having a fair number of locations only reachable by teleport, but having all areas united together by the end. Earthquake, the game we most recently looked at, had an almost completely wide-open map, but led to puzzles where the thought process sometimes went “what store would have a solution to this” and not simply thinking about items.
Derelict is another Bob Anderson game from 1982, where he is again listed as co-author with Rodger Olson (founder of Aardvark). I’d be cautious about saying this was an equal collaboration; quoting Bob Retelle (of Trek Adventure):
Credits often resulted from “Hey why don’t you write an adventure based on xxxx” and it became “By Rodger Olsen and (whoever)”. At least I got paid (sometimes).
(Regarding getting paid, Retelle points out how ports were considered “owned by the company” so the original author did not make money off them. In one case a store told him about how the TI-99 port of his RPG Quest II was popular, except this was the first he even heard of a TI-99 port existing. Also, there is no Quest I and calling it II was a marketing stunt.)
Our goal is to raid a 1000-year old alien vessel for treasures. This is kind of like Queen of Phobos if we were one of the thieves. The catalog says it is “the new winner in the ‘Toughest Adventure at Aardvark sweepstakes'” and notes there are “no irrational traps and suddenly senseless deaths”.
This ship was designed to be perfectly safe for its builders. It just happens to be deadly to alien invaders like you!
This description made me hesitant. Earthquake was genuinely good (almost recommendable) but still had the miserable Aardvark parser. Any game designed as “easy” can get away with a less robust parser, not just because the player will have less moments of stuck-ness in order to test the boundaries, but because easy games tend to ask the player to communicate fairly straightforward actions.
The two versions of Derelict I’ve been able to find are for the Commodore PET and C64. I went with the Commodore PET this time. There’s a short series of messages about being pulled in a ship by an alien tractor beam, and then:
My first problem was just trying to pick anything up: GET BOOTS says “IT’S NOT IN SIGHT”. This is another instance of a parser’s try-not-to-reveal-too-much attitude is hurting, those boots are clearly right there! The default message is trying to avoid noun-hunting but it ends up leading to a bit of nonsense right at the start.
You’re instead supposed to TAKE MAGNETIC (or TA MA, this is a two letter parser) and you can do that for the other items. The sign indicates the treasures go in the room for points; yes, it’s one of those games. (Oddly enough, not common for Aardvark! They’ve been cranking out escape games, not Treasure Hunts.) Moving on with all three things (boots, spacesuit, oxygen):
Here is the usual airlock setup where you close one door to open the other one, go outside, and then:
I… what? Didn’t you say I was wearing the oxygen, game?
READ OXYGEN gives the message ATTACH/DETACH OXYGEN. Ok, fine, but it seems weird to make this essentially a puzzle. (And give the oxygen a response to reading! The magnetic boots give a blank message when you try to read them.)
Finally, through with that, I went outside again, did LOOK #1 DROID, and got the response
WHAT?
(EXAMINE doesn’t work at all, READ gives a blank prompt.)
Hmm, maybe try the booth instead? LOOK BOOTH:
THAT’S NOT HERE
Oh that’s right, it needs the noun from the start, it needs to be called “glass” instead. LOOK GLASS:
THAT’S NOT HERE
Game. Excuse me. You literally have the text “THERE IS A GLASS BOOTH HERE”.
Ye flask indeed. I don’t remember having anywhere near this trouble with Earthquake, but keep in mind this game has already tried to having both items being worn and things attached, and I have no doubt there’s something weird and complicated going on in the landing bay, but I’m still unclear what that thing is. Maybe it is best to just move on and explore.
This one’s going to be a headache to map out, isn’t it? And likely buggy.
I remember discovering some of the bugs of other games in early testing (it was pretty common for Rodger to hand out tapes of new games before they were put in the catalog), but it was like pulling teeth to get him to fix any of them.
In “Mars Adventure” (or was it “Pyramid”.. hmm.. I forget exactly), there was a stairway with exits that didn’t line up with the next locations. That is, you’d exit to the East, say, and end up in a room with exits to the North and South. Going south would take you back to the first room (it should have said West). Made it really tough on people who liked to map the advanture. Rodger’s response was something like “tough”.
Another one let you eat the key that was absolutely essential for escaping (maybe that was the Pyramid bug). Again the answer was “well, then don’t eat the key”.
Let me get a bit farther and report back next time. Aardvark games always stayed in tight constraints so there’s no way this goes out long, but if the parser difficulties stay this could still require multiple parts.
This is, as far as I can find, the only game or article of any kind by Stewart F. Rush. It comes from a BASIC type-in listing printed in the January 1982 edition of Creative Computing (the same one that had that rollercoaster game that used a laserdisc); it is for computers that use a S-100 bus (like the North Star Horizon) but includes conversion instructions for TRS-80 and Apple II. It was later re-printed in a slightly larger form in David Ahl’s Big Computer Games (1984), which gives the lines:
5 REM MOON SURVIVAL PROGRAM
6 REM WRITTEN BY STUART RUSH 3/12/81
These lines are not present in the original magazine article. We’ve had plenty of instances of people removing comment lines of this sort but never retroactively adding them (people might add themselves in the credits, but David Ahl was the editor, not Rush). I think what this indicates is that the 1984 form of the game is the original and the one printed in the magazine is pruned down for memory-saving purposes.
Here’s the intro of the 1984 version:
*****************************************
* CURRENT STATUS & LOCATION INFORMATION *
*****************************************
ELAPSED TIME: 0 MINUTES
POWER UNIT: 225 UNITS
OXYGEN REMAINING: 180 MINUTES
LOCATION: You are at Mare Serenitatis. Long eerie shadows from distant mountains and craters cast themselves across the barren landscape.
Compare with, simply: “YOU ARE AT MARE SERENITATIS.”
I’m fairly certain the intent was to put both versions in the January 1982 magazine, but something got messed up in the printing! The end data section has two versions, with Listing 2 being an “Option for Shortened Text”. The two are exactly the same.
Being in the vague “implied public domain” (not really public domain but people played fast and loose with BASIC source code in the 80s) there were multiple versions later, some based on the ’82 code, some based on the ’84 code. If you’re an avid follower of this blog I’m betting you already know one of them.
Via eBay. OK, I know the cover is depicting Quest for Gold, not Moon Survival, but is that a prospector posing for a picture with werewolves in the background?
I pored through many versions trying to find one that matched the ’84 code (including checking a port for the wildly obscure Microbee, an Australian computer — it turns out the DROP command is broken) and the best I could come up with was this copy which has “enhancements” by G. M. Bright. I didn’t know what these “enhancements” were (cue ominous foreshadowing) but it’s the closest version I could find that I could get to run.
From the 1982 article.
It is THE FUTURE, the year 1991, and our craft has crash landed on the moon and our goal is to escape. I admit I was originally excited to see how things would go because the author mentions
Each location described corresponds to an actual moon location taken from a National Geographic map of the moon.
making me wonder if this was going to be set in “true” hard science fiction — that is, we’d be dealing with a real spacecraft and scenario as much as possible. This turned out not to be the case, alas. Surely someone in the early 80s was nerdy enough to do an adventure with a realistic spaceship model, and not just randomly guess what it might look like?
*****************************************
* CURRENT STATUS & LOCATION INFORMATION *
*****************************************
ELAPSED TIME: 5 MINUTES
POWER UNIT: 220 UNITS
OXYGEN REMAINING: 175 MINUTES
LOCATION: You are on a promontary point on the rim of the crater Posidonius, only half visible when seen from below. There is total darkness to the East.
As the screen indicates, there is a constant check over “power” and “oxygen” and the magazine article even mentions
The emphasis is on determining optimum move scenarios, resulting in minimum times and resource use.
That is, the actions you need to do (barring parser annoyance) are easy to figure out, and the hard part is making sure you don’t run out of oxygen whilst escaping. You have an inventory capacity of four, and you start with a power pack and an oxygen tank, both you need while exposed to space.
The “dead” on the right shows the player hitting a dark place, and any step after is death.
The green-marked part is your ship, and has oxygen, so you can simply drop your oxygen to stop using it. (I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works in a real space suit; it took me a while to realize this and was the only “tough puzzle” of the game for me.) Oxygen is tight enough that you do need to optimize both steps while on the moon and make sure you drop your oxygen every time you’re indoors.
LOCATION: You are at Mare Vaporum. The Apennines Mountains rise ominously to the North and West.
##
There is an ILLUMINATOR here.
Quite randomly on the surface of the moon there is an ILLUMINATOR in one place and a SHOVEL in another. Both can wait for later; what we really need to start with are a SEALANT and a KEY from the ship.
LOCATION: You are in the control room, the ships console is before you.
##
There is an ELECTRONIC KEY here.
Starting from the Base of Crater of Plato and heading west has our suit get hit by a meteor shower, and we need to USE SEALANT otherwise we’ll die.
LOCATION: You are at the base of the crater of Plato. A shiney object is seen to the West.
? w
There is a meteor shower. Your space suit has developed a leak!!
? use sealant
Proceeding to seal suit…….
LOCATION: You are standing before a small metal shed. A sign reads ventillator shaft number 2.
There’s a peculiarity of the source code worth highlighting here.
3080 PRINT “There is a meteor shower. Your space suit has developed a leak!!”
3100 GOSUB 4890
3110 IF I2 THEN 2980
3120 PRINT “Proceeding to seal suit…….”:FOR CX=1 TO 1500: NEXT CX
Specifically, GOSUB 4890 is asking for a one-shot command. Either “try” or “use” is accepted, otherwise whatever the player does (even if it is something reasonable like APPLY SEALANT) fails.
4890 INPUT B$
4900 C$=LEFT$(B$,3)
4910 IF C$=”try” THEN 4950
4920 IF C$=”use” THEN 4950
4930 I=-1
4940 RETURN
Then, the player goes through a routine to check the player specified the right item (sealant, in this case) and that they have it in their inventory. This is all bypassing the regular command parser; we’re in a “faked” mini-parser level. This isn’t so apparent with the sealant, but it gave me issues at the next step.
?w
The shed is locked
I first encountered this without the key (I had the illuminator and the sealant) so I went back for the key, returned, and tried many different methods of typing UNLOCK DOOR. I finally realized that the game is treating the locked door with the fake parser again. That is, you need to first try to enter the locked door to trigger the section starting at 4890, then type USE KEY (it won’t work outside of the routine) and this will allow the player to move on.
The next part is all in green so is generally safe without oxygen (except a red-marked exit — if you go straight from the corridor to the hanger, there’s no oxygen, you need to go through the side “air lock chamber” first, and no, the game isn’t clear about that at all).
LOCATION: You are in a lighted space station corridor.
##
?n
LOCATION: You are in the storage room and supply area.
##
There is a CODED BADGE here.
?
The coded badge is incidentally so that a nearby robot won’t think you’re a security threat and shoot you, but given the robot is in a side room anyway, there’s absolutely no reason to worry about the badge. What you do need to worry about is going to the upper floor and finding the nuclear bomb in the hanger (with the oxygen caveat I already mentioned).
LOCATION: You are in the hangar area. The launch area
is located to the South of here.
##
There is a NUCLEAR BOMB here.
Why is there a nuclear bomb about to go off? Where are the people who set it? One could imagine a convoluted situation like Lost but the author has not filled in the gaps.
You can use a “transporter” to a room that gives information about a defuser to the east of where you started. You can’t find the defuser until you’ve seen the message. Where going east from the start point twice previously led to death, now it leads to a new room with the defuser.
LOCATION: You are in the space station’s control center.
##
There is a TRANSPORTER UNIT here.
There is a COMPUTER MESSAGE here.
? read message
Bomb de-activator located somewhere east of Mare Serenitatis on moon’s surface.
You need to coordinate picking up the de-activator while not burning too much oxygen; additionally, there’s some dilithium crystals you need as fuel (…realistic space ship…) that you can dig up with a shovel.
LOCATION: You are at the top of a rocky arete on Burg crater. To the North the center of the crater is thousands of feet below you. To the West, the huge crater of Eudoxus can be seen between crags on a ridge bordering Lacus Mortis.
##
There is a SHOVEL here.
? get shovel
Okay
? d
LOCATION: You are at the base of the Burg crater in Lacus Mortis. The surface is very soft here.
##
? dig
There is DILITHIUM CRYSTALS here.
Incidentally, there’s a walkthrough over at CASA that optimizes things even more by picking up the bomb and bringing it to the defuser rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, in the version I played, the bomb was too heavy to pick up.
This turns out to be a serious issue. I did very careful step counting: the game gives 180 minutes of oxygen, and each step takes 5 minutes. That turns out to be 36 non-oxygen steps.
8 steps are needed at start to grab the illuminator and head to the crash site. You can technically do this part just a little later but it doesn’t save any steps.
For the crash site you can grab the sealant and key. You need to go to where the meteor shower happens, get hit, drop the sealant, and return for the illuminator. Doing all that and making it to the shed (where you can drop the oxygen) takes 13 steps.
14 steps are needed to leave, pick up the defuser (and just that), and return for the defusal, for 22 steps.
That’s 35 steps out of 36, and doesn’t even account for getting the dilithium crystals for the ship to blast off. (You might wonder why you can’t ignore the bomb, get the fuel, and blast off — it says your ship isn’t fixed yet if you do that. I guess there’s some kind of auto-repair function?) If you’re allowed to take the bomb with you, the step count becomes manageable at 17 to both get to the defusal room and retrieve the fuel.
Since the original source does let you take the bomb, and the step count seems impossible otherwise, I’m pretty sure it was intended by the author, and G. M. Bright in an effort to make the game more “realistic” made the game impossible to win.
I decided to change the appropriate lines to make the behavior match the original, went through all the steps, got to the last room where I could blast off, and…
You have no power left, or you have no power source.
You have frozen to death.
You have failed to survive.
Do you wish to try again?
Agh! There’s not just oxygen going down, but also power. This wouldn’t normally be a problem but the “enhancement” also added the bit with a shovel. The original intent was for the player to just dig with their hands. You can even see this in the sample play in the 1984 book:
The steps it takes to pick up the shovel are just enough to exceed the player’s power pack. Unlike oxygen, which has no means of restoration, there is a spare power pack in the moon base, but just retrieving it and walking it to the entrance burns up power (even though the power isn’t needed indoors!) However, maybe there’s just enough to make things work?
Well, no. It has 50 power, and uses 5 power per step. It takes 10 steps to get outside, so you use the power pack entirely just retrieving it!
So not only did adding the “realism” of the nuclear bomb that couldn’t be picked up cause the game to be unwinnable, but adding the two extra steps to pick up a shovel did too.
You know what, if the game is going to be that broken, I’m just going to cheat, since I got to the end anyway:
GOTO 4165
Congratulations, you have just blasted off and are on your way to earth. Your escape time was 355 minutes.
I bet if you try hard enough you can win the game in negative moves!
In all seriousness, putting aside my mishap with the bad version — which says something about even when something is preserved with lots of versions, the act of playing can be difficult — the emphasis on super-exact timing is interesting; we haven’t seen it much before (but have a little; for example, with the games of Paul Shave). However, the timing being this tight removes any real sense of verisimilitude — we can’t pretend we’re just a lucky protagonist when we already know so much to ignore any misstep at all. Somehow this didn’t feel awkward with Atom Adventure, which clearly was an exercise in step-counting, but the initial framing here being couched in realism — up to at least including the real map of the moon — made the slow destruction of the facade a touch more grating.
By the way, if you linger and try to play with the robot or whatnot the moon gets destroyed by an asteroid anyway. Wouldn’t that be more of a problem than the bomb is?
ELAPSED TIME: 405 MINUTES
The moon base has just been destroyed by a large asteroid.
You have failed to survive.
Do you wish to try again?
A recent discussion that happened with Starcross is relevant here. In that game, the player is taking a “test” in an alien artifact; parts of the artifact are failing. One idea brought up (by both Jimmy Maher and Drew Cook) is the possibility that every puzzle in the game is a coordinated part of the test. I discarded that idea given that some characters are independently acting; that is, there wasn’t some way the Master Overlord Aliens could have guaranteed particular things happening, like the “chief” weasel alien being willing to trade their brown rod to the player. So there was a “test” where the aliens had to go out of their way to provide ways for the player to succeed because of certain things going wrong, and they just had to hope they had gone far enough to make the test fair.
What if, instead, it was an evil Demon Lord that made a “perfect test”, and generated a completely controlled tower of traps, with all objects and solutions intentionally given at hand? What if they decided, even if their victim “won”, they wouldn’t play fair anyway?
From the cover of the Firebird edition of Jewels of Darkness. Via Gaming Alexandria.
To back up a little: last time I mentioned all I really needed to “win” was to escape, given I had smashed the gem containing the Demon Lord. As orcs were gathered at the exit, I needed to get the horn (showing fleeing enemies) that was guarded by a goat that butts the player off a cliff.
Rather than thinking in terms of the puzzle, I thought in terms of my unused objects. I had magical dragon’s teeth, a magical bed, a cracked pot, and not much else I hadn’t used already. (There was of course, the possibility of object re-use, like the hammer on the gem, but I went with the logic that I didn’t have many obstacles left and the objects I hadn’t used probably had a purpose.)
The cracked pot, despite being cracked, could be considered as a container. But for what? It isn’t helpful for water, but maybe — studying the part of the map it was located in —
— maybe it could go pick up the jelly (which previously ate up a corpse), only two rooms away? Indeed it could.
Part of what took me a while to come up with this is what I call the physicality limit problem. This is a concept that affects nearly every videogame that aspires to a certain level of real-world integration. This is the moment where it seems like a player’s avatar ought to accomplish some task, given the world’s visual and/or textual description of the circumstance, but can’t.
The first two Divinity: Eternal Sin games lack a jump (unlike Baldur’s Gate 3 which uses the same engine), and this is lampooned in the first game with a simple rope that stops our heroes who need to resort to teleportation, telekinesis, or some other arcane trick rather than just stepping over the rope.
This physicality limit happens all the time in text adventures; all sorts of physical stunts and schemes that seem like they ought to bypass puzzle X but don’t, because the parser doesn’t allow unlimited creativity or, for example, self-reference to body parts. (One reason why I was startled by CLOSE EYES working in Dungeon Adventure is the number of times a body part reference might help in a different game — like one with a medusa — but isn’t understood.)
Typing GET JELLY gets a response of
Don’t be silly!
and I might normally think to PUT JELLY IN POT or SCOOP JELLY WITH POT or something of the like (neither “put” nor “scoop” is an understood word), but at this stage in Level 9’s development it still is essentially using a two-word parser. So I was essentially hitting my physicality limit on anything where a well-specified command would require both a noun and an object. Analogously: yes, I know there’s no jump button, but that rope is still there taunting me.
The thing tripping me up was not thinking “oh yes, FILL POT would be non-ambiguous as to what the pot is being filled with”. Fortunately, when I went to the jelly with intent the right command was not hard to summon up, but just in terms of my general mental puzzle-solving, the limited parser was stymieing my approach to a solution by implicitly providing a physicality limit.
(Put more simply: sure, a two-word parser can express a lot, but that doesn’t mean it won’t throw up obstacles that aren’t just in trying to communicate!)
Getting back to the action, with the jelly-filled pot, and my knowledge that nearby slime made things slippery, I decided it was time to return to the goat with new concoction in hand.
And yes, the horn works exactly as expected: the orcs run away, and the way is free to leave.
I’m happy to consider this (510/600 points) my “canonical ending”; our protagonist got most of the treasures, killed the Dark Lord, and likely retired in luxury. I had lingering puzzles I wanted to check on, but given I already “won”, I was much less resistant to the hints provided by lmari Jauhiainen.
First off, there is a source of light that can fill the miner’s helmet, found near where the roc’s nest is. In the DOS version the roc grabs you right away (and it might have the most absurd solution in the game) so in practical circumstance the second light source likely won’t be found by a player until the very end of the game. Erf. In the Atari version the source is a little more accessible:
Again there’s some parser weirdness; the wisp floats out of reach if you try to take it normally, but for some reason you can catching it while holding (not wearing) the miner helmet. (PUT WISP IN HELMET of course does not work. This genuinely stalled me for a bit trying to think I needed to attract the wisp somehow.)
I still found the roc would always grab the player after getting the wisp, so the roc nest puzzle needs to be solved anyway to escape.
Ilmari rightfully calls this puzzle “ridiculous”. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen SQUEEZE as a verb … somewhere? … but it is wildly uncommon, and it certainly wouldn’t make my top 10 in How to Make a Caterpillar Produce Silk, even with magical rules.
Ugh. In the department of More Reasonable to Solve, but I Swear I Tried It Once, let’s go back to the mystery enemy hurling rocks.
I had tried waving the wand, I thought, everywhere, but apparently not everywhere.
I admit I was imagining something like giants rather than just some person in a chair. I realize the wand’s use before was in an adjacent room so it makes sense here. Oh well.
With that out of the way, we just have the end of the Tower Trap Test. I had 8 out of the 9 needed gems (with 10 available, isn’t it nice how the Demon Lord gives an extra gem to make it super fair on adventurers who get stuck?)
Regarding the snake in the box, Ilmari’s hint was that the snake needed to be dead before opening the box. Hmm. I sort of visualized the box as waterproof, but I realized that wasn’t well-founded, so tried:
Oho! But what about the ghostly strangling hand? My best bet was — given the trap tower was carefully arranged so everything had a solution inside the tower itself — the red-gold ring. The ring killed me upon picking it up without having a leather gauntlet on. At the ghostly-hand room I had tried waving it, rubbing it, all sorts of other actions. I was unknowingly hitting a physicality limit issue again — normally to communicate “I want to throw the ring inside the opening to the room” I’d need a parser that takes both nouns and objects, but THROW RING turns out to map to exactly that (despite THROW almost everywhere else being synonymous with a DROP command).
Even with the strength belt on filling up 10 inventory slots with gems plus the burning driftwood plus the magical case turns out to be impossible (if you have the miner helmet, you can leave a slot free and get all 10). However, since only 9 are needed to enter the door, I went ahead and tried it.
Congrats, you escaped the Demon Lord with wonderous treasure! Now I’m sure it’s safe to leave — oh —
A horde of wights attack!
You have managed to get yourself killed!
This is sort of an anti-Zork. After carefully playing through the carefully-designed puzzles, rather than the adventurer being able to walk out with newfound loot, they (and their full inventory) get killed anyway. The only reason we’re able to get out is our magical case and the fact we can be somewhat meta since the Demon Lord is dead already: swapping inventory around so the crucifix and cross are both being held is sufficient to survive a landing back in the wight house.
Of course there’s no point in going there! There’s no reward for going through the Exit, only death. Rather than a Dungeon Master (or aliens) congratulating us, the whole mini-adventure was revealed as a ruse all along.
Back of the manual for the “wallet” edition, via the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
Coming up: Back into space, or more specifically, the Moon. Also, part 2 of my Lost Adventures list soon.
One quick thing first: I have managed to resolve my light source issues. The trick here is that when the driftwood burns out, you can just relight it and it lasts just as long on repeat. Frustratingly, while the game lets you re-light the driftwood early, the extra time only happens once the driftwood is out, so it’d be very easy to test this and decide this was a useless maneuver.
Now for my main progress: I had a wrong presumption partly brought on by the exact positioning of the copy protection of the game (right before the entrance to the black tower). In the versions that don’t use Lenslok (like the DOS version I was playing) the game asks you to pull words from the manual instead.
The gates are simply shut and not described as locked. While I was starting to think a collect-enough-treasures method of opening was unlikely and it was instead going to be via magical gizmo, I didn’t realize I had the object to do so quite early. It was an item I had been trying everywhere with no luck, and to be fair, we have the fantasy-vs-realism divide here again (see my last post’s discussion of Starcross) where it’s more of an intuitive reasoning that came up with the connection rather than a solidly logical one.
The whistle is just to a west a bit of the jellies so solving that puzzle is all that’s needed. I do think the authors expected the player to get in here relatively late because the “later” collar security clearances are in here, including a new one (mithril).
The authors really thought carefully through here: you’re in a lair of a giant mega bad-guy who is already dead (sort of, we’ll get to that). What will you find? If you get on the throne, you’ll find his secret control buttons to set people on fire and drop people in pits and so forth.
The list of controls are:
1 pit opens 2 pit closes 3 fill room with light 4 throne moves up to an “odd little room” (I will describe in a moment) 5 throne moves down 6 alarms sound 7 fire jets 8 “Master: I beg to report that all internal eyes are dead and enemies are in the caves. Also, thousands of enemy orcs are advancing upon us.” 9 you get teleported to a secret room at the top of the giant trap tower (will save for later)
This reminds me a lot of AD&D, but I’m not sure if it’s a particular campaign reference. It was delightful to play around with. It also helped explain a game design mystery, as the trap towers seemed to be entirely self contained: they were intentionally designed by the Demon Lord himself in order to dump in unsuspecting adventurers and presumably cackle at their demises. For example, if you press the “1” button and decide to jump in, there’s a sign explaining the 9-gem condition:
The “odd little room” that the throne moves up to (elevator) style has two collars and two treasures.
The “mithril collar” is indicative of yet another pillar. That pillar turns out to be the throne itself. If you’re wearing the mithril collar you can teleport to any of the locations while standing on the throne (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet (indigo is a synonym), silver, and mithril itself will warp you back to the throne). I love that the detail makes sense as both a puzzle and as a magical access system someone might design. There’s no logic you can just eyeball and work out — you have to experiment — but at least the Demon Lord’s motivation has been thought through.
There’s a bit more to see than just the throne:
Heading south, there’s a spot where you get picked up by a Roc and dropped in a nest, with both a caterpillar and a rock crystal (both are treasures). Unfortunately, I don’t know a way out! This is more irritating than it might normally because since I just unlocked teleportation across the entire map.
The Atari version has a “powdery peat” area before the nest, but since the DOS version jumps straight to the nest, I’m guessing it is just for atmosphere.
Heading north, you get stopped by ghosts, who explain “We failed the Master once and our doom is to remain here whilst He lives.”
In the Atari 8-bit version, you get rather less information.
Whilst He lives! Yes, as I long suspected, the Demon Lord is dead but not quite Dead dead. Although I didn’t realize it immediately, the place he’s hidden is revealed by pressing button 9.
This is technically a room at the very top of the trap tower, and the exit will (in two steps) drop you down to the swirling-images-of-madness room. The silver collar is of course one for the collection (I have the whole set now, but I don’t know if there’s some ramification of this). The gem starts trying to take you over if you pick it up.
Trying to CUT GEM helpfully responds you need a hammer for that, so I reloaded, grabbed the hammer from my supplies (they were previously used with nails to lock in a zombi) and killed the Demon Lord, this time for good.
This can be confirmed because once you do this the ghosts are gone. There is one catch to all this, which was mentioned by button 8 — there are orcs approaching. If you walking out the front gate, or even teleport to the green tower (which might be the better idea), you’ll be overwhelmed.
My guess is that I need the horn at the goat — the one showing fleeing enemies — and then I can escape. I still am stumped on getting it though! My best guess is I need to drop the bed somewhere (which becomes very large when you drop it — there’s no way they coded that in without it being important) and use it as a mattress to fall on when the goat bumps you off the top of the “stone face”. It looks like the landing place might be right outside (to the southeast or “out” where the skeletons were) but I can’t get there yet because I still get rebuffed by stones getting thrown from afar.
It would make sense in terms of story logistics if whatever item(s) found by solving the trap towers can then go back to get outside the stone face, and that will lead directly to the horn, which will lead directly to getting by the orcs that have gathered at the front of the dungeon. The game hasn’t followed my predictions that well, though.
(Speaking of trap towers, no, I haven’t got past the flying hand yet. I don’t know if you can get past the flying hand. And does the gem I destroyed count as the “10th gem”? The game gives you score for destroying it and the ghosts acknowledge the Demon Lord is finally dead, but maybe there’s a way to keep it around long enough to open that door.)
Just to summarize, the open puzzles I know of are:
getting the horn, where a goat knocks you off an edge
getting by unseen enemies throwing rocks
getting out of the Roc nest
finishing the gem-gathering trap tower area, either getting by the hand or safely opening the snake box or both
(MAYBE?) keeping the gem from soul-stealing without breaking it
the endgame with the orcs, that I theorize needs the horn
(BONUS, NEW) getting by a spot that is “too slippery” by some “evil green toadstools” in the mushroom area — this isn’t marked as an exit but going north has that special message, so it may or may not be a puzzle
Keep in mind this is at its essence a treasure hunt there could always be some secret action somewhere that reveals yet another treasure. I don’t get the vibe this is like Sharpsoft Haunted House which had one of the treasures hidden in a super-obscure way; the Level 9 method has generally been to give at least a stub of interaction to indicate there’s something to worry about.
But also: technically, I don’t need all the treasures. The game lets you leave right away, even, so you could claim you’ve “won” with just a few. I still think killing the Demon Lord is important enough it is a requirement of really “winning” and getting to that point will cause the orcs to appear blocking the exit. Even given that objective, some treasures would still be purely optional, just like Hezarin or Acheton.
I made progress last time mostly on the giant towers full of traps.
From a Your 64 article specifically about the Level 9 trilogy, written by Bob Chappell (author of Cracks of Doom). He raves particularly about their text compression algorithm.
Before getting too deep in, I should mention I’ve now played around with a third port, thus looking through the puzzles I’m stuck on again in a fresh context.
This is the DOS Hercules version. (An early high-res graphics card that came out the same time as CGA, but black and white only.) I’ve always been a fan of black and white and some of the colors in this game have been quite odd, so I thought it’d be worth a try. This is again from the Jewels of Darkness version, so that means I have running:
the 1982 BBC original, from tape
the 1986 Atari 8-bit version, from the Jewels of Darkness compilation
the 1986 DOS version using Hercules display, from the Jewels of Darkness compilation
The Atari version has had shortened text; this is not an issue with the DOS version, which had more space and so is uncut. It essentially is identical in text to the original (still haven’t found any Tolkien references besides the one in the manual, I think it’s only the second game that made them part of the plot) but includes the slight parser improvements (GET works instead of just TAKE, and you can also GET ALL). There’s also the practical circumstance of being able to see more text in the lower window compared to Atari.
The screen above represents one of my discoveries. The valuable dragon-slayer sword, remember, is seeking a dragon to kill, and will not be happy if you try to drop it (it will drop anyway if you eat the shrinking-mushroom). You can still give it to the troll and it counts. This almost feels like a bug, and it isn’t really necessary — whatever treasure you hand over lands in the troll’s room which you need to get into anyway.
I also managed to figure that part out, and this might be one of the toughest puzzles in the game. It required a jump of faith in terms of parser control. The text explicitly says the troll “sees you” so it made me wonder if I can turn invisible somehow. There’s another room just a little to the north where “you keep bumping into objects you can’t see” which is suggestive of a hidden item or group of items.
I typed something like that out in an early draft of this post (really!) and added, as a parenthetical afterthought, (like mushrooms?)
Huh, that isn’t actually a bad idea…
…oho! This is sufficient to sneak in to the troll and re-take your treasure, as well as some “rare spices” that count as a treasure and a red collar.
The pink mushrooms “taste fantastic” but don’t otherwise seem to have an effect. Also, I’m suspicious about the red collar being there, given how I already figured out the mechanism in such a way it doesn’t seem useful to have. I have got red, orange, yellow, and blue; technically speaking blue should be all I need since it gives access to all the other types, and surely this would be one of the later puzzles someone solves. So maybe collecting all the collars is important.
Also, here’s the black and white version of the same room so you can compare.
Staying in the mushroom area, I also managed to figure out the ants. This was the puzzle where I had a shrinking mushroom which enabled me to pass an ant nest, and then on the other side of the ant nest there was a growing mushroom. Shrinking is useful in unlocking one area, but growing again was causing me to get stuck at the other side of the ants.
The resolution remind me of my discussion of Starcross, and how someone who is used to science fiction might have an easier time than someone who prefers fantasy, because the rules of Starcross follow (to an extent) real physics whereas fantasy can have arbitrary rules. The rule I missed was eating the mushroom a second time grows the protagonist even bigger. It’s not an unfair puzzle by any means, but it requires a willingness to experiment with “fantasy physics” that is less predictable than Starcross was.
With the second growth spurt, you are now large enough to simply squish the giant ants by walking into the room. Then you can shrink back down with the original mushroom to normal size (unfortunately you’re too giant to leave and cause carnage elsewhere).
(All remaining shots are in color. Welcome back to Oz.)
Almost ready for trap towers! However, I did make one more discovery via the return of my old nemesis, missing a room exit. How do you miss a room exit in a game that has an EXIT command which lists them, you might ask? There are quite a few “duplicate exits”, like how going “east” and “out” will map to the same thing, and they get listed separately. In one area in particular — with the skeletons and the dwarf — there were multiple exits that went a direction and either up or down.
A demonstration.
So at the skeleton room, I had mapped UP to one of the other exits, but it went up to an entirely new room:
With dragon-slaying sword in hand, the sword “fades away” if you kill the dragon, leaving a golden bed (which shrinks if you pick it up) and some dragon’s teeth (which are magical, and I haven’t found anywhere to them yet, throwing them in a random place does nothing). Unfortunately, the sword is a treasure. I’m unclear if this is the right action and you’re supposed to find the sword later, or if I’m doing something entirely wrong. (I confirmed the sword does not warp back to where you originally found it.) My suspicion is that the dragon was “too easy” a fight and there really is a gimmick I’m missing.
For completeness, I should say there’s a “left eye socket” and a “right eye socket” connected to the dragon room. The layout here has been a face, with the goat guarding a horn (that I still haven’t resolved) at the “stone dome”. There might be some gimmick regarding the face similar to the invisible mushrooms where an action at the right place causes a special effect.
And that’s nearly it for unsolved puzzles outside the trap towers! I also am getting blocked going southeast from the skeletons…
A hurled flint splinters in front of your face, driving you back.
…and I still don’t have a replacement light source (or at least, fuel and a wick for the lamp). The light is short enough that I don’t have a good save file yet with every item in the game stored (I run out of driftwood light before getting them all), making it annoying to test out quick theories.
Finally, on to the towers. Remember, this is an (apparently) self-contained puzzle area entered via a one-way path. With the collars worked out I can teleport out if needed but I haven’t found that useful. (I now suspect the teleport is the only exit, though. The pedestal is in “darkness” and can only be teleported from, not to.)
I tried my best to compress a map here: the stacking means “up/down”, not “north/south”, and the second tower is tall enough I had to split it into two parts. Anything marked light purple has a gem I’ve found, and the goal is to get to the door that asks for “9 or 10 gems”. (This is true in both the DOS and Atari versions, but the BBC version only asks for 9 gems.)
You are on the ramp. A doorway bears the following message: “To escape the dungeon, collect 9 or 10 gems and go through this door. Leaving without the gems will cuase your death”. Clearly you must be in the central dungeon of the Demon Lord.
The salt cellar has a “salt pig” and if you go over to the saltwater and drop it, you can find a pearl. The topaz and emerald are not gated by traps and easy to get, and pushing the sculpture at the top of the smaller ramp lets you get a rhinestone. A sapphire comes from the “reward room” where you needed to avoid the temptation of picking eternal life or world peace.
Now things get trickier. The next thing to resolve is two black spheres that appear nearer to the top of the large tower; one is by the pedestal, and one is in the room where you need to close your eyes to maintain your sanity (“myriad moving images of writhing tormented creatures”). If you keep your eyes closed, you have enough time to leave the top floor room with the black sphere following, make your way down to the other sphere, and enter. The two black spheres will annihilate each other. (Another anti-Starcross moment — this felt like a natural action to test, following the rules of fantasy logic, but I imagine some hard sci-fi types hated it.)
Heading back to the top lets you get a diamond and a shield. The shield can be used on a “door with holes” that lets out spikes. Inside is a corpse with a leather gauntlet and leather blindfold.
Mixing things up, no gem.
The gauntlet can be used to pick up a “gold-red ring” that otherwise sucks your blood like a vampire; it’s enchanted but I haven’t found a use for it. The blindfold can be used to protect yourself from acid, entering another room with an enchanted brooch.
The brooch unleashes a real elephant if you throw it but the room is generally too small for one. Normally that’d be a signal to go to an open space, but the idea here is to go to an “executioner” who is stopping you from leaving a room with an amethyst.
The executioner leaves a hood behind where if you try to wear it you are now the executioner. It might just be a trap. There’s also still a box that unleashes a snake if you open it; I still haven’t found a use. I did manage to get into a room with a “crusher” via a wooden wedge near where one of the spheres was. This gave me a topaz.
The only room where a (non-portable) trap remains is one with a hand pointing at it. Trying to go in has the hand strangle you.
I might think the hood could somehow protect here, but no luck. Maybe we finally bring in an outside item? I’ve got a stick that makes a whistle I haven’t used yet, those dragon teeth, and a … magical inflating golden bed? Nothing I’ve thrown out seems to work.
I hope to get to at least the endgame next time! If there even is one. Maybe it’ll be a single-room ending rather than something extensive, but the room count suggests at least one more area.
Poster from Jewels of Darkness (the trilogy repackaging of the game), CPC version. Via cpcrulez.
I haven’t had time to play much, but I did resolve something major that’s worth a post: how the teleportation system works.
First, though, the puzzle which I realized the solution as I was posting.
This is a case where the coffin is “ajar” and a zombi comes out of it and kills you; you don’t need to kill the zombi, you just need to stop it from coming out. Back at the jelly crossing there’s a hammer and nails nearby, and so, after a little struggle with the parser:
A couple of my other tentative solves fell through (I’m still annoyed about not being able to pick up the needle after turning small and using it as a spear on the ants) so I ended up switching to the BBC Micro version for a bit to see if (just like with the man with the wand in the forest) there were other parts made clearer via the expanded text. The dwarf says explicitly you’re looking for ore (rather than just “a treasure”) so my moment of confusion would have been cleared up faster:
As you wave the skeleton staff they all clank off, leaving the dwarf.
“Thank you”, she says, “You saved my life. I’ve found a rich vein of ore above the stone face and will share it if you visit the area!”
While I still haven’t figured out the goat yet, the horn has a description suggesting its use which isn’t in the later version:
You are on a smooth rock dome, a narrow path
A fierce goat is on guard
A large horn lies on the ground
EXAMINE HORN
It is very valuable!
It is enchanted!
The horn is decorated with pictures of fleeing enemies
Apparently the octopus solution was supposed to be another pun/proverb:
The octopus waves its arms and you can see. Thus “many hands make light work”!
You are in a second dead-end black room.
A staff of polished bone is here
A yellow collar is here
Let’s focus on the yellow collar a bit — remember I needed to use that to get through a particular exit because otherwise I wasn’t authorized. I had some urgency to try to figure out the teleporters because I found out (horrible!) the light source of the burning driftwood does have a time limit, and it is a tight enough time limit I might need to optimize my travel. (Might is because I still have a lamp that lacks wick and fuel; it counts as a treasure so just might be that, but surely such a device would be used for more than a treasure?) I’ve found optimizing somewhat fun before, but only in very small scenarios; when it’s a big game like this requiring many objects be tested on many places, it becomes irritating to run into a situation where you run out of time simply because you didn’t have the right inventory at hand.
I tried all sorts of antics with the yellow collar while on the teleporter. I didn’t do every single verb on the list…
The BBC version is different; for example, CHOP is accepted, but GET rather than TAKE is not.
…but I tried all the ones that seemed reasonable, and collars in different combinations as well. I finally turned to the possibility of voice commands and it worked!
Jewels of Darkness needs a “SAY” in front. The BBC version does not.
After playing around a bit more, I realized the security level setup was something like
red < orange < yellow < green < blue < indigo < violet < silver < "darkness"
although oddly, "Indigo" is a word in the BBC version but not the Atari one. If you have an orange collar on, you can only access the red and yellow pedestals. If you have the blue collar on (the best I've found) you can only access the red through blue pedestals. You can still teleport from the higher security pedestals with a lower collar, just not to them.
Now, looking at my previous map, I did not have “indigo” (but since it doesn’t exist in the Atari version I’ve been playing, it likely just doesn’t exist) but I also didn’t have “green”. This is a pedestal that can only be reached via the teleport system, but sadly, it doesn’t unlock anything noteworthy; it lands you inside the mysterious tower from the start of the game, with no new objects or locations otherwise.
The one thing that helped tip the puzzle towards being a little easier was the “SAY PASSWORD” puzzle I referenced last time — it meant that the game did have a SAY trigger with particular words, so the possibility was in my head as I was testing through the various collar manipulations. I don’t think the authors were intentionally tutorializing part of the game, but I’ll take a lucky accident.
Renga in Blue 
