Ken Rose’s Adventures in Adventuring column has featured in this blog once before, where I wrote about the first three installments, including Journey to Planet Pincus. The column was printed in the bi-monthly magazine Softline (essentially an extension of the Sierra brand, at least when it started) and was meant to teach people how to program their very own adventures in BASIC.
Today I’m going to take down the remaining issues of 1982.
Just like the previous three installments, there’s a prefatory article explaining the thing being taught; unlike the previous three, the source code has no commentary with REM statements. My guess is as the games started getting longer it became harder to justify the print space. The September article even discusses the increasing length:
You’ll probably notice that as these programs become more sophisticated, they become longer. Most of the length is taken up not by the logic of the program but by the descriptive words needed to flesh out the story. In fact, in most commercial adventure games, the program takes up very little of the disk. The bulk of the disk is filled with the wordy descriptions used to make the game interesting.
The articles still explain what’s going on section by section. I’m hence treating these as “teaching exercises” rather than full-fledged attempts at games; each games tries to emphasize one particular aspects of adventures as opposed to being complete experiences.
I did manage to avoid having to type in any of the type-ins. Werewolf and Minotaur I found on this disk at the Internet Archive. It was uploaded from “crates” via the Rhode Island Apple Group, and this particular disk comes from the Big Red Computer Club (a public domain distributor similar to Brunswick Publications). However, I couldn’t find any Apple disks that had the Diamond game.
What saved me is the Atari. All the programs from the Adventures in Adventuring series were converted to Atari and then sold on disk. You can find the files in a thread here.
Brian Hall, credited on the disk, chimed in: “Seeing pictures of the floppies really warms my heart! This was one of my first paid projects during high school.” When asked how he got attached the product, he responded: “I think I had approached them with the idea, and they agreed. I *think* that came as a result of having been mailing them high scores (when mailing in a high score was a thing!)”
However, there’s a catch! Disk 2, the one shown above, is corrupted. I used the Atari Explore disk utility and was able to rescue Diamond and Minotaur; Diamond is the file that I didn’t have in Apple form. I have a hacked version of the disk here (with the menu for disk 1 — pick option 2, Please Pass the Zork, which will actually play Diamond).
So the upshot is I’m playing July on Apple II, September on Atari, and November back on Apple II. All three only give credit to Ken Rose (and given Michael Rose — who after some Internet scrounging I am 98% sure is Ken’s younger brother — was pretty explicitly mentioned in Jan. and May, I’m not going to assume he’s not involved here, but it is faintly possible).
The Werewolf Howls at Dawn
The easiest way to control time is to set up a counter that keeps track each time a move is made. These moves can be called hours, or minutes, or stardates, and they can be incremented every time another move is made. This is the technique illustrated in this month’s program.
This is essentially a 5-minute game. The idea is you’ve been bitten by a werewolf and have a limited number of turns to get some wolfsbane which will cure your condition, so the game is showing off how a “timer” works in a game.
The room descriptions, at least, are colorfully done. There are regular messages indicating your slow transformation into wolf-form.
Tight limit, but very short game.
Curiously, the parser has regressed: it’s the type where you type in a verb, and then if it applies, you type in a noun. This game is so simple the author apparently wanted to isolate just the time-changing aspect.
This is just a bit west of the starting location, rather than right where you start, even though the narrative essentially picks up with you bonking the werewolf on the head.
You just need to grab some CATNIP from the cave and some PLANT CLIPPERS from a swamp. Then you need to pass by a panther, with THROW CATNIP.
Remember you type THROW and CATNIP separately.
Past the panther is an alcove with the medicine you need. The clippers need to be used to CUT first, then you EAT.
This game isn’t that surprising in context; if all I was doing was demonstrating a global timer, I’d also want the game to be short in order to quickly show off how it works (and how it’s not just a simple “move” increment but actually using a clock). The only part I’d do differently is make sure that typing in something wrong (like a bad direction) would not increment the time, and discuss the idea of how meta-moves and mistakes shouldn’t count, because something as simple as a typo can then kill the player.
That’s a funny-looking werewolf den.
The main issue is that not everyone would encounter this game in context! It was, as I mentioned, on a public domain disk, and made it to an unofficial DOS port. I imagine some people popped it open expecting something a little more substantial, when something substantial might have actually interfered with the demonstration.
The Case of the Pig-Headed Diamond
The September article is titled The Thing’s the Thing and is “about” objects. Again the game is quite small.
This month we’ll deal with the handling of objects in an adventure program — how to pick things up, use things, and drop them. Our adventure has a mystery theme, in that we will be trying to recover a stolen diamond of little value.
The game has switched back now to a two-word parser. I’ve been wondering if all these games were really written in sequence for the articles or if there was a certain amount of scrounging from the archives, so to speak. Again, the map is quite simple:
The room descriptions have been nuked for functionality. (And less room in the magazine.)
There are no room exits so mapping is slightly slower than the previous game (which was good enough to mention every possible exit in descriptions). The overall effect is for the game to feel even more like a demo than Werewolf.
You first need to grab a shovel, and then use that shovel to dig out a ladder from a garage. Why the garage has a dirt floor is left unclear.
Then take the ladder inside to find a chandelier.
You can use the ladder to help grab the diamonds.
CLIMB LADDER
YOU HAVE OBTAINED SOME DIAMOND—LIKE PENDANTS HANGING ON THE CHANDELIER. YOU CLIMB DOWN THE LADDER.
…and then the Atari BASIC broke down and kept insisting on “TWO WORDS PLEASE” over and over after making the heist. Oh well. I think I’ve seen enough here.
There’s a pig in the bathroom for some reason. Also, you can grab ice cubes rather than diamonds.
ADD: Matt W. in the comments points out the actual goal: bring the ice cubes back (the chandelier is a fake-out) as well as some matches. If you drop the matches first at the bank, then drop the ice, you’ll get a “win”.
4020 IF OB(3) = 1 THEN PRINT : PRINT “THE MATCHES FLARE UP AND MELT THE ICECUBES AND OUT FALLS A CHEAP INDUSTRIAL GRADE DIAMOND. NOT MUCH, BUT ENOUGH TO WIN.”: PRINT : GOTO 4100
I would much prefer to teach good game design at the same time as teaching the programming, but I suppose the author felt it was appropriate here to noodle around with fake-outs, especially given the number that appear in the next game.
The “adventure” part is so barren I can understand why this game was left off the Apple II disk. It really is just a demonstration.
The Labyrinth of the Minotaur
For the November article, Ken Rose feels obliged to teach us about mazes. Could we skip teaching the masses that one, please?
Ever since Adventure, it has been almost a requirement that an adventure game contain a maze. Perhaps the neatest among the current ones is the maze in Zork I, because of its complexity and the necessity of exploring it thoroughly.
I assure you it is not “almost a requirement”, especially given the author’s own Palace in Thunderland did not have a maze! To be fair I think the percentage of adventures with mazes has been roughly 80%, not counting “confusing geography” as a maze, and some of that no-maze percentage comes from multi-title authors like Scott Adams and Peter Kirsch who shook off the need to have a maze in all their games.
I can say of all the games, it is the only one that felt “substantial”; it took about an hour to map out.
The game gives only five gems to map 20 rooms. You can do the “relay” method to an extent (take the red gem you used in the room 1 and transfer it to room 6) but that only works if some of the exits don’t warp you back a significant way, and you might notice a room two away from the exit room goes nearly back to the start.
In addition to that annoyance, the game includes death rooms next to signs.
Worse than a death, this is a softlock. You have to test out N/S/E/W to realize they all loop after here and your game is over.
Another sign tells you “Don’t go west” and the exits of east, south, and west all kill you. (That is, both following the sign and following its opposite by going east are both deaths.)
You’ll finally hit a sign that says ABSOLUTELY DON’T GO NORTH and that’s when you finally do want to go north, escape, and reach the twist ending.
I’m not sure why being cooked by the minotaur earlier made sense, then.
The maze is a “cheap” way to extend game time. It forces the player to slow down and map and requires almost no design thinking on part of the author. And I guess people were still having … fun with it? At least I appreciated the moments of cruelty mixing things up, even if I only muscled through by using save states on my emulator.
Postnote
The author indicates the development so far has been systematic…
Those of you who have been following this series of articles can probably see how we have been using various routines to build up from very primitive programs to some level of sophistication. If you entered the game late and are feeling a bit bemused by all this, pick up earlier issues of Softline and you’ll be able to see why these things work as they do.
…and I’m not quite so sure, given it isn’t using the exact same structure every time. For example, in Minotaur the maze data is all saved together as one data file, and only uses N/S/E/W:
10010 DATA 2,7,1,1,1,7,3,2,3,8,3,3,3,4,5,4,5,5,5,5,21,
16,16,16,1,1,7,7,4,8,8,9,4,9,10,8,5,15,15,15,7,16,11,11,
17,7,12,12,8,13,13,12,9,19,14,14,15,15,14,15,11,16,16,
6,12,17,17,11,13,18,18,18,18,20,20,20,20,20,20,20
while Diamond splits things up, and includes UP/DOWN directions.
10020 DATA 3,1,0,0,0,0, “LONG SHADY ROAD”
10030 DATA 5,2,0,0,0,0, “BOTTOM OF HILL”
10040 DATA 0,0,5,0,0,0, “DUSTY GARAGE”
10050 DATA 8,2,6,4,0,0, “OPEN FRONT DOOR”
10060 DATA 0,0,0,5,0,0, “OVERGROWN GARDEN”
Any of the source code could be helpful for a budding adventure writer, just if I was building the series I would have tried to build up the source code so later months always duplicated prior months precisely. We saw something approaching this systematic approach with Basement and Beasties. At least the line numbers essentially match in terms of section organization. For example, moving around in Minotaur starts at 1410:
1410 IF VIS = “NORTH” THEN R = N(R)
1420 IF VIS = “SOUTH” THEN R = S(R)
1430 IF VIS = “EAST” THEN R = E(R)
1440 IF VIS = “WEST” THEN R = W(R)
and it does as well in Diamond, just the logic has sightly different structure:
1410 R1 = R
1420 IF VIS = “NORTH” AND N(R) > 0 THEN R = N(R)
1430 IF VIS = “SOUTH” AND S(R) > 0 THEN R = S(R)
1440 IF V1$ = “EAST” AND E(R) > 0 THEN R = E(R)
1450 IF V1$ = “WEST” AND W(R) > 0 THEN R = W(R)
1460 IF V1$ = “UP” AND U(R) > 0 THEN R = U(R)
1470 IF VIS = “DOWN” AND D(R) > 0 THEN R = D(R
I can’t claim this is arbitrary as teaching material, then, although I’m most curious where things eventually lead, as there are three more months to go in 1983. Will there be a “culmination” adventure including all the previous learnings, or will the series just fade out?
I had the nagging feeling there was some frustrating, brand-new way of hiding stuff I had to muscle through, and then I could make it to the end of the game. I was essentially correct.
Close-up from the Digital Fantasia “blue” variant box. Via the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
Bach to the maze!
And specifically, something where I was looking at what I wrote and re-considered my position. Here, I’ll go meta:
This part, where I was assuming the vent was just random picture re-use.
Given finding the bunk in the first place required searching some wreckage (and it is the only place where SEARCH works in the game), I thought it highly improbable there was nothing here, but I concluded after failing enough times it was a situation where I needed to come back later (maybe pushing a different button elsewhere opens a secret). Not an unreasonble conclusion, but the vent picture in particular kept nagging at me, so I kept trying a whole slew of things, like LOOK UP (on my regular checklist, but it didn’t work here) and, for what I believe is a first for this blog, EXAMINE CEILING.
Colossally frustrating. I have trouble believing I could — in the real circumstances — be searching so thoroughly and never come across a grille that’s right there. At least I got saved by the ZX Spectrum picture; the TRS-80 and BBC Micro version have no such help. (Dave Dobson needed a walkthrough here and somehow that didn’t bother him, but I’ll get back to that.)
It’s also unclear from the description (and attempts to enter) that you need to JUMP to enter, you can’t just GO in.
Just above is an area with a cable. I immediately guessed that went back to the lathe, but I wanted to explore a little further before testing that.
Don’t go in the cage; you’ll get locked up and die of hunger. While unmentioned, you probably have the satisfaction of the creature dying of hunger first.
The storage crate here has a square block. Remembering that the oven needed something ROUND in a hole, and that the cable probably goes to the lathe … I immediately knew what to do next, except for the eternal “struggle with the parser” bit.
Specifically, you need to FIX LATHE while you have the cable (not PLUG CABLE, or INSERT CABLE, or ATTACH CABLE … you’re not really fixing it in the classical sense, are you? …).
Something happened!
Lathe works
Then you can TURN CUBE (??) in order to insert the cube in the machine and transform it into a ROUND BLOCK. With this in hand you can go back to the oven and FIX OVEN (not INSERT ROUND BLOCK, of course). With the mix I mentioned last time (including the tablets) you can make a poisoned fruit cake made especially for the creature.
I then took the magnetic boots, and the space suit from the locker, suited up, went over to the airlock with the orange button, and–
I’m blasted into deep Space!
I’M DEAD!
Well. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Fortunately, I already had a bead on an alternate exit, because I went around trying EXAMINE CEILING on all the bunks and found the Captain’s Bunk (which already held the tablets) also held another secret.
I admit I was annoyed at the game enough at this point that I just checked a walkthrough. I was missing the fact at the lathe you could GO LATHE. Urf.
Because I had already been noodling with the MAKE command off the verb list, I came across MAKE SCREWDRIVER without too much trouble, which is apparently enough to allow REMOVE PANEL back at the Captain’s Bunk. You do not refer to the clips that hold the panel down despite them clearly being part of the issue. It seems like for every basic action, the game insists I try phrasing it four different ways before it’ll work.
The rest is straightforward: you walk into an airlock, out the ship to a shuttle, and escape. (Putting on those boots and suit in the middle there, and pressing the white button at the Bridge from a while back was needed to let the airlock open.)
Look. Object Hunt: the Game can be fun; I already noted that Jigsaw essentially uses it as its premise (but also with a prevent-change-in-the-timeline plot and delicious prose). The gameplay here was essentially overwhelmed with me having to check if there were any more obscure ways to EXAMINE a thing I was missing, cojoined with an epic parser struggle. There was a creature to worry about, I guess? But it just peacefully hung out waiting for you to bring some poison, and was only a threat if you decided to take a nap. (There’s technically a time limit too — after enough turns the natural daylight cycle of the ship turns off and you need to leave the rod on, and your rod can run out of energy. I never came close to this being a problem.) The overall plot effect was the most un-heroic disaster escape ever made.
Both nimusi and Exemptus at the CASA Solution Archive had similar disappointment to myself over the game. Exemptus additionally points out the larder (the room) works as a container that you can pick up and carry around with you.
Map of the whole game, via Sudders from the CASA Solution Archive.
Escape from Pulsar 7 was an entertaining challenge — not too arbitrary, and tough for (mostly) the right reasons. Maybe I’m just personally biased toward the science fiction side of things, but I had a lot more fun on the Pulsar 7 than in Howarth’s fantasy worlds.
I totally agree that this was better than the Arrow of Death games. Needed some of your tips there!
It’s easy to brush over such disparity with “it’s just subjective” and move on, but given how often my opinion has matched Mr. Dobson’s, it’s worth some thought about what’s going on. I don’t think it’s just because of being sci-fi. Studying his post, he had to use the walkthrough on three crucial parts:
I had to reference a walkthrough to learn that SMASH LOCKER (once the hammer has been found) is the way to access its contents.
There are two points where we have to EXAMINE CEILING from a bunk to find somewhere new to go — I missed this entirely and needed a walkthrough nudge, as the first ceiling entrance I found was clearly visible.
I spent quite a bit of time in the Pulsar 7’s airlock trying to figure out how to keep myself from getting blasted into space. Even when I was wearing the space suit and magnetic boots, the result was always the same. A much-appreciated walkthrough informed me that there’s a secondary, well-hidden emergency airlock.
For the second moment in particular, not only did I not need to check a walkthrough, I found it enraging when I solved it. Is this a possibility where using a walkthrough makes a puzzle more palatable? I certainly have encountered games before where people have given thumbs-up but I long suspected that the thumbs-up is conditional on not lingering too long trying to figure things out. Perhaps Dobson was being more casual here about when to check hints and moved on as soon as the experience started to be trying.
Still, though, better than Arrow of Death Part II? That game featured a clever unfolding structure which overlapped, and had reasonable enough puzzles I made it all the way with no hints at all.
For the record, my current ranking is something like
Pulsar < Golden Baton < Arrow Part I < Time Machine < Arrow Part II
but maybe (as my final theory) some people are more immune to guess-the-verb troubles.
How could this location not make someone mad though?
I was getting tripped up by how you look at things in the game. When a text adventure author wants to hide things in the items of a game that gets revealed, they have a few options:
a.) Just have one consistent command, like LOOK, for everything.
b.) Have examining and searching be considered separate actions.
c.) Add in LOOK UNDER or LOOK BEHIND.
d.) Require some specific “movement” command like MOVE or PUSH.
In addition to all the above, a game might have a “second order” style looking, where a description of an object has something inside it that can be looked at (as we saw with El Diablero and the thread).
Now, none of the above necessarily are “good” or “bad” design on the face of it, but they need to be implemented in such a way that the game is careful about feedback. Jigsaw (1995, Graham Nelson) has finding hidden objects as a mechanic, and introduces this early with a rolling stool.
Vestry
The vestry once held surplices. Today, it holds a surplus. Debris, broken furniture, blown-in leaves, panes of dusty glass and mildewed cloth, all unwanted.
There’s even an old Victorian piano stool, but no sign of a piano.
>examine stool
An old wheeled piano stool, wide and tall, with a hinged and padded seat.
>search stool
You can’t see inside, since it is closed.
That makes the bit after not-so-frustrating:
>look under stool
There’s a charcoal pencil underneath the stool.
>move stool
It rolls a little.
>look
Vestry
The vestry once held surplices. Today, it holds a surplus. Debris, broken furniture, blown-in leaves, panes of dusty glass and mildewed cloth, all unwanted.
There’s even an old Victorian piano stool, but no sign of a piano.
On the floor, underneath where the stool used to be, is a pencil.
You can incidentally just move the stool; either way, the game is training you that LOOK UNDER works different than EXAMINE or SEARCH. At the very least, there are no conflicting messages, where a player thinks they did a thing, but did not actually do a thing.
Now, back to Pulsar 7, and first off, something I had on my map last time and neglected to mention.
This is a “wrecked cabin” that is inside the maze. The only thing you can see is “Wreckage” and EXAMINE WRECKAGE responds
I see nothing of interest
If you instead SEARCH, or, weirdly, FRISK the wreckage:
I’ve found something!
This reveals a bunk. The bunk appears to have nothing.
Despite the bunk-with-vent picture being re-used, I don’t think there’s meant to be a vent here.
I even tested EXAMINE BUNK and SEARCH BUNK, keeping in mind Arrow of Death Part I had a moment where you could search the name of the room you were in (even though it wasn’t technically an object). I still found nothing (and later in the game, where I tested every verb on my list for reasons you’ll see in a second, I still found nothing).
This would normally be a discouraging dead-end, but thinking about the situation later, I realized I hadn’t done the same test in other bunks. Normally, EXAMINE NAMEOFROOM gets a “missing noun” error, but it at least lets you examine the bunk. I remembered it being weird that the captain’s room had nothing in it…
…so doing GO BUNK and then EXAMINE BUNK, I hit paydirt:
These are sleeping pills (which you can verify by trying to eat them, you fall asleep and get eaten by the creature). If you’re holding them with the other cake ingredients when you MIX CAKE, the tablets disappear from your inventory too, so I’m guessing they made it in.
I realized while I had looked at everything in the game, I hadn’t done both EXAMINE and SEARCH. It turns out SEARCH is (maybe) only useful at the wreckage, whereas EXAMINE works on more things. I had mentally been mislead by “I see nothing of interest” since I had (essentially unconsciously) interpreted the act of searching to be equivalent to examining, even though I was well aware authors have a tendency to separate them.
So my progress after came in pinpricks, finding out things I could examine and gathering more stuff:
Marking where I found things, or was able to make progress since last time.
Back where I was able to MOVE COUCH at the start, finding a rod underneath, I tried EXAMINE. (Which, again, I thought I had already done, but apparently I just used SEARCH.) This found me a small key (no idea where it goes) and a note.
Says:
…as the only surviving member of the PULSAR 7 crew…
That is, it is a note you wrote! This doesn’t seem to be amnesia as much as the protagonist has more knowledge than you do (which has been a odd running theme the whole time — surely the protagonist knows the layout of the ship).
Newly inspired, I finally found at the PILLOW DISPENSER I could MOVE PILLOW and find a circuit board. Using the circuit board, I then went over to the bridge and the “Console Control” and was able to INSERT BOARD.
Outside at the console, I tried EXAMINE CONSOLE and found a white and a black button. The black button does nothing, the white button says “something happened” but I have been unable to figure out what that things is. I assume it comes up later.
Not part of the examine-fest was finally being able to open the locker.
I was trying to direct actions against the locker (and had tried every single one on my list) with no luck; I needed to be directing my verb on the tool I was using. USE HAMMER breaks open the locker, and then EXAMINE LOCKER reveals it has as spacesuit.
Which I can’t use yet, because I need the magnetic boots the creature is guarding still. Hmmf.
To give my current issues:
a.) I still can’t use the oven even with the pill-poisoned cake mix. I noticed FIX OVEN seems to give a coherent response, just I don’t have the right item for it, and EXAMINE OVEN notes a round hole. My guess is I use the lathe to make something that goes in.
b.) Except I can’t get the lathe working either. I assume the socket is a power plug so I need a cord to connect the two. Is it just hiding out there? Do I need to start frisking everything too in case that’s considered a separate verb sometimes?
c.) I still have a key I don’t know the use for, and I don’t know what pressing the white button did.
d.) Surely there’s something at the wreckage with the bunk? I tried every verb I could both in the “bunk room” and standing next to it.
I’m hoping I’m just missing one item that will chain-reaction the rest of this thing. I will take a hint if anyone knows one of the examine-spots is ridiculous somehow.
We are back in the house of Brian Howarth, whose Mysterious Adventures series started with Golden Baton, followed by The Time Machine, Arrow of Death Part I, and Arrow of Death Part II.
Howarth still had a friendly relationship with Molimerx who kept publishing his games in TRS-80 format (Dale Dobson used that version in his playthrough) but he also had his own spinoff company Digital Fantasia in order to make BBC Micro and (eventually) ZX Spectrum ports.
The new element here is that Mr. Howarth had a collaborator: Wherner Barnes. According to an interview with Brian in Retro Gamer, Wherner was
a dude who was around the same age as me who I knew from a group of my drinking buddies that went fell-walking in the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales
and … that’s all we have. This is despite the collaboration happening for 3 of the Mysterious Adventures games (that is, about 25% of the series). I don’t know how the division of labor went — was this a situation where Howarth was just editing what someone else wrote, or was this more of a 50-50 split, or what exactly?
From the Molimerx version of the manual.
Well, at least we can get into detail about the game itself! The premise is that we are part of the crew of the space freighter Pulsar 7, with a mission to obtain and deliver the ore Redennium to planetoids in the Xanotar system. An alien creature was given as part of the payment from one of the planets.
The creature, normally peaceful, had managed once to escape from its cage and roll around in some Redennium. Unfortunately, this led to disasterous effects in the days ahead, as the creature grew at an alarming rate and started to kill and eat crew members.
Everyone is now dead except for you and the still-hungry creature. Your goal is to reach the freighter’s shuttlecraft and escape.
We’re back to the curious ZX Spectrum graphics system (I have an explanation here of how it works) which is why there’s “color bleed” from the blue onto the black.
We’re also back to how the graphics system is oriented with the text system, which is you need to hit ENTER to switch from the picture and back. Enough information is given on the text portion you really need to be looking at that most of the time. Hence gameplay involves playing the game like a normal Scott Adams joint, except every time you enter a new room, you’re supposed to peek at the room’s picture (a process with a very small draw speed at authentic speeds) and flip back again afterwards.
When you see blanks after WHAT NOT? on my screenshots, that’s just me switching modes back and forth.
You start at a crew social area next to two rooms with bunks. If you want to speedrun Death%, go into one of the bunks rooms, GO BUNK, and then SLEEP. Fun!
Ready for submission at the next Games Done Quick. This also is not quite the fastest — you can just SLEEP anywhere, including the spot you start at, to get the same result.
With the bunk to the south, there’s a door you can close; by closing the door, the game says “Something happened!” and the bunk has a “auto-dispense pillow” but I haven’t found anyway way of taking it or manipulating it. Perhaps this is meant to tempt you into the SLEEP death above.
Back in the social room, you can MOVE COUCH…
I’ve found something!
…which reveals a “Dull Illuminant Rod”. You can then TURN, TWIST, or ROTATE the rod and it will light up. You can turn it off again the same way (unclear yet if the creature utilizes light in any way, but I could see needing to turn it off for stealth reasons).
To the west is a bunk with a different setup: there’s a vent visible.
You can GO VENT and then sometimes — sometimes! — die by the air blasting and blowing dust into your lungs. As far as I can tell this is entirely random. (I tried LISTEN and SMELL, both understood by the parser, just in case there was some indication the vent was running and was unsafe.)
Past the vent is the main part of the ship. You’ll notice it is a bit twisty and while I could see a ship being a touch labyrinthine I can’t make topological sense of what’s going on here.
To the west is an airlock where you can push a button and it blasts you into space. I get the impression this is the route we need to take to find a shuttle, just we need a little bit of safety first.
The “Ship’s Bridge” has an console with a Electrical Edge Connector (not mobile). I don’t know what to do with it.
The “Galley” connected to a “Larder” has a bottle of water, a bag of flour, and a bag of raisins.
I found a cake tin later and was able, after fussing over the parser enough, to make a CAKE MIX. (POUR the water in the tin first, then MIX while holding everything.) Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to actually do the final deed of cooking the cake. I even enlisted my verb list to help.
It seems like a lot of coverage! But given the cake, and a bit later where there’s a locker that can’t be opened, this isn’t the greatest of parsers — “knowing” a word in the vocabulary database isn’t the same as having a good response to using it, or at least a response that makes clear why the action isn’t working. There’s a “closed steel door” at the start of the game (which you arrive at the other side of after using the vent); “OPEN DOOR” says “Sorry” and you have to just imagine what’s going on, since the room is enterable from the other side (and then you’re trapped in again).
Other than the places I’ve mentioned, there’s also a “workshop” which you can only enter in one-way. It has a lathe (which the game says needs repair) and a socket (which I have not been able to manipulate or get a description of).
Going down from the workshop leads to a maze. The maze has a lot of “loop back to the room you’re in” exits, so when mapping them out I used a line stub to indicate the loop for a cleaner image. Additionally, “up” is on the northeast side and “down” is on the southeast side of each room.
Other than the cake tin I already mentioned, you can get to a reactor and find a hammer and peice of wood. (Yes, spelled that way.) I haven’t found a use for either yet.
The “creature’s hide out” is where you can finally encounter the beast while awake.
If you duck out right away you’re safe; spend any time and you die.
CREATURE rips my head off!
My best bet is I need to finish baking the cake by fighting the parser boss, and somehow that will be sufficient to distract the creature long enough to get the boots. After that?… maybe we’ll be led along a chase. There’s multiple places where you can go into a “bunk” which feel like they’d be used for hiding; there’s also one extra steel door that can be left open or closed leading from the “metal passageway” to the “galley” on the main map. It is possible this will be a “preparation puzzle” where we have to yoink the boots first, then do a series of puzzles to make it safely to the airlock for escape. This means while I haven’t been impressed with the game as of yet, things could pick up.
One last thing: the locker in the maze. Can’t go in, can’t lock or unlock either. I am truly baffled.
This issue of Time called Castaneda the godfather of New Age. The best article I’ve read on his legacy (and his “cult” of “witches” that cut themselves off from their families) is this one from 2007.
First, let me go over two chunks of contents from before the cave that I had missed. Neither is necessary for the win.
The first moment is right here, at the shack. I had never worked out what being watched meant, and I could swear I tried LOOK WINDOW here. Maybe I misspelled it WIDOW and didn’t notice and moved on.
You can shoot the shotgun (which I also had never used) at the coyote.
You can then go outside to find footprints, and later, if you go in the canyon, you can see more footprints and LOOK UP to see a cave.
This is how you’re supposed to know about the cave without guessing based on geography.
The other scene I missed involves the place with the machete.
There’s a hole you can climb in and up and it seems to be the bottom of a well (that is, the well seen in the desert) but I had warped out without thinking of it much. If you wrap around on the map there’s a wall you can PUSH, breaking open a passageway, and that allows light to come in so you can see some inscriptions in the southeast corner.
Then if you go down to the bottom of the well and SAY UP you get warped to the top. This is entirely unnecessary, and I had to check a walkthrough because it wasn’t working (it turns out I was trying it while I had already crawled partway up, but you need to use the word at the bottom). However, the inscriptions that explain dreaming aren’t readable until you have the mask, so I understand the author’s sequencing as some players wouldn’t be able to dream-warp yet (and I respect the fact he left open the possibility of an alternate solution).
My winning game did neither of these scenes so I can confirm they are not strictly necessary. One last thing before returning to the action: after entering the cave and before riding the beast, I missed an important room. This is back where I found the bell:
You can GO CHAMBER (somehow, probably because of the sound, I parsed the room as geographically close to the noises but not having a literal door, even given the word “inside”). There you can have a confrontation with the coyote. You’re not ready yet — the twig needs to be dipped in the oil of cactus blossoms, as told us by the lizard. So let’s save that:
Back to where I left off, I had been swimming in a pond and made it to a “block” which referenced a mysterious yellow bull. I was stuck, but I should have been paying more attention to one of the messages while in the water. For the initial dive, if you try to keep using SWIM DOWN to go farther, you get the message
CAN’T GO.
but if you do this at the third lake with the ruins, going down at the “bottom” instead says
I CAN’T SEEM TO GET ANY DEEPER.
These being different messages should have been a red alert: there is a way to go deeper. You need to be holding something heavy.
You need to be holding the granite block.
This lets you go to a fourth pond, leading to a tall pillar by another chasm. You can PUSH PILLAR to knock over the pillar and walk over it.
The path eventually leads to the north side of the same chasm we started at.
The north side of the chasm, importantly, includes a golden door. Try to open the door, and it proves to be an illusion. You can just walk through.
Lizard buddy! I tried the SAY REVEAL code from before and was told
LISTEN WELL, FOR ONCE YOU BREAK THE YELLOW BULL, THAT WHICH WAS UNREAL BECOMES REAL.
To the west are some clay colored statues of bulls. None of them look yellow normally, but fortunately I had been obsessively trying GAZE on everything in the game, and finally it paid off.
Don’t take and break the figurine right away! As the lizard warns you, unreal things will become real, so the golden door that previously you could just walked through now seals shut.
Yes, this is a softlock, although the player was pretty amply forewarned; I had to set this up on purpose to get the screenshot.
However, this also means the golden bridge and golden statue become real as well! So you can walk across the golden bridge now without falling in, and the golden statue lets you touch it, and more dramatically, push it so it falls into the chasm.
I did something goofy in retrospect here and went through the chasm section again trying to figure out where the golden statue landed, but the smell is coming from the spot the statue was, not where it went. I was just supposed to look, as the room now had a DEPRESSION.
Twig powered up! So now it was time for a confrontation with the coyote, and the game’s final trick. This is yet another moment of participatory plot, where the player themselves needs to figure out what’s going on to get the final revelation.
Pause a moment to breathe, and formulate what you think the answer is.
From World of Dragon.
If the coyote wanted us to lose, why would he tell us what we needed to do to use the magic?
Yes, our teacher was El Diablero the whole time, in some cases putting us in a significant amount of danger. This is not absurd for the Castaneda-verse.
In Castaneda’s fourth book, Tales of Power, he essentially finishes his initial “sorcerer’s journey”. He is ready at the end to take his final test with don Juan and don Genaro, and is taken to the edge of a cliff, where he must jump.
Don Juan and don Genaro stepped back and seemed to merge with the darkness. Pablito held my forearm and we said good-by to each other. Then a strange urge, a force, made me run with him to the northern edge of the mesa. I felt his arm holding me as we jumped and then I was alone.
This works terrifically as literature, but is a bit more sad when it is given as literal, which Castaneda always clung to until the end. I’ll leave the sordid details to the article I linked (but at least one person seems to have died trying to enter the “other world”). I should emphasize none of this was really known to the general public in 1982, when El Diablero came out.
Which is good, since I don’t know how well I’ve conveyed this, but: the game was magnificent.
Not a masterpiece, maybe not even a high scorer if I tried to come up with some acronym (Morpheus Kitami gave it a try). The writing is obviously sparse and one could imagine the brutal reviews if this was turned straight from text to novel form, but in terms of the game’s premise it works: it felt like I was reckoning with nature as intellectual and sparse, and the parts where the words counted they were used effectively.
I AM EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE AT THE SAME TIME. A STEADY WIND BLOWS AGAINST MY FACE.
Despite the grand cliche at the end, the story was genuine and serious, and it gives the player freedom to do some things out of order while still driving to an ending. There are two moments of participatory plot where the player moves events forward simultaneous with having a revelation about what’s really going on.
Amnesia is definitely old hat by now, but this is the first adventure game we’ve reached that’s had it. Kalish invented the amnesia adventure plot for this game. This is the first time we’ve had “memory unlocking”.
(No, seriously! The other references I’ve made have been sort of a quasi-amnesia. Ferret had amnesia, but it was only tangentially relevant and the game is only sort-of from 1982. Mystery Fun House has come the closest by hiding the player’s objective in their shoe, and that game also did some wonderful moments of participatory plot; the protagonist knew what was going on, just the player had to figure it out.)
The puzzles were rough and could use tweaking, and a couple bugs caused distress (I didn’t even discuss how the inventory count gets messed up by the magic twig, causing your inventory limit to go down permanently by one). But this is the sort of game I was hoping to find through All the Adventures, something known to very few which deserves a more public viewing.
This was Ken Kalish’s only text adventure.
It would have been nice to be able to do more text-only adventures as a way to do story telling, but graphics adventures supplanted the text ones.
Odd comment (since Infocom was just getting started in 1982) but I can understand it being easier in a business-pragmatic sense to do graphical games, especially for a US author that didn’t have a thousand shelves he could toss a ZX Spectrum tape onto.
Next up: Speaking of endless shelves of ZX Spectrum, we’re headed back across the pond to hit one of those games, with a much simpler plot than El Diablero. (Which happens to have graphics! I might instead do one of the other ports, I haven’t decided yet.)
Nearly almost immediately after finishing my last post I made a breakthrough. This is not that uncommon for me. The act of writing sometimes helps me think, and having my tasks laid out with pictures can also help me zero in on what to do. I had listed as task number one to try different teleport destinations, and it occurred to me, regarding the scene with the eagle…
…that I could possibly DREAM my way straight to the nest, avoiding the eagle confrontation that way.
Remember, the mechanics are such that you can DREAM a place to go to it, then AWAKEN to return right where you left off.
I flailed a bit trying to transform with the eagle feather. I should mention I still have no idea how to transform — it isn’t needed for immediate progress — and I’m starting to suspect it is location-specific rather than a new general power.
I then tried a bunch of plausible dream locations — trying to imagine what the author might go for from the Sonoran Desert — and while RIVER and STREAM didn’t work, I hit paydirt with DREAM CAVE:
HIS POWER PREVENTS ME.
I technically was already able to bypass this. It turned out to be the hardest puzzle of the game so far. Let’s save that for a bit later.
I also did some verb-testing on each of my objects in turn; with BREAK, I finally got a hit when I reached my bowl:
The key was the missing item needed to unlock the box, and the box has a blue pebble and paper that gives instructions.
This opens a small area with an “ancient Mayan mask”. Wearing the mask is sufficient to translate the various inscriptions. They essentially already reinforced what I knew about the mechanics of the game, although the second message is subtly different; remember it shortly.
I next had the the tombstone to reckon with. The MAT, woven with blue and white threads, can be examined further. You can LOOK THREADS.
Second-order nouns — where you have to examine something in an description obtained via examining — are pretty rare in this era. I usually miss them and I’d argue in this case it’s unfair you don’t get any sense that there’s more to see from the first description.
I already had everything collected for this. The beetles came from using the machete on the cactus.
From a Computerware ad in Color Computer News, November 1982.
Heading over to Uxmal’s grave, I enacted the revenge medicine:
I absolutely loved this moment; no, we haven’t had our teacher built up as a character that much, but this is still a participatory plot twist rather than one just given to us. (See, relatedly, participatory comedy and participatory deathtraps. See also the “research puzzle” in Anchorhead which leads to one of the biggest plot moments of the game.) If nothing else, I’m pleased that the game actually appears to have a plot, even if a small one?
The next phase simply involved typing REVEAL to all three of the major critters (snake, crow, lizard) and finding the lizard was willing to chat.
I already had a magic bush, so I had a guess I could TAKE TWIG whilst there.
I have not dipped the twig in anything; I don’t think I’ve seen the oil yet, but it is faintly possible I’ve missed something in the initial areas of the game.
With all this reckoned with, I needed to reach the cave still. I was misunderstanding part of the mechanics of dreaming, in a way that feels like Castaneda getting told about some layer of reality he’s missing (or being informed in Journey to Ixtlan that not everyone needs drugs but he wasn’t smart enough to enter altered-reality at first without peyote).
You can DREAM, just on its own…
I AM EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE AT THE SAME TIME. A STEADY WIND BLOWS AGAINST MY FACE.
…and then AWAKEN, and you’ll be in the same place you started.
You can DREAM (LOCATION), which will take you to a location on the map, and then when you AWAKEN you will land back where you started. El Diablero is preventing dreaming of the cave.
However, you can also DREAM, no set location, and while everywhere and nowhere at the same time, you can AWAKEN (LOCATION). This can be used to arrive at the usual locations (like the well) but also can be used to bypass the power preventing you from arriving at the cave.
(Hence: “As you go, so can you return” doesn’t mean just that awakening is a power, but that awakening can be used just like dreaming with a specified destination.)
To the north is a ring on the floor which, quite straightforwardly, can be turned and then pulled to open some stairs. (I guess TURN isn’t used for shape-changing after all.)
If you’re wondering about the visual change, I switched to the Dragon version of the game here and switched the color scheme while I was at it.
The reason why is an item that shows up shortly after. You go down the stairs to a long east-to-west section by a chasm.
On the east side there’s a “copper bell”.
Trying to RING BELL caused the screen to clear (and no, that’s not supposed to happen). I was only using the first copy I found at the Tandy Color Computer Archive and likely one of the other copies works, but just in case I had an emulator issue I switched computer systems to the Dragon and found the issue resolved itself.
Going west to the “columns” (which have the message “FOR HE WHO SERVES”) and ringing the bell reveals a beast who is ready to give us a ride.
Before journeying deeper into the cave with beast-buddy, let me cover the two extra rooms to the west. One room has a “gold statue” but it seems to be illusionary:
MY HAND PASSES THROUGH IT! AM I IMAGINING THINGS??
Farther west is a bridge which seems to also be a fake-out.
However, since I’m stuck later, I can’t discard either room entirely.
Back to where we left our ride running:
This leads to another self-contained section where part of it is under water. I’ve marked the water sections in blue:
South of where you land there’s a skull; north is a pond. You can jump in the pond and then SWIM DOWN. This goes into darkness, but I realized I could SWIM EAST while underwater to reach a new area.
The first area you can pop your head out on is deadly. The game gives you plenty of forewarning about this, but I tried swimming in all possible directions anyway but I died of poison in all cases. (This is far more polite than the average 1982 game, which would just have the death happen without warning. There was even that mechanic with the blue/yellow shading earlier which was intended to hint at danger level; I suspect the author might have been annoyed at some deathtraps in a different game but still wanted to use them.)
Returning to life again, we can dive even deeper to swim east yet again, finding a safe pond to exit. This leads to a “granite block” adjacent to some “ruins”.
Combining the two hints together gets
HE WHO (WOULD)
FIGHT (THE DIABLERO)
MUST FIRST (DESTROY THE)
YELLOW BULL
with the catch that I have no idea what the yellow bull is, BULL isn’t even a recognized noun in the game, and I’m at a dead end. So I might have missed something in that whole sequence or I might be a few cryptic leaps from victory. (Do also note I haven’t found an appropriate twig-dipping spot yet either.) I’d still like to finish at my next post but I suspect the game will push hard enough back it’ll have to be two.
“A diablero? You are crazy! There are no diableros.”
“Do you mean that there are none today, or that there never were any?”
“At one time there were, yes. It is common knowledge. Everybody knows that. But the people were very afraid of them and had them all killed.”
“Who killed them, Genaro?”
“All the people of the tribe. The last diablero I knew about was S⸻. He killed dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people with his sorcery. We couldn’t put up with that and the people got together and took him by surprise one night and burned him alive.”
“How long ago was that, Genaro?”
“In nineteen forty-two.”
“Did you see it yourself?”
“No, but people still talk about it. They say that there were no ashes left, even though the stake was made of fresh wood. All that was left at the end was a huge pool of grease.”
— From The Teachings of Don Juan
My main key to progress from last time is to realize that I probably should just try anything that might possibly be a verb that is referenced in the game and in the manual. Doesn’t matter if no other game might consider such a thing: this game does not do its magic by SAY BLAHBLAHMAGICWORD (or at least, not so far).
Regarding the manual, I haven’t talked about it yet, as we only have the Dragon version. But Gus Brasil pointed out it was essential for something so I spent some time looking over all the notes.
From Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
When a location description is preceded with the words “I AM IN DANGER!”, there is only one correct response which will prevent you from being killed. There are no second chances, but there are subtle warnings. which can prevent you from getting into situations for which you are not prepared.
I’ve seen this already with machete man, and we’ll see this again shortly — this is indicating the way the code works, which really requires typing one specific thing in response. “Not prepared” suggests these will not be self-contained (like a puzzle where you have to WRESTLE the enemy but there’s no items or knowledge involved).
The manual also says you remember a poem on waking up:
Remember well the power word,
Remember that which twice you heard.
Awake to that which dwells within.
Throw off the yoke of ignorance.
I spent a long time trying various interpretations, and especially looking for anything early on that indicated something had been encountered twice. The closest was the shack which the game says you recall being familiar.
I still haven’t reckoned with being watched.
I tried using SAY on each one of the words in the poem in case any of them was a trigger: this was close to right. I needed to test each one as a verb. While in the shack:
Oho! This leads to a room with no exits or anything you can interact with, but you can AWAKEN to get out.
I discovered after some mucking about that you can DREAM OBJECT. In particular, at the well you can DREAM WELL. If you LOOK, though, it appears that nothing has changed; however, attempting to type DREAM again, the game says:
NOTHING.
And you are able to AWAKEN — even after wandering away from the well — to jump back to it. If you do something in the “real world” while you are dreaming it still stays.
I hadn’t unearthed the box while in “real world” state, but it stayed here after teleporting back to the well from awakening. This seems too elaborate to be a bug but I’m not sure what’s going on. It’s not the normal world-separation I’m used to with this kind of mechanic.
You can DREAM WELL while not even next to the well, and it’ll jump you over there; this puts you in the “sleeping state”, so awakening will warp you back to where you started dreaming. DREAM CANYON works similarly, taking you over to where the poisonous snake is. It’s almost like a warping “checkpoint” system?
Because you can dream of places you are not even at to travel to them, that lets you warp to a new area. I was able to DREAM ROCK to go to one of the flat rocks I had been seeing in the desert but had been unable to get to.
I found out, after the fact, that I had typed GO ROCK in one of the rooms which describes it being nearby but you aren’t close enough yet. If you are to the west or east of the flat rock, GO ROCK works.
Just to the south of the previous location.
The “looking familiar” means this is a “remember” spot. Using REMEMBER here says
I USED TO PRACTICE THE SORCERY TECHNIQUE OF “GAZING” AT THIS SPOT!
You can GAZE ROCK and find it has a blue shade. This seems to be a hint that blue = safe (the blue pool is safer than the yellow one, that is). There’s another rock you can walk on which is more ominous. You “start to feel anxious”, and gazing upon it gives a yellow glow.
Flat rocks marked with colored squares.
So the end result is I figured out GAZE and DREAM a little out of order, but the game lets you. For the new location with DREAM, you can dream about the mountains in the distance.
At the top of the mountain is another REMEMBER moment.
None of the verbs I might suspect seemed to be understood. I almost thought I had progress by pretending the parser understood more words and typing TAKE FORM OF CROW, but all that’s happening is “FORM” and “OF” get ignored — the game understands that as TAKE CROW, not shapechanging.
This doesn’t work either.
I can at least report two other locations found off the mountain. One is some “rich soil” where it immediately occurred to me to try planting the seeds.
I have been unable to take the bush afterwards, so I don’t know what purpose it serves. LOOKing just says I’ve never seen one like it before; gazing does nothing.
Off in another direction is an eagle’s nest.
I assume shape changing is needed here for progress.
I’m fine with speculation/hints now, although do use ROT13 as usual. I especially want to know if I am missing out on the shape-changing for puzzle reasons (in which case I’m happy to keep whacking on it), or frustrating-parser reasons (in which case I’m happy to spoil). To recap where I am:
1.) I can DREAM in addition to GAZE in order to teleport to other places. (There may still be teleport destinations I can infer, I should make a full list.)
2.) I supposedly can shape-change but I have no idea how.
3.) I’ve planted the seeds, getting a bush, but the bush doesn’t want to be interacted with.
4.) I now have an eagle to get by, in addition to machete man. Regarding the snake that causes death upon being picked up, I’m guessing that’s a non-puzzle and the snake is just a shape-change target. The same might be true for the lizard.
5.) I still haven’t used the bowl, the mat, the shotgun, the debris, or the brush. I still don’t have a rope for getting into the well. I still don’t have any way of helping the blighted cactus.
To perceive energy directly allowed the sorcerers of don Juan’s lineage to see human beings as conglomerates of energy fields that have the appearance of luminous balls. Observing human beings in such a fashion allowed those shamans to draw extraordinary energetic conclusions. They noticed that each of those luminous balls is individually connected to an energetic mass of inconceivable proportions that exists in the universe; a mass which they called the dark sea of awareness. They observed that each individual ball is attached to the dark sea of awareness at a point that is even more brilliant than the luminous ball itself. Those shamans called that point of juncture the assemblage point, because they observed that it is at that spot that perception takes place. The flux of energy at large is turned, on that point, into sensorial data, and those data are then interpreted as the world that surrounds us.
— Carlos Castaneda, from the 30th anniversary edition of The Teachings of Don Juan
Long-time readers of this blog will know one of the tools I deploy when stuck (or even before I am stuck, if I know the game is going to be on the tough side) is a verb list. I plow through a set of verbs I know have worked on games in the past and mark which ones are active.
Sometimes a game’s parser will fight against any attempts to create such a list, but El Diablero helpfully states I DON’T KNOW THAT for any unknown verb, and only uses that phrase for unknown verbs.
I’ve never done anything resembling an exact sort, but for verbs that seem to be appearing more often I have shuffled them to a left column; the result here is that if a verb appears in the third, fourth, or fifth column, it is notable and worth remembering. LIFT just is a synonym for TAKE here; GAZE on the other hand is clearly its own verb, as LOOK on an object with no description gets the response
NOTHING SPECIAL.
while GAZE gives
NOTHING APPARENT.
Usually GAZE has applied to either crystal balls, mirrors, or reflective surfaces like water. The first two have not showed up in the game (yet?) but there has been a pool of yellow water and a pool of blue water, and both allow the use of GAZE. (Gazing is also one of the “powers” mentioned in the Castaneda books, similar to how sorcerers “perceive energy”, but I’ll save discussing that for the end of this post.)
Gazing at the yellow water leads to a tunnel; there is no pool on the other side to travel back. The only way to go is south, where a man with a machete kills you.
I get a loaded shotgun later, but that doesn’t help here either.
The blue pool is more interesting, as it leads to an entirely new desert area with a map the size of the first one. Again, it is rectilinear, so I have made an RPG-style map.
Well (with no rope), tombstone, blue pool, shack with dirt floor, thick brush.
The well has inscriptions just like the dead-end at the canyon. The game explicitly mentions needing a rope if you try to go in.
The tombstone has the name of your lost teacher. DIG is not a verb the game understands.
The shack is unlocked and two rooms. On the north side there’s a window where you can look in and see no-one. When you step in the shack, there’s an old shotgun and the feeling like you’re being watched. I have not been able to act on this information.
The shotgun is described as having one round. The game tells you to save it when you try to shoot random things. I don’t know why it doesn’t work on machete man. Is machete man even real? I don’t think it’s the sorcerer; following Castaneda, we’re more likely to encounter El Diablero shapeshifted into an animal.
The shack has (in its other room) a bowl, some seeds, and a mat woven of blue and white threads.
You can PLANT the SEEDS to form a mound of dirt but I haven’t gotten a result yet.
Finally, the shrub, when taken, reveals a tunnel. Going down the tunnel, you find a hardwood box that is locked.
That’s certainly enough to chew on. Listing out my issues:
1.) What do I do with any of the objects: a crow, some debris, the brush (assuming it is more for than hiding the tunnel), the bowl, the mat, the shotgun, the seeds? The seeds can be planted, but where do they go?
(and before you ask, unless I’m missing something in the parser, you can’t fill the bowl with either the yellow or blue water)
2.) What should be done with the snake? It isn’t an obstacle, it just kills you if you take it. My best guess is taking it safely will then allow it to get re-used later (perhaps fending off machete man).
3.) How do you fend off machete man?
4.) What do I do with the inscriptions at the canyon and the well?
5.) Is there a way to get into the well?
6.) What can you do with the blighted cactus?
7.) Is the tombstone important other than giving your teacher’s name?
8.) How do you get the lizard? Or if you don’t get the lizard, what do you do with it?
9.) Is there any other hidden exit? Does gazing work on anything other than the pools?
The last point reflects that gazing is important to the Castaneda-verse. In one his later (and frankly, more bizarre) books, The Second Ring of Power, he goes into the mechanics behind gazing at things, including stating that women have an easier time gazing while they are in their menstrual period because they are not focusing (???).
La Gorda told me then to gaze at the middle part of the canyon until I could spot a very dark brown blotch. She said that it was a hole in the canyon which was not there for the eye that looks, but only for the eye that “sees.” She warned me that I had to exercise my control as soon as I had isolated that blotch, so that it would not pull me toward it. Rather, I was supposed to zoom in on it and gaze into it. She suggested that the moment I found the hole I should press my shoulders on hers to let her know. She slid sideways until she was leaning on me.
I struggled for a moment to keep the four actions coordinated and steady, and suddenly a dark spot was formed in the middle of the canyon. I noticed immediately that I was not seeing it in the way I usually see. The dark spot was rather an impression, a visual distortion of sorts. The moment my control waned it disappeared. It was in my field of perception only if I kept the four actions under control. I remembered then that don Juan had engaged me countless times in a similar activity. He used to hang a small piece of cloth from a low branch of a bush, which was strategically located to be in line with specific geological formations in the mountains in the background, such as water canyons or slopes. By making me sit about fifty feet away from that piece of cloth, and having me stare through the low branches of the bush where the cloth hung, he used to create a special perceptual effect in me. The piece of cloth, which was always a shade darker than the geological formation I was staring at, seemed to be at first a feature of that formation. The idea was to let my perception play without analyzing it. I failed every time because I was thoroughly incapable of suspending judgment, and my mind always entered into some rational speculation about the mechanics of my phantom perception.
There’s also gazing into distant things like clouds; fog is especially difficult and not something most sorcerers can handle. I don’t honestly know if any of this gets woven into El Dialbero (…probably not the menstrual periods…) but poking at the mythology gives me something to do while I’m stuck on the game. The game does allow for GAZE SKY and GAZE MOUNTAIN (and understands the nouns!) so events might eventually go that way.
There are authors from prior centuries that used to be world famous that are now obscure, or at least known more to niche enthusiasts rather than the wider public. The most popular and most prolific author of the mid-19th century was G. M. W. Reynolds, even beating out Dickens.
“Again these awful words!” ejaculated the old man, casting trembling glances around him.
“Yes—again those words,” echoed the mysterious guest, looking with his fierce burning eyes into the glazed orbs of the aged shepherd. “And now learn their import!” he continued, in a solemn tone. “Knowest thou not that there is a belief in many parts of our native land that at particular seasons certain doomed men throw off the human shape and take that of ravenous wolves?”
The best selling poet in all of American history was Rod McKuen, who sold 60 million books and performed to a rapt audience at Carnegie Hall. I won’t expose you to the horror, but I can link a sample at the blog post entitled Slightly Creepy Seventies Bad Poetry.
Carlos Castaneda used to be a household name, with his first three books (The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, A Separate Reality, and Journey to Ixtlan) making him a superstar anthropologist; the third book earned him a doctorate from UCLA. They describes his dealings with an indigenous Yaqui sorcerer who used peyote for drug trips and had mystical powers like levitation and teleportation. Castaneda was taught to see the inner workings of the universe, while dispensing 1960s New Age wisdom to us, the readers.
Via eBay. $2.70 or best offer. They printed a lot of these.
While the first book held to strong reviews, critics eventually started to question the veracity of the events — not as in doubting the magic, but doubting Castaneda ever even had dealings with the Yaqui. The Yaqui did not experiment with peyote (to the disappointment of drug enthusiasts who took pilgrimages based on the books) and before Castaneda died in 1998 it was pretty well established he was a fraud.
Ken Kalish, the author of today’s game, El Diablero, does not seem to have been a true believer. He used the novels instead as a sort of fictional background universe.
Carlos Castenada purported to be an anthropologist who found himself apprenticed to a Yaqui Indian ‘sorcerer’ from Northern Mexico, called Don Juan Matus. Although there were unfortunately some things which involved peyote, the basic idea dealt with an underlying reality beneath common perception (which even Aristotle referred to).
This interview was admittedly given long after 1982, but I don’t think the peyote comment would be compatible with him being a superfan at the time. (The word “purported” and quote marks around “sorcerer” also are suggestive.)
After graduating college, Kalish worked in construction for two years. He used some of the money he made to get into stock speculation (he listened to a radio station for market reports). He ended up making a “nice profit” which he used to obtain a computer:
So now, I was walking out of the Radio Shack with a Color Computer, chock full with a whopping 4k of RAM and also with Color Basic from a fairly new company called Microsoft. Before too long, I’d piggybacked two sets of 16k chips with a soldering iron, had bought the Microworks editor/assembler cartridge and was thinking, “hmm, I think I’ll write a game or two myself on this thing. The first step will be to figure out how to clear the screen…”
He became (relatively) famous for his Tandy CoCo work, mainly for his arcade-style games like Starship Chameleon.
El Diablero is his only text adventure.
You awake, dazed and confused, in the middle of a desert. You had been learning the techniques of sorcery from an old man. The old man told you that an evil Sorcerer, a “diablero”, had become his enemy. Now, your teacher is missing and you are alone. Worse still, you cannot remember those spells you had already learnt.
I admit I like the vibes from the setup, even if the actual gameplay effect is to drop us in a large desert.
I played the Tandy CoCo version. There’s also a port of this for the Dragon.
You can’t drink from the yellow pool; you are told it is too dangerous. The same is true for a “bluish” pool at the northeast corner of the map.
The room descriptions are mostly the same (“I am in a desert, cactus all around.”) with only slight variations (“I am in a desert. There is a large slab of rock nearby.”) and the map is rectilinear, so rather than my usual node-based method I drew things out like they were a tabletop RPG map:
Before taking the tour, I should mention one unusual property of the game: while you can type GO NORTH, GO EAST, etc. to travel around, the usual abbreviations of N, E, W, and S don’t work. The game instead uses the keyboard’s arrow keys, and you don’t have to hit ENTER after pressing, say, right arrow. However, because the author wanted to reserve “left arrow” for deleting text, the symbol @ gets used for autotyping GO WEST. This sort of makes sense if you look at a real keyboard:
The emulator I was using (XRoar) maps the “[” key to “@”, so to keep my sanity I wrote an AutoHotKey script to make the left arrow work normally.
#Requires AutoHotkey v2.0
#Singleinstance
#HotIf WinActive(“XRoar”)
Left::[
(Just in case anyone wants to follow in my footsteps. The game itself is here.)
So back to the map! There’s three animals (lizard, crow, snake). You’re allowed to take the crow…
…the lizard “scampers away” from you…
…and trying to take the snake kills you. Fair enough.
The snake marks the entrance to a small canyon section. Here’s a repeat of the map so you don’t have to scroll back:
There’s some “debris” in the canyon you can just take, and a “strange inscription” that is “not understandable” if you try to read it.
Other than the two pools I already mentioned, the only place left of note is a blighted cactus.
I haven’t gotten anything productive to happen, nor have I had any indications of somehow having the ability to cast magic. El Diablero, the nemesis, is out there somewhere; it is unclear if we are meant to defeat him or run away.
This game is allegedly quite hard, as mentioned by both by the interviewer of Ken Kalish and Alastair, who wrote the CASA Solution Archive entry. There’s even a GameFAQs entry (very unusual for an obscure text adventure) which claims the playtime is about 12 hours. I’ve got my week clear just for this game, and I’m even willing to do one of those “well, I haven’t made progress but here’s what I’m pondering” type posts. (It’s been a while, eh? I’m still quite interested in the thought process of solving puzzles, not just plowing through history.) Please hold off both spoilers and speculation for now, I’ll let y’all know when it is time to start piling on.
Let’s do something a little different and have one of today’s co-authors introduce the game. This is a video from 5 years ago when Al Lowe was selling his source code from his days at Sierra. He included some pre-Sierra materials from when he was co-founder of Sunnyside Soft.
…and the floppy disk, that we copied ourselves on my neighbor’s pool table. We set up an Apple II, open the lid of it, blew an electric fan at it, and put in five disk drive cards and pairs of disk drives … we ended up producing hundreds of games in one evening on my friend’s table.
Prior to changing professions to software, Al Lowe was a veteran music teacher. A few years before, he had been caught ill with chickenpox and in isolation he was able to try out a DEC timesharing terminal remotely hooked up to a PDP-11/70.
This gave him the computer bug, enough so he bought an Apple II, and used it for keeping track of band information. When going to a band conference in the summer of 1982, he also went to the National Educational Computing Conference held the same week.
From the proceedings of the previous year’s NECC conference.
Most educational-software material on the market today could be done in a workbook … what kids need is brain-world coordination.
He felt he could do better, and he (with his wife Margaret, and his neighbors Rae Lynn and Mike MacChensey, all in education) founded Sunnyside Soft with Dragon’s Keep and Bop-a-Bet as starting titles. Bop-a-Bet is a maze game where you need to zap letters in alphabetical order, and Dragon’s Keep is an adventure game with menus rather than a parser (more on this later).
In Dragon’s Keep, I used paddles! They were left-over from Pong – each paddle had a knob that could turn and a button to press. You held it in one hand, press the button with your left thumb, and turn the knob with your right hand. Your opponent had another paddle just like that. Since I couldn’t afford a joystick, I used the paddles to create backgrounds. You would turn one paddle to move the cursor up, and turn the other paddle to move the cursor across, and then you would press the button to draw the picture. Picture Etch-A-Sketch with a Paint program.
In early December, the company had a booth at Applefest in San Francisco.
At the same event was Ken and Roberta Williams, with a large space at the entrance devoted to Sierra On-Line. They had just added the “Sierra” to their name. Allegedly this was to avoid overlap with another company, but also, quoting marketing director John Williams, the original name of the company was “generic as could be and dull as dishwater”. The booth had a mural of a Sierra waterfall to announce the change. Richard Garriott was there, showing off Ultima II (now a Sierra product) while dressed as Lord British.
Of course, such events are for networking as much as sales. According to Steve Levy in his book Hackers:
Ken tried to throw himself into the spirit of the show, and took Roberta, looking chic in designer jeans, high boots, and a black beret, on a quick tour of the displays. Ken was a natural schmoozer, and at almost every booth he was recognized and greeted warmly. He asked about half a dozen young programmers to come up to Oakhurst and get rich hacking for On-Line.
As part of this schmoozing the Sierra founders came across the much smaller Sunnyside booth, and were impressed by how the look of Dragon’s Keep resembled a Sierra title. This connection led them to publishing the titles under the Sierra label.
As Sunnyside ceased to exist soon after this, copies are rare; it is possible the “pool table copies” were the only ones ever made under that label.
Three pictures of the same copy, from Larry Laffer dot Net.
The back of both Sunnyside games came with a “mission statement” which is worth quoting in full:
SUNNYSIDE SOFT is a progressive software company, whose staff members each have over 15 years of educational experience. We intend to utilize this newest teaching medium to its maximum potential, in both educational institutions, and in the home.
Our immediate goal is to develop innovative computer materials which challenge and stimulate children, while meeting the educational priorities, of teachers and parents. Future products will include games designed to teach skill development, programs for primary grade skill and concept development, as well as management and organizational programs for administrators, athletic, and fine arts departments.
Notice the “organizational programs” — they were clearly thinking of the software Al Lowe already wrote for music classes.
Our authors have published instructional materials for several nationally known companies in other formats, and our collective experience includes learning theory, elementary curriculum, administration, music and the fine arts, and computer programming and literacy.
We are eager to develop new materials to meet your specific needs. Please contact us.
Rae Lynn MacChesney / Margaret Paul Lowe
Albert W. Lowe / Michael MacChesney
Sierra added a map and stickers to Dragon’s Keep enhance the appeal, and included a parent guide which outlined specifically what skills were being taught.
In the game, a magical dragon is holding 16 animals captive in and around its magic house. The player must find each animal and set it free. Sometimes the dragon appears and won’t let an animal go. The player must then leave the scene and return later when the dragon has gone.
Dragon’s Keep is designed to help your child develop reading comprehension skills. These skills include identifying details, making inferences and drawing conclusions.
The stickers correspond to the 16 missing animals.
From The Sierra Chest.
Navigation and action is all done via a menu system. We’ve seen this with Kadath in 1979 so isn’t the first appearance of this kind of thing, but it’s still pretty early.
The menu is slightly out of the ordinary, anticipating a child who has never touched a keyboard before. There are at most 3 options at any time, and even though the options are numbered, you don’t use number keys.
Instead, you move a cursor to the left by hitting the space bar, and then you hit enter once the cursor is at the option you want. This is at the level of games for children I’ve seen where the goal is to push the C key, and the authors anticipate this will present some challenge level. I personally would have included the numbers as a secondary scheme but they clearly didn’t want to muck up the directions.
This shows going into the back yard, and presents one of the major oddities with the game: map traversal isn’t all two-way paths. Notice there’s no option to go back to the front of the house, so someone who wanted to reconsider and climb up the ladder instead now doesn’t have an option.
Even if you think — well, I’ll go back in the house, and then I’ll be close enough I can go up the ladder, no, you get entirely different options:
(There’s a dog behind that chair! Mean old dragon.)
Eventually the map kind of makes sense, but if the goal is to teach map skills, this is a curious way to do it. The navigation reminds me more of regular-gamebook style, where sections often get elided or skipped over; that is, if a section of map requires you travel 3 sections to get to a dead end, the game won’t necessarily have you take every step back, because in terms of narrative it can feel strange to read the exact same texts in reverse order. There are books that do this anyway; Scorpion Swamp of the Fighting Fantasy series has an “open map” so has more adventure-style map movement, but that translates to sections that look like this:
290
You can see signs that others have walked this way recently. Ahead is another clearing. This is Clearing 26. If you have been here before, turn to323. If you have not been here before, keep reading. As you enter the clearing, an arrow whizzes past your head. You see three mangy-looking SWAMP ORCS armed with bows. The other two let their arrows fly. If you have the Golden Magnet charm, turn to 83. If you do not have it, turn to 151.
Notice the “if you have been here before” failsafe (which is made even more complicated here because you’re allowed to flee from this encounter, so section 323 might kick you back into combat).
For example, the game has a school. To get to the school from home you go to the back yard (with the fish), then follow a river…
,,,then go to the mountain, which happens to have a train…
…then from the train station go to the bus stop…
Dog number 2. Notice the stickers show brown dogs and these dogs are white.
…and finally from the bus stop go to school.
The dragon at that last stop represents the other element of the game: in some scenes the dragon will be there at random. It really is truly a random dice roll if the dragon shows up, plus the dragon will just stop you from rescuing an animal in the immediate scene; you can leave and come back. (Unless you leave the school. In which case you get back sent to the front of your house, and you have to take all those steps to return.)
The dragon shows up in scenes, not rooms, so if you’re in a library and pick up a book to read, the dragon may show up at the book but won’t be in the room.
Ah yes, the “hen is at the station”. One of the other quirky things about the game is that it generally expects you to think about where animals might be where you still don’t have the stickers placed and go where the animals might be. To problem is quite a lot of the animals are in odd locations so that logic doesn’t work that well. If you’re still looking for a rabbit, and you remember you saw a top hat you neglected to look inside, sure, that’ll work:
A calf? At the zoo.
In the end, the game is more “about” the skill of lawnmowering through all the story options. The hen (hinted at in the book, the only animal with this treatment) is the most curious find, as you locate it by taking a nap at the train station.
Mind you, the odd directionality isn’t that bad, and parts of the map (as given at The Sierra Chest) do direct around like normal, although I should make one last point that there’s not really a geographic sense to any of this — I have no idea what the real layout of the house is.
In the end, the game requires enough reading I’d say it has legitimate educational purpose, but I think modern children might find the overarching idea too simplistic.
In historical terms, other than uniting Sunnyside with Sierra, the interface was noticed at the time as a potential new direction for adventures. Jay Lucas had an extended 1983 review in Infoworld which begins with an extended rant about his difficulty with text parsers:
I used to be hooked on adventures, but like most of my computer colleagues, I closed my adventure era because of reoccurring frustrations. The programs have limited vocabularies, and I often had to go through four or five synonyms to find the word acceptable to the machine. Once past the word barrier, I was still limited to the choices of responses envisioned by the program author.
He then goes on to do a mock-example, then point out that the game “cleverly avoids” such issues.
Of course, this is a game which isn’t even trying to have puzzles. It was rather harder for people at the time to imagine what a “crunchy” game would be like with a menu system (Kadath pulled it off but had a wild navigation gimmick that wouldn’t work elsewhere). At least Sierra didn’t drop the notion, as the Sunnyside crew followed up with Troll’s Tale in 1983. Perhaps the most interesting use was taking the text-parser game The Dark Crystal (published early 1983) and converting it for a menu system in Gelfling Adventure.
Menu version on the left, parser version on the right.
Up next: a con-artist anthropologist, and the game based on their work.
Renga in Blue 
