Star Trek book from 1975, with stickers, via Collecting Trek.
In terms of responses to typed input, you can roughly divide the parsers from the 70s-80s era into roughly:
Tier 1: does not respond to anything other than “correct” input, single error message for all failures
Tier 2: will specify if an unknown verb or an unknown noun, but otherwise single error message for all failures
Tier 3: will acknowledge basic hinderances like using GET with too many items in inventory
Tier 4: will include custom reasons why things won’t work (“you can’t stab with anything in your inventory”; “his armor is too thick to stab”), the messages may give hints as to correct action (“stabbing won’t work, you need something blunt instead”)
This is quite rough and not always sequential. A game might even start with helpful messages but have them drop later because the author ran out of space. Tier 3 is the most common, but we’ve had Tier 4 all the way back to the earliest parser games, so it isn’t like any level is uniquely innovative. It’s just a matter of: does the author(s) have the technical chops and game-design insight to include them?
Game-design insight especially is more of an obstacle than you might think; I’ve noticed designers really have trouble having an intuition for how things might go wrong as it requires “being in the head” of a player who doesn’t have the knowledge that you do.
Star Trek Adventure hovers around Tier 2 (“CAN YOU REPEAT THAT” for nearly everything) with the bonus that one part where there’s a different message it becomes actively deceptive for the player! I’m referring to this:
I honestly thought this was a puzzle about speed somehow. Maybe you had a camera that saw ahead of you so you could pre-emptively aim at the Klingons? Or fire at them from a “different room”? Or maybe my joke about drug enhancement was real? (It’d be weird for Original Trek, but keep in mind lately this blog has seen a game where you have to shoot your own mule to get the shovel off their back, so anything’s possible.)
No, this is a spot with a “parser override”: when in danger from a Klingon, anything typed other than the “correct action” will tell the player they’re too slow. The thing is, shooting the Klingon is correct! It just was communicated with words the game didn’t like. You’re supposed to FIRE PHASER:
I want to emphasize FIRE PHASER is a reasonable thing to accept, but having a parser message which suggests that shooting happened but failed makes for one of the worst things a parser can do: an actively deceptive message. Of course, it likely never occurred to Mr. Hawkings that someone might communicate the exact sentiment of FIRE PHASERS and glean a different understanding. That is, he must have thought of the message as “you were too slow and dithered around instead of using weapons” without knowing it could be read as “you tried to use a weapon but were too slow”.
This opens several floors up a little more, but not the big set of Klingons in engineering (we’ll take care of them in a moment).
On the third floor (with a medical bay that has a hypo), you can find the Klingon guarding a library, which contains a TECHNICAL MANUAL. I was first quite confused because it initially talked about “NOTHING OF VALUE IN THIS SITUATION” which I interpreted in a holistic sense (we have Klingons who took over the ship, and the manual is useless in such circumstances). Instead the manual is supposed to be read in particular rooms, where you can get information about what you see.
On the fourth floor (with the supply warehouse, where you can GET ITEM-YOU-NAME and hope it is there) you can find a knocked-out Spock, then use a hypo from the medical bay to revive him. He will start following you around after. I discovered much later that when you type HELP with him around this is directed at Spock (not the invisible helper behind the parser) and this needs to be done at least once for some essential information.
Thanking McCoy is interesting. Even though he doesn’t appear, this implies he left the hypo behind in the sick bay before being captured with the hope it might get used; that is, he was able to scan the situation and prepare. Usually you’re supposed to just accept the helpful items will be left out for solving puzzles, without a reason given.
On the second floor (with the Captain’s Quarters and the Transporter Room) it opens up a Crew Quarters which have a tribble in them. Tribbles are from the episode the Trouble with Tribbles and are small furry balls with voracious hunger that multiply quite quickly. One of the most famous scenes from original Trek has Kirk buried in a pile of them which got into a space station’s food store.
Relevant to the game, tribbles also have a negative reaction to Klingons, enough so that they get used in the episode to unearth a spy. Heading back to Engineering, just outside where the mass of Klingons are:
It’s not clear from the phrasing, but that HELP line is given by Spock.
The trick here is to THROW TRIBBLE. I can’t swear there’s no hint anywhere (I haven’t bothered to de-rotate the encryption of the entire source code), but I think this is a rely-on-outside knowledge puzzle. These are general considered bad design, but I admit if you’re going to include such a puzzle, a Star Trek game is a reasonable place: you’d generally expect players to be fans. (Except some people in ’82 would have just typed the game in because it was there.)
The opens two rooms. One is a room for dilithium crystals where we find out the crystals are depleted. The other is auxilary control.
If you ask Spock for HELP at the commander, he’ll tell you the Klingon word for surrender, and you can SAY it to him and he will give you coordinates where your crew are on the planet. (At least in this version of the game, that’s all you need to “rescue them” — it gets assumed this happens off-screen. Remember what I said about not realizing the game was over?) You can instead shoot the commander, and Spock will comment that shooting an unarmed person was a poor choice. But the game lets you do it, so you get softlocked!
Oddly enough, I’m in favor of this scene. It reminds me of the baton taken up by Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (and later games like A Final Unity) where there are multiple approaches to dilemmas, and it is possible to be aggressive and get through but still be “less Federation-like”. Here, it’s clearly just one answer to the dilemma, but the fact Hawkins spent the work including this possibility (given how many times I saw CAN YOU REPEAT THAT) in this game means he was actively thinking about the peace-or-war dichotomy that arises naturally with Star Trek as a whole.
Put another way, you might argue that the format for Star Trek itself — being explorers and scientists who sometimes act as soldiers — is part of what spawned the gaming innovation in the first place.
Let’s get back to the other issue in the room, the broken Aux Control. The technical manual works here (and to the game’s credit, even I though I didn’t understand the manual’s purpose up to this moment, it immediately occurred to me as a solution).
Heading back to supplies, I tried GET SHUNT and it worked.
OK, I’m almost accepting of this room (with the wide-open GET WHATEVER format).
To be clear, this screen was before I realized the Spock HELP command so I hadn’t reckoned with the Commander yet.
The other thing the ship needs to move is dilithium crystals. I checked the “ship status” from the bridge and it mentions that there’s dilithium crystals on the surface of the planet we’re orbiting. Great, I just needed to beam down! Too bad it is so hard to communicate:
This is the moment I figured out HELP referred to Spock. He tells you that you need to SAY ENERGIZE. Unggh. At least I wasn’t alone here, as there was one player who experienced this in the 80s but couldn’t beat it, even with a walkthrough.
I was never able to beat it, because I couldn’t figure out how to operate the transporter. Years later I found a walkthrough I think on Compuserve, and it said to beam down to the planet, but not exactly what to type, so I remember trying USE TRANSPORTER, BEAM DOWN, ENERGIZE, ENERGIZE TRANSPORTER, etc., but I never figured it out. I guess I didn’t try SAY ENERGIZE. :(
An uneventful away mission follows. This is the last time you need your phaser.
With the crystals in hand you can replace them. This starts an immediate countdown as your ship’s orbit starts decaying. (It is possible to fix the crystals first and shunt second — this will cause the same result.) You need to rush to the bridge with engine control — no mistakes — and PRESS BUTTON (not PUSH! you monster).
We win! Yes, that’s the end of the game. What, you expected some sort of end message? I tried checking if maybe I could look for the crew on the planet but found that typing HELP made the game think I didn’t have a communicator (which was clearly in my inventory) and crash at the same time.
Worried, I ended up pulling up the walkthrough from the original magazine. This is quite unusual to print a walkthrough with the game, but the author wanted to show off the utility of the letter-munging aspect and so included one with the encryption, and a program to decrypt a walkthrough line by line (it says for you to BREAK when you’re done).
PROCEED NORTH FROM YOUR CABIN INTO THE HALLWAY. HEAD WEST UNTIL
YOU COME TO THE TURBOLIFT ENTRANCE. ENTER BY HEADING NORTH
AND GO UP. EXIT THE LIFT TO THE EAST AND EXPLORE THE BRIDGE.
FEEL FREE TO PRESS BUTTONS AND RECEIVE THE VARIOUS REPORTS.
GO BACK TO THE LIFT AND GO DOWN TWO LEVELS. EXIT THE TURBOLIFT
AND HEAD EAST UNTIL YOU COME TO THE SICK BAY. TAKE THE HYPO
AND RETURN TO THE TURBOLIFT. GO DOWN ONE MORE LEVEL AND TURN
WEST AFTER EXITING THE LIFT. GO NORTH & WEST UNTIL YOU FIND A
WAREHOUSE. YOU WILL NEED A PHASER AND COMMUNICATOR IMMEDIATELY
GO NORTH OUT OF THE WAREHOUSE AND THEN CONTINUE EAST. YOU WILL
ENCOUNTER A KLINGON GUARD BUT FIRING YOUR PHASER WILL DISPOSE
OF HIM. SPOCK’S TRICORDER INDICATES HE IS CLOSE BY AND ONE MORE
STEP EAST FINDS HIM UNCONSCIOUS IN THE BRIG. INJECT THE HYPO
AND HE WILL BE REVIVED AND HELP YOU. RETURN TO THE ENTRANCE
TO THE TURBOLIFT AND GO UP. EXIT ON DECK 3 AND HEAD EAST THEN
NORTH. PHASER THE KLINGON AND HEAD EAST AND GET THE MANUAL. GO
BACK TO THE LIFT — GO UP — AND HEAD EAST. TRANSPORT DOWN TO
THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET AND GET THE DILITHIUM CRYSTALS. RE-
TURN TO THE SHIP. GO WEST TO THE CREW’S QUARTERS AND TAKE THE
TRIBBLE. GO BACK TO THE TURBOLIFT AND GO DOWN TO THE BOTTOM
LEVEL — ENGINEERING DECK 5. FACE THE SQUADRON OF KLINGONS IN
ENGINEERING AND THROW THE TRIBBLE AT THEM. REMEMBER — KLINGONS
ARE EXTREMELY FRIGHTENED OF TRIBBLES. GO SOUTH AND REPLACE THE
DILITHIUM CRYSTALS. GO NORTH THEN EAST TO AUXILIARY CONTROL.
SPOCK WILL HELP YOU WITH THE KLINGON COMMANDER … THEN INSERT
THE SHUNT (IF YOU DON’T HAVE IT IT IS IN THE WAREHOUSE).
YOU ONLY HAVE A LIMITED AMOUNT OF TIME SO HURRY BACK TO THE
BRIDGE AND PRESS THE BUTTON TO FIRE THE ENGINES. WHEN STABLE
ORBIT IS ACHIEVED … YOU HAVE SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED YOUR
S T A R T R E K A D V E N T U R E !
With this I was able to confirm I was done. If that seems odd to you, you’re in company, as Howard Batie (who did the Tandy CoCo port called Galaxy Trek Adventure) must have felt the same way. In that version, the game keeps going! Quoting Dave Dobson, who played the game on a portable Model 100 with its own unique bugs:
Now how do we beam everyone back aboard the Enterprise? The Tribble is still available, so maybe we can shoot one Klingon and scare the other to get into the Klingon camp. THROW TRIBBLE at the south edge of the camp on Tieras-80 works, but we get a syntax error in line 101, another semicolon/colon mixup (fortunately the Model 100’s EDIT command is pretty easy to work with.)
The tribble runs off again after scaring the Klingon guard away, but we can still FIRE PHASER to eliminate the sentry outside the camp. And now we can enter the camp and find the crew! YOU MUST LEAD THEM BACK TO WHERE YOU BEAMED DOWN, we learn, which is easy enough to do if we’ve drawn a map so we don’t wander into the surrounding dangers. We return to our landing point, SAY ENERGIZE one last time to beam back aboard with the crew, and victory is ours!
I recommend that version over the original. (The Jim Gerrie port is fine.) Not only does ending at a rescue feel more satisfying, but Batie thought to take out the “loops” in the corridors which don’t do anything other than make the ship feel bigger. I’m sure they’re there for “atmosphere”; they copy the technique that goes back to Crowther (which wanted his outside Forest to seem like it was outside) but the ship is clearly simplified even with the trick, so it’s better to just acknowledge the tiny map and move on.
Deck 4 as an example. Those “loops” in the corridor are gone in Galaxy Trek.
Coming up: a haunted house as we aren’t in any danger of running out of those, followed by Starcross, followed by two recently-unearthed games for the North Star Horizon.
This is the third time Star Trek has appeared on this blog. First came Trek Adventure (1980) by the oddball company Aardvark, with a parser meant for a system with a tight memory limit; the game itself was one of the best of the Aardvark games, with a clever map trick (where rooms are first accessible only by airduct, but eventually you attain a more natural way of reaching them) and some savvy atmosphere, despite the ship being abandoned and the protagonist being a random crew member who has been left behind.
The second time was the graphic adventure Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (1992), where I took down a fair chunk of the “episodes” but I got softlocked by a bug (I think). Dubious UI, but voice acting from the original stars still gave a wonderful Original Series vibe. I promise I’ll give it a replay sometime (maybe I’ll try to mop up those missing points). As an aside, I’ll plug the freeware game Super Star Trek meets 25th Anniversary which combines the bridge of the graphic adventure with the gameplay of the original 1971 Mike Mayfield game.
It would have been better had the graphical adventure copied this style for the battles, instead of the slightly janky Wing Commander clone we got.
This game, by Randy Hawkins of Corpus Christi, Texas, first appeared in the August 1982 edition of 80 Micro. It has an internal copyright date of 1981. It was later re-written for the magazine Hot CoCo by Howard Batie under the title Galaxy Trek Adventure, with the odd condition that while the article gave full credit to Hawkins, the source doesn’t, meaning when the source code resurfaced later (as a game for the portable Model 100, for instance) it lists as being by Batie instead of Hawkins.
The problem with making a Star Trek game with 1982 technology (or even, let’s be honest, 2024 technology) is that the ship is supposed to be teeming with people. Even if we limit crew interactions, we’d at least have the main trio in action (Kirk, McCoy, Spock) with support from everyone else (Sulu, Chekov, Uhura, Scotty). While Deadline managed a cast this large, most authors cannot, so rather like Trek Adventure, the game gives a reason to isolate the player, who is playing as Kirk himself. Time to warm up on your Shakespeare!
(In all seriousness, William Shatner’s Shakespeare is better than you might think. He was allegedly quite good in his Ontario Stratford Shakespeare Festival days. I have a theory that the type of acting that works with elevated language can seem overmuch when transferred to everyday dialogue; that is, some of his more “famous” acting moments in Star Trek would have worked had they been Shakespearian poetry instead.)
I had some serious issues getting the program working because the source code does a letter-shift-by-one in order to avoid giving the game away to people typing in the type-in. Randy Hawkings explains:
… I have typed several other Basic adventure games myself, but by the time I had read through the program and, laboriously, typed every line, I knew how to solve the adventure’s riddles before the first execution. Just reading the list of nouns, verbs and descriptions gives too much of the mystery away.
The source code does a POKE in memory to do the decipherment, but this can cause havoc with emulators. I recommend trs80gp in Model 1 mode, where you load BASIC manually, then load the program manually, then start by typing RUN.
The Enterprise has suffered a boarding party of Klingons; Kirk wakes up seemingly alone, and needs to heroically claim the ship.
I haven’t even come close to being heroic yet, but I can at least give the lay of the land ship. Star Trek is based around turbolift floors. Star Trek First Contact (1988, no relation to the later movie!) lets you visit every single one of the floors. Star Trek ’82 lets you visit five of them.
A zoomed out view of my incomplete map so far.
Let’s linger a moment in the starting room, the captain’s quarters of Floor 2:
Trek Adventure ’80 put multiple objects, with the Saurian Brandy giving a convincing impression of Kirk.
You ARE–
In a CABIN
You Can See-
Saurian BRANDY
PILLOW
MIRROR
VIEWPORT
VENTILATOR
Computer TERMINAL
This game … just puts a 3d chess set. This does not quite give the Captain Kirk aura. Also and more unfortunately, no verbs I could find work.
Mind you, since CAN YOU REPEAT THAT is the error command for every rejected command, no matter what, I can’t tell if it’s a verb misunderstanding, a noun misunderstanding, or the game truly means the chess set as scenery and I’m supposed to leave it alone. My list above assumes the noun is SET, but maybe the game is looking for CHESS, or 3D?
Moving on and staying on the same floor, there’s a transporter in one direction, but again I’m parser hell. Am I messing with the PANEL, the CHAMBER, what?
Rounding off the floor is a confrontation with a Klingon who captures you if you don’t have a phaser. (The game even explicitly says the game over is because you don’t have a phaser.) If you do have a phaser, you manage to — nope, never mind, you get captured anyway.
It’s not a real time thing. I turned the emulator down super slow to test while typing fast and I had the same result.
The Bridge (deck 1) is fortunately empty.
There are STAR CHARTS you can pick up (GET CHARTS, TAKE instead of GET otherwise you get the generic failure) and three stations available. Navigation has a button for impulse control but it doesn’t seem to be working.
PRESS, not PUSH. sigh
Status indicates the Enterprise is in decaying orbit and having the impulses engines broken is very bad. Communications indicates in addition to a humanoid on board (yourself) and many Klingons, there is one Vulcan.
Yes, I accidentally did PUSH first every single time. If the text wasn’t encrypted I’d hack the verb in just out of spite.
Deck 3 (medical) has a hypo antidote in a sick bay, and a Klingon guarding the rest (who I can’t get by). Deck 5 (engineering) has many Klingons in the engine room.
Nope, that’s not going to work. Instead of a hypo antidote Kirk needs a hypo stimulant.
Deck 4 has a corridor one way (with a Klingon hanging out at “Spock’s tricorder”) and a supply room the other way. The supply room is designed like Dog Star Adventure where you’re supposed to just name what you want.
In addition to the phaser (see above) I found a communicator by guessing. I haven’t lucked out with any more items, and I have not been able to find any verb that works with the communicator (I’d love to try contacting Spock, who apparently is still somewhere on the vessel).
I’d certainly be leaning on my verb list about now but a generic error response means I can’t tell if a verb is understood or not. Sometimes in such circumstances I can find a loophole so I’ll keep prodding but this is a game that simply does not want to be communicated with.
A North Star Horizon computer; the original was released 1977. They are notable for having early versions of CP/M and DOS, as well as being one of the first personal computers with an available hard drive. Via the blog Broadbandpig.
This is thanks to Gus Brasil who commented in my last post. I mentioned a 1979 North Star game (Middle Earth) which might be somehow related to Tolkien, although the situation was ambiguous as the game was lost media. I also mentioned Cranston Manor Adventure (North Star Horizon version) being a lost game as well. This was on the basis of my searching in 2022. However, it turns out that late in 2023, a large archive of North Star Horizon software got uploaded. By large, I mean at least 30 disks that haven’t seen daylight for a long time, including the North Star version of Cranston Manor.
Two adventures from the archive I have other copies of in another format (Windmere Estate, Zodiac Castle), but there were two more I had never heard of before: Uncle Harry’s Will (1981) and Whembly Castle (1982). Both are by R.L. Turner. I have added them to my list (and there’s something fascinating about Uncle Harry’s Will, but let’s wait on that until we get there).
Relevant to Cracks of Doom, the archive has the game Middle Earth. Let me quote, in its entirety, the entry from the Chronological list of Tolkien games:
Produced by: Dendron Amusements (?)
Distributor: Dendron Amusements
Year: 1979
System: North Star Horizon
Type: Possibly wargame
Distribution: Commercial
Availability: Out of print
Licensed: No
I am not sure if this is really based on Tolkien’s Middle Earth or if it is just another game that steals the title therefrom. The game was released as part of a series. Other titles in the series included Panzer, Blitzkrieg, Fall of the Third Reich, D-Day, Armorcar, Porkchop Hill, Africa Corps, Waterloo, The Battle of Monmouth, Starship Troopers, Invasion of the Mud People and The Boston Marathon.
Arnold Bogenschutz suggests that this may be somehow connected with a board game published by SPI with the same title. He seems to remember seeing the computer version, but has no further details.
I’m not seeing Dendron mentioned in the source anywhere, but the year and author are:
COPYRIGHT 1979 R A MAGAZZU
I don’t think there’s title stealing. I think the title is just incidentally connected.
The Middle Earth is referring more in a “journey to the center of the Earth” sense.
I did play just a little to confirm; while there are creatures, they are definitely not of Tolkien vintage.
I am not doing All the Wargames (that’d be a certain Scribe) so I am not the best person to parse this, other than to confirm that: as long as you discard The Lord of the Rings (TRS-80, 1981) as a weird trivia quiz, the first commercial Tolkien videogame adaptation we know of is Cracks of Doom.
I have finished the game; you should read part 1 here first.
Before plunging ahead and witnessing Frodo perform judo (really), I want to look a little more at the early history of Tolkien videogames. There are complications in asking “what’s the first Tolkien videogame” along with “what’s the first commercial Tolkien videogame”. It depends on what you think counts.
For any influence at all we might think about 1975 with Moria, one of the early CRPGs on the PLATO system, although that game is really just an adaptation of an earlier PLATO game (neither author was aware of the existence of the tabletop D&D nor had they read Lord of the Rings). Mines of Mordor (1979) similarly just does a namecheck, and seems to be an adaptation of the boardgame Citadel.
Hovering somewhere in the 70s is the game Nazgul, which is mentioned by Christopher Burke in a Quora thread as a “private” game he wrote for an ASR-33 where the player is trying to avoid a bunch of Ns on a grid. It is a re-skin of the game variously known as “Robots” or “Daleks” or “Chase”. I have trouble counting this as an actual Lord of the Rings adaptation.
+-----------+
|N N | 812
| | 703
| | 654
| NN |
| * |
| |
| N |
| |
| N |
| N |
| N N |
+-----------+
Enter move (0-8):
Staying with 1979, the Tolkien Games chronology lists Ringen, The Shire, and Middle Earth. Ringen was an adventure in Norwegian only preserved by being made into an area on a MUD and you can read about my playthrough on this very blog. The Shire was potentially a mainframe game, maybe on PLATO? Middle Earth is allegedly a wargame for the now-super-obscure North Star system by Dendron Amusements. (Cranston Manor Adventure had a now-lost North Star version, as did the GROW software, but those are the only times the system has appeared here.) That last game was technically commercial but both its existence and its content are ambiguous.
Ringen is solidly enough “real Tolkien” I’d give it credit as first we know of that tries to be a real adaptation, although it doesn’t take the commercial mantle. For a candidate we might try source code dated February 1981, by “P. & M. Hutt” and published by Kansas City Systems.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I’ve gone ahead and played it and the gameplay is hard to describe. It’s sort of a cross being the previously mentioned Robots/Chase game and a trivia quiz.
You’re Frodo exploring around Shelob’s lair, and it is divided into floors where you are stumbling in the dark. The floors are represented in ASCII.
As you move around, a “nasty” marked with an N tries to find you (it takes about five moves trying to get to you, and if it gets seriously blocked, it disappears entirely and a new nasty appears). If the nasty gets to you it might be a dwarf, or might be Shelob. If it is Shelob you need to answer the next letter in the “spell”, that is, answer the trivia question appropriately.
There’s various doors that lead up and down floors, and the game implies some sort of final conditions to exit, but I never got that far. The Lord of the Rings credentials are extraordinarily tenuous.
Honestly the best part is this opening screen.
Kansas City Systems incidentally has only previously appeared on this blog in context of illegally re-publishing games from other companies (the case against them ended up being what firmly established software in the UK as being under copyright); although I wouldn’t say the theming is just a cynical ploy to sell copies, I would say it is a game more in the category of Moria with “elements inspired by” Tolkien without really being an adaptation.
Here I prove — by typing in the first letter of the name within 5 seconds — that I know who the “bear-man” in Tolkien is. So Shelob goes away, taking 1 gold piece, rather than killing me.
All this is meant to lead to the fact that — especially since it appeared in a January 1982 issue of Computer and Video Games Magazine, meaning it was really published late 1981 — Cracks of Doom is arguably the first actual adaptation of Lord of the Rings for commercial sale. As already highlighted, caveats are needed. However, even with the odd “alternate reality” of the mission just being Frodo, having to toss 5 treasures into Doom rather than just the One Ring, etc., there’s still some recognizable elements, especially upon picking up the One Ring. The game felt like an attempt to put the player in the part of the story rather than just namecheck Shelob.
The cover of the de-Tolkien-ized edition, from the Museum of Computer Adventure Games. Saruman is now Solbone. Shelob is now Shogra.
Back into the action! Regarding the Palantir that I was unable to cart all the way back to the cracks without Frodo losing it mentally…
…I found you could just pick up the “wolf fur” that was covering the Palantir and you’d be fine. No need to rush. I had noted a lack of “wrap” or whatnot as a verb but I guess you are implicitly covering the Palantir up, matching the lore that it really is only dangerous if you can see into it (and Sauron can see you back).
There’s also something I did right without being clear I was doing something right. There was a “mighty falcon” where I gave it a feather and it broke a “binding spell”. The idea is that you can take the falcon away now; before it says it has a spell and is stuck in place. So the falcon is useful for a confrontation later.
Picking up the falcon suggests something else that Rob mentioned in the comments as an idea: the NPCs aren’t the sort that stay in place and you interact with them, but rather you can simply pick them up. This seemed like an absurd idea (Halfing arms!) but then I was able to just wholesale grab Gollum, giving Frodo a serious workout. Gollum does not stay put but he moves somewhere better for him to be later, anyway.
Gollum cackles Stupid Halfling! Did precious think it could hold Smeagol and runs off.
In fact, I briefly was carrying both Gollum and Saruman the White at the same time. Saruman doesn’t let you just powerlift him. I had missed another aspect to the game, with the third dwarf at the Cave of Crystal Presence. It also wants a crystal cup, just like the dwarf I got a hat from. However, if you give the Crystal Presence dwarf the cup first, he’ll give it back to you along with Gandalf’s staff. If you instead pick the other dwarf first, you’ve softlocked the game.
With the staff in hand, then Saruman is paralyzed, and you can take him. Not only take him, but cart him all the way over to the Cracks of Doom and hurl him down. Yes, he’s one of the 5 anti-treasures. (By the way, the iron fist? Is not useful for anything. It can go down too.)
Shelob tries to catch you again at the cracks, so you need to BRANDISH PHIAL before practicing your judo toss.
Having the discards made is sufficient to trigger that message about the One Ring; in addition, for some mysterious reason, you can defeat the Balrog now. I had previously theorized the green fire would work, and I was absolutely right, but I was doing it at the wrong time. (IF you type HELP at the Balrog room, in addition to the “walkthrough” you get by saying “yes” to Gandalf, you can just get a contextual hint by saying “no” to Gandalf; you’ll be informed to “fight fire with fire”. I was heavily stuck because dropping the green fire did nothing.)
Past the Balrog is some red fog, and then a tower containing Morgoth the Dark Enemy. Here’s a rendition of Morgoth as he is usually depicted:
Via Guillem Pongiluppi.
In Cracks of Doom, your falcon friend is sufficient to scare Morgoth away.
Given the falcon was freed via a magical artifact of the original Eagle Lord, this doesn’t feel too absurd to me.
The falcon flies away, which is unfortunate, because you can find a “gleam” in the tower which is high up and clearly one of the anti-treasures we want. Going down the opposite way you can find Gollum hanging in a cell.
I never got “speak Gandalf” to do anything.
We’ll need Gollum in a moment. To get at the gleam, we need the falcon back; the falcon has wandered all the way back to the room we started the game in. (No clue or anything, we’re just supposed to hope we’ll find him and check the entire map.) With the falcon in hand we can get it to retrieve whatever that gleam might be.
We are now on a strict time limit. This part was really well done; we start feeling “depressed”, and then eventually the baleful eye is cast upon us.
I felt genuinely tense and thought I was going to need to reload a save and optimize my route to avoid being crushed by Sauron.
We need to scoop Gollum along the way to the cracks (he’s a lot easier to get from the cell at the tower than his starting place, this is why I said it was helpful he ran away). Then dropping the ring leads to a canon-adjacent effect:
Despite it suffering an almost equal amount of jank, I enjoyed this a lot more than Hitch Hiker’s Guide. I think, curiously enough, the odd effects and messages add to a general feel of oppression, and that mood fits a lot better hanging out at Mount Doom than it does traversing the universe in the Heart of Gold.
I also really, really enjoyed hurling Saruman the White into Mount Doom, despite the improbability. Maybe it was all that lembas bread.
Greetings, Halfling. I an Gandalf the Grey, your guide. Your task is to find the 5 objects and cast then all (alive or otherwise) into the Cracks of Doom in order to destroy, once and for all, the terrible power of the Dark Lord.
This is not the first or even the second Supersoft game we’ve looked at using an outside franchise. Pythonesque wasn’t licensed (and is a loose enough adaptation of Monty Python it likely didn’t need to be) while The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was (yet suffered a lawsuit anyway, ending in destruction of product). The Hitch Hiker business clearly would have left Supersoft skittish. Hence, this game is also known as Cracks of Fire, with the Tolkien references torn out. Given the Tolkien Collector Guide was unclear if the Cracks of Doom version even came out (see picture above), it clearly is the rarer of the two.
This is the second adventure game Bob Chappell wrote after The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (His first game generally was Nightmare Park.)
The “treasures” you are collecting this time are items “forged of Mordor” and your goal is to tote them over to the “cracks” nearby where you pitch them to their destruction. This is an alternate universe Lord of the Rings where Frodo starts from the center of Mount Doom and works his way out. The alternate reality aspect threw me for a loop; even if you try not to think about it too hard, there are some deeply odd moments, like a weirdly passive Saruman the White hanging out near both Shelob and Gollum. Look, it’s just easier to talk about the game in context–
You (Frodo) start out at the Mountains of Mordor. Two moves to the east lands you at “the very edge of the Cracks of Doom”, where the Evil Artifacts go. Found there are a small sphere where if you drop it you get a key (exactly like Valley of Cesis) and a manuscript.
Regarding “brandish it high”, the game helpfully comes with a verb list (if you just hit ENTER with no prompt) and the verb BRANDISH is on there. We’ll be using it soon.
Also outdoors you can find a “majestic falcon” near a “smooth blood-red pebble”. Just north of that is “the Red Book of Middlearth”.
I don’t know Gollum being bound only by the “.i.” means a three-letter word with an i in the middle, or just some general word with an i in the middle.
Going down a hole at a “swampy stretch”, reveals a sleeping orc captain near a locked portcullis, and a “rune tablet” in an adjacent room. The tablet says…
Read the rune tablet.
…which I suppose is meta? As I already mentioned I found a key, and it does fit the portcullis, but opening it awakens the guard. With the items seen so far, it doesn’t end well.
Fortunately, even without applying the key, there’s one more place to explore, a very tiny maze.
As usual, despite being small this took a while to get mapped out in a sensible way. Important items lying around are: a brown weed, some rotting orc meat (“looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys!”) and the Phial of Galadrial. Yes, it’s just sitting there. (The phial ends up being essential to carry everywhere.)
There’s also a gargoyle with a missing eye, but the red pebble occurred to me as a good replacement candidate.
Pushing the nose of the gargoyle then drops you to your death. You need to push the eye instead in order to open a passage to the east, but I didn’t discover that until later, so let’s save that bit of exploration for just a moment and head back to the orc captain. Remember the cryptic instructions about using “brandish”?
After this happens, orcs start rushing at you at random through the game. They serve the function of the dwarves of Adventure (or Vogons of Hitch Hiker’s) where you need to be paying attention and BRANDISH PHIAL at the right moments, lest you die. It is surprisingly hard to keep from messing up and sometimes immediately after killing an orc another one would come.
Don’t get excited: we aren’t recruiting an undead army. Rather, we are reading the tablet that said to read the tablet. I did figure this out quite quickly but only in a sense of not having many options. I don’t know how the clues connect.
There is a deep rumble and the east wall slides back.
A harsh voice croaks
The Dead Marshes….
Not much here. First, there’s a troll. Give it the meat to get by. (The screen below shows up simultaneously fending off Orcs.)
Past that you can find a iron fist (“forged in Mordor”) which is our first anti-treasure. I confirmed you can bring it to the Cracks and toss it in for 20 out of 100 points. I am saving it in case it is needed for a puzzle.
Moving on is an “elven crystal cup” (sure, why not) followed by the Balrog, wielding that most dire of weapons, the gosub error.
I don’t know why a weed would help with a Balrog, I was just trying everything I had.
Note also: the Balrog killing you on a give turn is random, and this randomness can trigger when you enter the room. Since you presumably need to enter the room to defeat it (I have not defeated it yet) that means the RNG can just decide to kill you.
With that charming enemy left on the back-burner, let’s proceed to the area past the gargoyle, Minas Morgal.
The sequence is whiplash-inducing. Starting at the far northeast, there’s a dwarf; as the room is titled Crystal Offerings, you’re supposed to GIVE CUP and you get a hat in exchange.
The hat incidentally has a feather that can be removed separately…
The Feather of Thorondor
…and taking the feather back to the falcon gives the message that the falcon picks up the feather and the binding spell breaks (this doesn’t happen with other items). Is this a good thing or does it softlock the game? In Tolkien, Thorondor is the king of the Eagles in the First Age, but I honestly don’t think it helps to dwell too much on the lore as it might be misleading.
From the Lord of the Rings collectable card game.
Moving on, there’s another dwarf with a pipe. Give him the brown weed and he’ll drop off a globe of green fire.
Past that is yet another dwarf hanging out at a Cave of Crystal Presence. I haven’t found anything useful there.
Once past the three dwarves we get into more hostile country, with a “rock-hewn chamber” and a wolf pelt. Taking the pelt reveals a Palantir.
This feels like it ought to go in the Cracks of Doom, but if you try to carry it around, it’ll eventually “affect your mind” and then “seriously damage your mind” up to where you can’t reach the Cracks in time: the Palantir kills you.
Past that is Shelob. Shelob you can defeat with the phial, but it has the same RNG as the Balrog and can kill you when you enter.
But still, she was there, who was there before Sauron, and before the first stone of Barad-dûr; and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness.
(That’s from real Tolkien, not the game.)
Off by a lake you can find Gollum. I have not managed to get him to acknowledge any actions.
Just a little further, Saruman the White is just hanging. He also doesn’t acknowledge your presence.
There’s some “strange fruit” just past that was poisoned by Saruman, so he’s still evil. Finally, the most cryptic room at all in this section:
You can take the slates, but you can’t read them or “inspect” them. I am quite befuddled.
Since that was quite a few random elements, here’s the list of objects so far, excluding already-used items: 7 slates, strange fruit, wolf fur, Palantir, iron fist, globe of green fire, dwarf hat, feather.
Spots of confusion are: the Balrog, the falcon, the dwarf at the Crystal Presence cave, Gollum (with the “.i.” clue), and Saruman.
The inventory limit is four (the game logically says you are “only a Halfling and cannot bear more”) so I haven’t tried every item on every obstacle yet (like the green fire on the Balrog) but nothing strikes me as an immediate obvious combination. I did try the “phial” on Gollum to no effect.
One last element I should highlight is there is a built-in help feature and it works differently than any I’ve played for the Project. Usually such hints have been contextual (based on what room you are in); here, the game asks if you want help from Gandalf, and if you say yes, you get the next hint out of a pre-made list. So there’s X hints behind the scenes that get revealed one by one, and that probably make some kind of walkthrough (I haven’t checked in enough to spoil, but I did check enough to see if this was the kind of game where essential info was in the help command).
I have beaten the game. You can read my posts in order here.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I broke through most of the rest of the game myself, but I did have to look up hints on two things.
Essentially the game consists of:
going through a number of “secret walls”; some of the walls have specific flags and conditions that are cryptic
evading deathtraps
gently applying the commands ACTIVATE, PUSH, OPEN, ENTER, and BLAST as needed
If you add TAKE, DROP, WEAR, and REMOVE, that’s essentially all the commands in the game. There are esoteric conditions and fussy spots with verbs that make this non-trivial to handle. For example, one room I was stumped on had a DOORLOCK I couldn’t get through, and after much suffering I finally came across PUSH LOCK (not DOORLOCK) which revealed a bulkhead. Opening the bulkhead is then a deathtrap and kills you, so all that time I spent on the lock was wasted. Good times.
A TRACTORBEAM GRABS YOU FROM INSIDE…. PULLING YOU IN!
THE BULKHEAD SLIDES SHUT.
YOU ARE IN
AN OBSERVATION STATION BELONG TO THE UNITED STARS ORGANIZATION. BUT IT IS OUT OF ORDER. THERE’S NO POSSIBILITY OF RETURN…..
To be fair, maybe not wasted — this sequence is what led me to really grokking what’s going on. PUSH, TOUCH, and OPEN all are mapping to the same action. Given how broken the parser was being overall I made the guess at the highly reduced verb list was all I really needed. (I found out later that the source code behind the scenes is checking the noun first, then the verb, so the verbs PUSH, TOUCH, and OPEN lead to the “I’m confused about everything” message if being applied to anything other than one of the “secret wall” type objects.)
It also led me to test out referring to the HOWALGONIUM-CLIPS just as CLIPS; it still didn’t work, but with a little more testing it worked as long as I tried to WEAR them directly and not pick them up.
That is, you ignore the “HOWALGONIUM” even though it is part of the same word, just like you ignore the DOOR of DOORLOCK.
I had been trying to take the INFO-CUBE everywhere and doing INSERT CUBE and various other “why is there no machine that reads this” maneuvers, but given my newfound zeal to stick with a reduced verb set, I found all I needed was ACTIVATE. (On the word INFO, though, not CUBE. God forbid the nouns be treated with any consistency.) The game then asks which INFO-MODULE I wanted (1 through 9). Each of the 9 represents a hint:
SPACE-SUIT……..1…..2……..DOOR
SUITS COMPLICATE IDENTIFICATION
NOTHING IS AS IT APPEARS TO BE!
ROBOTS DIMINISH CHANCES OF SURVIVAL!
THE INFO-CUBE IS A KEY
BLASTING IS HELPFUL AT TIMES!
CLIPS SECURE ENTRY
ONLY ANSON ARGYRIS MAY SURVIVE
AFTER 2 ACTIVATIONS, THE INFO-CUBE BLOWS-UP!
The last hint is true: you can only use the cube twice before it goes away, but fortunately there’s the magic of saved game states.
One thing you might notice from the list (ACTIVATE, PUSH, OPEN, ENTER, and BLAST) is that there’s no SHOOT on the list. That verb is not understood. So back where I was getting shot by the Laren, all I needed to type was BLAST LAREN (not SHOOT LAREN) and get a little animation of a crosshair moving from the enemy getting vaporized. (I could swear I had tried it, but I must have tried it on other things and not this moment.)
Even though the manual takes pains to say you have a blaster and a disintegrator and they’re different, there is no difference and no reason to do anything other than blast things.
Past the alien led to a new area, with the same one-way exits as before and the same instant death rooms as before:
I marked the room with the Laren in blue.
For example, just past the alien is a “SEEMINGLY UNIMPORTANT” room, with only one exit mentioned: to the north, which tosses you right into a deathtrap. There are “MARKS” indicating the east wall has been tampered with.
Using The Method ™ the right way to proceed is just PUSH WALL.
This leads to a “distribution corridor” where there is a spot where a crystal goes. Ignoring that for now (since we don’t have a crystal) yet you can take a loop around to the north, reaching a large “BIO-POSITRONICON”.
The machine stops you to quiz you who the founders of the Free Traders was (that’s the folks you’re the Robot Emperor of) which essentially counts as copy protection; the name is mentioned in the manual.
I don’t know if they were thinking piracy prevention or they just wanted to incorporate some of the lore.
Moving on you find an “INFORMATION CELL” with the missing crystal and an AMMUNITIONS CLOSET that frustrated me a long time (more on that in a second). If you keep going you get a dire message about everything being doomed, and then a step further kills you.
You’re already Dead Robot Walking when you see this message.
I flailed around here for a bit until I realized the AMMUNITION CLOSET cannot be referred to as a CLOSET (again, wonderful consistency) but instead as AMMUNITION. You’re supposed to BLAST AMMUNITION which reveals an invisible door, and then OPEN DOOR (not OPEN INVISIBILE). This lets you find a one-way door that leads you back to the transporter with the gap needing a crystal.
Before using the crystal, I should mention as an aside you can also find a room nearby with a BULKHEAD that opens to be a GATE. At the time I found it, none of the commands I tried worked, and it turns out I wasn’t supposed to open it yet.
Just remember this room later.
Returning the transporter/crystal combo, DROP CRYSTAL will activate the transporter, and then you can step inside and find yourself … sent to the west side of the map, with the frustrating wall that I could never open.
Even using the standard verbs got nothing this time. All the previous parser suffering had me decide it was time to reach for hints; I used Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure Games II this time.
The offending room is near the bottom at “Hall Well Hidden Bulkhead”, marked 13.
The hint “THE INFO-CUBE IS A KEY” is supposed to apply here. I admit this occurred to me but I tried to ACTIVATE the cube while in the room with no help. For some reason, dropping the info-cube is the key. Once you’ve dropped it in the room, PUSH WALL then works to reveal a TRANSPORTMODULE.
This has smoke. Art-wise we’ve had nothing like this for the Project.
Moving on (in a one-way circle) is a transmitter station that had an “accident” (ew) a “gravity trap” that crushed some Laren (ouch) and a desert.
I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this and I prowl the “bizarre” tag on itch.io for fun.
The desert has a spacesuit and a key. The key is a trap that will kill you if you take it. You want the spacesuit (and you can only WEAR it, you can’t take it or the game gets confused). The transport doesn’t work, so it appears we’re trapped in a loop again, but I had a clue from the info-cube in mind:
SPACE-SUIT……..1…..2……..DOOR
That is, “when you find the space suit, take two steps, and then there’s a door. That means in the northwest (with the transporter malfunction) the command OPEN DOOR ought to do something, and indeed it does, opening another passage to a computer room, followed by a defense room.
The display shows Laren being killed by the automated defenses.
Past this is a transporter. Now: I had actually been in this section before. It is possible to arrive here from the start of the game, where you are in a dark room, as there is a ROBOT hanging out that normally just lets you pass by. If you pause and try to do some action, the ROBOT catches on and activates a transporter, sending you here. Then entering the transporter kills you. For some cryptic reason, entering the transporter while wearing the spacesuit instead sends you back to the east side of the map, near where you killed the Laren.
Here is the final challenge. Remember the GATE I mentioned? Now you can finally open it.
You have to drop the spacesuit, and drop the mask (or rather REMOVE each), and it works. You might wonder “well, you’re not wearing the spacesuit already, can you drop the mask right away and get into the gate early?” The answer to that is no: the game says
YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG!
like it has always been doing when conditions are off. I admit this part really doesn’t make sense to me since it is unclear what you would have triggered in that whole jaunt with the spacesuit to make the gate suddenly work! At least, unlike Chinese Puzzle (which this was starting to remind me of) there is technically a hint off the info-cube, namely, “SUITS COMPLICATE IDENTIFICATION”. I guess that means the door can’t identify us for leaving, but why wasn’t the door working before?
I assume setting up a sequel which never happened.
Regarding the art, there’s an assembly routine called FASTDRAW and each of the rooms has a TXT file with the information to draw it. There’s some kind of compression going on because the byte size can vary quite a bit. I still don’t think it’s any kind of vectors; rather, the screen is divided into multi-pixel columns and those chunks are being expressed in the draw data somehow. Whatever is going on has to be very clever because even at authentic speeds it goes fast for an Apple II routine.
I know “outsider art” doesn’t make sense as paradigm for adventure games this time, because nearly everyone was making outsider art. Every company was starting fresh; even the starting-to-be-commercialized Sierra On-Line was just getting out of their “summer camp” period. Still, this was far more outside the curve than normal, but I have a notion as to why: this isn’t an original setting at all. This is based on a book series from Europe.
In the original disk version, there’s a file called DATEN.TXT (that is, “data” in German), and the main basic file is marked:
Perry Rhodan is a space opera book series that’s been around in Germany since the early 60s, with two billion in sales. Some books have been translated but as far as I can tell this one never was — and of course the title is given in German and it was sold only in Europe — so I strongly suspect our pair of authors was from Germany or Austria, maybe with subscriptions to an overseas publication; they saw Wolf’s solicitations and decided to send the game in.
And yes, the Laren come from Perry Rhodan. You can read more about them on the Perrypedia, and you can read a summary of the original Caves of Olympia book here. The plot goes in a very different direction but this was clearly meant to be a sort of fan-fiction. The main character in the book is Sanssouq (a psychic with amnesia) but he meets the game’s protagonist Vario-500 (in one of his masks) as part of the story.
The Hordes of Garbesh, referenced at the end of the story and seemingly setting up a sequel, are from Perry Rhodan book #328.
Coming up: Tolkien, Star Trek, another haunted house, and the glorious return of Infocom.
ADDENDUM
I found the German version of the game. We’ve certainly had multiple languages on our games before due to translation after the fact (there are some ’82 dated translations in German of the old APX text adventures, for instance). This one is marked 19xx so never raised any eyebrows, but given the file names still have German in them, and the source material, what we likely have is the first adventure game written in German. What got published in the US must be a translation made afterwards.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games. Both the box art and disk use just “Caves” rather than “The Caves” but I’m giving the title screen priority.
First off, just to make it easier to visualize what I meant regarding the graphics (and how it completely ignores the vectors-with-fill paradigm everyone else was following), here is a portion of the game animated:
When I get closer to the end (or so frustrated at the game I don’t care about spoilers) I’ll poke at the source code, at least some of which is in BASIC, and see if I can decipher what’s going on behind the scenes. For now, let’s worry about the gameplay instead which still is drawing heavily off of paradigms I normally associate with gamebooks.
Single movement commands sometimes imply a long journey
Has paths that lead to random death
Starts the player with weapons and a shield device, includes a running energy counter
I’ll discuss all of these, in order.
First, consider the gamebook Fire on the Water (the second Lone Wolf book, where the player obtains the legendary and overpowered Sommerswerd which lasts for the remainder of the twenty books). Every place on the map marked is included in the story.
Given there are only 350 sections, the game cannot afford to have one “step” between sections represent ten seconds or twenty seconds (as might happen in a traditional adventure game). Sometimes the transition between sections involves travelling many miles. By doing this, the game is also (as is traditional) uni-directional. “240: After three uneventful days at sea, you find shipboard life rather dreary.”: the player wouldn’t have three days of travel, followed by backtracking to the previous section. In one memorable series of travel sections, we’re trying to identify a killer (before the player is required to pick out of the suspects and have a confrontation); it doesn’t make sense to repeat scenes.
Here’s a description from the game:
YOU ARE IN
A SORT OF ANTEROOM.
AHEAD OF YOU – TO THE SOUTH – YOU SEE A 5.23 KILOMETER LONG CORRIDOR. TO YOUR RIGHT THERE IS AN EXIT…
On the map below, the 5.23 km encompasses the “Anteroom” going south to an “Armory”.
I don’t think it’s implied that every exit is in >1 kilometer range, but certainly it means some other exits have to be, and while in most adventures going north-then-south would imply stepping back and forth between a door, here it might indicate an hour of travel. This makes the opening I was puzzled about — where we went straight from the outdoors to past the meteorological station into the caves in one move — make more sense. It also makes the one-way passages you see (like the 5.23 km one) feel a little more palatable at least in a story sense, although in a gameplay sense they still made me grumble.
Second, regarding paths leading to random deaths, all the ones marked in red seem to be instant death with no escape. One of them (the Stasis Field) I originally couldn’t enter because I got blasted by a combat-robot, but I managed (after using an item I’ll mention later) to get by, just hitting a second death! This is a tradition back to regular Choose Your Own Adventure, and is a low-mechanics way to make a narrative seem like it has “challenge”.
Three deaths smooshed into one screen.
Third, regarding the weapons and the shield, here are details from the manual:
As the solitary prototype of the Vario-500 line of robot, you are equipped with a Force Field Generator, a Disintegrator, and a Blaster. The generator will keep all attacking objects or dangerous energy discharges from you, unless it becomes overloaded. Normal physical activities will not be impeded by the presence of the force field. This is due to the intellitroller implanted within the generator housing. This device actively controls the force field and instantaneously adjusts for changes in body position and the number of possessions you are carrying.
Your disintegrator will disrupt the molecular-energy bonds of almost any target. This will cause whatever you are shooting at to be effectively converted to an expanding cloud of gas. The blaster will project a high intensity energy beam, melting most any object in its path. Both of these weapons are very effective. Depending on the result desired, one weapon may be more desirable under given circumstances than the other. Your knowledge and deduction will have to be your guide.
I can theoretically type BLAST (melting) vs. DISINTIGRATE (converting to gas) to get different actions, but I haven’t seen anything happen with either in practice. I might even be using the wrong verbs.
I have the force-field figured out, sort of. ACTIVATE FORCE-FIELD changes a message in your inventory to indicate it is on. I only say sort-of because the one place I’d like to use it I get blasted anyway.
The place I’d love to use it is where there’s a Laren (one of the alien bad guys). Trying to shoot him or move past him results in death in every combination I’ve tried, with the force field both on and off.
He’s quicker to the draw.
I’ve solved two puzzles, at least, one which I alluded to already. In the northwest corner of the map there is a “cocoon center”.
Wearing the mask, colorfully, informs us
YOU HAVE CHANGED BACK TO THE EMPEROR OF THE FREE TRADERS!
which is apparently enough to make robots grovel at our feet. Some lore from the manual to help explain:
Before the Laren invaded the star system, you (Vario 500) had hundreds of different cocoon-masks to enable you to take almost any form you desired. Most of the masks are now hidden all over Olympus, useless to anyone except yourself. The Anson Argyris mask was left in the caves after the Emperor had “officially” fled the planet, as it was necessary as an instrument to penetrate key chambers of the caves, should the robot have need to escape. It should be noted that you are only considered the Emperor (Anson Argyris) when you are wearing this mask.
In other words, we helped build the facility but forgot about the details, yet the robots there will remember us as long as we’re wearing the mask. Other than passing the robot (which allowed us to walk right into another death-trap) I haven’t got any useful result yet.
From the Armory I found a micro-bomb which I was able to use on a suspicious part of wall. This opened up a transmitter that I was able to hop in and go elsewhere, but unfortunately, elsewhere turned out to be that Laren death scene. So two puzzles solved leading directly to death!
I’m also facing a less-deadly foe of (probably) the parser. There’s another “wall” that looks suspicious and it seems like I ought to be pass through, but no verb I’ve attempted works, and I haven’t been able to blast it.
PUSH WALL even has a different message than normal: “YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG!”
Here’s another parser boss:
I don’t know what the clips are exactly, but based on poking through the manual for clues, they might help fix matter transporters, and one of the transporters (just south of the frustrating wall) is broken and kills you if you try to enter. Hence, I’d like to bring one to the other, but the game won’t let me. Yet another hint indicates wearing the mask ought to be sufficient to take the clips, but again, no dice (“THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!”)
The Anson Argyris mask is necessary to perform certain tasks within the caverns to make escape possible. Some items may only be picked up if you are wearing the mask. For instance, the hairclips used in some identification procedures.
The general summary is I still don’t understand how to communicate with the game or what its norms are. I assume I already have everything I need to fight the Laren but I can’t. The same is true for getting through the wall or fixing the transmitter. Maybe everything will go smooth once I get the hang of it?
Howard W. Sams — previously employed for Goodyear and General Battery — eventually landed at the battery manufacturer P.R. Mallory during the 1930s (headquarters: Indianapolis, Indiana). While there his responsibilities included sales literature and he got involved with technical printing like with the Mallory Yaxley Radio Service Encyclopedia (1937).
He tried to coax his employer into diversifying into technical publishing in general; being rebuffed, he founded his own company in 1946, named after himself. Howard W. Sams and Co. became prolific in publishing “Photofact” guides and their technical manuals are still valued by people who work with old electronics.
The company Sams eventually became large enough to purchase Bobbs-Merrill Publishing (famous for The Joy of Cooking) and diversified into textbooks in general before selling the company to ITT Corporation in 1967 (while eventually being sold again in 1985 to Macmillan Publishing).
As a technical publisher, they got into computers early, like with the Computer Dictionary & Handbook (Sippl, 1966)…
You might assume they would immediately make a natural segue into programming languages when those books started to appear, but their books through the 70s tended to stay at their roots in electronics, aimed the “circuit design” layer. The first book of theirs I’ve been able to find with programming is the 1977 volume How to Program Microcomputers, followed by The Z-80 Microcomputer Handbook from 1979. Both stick solely to assembly language. In 1980 Sams finally broke into the mainstream source code market with the Mostly BASIC book series by Howard Berenbon (an automotive engineer in Michigan who worked on computers in his spare time).
Berenbon, from the second Mostly BASIC book, 1981.
I’ve referenced the first book before as it has an early CRPG, Dungeon of Danger. It is not impressive as a game, but it does represent Sams entering the software industry, in a sense. They soon after entered the software industry proper (with boxes on shelves). But why?
It could be brisk sales of the book (enough for a sequel) gave them favorable thoughts. However, my current best theory has to do with a competitor: in late 1980, the California company Programma was bought out by the Hayden Book Company. The timing is suspicious: in March 1981 Sams formed the spinoff division Advanced Operating Systems, and they hired a former Programma employee, Joe Alinsky, to be in charge of the division.
Unlike Hayden, Advanced Operating Systems planned to build their catalog from scratch. Palmer T. Wolf (previously at Instant Software) was hired as the “Software Acquisition Manager”. Wolf blitzed classified ads in the trades looking for submissions.
InfoWorld, Nov 23, 1981.
In the original 1982 printing of Caves of Olympus, he even included a letter in the manual identical to one from magazines. I haven’t been able to unearth anything about the authors (Thomas and Patrick Noone) and if they had any prior relationship with Sams, but it is possible they simply saw one of the ads and sent their game in. (Wolf claimed “50 submittals” in his first six weeks, so around one game a day.)
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
The above is the cover from 1982. The survival of Advanced Operating Systems as a separate division from Sams was short-lived; they got wrapped back into the fold in 1983 (without Alinsky and Wolf), so a re-print in 1984 of this game is purely under the Sams label (I’ll show what that cover looks like in a later post).
This is the only adventure game published by Sams and the only game by Thomas and Patrick Noone. (The credits also list a documentation editor, Jim Rounds; shockingly, a company renowned since the 40s for providing documentation for technical devices cares about their documentation.)
On the devastated planet Olympus, beneath the ruined palace of the Emperor, lie the Caves of Olympus, the last fortress to withstand the onslaught of the evil Loren hordes.
You are Anson Argyrus, an advanced Vario-500 robot. Stranded and alone, you must make your way through the caves to safety and freedom. Cunning is your ally, reasoning is you1 weapon, as you battle against the destruction waiting at every turn-false chambers, one way doors, death traps.
But negotiate the caves successfully, and you’ll escape to join the rebel forces gathering to counter the Loren invaders.
We’re a robot! I think the last time we got close to that was Cranston Manor Adventure but that was pretending the “I am your puppet” perspective had a digital avatar in the world conveying information to us. Cyborg from Michael Berlyn united both the the player-avatar and the computer-narrator. Here, we are straight out playing a robot, no human attributes at all. Not only are we a robot, we’re a small robot “a little more than fifty centimeters tall” and who is centuries old. We are in fact old enough to have helped build the Caves of the story, but our “bio memory” has failed us so we don’t remember what’s inside.
Regarding the graphics, the display uses Jyym Pearson logic where you press enter to swap between text mode and graphics mode, and you pretty much have to keep swapping between the two as you’re walking around as you don’t get enough information conveyed while in graphics mode.
I should also highlight — and it will become more obvious soon — the actual graphical style is very different than anything we’ve seen before. Essentially all the 1980-1982 Apple II games have used some form of vector graphics, like Mystery House; some have looked better, and have incorporated wavy lines and fancy fill effects and the like, but still there’s a sort of basic continuity where it is easy to recognize Apple II graphics as falling within a certain family tree.
No vectors: Caves of Olympus relies heavily on pixels. This is very different from every other adventure game I’ve played in 1982.
Notice the random break-up of mountain ridges by pixels rather than smooth curves. It’s almost like the authors added “noise” as a stylistic feature. It looks as if at least part of the images are being stored as bitmaps.
I’m not sure what to do with the ID-STRIP. Trying to TAKE, EXAMINE, etc. just gets the message RESULT: NEGATIVE! and if you waste more than one turn before going inside the meteorological station, you die. So I’m going to assume the strip works automatically for someone travelling north to keep the Bad Guys out.
Going in, we arrive at a “vestibule”.
TAKE INFO-CUBE: “THE CUBE GLOWS IN A WARM LIGHT … WHAT INFORMATION MIGHT IT CONTAIN?”
The room description includes some “narrated action” which skips some steps. Rather than going from straight outdoors to the room we’re in, our robot hero goes from the outside to a meteorological station, and from there into the caves. The part in the middle is skipped over, more like a gamebook than a regular adventure game. Not all room descriptions are like this but there are some others which assume action rather than just description.
For example, heading north, there is a dark room with a combat-robot (fortunately you can just sneak on by)…
…and the room farther north is both described and depicted quite oddly.
This sort of room description tends to get avoided in modern text adventures, since it doesn’t hold up well to repeated viewings. For example, if you go back to the starting vestibule, you get the same dramatic description as if you just entered the room with the station exploding behind you.
Moving on further, you reach a hall with a dead creature.
Taking a turn west, there’s a combat robot, and trying to move on further is disasterous.
I’ve explored more rooms but I’m still getting a feel for the geography (and what interactions really work) so I’ll save more details for next time.
(And thanks to Allen Wyatt, who has been helpful with the history here, as he worked for Advanced Operating Systems starting in mid-1981. He moved to Michigan City to be closer to AOS in late 1982 but had to move again a few months later to Indianapolis when the operation got wrapped back into the main headquarters location.)
I’ve finished the game, and you’ll need to have read my previous post to make sense of this one.
Before I get back into the game proper, I’d like to do a side trip into history, as this game (and the Softside adventures in general) relate to something interesting about the history of “public domain” distribution companies and preservation as a whole. With that in mind let’s visit the retailer Currys (“Britain’s Electrical Specialists”) before they were bought by Dixons in 1983–
(Ad allegedly from 1980 according to the channel. Does anyone know what is up with UK stores and their lack of apostrophes?)
In 1982, Les Ellingham was a special project manager at Currys, and had the task to launch selling Atari 8-bit computers. Ellingham proposed starting a user’s group in order to more easily show off the Ataris, and got space in a pub in an upstairs room. This was the genesis of BUG (the Birmingham Users’ Group).
The first night — advertised on posters — ended up having a “massive turnout”, and based on the success of the group, they started also producing a newsletter (edited by Ellingham).
The main objective is to encourage Atari owners in this country to begin writing their own programs, but for those of you who are not as yet ready there are plenty of reviews and hints, and tips for beginners. The magazine started in conjunction with the Birmingham User Group, but is now produced independently although several BUG members contribute material. It has grown quite quickly and many people see it as the UK equivalent to ANALOG magazine.
Page 6 had a strong focus on adventures, trying to keep up a list of every Atari adventure game ever made, and issue 10 (July/August 1984) was a “special issue” devoted solely to the game genre.
Like many Users’ Groups from the 80s, they had a library of public domain software, and unlike many Users’ Groups from the 80s, the entire library is online. Disk #82 (Super Adventures 6) includes both Robin Hood and The Mouse That Ate Chicago (for Atari, of course). The games aren’t technically public domain in the legal sense, being copyrighted by Softside, but if a game showed up in a magazine disk, it seemed to be fair game for any distributors. For those of us delving into gaming history, that’s not necessarily a bad thing: I get the impression that the BUG specifically might be the reason we have a complete Atari collection for the Softside Adventure of the Month games (whereas for TRS-80, for instance, we only have a small selection); one of the early games in the series (I think Alien Adventure?) I only found on a Page 6 disk.
One practical upshot is that when Dale Dobson ran through the complete series, he played the Atari versions which were the only ones readily available. The other upshot is that while Robin Hood had a bug for Atari not present in the Apple, the reverse seems to be true here.
The mice were supposed to be wandering about more than they were (Sam in particular can be lethal), but for some reason their routine was broken. I switched over to Atari and was able to finish the game.
First, a detail I missed that is purely for story. The mountain that was too steep to climb has a cave, and you can enter it to see what happened to Hans and the Professor.
Second, something I had attempted in the Apple version which worked, except (I think) I had the emulator speed too high. If you go to the river where the fight happened and try to GO RIVER, there’s a message…
GASP…PANT…CHOKE
…which made me think I just couldn’t swim. There had briefly flashed on the screen another room, wherein our intrepid mouse-slayer had gone to the bottom of the river.
You need to HOLD BREATH in order to do this. Fortunately, this maneuver is repeated in other games so I puzzled it out quickly. The same command shows up in The Institute, Secret Kingdom, Savage Island (both parts) and Nuclear Sub.
It immediately occurred to me — especially given the CAT BURGALAR reference when trying to enter a house — that I needed some milk. The grocery store was still open and obliged, and I was able to drop the saucer and use POUR BOTTLE to get a saucer with milk. I tried taking it to the front of the (still-closed) pet store but no cats were being attracted.
Back when I was playing the Apple II version I wandered for many, many turns waiting for the stores to be open. Knowing Kirsch’s prior game had “drama timing” I figured that was the case here (that is, certain events aren’t based on X turns passing, but rather when the player reaches goal Y). As another example, even in the Atari version the mice don’t start wandering until you enter the powerline area.
I was unsure the first time around, but I think the way to read this scene is that Maja is the super-huge mouse, and the other three are simply regular-huge. That is, Maja is Godzilla, King of the Monsters, and can only be taken down by a similarly impressive monster.
Sam is the one that was hanging on Hancock Building (and is the only one of the four that killed me by hanging around). The other two are Puji and Fiji, neither who get descriptions.
To take down Puji, you shoot the powerlines while the critter is nearby. Trying to shoot powerlines at any other time simply has the shot miss, and yes, this doesn’t make any sense.
(Game design reflection moment: this game is supposed to be about discovering the weaknesses of the mice. It is perfectly fair to have only this one succumb to an electrical trap — maybe Sam and Fiji are are too alert and dodge, and Maja is so big he just ignores it. What isn’t fair is having the shot itself fail when the wrong mouse is in the room. In a way, this is trying to make the gameplay easier by preventing a softlock — probably the powerline-shooting would only work once. In a Lucasarts style game, this would be unacceptable. However, I honestly would rather have had the mouse-evasion-plus-softlock scene; I would have known to reload, and it would have given a strong clue I was on the wrong track, just with the wrong victim. A simple UNDO feature, not yet invented, would have evaded this being a real gameplay problem, or the game could even auto-UNDO, similar to failing at one of the grail traps in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The general design lesson is that preventing failure doesn’t always make life easier on the player.)
I was on the right track with cheese on the bridge (which never worked, likely because the cheese-hungry Fiji never goes that way); if you DROP CHEESE at the quicksand your player will automatically put it in as a trap.
This is the moment where the music store but not the pet store opens. The music store, just like the grocery store, is happy to give you something for free if they have it in stock.
(Game design reflection moment #2: drama time is often seen as the superior alternative to constant time advance, but drama time can be so cryptic to decipher that it only works in particular circumstances. Certainly Outer Wilds did fine with not only constant time advance but real time. So while it is a more “modern” approach — maybe not the best term since it shows up in 1981 — it isn’t automatically better.)
The music store was more cryptic than the grocery store to figure out but fortunately there aren’t that many instruments that are associated with mice. We need a flute.
With flute in hand you can attract Sam’s attention; as long as you’re in the room adjacent, PLAY FLUTE will cause him to come towards you. Given the bridge hadn’t been used yet, it was quickly clear what route I needed to take.
There’s still the giant, Maja, to contend with, but fortunately the pet store has decided to open. (I get what the author was after using drama time. Due to the plot beat which you’ll see shortly Maja’s defeat has to come last. If I was designing this I would have made the method of defeating the smaller mice available right away and had some specific connection to the pet store owner — maybe they’re too afraid to come until they’ve seen you’ve defeated 3 out of 4, and then they’re willing to let you in.)
I already had the milk-in-a-saucer so I already had a plan: take the cat to the enlarging machine, drop the saucer off to keep him from wandering, activate the machine, and … profit?
This could have been Kirsch’s best game so far. Everything is one connected puzzle. Nearly all the action the player takes is participatory comedy, which is rare even in modern games. The writing could be better but generally hits the right tone all the way through.
However, details matter enough in game design it was still a miss. The promise of being able to figure out the mouse vulnerabilities via observation was an illusion. The movement was random and a bit broken (and even in the Atari version, I had a dead mouse randomly appear somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be). The powerlines puzzle was broken in an effort to keep the wrong mouse from being fried.
At least the ending was comedic and satisfying at the same time.
Yes, I’m sure that won’t be a problem at all.
Coming up: the return of the warm, soothing glow of Apple II graphics.
Then Hans, holding a dripping cheeseburger in one hand, said, “This is a great moment, Professor!”
“Yes, Hans, we shall be able to enlarge anything we so choose. We shall be richer than kings and emperors. We shall own the world.”
We’ve reached August for Peter Kirsch’s next installment of the Softside Adventure of the Month. (Previously: Robin Hood Adventure.) I don’t have absolute confirmation this time the author is him (the author credit tends to be on the TRS-80 version, which nobody seems to have) but the structure is identical to his other games.
So many of our authors, tentatively stepping into the waters for the first time, crank out either a Crowther/Woods fantasy or a haunted house game. Kirsch, needing a game every month, is trying out all the genres. This is not just a giant monster story but also a comedy.
Hans carefully watches the Professor as he turns on the machine as cheese from his burger slowly drips onto the platform.
The two men stare silently at the hunk of carbon as it begins to glow.
Suddenly, unnoticed, a small mouse scampers onto the platform to the cheese…
Giant mice with catchy names have been unleashed and are destroying Tokyo Chicago, and our job is to stop them.
We’ve encountered August 1982 Softside before as it is an adventure-heavy issue, with Operation Sabotage being the cover game and Kirsch including an article about his adventure-writing process (which we looked at while exploring Magical Journey).
I have both Apple II and Atari versions but I stuck with Apple II since I had already set up a disk the same time as Robin Hood. I have a download at this link.
The narrative experiment here is to create a wide-open map where the mice essentially roam freely. You’re just supposed to set up … traps I think? Unfortunately, given I have yet to defeat any of the mice, so I don’t know if that’s true generally.
I can give the complete map (so far), the items I’ve gotten (which is not many) and the general behavior of the mice. A zoomed out look at the landscape first:
I’ve divided the map into four regions; the southeast (where you start) is the Laboratory, to the southwest is the Bridge, to the northeast are some Stores, and a powerline-laden road leads to Downtown in the northwest.
Before the action starts, your inventory has a wallet with $39.98.
The road you start on includes a “quicksand bog” which is so far the only place I’ve found you can die…
It’s a Kirsch game so it uses GO instead of ENTER. I’m still recovering after Sharpsoft Haunted House.
The laboratory is three rooms: east and west rooms with a MACHINE and a room in the middle with LASER-SHAPED RODS. The machine has a red RESET switch, a green #1 button, and a green #2 button; if you hit these in order the machine will theoretically work (if something is in the laser room that it can transform). I have managed to make something GIANT but I’ll show it off later.
Moving on to the Bridge area…
…there’s a small town to the south with houses you can’t enter.
These turn into SMASHED HOUSES later. Your JEEP incidentally gets the same treatment.
The Bridge that I’m using to name the region is given with an ominous weight limit…
…and a curious scene on the west side. I don’t know if this is meant as a joke or a hint. Knowing Kirsch it could be either.
You might think this is indicating with a bright klaxon that I’m supposed to get a mouse to follow me, and its enormous weight will drop it to its doom, but I haven’t gotten any of the critters to visibly follow me over to here yet, despite the smashed houses.
Hitting the northeastern area and the stores:
The hardware store, helpfully, has a high-powered rifle. It costs $39.99, and your wallet has $39.98, so you are one penny short. Cruel, cruel capitalism.
Fortunately, outside, there is a “young lady” who wants a “penny for your thoughts” and is being literal.
With the change added to our account we can obtain the rifle.
Two of the stores (the pet store and the music store) are closed with the owners “out to lunch”; the fourth store (a grocery store) is open, and the owner is the opposite of the hardware store owner and is giving away everything for free, as long as you say what it is and they have it in stock.
This is kind of like the storage room in Dog Star Adventure where you had to specify what you wanted, but with some comedy logic to it.
At the end of the line there’s a MOUNTAIN which is too steep to climb; I assume this comes into play later.
Now, to Downtown, and finally meeting the critters!
First off, at where the powerlines start, is MAJA.
I don’t know what the “small rodents” indicate; I do know this is the only mouse that wanders, although he sticks to the powerline area.
Chicago has more stores, but try to enter them and you get rebuffed by a gust of wind.
Satisfyingly, not long after both of these buildings become SMASHED versions (this happens offscreen). Wandering further there’s another mouse (SAM) wrecking havoc:
Weapons useless, just like King Kong. If you try to shoot MAJA you just miss.
I have seen either of the other two mice. I might being hearing one of them as I have been walking around with the message
SQUEAK…SQUEAK
sometimes appearing, although this may be connected to the fact that in the laboratory I created giant stinky cheese.
I haven’t been able to FEED MOUSE or tempt the monsters onto the bridge via dropping cheese in the middle or anything like that. I’ve honestly been having trouble communicating in general, with the only verbs working off my standard list being READ, DRINK, POUR, PRESS, PUT, PUSH, SHOOT, THINK, HOLD, PLAY, GIVE, and ENTER.
The machine incidentally does not work to create a giant rifle (even if you try to convert it before the cheese). I suspect it only works on particular types of matter.
That’s all I have. Despite the size of the map, a lot of the rooms are “filler” (YOU’RE IN DOWNTOWN CHICAGO, no description otherwise) and I suspect some of the geography will be leveraged in the puzzles as we try to lead mice in various ways to their doom. I’m happy to take any speculation people want to make on what to try next.
Renga in Blue 