To clarify something on the video nasties from last time, 72 were listed for banning, but not all were prosecuted for obscenity; only 39 were. One on the list that was not only listed but prosecuted I was rather surprised to see.
Above is the trailer for Evilspeak. I always considered it one of the “goofy” horror movies of the 80s/90s era, along with Chopping Mall, Death Spa, and Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (because just one Christmas horror movie isn’t enough). It involves a child who is bullied at a military academy so he uses an Apple II to summon the Devil.
I’m serious. That’s the plot. (There is “Satan summoning” type imagery and some genuine gore.) It is hilariously dated now but it does give a good sense where the mind-space of the morality judges was at the time.
And yes, we’re going to get to how Ship of Doom got its association–
So I left off last time with a square microbattery, a coin, a laser coin, a hook, a torch, and a silver rod with a square slot. As Mike Taylor pointed out the microbattery really ought to go in the rod, but with INSERT failing, and PUT failing, and then a bunch of other verbs failing, I was still stumped. Of course I missed the fact at the time that PUT had set the item down, so I went through the correct verb and was sidetracked a while realizing I hadn’t actually tested the verb yet.
With the sonic screwdriver, direct from Dr. Who, it was time try to open the case with a key in it.
Unfortunately, I went through every verb on my verb list, with no luck. Then I went over to the key hole at the computer room and tried every verb again, still with no luck. After some severe bafflement I realized that the game does not recognize the word SCREWDRIVER at all. You have to refer to it as a SONIC.
… pardon, need to go take a moment …
OK. I’m back. No primal screaming here, nope. Why on EARTH would you accept the adjective and not the noun kljASFJGkjlj234
… sorry, let’s try that again …
OK. Breathe. Things did go better from here. It really would have helped had the game had a few more error messages — it isn’t really revealing much even if you’re typing a noun that the game doesn’t recognize. On top of all this the verb is a pretty odd choice, but at least I had it on my standard list: POINT.
Now the key goes back to the key hole, but before I show that off, let me give the result of using EXAMINE (or GAZE) at the key hole, and get an ad.
Fun! So with the key inside, it seems that a heater has been activated.
So we can go back to the frozen body, wait a beat, and see what happens when it is unfrozen.
The little girl is not helpful and if you spend enough turns hanging around she’ll strangle you to death. You should instead shoot the door and move on, although the game also lets you KILL GIRL if you want (spoiler: the whole ship is going to blow up anyway).
You can scoop up the knife in the first room you encounter and a mirror in a side room (which I’ll talk about later). While you are doing this aliens start appearing, akin to the dwarves in Adventure. You can SHOOT ALIEN to kill them or try to run away, and they may or may not follow.
Shooting an alien has a decently high chance of success, but you might just miss, giving the alien a chance to shoot back. The alien’s aren’t bad shots either so there’s essentially a random chance of guaranteed death.
Nearby there’s a laser beam which will trigger a security system if you try to pass.
I don’t know why CRAWL is an understood verb. Maybe the authors thought they were going to use it but thought better of it. It doesn’t work anywhere.
I got through by … EXAMINING it? I honestly don’t know what happened here or what this sequence was supposed to represent, but I saved my game and I didn’t have to think about it any more.
Yes, but why? Is Fred behind the scenes hacking the tech, C3-PO style? I sort of imagined Fred more like the robot from The Black Hole.
Moving on there’s a couple colorful scenes, including a human tied to a table awaiting androidization; if you release him, he’ll strangle you.
There’s also an android working on a ship attached to a rope, and you can chop the rope and the android will float away. I found quickly I could TIE ROPE to the hook I had earlier, and I spent a long time trying to get the rope to work in another scene with a switch in a control room.
The switch is a red herring; you’re supposed to instead go to a PIT ROOM (no other description) and realize it makes sense to THROW ROPE, and climb up to a higher level.
The aliens can appear anywhere, and sometimes one after each other in sequence.
You can use the coin from way back at the bank to get the drink from the bartender, but it knocks you out with a giant headache and you end up imprisoned. This is a good thing.
This is a good thing because you can use the mirror I mentioned earlier to cause the bars to “fuse” so you can escape. (I do not know why the mirror didn’t work on the laser beam earlier.) The verb here has to be USE; again my verb list came to the rescue.
This room represents the final challenge, and is essentially brute force. There are six button combinations, and each take you to a different place. Green-orange-red just ejects you into space which is not helpful. Red-green-orange and orange-red-green drop you back closer to your starting ship, which will be helpful in a moment. Red-orange-green takes you to a computer room.
Why do we even have that button?
Down brings you back to the combo room. I used orange-red-green to get back to the Map Room nearby where the key with the Artic ad was and it was a short trip back to the ship. I was unclear until I hit the escape button if starting self-destruct really had shut down the tractor beam.
Look, a passenger!
The game events seemed colorful enough but it came in really jerky jumps and starts due to me having to struggle with the parser every time I wanted to use it. The fact it was only two-word was really saved it from some unmanageable guess-the-phrase battles.
So back to those tabloids. In an interview Charles Cecil talks about people wanting to use swear words in his first game (Inca Curse):
I made my first game for the Sinclair ZX81 in 1981. That was my first commercial project; a text adventure called Inca Curse. I immediately learned about frustrating players. Players would type something like ‘look at man’, and the game would reply ‘does not understand ‘look at’. I know a lot of players would then type in expletives.
This causes him to get creative in his second:
I made sure my next game – which was Ship of Doom in 1982 – would understand swearing. You could type in any expletive, and the game would understand it. You could try out those expletives in the ‘Android Pleasure’ room. That was okay, until I got busted by The Sun. They thought games shouldn’t have pleasure rooms. I remember they ran the piece at the bottom of page three, which felt ironic really. It even went on to be discussed in parliament, as the Obscene Video Act at them time. If video games had been included in that act at the time, I would have been an extremely unpopular person.
Here’s the room in question:
If you “do the deed”:
SHE POINTS OUT THAT PERHAPS YOU WOULD BE MORE SUCCESFUL USING A SCREWDRIVER
This is what raised the attention of an alert parent who discovered their child in the room in question. The subsequent chain reaction of events led to a story in The Sun about the Pleasure Room —
Computer Game Nasty Zapped by the Sun
— which caused some returns from Whsmith. Artic also heard from a couple who bought the game expecting erotica and was upset to find a sci-fi text adventure. Others traders wanted the tapes specifically because of the notoriety; as Richard points out, despite the returns, they were able to sell out.
While the first-mover status (in terms of getting on the ZX text adventure market early) might have helped Artic, and along with the better art, the moment of news fame surely was the biggest boost, just like controversy over Death Race helped Exidy back in the 70s (which had stopped building new copies of the game already, but suddenly got an influx of orders after it became a scandal). They published five more adventure games following this one. I don’t know otherwise if they would have gotten that far.
Via Mobygames.
Coming up: A short Australian game involving a combination software distributor / jazz musician, followed by one of the most obscure games in the On-Line Systems catalog.
Does my hon. Friend agree that pornography is a drug, and a very dangerous drug at that, as it rots the mind and can persuade individuals to commit great violence and cruelty against innocent people?
The 1987 ZX Spectrum game Soft & Cuddly was infamous for gauche horror imagery and being distributed with a barf bag. The advertising leaned into this; an insert poster distributed with the October 1987 edition of Crash boldy declared the game
THE FIRST COMPUTER NASTY
One of the tabloids — The Star — ran with it, quoting Mrs. Mary Whitehouse of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association as saying “It is the product of a sick society.”
The British obsession with deviant media really kicked off in the 80s with the introduction of video stores, and the fact that videos were not covered under the rating system and so could be released uncensored. This led to a moral panic about “video nasties” (a term introduced in 1982) that included horror films being accused of spawning particular murders; the Video Recordings Act 1984 eventually led to a set of 72 videos being outright banned in the UK. These were not all recent videos and included, for example, the 1963 movie Blood Feast.
An Egyptian caterer kills various women in suburban Miami to use their body parts to revive a dormant Egyptian goddess while an inept police detective tries to track him down.
The raw paranoia that such media produced is vaguely reminiscent of the Satanic Panic in the United States.
The trailer above includes such tabloid headlines as
Scarred for life: Experts links street riots and child abuse to diet of filth fed to our young
and
Cruel movies fan hacks 4 to death
However, despite Soft & Cuddly cozying up to the title in order to trump up sales, the first game called a “digital nasty” in the tabloids came rather earlier, in 1982, in the form of an innocuous text adventure published by Artic Computing, Ship of Doom.
…
Ship of Doom was the second game from Charles Cecil (he was now 19), and the third in the series from Artic, hence Adventure C. (Previously: Planet of Death, Inca Curse.) Again it had ports to ZX80 and ZX81, with a port that followed for the ZX Spectrum. (The latter is what I played.)
Via World of Spectrum.
Richard Turner, one of the founders of Artic, worked together with Cecil so I am calling him a co-author.
He and I had quite good imaginations so we came up with some nice stories. We also had a love of puzzles and we liked stuff that you had to figure out. That was of more interest to us at the time than arcade games — which I wasn’t that good at anyway.
This game represents a turning point in their catalog, as Richard had talked with a Whsmith manager about selling the tapes, and discussion turned to business in general. The manager explained Richard’s company needed to be Vat-registered and also that “the artwork [was] rubbish and we needed something a lot better.” The cover above is the last of the “complete minimalism” covers in the Artic catalog of 8 adventures, and re-prints additionally added new art. Sales (according to Richard) went drastically up.
Via World of Spectrum.
As the text on the packaging (in either version) informs us, our spaceship has been scooped up by an Alien Cruiser looking to enslave humanoids and we have been stuck by a tractor beam (as told to us by Fred, our pet android). Our goal is to disable the tractor beam and escape. It’s not exactly Star Wars because there’s no stormtroopers to greet us; in fact, the entire opening area of the vessel is empty of aliens or even deathtraps. This seems to be the “apathy alien” style like how the Star Trek crew boards a Borg vessel but the hostiles don’t bother to acknowledge the crew’s presence until they become a threat.
In the typical fridge-logic sense it is puzzling, but honestly, I kind of like it. Alien stuff should be alien and it makes the experience feel stranger.
Room descriptions are minimal; the opening setup is here to provide us objects and devices to fiddle with.
A “shady room” has a dark corner, but fortunately nearby there are some infrared glasses. If you wear them, leave, and come back, you’ll find a SQUARE MICROBATTERY.
Other than those objects and the hook from an earlier screenshot I’ve racked up a laser gun, a coin, a silver rod with a square slot, and a torch (British, so flashlight). I feel like the battery ought to go in the torch or some such but OPEN TORCH gives me
I CANT
with the Ken Reed standard message showing again and LIGHT TORCH just says I CANT DO THAT YET.
As far as obstacles go, there’s a body in a block of ice (can’t move or even shoot it with the ray gun)…
…a key under a glass cover (you can shoot it with the ray gun but the whole thing vaporizes and you softlock the game)…
…and a computer room with a red light and a key hole. I presume the key goes in the hole.
I’ve gotten a whole lot of I CANT from the various things I’ve tried. I don’t feel like anything is broken, really, and I’m guessing I’m missing a simple interaction. Inca Curse (game B) wasn’t terribly hard but Planet of Death (game A, without Cecil) was so this is really a coin flip on what level of pain I’m in for.
I did go ahead and make my verb list, which I’ll provide now.
I’ll wait on finishing my historical story about Artic’s encounter with the British tabloids, as I haven’t reached the room that caused the controversy yet. Cliffhanger!
It’s similar to Bally’s Alley, except the environment is more coherent, there’s one (very minor) puzzle, and most significantly, there’s graphics.
TREASURES OF CATHY
(C) 1982 BY JOHN COLLINS
KEY WORDS IN, UP, DROP, GET
49 LOCATIONS 18 TREASURES
BUT CAN ONLY CARRY 6
EACH TREASURE = + POINTS
BUT -1 POINT/MOVE
TRY FOR SCORE > 1000
Again, you’re just trying to find treasures, and there’s a move counter that ticks away. There’s no particular goal score or end game message, which is fairly unusual for an adventure game, but perhaps the author was thinking in terms of what console game players want.
Unless I’m overlooking something, there’s no “end room” treasures should be brought to, either; this is like Fantasyland (the surreal Canadian VIC-20 / C64 game) where the goal is to get maximum treasure in your inventory, not in some specific place on the ground.
Having been forewarned from last time, I had my MAME configuration set to what I might call “normal” keys; pressing 1 will show a 1, 2 will show a 2, ENTER is the same thing as GO, and the backspace key will cause a real backspace. This fiddled with some of my other key combinations I came up with but I found it faster to pop open the MAME key guide to check any modifications rather than keep the default.
Fortunately, you don’t need to type the full words IN, UP, DROP and GET to use them. Just the initial letters will do, except for drop, which requires DR. Using my revised MAME keyset this makes for:
. 6 becomes (U)P
. 9 becomes (I)N
E 9 becomes (G)ET
E 8 . 5 becomes (DR)OP
I tried to go for gold and get AutoHotKey to do combinations, but it wasn’t behaving itself well with MAME, so I just kept a text file of the four combos I needed to the side of my playing window and things went smoothly.
Collins ran out of keys so left out UP and IN, and you have to type them as commands instead.
The last extremely-tight-sized game we’ve had with graphics was Adventures in Murkle for the TRS-80, done in a 4K using glorious ASCII. That game built the outdoors by having a set of graphics that could be turned on and off: some trees, a stream, a building.
A sample: turn off the stream and now you have just a forest.
This game does some the same, turning off or on pieces of graphics to represent particular rooms outside.
Here’s the full map of the outdoors:
The trickiest part for me — especially because I wasn’t sure if I was doing the input correctly until it worked — was finding that I could go UP at one of the trees and find a nest with a key.
Remember, taking an item just requires typing the letter “G”. The bizarre part is that the screen doesn’t clear when you enter a command, causing your typing to land directly on top of the text that says INPUT CODE. So if you want to type I or even IN, it overlaps exactly the text that’s already there, and you can’t see anything!
With the key you can go into the house (to the north) and the cave (to the south). I’m not sure if the house serves any purpose. There’s an axe, which I toted along with me, but any object use in this game is invisible.
All indoor rooms have the same picture.
The cave to the south makes an interesting choice for the graphics by going abstract. There’s a small box that gets filled in different ways with squares. I like the idea of non-literal graphics and I can’t think of any other game that quite does it this way.
Bob is an item you can take.
Maybe the author meant for you to consider this the literal end.
There’s legion of objects like a gun, a pen, a book, and water, all which might be useful in a normal game, but are just window dressing here. They’re the sort of thing someone would expect to find in an adventure game and manipulate, and I get the impression not that the author ran out of room (Irvin Kaputz style) but rather just wanted his game to feel a little more like an adventure by having objects that could potentially be noodled with.
The source code on this is astonishingly small, so there aren’t really any mysteries (not even a strange magic word that we never got to use). The code is so tight rather than just have two people click the link and see it, I’m going to cut and paste the whole thing here, and it’ll be over faster than you expect.
2 NT=0;GOTO 25
3 U=ABS(*(R)÷10000);V=RM÷100;W=ABS(RM);RETURN
4 GOSUB 3;TV=V;TV=W;RETURN
5 R=(I-49)×2+198;GOSUB 4;R=R+1;GOSUB 4;RETURN
6 VA=H;VB=H;FOR I=0TO K;TA=E;TB=F;NEXT I;RETURN
7 GOSUB 3;R=R+1;IF ULINE V,W,U×U;GOTO 7
8 LINE V,W,1;RETURN
9 CY=-16;CX=O;PRINT “0=COM,MOVE 1=N,2=S,3=E,4=W,5=NE,6=SW,7=NW,8=SE,9=↓
10 PRINT “INPUT CODE!”,;L=KP-48;IF (L9)GOTO 50
12 G=ABS(*(A));M=0;FOR I=1TO 5;IF G=0I=5;GOTO 20
14 G=G÷10;IF RM=L M=I;I=5
20 NEXT I;IF M=0CX=O;PRINT ” DEAD END ?”;GOTO 9
22 M=M-2;IF M20B=A÷4;Y=RM;IF Y MO=49;H=12;E=35;F=53;GOSUB 6;E=33;F=50;GOSUB 6;E=35;GOSUB 6;E=44;F=67;GOSUB 6;↓
26 IF BIF YPRINT “YOU HEAR A “,;E=2×A;FOR Z=0TO Y;GOSUB 6;NEXT Z;↓;GOTO 29
28 PRINT “YOU ARE AT “,
29 I=A-1;GOSUB 5
30 N=0;FOR I=50TO 67;IF *(I)=A CX=13;PRINT ” I SEE “,;N=I;GOSUB 5
32 NEXT I;IF A<12R=237;GOSUB 7
34 IF A11IF A48IF C0GOTO 94
62 IF C=68IF *(76)=82GOTO 88
64 IF C=85IF (A=6)+(A=15)A=A-1;RUN
66 IF C=73IF *(50)<0IF (A=10)+(A=20)+(A=44)A=A+1;RUN
86 RUN
88 CLEAR ;PRINT " SCORE= ",P;IF C=1RUN
90 FOR J=68TO 73;I=*(J);IF IGOSUB 5;IF C=68PRINT " 1=DROP,2=NO";D=KP;IF D=49T=-1;GOSUB 97
92 NEXT J;E=35;F=53;GOSUB 6;↓;RUN
94 T=1;FOR I=68TO 73;IF *(I)=0;*(I)=N;*(N)=-*(N);GOSUB 99;I=73;N=0
95 NEXT I;RUN
97 *(I)=A;N=I;GOSUB 99;*(J)=0;RETURN
99 C=N-49;P=P+T×C×C;RETURN
It’s a poem of code. Data is entered separately, using the same trick as Des Cavernes (including having everything be stored in one array).
Incidentally, regarding line 90, with PRINT ” 1=DROP,2=NO”, the dropping in this game is improved: rather than you needing to keep track of numbers and then typing the right one, it will go through each of your objects in turn and ask if it is the item you mean to drop. This is the sort of kludge that really would only happen in this sort of environment but it’s good to see the author was still trying for an improvement.
There’s nothing in the end here terribly novel in terms of content (…except for the rooms represented by abstract pictures…) but that doesn’t take away from the historical and technical interest, and the fact people kept trying to do adventures on every machine possible, kind of like how modern systems are required to run DOOM.
Of the consoles that launched in the US during the 70s, the Atari 2600 undoubtedly became the most famous, with the games still able to be re-packaged for sale in modern times; the Intellivision (1979) makes second place in overall historic sales. The Odyssey 2 (1978) falls in third.
There were more US launches during this time, but they have less recognition: the RCA Studio II, Fairchild Channel F, APF MP1000, and the Bally Professional Arcade, the last one being sometimes dubbed the Astrocade. As a child during the early 80s I hadn’t heard of any of them.
The most ill-fated of these might be the RCA Studio II, which launched in January 1977 only to be followed by a discontinuation announcement in February 1978, but today’s topic is the Astrocade, which had one element that made it unique of all the systems: the combination of Bally BASIC and a tape drive.
The ad above from 1982 touts how “you can even create your own games in Astrocade BASIC” and ends with:
Astrocade, the home entertainment sensation that’s a personal computer too.
Bally BASIC was published in 1978. The system did not have a keyboard but you could use its keypad to enter in arbitrary text with enough patience, using a template to tell you what the keys meant. The fact you could not only write games but save them to tape meant the Astrocade attained a “home brew” fanbase contemporary with the console that none of the other second-generation consoles had at the time. This was a console that had “bedroom coders” we’d normally associate with computers, and these coders created tapes that were sold in newsletters. So Astrocade’s “official” catalog is only a small subset of the games (and art demos) made available in the late 70s and early 80s. Here you can watch a computer art tape published in 1980 by W&W Software Sales:
He also had interest in adventure games, marking Bally’s Alley as “the first in a series of adventure programs I hope to write” and also claimed it “may take days or even weeks to complete”. It first appeared in the classified ads for the Arcadian, May 19, 1980.
While a tape hasn’t survived to us of the game, the original typed copy has (complete with handwritten notes for the variables) and in November 2022 it was typed in by Paul Thacker. He considered it a “work in progress” but it’s sat since 2022 with no changes so I’m assuming it’s in the ballpark of what Collins intended.
Bally’s Alley – An adventure game; one player. Game can last for days or weeks; can save at any point for restart; can go in nine directions; find the ten treasures and return to house; can only carry four treasures at one time. Each move subtracts a point. A magic word-sound-color will be helpful.
— Description from the Bally / Astro Professional Arcade Software and Hardware Sourcebook, Summer 1982
Now we get to the most complicated part of the whole proceedings: running the thing. First off, this has to be done with MAME, which officially got tape support in 2019. There’s a video here of the process. That’s fussy enough as it is, but the more painful part is the keypad.
To type a “red character” you press the button 0, which switches you to the reds, then press the button with the letter in red you want. So the letter Q, for example is 0 and then 8. On top of all that there’s no one-to-one mapping on modern keyboard. Adam Trionfo suggests keyboard stickers:
However, this is not the default mapping in MAME! Here are the keys for the “bottom four” of the pad, which let you change between “green mode”, “red mode”, “blue mode”, and “yellow mode” (or WORDS).
E = green
0 = red
. = blue
enter (number pad) = yellow
The last three seem like they’re trying to do something with the real number pad, except the number pad versions of the keys don’t work! (That’s is, 0 on the number pad does not get read by MAME as the red key — you have to use the regular key 0.) On top of that, the colors are a lie; while the “green” button turns the screen green to indicate your setting, and the “yellow” button turns the screen yellow, red goes to orange and blue turns the screen pink, and I’m not kidding:
What you see when you press “blue”.
If this was part of a Myst-style-game puzzle using cryptic old equipment, I’d ding it marks for being too unrealistic.
There was some more cryptic mess behind the scenes (hot tip: of the four slots the cassette is required to be plugged into port 3) but I’m going to save any more technical discussion for the comments and move on here with the game itself.
The game unfortunately does not give you a starting location, but I worked out later the player begins at Bally’s Alley. Just to the north is the player’s home where the treasure goes:
The book description earlier mentions ten treasures. Poking in the source code, there’s only five listed, but maybe there’s some weird way they’re doubling, kind of like Pokémon vs. Shiny Pokémon.
1 lets you pick a direction, 1 through 9, or from the format here, N, S, E, W, UP, DOWN, SW, NE, NW. No southeast! The author ran out of buttons.
(In MAME, 1 through 9 are 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, R, S, and H respectively.)
Command lets you type an arbitrary word or abbreviation. G stands for GET and DR stands for drop. (In MAME, E H for the “G”, and “E S . 8” for the “DR”.)
When you DROP you specify by item number which thing you want to drop, so 67 would be the ROPE as shown being carried above.
Paul Thacker tested the game and this is the only part of the map he managed to make:
He concluded perhaps there’s something still broken in the source code (part of it was messy and handwritten), and I think he’s right, but not in this exact spot. I realized some of the random connections were because rooms were getting duplicated. In the Garden, it appeared sometimes I could go north to Bally’s Alley, and sometimes I could go south to the Garage. Instead, these are both two entirely different rooms with the same name! I confirmed this by dropping an item, which was only present in one of the variations.
The “duplicate name” trick continues through the early areas but it isn’t utterly nonsense, at least:
I’m unclear if the “rope”, “knife” or “keys” serve any practical purpose. If they do it seems to be commandless (that is, you can go through a particular exit if you are carrying the right thing, but the game doesn’t ask you to CUT something, which would be hard to figure out how to type anyway). They did help with the early mapping but once I got the hang of the author’s tendencies I didn’t need them.
If the keys are needed anywhere they’d be at the Well With Locked Cover, but I dropped them and tested both exits and I wasn’t stopped by a lack of keys.
Past the well was the final section I was able to get to, a “color maze”. The rooms are varying colors using the Astrocade’s curious choices for a main palette.
I was able to find a lamp (see above) and some coins (the only treasure I saw) but then I hit an unfortunate room that was “blank”, that is, there was no room description.
I could still try to move around; going NE leads back to one of the pink rooms, and going down just loops in the same room, but I suspect the down-exit is broken and not intended to be the game’s real destination.
This was an astonishing technical feat on a platform clearly not designed to have a text adventure, and it was delightful to enter territory likely nobody but the author had ever seen. If nothing else, it was wild to see a game with the southeast exit (and only the southeast exit) missing. Still, this boils down to mostly exploration and mapping (there’s a magic word mentioned in the source and two other possible words, but I still don’t see any effects other than movement). I’m still willing to take another swing if the source gets a fix (the file is marked “WIP” because of the uncertainty on the handwriting).
However, we aren’t done with Collins yet: he called this the first in a series, and he did manage to make a second adventure! His second is also for the Astrocade, this time with graphics, and seems to be more than just an exploration journey. Stay tuned!
Special thanks to Kevin Bunch whose book Atari Archive I used as a reference (it’s one of the best books out there about second-generation consoles) and who helped me get over the technical difficulties with MAME.
If the idea of playing another game by the author of early Magnetic Scrolls works appeals to you, I’d certainly recommend trying this. If you don’t want to try the BBC Micro version I’ve got a download here for the TRS-80 version. Just drag and drop the file onto trs80gp and it’ll launch.
I will say the first puzzle might be worth spoiling, but it is mostly smooth past that.
Zoom-in on the wrist bands, shield, and dagger, the three items needed to defeat the demon.
So what I suffered last time turned out to be a colossal piece of disjoint visualization — that is, I was seeing the situation very different from the author, based on text that could be understood multiple ways — combined with my uncertainty about the parser (and the fact an unusual verb is required here). I will say it is a four-word parser and there even is a special data line for prepositions, which is a slight hint of Magnetic Scrolls going on to make one of the better parsers of the British companies.
3010 DATA 9,ON,IN,AT,INTO,OVER,ONTO,ACRO,WITH,TO
I needed to get a key from a fountain. The only description you get upon finding the key is that
THERE’S A KEY THERE!
and the fountain otherwise receives no description. TAKE KEY responds:
I CAN’T REACH IT
This was my first visualization issue. I figured, if the key was in the fountain at “ground level”, it would be easy to grab it, and otherwise SWIM FOUNTAIN and GO FOUNTAIN ought to really work anyway.
I thus thought of it being a fountain with tall layers, where you can see the key on top, but you somehow need to climb the fountain or shake the key loose.
I am fairly certain now, no, this is a regular all-on-the-ground fountain, and the key is floating in the middle and our player doesn’t want to get wet (??) I guess (???). So we just need to extend our reach a little. (I guess this technically could also be consistent with snagging a key up high, but honestly, what I visualized completely excluded such a solution.)
The other important item is a WIRE STAND, and this one does give a description
IT’S A THICK WIRE BENT INTO A STAND
and if you’ve ever fiddled with one of these in real life, this is not the kind of wire you can bend by hand (it even says “thick wire”). Of course I should have tested it, so I wouldn’t call this unfair, just I’m giving the reason I got sidetracked.
Something like this. I’d expect to melt it under heat or something.
If you try BEND STAND, the game says
USE BEND INTO WHAT?
which is prompting for an exact creation. What works — and I did figure this out once I realized what the game was going for — is a HOOK. Then you can GET KEY from the fountain and finally move on with the game.
Incidentally, if the game had said “it’s just out of reach” instead of “I can’t reach that” I probably would have worked this out faster.
Just to prove this game really is designed on the tighter side, here is the entire rest of the map:
The first new room, the altar room, uses the items I’d been gathering up thinking there was going to be some Aphrodite ritual: a statuette and the incense.
There’s no explicit instructions, but the indent plus the burner for incense make their case pretty clear. I also realized quite naturally I should try to GO PRAYER MAT and the game then explicitly mentions you should try out PRAY.
I also needed to light my torch with the flint and steel before this. I don’t know if there were any “dark rooms” being kept track of; I don’t think there’s an inventory limit so I had my lit torch the rest of the game.
The flash of light is the WRIST BANDS appearing. They have “odd glyphs” which you can’t read (yet).
Because of the sequencing here, I could see someone forgetting about this by the time they get the ability to read glyphs.
The next room uses the metal triangle from a few rooms ago, as there’s a triangular space on a dias.
You can climb the stalagmite to get back, so this isn’t a one way trip (for now) but given the mention of something metallic inside, you’ll need to do some destruction later.
The niche has some brown powder with writing indicating to mix with water. Conviently, there’s a stream to the west that serves to do this very task, leaving you with a potion. Drink the potion and now “odd glyphs” are readable:
Go ahead and scoop it up, there’s no inventory limit.
The WRIST BANDS tell you to say APHRODITE at the evil temple? But where is the evil temple? Well, if you go back to the stalagmite room, open the door (not controlled by the keyhole, I was confused at first), and head north, you’ll find a wardrobe. Move the wardrobe to find the temple.
Importantly, the pool has some nasty green liquid which turns out to be acid. The APHRODITE phrase that the bands mentioned opens up a secret stair down, leading to a sacrificial room.
Given the black rock I just scooped up was quite thoroughly described (…unlike the fountain…) I quickly realized it was in the shape of a toe and added it to the idol. This opened up a gold keyhole, but I had no gold key to go with it yet.
Heading back and wandering some more, I found a plank of wood and a platform with a key of ice on it. I scooped up both (the plank and the key, that is, the platform’s too big).
Applying the key to the glass keyhole led to a room with a chasm. I immediately thought to PUT PLANK ON CHASM and it worked.
A weird case where solving a puzzle too fast turned out to be a problem, as you’ll see.
The next room has a stone block which I spent entirely too long fiddling with (it’s the only pure red herring of the game) and a ZOMBIE MOVING TOWARDS YOU. I thought back to all my resources and remembered the holy water back at the font I moved at the beginning. I didn’t have a container at the time but I did now (with the empty jar that used to hold a potion). I scooted back up the stalagmite, grabbed the water, and took it back to the zombie and hurled it:
And now we reach the part of the game I had second-most trouble with after the hook. This is entirely a self-contained riddle. The answer makes sense but I think there’s something unfair to it. However, what I’ll do is withhold giving the answer here, and put my thoughts in the comments instead.
If you get it wrong, THE SHIELD SPIN TOWARDS YOU AND SLICES YOUR HEAD OFF. If you get it right, you have the magic shield and are one step closer to defeating the demon!
From here, two issues remain: finding the dagger, and finding the gold key for the evil temple (which will lead directly to Disrondu). I alternated between noodling with the stone block at the zombie and the stalagmite at the cave, and it occurred to me that I could re-use the jar yet again to pick up the acid from the evil pool.
The metal box has the dagger of truth, but also, this melts your path out. However, that wardrobe from earlier had a POLE in it, so you can bring it over and CLIMB POLE if you want to as a substitute and get back up. The game isn’t softlocked! Classy. (Well, that means the pole is huge, right? Eh, I’m done trying to visualize stuff.)
Now is the part I was stuck third-most after the riddle, but I’m not calling this one unfair at all. Just I kept trying to do things to the STONE BLOCK and never realized I had overlooked trying to LOOK CHASM back one room over. I had to actually look at the map from the Strand Games website to see what was going on.
Climbing up leads to a ledge with the missing gold key. I was then able to bring it back to the evil temple, unlock the last barrier, and make my way down to Disrondu.
There’s been enough lead-up, I don’t need anything more than exclamation marks.
And thus ends our visit to (sort of) the start of Magnetic Scrolls. Other than heavier than normal use of prepositions I didn’t spot anything that would indicate the company’s future; this was much closer to Scott Adams than anyone else.
The most pleasant part in the solving sequence was the triple re-use of the jar; it didn’t originally occur to me to scoop up the acid, but the first re-use applying the holy water immediately gave the idea that I could scoop up any liquid I wanted to. This was essentially a small piece of object transformation, which is one of the key elements I’ve identified in the past as being a way for these super-old games to have puzzles that strike the right balance between simplistic and arbitrary.
Using the word ‘design’ makes it sound like we had a grand plan thought out over many months of agonizing over analyst presentations and consulting focus groups. If we liked it, it was good. There was no pressure to articulate why but usually if it made us laugh it was good. If we thought it was a bit dull, it got cut.
As far as what’s coming next, I’m not sure. I’m slated to write about a game with a very high technical start barrier (think back to that French pocket calculator game in difficulty, although this game’s American) but that might get postponed if I run into too many emulator woes. So there might be a wild card! We’ll see.
Before hopping back from France to England, I should quickly mention I had an update to my last Folibus post; the commenter Gus Brasil pointed out a method of surviving the ending, although you still remain permanently blue. I’ve only added a single paragraph but go check if you’re curious.
Now let’s swim over–
When he was in his teenage years, Rob Steggles placed three advertisements that appear in consecutive months in late 1982.
A month later, in Laserbug Magazine, he put up an ad for three pieces of software.
All three games are relevant for today’s story. First, note that American Trader has already dropped in price, suggesting sales were not brisk.
Second, remember the presence of the fairly technical disassembler (“invaluable to the assembly language programmer”) being added to the list.
Third on the list is today’s game, Temple of Disrondu. It includes a mention of a copy existing for TRS-80. We are tasked with killing the evil demon Disrondu, but must first find three magical treasures to do the deed. Of the two versions, the TRS-80 one is the one that has survived to us; I’ll explain the circumstances in a moment.
This indicates a large collection of manuals and figures. Steggles was well-known to his friends as a talented dungeon master in D&D campaigns, and he apparently dabbled in Traveler as well. Quoting Rob:
Ken [Gordon] and Hugh [Steers] and I were all in the same class together at school together in Woolwich. Ken and Hugh were the computer whizz-kids and I used to tag along and do Dungeons & Dragons scenarios which they and several others would play. We all played Zork too and some of the Scott Adams adventures and loved them. As I remember it, Hugh started designing his first parser on an old TRS-80 and Ken was heavily into the Apple side of things where (I believe) he met Anita Sinclair.
In fact, his DM prowess is why Hugh Steers (with Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon) tapped Steggles to join their new company Magnetic Scrolls: to be the writer on their first game, which ended up being The Pawn. Quoting Hugh:
Rob did play a fair bit of it. He was very creative and able to adapt dynamically – as you would need to be to make interesting gameplay from random dice throws … D&D gameplay relies heavily on the skill of the person hosting it rather than from the rules.
Hugh additionally comments “that we saw Rob as an author that also had the talent to develop the dynamic type of fiction needed for an interactive story”. Histories of the group of four in the company generally say they played to their talents, with Rob being the non-technical one of the four. I do want to emphasize “non-technical” is a comparative statement, given Mr. Steggles was previously selling an assembly language decompiler. As he mentions in an interview:
Ken and Hugh were the programming geniuses: I knew a bit of 6502 but not enough to go to their level.
The reason we have the TRS-80 version is because Hugh himself rescued a copy off a tape in 2021. I’m guessing this was a personal copy and not one that had been sold. I’m unclear about is if the parser used in this game is based on Hugh’s work — remember the quote from Rob earlier said Hugh’s first parser was for TRS-80.
For the announcement, Hugh commissioned a new work from the artist Gustavo Gorgone depicting the final battle against the demon.
Magnetic Scrolls ended up being a significant force in the 80s British adventure industry, with Rob himself also penning Guild of Thieves and Corruption, but that’s all a story for a different time (or, if you can’t wait, there’s Maher’s account of events). Let’s turn to Rob’s earlier game, made while he still owned 40 TTRPG figures:
The game starts not as you approach the Temple of Disrondu, no equipment in hand (as a sensible adventurer might do) but rather after you’ve already entered. You can go back up to find the cave you entered and a desert, which is an interesting touch (and as far as I can tell, entirely just for color).
I’m stuck early, and this seems to be more the Scott Adams small-spaces style rather than a wide-open barren game. This makes sense as Steggles has called The Count his favorite text adventure and that’s the smallest and tightest of the Adams games.
In the opening room, when you LOOK at the FOUNTAIN, you’ll see a KEY. When you LOOK at the ALCOVE, you’ll see a STATUETTE.
The statuette is reachable but the key is not (“I CAN’T REACH IT”), which is unfortunate because just to the north is a locked door.
The metal triangle looks tantalizing but the description is YOU SEE NOTHING SPECIAL, so I’m not sure whether it is large or small or ornamental or the kind you play in an orchestra.
To the west you can find a FONT with some HOLY WATER; the font can be moved to reveal some FLINT & STEEL.
To the east there’s a storeroom with various supplies: INCENSE, a CLAY POT (with OIL), a WIRE STAND, and a TORCH.
As you might expect, you can light the torch with the flint and steel, and you can burn the incense, but that isn’t helpful anywhere I’ve tried:
OK IT BURNS AWAY
I can’t tell if this is a “kick opening” meant to require some big insight (like the clever-but-cruel puzzle that kicked off Doomsday Mission) or I’m just missing something obvious. I went ahead and made my verb list:
However, nothing I’ve tried on the key has worked; I can’t climb up to it, or throwing anything at it.
I might be doing something wrong with the THROW syntax. Observe that
WHAT SHALL I DO? THROW TORCH
OK-
WHAT AT?
WHAT SHALL I DO? AT KEY
I DONT KNOW THAT VERB
defies the normal Scott Adams syntax. THROW TORCH AT KEY just says YOU CAN’T DO THAT and I don’t know from this parser whether that means “you said that wrong and I’m going to give you a default message” or “that’s a nonsense item to be throwing at a key to try to be knocking it off a fountain”.
Of course, maybe I’m supposed to do something else before getting the key, but I haven’t had luck noodling with the objects in the store room — what’s a metal rack for? — and while I have the statue to Aphrodite and there’s those frescoes, they don’t combine in any way I can find, and PRAY isn’t helpful either.
Now, you might be thinking “oh, this is a Steggles game, and The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, and Corruption were all super hard, what were you expecting?” And possibly, yes, this is an extension of that, although the style is very much a Scott Adams tribute stuck on the 16K of a TRS-80, with minimal text description, so this still feels like a different world than the eventual one obtained by Magnetic Scrolls.
However, given the history, I don’t want to give up on the game too soon. (I know, often when I try to establish that, the game requires an absurd action I’d never, ever, do, but humor me.) So if someone wants to try a hint, please stick to ROT13, please.
In the meantime, the easiest way to play the game is via the BBC Micro port. Yes, the “real” release was lost, but with the TRS-80 code it got back-ported to be playable on the BBC Micro again. I should warn you there are some crashes not present in the TRS-80 version (try to EMPTY POT, for instance) but it otherwise seems to play exactly the same.
As I suspected, I didn’t have much game left to go. This continues from my previous post, where I was stepping off an elevator and getting electrocuted.
My confusion was thinking that the explosion was encompassing the entire house; that is, there would be no way to survive the explosion no matter what. However, assuming you can step out of the elevator and survive the electrical cords, while the explosion will cause the elevator to collapse, you will survive.
To be fair, the text upon dying says
LA GENERATRICE VIENT D’EXPLOSER LA MAISON N’EXISTE PLUS, VOUS NON PLUS
or
The generator just exploded. The house no longer exists, neither do you.
and I don’t think you’d normally read it other than “there was no way to survive that”? But moving on–
As long as you wait (either typing ATTENDRE, WAIT or RIEN, NOTHING) you can get the timing exactly right so that you step out of the elevator right as it collapses but also (because the generator is gone) you don’t have to worry about the electricity killing you either.
However, you still have to worry about the room immediately killing you some more. That “corde” (rope) is not takable, but it is oriented in such a way you might be tempted to climb. The verb list is confusing here but it turns out you can still jump, and the game prompts you to open the window first. If you do so, you die:
You crash to the ground
I don’t know what the deal with the rope is, but I appreciate the extra beat in there where you have to intentionally do an action leading incrementally to your doom rather than just wandering into death via a single step.
You should instead ignore the rope and window and just move on through the door:
The door has just closed. Hello…
How do you write this in 4 letters?
In French, this is COMMENT ECRIVEZ VOUS CECI EN 4 LETTERS, and is a word puzzle. The word puzzle works in both English and French; you’re just supposed to type THIS (or CECI) to move on. (There’s shades of the word puzzle in Avventura nel castello which worked equally well in Italian and in English.)
This allows you to find the Professor’s time machine.
There’s buttons to go to the PAST, PRESENT, or FUTURE, but if you try to do PAST or FUTURE (that is, do actual time travel) the game informs you that it isn’t a very good time machine and you die. With PRESENT:
There’s three pills on the ground and a laser gun. I bet you can guess at least one of the pills is poison. We’ll get back to the pills in a moment, though.
To the south is a mysterious black cube, and you can go up to a “saucer”. Neither serve any purpose other than make you hopeful you can … launch into space I guess?
From the cube room there’s one more room to the east, where you can find a book and rubber gloves. The rubber gloves need to be worn as there’s an electrified door to the west of the pills. The book is useless and can’t be read or opened. (I was hopeful it would kill the reader with a joke so good it makes you die laughing, but alas, this is another boring non-death room.)
Now, back to the pill room. With the gloves on you can go west into a room with a shower and a hole.
If you try to use the shower you find out it is full of acid. If you try to go DOWN (entering the hole) you find out it is full of water. So clearly the next step is either take the pills or use the laser gun.
The laser gun works with nothing, even though FIRE is a verb. I get the honest impression the author was starting to run out of space for puzzles and had something involving the gun and saucer which got cut.
With the pills:
1.) swallowing the Q pill is death
2.) swallowing the Z pill is not immediate death, but swallowing Z alone doesn’t help
3.) swallowing the K pill will make it so you can escape the house through the water
So you might think, horray, just swallow the K pill, and you’ve won? Well:
Phew, you found yourself outside, and irradiated. You die after a few days.
Hmm. What about the K pill and the Z pill?
Phew, you found yourself outside. But, you are all blue. It must be the pills.
And irradiated. You die after a few days.
So either you can escape the house and die of radiation, or escape the house and die of radiation while you’re also blue. And people were mad about Infidel’s ending.
I do appreciate the sense of humor the game had, and how it mostly invoked deaths in a “participatory” way, where the player is at least partly complicit (rather than choosing to turn left instead of right). A game like Revenge of Balrog which relies on stepping the wrong way for death doesn’t give off the same “death labyrinth” vibe (even when it is a literal labyrinth). Or to put it another way, navigating which action to take rather than what direction adds an extra edge. The fact deaths were almost in every room felt consistent rather than mean, and I was disappointed when there seemed to be no way for the saucer or book to result in yet another goofy demise.
I can at least explain where the author’s ending probably came from. Remember this was derived off of The City of Alzan, which the author admired. The game had two multiple routes through. One of them led you to catch the plague in the city (the whole reason you were trying to escape in the first place) and if enough turns pass, the plague kills you:
OH DEAR. YOU MUST HAVE CAUGHT THE PLAGUE IN THE TOMB. IT SEEMS THAT YOU HAVE DIED.
However, you can escape with the plague! The game will congratulate you like normal if you do so:
YOU MADE IT OUTSIDE THE CITY WALLS. THIS IS INDEED A RARE OCCASION. WELL DONE.
I speculated that maybe somehow leaving the city cured you, but taking a more realistic view, you “escaped” only to die just a little bit later. The author was clearly copying the same dismal ending.
ADDENDUM: I used the walkthrough in the Brutal Deluxe manual to confirm I had the “best ending”, but Gus Brazil in the comments points out there’s a way to survive still. The blue-generating pill also makes you immune to the acid in the shower, so if you swallow both pills, take a shower, and then escape, you won’t die of radiation. However, you still are permanently blue — it’s the exact same ending just the death is missing — and I do still think the author was thinking of Alzan when he wrote all that.
After this, Alain Brégeon did stay in games at least a little. Rob mentioned in the comments a 1985 RPG, Crystal 5, which he says has the “French touch”; by this he likely means something approaching this quote from The CRPG Addict:
French RPGs of the 1980s feature weird combinations of plot elements from mythology, fantasy, and sci-fi, NPC dialogue that makes little sense even in its original language, vague quests, and odd in-game asides. It’s as if their developers felt that RPGs were the next frontier for the Surrealist movement.
But what Brégeon is truly famous for is his later work on the Amstrad made with Patrick Beaujouan: the action-adventure game Carson City from 1986 and the traditional parser adventure Le passager du temps (The Passenger of Time) from a year later.
As far as direct influence of Professor Folibus, we have at least two games upcoming: Cauchemar House by an anonymous author in an unknown year (but almost certainly following Folibus) and The Manor of Dr. Genius from 1983. The latter was for the Oric but adapted the Toms engine. We’ll have to get deeper in adventure history in general to see if there are any other “trap labyrinth” games from France.
For now, though, let’s hop back over the Channel to England, and specifically, the start of the legendary company Magnetic Scrolls (kind of).
The title translates to The House of Professor Folibus, and yes, we’re back in France.
When I wrote about Des Cavernes dans le poquette I mentioned, as an aside, that the Sinclair ZX81 dominated more than the ZX Spectrum. As late as a May 1983 issue of Micro Systèmes (a magazine that had been around since 1978), the ZX81 gets twenty mentions and the ZX Spectrum gets zero. While the ZX Spectrum French debut was in June of 1982 (compare to the UK getting the product in April) the rollout was sluggish and I haven’t entirely deciphered why. My best guess is related to the SECAM format for televisions, which was France only (Europe otherwise used the entirely different format PAL). It already takes some effort to cope with linking the black-and-white ZX81 to SECAM, but the color format of the ZX Spectrum had even more trouble.
The competitor Oric-1, which took off at the same time in the same price category, was instead easily able to cope. Quoting the CPCWiki: “the Orics were the only machine in their price range to ship with an RGB output socket, which made them the only machine in their price range to be usable with French SECAM televisions, via their SCART(/Peritel) sockets.”
Thus, in a curious way, a ZX81 book from the UK — The ZX81 Pocket Book by Trevor Toms — ended up being more influential in France than its place of origin.
If that book sounds familiar, yes, we’ve covered it before. The City of Alzan was the sample adventure game. The system got used for Greedy Gulch (and two other games on the same tape I haven’t gotten to yet). It was derived off a 1980 article in Practical Computing, and that article was used for both the Artic games and the massively popular Quill system, but the Trevor Toms system itself in the UK didn’t go as far. The ZX Spectrum smashed up the ZX81 market enough that it became irrelevant by 1983.
In France, the book became the ur-text for early French adventures, kind of like Crowther/Woods Adventure for mainframe games and Omotesando Adventure for Japanese games. This is because of La maison du professeur Folibus by Alain Brégeon, which essentially kicked off French adventures as a real genre.
The game isn’t exactly the first French text adventure; Bilingual Adventure (1979) and Mission secrète à Colditz (1980) came before. But Bilingual Adventure was not well-distributed outside the US, and it was just a port of Adventure; Colditz was a private game for family and friends and only published later. If we want to be finicky, using Hugo Labrande’s phrasing in an interview with the author, we can say it is the first original French adventure game with wide distribution.
Alain Brégeon wanted to work with computers since he was a child and through the 70s he was, as he calls it, an “inspecteur” maintaining large systems (that is, mainframes). He started to get interested in “small systems” (home computers) in the 80s and got a ZX81 in kit form (as he notes, it wasn’t like IKEA, it required soldering). Given his expertise and interest in electronics, he started selling hardware for the system he made out of his garage (including, yes, SECAM adaptors).
Not long after, Brégeon obtained a copy of the Trevor Toms book (original from 1981, translation published early 1982). He became interested in the adventure system, especially City of Azlan, admiring the “codification quasi booléenne” (quasi-Boolean codification) of the logic.
This made him want to write his own adventure. He had already published a bowling game in an earlier issue of Micro-Systèmes, and in issue 24 (July/August 1982) his game appeared with both source code and, importantly, a detailed explanation of how it worked.
There are two “modern” versions of the game. One, by Xavier Martin, adds art in all the rooms. The other, by Antoine Vignau & Olivier Zardini at Brutal Deluxe Software, is a conversion to Apple II; it includes an English translation and manual that lists all the vocabulary the game uses.
You find yourself in Professor Folibus’ laboratory. To get there, you had to go through a thousand dangers and avoid as many traps. But you are not at the end of your troubles. This house is in fact a labyrinth from which you will have to discover the exit while showing intelligence and cunning because there is no shortage of traps on this route.
— From the Brutal Deluxe manual
I wanted to see the art so I tried out the Martin version some, got stuck, tried the Apple II version, and stayed stuck. I don’t think this game is long — there’s only so much space in the source code — but it starts with a frustrating sequence where I must be missing something.
This is, akin to Medieval Castle, a story where you go in somewhere for no obvious reason, and then the goal is to get out. Unlike Medieval Castle, this place you’re trapped is quite deadly.
You are in front of a house; the door is open.
I had a little trouble at the start; the directions (N/S/E/O) don’t work. You’re supposed to use ENTRER (ENTER), and the door closes behind you.
You are in a corridor. There is a door to the east and a door to the west. There is also: fire, candle
It seems quite natural to pick up the candle and light it, but that’s a mistake. Heading east, there is a room with a strange smell where it explodes and you die:
(To restart the game you’re supposed to type GOTO 10. This is normal for ZX81.)
I will say the deaths in this game are somewhat distinguished from the ones in my last game, Pharoah’s Curse. Heading east just on its own reveals the smell but you don’t die; with a little more caution you can avoid the death, and even on deaths you can’t avoid (as you’ll see shortly) you at least bring forward the death by actions a little more elaborate than going east rather than west (falling into a pit) or opening a box revealing a snake. It isn’t quite as elaborate a setup as the “hang you by your own rope” moments in Journey (1979), but it leans more in that direction.
Even without the candle-death the odor room doesn’t seem to provide any use. Going west instead leads to a room with a paper; after GET PAPER there’s a KEY you can also get. What you can’t do is read the paper or otherwise examine it, and I would have been fiddling with that moment for a while had I not had the Brutal Deluxe verb list in front of me.
Further west is a machine with a red button and a green button. If you push the green button it starts “getting carried away”; if you push the red button it simply “starts”, but either way, after a few turns the whole house will explode.
To the north from the exploding machine are a closet and some wires. You can find tools in the closet and REPAIR WIRES.
REPAIR is an uncommon verb to use here. I’ve had FIX in games, and MEND once, but I don’t think I’ve ever had REPAIR. One of the interesting things about playing non-English games is they’ll sometimes reach for verbs whose English equivalent isn’t in the typical stock of adventure verbs. Colditz had “assommer”; “knock out”, and distinct from “hit”, which I don’t think I’ve seen in an adventure otherwise.
Unfortunately, fixing the wires just leads to the same result as before with the machine. But maybe it is meant to fix the elevator to the north?
Going up just results in the game saying “the elevator does not move” and going down is not possible (I assume there’s no basement). If you hang out in the elevator, the cable breaks and you die, or as the Brutal Deluxe version says
You crash down: deaed
If you press the red button it does provide power, enough that you can go UP in the elevator, but immediately upon arriving there’s an unfortunate scene involving a damp room and an electrical wires.
“Une corde” is a rope.
There’s not a lot to noodle with! I suspect I am missing something very simple. I imagine the electricity comes from the generator, so if the generator were off, I’d be able to survive stepping south. However, I need the electricity to go up the elevator. Hence … ?
Here’s the verb (and noun) list from the manual if it helps any.
Vince Apps has previously graced us with Devil’s Island and Forbidden City, and other than self-publishing under the title Apex Trading, he was mostly distinguished by having a whole set of books of BASIC source code in his name. For example:
40 Educational Games for the Electron
40 Educational Games for the BBC Micro
40 Educational Games for the Dragon
40 Educational Games for the VIC-20
40 Educational Games for the Atari
40 Educational Games for the Commodore 64
40 Educational Games for the Spectrum
40 Educational Games for the Amstrad
Some above even got Spanish and German translations.
The “Educational Games” series of 40 had picks with a minimum of complexity so they were easily portable. Less easy to port were the games in his Commodore 64 Program Book — now not solely “educational” works — and only some of them show up in his Texas Instruments version of the same.
However, the MSX version of the Program Book got the same set of games, including two adventures: the previously mentioned Forbidden City, and today’s game, Pharoah’s Curse.
This is the kind of adventure game that even your older friends and family may like to play, as it involves logic, memory and the powers of deduction —- you don’t have to be a crackshot arcade games player.
On this adventure you will be seeking for treasure, of course, but you will have to decide whether or not to collect stone urns, iron rods, boxes, earthenware pots and daggers on your way to the centre of the pyramid.
You will have to decide whether or not to go East, West, North, South and whether or not to open doors, enter ante rooms and tackle mazes. Beware that floors may crumble, walls may collapse, mists may envelope you as the tombs are protected against robbers such as you.
This text is from the printed book, not the game text. This game turns out to be extremely simple — even compared to the author’s last two games — and in such cases I always like to see what “script” the author has in mind for the players. The author mentions “deciding” twice. I think the expectation is that with the deathtraps in place (which you’ll see in a second) the player will be nervous at every step, basically relying on the power of possibility space, as I’ve written about long ago:
I know traditionally the “diegetic plot” of an adventure is the one that goes through without deaths … On the surface, the player is walking through a door. Underneath, the player is avoiding a death-trap. Without both branches simultaneously, part of the story is missing.
For Alien, which had a similar number of deathtraps, I think the author was just amusing themselves. Here, the author is hoping you’ll feel a tangible feel of danger and make it so even a choice of East, West, North, and South has some gravity. (Using authentic C64 load speeds, maybe there is something to fear. The game also runs fairly slow so if you die without saving it takes a while to get back to where you started.)
Anyway, let’s go raid for treasure!
You start in a “Valley of the Tombs” complex with multiple places to raid. In a Maze-Like Complex of Caves you can find a parchment with a clue.
In three burial chambers there are caskets, where you can find a key, a cloak, a mummy, and a box. The mummy, unexpectedly, does not sit up and mutter curses; the box, on the other hand, kills you.
The cloak includes a slip of paper with the clue:
HE WHO CARRIES UNTO HIS OWN REFLECTION INSIDE ON SHALL GO
TRANSLATION BY ADVENTURE TRANSLATIONS INC.
COPYRIGHT 2040 B.C.
The key goes to a door leading to the next section, with two pyramids. The first has some sand and you can just DIG SAND to reveal a secret entrance. If only all tomb raiders had it that easily. Or most of them are falling in the pit traps and so forth.
There’s an iron rod (which is useful) and a dagger (which isn’t). The iron rod was mentioned by the parchment earlier as being used to STRIKE a man, and the STRIKE verb is important. At the second pyramid there is a statue you can STRIKE with the rod.
At the inside there is a mirror, and here is where the second clue (from the cloak) comes into play, and the very specific word go in the phrase “ON SHALL GO”. GO MIRROR while holding the cloak leads to the last area.
This is simply a matter of navigating around the instant-death rooms until you reach the End, whereupon there is a sign you read that triggers the winning screen.
There was a large rock we moved earlier to open a passage to find the parchment, but this one is just a red herring.
Especially given the ending where the “treasure” was just a room, this came off as treating the idea of an adventure as an abstract exercise, which might be true if this was written for the book. However, this game was published in ’82 and the book was in ’84.
Devil’s Island, being by the same author and having a similar number of death rooms, makes a good comparison, in that I found that game plausibly sell-on-a-tape worthy, whereas this one seemed far too light. Oddly, I think the “hard” bits in Devil’s Island are at their essence unfair and bad design: the starting puzzle being real-time without letting the player know, the woodcutter that has only a random chance of appearing, the randomly appearing guards where you need to “run or fight”. But they made the experience “crunchier” so I had to reckon with it longer.
What I mean to say is the manifestation of some of these more outrageous elements we’ve seen in games is because otherwise (given authors who can’t handle complex mechanics) the game would be “for beginners” and there’s only so many that can go on a store shelf before the customer starts to be grumpy.
Coming up next: Il y a une porte en fer à l’ouest, et une autre au sud marquée « DANGER ».
One of the earliest homegrown computers for the British market was the Nascom 1. (This is the same computer Level 9 got their start on.) Alan Butcher had obtained one in ’78, and at his company (British Telecom) there were enough other people interested in the same computer that he was able to start a computer club.
From the Centre for Computing History.
This club soon expanded past British Telecom employees to the general public. An early member who joined was Bob Simpson, who we’ve mentioned here before: he was the founder of Micro Power. Micro Power had some early Nascom games but they were essentially focused on Acorn computers like the Electron and the BBC Micro. They published Seek, the game that was essentially stateless and all action happened in the connections between rooms, and a game they just called Adventure, which had a princess who didn’t want to be saved and an out-there “meta-narrator” mechanic.
They were started out as half-computer-store half-publisher, with Micro Power’s growth as a major software company happening organically.
As the place became a hub for people, they would bring along programs they’d written and Bob would say, ‘I will sell that for you.’
— Chris Payne, Marketing Assistant for Micro Power
Alan Butcher (who eventually became the software manager) notes that people in the publishing side spent time in the store:
Having the retail outlet helped a great deal in keeping in touch with customers; the shop would be packed with enthusiasts only too willing to give feedback.
Part of the Nascom club I mentioned also had David Elliott as a member (described as a “young kid” by Chris Payne), which is how he got connected with Bob Simpson and Micro Power. David Elliot is the author of today’s game, Eldorado Gold.
Computing Today, May 1982.
David Elliot has been interviewed but he doesn’t mention his text adventure game (originally for Nascom, see above) at all. He calls his first game Alien Destroyers, even though it almost certainly was Eldorado Gold. (That Nascom ad was from May; the first ad for Alien Destroyers was in September, and the ad includes a BBC Micro version of Eldorado Gold.) So: why did he neglect to mention it? Was it because the book all this is coming from (Acorn: A World in Pixels) was specifically oriented towards the Acorn products anyway? I don’t think so based on his phrasing:
Alien Destroyers was my first game, and not the best implementation, but a learning experience. Funnily enough, it being one of the first Micro Power games, meant it was on the back cover of magazines tor several months. It was quite nice for me, but I expect a bit boring for the readers and a push to get new games written.
I don’t mean “derived” like we recently saw with ADV.CAVES where the exact same source code had a new company name dropped on top, but clearly the author was using the original source code and map as a reference and tweaking it to make his own game.
From the Centre for Computing History.
The meta-structure of both games is identical. You start at your shack/hut, with a mule nearby. At hand is a map, a lamp, a gun, and carrot(s). You can wander into the desert and follow the map to a secret canyon, make your way to a mine, dig holes in the mine to get some treasure, and take a ladder that goes directly from the mine to the starting residence, obtaining victory.
The original game was simple but managed to have some charm due to, first of all, the main narrator being THE GHOST OF BACKPACK SAM who takes on a old-time-Western accent for even basic parser messages.
GOOD LUCK AND I HOPE YOU DON’T END UP A GHOST LIKE ME.
The mule also can be befriended with the carrots and the saddlebags it carries around can increase the size of your inventory. The canyon includes an encounter with Indians that can result in a gun battle although the best route is to steer clear because it will eventually kill you; the gun that the game starts you with is in fact a red herring. (This is similar to how Time Zone had a number of scenes with angry indigenous people where the right play is to avoid them.)
The source code was distributed past its TRS-80 origins — it was one of the games on the ADV.CAVE disk of Apple II games, and had a printing in The Captain 80 Book of Basic Adventures. Speaking of computers popular in the UK, there’s ports for the Atom, BBC Micro, C64, and Nascom; there’s even a version for Microbee (a computer essentially exclusive to Australia).
So it makes sense David Elliot got a hold of the source code; what he did maybe could be thought of as a parody.
You start in your hut with a chart showing a path to a mine, and a gun. Outside is the mule, as in the other game, although the mule only is carrying around a shovel, not saddlebags. Just to the west of the mule is a carrot.
I’ll speak more of the mule in a moment. The ghost town in the original game just has a saloon where you’re meant to find keys that are used to open up the mines. In this version, there’s a bank with some bank notes you can try to take, but then you get tossed in a jail. It’s just a trap — you’re supposed to steer clear. The only thing you really need is some more cartridges for the gun. Given the fact the gun was a useless red herring in the original game, this gives a hint that things are going to roll down differently.
Hey, it worked in Deathmaze 5000.
Going in the desert and following the map/chart is identical; there are no Spanish coins in the cave, just a jar of oil (which can be used to revive the lamp if it runs low, but you don’t need to). If you go into the Indian encampment rather than a shootout there’s just nobody there.
I wonder if anyone was disappointed by the ad copy and cover image.
There’s no keys in town, so entering the mine is not handled the same way as before.
And now is where I reveal the big change I alluded to. You use the gun, twice.
First, the mule just eats your carrot if you try to feed it and never gets close, so instead of the mule being a helper who follows you around, you’re supposed to SHOOT MULE.
Since there’s no keys, you also use the gun (with the extra cartridges from town) to blast the door.
The mine is essentially identical: you can grab some gold, diamonds, and silver, two of them requiring the shovel to DIG.
There’s a ladder you can use that will take you up a secret passage back to the starting location. Then you need to go back to the hotel in the ghost town (as the instructions say) and type SCORE to win.
It almost seems like this was meant to be a parody game; that is, the young author started with the source code and mucked about with it as a learning exercise, especially noting how useless the gun was. He decided to make the gun be an integral part of the game and simplify the mule mechanic by just making it a poor victim.
OK, it isn’t that much a mystery the game didn’t come up in an interview. At least its existence is interesting as a historical snapshot.
Perhaps you’d like to play the author’s game Swoop instead. It feels halfway between the gameplay of Galaxian and Demon Attack. Patterns of birds that swoop down are trickier than either of those two games and birds will aim for collision more often, giving a different flavor to the gameplay loop.
Renga in Blue 