In a deserted city on a far away planet, there is legend of a hidden treasure guarded by force fields, hallucinatory gases and alien life forms. Do you have the courage to set forth and seek the treasure?
The city lies at the edge of a vast primeval forest, near shimmering lakes, and will offer the unsuspecting visitor choices of silver spoons, blue liquids, metal discs and possible death. You will see however, that if the going gets tough, you can always stop for a Coke!!
We’ve played so far one game by Vince Apps, Devil’s Island as published by his company Apex Trading. It was mostly memorable for the opening puzzle requiring waiting in a cell in real-time (!) for a guard to show up; past that point was an extremely open map (with very little walled off) but a lot of instant-death, enough that I felt it proper to color code some rooms in red.
Forbidden City doesn’t have a real-time puzzle, and it is much more linear than Devil’s Island (so far) but the instant-death is still in. This time our goal, rather than escape, is to Discover the Aliens hidden treasure.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
The game was originally from Dragon 32, just like Devil’s Island, with a TI-99 version and Spectrum versions appearing as well, and I haven’t been able to find any of those versions. Rather, I played the C64 version, which showed up as a type in via The Commodore 64 Program Book. (It is through this book we even know the name Vince Apps, otherwise everything would have to be credited to Apex Trading.)
He also has the Texas Program Book (as in Texas Instruments computers), the Oric 1 Program Book, and a 40 Educational Games for the Commodore 64. The last gives some more biographical info:
Vince Apps is a regular contributor to journals such as Popular Computing Weekly and Home Computing Weekly. He is a graduate of Sussex University in Computer Science and has his own successful software company.
We still have three more games to go from the author so there’s still time to dig up a little more; for now let’s get into the game itself and enter an alien city.
Alien cities have generally fared pretty well here. The enforced text-adventure minimalism works better with exploring techno-halls than with nature, authors can go freeform with button-pressing effects (and they’re a lot less tempted to be arbitrary like they are with fantasy games), and language barriers mean NPCs don’t have to be conversational.
To make a more concrete comparison, the modern-realistic Crime Stopper which was just featured here fell short due to character interaction being extremely limited and some massive simplifications in terms of city layout. With an alien city, it is more reasonable to have a slightly esoteric subway/train/monorail system, as the other Forbidden City (William Demas) does.
I got stuck fairly quickly, because one of the commands is unconventional.
Specifically, there’s nothing to do here if you OPEN GATE or UNLOCK GATE or SCREAM or a variety of other things. The usual I and INVENTORY got me nothing. Finally I went to HELP (assuming maybe it was like Fortress at Times-End where it was necessary and not just a last-resort) and was told TAKE INVENTORY was a command.
So you start with a key but can only refer to the thing that does the unlocking, the key, not the thing being unlocked, the gate.
The game, as already mentioned is fairly linear; the red rooms are deathtraps, with a deep pit, crushing walls, and a laser testing chamber.
You can find a device with a button in a dark room to turn off a force field. Then there’s a “silver spoon” (which I haven’t used yet, might be a red herring) and a “small metal disk” in a cupboard…
…and you can take the disk over to a nearby device, drop it in, and get a rusty metal rod. Then you can go to a “flat wall” with a hole, insert the rod, and reveal a doorway.
This is followed by everyone’s favorite, a maze.
In the middle there’s a room with four levers, and one of them kills you, and of course you just need to test them out in order to find out which lever does which.
The maze only has cardinal directions, and it is the kind with a “path” where the wrong direction consistently drops the player back in the first few rooms.
Moving past the maze…
…the vast majority of the “obstacles” are still instant death traps. There’s two lever rooms (four levers each) where some of the levers do useful things and some eject you into space, and again, then only way to find out which is which is to test.
Two of the levers spawn a notebook (the same notebook). That’s just a code where you shift the letters forward by one to get “go twice to succeed”. I haven’t found anywhere to use it yet.
One of the levers randomly takes you to a “lab” area with a tin (see above, I haven’t worked out the number’s meaning yet), another deathtrap room, a potion that kills you if you drink it, and a steel locker that explodes if you open it.
Another lever goes to a forest area with a “pod” containing an “amulet”. The amulet has no description if you look at it and you can’t WEAR it.
Finally the only thing I seem to be “stuck” on is a locked door. I can’t refer to it in any way and the KEY I had at the start of the game doesn’t work.
This is one of those games where there aren’t really “puzzles” to struggle on as much as trying anything to get the game to recognize an interaction. For the record, I’ve got
a plastic cube (with a cryptogram that turns into “rubik got here too”)
a helmet (with several small lights)
an amulet
a flash of luminous blue liquid (that makes you heavy and kills you)
a key (from the start of the game)
a silver spoon
a tin (with the number hint)
a notebook (with the “go twice” hint)
a black metal rod (that was used to open the hidden doorway)
I trust either the next steps will be very simple or impossible; either way, based on the length of the author’s other game, I expect my finale here to be in my next post.
I probably should have checked help sooner. Unusually for Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure Games, it discusses possible bugs in the hints themselves and even mentions a late action only working on two of the six playthroughs. I wasn’t able to get the ending to happen so while I came close, I can’t show the grand finale.
You may want to re-read from the beginning for story points before moving on.
Via eBay, with someone’s hand-labeled disk and hand-made map.
First off, I had something close to the right actions last time.
I had missed the fact in the room with the receipt at the hotel, the phone rings. I did have the sound on, but you need to pause in what appears to be real time; if you’re typing commands too fast it doesn’t turn up, and even after I knew about the phone potentially ringing, I wasn’t able to get anything to happen until a second attempt.
“It’s all set, Beau. She shoves off tomorrow.” They hang up.
Now, you’re supposed to follow the receipt to the red herrings, just as I did. When I did so I had nothing happen and left, but if you wait — by just WAIT or LOOK — eventually someone will spring a trap on you and trap you in a locker.
The locker has a ticket stub (needed for the cinema) so you need to get in here. To escape is the only real item based puzzle: the cigarette and lighter from the desk are needed. You stand on the desk and set off the smoke alarm.
To the game’s credit, I figured out the parser commands here fairly quickly. With ticket stub in hand we could visit the cinema, and there Beau (the fiancée) arrives (I think probably this would not have happened had we not caught the phone call).
However, when we go in, we find the man… dead!
We can take the invitation if we like; whatever happens, it seems to be scripted that if we arrive at the platform where our office is we’ll get a message that tells us to wait at a phone.
We can then follow that phone message over to the (previously not-useful) museum, and have an encounter which results in another dead body.
Now we get into serious bug territory. According to Kim Schuette, the body has a key (according to the source code) but no way to access it in the game. The key then works on a locker in the stadium which opens a duffle bag with barbells, but there seems to be no purpose in this anyway (since neither he in the past nor myself now were able to see any of this in-game).
This encounter is the last you can have before picking up the ransom money, as you were informed about way back at the penthouse; you were supposed to pick it up at 7 PM, then drop it off at the lockers at the bus station at 9 PM. This part of the game is a matter of typing WAIT a lot or just I since that’s a quicker command.
I dutifully rode the clunky subway system back to the bus station, did the drop off, waited nearby for the pickup (as Mr. Schuette explains in his book) … and had nothing happen. The person that is supposed to do the pickup is Livwell (that we learned about via bribery in my last post) but he never shows.
West & 21st St.: Wait and watch for Crowded Corridor. If no one comes by 10 PM (the courier is Livwell), he won’t come due to a bug in the program. (On six near-identically played games, he appeared only twice. Perhaps a flag wasn’t set by doing something which seemed to have no bearing on the game, like not getting the Hanky or going to the “wrong” bank.)
The ending at least sounds dramatic. You’re supposed to follow the man (Livwell) with the suitcase all the way back to the Sizemore building (??) and then sneak in the elevator and shoot him. Then, arriving at the roof for the drop off, you encounter J.J. (the basketball star) and Cartier (the allegedly kidnapped person), shoot the man, and “pull lever” (which I assume stops Cartier, who was in on the scheme all along).
Ugh. I won’t recount my time valiantly trying to play the game for real and getting nowhere. I think the authors had some interesting scenes mapped out, but didn’t have a good way of putting them together that made both narrative and ludic sense at the same time. There wasn’t any learning that happened from the man at the museum, nor with the death at the theater, and no sense of a gradually untangling mystery that requires thoughtful deduction. Simply a sequence of events happened which eventually led to what would be a conclusion (if the game wasn’t broken).
You’ll be glad to hear I am already part-way through my next post, so I hope it won’t be nearly as long a gap before you hear from me next time.
The map from The Book of Adventure Games.
Nothing terrible earth-shaking this time: I visited all the subway stops and mapped everything out.
The key in the top is now fixed, with W and E going the appropriate directions.
We’ve seen the starting office, the penthouse, a museum, and an ATM, but a brief tour of the rest:
Sports Complex:
Mainly seems to be there for a locker, which I assume we get a key for at some point.
The NOISE MAKER seems tempting for some puzzle where we have to distract bad guys, but I haven’t come close to any related scenario yet.
Unfriendly:
There might be a scene later, but this was the most bare-bones of the destinations I could find. It just is described as an unfriendly part of town, with no buildings to enter.
Broken Arms Hotel:
We can see from the registrar where Beau McBride is staying (that’s the new fiancée of our kidnappee), and visit to see a shipping notice.
I did find the crate, which I’ll show off in a moment.
“Executive Row”:
Where broken-down executives go to self-medicate.
There’s a person who indicates they know something that you can bribe. I am quite unclear what it has to do with the case — I feel like I’m seeing something out of sequence. All I can clean is someone named Oliver Livwell exists and was acting suspiciously.
Bus Station
Rather like the Sports Complex, this seems to exist for the purpose of providing a mysterious locker that we can unlock. Again, we seem to be out of sequence:
Warehouse
There’s a steel door that we can’t get through (and where I assume more drama occurs) but also the crate I promised would come up again. It is full of red herrings.
Cinema
There’s a cinema that is currently playing a movie, and it doesn’t let you buy a ticket; however, if you have a stub, you can see a movie in progress. So this is just a matter of waiting for the right item.
Apartment
You can visit your own apartment, which is very messy. There’s a picture of your mother with a safe behind it.
The combination hidden in the office (from a few posts ago) works, although it took me a while to get the syntax. You need to TURN DIAL LEFT or TURN DIAL RIGHT, and then a real-time interface happens where a number rapidly increases and you have to push a button when it hits the right spot — almost a mini-game.
The statue contains a statue which appears to be a reference to The Maltese Falcon.
It’s a statue of a bird of some sort. This is a family heirloom, handed down to you from your great grand-dad. On the bottom of the base it reads, “Made in Malta.”
If the statue shows up in the plot, I haven’t seen it yet; at the moment it appears to be just a reference.
Bank
Nothing exciting about this. I assume this is simply another location the bankcard works at, but maybe a future event happens here.
Summary
This seems to be the sort of game where I’m supposed to find clues in a specific sequence, and various people and events will show up at the right intersections once I learn about them; alternately, I’ll get a key for one place, which then has a key for the next one. In a ludic sense, I don’t really feel like I’m investigating anything, but let me save any design conclusions for the end of the game.
The locations end up not being large so I suspect once the progression really gets going unless there’s some difficult puzzles along the way, I might blaze through what remains of the plot. So hoping for a win next time?
Other than my life-delay, there were a couple aspects going for Crime Stopper making it hard to get moving on progress:
1.) The variant-versions fiasco I already wrote about; anything where I have to switch emulators or disk versions or the like can take away my momentum.
2.) The ALL CAPS block text, which hasn’t been a pain in other Apple II games but is here. There’s a fair amount of reading giant chunks.
I’ll give the non-blocky version of this shortly.
3.) The way travel on the map works, which I have only touched on briefly.
Each of the circles shown is a subway station. You go into the subway, buy a token, then wait on the platform for subway cars to come by. If you’re trying to go a particular direction, you have to wait for that particular car. The directions (as partially indicated by the compass) are Uptown (right), Downtown (left), East (down) and West (up). (And yes, if you check against the map, east and west are reversed for some reason compared to the compass guide.) I found it very easy to go the wrong way, and every time you use the subway you have to buy a token (hope you didn’t max out your inventory, otherwise you need to figure out what item you want to drop), wait for the right car (which takes a while), enter, and wait while in the car (which also takes a while).
You start at 2nd and 90th and the telegram asks you to go to 2nd and 50th (one stop uptown). Even figuring out this fact took a while of parsing the subway system.
If you go downtown instead of uptown, you end up at this museum which is at the far upper left of the subway map.
So from here (unless I run into a specific problem) I’m going to pretend I’m fluently flying around the subway system, although I’m also running into inventory capacity problems and having to dump things on the subway platform hoping that I won’t need them four stops away and have to do tedious backtracking. I will say in a theoretical sense it is interesting how simulationist the authors went here in their world-modeling, but in a practical sense I was pining for a fast-travel.
Rewinding a bit now, just because it’s been a while you may have forgotten the plot–
A newscaster appears on the set. “There is still no word on the demands of the kidnappers of construction heiress Cartier-Blanche Sizemore. Miss Sizemore disappeared today from the plush 2nd Ave penthouse she shares with her mother, Millicent-Hyacinth Sizemore. Mrs. Sizemore herself made headlines last October when she announced her divorce from her husband, the internationally known gambler Henri Louis Chevron. So far the police have issued no official statements except to confirm the kidnaping. We will have more information for you as it develops.”
That’s from your office you start at, where you can turn on the television and CHANGE CHANNEL. You get an urgent phone call at 7 AM with a “trembling female voice” saying “they are coming to get me” with loud noises, and there is already a telegram from Sizemore’s mother asking you to come to the 2nd Ave penthouse regarding a strictly confidential matter.
Putting my mystery hat on, there’s already something very bizarre here: the kidnapping is supposed to have already happened. What is with the phone call seeming to be the event occurring on the spot? While you can’t read the telegram first, it is already sitting at your desk when the phone call happens. Is the telegram about some different thing that then changes because by the time we arrive the kidnapping has happened, or is there some kind of setup? The television program clip also can be seen immediately after the phone call, which doesn’t make much sense with the timing.
Going outdoors, we can buy a newspaper (I already showed a screenshot of part of it, but here’s the whole story converted to more readable text, for both your benefit and mine).
Cartier-Blanche Sizemore, daughter of construction magnate, Millicent-Hyacinth Sizemore, was abducted from her 50th floor penthouse apartment at 10 AM this morning. Two masked gunmen forced their way into the Sizemore building, captured Miss Sizemore, and escaped in a black limousine. The police are puzzled by the gunmen’s apparent familiarity with the Sizemore building’s layout, as hell as their unconventional getaway vehicle. “there are no firm suspects at this time,” said Detective Frank Sanderson, who is in charge of the investigation, “but it is still early.” Over the years, the Sizemore family has received a certain amount of notoriety for their frequently turbulent personal lives. Miss Sizemore made news several months ago when she spurned her fiancée of two years, megabucks basketball superstar J.J. Johnson, in favor of Beau McBride, a Bristol’s department store clerk. Mrs. Sizemore and her husband at the time, Henri Louis Chevron, were stunned by her decision and threatened to disinherit her.
Several weeks later, the social circuit shaken by Mrs. Sizemore’s stormy divorce from Chevron, an internationally-known gambler, Chevron was reported to have filed for bankruptcy following his removal as acting head of the corp.
Although Detective Sanderson has made it clear that there are no real suspects as of yet, Mr Chevron could not be reached for comment. Mr McBribe also could not be reached at his room in the Broken Arms Hotel.
Yes, the fiancee’s name is written McBride, and then McBribe. This might be an intentional typo.
(…skip by subway transport shenanigans. grr this is annoying…)
Arriving at the Sizemore building, there’s a letter from the mother explaining there had been “treats two weeks prior” and that “now it is too late”. You get a account number (10-28-81) and a bankcard in order to make withdraws, and are informed that there is ransom money being prepared that we can pick up by six o’clock.
According to the map we can head “Downtown” back to where we started, or “East” in order to go down on the map. Going “East” we get to a bank and can use the bankcard we just acquired.
That is, as long as you make sure you use the syntax correctly. Typing 102881 or ENTER 102881 or ENTER 10-28-81 all fail; you have to type exactly 10-28-81 for the withdraw to work.
And even if you get through that, the transaction might just fail anyway! This happens if you exceed $100 in-hand, and I was holding $10 of my character’s personal money, and I tried to get $90 which seemed to be possible. Argh!
I’ve gotten a little farther than this, but I think this gives enough of an idea what I’m struggling against for now. Update on all the map locations next time, and then maybe we’ll see a dead body.
In my 2023 recap post, I mentioned being sad about not being able to finish Secret Kingdom for the MZ-700. It didn’t have anything completely remarkable (plot recap: find treasures, win) but I only attained eight out of ten treasures, giving me the feel of a gnawing gap.
LanHawk took this up as a challenge and first managed to extract the BASIC source code; it turns out he had trouble getting anything out of it (baltasarq from my comments also called it “weird and unreadable”) so Lance decided to just play the game using the posts I had so far as reference. He managed to find the last two treasures and send hints.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
First and most simply, I’d been carting around a SWORD the entire game, but apparently had never bothered to LOOK at it.
Since you need the sword to handle the random wolves, it needs to be held pretty much the entire game.
If you look at the sword the game says you’ve found something, and a *GOLD STUD* appears.
The second find is a bit messier and I can understand why I missed it. Look again at the tower room above. There’s a PARCHMENT which LOOKS WORTHLESS and I tried in vain to make it show a treasure map or the like.
GET PARCHMENT and TAKE PARCHMENT led to TRY ANOTHER COMMAND, so I thought I reached some sort of parser barrier, but that was in fact a hint. This was partially a problem with visualization; you are supposed to imagine the parchment is put against the wall, somehow. The right command is REMOVE.
Now with the window revealed you can go outside to get a medallion.
This means the long snow section which I assumed had to have something is in fact entirely a red herring. It seems like a lot of work for the author to have bothered. I half-suspect G. Clark had some ambitions but simply run out of room so had to stop.
I’m afraid there’s no deep insight here — I was hoping there would be some sort of grand step in the final puzzle which would change everything, but alas, I had already racked up the interesting treasures.
At least the loose thread doesn’t have to bother me any more!
Apologies for the radio silence — I had some major work things to get to pushing up to the end of the year, and my brain just hasn’t gotten back in gear yet. The Project will continue next year, but a few snapshots of moments from 2023:
We finally finished the murderously hard Ferret, a bit behind schedule — regular posts through January, then with action continued in the comments through February, before we finally pushed through at the end of the month, with a brilliant moment at the end by commentor Sha1tan who realized the last step.
I don’t know if we’ll ever experience anything again quite the same, but how many games take 40 years to write?
I still think the train puzzle near the end is one of the best I’ve ever experienced.
I never did quite figure out how to push Breckenridge Caper to the end. It was fun to see an adventure game written from the angle of a classroom historical simulation, which gathered a much different flavor than anything else from this blog.
I had far more enjoyment of Zork III than I thought I would. I think I had to use hints too many times back when I first played it so it didn’t make as good an impression.
Asylum II also surprised me; the author experimented with the format and came up with something tighter and more playable than the previous iterations, with the jaw-dropping plastic surgery puzzle (which felt creepy every. single. time.)
Secret Kingdom gnaws at me. Lots of games where the final hurdle is missed I feel apathetic about, but I really want to know how to take this one to the end. I’m not sure why. I guess because the somewhat novel handling of “error messages” (which hint as to the correct action) makes it seem “fair” despite the presence of 1982-era softlocks.
On the other end of the spectrum, I am incredibly happy I finished Doomsday Mission, which tried hard to push back and where zero hints or maps existed on the Internet.
The weirdest moment of the whole year (ERASE BRIDGE) courtesy of Kabul Spy.
Just in terms of sheer puzzle joy I think Murdac was my favorite of 2023. You have to take the old-school aspects on their own terms (like the very early softlock with the wall, and the maze) but if you’re willing to cope with those this feels like the work of someone who has actually learned how to design a puzzle, rather than still building an apprenticeship.
I appreciate the raw uniqueness of Apventure to Atlantis. Much more fun to read about than play.
Adventure 200 was the biggest surprise of the year; I expected a generic Adventure clone, but because of one clearly executed idea spread throughout the game it became something much better.
Rick Incrocci, who did the art for Masquerade, was operating on a different plane from everyone else.
Let’s finish with the sheer strangeness of Africa Diamond, which had a “shadow room” map under the regular map which took a wild approach to solve a technical problem.
That’s not everything, or even everything good, but that will do.
Still lots more to come in 2024 past finishing Crime Stopper, like:
- an adventure game for the Bally Astrocade
- two 1982 games written by people who comment on this blog
- Brøderbund’s entry into the adventure market
- more graphics for TRS-80, somehow
- a strange combination adventure/shooter game
- a rare Sierra On-Line oddity most people don’t remember
- at least one game in French and one in Japanese
Happy New Year!
I haven’t had a lot of time to play, unfortunately, but I still wanted to make a post as Matt W. in the comments last time skillfully sleuthed out the issue: I was using a bad disk.
Specifically: I had been using this version of the game from the Internet Archive (added 2018-08-08 by 4am) but I should have been using this version of the game from the Internet Archive (added 2019-09-29 by 4am).
Apple II preservation history is long and complicated as the first emulator goes back to 1990 (!) and the emulator I typically use, AppleWin, goes back to 1994. Early files were in DSK, PO, or DO format, which copied file content but not necessarily their exact layout on the disk; much later, technology was developed to dump the disk as a whole including disk structures that don’t port over with DSK (NIB files). In 2018 things went even further to allow dumps at the individual magnetic flux level and the WOZ file format.
Visualization from AppleSauce of the Crime Stopper disk.
The big catch here to all this which makes Apple II emulation tricky is copy protection. Piracy was rampant (as well as methods of circumventing copy protection) but copy protection bypasses also sometimes broke the software in subtler ways. The most amusing I’ve encountered is how The Queen of Phobos has the nuke in the game get set off right away if you’re running off a disk sector other than 000.
You can generally expect early dumps to be based on cracks from the 80s — especially since some of the dumps genuinely go back to 1990 — while WOZ files are based on “fresh cracks” on current technology and the ability to account for subterfuge like what disk sector a program is running on. This means that WOZ files are usually preferrable to DSK, although in Kabul Spy I had the opposite: there was a bug present in the newer WOZ dump not in the DSK format.
None of this was actually relevant here! The two dumps were both in WOZ format, although one of them was more recent than the other. I’ve checked all the ways I can and they seem to be the same “version” (an early version of Oo-Topos was unfinishable) but yet something is different enough about the dumps that there is a signifcant gameplay difference.
In the 2018 version of the file, looking at your desk in your office says you see nothing special.
I also hadn’t found the secret behind the picture last time I played.
In the 2019 version, you find a drawer.
You can still refer to the drawer in the 2018 version dump (which is why I went hunting for version numbers first) but you just have to guess one exists.
(ADD: 4am confirmed on Mastodon it was different versions rather than different dumps. There isn’t anything visible to the player.)
Neither dump led me to realize the other issue, which Matt. W also pointed out: this game has a clue via sound. Specifically, there’s a loud obnoxious beeping sound at the start, which is supposed to indicate your telephone is ringing. This never gets mentioned in the text. (Sorry, I’m still not turning on Apple II sound otherwise except in dire circumstances.)
The message from the phone, combined with the telegram on our desk…
AL CLUBS- I REQUIRE YOUR SERVICES STOP STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL MATTER STOP COME TO THE LOBBY OF THE SIZEMORE BUILDING 2ND AVE. 50TH ST. STOP COME IMMEDIATLY STOP -MILLICENT HYACINTH SIZEMORE
…led me to the subway where I could use my newfound cash from the desk to be able to get on board.
I assume this means the game has 13 places in total we can go to.
Arriving at the Sizemore building, we are handed a ransom note and a letter.
So, as far as we know so far, we’re supposed to help deliver ransom money in order to get a kidnapped daughter back. Something tells me the plot won’t be this straightforward, but I’ll try to pick up the momentum from here next time.
This case has more twists than a Martini drinkers’ convention. You’re Al Club, private eye, and you’ve got to grab a beautiful heiress from the gang that snatched her.
Hayden Publishing company was founded in the early 1950s (trademark registered 1954) as a technical publisher, generally associated with electronics and mathematics, although they branched into other subjects including language arts.
From The Mathematics Teacher, March 1965.
They were well positioned to enter computers as well, starting in the 60s. As far as games goes they re-published what is arguably the first “commercial” CRPG in the second edition of William Engel’s book Stimulating Simulations, which includes the CRPG Devil’s Dungeon. (The 1977 self-published 1st edition does not include it but a self-published 1978 booklet does, which was folded into Hayden’s first version in 1979.) They also published non-books around this time like Sargon II and Sargon III, two of the most important early chess programs. Relevant for our purposes today, in late 1982 they published two Apple II text adventures by Daniel Kitchen, Crystal Caves and Crime Stopper, the latter also giving story credit to Barry Marx.
Crystal Caves was written first (people of this era tended to copy the fantasy of Adventure before branching out), but they don’t form a series, I’m not being that picky about chronology as long as I’m playing within a year, and I’m still needing a break from Adventure Quest, so: hard-boiled crime it is.
Dan Kitchen, a New Jersey native, got his game-design start in handheld toys, making Bank Shot and Wildfire for Parker in 1979. He obtained an Apple II that year:
I was a big fan of Microsoft Adventure and all of Scott Adams’ games … I fell in love with text adventures instantly and knew I wanted to make my own.
With his brother Garry Kitchen he co-founded Imaginative Systems Software and got a contract with Hayden (also in New Jersey) for six games.
The idea for Crime Stopper came from one of my brother’s friends, Barry Marx, a writer and a brilliant chap. He suggested he write the story and I would make it interactive using my Crystal Caverns engine. And he’s responsible for the Sam Spade pun.
You start in your stereotypical office, with a telegram urgently summoning you:
Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten to the actual crime-solving part of the game. If you climb to the roof of the building your office is in you cand find a “hanky”…
…and if you go out into the street you can find an ice cream shop and a diner.
However, to get to the building mentioned in the telegram (2nd and 50th) we need to ride the subway, but the subway requires cash, and our protagonist has no cash.
I’ve very thoroughly examined every object described in every room, I’m still stuck with just the HANKY and the TELEGRAM. I tried GIVE HANKY in the ice cream parlor (…maybe they’d give me something I could get money out of?…) but the game responded I didn’t have any money, suggesting it thought I was trying to buy ice cream instead. To be fair trading a hanky for ice cream isn’t logical but when I’m stumped already I’m willing to try anything.
There’s hints out there — Crime Stopper is even a featured game in the Kim Schuette book I’ve re-visited in this blog many times — but I’d very much like to avoid spoiling the very first puzzle in the game, as that makes me much less likely to hold out for anything later which might involve solving an actual mystery.
My map of the city streets so far.
The first programming contest was held at Texas A&M back in 1970 on a large mainframe using punchcards. Teams competed to finish problem tasks within a set time.
This eventually transformed into the The Association for Computing Machinery’s Scholastic Programming Contest, and even later the International Collegiate Programming Contest. Back before the contest was international, in 1988, there was a set of 8 problems that teams has 6 hours to complete, using Apple Macintosh computers. The contest had recently switched from allowing both Pascal and FORTRAN to just only having programs given in Pascal (this made it easier to give problems, as they were designed previously so that neither language would have an advantage). The winning team — for the second time, and they only started competing in 1986 — was Caltech.
Caltech’s team had two graduate students (David Gillespie and Scott Hemphill) one senior majoring in biology (Adam Greenblatt) and one junior majoring in computer music: Ron Goodman. Likely, Ron — also the founder of the group Synthesized Music Enthusiasts of Los Angeles — was responsible for the victory lap that happened after winning, as all programs were finished with 43 minutes left to go:
We spent the remaining time fooling around, programming the computer to play musical scales.
Ron Goodman later went on to work for Creative Labs (most famously known for the Sound Blaster). In 1998, while working on some new mixer software as well as the Nomad (a predecessor to the iPod) he started to get major arm and wrist pain. He was diagnosed with De Quervain’s disease and tried to use a pre-existing software to help:
Eventually, intense pain prevented me from clicking the mouse. I found a free utility that would click for me, and I asked the author to make a few tweaks to make it more usable. He was “busy” and politely suggested I do it. Slowly, I did! My dev environment required that I come up with a name – I chose RSIGuard with far too little consideration. I thought I’d finish the program in a couple of months, never imagining I was starting a 20+year project.
Ron made a small webpage and received an order for “50 licenses” from Hewlett-Packard. He decided this was the time to leave Creative and start his own business; Mr. Goodman still works as the product manager for RSIGuard today.
You’ll notice all this, including the contest, is long after the year for today’s game (1982). Goodman was another one of the teen programming prodigies we’ve seen and was quite involved with computers all the way through the 80s; for example, in 1983 he wrote a technical article for Dr. Dobbs about the shift and rotation commands on the Z80 processor.
Goodman was 15 or 16 at the time he sent Building of Death for publication in the TRS-80 tapemag CLOAD.
CLOAD, October 1982. Technically speaking this is the month a disk started being available, so it was also a diskmag.
The copy provided by the CLOAD editor just states that
Just in time to miss Halloween – Building of Death. This is an adventure game with many ways to die.
and it isn’t more complicated than that: we’re in a building, we need to get out. The novel bit is that the Building of Death is a department store.
Now, just being written by a teenager doesn’t mean a game is bad; Frankenstein Adventure, published in CLOAD exactly a year before this game, is a good case in point — it genuinely is one of the best from 1981.
I regret to inform you, alas, that this game does not accomplish the same feat. It is quite dodgy.
Just to illustrate with one screen:
Yes, immediately after using the word PLAY to play a portable game from the toy department, we are informed trying that the game doesn’t understand the word PLAY. The cassette incidentally is “A cassette labeled ‘Adventure hints'” and if you go back to the TRS-80 at the start you can LOAD it or CLOAD it (I had to look this up) but this gets a checksum message I never was able to get by.
It doesn’t really matter though; I checked the source code and if you manage to get in farther the computer explodes and you die.
Just to give a general sense of geography, let me first give a zoom-out of the entire map…
…and a zoom-in on the starting area, which is the only part that feels like a normal department store.
Some observations:
1. The large grid makes me wonder if the author was riffing off of Conquest of Memory Alpha, like Danny Browne did. The layout and parsing in the actual source code are different enough that I don’t think so, but the author may still have played it, as there’s a similar notion of a “central area” that the player breaks into.
2. Rooms are incidentally specified by X and Y coordinate; here’s a line from the source code, where (7,0) is at a vending machine:
260 IFC$=”INS”ORC$=”PUT”IFB$”QUA”THENC$=”DRO”:GOTO230:ELSEIFX7ORY0THENPRINT”Where ???”:GOTO120:ELSEI(0)=512:PRINT”The machine rumbles for a second then stops.”:VM=1:GOTO120
3. The vending machine lets you use a quarter that starts in your player’s inventory to get food and some garlic. The food must be eaten to avoid starving (yawn) and the garlic fends off a vampire that randomly enters the store later and starts hunting you. Somehow you are supposed to WEAR the garlic, garlic breath like Adventure Quest doesn’t work:
A vampire attacks
But your garlic warded her off
4. Most of the inventory is stuffed in the upper right corner, where you get some no-slip boots, a flat handball, some dill pickles, some meat, and the aforementioned food and garlic. Only the meat, food, and garlic are useful. Throughout the map you can also find a chalkboard, a torn leash, a bottle of vitamins, and a comb; again, none are useful. Most of this map is a red herring.
5. The red-marked rooms all have lions which kill you. None are worth visiting, and one even specifies the lion has a key, but that’s just another red herring.
Most of the experience of the game — due to the giant grid — is walking through large, empty halls. Again, it invokes the Memory Alpha experience, and can also be compared a little to a CRPG like Wizardry.
Again useless. Leading up to here are simply “dimly lit hallways” and rooms with strong stenches.
Barring randomly being killed by lions (and also one bit where there’s a spider on a key, again a red herring, just don’t get the key) the central part is where the action really begins.
Starts from the lower right.
First, a dog you need to give meat to.
Then, a door you need to KNOCK to get by. (The portable game from earlier gave a hint about this.)
Then there’s some grease you need to JUMP over. There’s an explicit hint elsewhere about acting like a kangaroo, but I still wasted a fair amount of time trying to wear the no-slip boots which have no purpose at all (“I don’t think you want to put it on”).
Proceeding further I get exceedingly stuck on a door.
Here’s the relevant bit of code:
315 IFC$=”OPE”ANDB$=”DOO”THENIFX0ORY0THENPRINT”Oh! You are upsetting!!!”
The command OPEN DOOR only works at the “front door” to the building, in the far left corner at (0,0). Otherwise it gives the weird response shown. You can still open the door, but you need to TURN DOOR (??) or TURN KNOB.
Then you can straightforwardly find the front door key, although don’t leave just yet! There’s also a room with a “rusty pin” where if you take it summons an elevator and you are asked if you want to go in. Say Y and an animation starts.
On the top you can find a bulletproof vest.
Leaving teleports you out close to the exit, and with both front door key and bulletproof vest in hand you can leave safely.
The first part of this gets animated with a “screen shake” effect but I’m going to be polite and leave it off.
So yes, dodgy. At least memorable and slightly unique-feeling, with the vast majority of the content as a red herring; I did kind of like the fake keys as it wasn’t too hard to catch on to the fact they were unnecessary.
This game is otherwise noteworthy insofar as a tape (now diskmag) was willing to publish it as late as 1982; they clearly were still scrounging for material.
13000 I(1)=512:PRINT”You lost your sunglasses. It is much too bright to see. Your
eyes are burning up. You are blind.
Do you wish to continue this adventure as a blind person (Y/N)”
I have completed Adventure Quest, and as usual, my previous posts on the game are needed to understand this one.
I completed the game with no hints.
In some of the later printings of Level 9 games they included this paper you could send by physical mail for a clue. From the Museum for Computer Adventure Games.
I was very much on track to win already; the problem with this sort of game is you never quite know if you’re inches away or miles. All that is really needed to finish from where I ended is
1.) getting all four stones plus the talisman together at the end, which is more trouble than it sounds like
2.) also bringing the “onion” that’s really garlic (except I found out after the fact I didn’t need to tote it around at all)
You get “locked in” at the last part with all four inventory slots spoken for, so it turns out you don’t need to laboriously bring over the silver ball, the stick that makes fruit, etc.
I left off on a marsh where I found a Mist-Stone and teleported to escape (you find boots later which let you just trudge back through quicksand, but I only found them after I already had the stone liberated). The whole marsh area is tricky insofar as hands keep trying to grab you, and you need to HIT them with your sword to shake them loose. The sword occupies one of the four crucial inventory slots.
For a while, I was toting the sword and the insulated cloak and the magic lamp and making runs back and forth to tote items forward using my one available inventory slot (it turns out there was a faster way, but just like with the boots and the Mist-Stone I only realized this after the fact). Still, in a text game it doesn’t take that long to shove things forward, and eventually, I had the Stones plus the talisman. I also brought the “onion” (garlic) along because I had found this building on a side path in the marsh:
Gee, I wonder what’s inside?
I first thought I needed to cut the garlic or throw it, but you’re actually supposed to eat it, attaining permanent garlic breath. I could have done this at the very start of the game, even.
At the top of the building are some boots (the ones that protect from quicksand) and a window. The window is one-way but you can pitch all five items (Stones + talisman) before going through. Then it’s just a short walk through more quicksand (hope you kept the boots) and the Black Tower.
In the room back at the lake that sucks down items, they go to the quicksand room. I found this out after doing most of my work toting things through the biomes of the game, though.
What follows is simply a series of doors of different colors, and you insert each of the stones. This is a satisfying sequence despite — really, because of — the simplicity of it. The work is already done, you’re just proving it.
At the gold door and above you are locked in one-way, which is why — as I mentioned before — you are stuck with all four of your inventory slots full: three Stones, plus the Talisman. This was honestly helpful because it meant I could stop tracking all those previous items in the game thinking they’d may yet be useful. (Maybe the picnic table from the very start is useful in the final battle, who knows!)
Once on top you get a forced sequence where you are surrounded by orcs and pushed to the face-off with AGALIAREPT. Given there’s only one inventory item left it isn’t hard to figure out what to do.
You give the demon chase; the orcs chase you. This is a very short section where there are tunnels with dead ends but you just need to find the right room to hide in.
Having juked the orcs, you can go down a previously blocked passage to find the central lair of the demon.
The Phoenix has been following us around (as visible if you just stop and WAIT or LOOK) and now is its time to shine, as was told in the prophecy:
No idea what’s up with the point system, I don’t care much but I am not surprised there’s a wide possible range. The structure of this game led to more alternate solves but in an unusual way. That is, there are some puzzles you can simply ignore.
Remember the octopus I killed with an air-filled bag? You don’t need to fight it at all. It lurks at the white dot in the lake, and there’s a black dot right at the final quicksand that goes there, but there’s no need to use it. You can either a.) properly anticipate which items should be tossed through the window to the final area so you don’t have to go back or b.) use the magic lamp to teleport instead. Shockingly, giving how much magic lamp use I had in the game, I went with a.
The moor where you get cold? The insulated cloak works (I was keeping it because I was using the fire-stair at the volcano) but you technically can walk all the way from your teleport landing point to safety without it. Or you can use the brazier (the one that was “glowing like a commercial”) by dropping it so it provides warmth. Or you can eat a fruit (according to Ilmari Jauhiainen, I never even discovered that). And if you’re out of fruit, you can drop the stick which provides more fruit, and finally I understand why the item exists.
Again, I want to emphasize: the unusual aspect here isn’t alternate solutions so much as the ability to ignore the existence of a puzzle. I had no idea removing the djinn from the oasis was meant to be a puzzle until later. The fact you could run by the tentacles really suggests that the authors purposefully engineered a way to ignore the whole sequence in getting the ruby and throwing it. This means someone could blissfully skip the unfair puzzle at the slab (SAY OPEN SESAME) and maybe even think it was scenery and not a puzzle at all! A player could even skip the sphinx, snakes, and priestess; at least it seems clear you’re intended to solve something there. But it’s definitely still possible to at least skip the sphinx and think that maybe teleportation was the intended route!
While I eventually found the lung-fish model, I ended up never strictly needing it; even lighting up the dark portion of the underwater was optional. You might think that there’s no way someone would pass by dark rooms and without realizing there’s a puzzle, but at the very start of the game — in the first building — there’s a dark room that never gets lit up! With teleport luck you could probably bring the jellyfish down into the well but maybe the authors never even bothered to give the room a description and you’d see a glitch.
I will admit I would only recommend Adventure Quest to others under very specialized circumstances. The mazes weren’t bad — except for the very start I wouldn’t say the game had mazes as much as tricky geography to keep track of — but the four-item limit is really obnoxious after a while, and it gave me tension the entire game wondering if I needed to go back yet again to my stash (a convoluted operation) to test another object out for solving a puzzle.
The endgame was satisfying, though. It was in a way very quick and easy, and I think designers are afraid of something like that — making a gameplay denouement when the plot is at its climax — but it works, as the game was all about pre-planning, so the ending is just showing the result of all the player’s planning falling into place.
Trilogies help. Adventure Quest sells as people play Colossal. Middle Earth was a convenient fantasy setting. It was a way of telling people the type of world they were getting.
— Pete Austin, from an interview in Sinclair User, May 1985
Level 9 eventually got called the British equivalent of Infocom. I don’t think they are there yet with this game — the parser is still completely basic, the design is still too tedious in parts — but at least I get the fringes of what is meant, as there’s ambition for some fairly complex overlapping systems at a grand scale. So I’m still looking forward to their next game, but I hope you understand when I say there will be a large gap before we get there.
We’ve had a big chunk of both concentrated fantasy and concentrated Britishness, so for our follow-up let’s go in a different direction. Next up I’ve got two games from the United States: a building that wants to kill you, followed by a hard-boiled detective story.
Renga in Blue 