If you’re wanting a really long digression start things off, here’s a concert from the indie rock group Blake Babies. Freda Boner (aka Freda Love) was on drums.
She’s a co-author today with her father Don Boner; previously we’ve looked at their Smokey-and-the-Bandit-fanfic game called Thunder Road.
I’m not sure how to place things date-wise here, but Deadly Dungeon has an internal copyright date of 1980, was published in the Captain 80 Book of Basic Games in 1981, and showed up in the Programmer’s Guild catalog by 1982. I’m shelving it with 1980 rather than the 1980/1981 split I did with Thunder Road in that it feels very early; a bit sloppier parser-wise than Thunder Road.
What this game does share with Thunder Road is a very gamebook feel, up to the point it starts by generating you a combat skill and giving you a random set of arrows, like you were rolling dice to fill your character sheet and if you follow the rules you have to stick with that 2 out of 12 for combat skill if you’re really that unlucky.
This combat rating is out of a possible 6.
DISCOVER THE SECRET OF THE DEADLY DUNGEON AND EMERGE VICTORIOUS AND WEALTHY.
That’s from the ad copy. Yep, it’s a treasure hunt again; this time there’s seven treasures. You start in a temple which announces it will be where you store the treasures, standard enough opening…
…but then you EXIT TEMPLE to leave and find yourself in one of at least four different starting areas, which with a different monster to fight.
With the combat above I fought against a tiger, but the enemies are mostly interchangable. Here’s a different possible start:
There’s no strategy other than you choose to fight with a sword, or arrows. Sword means you have a chance of dying immediately if you lose an exchange of blows, whereas arrows you can keep going but you’ll die if you run out of arrows.
Sometimes you just die to the opening combat by bad luck, and there’s not really much use in strategizing here. I checked a walkthrough later (for the C64 version) and the author just says to restart if you lose.
Past the opening room is weirdly disconnected complex of rooms that made my brain hurt to map it.
I have trouble describing what’s so bad, or at least unconventional; my best analogy is like getting motion sick at a 3D game. Most games with maze-like sections there’s at least a pretense of explanation why connections would be so arbitrary, but here it was never clear why a graveyard was next to a Victorian room was next to a rock mine, and then, oops, you looped back to the Victorian room again. (Also, the Victorian room contains a box that kills you, but at least it is helpfully marked DO NOT OPEN.)
I might say it was again trying to recreate the game book experience a little bit (lots of one-way choices, especially in the early ones) except you can loop around and revisit rooms, it’s just a little circuitous.
For a while I was stumped until I broke out my verb list and found MOVE amongst the candidates. There aren’t many; the game also recognizes YELL, SAY, PLAY, GO, ENTER, FIGHT, EXAMINE, THROW, HIT, OPEN, READ, and CLIMB. I was able to MOVE a TOMBSTONE randomly in the middle of the map and find a SORCERORS MAGIC ROOM.
The coal pick is important later. There’s also a diamond ring hidden if you EXAMINE TABLE.
I was able to dive into a nearby pit and find a “Council Room” at the bottom, containing two more treasures (a valuable painting and a deed to the castle we’ve been tromping through).
Look, don’t try to make geographic sense of it, unless you want motion sickness.
The sign as shown in the room description above indicates we can ENTER TEMPLE from here, and when we EXIT TEMPLE again we will be on Level 2.
Kind of like an arcade game, I suppose? The general effect was to punch verisimilitude in the head, but I at least see what the authors were getting at. Each “level” starts has a new random start with a new enemy to FIGHT. For level 2, you can get a wolf, a dwarf, or a grasshopper.
You may be wondering why I didn’t drop the deed. You’ll see why in a moment.
The geography of the second level is even more egregious, as you travel from a cave to a mountain to a forest to a tunnel to some senate chambers.
South of the senate chambers are a field of poppies with a rope, but if you try to leave the field without the deed, the game dutifully informs you I DON’T HAVE THE DEED, and soon after you die of poison gas.
If you are holding the deed you can land at a room marked “inside castle” with a copper lamp (another treasure, but you need to hang on to it until you’re done with level 3) and another message informing you that you can ENTER TEMPLE to reset to the next section.
Entering level 3! There’s two possibilities, a vampire bat (dangerous, I died a couple times) and this very helpful troll, where you can just READ SIGN, be told to go east, and you can do it without even bothering to get in a fight. I assume this was a programming oversight.
The third level has a candlestick and a message on a stone cavern that informs you to H I T M E. As long as you have the pick you can do so and as long as you still have the rope from the poppy field you can then climb down a pit to a treasure room.
As long as you haven’t forgotten anything on the way (my first run where I reached this point and I had forgotten the diamond ring, even though I had got it on a previous try) this lets you accumulate enough treasures to win.
Summarizing the “innovations” going on:
1.) Arcade-style level resets (Kidnapped had mini-levels, but was logically proceeding down levels of a building, this made “EXIT TEMPLE” change its destination)
2.) Random room starts with different enemies (even though there wasn’t much actual difference other than their name)
3.) Combat where you could choose from sword or bow and arrow
Without a lot of system density, RPG combat in an adventure game is a tough sell. Without making actual puzzles, there just isn’t enough going on to make fights interesting; Zork managed with the thief by having him be a long-running enemy, integrating him with the treasure hunt itself (he’s even required to get at one of the tougher treasures) and still keeping an “experience point” system of sorts going by using the overall score. I’d love to be proven wrong sometime, but in one of these TRS-80 miniatures I’m not sure a satisfying adventure/RPG hybrid is even possible.
In the far reaches of the Outrim, the Adventure continues.
80 Micro, February 1982.
Death Dreadnaught (1980) was a release of the Programmer’s Guild by “The Dog Brothers” who were probably Robert and Richard Arnstein. It was self-rated R (“due to EXTREME depictions of VIOLENCE”) and distinguished itself with an unusually high level of gore.
Not having the ability to save might be just lazy programming for some, but arguably the game here leverages it into a feature: your goal, to find an ion rod to fuel your ship, is mostly a linear quest with lots of stuff that can kill you, sometimes in amusing ways reminiscent of a Choose Your Own Adventure™ book. We have had a CYOA-style game with Assignment 45 where the restarts became tiresome, but they felt a little different here; mainly in that it feels possible to ratiocinate through the obstacles of Kilgari and live, whereas picking the “right” choice in Assignment 45 came off as random. (I wouldn’t call Kilgari’s deaths “fair” exactly either, just “not random”. Let me explain more when get to that in context.)
The required restarts enhance the gamebook feel, and the drastically low recognized verb list does as well:
READ, OPEN, KILL, THROW, PUSH, PULL, PRESS, SHOOT, CLOSE
(There’s also a couple “magic words” which are standalone verbs.)
One curious feature is despite the minimal parser, if you enter a verb, it will prompt for the noun
-CLOSE
CLOSE WHAT?
or if you just type the noun, it will prompt for the verb
-CARD
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO WITH THE CARD?
(I recently saw a Twitter thread where someone was frustrated playing Zork because they heard a songbird and then just typed >BIRD with the typical Infocom response of needing a verb, followed by >BIRD IS THE VERB. People from the early 80s era, even when using bare-bones parsers, were aware of interaction problems people were having.)
You may incidentally notice my screenshots look slightly different from my other recent TRS-80 plays. I had to use Model I mode (the original computer from 1977) as opposed to the Model III mode (the version released 1980); I don’t know if this was related to emulator issues or the game would have genuine problems on a real Model III.
You start relatively safely, in a desert aboveground with an elevator; the first floor just has a card, an “ion meter” (not a measuring stick, a detector) and a lever that shuts off “LASER PROTECTION”. There’s a room later that fries you if you haven’t pulled the lever.
The second floor is where danger starts. There’s a locked door requiring a word from the card in the screenshot above to open (“SATURN”) followed by a second elevator with ominous vents:
A MEAN VOICE OUT OF THE FRONT PANEL SAYS, “GIVE THE PASSWORD TO GO TO LEVEL 3. NOW!” (I THINK YOU BETTER GIVE IT WHAT IT WANTS. THE VOICE SOUNDS AS IF IT MEANS BUSINESS!)
If you try to use SATURN again:
A VOICE FROM THE FRONT PANEL SAYS, “INCORRECT!”. AS IT SPEAKS, NOT-TOO-BENEFICIAL-FOR-THE-LUNGS GAS POURS OUT OF THE VENTS. OH WELL, SO WHAT IF THERE IS NO OXYGEN TO BREATHE?
The right move is another word from the card; it mentions the Digitron Corporation, and the right word is DIGITRON.
A VOICE FROM THE FRONT PANEL SAYS, “CORRECT. GOING TO LEVEL 3.”
Looping back to what I said about “not random” but also not exactly “fair”, this is a good example — in a real-world logical sense it doesn’t make sense that the code word is Digitron, but in a game-reality sense it came to me quite quickly to try it. It never would have been my first try, but I still found it satisfying to solve.
Moving on, a red herring:
Yes, it’s another in the long list of weapons in adventure games that are unhelpful. There’s temptation to use it later, but it’s a trap.
Moving in farther gets you close to a “blue rectangle”, which is described as being inside a ring of rooms:
Here you get fair warning of a deathtrap; the “Core Observation Floor” mentions the passage north is hot, and if you (wisely) try the other direction you find some insulation.
The insulation is sufficient to get you past the red-marked room and death by heat. (In Assignment 45, the wrong direction would have just melted you without warning, so the player gets denied making a rational choice.)
You next pass by an emergency exit, and enter “The Rectangle”.
Going down at the next level, you find a room which is blank except for encouraging you to use a “magic word”. On the same level, you find a monster, try to use violence, and die.
This is the Death Dreadnaught reference; the creature there is “multilegged, flat-faced, one-eyed, elephant-nosed”, which I’d say is close enough, especially because you can attempt the solution from the original game, which was to throw your weapon (it would accidentally shoot itself).
The weapon, as I said, is a total red herring. Back in the rectangle where you “barely see” an exit down, it turns out you can go up as well. There you find a “miniature rubber monster” which you can take back to the real one:
WHEN YOU DROP THE RUBBER MONSTER, THE CREATURE LOOKS AT IT AND THINKS IT IS A MIRROR IMAGE OF HIM. HE LETS OUT A SHREAK AND RUNS OFF.
Past the monster is a protection suit, that you need for the next obstacle.
Here’s what happens without the suit.
Notice, again, the game tries to give warning: the ion meter from earlier starts going off, and it’s quite possible to veer away and only return once the suit is in hand. (Of course, as a chronicler, I had to experience the deaths for recording purposes, and I didn’t plow ahead just because I thought I’d be lucky and there’s only be a time limit or some such. Nope, didn’t do that. Speaking of time limits, there doesn’t seem to be any until right to the end, which is another gesture towards fairness.)
Getting by the ions allowed grabbing a key, which opens a nearby door with a convenient box for containing ion rods (albeit an easy-to-miss one, the exit is not described), and a hint about that “magic word” room from earlier.
Not too rough; I’ll leave the identity of the magic word unspoiled for anyone who wants to solve it.
The magic word then leads to THE FINAL COUNTDOWN.
I knew something was fishy with “RODA” but I decided to go with it.
Rushing to the emergency exit, I tried to leave and died. The exit was tight, and I couldn’t carry my inventory through so I wasted time dropping stuff. Oddly, the game has no general inventory limit, but that allows for the trap where it gets enforced.
Another go: this time I dropped everything but the box. I was able to get RODA, slide out the emergency exit, drop the rod in the ship at the start of the game.
I absolutely knew this was coming, but I wanted to see it. Nice job, game. (Again, not “fair”, but not “random” either, especially given the meta-parser hint about there being multiple rods.)
Even though not described, the room that has RODA lets you go south to find RODB and south again to RODC. RODC is the one that’s just right.
Fun for what it was, I suppose; I was in the right mood so the deaths gave me amusement rather than frustration. I’m glad it didn’t go any longer (see: no saved game feature, having to retrace my steps every single death).
We’re nearing the end of Programmer’s Guild games. This April 1982 ad I believe shows all of them.
80-US Journal, April 1982.
Gauntlet of Death and Maze of Darkness are semi-roguelike action games. (From the latter: “The MAZE is filled with invisible traps, avoidable only by the skilled, the experienced and the lucky. To move your figure through the MAZE, use the arrow keys.”)
That leaves Deadly Dungeon, which I’ll be playing next. It will bring us the return of Don and Freda Boner (previously: Thunder Road). It looks like there are RPG elements, but we’ll see?
Your object in this game is to overcome the forces of evil.
— From the instructions for the Dragon version of The Black Sanctum
The Black Sanctum (original version 1981, graphics added 1984) is the second game by Ron Krebs to be converted by Stephen O’Dea and Bob Withers for TRS-80 Color Computer. It is also the last game from Mr. Krebs, which is rather a pity because it’s rather good, honestly one of the best I’ve encountered for All the Adventures. (If you’d prefer to try it yourself and avoid spoilers, I give instructions for getting the game at the end of this post.)
The setup rather nebulously places you outside a cabin with no explanation of how or why you are there; I went with the notion this was accidental and the protagonist was looking for shelter, but I could also see rolling with the idea that they arrived intentionally looking for someone in danger, who you’ll see in a moment.
The outdoors just loops you in a circle, the only way forward is in:
The “it’s getting cold in here” message occurs after a few turns, and was sufficient for me to feel the cold. What I mean is that I’ve seen many deserts and snowy valleys in adventure games, but only sometimes do my imaginings contain any real temperature, hot or cold (even the thirst puzzle in the desert of Acheton was more an intellectual exercise than sensing the inexorable heat of the sun).
By waiting a beat before the cold message, the game leveraged the passage of time itself to increase the effect, essentially integrating atmosphere with mechanics; the door will also come into the plot later.
Upstairs is the person in danger I mentioned, in a magical coma and clutching the note shown above.
You can, if you want, carry her with you.
The closet contains a black robe and mirror, looking in the mirror takes you through to the Sanctum. While in the Sanctum black-hooded figures will occasionally appear; if you don’t have the robe they will try to turn you to stone (you can break out by saying “invocare episcopus”, but that teleports you to the closet and it means the robe might be somewhere difficult to reach).
A plaque announces we are at St. Sebastian’s, founded 1739, and a manuscript announces things went wrong in the same century, shelved next to a Bach fugue.
The only antagonist who isn’t a monk is the old man above, although he is placated by a jug full of wine and falls asleep (you can get the jug back). From the man you can get the items above (keys, shears, a saw) and the keys let you into a locked room with an organ.
Playing a fugue at the organ will open a secret area where clearly the Bad Things happen.
A passage behind the lectern leads further to a crypt, where the bishop from the 1700s awaits us…
…and explains how to overcome the forces of evil.
Looking at the more satisfying adventure games we’ve encountered, many have been a sort of “climax” puzzle, one that puts together the pieces throughout the game for a final push, heroic or antiheroic. Zork II had you collect treasures for a demon, who you used to defeat the wizard that tormented you all throughout the game; Voodoo Castle had a ritual that you put together in pieces; Frankenstein had the ultimate revival of the monster (who you then had to defeat).
The collection of the ritual above fell in the same category, as it was a treasure hunt across the whole map. For building an altar, there’s a boarded up door; removing the nails with the hammer lets you reuse the boards and nails. The white cloth (which took a little thought) is from the bed that woman is sleeping on. The pine needles are from outside, although going outside presents a problem:
You can use a shovel to get through to get needles; you also need to GET SNOW while holding the jug. After you’ve gone through this, the woman has disappeared. There’s no way to prevent this; she’s a statue back at the pentagram and the raven. (Even if you’re carrying her — I guess it’s a magic curse rather than a kidnapping. I would have loved there to be an alternate ending, but this is on a TRS-80 CoCo, so I understand there are limits.)
This does unfortunately present a potential softlock, because you need have gotten a lock of her hair (using the shears) before she gets statue-fied. (Another possible softlock comes from not getting the shovel before the snow blocks the door, but the shovel is just laying outside and I’m guessing very few adventurers would leave an item behind.)
Bringing everything back yields sanctified ash, as mentioned above, and it is only a few steps to victory: THROW ASH followed by INVOCARE EPISCOPUS.
I can’t say the game felt “modern”, but it aced its atmosphere, and even though they essentially present no danger when you have the black robe, the constant appearance of monks was nerve wracking. The puzzles weren’t difficult but they felt substantial, especially in collecting for the ritual, and the cursed woman gave the plot a bit of heft.
There wasn’t any especially artful prose, but nothing was sloppy or egregious either. There were not, in retrospect, that many dynamic elements, but the small pieces the game had (combined with the semi-tragic ending) elevated what could have been a regular scavenger hunt into something else.
I wanted this game to capture what I loved about playing D&D with Sam – we always spent more time bouncing between colourful taverns and having wild interactions with interesting NPCs than we did slaying dragons in his campaigns.
I want to get back to the other Rob Krebs game from 1981 with the groovy graphics, but for a chaser let’s toss in another all-text game. This happens to have the same theme as Calixto Island, where our quest is not to find a bunch of treasures, but just one of them.
Find a hidden bar of gold a text adventure game
The APX, or Atari Program eXchange, was intended as a way for users to publish through Atari. Since the last APX games we’ve examined (Alien Egg and Castle, both by Robert Zdybel) I’ve learned more about the APX program itself and its interaction with the aforementioned users, but that discussion should wait for a different game, because Wizard’s Gold has no author name attached and might be by in-house staff at Atari (I’ll get into why later).
All the APX games so far seem to share a common codebase, which involves a slightly odd parser where, for example, L works to LOOK at a room but not the word LOOK itself, and GET works but not TAKE. Also, obstacles are only vaguely described with failure to go past one described as SOMETHING IS IN YOUR WAY and — most relevant to my start of gameplay — exits to rooms are only sometimes mentioned.
So, whacking against every wall it is:
I think the text width is supposed to be two characters smaller, but I’m not sure how to change the setting.
The opening house gives the impression the geography might be slightly coherent, with a rooftop garden containing a book where reading it says THAT HAS NO EFFECT HERE, another quirk of the APX parser.
I typed GET first instead of TAKE almost every single time; sorry game, this is one habit you’re not going to train me out of. Look, GET is one character less: think of the efficiency!
A lamp is in a nearby “observatory”…
The wizard was keen on astronomy it seems, for this room is filled with many televisions and no windows.
…and the game gave its first hint this was not “fantasy” genre, exactly, but “wild gonzo surreal” (see also: Stuga). Eventually this sort of thing got overdone, but from the range of 1971-1981 I can’t pull many examples of sheer randomness. (Mines and Lugi maybe as well, but both of those involve genuine in-game randomizers.)
So I found it sort of refreshing, if not exactly satisfying on a deep art level. More examples:
BLANK ROOM
This room intentionally left blank.
ART GALLERY
This room is filled with many obviously valuable works of art.
Actually, all the works of art are forgeries and are valueless.
There is a large rusty key here.
EGG ROOM
You are in a room filled with rotten eggs.
From somewhere among the eggs you hear a voice saying “GLEEK”.
?SAY GLEEK
A very large egg appears. It splits open, and a weird guy jumps out and says “NANOO-NANOO”.
The complete map, where as you get deeper in it feels more and more like the author was just slapping on whatever they felt like.
After going underneath the Wizard’s house, you find a magic mushroom (which gives strength, not hallucinations), a magic broom, and a magic broom repair room (which never gets used, since the broom is in good condition). There’s also a library where you can read the book from the garden and get the magic word STELLA. Using STELLA yields a magic wand, which lets you go to the art gallery I quoted earlier and get the rusty key.
Another magic word yields itself up in a psychedelic room on a blacklight poster; you need to turn off the lamp to see it.
The magic word is COLLEEN. Anyone with a guess what it is a reference to?
Some more wandering will get you down to a computer room…
The wizard had many computers in his possession. Most of them look old by today’s standards.
There is even an ATARI 800, one of the first major home computers.
…immediately adjacent to a shooting range.
CROSSBOW FIRING RANGE
This was the sight of the firing range for the wizard and his crossbows.
There used to be a sign here that said “No Crossing on Foot”.
Wait, how do you know there “used” to be a sign here? Is the narrator adding details?
RIDE BROOM will let you go south to an aquarium.
This room has many aquariums in it. Some are broken, and some are not.
A fish tank full of piranha lies on the floor. The piranha look hungry.
As long as you’ve given yourself strength with the mushroom , you can MOVE TANK to reveal a trapdoor. The rusty key from the art gallery unlocks the trapdoor beneath to get to a treasure room.
The gold bar then can be toted back to the starting room for victory.
Why is this probably an internal Atari game? Well, other than not having an author name (which is pretty odd for the APX catalog, nearly everyone was credited) the name Stella refers to the original codename for the Atari 2600. While the Stella trivia is well-known now (an Atari 2600 emulator is even named Stella) it doesn’t seem to have been circulated to the public in 1981. Dale Dobson suspects Dennis Koble, who wrote two other 1981 APX games we haven’t gotten to yet, Chinese Puzzle and Sultan’s Palace.
Also, to be honest, this feels like a “let’s test out the system” type game more than a serious effort, where it got tossed in the catalog just because it was there. It wasn’t a terrible experience, though, and it’s nice to have another data point on the still-at-the-time-latent “surreal” genre which now has over 300 games listed at the Interactive Fiction Database.
Ron Krebs wrote two text adventures in 1981 for the TRS-80, purely in text: Calixto Island and Black Sanctum. Later he saw the work of Stephen O’Dea and Bob Withers — specifically the game Shenanigans — and asked if his games could be converted in the same way. Since I wasn’t able to find the original of Calixto Island, I played the graphical version instead, and oddly enough, the graphics look … nice? There’s even small animations. From the starting room:
Slightly later in the game:
Now, it helps these games were converted starting in late 1983, but even so, trust me when I say 1983 will have some art just as dodgy as 1981. It’s nice to see something approaching what might pass for modern pixel art.
The plot, unfortunately, likely doesn’t pass as modern: Professor Lagarto has gone missing and we’re trying to find him. We are given an entirely different starting premise in a later port for Dragon computers…
Your object in this game is to find a treasure and return it to its rightful place.
…but both quests amount to the same objective, as you’ll see.
The opening just starts you in the professor’s study, with a bunch of items you can slurp up, in fact more than you can comfortably hold in your very tiny inventory limit of four items: a flashlight, a chest, some glasses (in the chest), a manual (also in the chest), a box of costume jewelry, and the oriental rug from the start, which reveals a trap door when you pick it up. Beneath is a storage room with a tire pump, a bucket, a mouse trap, and a hidden switch which leads to a lab.
Remember back during Timequest where I said the time travel device might as well have been a teleporter? Well, this one’s an actual teleporter, although it only goes to and from one place.
I got stuck for a while here because I could only go west (to that animated path with jungle growth I showed off earlier). Is the intent really to have GO HILL be a hidden exit, or was this an interface failure?
There’s some fairly staightforward puzzles around here I won’t belabor, and someone in a “grass shack” that wants to trade.
The trader fairly specifically first wants the rug and then the wooden chest (interesting insofar as those didn’t originally seem like typical “useful” objects for solving puzzles but I was fortunately being a packrat). You can get some keys and a machete in the process. After you’ve traded both objects the teleporter disappears.
The disappearance is relatively subtle and I admit I didn’t spot it until I tried GO DEVICE and got confused from its lack of presence. (I mean, OK, it’s large on the screen, but I had reached the point where I was on autopilot-navigation mode through rooms I had been through before.)
This sequence is interesting and mysterious but kind of odd in that the keys go back to the desk at the start of the game and unlock it, revealing a microfilm.
It must be buried at the pagan idol on Calixto Island. If you find it, put it in my study.
Spoilers, the machine appears back again after you retrieve “it” — I’m not entirely clear why — but assuming a player who has to wait until the end to read the message, it seems like it’s already moot? Seeing the microfilm early requires getting the keys first and trade for the machete later.
Onward: adjacent to the trading shack there’s a inflatable raft that requires the tire pump to INFLATE RAFT, paddles from a nearby maze to go into the ocean…
…and a bucket to keep from drowning. Afterwards:
The “unfriendly natives” are satisfied if you give them jewelry. Then you can head off to the west and find The Professor.
Oops. Guess he’s not coming with us. You can apply a shovel to dig both the idol and the grave. The first digging reveals a pot, the second reveals *Montezuma’s jeweled crown* — that is, our object. The only problem is, the natives from earlier are observent:
Yes, they deflated the boat and are waiting for you. I died the first time through here because I didn’t tote along the tire pump. If you hurry to inflate the raft you can rush off the island to safety, head back to the study, and “win”?
So, let me recap the plot to make sure I have this right:
1.) You start looking for a missing professor, and find a teleporter that goes to some islands.
2.) On the islands, you find a set of keys, one which fits the desk back at the start and reveals a microfilm that for some reason informs you that the item you are looking for should be dropped off in the study.
3.) You locate Calixto Island, and find the grave of the Professor. Buried nearby is a crown that you are allowed to take because a microfilm told us to? And the natives aren’t happy with us taking it, which sounds kind of like “stealing”?
4.) Then we deposit the crown in the study of a professor we know to be dead, and “win”.
OK, I’m being a little harsh here, but the game really seemed to try to have a twist, so it was hard to ignore. I am glad the natives were not gullible rubes, and I suppose in some sense the game went out of its way to highlight we were being amoral. It’s interesting that the Dragon instructions are defensive that we’re to “find a treasure and return it to its rightful place” — it is of course possible that being buried on a beach isn’t its rightful place, but I’m pretty sure the professor’s study most definitely isn’t.
Nitpicks aside, I appreciated a game tilted to the easy end, and art that was genuinely nice to look at. I sometimes stopped just to watch the animated clouds float by.
That’s despite the shadows going in multiple directions.
What remained was mainly “hidden puzzles” — finding secrets to unlock the last section, with a battle against a cyclops guarding the fountain of youth.
First, I had missed that in one spot of the jungle I could dig twice, not just once. Digging a second time yielded a small stone that matched the other two I found, and when dropping them all together, they formed a tablet.
The tablet I bought from the market had a picture of a cave; this one had a picture of a mountain and the word SUN. Taking it to the mountain (on the small island with the sword, medicine, and shovel) and saying the word SUN opened a secret fountain.
Dropping the cave tablet in the cave fountain and the mountain tablet in the mountain tablet caused the ground to shake, and a white globe to appear in the fountain.
Searching all the places I visited, I now found the stone block I was stumped by earlier had now been turned into rubble.
This was “arbitrary” but still satisfying, since it was a puzzle that essentially required putting together pieces from the entire map: the cave fountain was on one island, the mountain fountain was on another, and the effect was to open the secret hallway on the third island.
(Before going on, I should mention I did manage to open the locked chest too — there was just a room I had forgotten to dig in with the shovel that had a key. The chest had a golden mask which is going to be coming up in a moment. Also, I had found a chalice on the altar which I had previously prayed at, which I’ll also need shortly.)
Inside the passage I found a pit which required using my rope.
Games from this era have way too much friction. The several minutes it took me to figure out the sequence of commands above made me lose momentum right when the plot should have been speeding up.
Down below was the cyclops.
While the cyclops also shows up in Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, the solution here is rather different. Breaking the white globe lets out a blinding flash of light, and wearing the mask protects you from the same light, hence:
This led the path open to the fountain of youth…
…which I was able to take back all the way to the palace and the waiting king.
I’m hoping he was a nice king and I didn’t just give an extra 50 years to a tyrant.
I don’t do a lot of rankings, but for fun, here’s my rough rankings of the Scott Adams Twelve, from “worst” to best:
Now, I admit I’m allergic to applying points to things, and looking at the list, even Ghost Town had some worthy aspects. Also, it’s not like I find Pirate Adventure bad — I’d even say if you only play one Scott Adams game, try that one, as the difficulty is tilted low and it still makes a satisfying experience.
Or consider The Count, which does an amazing job unifying a plot with puzzles (in a way only equaled by the Savage Island games) but where I had a frustrating time at the actual gameplay level in terms of getting everything arranged correctly. I could easily see other players having a more positive experience.
Golden Voyage wasn’t bad, per se, and the structure, as I emphasized before, was interesting to figure out, but it never had any puzzles that struck above average (unlike the heart of Pyramid of Doom or the finale of Mystery Fun House) and most of my time was dealing with fiddly aspects, like the parser commands to navigate off a staircase, or forgetting to lower anchor at a port and having the boat float away, or making sure I’ve tried DIG in every single room more than once.
It’s not like Scott Adams is going away — we’ve got his Questprobe series coming as well as adventures #13 and #14, and looking far into the future he even has recent work — but I can still summarize and say: the set of games for the time period (1978-1981) is an impressive achievement compared with the other adventures available. It’s true most of the ideas were outpaced by later work from Infocom and others, but some of them (like the intricate timing of Savage Island) still reward study today.
The cover above references a “fountain of youth”. This indicates that the fountain I ran across roughly 20 minutes into playing is the objective of the game! I don’t know if that means all we need is a container, but given the divine thunderbolt that killed me, I’m guessing there’s an extra procedure involved. In either case that makes for an interesting structural concept: showing the game’s objective early.
Speaking of interesting structures: as I theorized before, The Golden Voyage has more than one island. Once I realized the general pattern I found it satisfying to navigate.
This is the map the boat is on; you SAIL to the island you want, drop anchor, and explore. (As a side observation, while I understand the use of loops here to make the ocean feel wide and open, I feel it to be frustrating and unrealistic. Honestly, the only loops that were OK were in Adventure, simulating real cave exits that went nowhere; loops on most other text adventure maps have felt like crutches.)
Just like Timequest, the division of space makes for themed mini-areas. I already mentioned the jungle with the cave and the fountain:
To the west of the opening city I discovered a “small island” apparently without obstacles other than the ever-present scorpions. There’s a “skeleton” in the opening room that I thought might have been the animated kind, but no: it’s just an inert skeleton.
You can even pick it up and take it with you. Other than the skeleton, there’s a shovel, a box with “medicine”, and a sword.
The game made up for its lack of animated skeleton with an animated statue on a third island.
This led to a colorful combat scene:
It took me a long time to find the syntax get off the staircase. It’s WALK UP or WALK DOWN. GO STAIR says “please be more specific” and for the life of me I don’t understand why UP and DOWN don’t just work.
Past the statue was a temple with an altar, where PRAY opens a secret passage.
The inside was dark, but fortunately, on the jungle/cave island I had used my newly-found shovel to dig up a rope and a torch. Inside the temple passage was a large block (not sure what to do with that) and a curious stone which “appears to be broken” and “has strange markings”. You can find another stone just like it in the rubble of the defeated statue, but I haven’t been able to unite the stones in any way.
Other than that, I’m dealing with a locked ornate chest I can’t open … and that’s it. The list of obstacles suggests to me I’m missing a hidden puzzle somewhere, or maybe my island map is inaccurate and there’s another place to sail to.
Still, referring back to the structure, the gameplay is pleasing enough I’m enjoying myself so far and not about to reach for hints yet.
I want to clear up a misconception I’ve seen elsewhere about Golden Voyage, #12 in the Scott Adams series.
— backtrack that, I’m going to let Scott Adams himself do it. This is from an audio interview on the Atari 8-bit Podcast; you can listen to the relevant portion from the man himself or just read the transcript below.
Kevin Savetz: Based on your feedback that you get, what do you think is your most enduring adventure game?
Scott Adams: Probably Pirate Adventure, a lot of people remember that and connected with it. That, I get a lot of response from. Voodoo Castle, which I didn’t do as much of the writing as my wife back then, tried to write an adventure and I had to clean it up with her. It has more of a woman’s touch to it, and that seemed to resound with a number of people. Another one that was popular has an interesting story behind it. That’s Pyramid of Doom. That was adventure number eight. That’s set in the sands of Egypt, a lot of people remember that and the Purple Worm. They know a lot about it. The interesting thing is I didn’t write that one at all.
I got a submission in the mail from somebody saying, I wrote this adventure game, take a look at it. It runs on your engine. I’m going what, wait a minute I never released an engine, I never told anyone how my engine works, it’s totally proprietary you couldn’t have.
I took it and started playing it and sure enough, he did it on my engine. It was a decent game. I contacted him, his name is Alvin Files, he’s still around, he’s in Oklahoma now, retired. He’s a lawyer and he was just interested in it.
He took my machine language, disassembled it, figured out what it was doing, and figured out my language, which is awesome. He’s not the only one that did that. Another fellow did it which is, I think it’s number 12 in my series, Golden Voyage, by William Demas. He did the same exact thing. In both cases neither one knew each other and neither had contacted each other.
I worked with them and I thought this is so amazing if they’re able to do it, I want to get their stuff published. I’ll give them publishing rights, I’ll give them royalties, and I’ll edit it with them because they were still rough gems, and I’d learned a lot of things about how an adventure should flow and so forth. I worked with them from that point of view. It’s amazing what they did.
So Golden Voyage, like Pyramid of Doom, is not really “by” Scott Adams, although his name is on the credits.
Misspelled, even. I am not making this up.
Ravenworks in the comments has the theory this was just due to a bad read, as the difference between “o” and “g” in ASCII is one bit.
Demas was busy in 1981 with Timequest (which we’ve already seen) and Forbidden Planet (which will be coming up later in 1981).
The king lies near death in the royal palace – you have only three days to bring back the elixer needed to rejuvenate him. Journey through the lands of magic fountains, sacred temples, stormy seas, and gold, gold, GOLD! Can you find the elixer in time?
— From the back cover of the game, and yes, elixir is spelt wrong twice
I tossed this game in now while Ulysses and the Golden Fleece was fresh in my memory. Just like that game, you start in a small “town” area where you buy things, although the merchants in The Golden Voyage are a bit more bloodthirsty.
I haven’t seen a beatdown like this since Nethack. This amuses me rather than bothers me design-wise since it’s so easy to reset the situation. Ulysses and the Golden Fleece just says “YOU HAVE TO BUY IT” if you try for the five-finger discount.
Nearby is a palace, where you are given your quest and a giant bag of gold with a minimum of fuss.
This lets you go back and buy the sandals as well as a compass, telescope, and stone tablet (with a picture of a cave). But since this is a lot of gold, it also lets you buy an entire boat.
Just like Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, I had a hellacious time trying to launch the thing. That game I eventually hit upon GO OCEAN, which doesn’t work here.
The proper command is SAIL (direction), that is, SAIL NORTH or SAIL SOUTH or SAIL EAST or SAIL WEST. I was stuck for so long I thought maybe I was missing a crew or putting the sail somewhere in particular.
You incidentally can climb the mast to get to a crow’s nest, and go in the cabin to find a cot you can sleep in and have time pass.
Moving on, if you SAIL EAST twice and LOOK TELESCOPE while in the crow’s nest, you find land.
If you’re not wearing the sandals, the scorpions bite you and you eventually die.
However, there isn’t much more to see; you can go in the jungle (two rooms) and find a dark cave. The game had a slight delay before showing the usual “you can’t see” message, so I was able to assess there was a fountain inside with a strange liquid.
I’m stuck here although I’ve got a two ideas for experiment:
a.) Check sailing in different directions; it’s possible there’s only one island, but if this is anything like Ulysses there are more. I know TORCH is an accepted noun and given the jungle island seems to only have the cave (which I peeked into by less-than-official methods) I suspect I’m missing an area.
b.) Mess around with PRAY, which is an accepted verb. I tried putting the tablet in the fountain and praying after with no result, but maybe I need to use a different item?
For reference, here’s my verb list (verbs that work are marked in orange):
All videogame genres have norms; some are obvious (first-person shooters using WASD keys) and some are less visible (the lack of softlocks in modern adventure games). They can, of course, evolve (see softlocks in older adventure games) but they can feel as organic as the air, and it takes a off-kilter game that violates the norm to make them apparent.
…
The first two of the Softside Adventures of the Month (see: Arabian Adventure, Alien Adventure) both cadged liberally off movies, and I can tell you from peeking ahead that the September through December 1981 installments do relatively the same, but Treasure Island Adventure is a one-off: a traditional treasure collect-a-thon. It’s also Pete Tyjewski’s only game.
Softside, August 1981.
The “goal” is simply to find the pirate’s treasure, and if you want to declare victory with just that objective, you can. There’s a traditional building-with-vault to stick it in.
However, every single item in the game counts for points. So if you’re actually going for a maximum point total (258), you’re scavenging everything to bring back, not just ostensible treasure items. Specifically, the treasure chest is 50 points, three other treasure items are 20 points each, everything else is 2 points each. Oddly, some of the 2 point items are described as treasures, like a gold ring or a gold shield, equal to the “garbage” items which also count for 2 points, like a parchment giving the author’s name.
This is deep in the game, and the author’s name isn’t given elsewhere.
In addition, the game adds a point for every room visited (like Adventure 500) and it has a point bonus for finishing within a certain turn limit (like Adventure 430); handling both and getting all the items requires some serious routing.
Above-ground is very, very, plain, and establishes a minimal room-description style.
The only items are a keg of “whale oil”, a lamp, and some matches; those all go together to make a light source (FILL LAMP / LIGHT LAMP) which I’m fairly sure is unlimited.
Incidentally, the verb list is very small; other than lamp lighting, you can move around, pick up and drop, examine things, read things, and say words. That’s it. The experience is akin to Chaffee’s Quest (1978) in being mostly exploration and finding a treasure, but the game manages to eke out puzzles in the form of requiring items to be held for certain effects, and two magic words.
The sparse style is thrown for a loop by a couple rooms inside.
I think the norm being broken here was something like “at most 4 objects to a room”. A snath is a handle of a scythe.
I admit being somewhat boggled when I first hit these; I had spent a long time making my outdoor map (I still can’t guarantee it’s error-free) so the transition to having a cavalcade of items was both notable and confusing. Especially because so many of the items are “useless” except for the 2-point count. For example, in the Armory, the sword is useful, and only the sword.
This sword is magic
The runes say
ASTO REBLOF DOF
DESTO MARKO BLODD
I’ll get to the meaning of that in a second. There’s a gold coin two rooms away with a similar message (accompanied by an absolutely useless coil of rope).
The coin is magic, the runes are:
IFTO GOOTOO ROPTO BLUTU
MORTO FLORTO GORTO BORTU
Map-making remained slow because directions were usually but not always mentioned in room descriptions, which means I had to keep testing them all. Eventually I came across a maze, and progress was even slower. (I would say this was penance for skipping the maze in Castles of Darkness, but I had played through this part before Castles. I had shelved the game a while due to exhaustion before I got back into it two days ago.)
Inside the maze I found … nothing. Absolutely nothing. Similar to Microworld, this is because there was going to eventually be an object in the future, but I still felt a sliver of despair upon mapping the last unmarked exit with nothing to show for my efforts.
Another section of the map led me to Hell.
Hell is kind of tiny. Must be the Sartre kind of hell.
You need to have asbestos boots to cross a red hot iron bridge inside. (Just in your inventory, they’re apparently assumed to be worn — as I indicated earlier, tiny verb set. Compare with the bit in The Golden Baton where I got messed up due to having an invisibility cloak in inventory but not being worn.) Within Hell there’s an arch which requires a wizard outfit. Specifically: a robe, hat, and the 2-foot rod with a rusty star; yes, you use it as a costume, not as a magic item.
When I attempted to go farther the game said “You must have known a pirate and have a treasure to enter.”
Off in another direction there was a “scholar’s cave” with a treasure map, a book, and a parchment. Here’s the map:
The parchment is the author credits I mentioned earlier; the book translates the sword and the coin.
If you have this weapon, and say vargay, no door will ever, bar you way
If you have me with you, and say valoor, I will reveal, A secret door
The map indicates where to try VALOOR:
This led me to the desired treasure chest.
You are in a little nitch
There is a very large treasure chest here
Upon which the game threw another curveball similar to Quest: the routes back were either blocked by the wizard, who had come back…
…or used holes that the chest couldn’t fit inside.
I wandered a bit and the pirate came to steal and re-hide his treasure.
Suddenly Long John and the pirate leaps out of the gloom and takes the treasure
HAH, he shouts, found me treasure, did you. Well this time I’ll hide it better!
He dissappears into the darkness with the treasure
Fortunately, I had already mapped the maze, so it was a straightforward matter to reach the “more secret” hiding spot and get the treasure chest back. The chest is fortunately only stolen from you only once. (Aside: although we’re really the ones stealing the chest, right? I’m sure the pirate didn’t get his bounty through bake sales, but I get no sense the protagonist has a noble cause in mind.)
Having both the chest in hand as well as the encounter with Long John, I finally was able to go back into the lounge of Hell.
I’ve been taking a pass commenting on typos, but I can’t resist pointing out buccaneer is spelled wrong twice, and in two different ways.
This led to a (mercifully) tiny maze and an alternate exit which bypasses the wizard giving a straight shot to taking the chest to the vault.
The other valuable treasures are a Ming vase (it’s the Adventure puzzle where you have to drop a pillow first), a crown (that you get from a cage of the wizard that locks behind you; you use the magic word on the sword to get out) and an anvil (which if you EXAMINE tells you it’s secretly golden, which sounds kind of not-useful for an anvil).
When Dale Dobson tried this, he took a crack at optimizing, but threw in the towel. I tried a little, but unlike Madventure, it started to feel tedious rather than a tight puzzle; so, I’m going to stop here as well. I will say I appreciated the sheer oddness of a treasure hunt that was both simultaneously sparse (only 4 “meaningful” treasures) and packed (every item gives points) at the same time, where weapons are useless for killing, where one of the main antagonists only appears as something to avoid, and where a heavily restricted verb set nevertheless put forth a few tricky puzzles.
Renga in Blue 