We’ve previously played Reality Ends by William F. Denman, Jr. and Deathmaze 5000 by Frank Corr, Jr. For Labyrinth, William and Frank teamed up to re-use the Deathmaze engine for another 3D adventure.
The movement system is identical. There’s still a torch that slowly runs out and a hunger system. Every item is still in a “box” to make it easy to represent.
Unlike Deathmaze where the goal was just to escape, here the goal is to hunt down and kill the minotaur. I ran across the minotaur rather quickly.
The P is a pit you can fall down; note also the Z which is the bottom of a pit, indicating we are starting at the middle of the maze instead of the top or bottom.
If you stay in any of the “Fog” locations for long enough eventually the ground shakes and the minotaur appears. (This is a lot like the Deathmaze monster, but the previous game didn’t have an entire chunk of the very first map marked as a danger zone.)
The maze is more confusing this time; notice the “teleport” locations. Sometimes you can take a step in one direction and find when turning around that the landscape has changed behind you. I ended up making this map past one of the teleports; notice there’s a symmetry which suggests somewhere along the line I managed to loop back to where I started.
The grapes are FOOD. I’m pretty sure it’s the same box in both places.
There’s no obvious initial sticking puzzle like the calculator from Deathmaze. Just getting to the point where I have the boundaries mapped might take a while. If you’re eager to “read ahead”, Will Moczarski covered Labyrinth last year at The Adventure Gamer.
The AX at the beginning is entirely a red herring. The TROLL is a red herring. The FLUTE that you can use to charm a snake is a red herring (you get bit with or without using the flute beforehand). The stone IDOL is a red herring. The RAT is a red herring.
House of Thirty Gables is like a con as a text adventure game, and appropriately, one of the most infamous con artists in early computer history makes an appearance.
…
While he had already started his career in crime at least 10 years before, “Colonel David Winthrop” (aka Harry Hunt, aka Jim Anderson) first turned to computers in 1975 when he joined the Southern California Computer Society.
The Southern California Computer Society was formed that very summer as “a group of computer hobbyists and enthusiasts who are determined to build home systems and share their understanding and dreams with a world which has become dependent upon and soon must become familiar with those fascinating and perplexing machines called computers.”
Out of the 184 starting members (179 men, 5 women) 83 had interest in a group purchase; while it was possible to get a reasonably priced Altair 8800 at this time, more powerful computers were still very expensive.
They eventually gathered $7000, which “went to a vendor … who never vended.” This, combined with litigation involving a publisher, led to the SCCS’s dissolution a mere 2 years later.
The $7000, of course, went to the Colonel; around $33,000 in 2019 after inflation. This was a tidy payday, but he was just getting started.
On its surface, the advertisement above was a good discount for its time.
The picture is a mock-up; there are no parts inside.
The Colonel had refined the basic scam idea from the SCCS’s “group purchase” — get people to spend money for non-existent hardware, take the money, and run. The extra twist here is that the company is real. He hired four other people to form DataSync; they didn’t know they were part of a scam.
However, this time the police had caught up with him, and he was arrested the month before the advertisement above came out. That wasn’t enough to stop the Colonel, who instructed the receptionist to read, verbatim:
I must inform you that the DataSync Corporation advertisements currently appearing in the magazines are fraudulent and the man responsible is now in jail. We do have every intention of producing a 16K RAM and a low-cost video terminal that are similar electronically and cosmetically, but you have to be aware that the advertisements are false.
Our expected shipping date for the new DataSync DS-16K RAM is approximately July 28th, and the expected shipping date on the DA-100 Terminal is September 15th. Knowing this, would you still like to place an order for superior products from DataSync Corporation?
Most of the people calling in still put in an order.
The Colonel clearly had a knack for persuasion. He pleaded guilty to 3 charges of felony theft and was sentenced to 32 months in prison. After six months he used his knack to wrangle himself a transfer to the minimum-security Chino State Prison, where he then performed a prison break the very next day (February 26, 1978) by just walking away.
…
The Colonel was on the run. In their June 1978 issue, Kilobaud Magazine reprinted a bulletin from the Santa Maria Police Department.
His method of operation has been to move to a town under a new identity, rent a house with an option to buy and to make contacts in his field of endeavor (recently, computer hobbyists). Hunt will generally begin his operation by soliciting backing for product design from private parties. Often he will sell his qualifications so well that it is the victim’s idea to ask Hunt to design a product for him.
Despite this detailed description (with five mugshots!), the Colonel still wasn’t done scamming the computer world, and in 1979 he returned for his biggest score.
…
This time, the Colonel set up base in Tucson, Arizona. In January 1979, the unwitting Perry Pollock signed a contract to make a company called World Power Systems, Incorporated.
Perry Pollock’s job was to provide venture capital and credit. (He was the one with the good credit.)
The scam ran a little different. World Power Systems started like a real company. They bought equipment from suppliers, and they always paid on time. They took orders for merchandise and actually shipped what was promised. At first.
They started to fall behind in shipping; they blamed suppliers and told customers to please be patient. Orders were still being sent, just with a delay.
In the meantime, because they had bought equipment and paid for it on time, they built enough confidence with suppliers to ask for items on loan.
You might see where this is going, but the final phase never quite happened. The ideal scenario for the Colonel, as described in Kilobaud October 1979:
Eventually, everything would come to a head. The creditors would threaten to go to the police and courts for their money; the customers would threaten to go to the Better Business Bureau and the police to get their equipment. At this point Phase IV would be initiated. This would entail cleaning out the bank accounts, shifting the merchandise around from one location to another and leaving a confusing trail as to its exact location — and setting up a fall guy.
However, the heat went on too early, due to the efforts of two computer enthusiasts, Bill Godbout and John Craig (the latter being the former editor of Kilobaud). The Colonel decided to try to take the money and run; carting off allegedly around $250,000 in merchandise (over a million in 2019 dollars after inflation).
He (with his wife) was in the middle of dying his hair when the police found him.
…
So, back to the game.
It turned out I really only had two puzzles left to resolve since last time. The first involved finding an antidote for a snake bite, and as a number of commenters pointed out, the cryptic MAREZEDOATS… hint the game gave was a reference to a song.
If the words sound queer and funny to your ear, a little bit jumbled and jivey,
Sing “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.”
“Eat ivy” at the end was the key — while not an object in the game, there was a room described as having ivy.
YOU ARE IN A LARGE DAMP ROOM. THE WALLS ARE COMPLETELY COVERED WITH IVY.
A NARROW FOREBODING PASSAGE LEADS WEST.
A GLOOMY PASSAGE LEADS NORTH.
A WIDE MISTY PASSAGE HEADS SOUTH.
EAT IVY
YOU CHOKE DOWN SOME IVY.
YOU SUDDENLY FEEL MUCH STRONGER.
This is the only spot in the game which lets you interact with something in the room description as opposed to being an object on a separate line. This would annoy me more except I’m fairly confident now the intent was for the player to use the hint, as opposed to it being only-for-those-who-give-up.
I say this because of the crushing ceiling scene.
>GET COIN
YOU HAVE THE COIN.
A HEAVY STEEL GRATE SUDDENLY COMES CRASHING DOWN IN FRONT OF THE ONLY EXIT.
Nothing helps here. The ceiling lowers over a series of turns:
YOU HEAR A RUMBLING SOUND AND THE CEILING SUDDENLY LOWERS A FOOT. THE CEILING HEIGHT IS NOW ABOUT 4 FEET.
THE CEILING LOWERS ANOTHER FOOT. CEILING HEIGHT IS NOW ONLY 3 FEET!
YOU SEEM TO BE HAVING A BIT OF TROUBLE. I WILL GIVE YOU A HINT BUT IT WILL COST YOU A GOLD COIN.
DO YOU WANT THE HINT? YES
THE HINT IS: PMPH IS THE WORD.
THE CEILING DROPS AGAIN! CEILING HEIGHT IS NOW ONLY 2 FEET.
If you then SAY PMPH:
YOU SAY “PMPH”.
CHUCKLE, CHUCKLE. MAN ARE YOU GULLIBLE.
THE CEILING DROPS TO WITHIN 1 FOOT OF THE FLOOR! YOU ARE FLAT ON YOUR STOMACH.
The game eventually offers another hint
YOU SEEM TO BE HAVING A BIT OF TROUBLE. I WILL GIVE YOU A HINT BUT IT WILL COST YOU A GOLD COIN.
DO YOU WANT THE HINT? YES
I APPRECIATE YOUR TRUST.
The second “hint” opens the gate so you can escape, but this entire sequence is a red herring; the hints are the only way to escape (if you say NO to the hint you get crushed) and by the end of the scene, the player has gained one gold coin but lost two.
Speaking of being trusting, let’s return to a man with a coin I mentioned last time.
YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM WITH YELLOW TILE WALLS.
A TUNNEL HEADS SOUTH.
THERE IS A MAN WITH A FRIENDLY SMILE OFFERING YOU A GOLD COIN.
If you try to take the coin, he takes all your money and leaves you with a WORLD POWER I.O.U. That means the Colonel is here, commemorated in text adventure form. You can “kill” him, but he just poofs away with his money.
The solution is to KISS him. He still poofs away, but leaves the gold coin behind. (If someone has misconceptions about the player avatar’s gender or sexuality, I could see this puzzle being a problem; my main issue was I wasted a lot of time trying to solve the crushing ceiling puzzle instead without spending any coins and assuming this puzzle was the red herring.)
This left me with 60 points and still short. However, the last 20 just come from returning to the surface.
YOUR SCORE IS 80 OUT OF 80.
The owner of Instant Software (who published this game) was Wayne Green. He was also the editor of 80 Microcomputing, a hobbyist publication of the kind that suffered misfortune via the Colonel. While 80 Micro was started too late to join in the “fun”, it really feels like a large chunk of House of Thirty Gables was meant as a sort of catharsis via inside joke.
Enter the House of Thirty Gables. But come prepared — for fun! Inside, you will encounter all sorts of weird goings on. Serpents, dragons, wild bears and sulking trolls are just a few of the strange creatures you may run into on your adventure through this House. There are tereasures to be found amid the foreboding surroundings, but it’s going to take some real thought to figure out how to gather them… and stay alive!
Bill Miller did multiple board game conversions for TRS-80 (Backgammon, Chess, Gomoku) and made an Eliza clone (Dr. Chips) but this is his only adventure game. It was published through Instant Software and it’s also their only adventure game (although an ex-employee made The Programmer’s Guild which published quite a few more).
If you’re thinking “haven’t we played a game with this title before?” you might be thinking of Greg Hassett’s House of the Seven Gables. Additionally, if you want to find and download House of Thirty Gables, you have to look for the file marked House of Seven Gables (19xx)(Greg Hassett)[CMD].zip which has been misfiled for a very long time. (It took me an hour of searching and the realization “wait, Greg Hassett didn’t convert anything to machine language until he wrote Enchanted Island” to find it.)
Given the treasure-hunt premise and simple opening (see above) I thought I’d be in for a cozy traditional fantasy jaunt, but in what is becoming a common pattern for this blog, House of Thirty Gables took a hard left early. The closest comparison I can think of is Will ‘O the Wisp, which intentionally depicted the main character as bumbling.
After a few opening rooms where you can grab an ax and an apple comes the first “enemy”.
YOU ARE IN A SMALL DAMP ROOM.
A DAMP CRAWLWAY GOES EAST.
A PASSAGEWAY HEADS NORTH
A DIMLY LIT STAIRCASE LEADS UP.
A SINISTER TROLL SULKS IN THE CORNER.
When I first went through I just walked by the troll with the assumption I’d deal with it later, but eventually out of curiosity I tried KILL TROLL.
KILL THE TROLL WITH WHAT? AX
ONE MIGHTY BLOW FROM YOUR AX HAS KILLED THE POOR INNOCENT TROLL.
If you then LOOK:
A POOR MURDERED TROLL LIES IN THE CORNER.
Shortly after this comes another floor, which includes a dwarf which attacks at random, classic Adventure style:
YOU ARE SUDDENLY CONFRONTED BY AN ANGRY DWARF.
However, if you try to throw the ax:
YOU SEEM TO BE VERY INEPT AT AX THROWING. THE AX BOUNCES OFF THE WALL AND FALLS HARMLESSLY TO THE FLOOR.
Alternately, if you simply try to KILL DWARF and specify with the AX:
THE DWARF IS TOO NIMBLE FOR YOU TO KILL HIM WITH THE AX.
On the same level, there’s a snake guarding an emerald.
YOU ARE IN A LARGE GLOOMY ROOM.
A TUNNEL HEADS WEST.
A TUNNEL HEADS SOUTH.
A LARGE EMERALD RESTS IN THE CORNER.
THE EMERALD IS GUARDED BY A DEADLY GREEN SNAKE.
You’ve got a flute you can play…
THE SNAKE IS MESMERIZED WHEN YOU PLAY THE FLUTE.
…but finishing the puzzle and taking the emerald results in you being chastised for your greed.
YOU HAVE THE EMERALD. HOWEVER, YOUR GREED HAS BEEN VERY COSTLY. YOU HAVE BEEN BITTEN BY THE DEADLY GREEN SNAKE. YOU WILL PERISH IN 10 MOVES UNLESS YOU CAN FIND AN ANTIDOTE.
There are 80 points total. The emerald above yields 10 points, and a ruby from a different part of the map yields another 10 points. All the rest of the points I’ve gotten have come from “gold coins”. Gold coins are spread about mostly at random (kind of like Oldorf’s Revenge) and each one is worth 5 points, so a fair amount of treasure comes from just exploration rather than solving puzzles. The extra gimmick this game has is that the gold can be spent for hints. Continuing the situation above with the poison, if the 10-move limit gets close:
YOU SEEM TO BE HAVING A BIT OF TROUBLE. I WILL GIVE YOU A HINT BUT IT WILL COST YOU A GOLD COIN.
DO YOU WANT THE HINT? YES
THE HINT IS: MAREZEDOATS…
I’m not really sure how to read the hint here; based on other hints I don’t think it’s an anagram or cryptogram. (Relatedly, there’s a stone idol elsewhere with the word TLOLOC on it; trying to SAY TLOLOC doesn’t do anything, so I suspect it may be “encrypted” in the same way.)
Even though hints were a part of original Adventure, this is the first I’ve seen of actual treasure items being used as hint currency. This becomes common later with the Professor Layton games, but that’s much later (the first game came out in 2007), so, good job 1980.
My max score at the moment (not counting getting the emerald which I still die from, or a gold coin from a room where the ceiling crushes me from above) is 45 out of 80, so I know I must be missing a section. I have no idea how, though, because the game is extremely clear as to the exits; they’re always listed as seen in the room descriptions above, each exit on its own line, so there’s no real way for me to have missed something. Except, I must have missed something, right?
Other than the puzzles above I have yet to use a DEAD RAT (where you are continually told “THERE IS A TERRIBLE SMELL” if you tote it around) and I have to reckon with A MAN WITH A FRIENDLY SMILE OFFERING YOU A GOLD COIN where trying to TAKE COIN results in
THE MAN DISAPPEARS IN A PUFF OF SMOKE.
YOU SUDDENLY FEEL LIGHTER.
and your gold coins have vanished and your inventory now has AN I.O.U. FOR 10 GOLD COINS SIGNED BY WORLD POWER SYSTEMS. The I.O.U. is worth 0 points.
Peter De Wachter pointed out I may not have found the “real treasure”, so I ended up giving Dracula’s Castle one more visit.
I had also been thinking of this door
Je staat nu op een lange wenteltrap die omhoog en naar beneden gaat. Voor je zie je een vreemd gevormde deur in de wand met in het hout van de deur ‘DIT IS SESAM’ gebrand. Een zwaar gebonk is achter de deur hoorbaar.
You are on a long spiral stair which goes up and down. There’s a strange door in the wall with “this is sesame” burned into it. Behind the door you can hear a heavy thumping.
and the fact the VAMPIRANIA message didn’t seem to make any sense (I thought maybe it was a “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane type situation, but it didn’t match any of the lore.)
VAMPIRANIA, in fact, was the magic word to open the door, leading to:
Je bent nu in de kruiskamer. De wanden zijn hier met bloed besmeurd en er liggen hier restanten van dieren. In de hoek ligt het geraamte van een onvoorzichtige avonturier. Een groot vuur verspert de doorgang naar een ernaast liggende kamer. Er is slechts 1 uitgang, de zware houten Deur.
Er is een gevaarli jke kruisspin hier.
You’re in a cross room. The walls are blood-smeared and there are remains of animals. In the corner is the skeleton of an adventurer. A fire blocks the passage to an adjacent room. There is only one exit, the heavy wooden door.
There is a dangerous spider here.
The spider is defeated via a bottle of poison water.
De fles valt kapot op de grond. Het gif stroomt uit de fles en de spin, die natuurlijk uitgedroogd was van al die jaren wachten op een prpoitje, vliegt op de vloeistof af. Op het moment dat ze het gif aanraakt sterft de spin.
The bottle falls to the ground. The poison flies out and the spider, parched from many years of waiting, flies at the liquid. The moment she touches the poison, the spider dies.
That leaves the fire, which was probably the most interesting puzzle (for me) in the game. I had found much earlier that I could tote around a large suit of armor, but had never found any use for it. If you wear the armor you can walk through the fire.
Je bent nu in de schatkamer. De wanden lijken licht te geven door een vreemde weerkaatsing van de gloed van het vuur. Hoog bovenin deze ruimte is een gat in de muur in de vorm van een latijns kruis. Er komt lucht door naar binnen.
Er is een schatkist, vol met gouden munten hier.
You’re in the treasure room. The walls give a strange reflection from the glow of the fire. High up there is a hole forming a cross.
There is a treasure chest full of gold coins here.
So, there was some treasure more interesting than the gold necklace. Now, had this been all there was, I might have just added some comments to my previous post and let it be, but I wanted to share the endgame message:
Alle dorpelingen en ook de TROS (Transylvania Radio Omroep Stichting) zijn aanwezig om je te feliciteren.
All the villagers and the TROS (Transylvania Radio Broadcasting Foundation) are here to congratulate you.
Carried off by cheering elves, right?
Er zijn ook enkele heren van de belasting- dienst aanwezig die willen weten wat er in de kist zit die je bij je hebt.
There is also some gentlemen from the tax service present who want to know what is in the box that you have with you.
Huh, that isn’t too bad, but none of my other adventures required registering capital gains …
Ook blijkt dat zojuist de vampieren tot de beschermde diersoorten worden gerekend zodat je je binnenkort voor de rechter moet verantwoorden. Er zijn enkele leden van de aktiegroep ‘Stop de Vampierenmoord’ aanwezig, die je aggressief bejegenen. Het blijkt dat ze allemaal een zwarte jas aan hebben…
It also appears that the vampires have just become a protected species and you will have to answer to the court soon. Some members of ‘Stop the Vampire Murder’ action group are present and harass you aggressively. They all are wearing a black jacket…
Report blood type to doorman. Opening hours Monday to Saturday, midnight to 6 AM. Closed on Sundays.
I did need to check the walkthrough for some things, but they were generally things I would have gotten stuck on no matter what the language.
For one thing, there’s a looping structure in terms of returning to locations I wasn’t really expecting. The overall superstructure of the map looks like this:
For most of the games of this era, we’d grab the things in the starting house and be done with it. This isn’t like that; the intent is to go in and out of Dracula’s castle and return to the house multiple times. I did catch one loop: you have to get a ladder from the castle and bring it all the way to the start to reach the attic of the house. However, I entirely did not expect an underground section to the house, and you can eventually dig all the way up to Dracula’s Castle from that direction.
Je bent nu in een vochtige kelder. Het plafond is hier zo laag dat je niet rechtop kunt staan. Er zit een nauw gat in het plafond waardoor je omhoog zou kunnen klimmen. De wanden van graniet, maar naar het noorden is de wand erg zanderig. Je staat tot aan je enkels in modderig water.
Er is een vlijmsscherpe bijl hier.
Er is een kleine houten doos hier.
You’re in a damp basement. The ceiling is so low you can’t stand straight. You can climb up a narrow hole in the ceiling. The walls are granite, except the wall to the north which is very sandy. You are up to your ankles in muddy water.
There’s a sharp axe here.
There’s a little wooden box here.
The forest maze is another place most games would not have used twice, but after getting the axe mentioned above, you can return to the big tree and get wood to make a cross.
In addition to the I-needed-the-walkthrough issues above, I had trouble figuring out what verb to use to kill Dracula at the end, but we’ll get to that.
…
After grabbing my starting gear (lantern, bread, milk, coin) I went over to the nearby Black Hand Inn. I bought some garlic from the proprietor and he told me they had “had enough” (referring to vampire attacks, I assume) and mentioned a hidden stair.
Je bent nu op de donkere zolder van de herberg. Via een trap kan je naar beneden. Er hangt een sterke geur, alsof hier een lijk enige maanden heeft liggen rotten. De vloer is vol bloedvlekken. Er is echter geen lijk te zien. Een vreemd gevormde steen is in de muur gemetseld.
Er is een zware kist met een dikke laag stof op de bodem hier.
You’re in a dark attic of the inn. You can go down a flight of stairs. There’s a strong smell like a corpse has been rotting here for several months and the floor is covered in bloodstains. However, no corpse can be seen. A strangely shaped stone is in the wall.
There’s a heavy chest with a thick layer of dust here.
The chest contains a handy guide to vampires, including the note that “the vampire is very scared of the powerful cross, and the best are made of wood”.
After visiting the inn I scooped up the “wooden wedge” and “large machete” from the nearby forest, then entered the castle. In addition to a food serving hall and two bedrooms, I found a tower with a mysterious door …
Je staat nu op een lange wenteltrap die omhoog en naar beneden gaat. Voor je zie je een vreemd gevormde deur in de wand met in het hout van de deur ‘DIT IS SESAM’ gebrand. Een zwaar gebonk is achter de deur hoorbaar.
You are on a long spiral stair which goes up and down. There’s a strange door in the wall with “this is sesame” burned into it. Behind the door you can hear a heavy thumping.
… and a courtyard with a helpful ladder.
Je bent nu op een binnenplaats van het kasteel dat als kerkhof dient doet. Er zijn hier vele graven waarvan sommige open zijn. Van anderen is het grafdeksel weggeschoven. De meeste graven zijn echter intact. De enige uitgang is een poortje aan de westkant.
Er is een lange ladder hier.
You are now in a courtyard of the castle that serves as a graveyard. There are many graves here, some of which are open. Others have their cover pushed away. However, most are intact. The only way out is a gate on the west side.
There’s a long ladder here.
I took the ladder back to the starting house (as I hinted at earlier), found a “stuk dik touw” (piece of thick rope) and then was fairly stuck.
According to the walkthrough, I needed to sleep in the bed at home. There was no message I recall that said the player-character was tired, just it needed to happen for some reason. However, when I tried it nothing useful happened.
It turns out I missed an encounter with Dracula earlier in the castle (you need to use the ladder to reach it). Both these actions I pulled directly from the walkthrough.
>GOOI KNOF
Dracula sist en deinst achteruit. Hij wordt duidelijk afgeschrikt door de geur van de knof look. Hij kan zich echter tamelijk snel herstellen.
->BESCHIJN DRACULA
Dracula valt je nu aan en slaat zijn mantel dreigend in de lucht. Zijn scherpe hoektanden zijn nu zichtbaar, je loopt voor- zichtig achteruit. Dan valt hij aan en probeert in je nek te bijten. Plotseling verstijft hijen valt neer op de grond. lichaam wordt eerst grijs en zwarte rook omgeeft hem. Als de rook optrekt is er niets meer van zijn lichaam overgebleven.
Je hoort echter in de verte een sinistere lach.
>THROW GARLIC
Dracula hisses and pulls back. He is put off by the smell of garlic; however, he can recover quickly.
>SHINE DRACULA
Dracula now attacks. His sharp fangs are now visible. He attacks and tries to bite your neck. Suddenly he stiffens and falls to the ground; his body becomes grey and black smoke surrounds him. You hear a sinister laugh in the distance.
I … don’t know what’s going on with that second part at all. I assume you’re using the lantern, but it doesn’t do anything. It’s possible the result will happen no matter what the action is?
After this encounter, going back and sleeping in the bed did something useful.
>GA SLAPEN
Je wordt midden in de nacht wakker door gerommel, dat vanonder het bed li jkt te komen. Als je uit het bed stapt verdwijnt het gebonk als bij toverslag.
>GO BED
You are woken in the middle of the night by a rumbling under the bed. When you get out, the sound disappears as if by magic.
Now you’re able to find a basement underneath the bed. While later adventure games are plagued with these “obscurely set off some kind of story trigger before the plot can move on” problems, this is almost too sophisticated a mistake for a 1980 game. (It could be this is an artifact of the 1982 revision, of course, but even 1982 is a little early.)
After a side trip to make a wooden cross and grab a shovel, I managed to dig into where Dracula’s coffin was lurking.
Je bent nu in een graftombe diep onder het kasteel. Een smalle een trap gaat omhoog, halverwege de trap is een ijzeren hek geplaatst. Een i jzige tocht gaat door merg en been. Er staan enige houten grafkisten in deze kamer, die allemaal op elkaar lijken.
Voor de trap zit een ijzeren hek
Het i jzeren hek is gesloten.
is een zware doodskist met in gothische letters de tekst ‘D R A C U L A’ hier
You are now in a tomb deep under the castle. A narrow staircase goes up, where an iron gate has been placed halfway up.
The room’s cold goes through your marrow and bone.
There are wooden coffins that look all alike.
There is an iron gate in front of the stairs. The iron gate is closed.
There’s a heavy coffin here with ‘D R A C U L A’ written in gothic letters.
Unfortunately, it’s not a simple matter of popping open the coffin and staking him — opening it wakes Dracula up. Dracula then flees and you have to give chase. Eventually, you catch up, and the cross is as effective as advertised:
>TOON KRUIS
Aaaargghhhh’ ! Van schrik deinst de vampier achteruit.
Hij gaat tegen een muur staan en houdt zijn handen voor z’n ogen.
>SHOW CROSS
Aaaargghhhh’! The vampire backs off, scared. He stands against a wall and holds his hands in front of his eyes.
Then you can stake the vampire, except … I had no idea how to communicate this. Perhaps I was just making a verb-conjugation typo? The walkthrough told me to SIA WEDGE (“hit wedge”?)
De vampier gilt en valt neer. Even blijft het lichaam roerloos, om dan plotseling te worden omgeven door zwarte rook. Een zeer snel verouderingsproces begint en na enkele seconden lijkt het alsof er een eeuwenoud lijk voor je ligt. Dan vergaat het en blijft er slechts stof over.
De stof waait door elkaar en lijkt op een bepaald moment letters te vormen. Vaak kun je de tekst VAMPIRANIA lezen. Dan verwaait het stof totaal en blijft er geen sporr van deze toch eens zeer indrukwekkende dracula over.
The vampire screams and falls down. The body remains still for a moment and is then surrounded by black smoke. A fast aging process begins and in a few seconds it looks like an aeons-old corpse is before you. Then just dust remains.
The substance blows together and forms letters. You can read the text VAMPIRANIA. The dust then blows away completely and there is no trace of Dracula.
If you try to leave now, you find the heavy front door is “gesloten” (closed). You need to take an alternate exit.
I admit to exhaustion here and just used the walkthrough for the end (a little bit of an escape sequence). I wasn’t able to trigger a “you have won” message but it’s possible there is none. I killed Dracula, I found a “gouden halsband” (golden necklace) and I made it back home, so I think it’s safe to call this one wrapped up.
…
Keep in mind this is likely the very first text adventure in Dutch, and for that, it’s very impressive.
I somewhat wish I could find the 8K Commodore Pet original; almost certainly the room descriptions would have been mere room names (as the author’s webpage indicates, it had “very concise text”), which might be less involving to read but would have made my life much easier in translation. I’m also curious if the plot structure is exactly like the original; it’s a very unusual one for the era no matter what the language. I suspect the author had at least played The Count because (other than the obvious vampire plot similarity) Scott Adams was the only other author from this era working with interlocking plot elements quite in this fashion. Compare, for example, the defeat of Dracula with taking down the wizard in Wizard and the Princess. In the latter game, you meet and defeat the wizard in one room. In Dracula, you not only meet the antagonist early (before you can defeat him) but once getting the upper hand you have to give chase through his castle before making the final blow.
…
I have no idea what I’m playing next (I might just bop something off my remaining 1980 list completely at random) but at least I get to return to English! I do have one last question for any Dutch speakers out there. At the death of Dracula there is the scene with the text “VAMPIRANIA”. Is this referring to some Dutch-specific lore? I’m not sure what meaning it has.
This has been about Dutch, but I’m going to start with Russian.
Suppose I asked you what the word класс means. Perhaps you could make a guess (knack?) and perhaps you could even guess correctly, but unless you already know the Cyrillic alphabet, it’s still just a guess.
Using the above book covers as a guide, can you tell what класс means now?
I learned Cyrillic this way about 15 years ago via a series of pictures which started with words you could figure out from English knowledge, eventually moving through the entire alphabet. (I can’t find the webpage that did this anymore — I doubt it’s still extant — but it was brilliant.)
Ever since then I’ve wondered about the possibility of learning a language almost entirely like a puzzle, with the slow accumulation of content. Playing Dracula in Dutch feels a little like that; obviously, I’m looking up words I don’t know, but occasionally I luck into a sentence where I can figure out 80%, and the remaining 20% get added to my mental bank.
For example, upon entering Dracula’s Castle, the first sentence is parsable:
Je bent nu in een immense hal van het kasteel.
From the same description:
De zware deur naar buiten is open.
Trying to “sluit deur” (close door):
De kasteeldeur is met geen mogelijkheid te bewegen.
Looking at the room again, I noticed the door was still open, so I assumed the above message conveyed something along the lines of the “zware deur” being too large or heavy to close.
Later, I found a “zware gesloten kist” and tried to take it:
Die is absoluut niet te tillen.
With knowing that “zware” was heavy/big I was able to guess what was going on here and what “te tillen” meant, especially with the “absoluut niet” (absolutely not) phrase in there.
While I have made it farther in the castle, progress in general still feels minor, so I’ll report back on the actual events of the game next time.
I’ve been playing parser games for so long it’s often tough to for me to put myself in the head of a beginner who types things like >PICK UP THE RAPIER PLEASE and gets the response “You don’t see any such thing” even when the item is clearly in the room. (I just tested this on a real game — Kerkerkruip — and that’s what happened.)
Playing in a foreign language is a great way to recreate this feeling. I got the opening hints
SLUIT RAAM (“close window”)
KLIM GAT (“climb hole”)
LEES BRIEF (“read note”)
KIJK (“look”)
GA ZUID (“go south”)
and worked out a few more things like NEEM (“take”), but I’ve generally had enormous difficulty communicating anything at all.
For example, I found a traditional maze, the kind that needs dropping items to map:
For the life of me I could not drop an item. I tried every single word in a dictionary I could find, and then out of frustration
I still have no idea other than DROP in English how to drop stuff. You might think that LATEN VALLEN BROOD could do it but that really needs to be used as a two-word phrase (I think?), and this is a parser than only takes two words at maximum, including both the verb and noun. Relatedly, the order always has to be verb-subject, even though Dutch often prefers subject-verb; the phrase really should be BROOD LATEN VALLEN.
Here’s what I found at the end of the maze (I give both the Dutch room description and my best shot at a translation):
Je bent nu in een donker woud. Hoog in een zware eikenboom is een kleine hut gebouwd. De takken van de boom hangen laag genoeg om erin te kunnen klimmen. Er zijn vele voetstappen in de grond te zien.
You’re in a dark forest. There is a small cabin built high in an oak tree. The branches of the tree are low enough to climb. There are many footprints around on the ground.
Fortunately, I had the earlier hint to KLIM for climb and was able to KLIM BOOM (climb tree) to get in:
Je bent nu in een kleine hut bovenin een boom. Een van de planken, waaruit de vloer is opgebouwd, is afgebroken, zodat je daardoor naar beneden kunt. Je hebt van hier uit een prachtig uitzicht over het uitgestrekte bos. In de verte kan je het dorpje met de herberg zien. Een smal pad vanuit het dorp slingert het bos in. Ver links van het dorp kan je het kasteel van Lord Dracula zien. Door een vreemd schijnsel ziet het kasteel er spookachtig uit. Een smal pad loopt de heuvel op naar de ingang van het kasteel. Verder is de wand rondom het kasteel zo steil, dat het pad in feite de enige ingang vormt.
Er is een houten wig hier.
Er is een zwaar kapmes hier.
You’re in a little cabin in a tree. One of the floorboards is broken so you can get down. You have a beautiful view of the vast forest. In the distance, you can see the village with the inn. A narrow path from the village leads in the woods. Far to the left of the village you can see the castle of Lord Dracula. The castle has a strange light and looks spooky. A narrow path runs up the hill to the entrance to the castle. The wall around the castle is so steep that the path is the only way in.
There’s a wooden wedge here.
There’s a big machete here.
I could not get out of this room! Again, dictionary attempts failed me. I knew N (Noorden) W (Westen) O (Oosten) and Z (Zuiden) worked for directions, and I eventually found by luck that L is the one-letter abbreviation to “go down”. It is short for … I have no idea. I did also find that H means up, and I’m guessing that’s just shortening “omhoog” to the H since O is already taken.
I did get a little farther and explored Dracula’s Castle (with bedrooms helpfully marked SLAAPKAMER 1 and SLAAPKAMER 2) but I haven’t solved any puzzles yet; hopefully next time?
In all three cases, I played in English. Dracula Avontuur is (probably) the first original non-English game made for home computers, and (probably) the first text adventure in Dutch for any system.* It has never been translated, so I have to play it in the original Dutch.
The objective (as given by a note in your house) is that Lord Dracula has a great treasure, and you want to try to go get it. I’m glad it’s that and not “open parliamentary proceedings with interpretive dance” or “solve progressively harder sets of anagrams” because I’d have no idea how to solve that kind of puzzle in Dutch.
I’ve had to puzzle out what to type rather like I was playing The Gostak (which is a 2001 IFComp entry where the language itself of the game is a puzzle, and you have to infer what everything means). Thankfully, the game had mercy on me early and gave some possible sample commands…
Ik geloof, dat je niet helemaal begrijpt wat de bedoeling is.
Je moet steeds opdrachten geven van 2 woorden, je kan bijoorbeeld nu intypen:
SLUIT RAAM ,om het raam te sluiten
GA ZUID ,om naar die slaapkamer te gaan
KLIM GAT ,om te proberen dat gat boven je te bereiken
INVENTARIS ,om te zien wat je bij je hebt
LEES BRIEF ,om dat briefje wat op de grond ligt et lezen.
KIJK ,om nog eens te zien waar je bent en wat je kan doen.
…and for fun, for any non-Dutch speakers out there, what do you think they say?
Is “duivelaarsmunt” a normal Dutch word?
I’ve only made a smidge of progress, so I’ll get more into my gameplay process in my next post. So far I’ll describe it as “fun but exhausting”.
(*) There is another candidate, also in Dutch, but it could have been written anytime from 1980 to 1981, so I’m going to wait until I’ve done more research before playing it.↩
Upon arriving at Oldorf’s Castle, I found a wide-open area with no enemies or obstacles, just things to look at and secret passages to open.
Puzzles remained relatively simple. There was a room with “SHAZAM” on the floor, and while it didn’t do anything in the room it was in, saying SHAZAM in an adjacent room with suspicious footprints led to a skeleton key.
In a closet, going “UP” stated I wasn’t strong enough, but switching to the Strongman let me enter a secret room and find 5 gold coins.
Eventually, after looting everything I could find, I found my way down some stairs to “Snotgurgle’s Small Palace”.
You see a valuable cross upon entering the room, but need to realize that since your party isn’t automatically taking it, the cross must be out of reach. Using MOVE TABLE and MOVE CHAIR as the Strongman resolves the situation.
In addition to a talking pillar (where my Cleric’s ability to SPEAK came in handy) I found the surreal “Plains of Oxyxidies”.
Heading north, I had to do battle with a “Opthaplebian Eye-Sentry”:
I had to use the Wizard’s catch-all CAST ability here. It always felt uncomfortable to use since it can substitute for “real” puzzle solutions, but the manual does state there are scenarios where only the Wizard can succeed, and I’m pretty sure this was one of them.
After defeating the Eye-Sentry I found some magic mushrooms and took one. The game helpfully says “BAG LIMIT = 3: POSSESSION LIMIT = 1”.
If you come back here twice you can grab the other two mushrooms. However, if you’re holding more than one mushroom, later someone confiscates all of them, because you exceeded the possession limit. I guess this was meant to be a drug joke.
After the strange trip to Snotgurgle’s, I found my way to “Lynxor’s Caverns”. It was the only place of the three that felt properly protected. I had to use my gladiator to KILL a buzzard upon entering, and to take down some snakes later.
I had missed the “Sceptor” from Snotgurgle’s on my first playthrough.
There was only one place I got “properly” stuck, and that was a door requiring a tiny key. Scenarios where there is a puzzle to solve but it’s not certain where the puzzle might be can be very trying, although in this case I needed to just go to a “Merlinian Room” a few steps away and have my Magician cast MAGIC.
Having grabbed all that I could find, I went to “Sunshine” (the Wizard needed to CAST to pop open the last door) and made my exit:
For fans following the discussion in my last post, the Elf does get used one more time, but it’s in a way consistent with just sending the Elf solo to grab some gold in a small hole.
…
Without the character switching, this game would have been fairly bland; even though you could theoretically switch any time to test (say) if the Magician’s MAGIC skill does anything in a particular spot, the odd character restriction led me to only try it in appropriate places, and the game was set up in an easy enough way that it was never too difficult to work out what those places were.
I did also appreciate the solve-everything spell the Wizard had, especially since it didn’t *quite* solve everything (for example, at one point you encounter Lynxor’s “pets” which look like Egyptian cats, and while the Wizard can take down one of the pets, the Magician has to take out the other). I never did get close to running out of Strength; the game was relatively generous with it.
Weirdly, one thing I did miss was picking up items. While it seems like a convenience to dispense with needing to get stuff (and in general, why would your party leave behind treasure?) fighting my way to a ruby and then being denied the actual act of TAKE RUBY made the game feel slightly less like an adventure; less like I was “in a world”, so to speak.
Oldorf’s Revenge clearly had some grounding in RPG lore, and this game represents another “alternate universe” route that adventure game history skipped over. CRPG players are used to the many-characters-in-one aesthetic, but here it was a rarely-seen oddity. The good news is the same schtick shows up in the second game from Highlands Computer Services: The Tarturian. To get there, we’ll need to make it to 1981, and we are getting closer! I’ve got a challenge I’ve been putting off, but now is the time.
Je bent nu in je eigen huis. Er is een slaapkamer op het zuiden en een kleine hal oostelijk. Er is een deur die naar het westen leidt. De deur staat op een kier en een gure wind blaast zand en stof naar binnen. Door een raam kan je een bos zien.
After the initial puzzle I mentioned last time, there’s a fairly wide-open area bottlenecked by a toll bridge where you are asked to pay 50 gold coins.
The CAST action of wizards might be the “solve everything” spell, except the need for cold, hard, cash.
This is a way to force the player to explore the entire opening area, because there are exactly 50 (no more, no less) gold coins spread out amongst the map. In some cases they are in wide open places (in which case the game will say YOU HAVE FOUND 5 GOLD COINS with no fuss) and in some cases things are a little more secret.
Also note that, in general, there is no need to TAKE things; if the “party” finds something interesting they’ll grab it automatically. I do have to put “party” in quotes because of a very weird puzzle type in particular. In two places on the map there was an entrance “too small” for most characters to get in. If you switch to the Elf you can make it through:
However, the entire party follows along with the Elf. While you could suppose the crack scene above is just the Elf working solo, there’s another room which undercuts that idea:
You can’t reach this vault without the Elf. Then, if you try to say KIN, the game claims the character can only speak in their own language. The solution is to switch to the Cleric who can TRANSLATE and find out the word actually means GOLD, and if the Cleric then says GOLD, 5 gold coins appear and are added to the communal stash.
But how did the Cleric get in the vault? I can only assume that when switching characters, you really are “working solo” so to speak and you’re pulling them out from some magical reserve. Yet, this contradicts the idea of a shared inventory; later you get a magical sword, and while it makes sense to be held by the “party” it doesn’t make as much sense that the Elf is toting it around.
I think it’s possible the authors had two conceptual models going on at the same time but didn’t bother to resolve the tension. I’m going to assume it’s a traveling party still and the Elf somehow has the power to “pull in” the rest of the party. However, I’ve been stopped before in puzzle-solving by having the wrong visual image, so I have to keep in mind there really may be only one character in the world at a time.
This scene is the result of the Gladiator wielding a sword using KILL twice, once for each hand. It possibly is meant to evoke the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
For the most part, all the gold was easy to gather, but I was stuck for a long time at 45.
I had made a wrong assumption in thinking all the important clues would be textual, but there is one room where you need to refer to an item that is only in the picture (like Mystery House).
There’s gold in here! You need the Strongman to get it.
The fortunate thing is that the character skills in this game don’t seem to require nouns, so just LIFT works and you don’t have to play guess-the-noun.
After gathering all the gold, I made it past the toll bridge over to Oldorf’s underground castle.
This has been fun enough so far; I’m just hoping I don’t have to super-optimize my character swaps in order to finish the game (remember, you can only swap to each character 5 times at most).
One thing I haven’t mentioned yet: what is the objective of the game? Even this far in, I have no idea. It’s not mentioned in the manual, nor the opening screen. Who is Oldorf? Am I supposed to be killing him or her? Just stealing stuff and running away? The advertising says you are “looking for treasure” but given the initial treasure search was simply to get by the opening toll bridge this isn’t following a classic treasure hunt style at all.
Renga in Blue 