Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(This continues from my previous post, which is needed to understand this one.)

With help from ItsMe in my last post who found a hint guide, I was able to get to the end of the game. Before I get to that, I want to drop by another document found by commenter Rob, in the August 19, 1981 version of the newsletter Buss, for Heathkit computers (which Software Toolkit Adventure runs on).

Via Parry Game Preserve.

Specifically, Walt Bilofsky wrote an essay about Adventure; one of his points being that it teachers players how to use their computer (the control of a parser being close to the metal, akin to the command prompt on the CP/M operating system). Relevantly for us, he goes on to write a small manifesto explaining what good adventure game interactions look like.

Adventure has been extended and imitated, sometimes well, sometimes poorly. It has been done best when the following rules were followed:

Be consistent. Similar commands should produce similar responses unless there’s a good reason. Similar phrases in messages and descriptions should mean similar things.

Be informative. Especially, make sure that when the user types a meaningless or incorrect command, he gets a message that makes sense, and perhaps gives some hint as to the proper command.

Be rewarding. When the user figures out how to do something, make sure he is rewarded with smooth, reasonable, productive behavior on the part of the program.

I always appreciate when authors this early try to reach for some sort of guiding principles, even if they don’t quite hit their ambitions (see Clardy with Probe One: The Transmitter for another example). I will first play through the rest of Adventure 375 and then compare after to see how close Bilofsky got to his ideal.

Let’s get to the sword first, because that’s quicker to explain:

You are in a large room with medieval furnishings. Two bleached skeletons are hanging on the wall in iron cuffs. The room is dominated by a huge white boulder near the west wall. A tunnel in the east wall turns quickly out of sight. A dark hole in the floor was apparently once covered by a grating or trap door.

A very rusty sword with a ruby-studded hilt is embedded in the boulder!

This puzzle is also, I’ll admit, mostly fair. The idea behind the mechanism is that the sword goes into the boulder, and holds open some kind of latch that holds open the door and allows escape. The sword is described as a treasure, but the rusty blade does not seem to be contributing to the treasure-aspect, so if you could just take along the ruby hilt you’d still have a treasure. It is as simple as BREAK SWORD:

Weakened by rust, the blade gives way and the hilt breaks off in your hand.

When on the ground:

There is a ruby-studded sword hilt here!

There’s still some meta-concern here with the puzzle. While the rusty part does not seem to be contributing to the item being a treasure, as anyone who has watched the horrified look of a Antiques Roadshow host knows, sometimes “cleaning up” a historical item causes it to lose rather than gain value. There’s also the uncertain aspect of transforming a (!) marked treasure into another (!) marked treasure; while we’ve seen non-treasures turn into treasures, this is the first time a state change has happened between two treasures. This is at the very least a puzzle using abductive reasoning rather than iron-clan logic, but it is a good example of the form since it doesn’t take that long to experiment with BREAK SWORD.

The other secret portion I missed is much fussier. It was implied by the magazine that there was something under the troll bridge, but I could not get the game to acknowledge my commands.

You’re on SW side of chasm.

A rickety wooden bridge extends across the chasm, vanishing into the mist. There is a large rusty hook on the bridge’s handrail. Lying on the bridge is a sign which reads “Stop! Pay Troll!”

Step one is taking the sign. Mind you, in all other cases, items that can be taken are separated from the main paragraph, so knowing to do this violates one of the game’s established norms.

You take hold of the sign, but the wood is old and full of splinters. You drop it in the middle of the bridge and spend a moment picking wood out of your fingertips.

Now we’ve got an empty hook: what to do? Normally a kind of rope would be in order, but there is no rope in Original Adventure nor this game. Something that I have long-visualized in one way should be (according to the authors of this game) visualized another way. (See, analogously, my experiences with a bean bag in Asylum II.) The chain that is a treasure and is used to lead the bear is meant to be long, long enough to substitute in for a rope:

HANG CHAIN

The chain is now dangling from the hook down into the chasm.

That’s also not the easiest parser command to find! Hang on to your hats, everyone, it gets worse.

At the bottom of the chasm, there’s no apparent exit, but you can now JUMP to the other side even though a jump was impossible from the top.

You are on a narrow ledge near the bottom of a chasm running SE/NW. Above you the chasm is filled with mist. A rushing stream completely fills the bottom of the chasm. Across the stream is a dark opening in the chasm wall.

I can see why the chasm would be shaped differently farther down making a jump now possible, but the description doesn’t reflect that!

Moving in further is a room with a desk, which can be opened with the keys.

You are in a squarish, dusty room with a good passage SE as its only exit.

There is an ancient roll-top desk in the room.

OPEN DESK

The desk opens, revealing an old, dusty glass inkwell, and a bundle of old yellow papers, tied with a faded velvet ribbon. The inkwell is half full of dust and old dried-up ink. The papers teeter and fall out of the desk, raising a fearful cloud of dust. Sneezing, you read through tearing eyes that these are early certificates of Colossal Gold Mines, 333 Ltd., now one of the giants in the field! The spaces on each share marked “Shareholder’s Name” are all blank.

Again, the norms are no longer being followed here: the inkwell is particularly important. You’re supposed to get the inkwell going again (POUR WATER toted in via the bottle), then use it to sign the documents (although SIGN isn’t understood, you need to use WRITE). But sign with what?

The cheerful bird that chased away the snake has a second purpose.

The bird flutters to a higher perch, letting out an outraged squawk in buzzard dialect (I didn’t know he spoke buzzard)! Translation: “You’ll have to catch me first, pinion plucker!”

Feathers are not described as an object that can be referred to separately on the bird, you just have to take the leap they’d be there. The bird needs to be caught (or re-caught) in the cage before feather extraction happens, and then the feather can be used as a quill. Additionally, there’s some steps omitted going from feather to quill.

POUR WATER

The water splashes into the inkwell, turning the dried-up residue in the bottom into ink.

DIP FEATHER

The tip of the feather is full of ink.

SIGN CERTIFICATES

I see no sign here.

WRITE

Your name is now written as the owner on each stock certificate.

This sequence hit a whole bunch of design issues in a row:

a.) having an object picked up mentioned in the main text rather than a separate line, breaking norms

b.) using the chain in a way that can easily run counter to previous visualizations

c.) being able to jump what seems like it ought to be the same distance, and the description doesn’t make clear the distance is shorter

d.) needing to refer again to an item in the main text, rather than one mentioned separately

e.) needing to extract a non-described feather back at the bird, and somehow immediately it is usable as a quill

f.) tough parser commands along the way like DIP and WRITE

I think, arguably, you could say it meets the “rewarding” and “informative” conditions, but fails on “consistent” with points a and d — it might be consistent in the “author’s bubble” of puzzles, but it isn’t consistent with the game as a whole.

The larger issue is that the points don’t really encompass all the advice needed: parser commands should have reasonable synonyms, the text should not leave anything ambiguous in term of visualization, and there certainly shouldn’t be a brand new noun (feathers on the bird) that the player needs to guess at. In a big-picture sense, the authors were trying for a puzzle more ambitious than the parser was able to handle.

With the two treasures the ending is more or less identical, except you get prompted for the desired name on the certificate and get a password to go with it. I imagine this is to prevent sharing, but someone could have a save very close to the end and just generate another name.

As you release the hat, a cloud of sandalwood-scented smoke appears, out of which steps the Grandmaster of the Colossal Cave Lodge 437 of the Wizard’s Guild. He is wearing a long blue velvet robe, a long, pointed bejewelled hat made of solid platinum, and love beads. He carries a three foot long rod with a star on the end, all of solid gold. His eyes twinkle behind thick gold-rimmed spectacles, and he smiles benevolently as he says,

“Congratulations, young Adventurer. By your ordeals in the Cave you have proven yourself worthy of admission to the rank of Journeyman Wizard in the Wizard’s Guild.” He places the gold Wizard’s Hat on your head and, bending, asks,

“How do you want your name spelled on your Certificate of Wizardness?”
….

Jason Dyer

“All right, young Wizard, your personal Wizard Password is ‘Wyktut’!”

The Wizard waves his wand, and the cave bear and little bird appear in a puff of orange smoke, grunting and twittering their congratulations. You leap onto the bear’s back, and, with the bird fluttering in a circle overhead, you ride out of the building, through a crowd of cheering elves, and into the sunset.

You scored 375 out of a possible 375 using 442 turns.

All of Adventuredom gives tribute to you, Journeyman Wizard and Adventurer Grandmaster!

There is no higher rating! Congratulations!!

Software Toolworks went on to make this “Golden Oldies” collection which has normal 350-point Adventure. My own picture. This was the first commercial adventure game I ever owned.

(This continues from my previous post.)

As mentioned in my last post, Don Woods started editing Crowther’s game in March 1977. He was not working entirely solo; he got ideas from when people at Stanford were trying things out (“oh yeah, I could put a message in for that”), and from his friends. Bob Paraiso, Don’s roommate for part of that period, had what Don calls a “twisted sense of humor” and came up with the clam/pearl and narrow passage puzzles.

It did not go straight to a finished product; it has an intermediate version I’ve been calling “Adventure 250”, based originally on this recollection:

I’m relying solely on memory which tends to be fallible (see above: the dwarf ‘vanishes’, not ‘disappears’) but my best recollection is that ADVENT.EXE first appeared on the PDP-10s at ADP (the old First Data in Waltham, Mass.) in 1977. It was an incomplete version which only had about 250 points worth of treasure. I seem to recall that there was nothing past the troll bridge but an ‘under construction’ sign or some such. I believe our copy came from WPI, but word at the time was it was developed at Stanford. Two or three months later we got the full 350 point game.
— John Everett

I was uncertain of this account until I encountered Dave Lebling’s map of Adventure, the one he made prior to starting Zork. It has the exact signature described by Everett of having “under construction” at where ought to be the troll bridge. There also is no notation for an end game.

The content is otherwise nearly identical.

By mid-1977, Woods had added the portion past the troll cave and the endgame, leading to the “canonical” version of Adventure at 350 points, finished by June 3rd, 1977. (Zork already started development by then, but remember they were looking at the 250-point version!) The first “altered” version, Adventure 366, was out by the 15th of July. It added a small area outdoors and a “palantir” which allows teleportation:

You are in the gazebo. The dust is deep here, indicating long disuse. Ancient elvish runes here describe this as a place where one may see many things. Another, more ancient inscription reads “PKIHMN”.
There is a palantir(orb) here.

Relevantly for today’s game, Don Woods had discussions early about the potential for commercializing the software. From Lester Earnest, manager of the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) he was at, in June 1977 (that is, the same month the game was “finished”):

One general rule that you should beware of is that Stanford facilities (including this computer) may not be used in support of private business transactions. Under certain circumstances, is IS possible for Stanford to sell software, even if it was developed under a research contract. It is conceivable that a sale could be arranged in which contract you might share, but it sounds a bit hairy.

(There’s another fun message from Les being upset about someone managing to sneak on and play Adventure past the server capacity limit. These systems all were expensive to run and time was valuable! The messages all come from the SAIL message system and credit goes to Ethan Johnson for finding the material a few years ago.)

The general perception of software up to this point was often it was not something “intended for sale”, but the mid-70s this was starting to change, so it is a mistake to think at least Woods felt comfortable just having his work be “freeware”. However, the fact it was created on a massively expensive Stanford computer essentially precluded any direct commercialization. Certainly people treated it as public domain, and in an interview with Jason Scott, Don Woods alludes to the fact the people who got the source from him for the game were selling it; when he created a 430-point version which could be thought of as the “master quest” edition of the game (where only recently has anyone been able to manage to get a full 430 points!) he was much cagier about distributing it.

In the same interview, Don Woods discusses Software Toolworks, which came around in 1982; the company wanted them to endorse the game as the “official version”:

Don Woods mentions in the interview that he tested the program over at Will Crowther’s house; they found that there were additional treasures added, so they could not do the endorsement of saying it was exactly the original. Eventually, this was smoothed over, and you can read their “certification letter”.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

It was also possible to get a letter signed from them if you beat the game (similar to the certificate upon beating Wizardry 4), but none have surfaced. (We incidentally do know what the Wizardry 4 certificate looks like, thanks to Carl Muckenhoupt managing to beat the game when it was new.)

Today, I’m playing the CP/M version from February 1982, the one with the extra treasures that kept Crowther and Woods from saying it matched the original. I have some more detail here about Jim Gillogly and Will Bilofsky, whose names are on the port. Importantly, Walter Bilofsky (of Software Toolworks) was scrupulous about his first product, a C compiler, and tried to contact the original author so he could charge $80 and split with the author 50-50; the author was not interested due to having the early hacker ethic of just wanting to spread the Gospel of C, so Bilofsky just cut the price in half instead. It makes sense he would look for a way to eventually get some royalties over to Crowther and Woods for their game (unlike Microsoft or anyone else who was selling it).

A detail you might not know about classic Adventure:

Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?
NO

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
SCORE

If you were to quit now, you would score 5 out of a possible 375.

Where did the 5 points come from? Well, you start the game with them. If you request instructions (that is, type YES at the start) your score goes down by 5.

For my playthrough, given this is now something like the 142nd time I’ve played Adventure, I just referred to a walkthrough early in order to snag all the standard game treasures, keeping an eye out for anything unusual. There was only one obvious difference. Y2 contained a dictionary:

Baggins’ New Dwarvish-English Dictionary
Publ. TA 3005, Imladris
Reformed Spellings

-%&-^~~& (v.t.): to excavate a new side
passage through soft rock
-%!”! (n., fem): small warm granite stone

… These words are hurting my throat. I quit!!

There’s a “magazine” that gets used for the “Last Lousy Point” of the game — it gets dropped at Witt’s End. Importantly, the magazine has always stated (when you attempt to read it) that it is written in Dwarvish. With the dictionary in hand, it comes off different:

Most of these have been damaged by water, but here’s one I can read:

Spelunker Today
Vol. 1 Number 3
We regret to announce that our associate editor was lost while taking two consultants on a tour of Colossal Cave. One consultant returned, his hair and eyebrows turned white from the ordeal, and was able to mumble only “The Dark-room … the Dark-room…”
…
One of our contributing correspondents reports the Troll to be in exceptional good humor; snickering sounds have been heard issuing from beneath the troll bridge.
…
(Advertisment)
CERTIFICATE OF WIZARDNESS
… serially numbered and suitable for framing, may be obtained absolutely free by writing to The Software Toolworks, 14478 Glorietta Drive, Sherman Oaks, CA 91423. Only available to Journeyman Wizards. You must include the Wizard Password which is revealed to a new Journeyman Wizard when he/she has earned the maximum number of points.
…
The rest of this magazine is too damaged to read.

I went through the entire map and found no new passages. Generally speaking modifications to Adventures have fallen into two categories:

a.) adding a random set of rooms “in the open”

b.) trying to secretly hide the new rooms and keep things otherwise consistent

This game goes with (b.). Eventually I turned to the magazine which was the only different material to look at, and took a whack at the dark room that gets mentioned:

You’re in Dark-room.

A massive stone tablet imbedded in the wall reads: “Congratulations on bringing light into the Dark-room!”

This is the place where you have to say PLOVER to get in while also holding a lamp (a puzzle I wrote about when I first played 350-point adventure; it required a lateral leap of faith). Without much else to mess with, I tried PUSH TABLET, and hit new content:

The tablet silently swings open to reveal a small opening to the north.

N

You are in a large room with medieval furnishings. Two bleached skeletons are hanging on the wall in iron cuffs. The room is dominated by a huge white boulder near the west wall. A tunnel in the east wall turns quickly out of sight. A dark hole in the floor was apparently once covered by a grating or trap door.

A very rusty sword with a ruby-studded hilt is embedded in the boulder!

GET SKELETON

I’d really rather not desecrate the remains of these two intrepid adventurers.

DOWN

You are in a very tight foul-smelling hole with damp walls. There is a room above you.

It is not a large section; here the entirety of the map:

The sword in the boulder can be pulled quite easy; this isn’t the “Excalibur” scenario we’ve seen before. The catch is that pulling the sword causes the tablet to shut behind the player, locking the secret room.

You heave on the sword with all your might. Little by little it scrapes out, until finally it comes free.

There is a muffled crash in the distance.

Dropping the sword causes it to return to the boulder and the passage to re-open. Dropping the sword in the room below the Medieval Room will cause the sword to “bounce once” and then return to the boulder, again re-opening the passage. There doesn’t seem to be a way to keep the passage open while holding the sword, and I’ve tried dropping in substitutes and jamming the entrance with no luck.

There is a way out: while the cave-closing countdown will not start if the player has all the “standard treasures” from the original game, the sword is sufficient to put things over the top, and there will be standard closing message followed by a teleport after waiting enough turns:

The sepulchral voice intones, “The cave is now closed.” As the echoes fade, there is a blinding flash of light (and a small puff of orange smoke). . . . As your eyes refocus, you look around and find…

You are at the northeast end of an immense room, even larger than the Giant Room. It appears to be a repository for the “Adventure” program. Massive torches far overhead bathe the room with smoky yellow light. Scattered about you can be seen a pile of bottles (all of them empty), a nursery of young beanstalks murmuring quietly, a bed of oysters, a bundle of black rods with rusty stars on their ends, and a collection of brass lanterns. Off to one side a great many dwarves are sleeping on the floor, snoring loudly. A sign nearby reads: “DO NOT DISTURB THE DWARVES!” An immense mirror is hanging against one wall, and stretches to the other end of the room, where various other sundry objects can be glimpsed dimly in the distance.

However, the sword does not come with the player, and it doesn’t get registered back at the building as one! I can still report the gameplay to the end, though.

In the original, there are two endgame rooms; the second has some special rods, and if you drop one in the NE room, drop it, move to an adjacent room, and type BLAST, it will blow open an entrance to cheering elves. This time things go a little differently:

BLAST

There is a loud explosion, and a twenty-foot hole appears in the far wall, burying the dwarves in the debris.

You are at the SW end of the repository. Debris and broken pieces of mirror are strewn everywhere, burying everything that was stored here. At your feet, partly visible through the rubble, is a large steel grate, next to which is a corroded brass plaque, half obscured, reading “Treasure Vau… Keys in Mai…”

The grate is locked.

A whole has blown open to a “Main Office” which is a new room.

You are in the Main Office of the cave. A large jagged hole in the north wall opens into the Repository. Along a side wall is a large glass display case containing magic rods belonging to great wizards of the past. Another wall is covered with yellowed autographed glossy photos of well-known dragons and trolls. On a bulletin board are many charts and notices, marked “Dragon Duty Roster”, “NOTICE: Workdwarves’ Compensation Rules”, and the like. Through an archway in the south wall daylight can be seen.

Lying to one side is a ring with two large identical keys on it.

The keyring can go over to the treasure vault.

You are in a narrow vault with heavy walls constructed of large stone blocks. Dim yellow illumination glows through a square grate overhead.

A tall pointed wizard’s hat, made of solid gold, and inlaid with moons and stars carved from precious jewels, shimmers in midair!

Suspended a few feet off the ground is a wizard’s robe of blue velvet.

The grate is open.

The hat straightforwardly counts as a treasure, and the robe magically follows you around.

The robe rises gently, swirls about you, and settles around your shoulders. Evidently you have earned admission as a Probationary Apprentice in the Wizard’s Guild.

You can then head outside through the Main Office, walk over to the building, deposit the golden hat, and win.

As you release the hat, a cloud of sandalwood-scented smoke appears, out of which steps the Grandmaster of the Colossal Cave Lodge 437 of the Wizard’s Guild. He is wearing a long blue velvet robe, a long, pointed bejewelled hat made of solid platinum, and love beads. He carries a three foot long rod with a star on the end, all of solid gold. His eyes twinkle behind thick gold-rimmed spectacles, and he smiles benevolently as he says,

“Congratulations, young Adventurer. By your ordeals in the Cave you have proven yourself worthy of admission to the Wizard’s Guild in the rank of Apprentice Wizard. If you divine the remaining mysteries of the cave, you shall be rewarded with the rank of Journeyman Wizard.”

The Wizard waves his wand, and the cave bear and little bird appear in a puff of orange smoke, grunting and twittering their congratulations. You leap onto the bear’s back, and, with the bird fluttering in a circle overhead, you ride out of the building, through a crowd of cheering elves, and into the sunset.

You scored 345 out of a possible 375 using 448 turns.

Your score puts you in Master Adventurer Class A. To achieve the next higher rating, you need 1 more point.

Hence I’ve “won” but I’m still quite curious about the sword treasure and if there’s yet another hidden treasure somewhere. The only hint I can think of is about the reference to the troll being amused in the magazine, but prodding at both the troll and troll bridge have revealed no new actions I can find. It is possible the sword is really the only thing left to bring the score to maximum.

I’d normally try prodding at the source but there’s encryption going on (like the Dian Gerard games). I realize some of y’all are keen on that sort of thing, so I have files here to make the game easy to play. Run the RUN.BAT file, type B: to switch to the Adventure disk, and type ADVENT to run. I left my save files you can look at with DIR, and typing ADVENT SAVENAME will boot a saved game.