(Continued from my previous posts about Danny Browne, which were written four years ago so don’t feel bad if you need to refresh your memory.)
Just a reminder that for any UK-based author, “TRS-80” may actually mean a Video Genie instead. Computer & Video Games, March 1982 issue.
This is another circumstance like Marooned where I bailed on a game because it was broken, and a reader (Rob Browning in this case) came in later to repair it. The Lazurite Factor’s file had some kind of corruption and couldn’t be run on the original hardware (TRS-80). The game was one of three that Browne wrote over the summer of 1982 and all of them give off a “private game” feel; somehow the games tumbled into the various archives so we have them now.
The Lazurite Factor in particular apparently was stored in GW-BASIC format, even though that’s for DOS, not for TRS-80. (The easiest way to run the program is to get GWBASIC for DOS, copy the LAZURITE.BAS file in the same place, run DOSBox, and start the program with GWBASIC LAZURITE.BAS.)
Despite the Atari here in this Italian manual, this was for IBM-compatible computers. Source.
(Trivia: the Original GW-BASIC source code was released by Microsoft to Github. It includes COPYRIGHT 1975 BY BILL GATES AND PAUL ALLEN and ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM FEBRUARY 9 TO APRIL 9 1975; that is, the code for the paper tape for Altair that Microsoft started their company with carried over to GW-BASIC.)
The game is mostly a remix of Argorath Adventure: you start in a random spot in an underground area and try to escape, you find various discs and insert them in slots to open up the map, and you use a beverage to dissolve an obstacle.
On the map above, anything on the north side (not past the dotted-line connections) is a potential random start point.
This room has blue tiled walls. There is a table against a wal
There is a red disc inside a safe with a slot in it.
This room is one of the goal points; you find a different color disc to put into the slot in order to get the red disc.
A small library, the books have decayed badly. There is a sign but it’s unreadable.
There is a bottle of lemonade in the middle of the room.
You can just drink the lemonade if you want, but it softlocks the game.
A room like nothing ever experienced before. There is a hit of some dark prescence.
There is a glowing lever on the south wall.
Pulling the lever here kills you.
You were transported inside a small fishtank full of water. Naturally you drowned.
(Note I’ve fixed weird spacing and carriage returns; there’s a fair chance some of that got mangled in the TRS-80 porting process so it wasn’t fair to include them.)
While wandering the halls, you will occasionally meet a monster. You can FIGHT if you want; this will give you experience points if you win. There seems to be no purpose to experience points other than a more congratulatory final message at the end of the game. (This is exactly like Argonath Adventure, and seems to be the exact same source code ported over.)
An esgaroth is lumbering towards you.
It is small
It is of average strength
It has eaten 35 adventurers & now it wants to eat you.
>? FIGHT
It staggered off and died in a pool of blue ooze.
Having the fight go the wrong way (more likely if you pick on one that’s “powerful” rather than “average strength”) kills you. Death messages include
It ripped your arms out of their sockets and you die of blood loss.
and
It tore your head off and put it on a chain to wear as a good luck charm.
The right path is to first grab the lemonade and the blue disc, and head to the east side of the map to a chasm.
There’s a slot there, where you can INSERT BLUE DISC and it will cause a bridge to appear.
A small subterranean structure, this is the first part of a vast underground network. There is a screen with a slot below it.
There is a chasm preventing you from going south.
>? insert blue disc
A bridge swung across the chasm.
>? s
There is a pungent puttylike substance blocking your path.
The substance is very similar to a puzzle from Argonath, except rather than using Irn Bru to get by you use lemonade. The tricky part is that USE LEMONADE isn’t understood (despite this being comparable to the syntax with the blue disc); instead, you type the word “USE” alone, and then afterwards specify you want to use the lemonade. We’ve seen many perils with the bespoke parser but I think this is a new one. (Not even Argonath had this issue: it has the player type USE IRN BRU in full!)
>? use
Use what? lemonade
The puttylike substance vapourises.
Past that, there’s a button you’re not supposed to push…
There is a small poster which says, ‘THE LAZURITE FACTOR By Danny Browne jnr’ stuck on a black slimy wall. There is a red button on a wall.
>? push button
The roof caved in on your head.
…and instead you’re supposed to swerve west and pick up a white disc and a rom cartridge.
This room was totally white but, an evil darkness has escaped from an air vent in the ceiling and floods the room.
>?w
This cave is separated into two bits. In one there is an air vent behind which is a fan.
There is a white disc lying on the floor.
>?e
This physics lab has lots of different computer bits and pieces strewn around. But mostly in a large heap.
An inconspicous ROM CARTRIDGE lies on the floor.
>?
With those in hand, you can now walk to the far west of the map and the safe.
The safe opens with the white disc, letting you get a red disc. One room to the east you can find a door with a slot that needs the red disc.
You are facing a blue door. There is a screen with a slot to the left of it.
>? s
The door is in the way.
>? insert red disc
The door opened.
Head south, push a button, and you’ve won.
There is a large red button jutting out of the ground. On the ceiling is an grate above which is a camera like object.
>? push button
You are teleported.
You have escaped with the valuable rom cartridge! You are RICH!
By the way, will you lend me a few million?
In isolation, not terribly impressive, but just remember this has the context of the author just noodling around trying to learn how to make adventure games (here, by scavenging the code from his previous game). Despite the text-munging being cleared up the code was still broken, with one line in particular leaving a comment:
2110 PRINT ” You are teleported. “: GOTO 1202 : REM ***** THIS IS PROBABLY WRONG!!
Rob Browning fixed this so the game is winnable, but the comment means this is a snapshot of a private game rather than something published.
Coming up: an unpublished game recently rescued by an author from an old disc, then we’ll return to Japan.
From the official Irn Bru Facebook page.
I should’ve known.
The pattern: I write about some halfway-dodgy program, abandon it, and assume I’m done.
The date here differs from the other one in the source of June 19th. I would guess the date here is when this particular room was made, as opposed to the code being started.
My readers take it up as a challenge and finish the thing anyway (Chou’s Alien Adventure being a prime example).
Here, I felt satisfied with what I had seen with Argonath Adventure, but Redhighlander had to go and make it to victory, so I was obliged to give it another try.
The full map, the room is orange being ones I didn’t visit before.
To be fair, I probably should have given it another spin. I often overlook USE as a verb (being so non-specific) and I only figured out how to pick up the Irn Bru at the end of my last session. The way is blocked by some spiderwebs, and while I’m unclear what contribution this particular beverage might provide (is there lore about it being a powerful acid?), here’s the result:
This leads down to a small area with two kitchens, a “monster” that is hungry, and a computer where you are supposed to INSERT a DISC (which I had already from elsewhere).
Of the two kitchens, one of them has a red lever that deposits you in a volcano.
The other has a blue lever that gives you food.
You can take biscuits from elsewhere and feed them to a monster at a jet engine. I’m unclear what purpose this serves, but the monster goes away once USE BISCUITS happens.
Moving over to the computer, you can INSERT DISC to get teleported to a room with a key.
The key then lets you go south from the “Neon Sign” room I gave a screenshot of earlier, and make it to the exit.
The final screen suggests a sort of second game concurrent with the first one, where you try to kill the various monsters for score before escaping. FIGHT alone works, you can’t type the name of the monster, but it doesn’t matter, because this mechanic really does seem to be broken: you just die, even if you fortify yourself first by sleeping and eating.
I admit to finding the “optional objective” here which is almost entirely separate from the main game intriguing, even if it is entirely broken. The closest comparison I can think of from pre-1982 games is Lugi, with a randomly generated map and had tasks like “gather money” which could lend points but didn’t affect the actual element of escape. With platformers and the like, the interface can usually convey that Collectible X is there for points and a shiny medal; with adventure games, it is never clear to the player when one element really is separate, as there just might be a clue or hidden item that requires the right amount of progress.
Is this really the first Scottish text adventure? Well, there’s still not absolute verification of Danny Browne’s identity (but who else would insert a casual Irn Bru reference?) and of course there’s plenty of games on the 1982 list I have yet to examine, but whatever the circumstances, this has a high likelihood of being in the first handful of text adventures from the country.
We’re going to try something a little different today and work through the complete works of Danny Browne. No, not the reggae music producer. I’m meaning a possibly-Scottish probably-teenager, notable if for nothing else we have yet to have a game hailing from Scotland.
I’m guessing, based on factors you’ll see in a moment, Danny was a student who tried his hand at writing adventure games starting in June 1982 and ending in November 1982. I have been unable to locate any ads or reprints of his games in magazines, and based on certain other aspects I highly suspect this is a set of “private games” (like The Smurf Adventure a few games ago), ones written by the author as personal projects but not intended for wide distribution.
Rather helpfully for doing an anthology post, Danny put months (and in two cases exact days) in which he wrote his games.
Acids (May)
Argonath Adventure (June 19th)
The Lazurite Factor (September 3rd)
Memory Alpha (November)
So without further ado:
Acids
The million-selling David Ahl book BASIC Computer Games (first printing: July 1973) included a game called Animal (original by Arthur Luehrmann at Dartmouth), where the player thinks of an animal and the computer tries to guess it with yes/no questions. There’s a stub of questions to start (DOES IT SWIM? IS IT A BIRD?) and then when the computer gets “stumped” the player is meant to give both the animal they were thinking and question that will work to narrow things down to that animal. It isn’t really a game as much as a proto-expert system, of the kind where a doctor can put in responses to a computer’s queries and have a diagnosis get narrowed down. It’s also close to GROW which was used to write an adventure game, except that GROW was not restricted to yes/no responses.
According to Kevin Bunch who interviewed Luehrmann recently, the original Dartmouth version of Animal included a swearing filter because college students are predictable.
Techholtz did the modified version of the game for DEC.
Acid is the same game but for acids.
This is not remotely an adventure game, but I mention it since our biographical material on Danny Browne is non-existent. It is dated as May 1982 which suggests he was a student who wrote this potentially thinking in terms of a chemistry class? (Based on the games that are to follow, probably not a teacher.)
The other important bit of context we can glean from Acid is that based on the source code, and despite the easy accessibility of Ahl’s re-print of the game, it seems to have been made from scratch (at least, it doesn’t match any of the versions I’ve looked at).
(As an aside, Arthur Luehrmann is one of the important oft-overlooked people in game history; he was a physics professor who was an early embracer of computer graphics and wrote the game POTSHOT which is one of the earliest “artillery games”; think Scorched Earth or GORILLAS.BAS.)
Argonath Adventure
The file on this game had some corruption, I think due to the presence of non-standard ASCII characters. It only munges up the title screen but the upshot is that instead of my regular emulator I used the online one at willus.com.
I wish I could give what the objective is, but I haven’t been able to finish and I’m not 100% sure the game is finishable. You’re on some sort of alien planet and there’s a spot where you “escape” but past that I am unclear.
Rather unusually, the player is dropped in their initial room at random; the “opening room” shown above is one of many. I’m not sure if this was intentional on an artifact of the game being a work in progress, because there is an apparent “opening room”.
However, unless you get the lucky random start, the only way to reach the room is through the command FART. Yes, FART has returned to us, for the fourth time. Here, it teleports between a handful of rooms (a different set than the starting one) including the surface of the planet. Once going in any direction, the player is locked in the complex.
The blocked exit at the far lower left asks for a key, and the room above it mentions a web blocking the passage.
There are wandering enemies at intervals. They appear randomly in any room. There’s some mention of combat mechanics in the source but they don’t seem to work, and while FIGHT is a verb the game doesn’t understand when I try to use it. They end up not mattering insofar as you can just leave a room as one appears and come back and they will be gone (or at least, there will be a new re-roll with possibly a different monster).
It’s not worth being harsh evaluating the monster system here as game writers in general didn’t know what to do with monsters. The Crowther/Woods dwarves present a “logistical puzzle” in having to carry around an axe, and the slight bit of randomness (in terms of missing axe throws) keeps things from being too monotonous, but it was hard to expand on that concept and keep within an “adventure framework” (no stats, no complicated RPG tactics). Zork’s thief simply scaled in terms of your overall point score (that is, as you gathered more treasure, you gathered more experience so the thief became easier to fight and you were more likely to win) but even as late an Infocom game as Arthur didn’t improve on that (there’s a knight with a similar mechanic).
The game has three objects: a disc, some biscuits, and a bottle of “Irn Bru”. (The last is a Scottish soft drink which at least strongly suggests the author was not American.)
A note regarding Scotland: Spectrum’s main factory (under license from Timex) was in Dundee, and according to David Cowen (of Grand Theft Auto fame), not much attention was paid to loss prevention, meaning “everyone worked there just kinda walked out with a bag full of Spectrums”, causing a large ecosystem of computer clubs. So we would in fact expect quite a few text adventures to come out of Scotland, but written for the ZX Spectrum, not the TRS-80.
I checked the source later, you have to type “TAKE IRN BRU” as a whole and not worry about restricting to two words.
It’s faintly possible the game is finishable but even with source-diving left me puzzled, and I’ve drained the majority of the content juice anyway. The winning message from the source code is
You are the first person ever to get out alive.
The Lazurite Factor
This one’s unfortunately completely unplayable; there’s strings of broken ASCII characters all throughout the text. It seems to be fairly similar to the previous game, so I just pulled up a few pieces of source code to talk about the changes.
The Lazurite factor
By Danny Browne
3rd Sept 1982
For Futura Industries Computer Division
Again, monsters appear at random, exactly the same set as last time, suggesting that there was cutting and pasting involved.
” An orc ” , ” A goblin ” , ” An esgaroth ” , ” A large furry creature ” , ” A troll ” , ” A biggish red eyed animal ” , ” A minotaur ” , ” A bogey man ”
There’s a good chunk of “auto-message” verbs; that is, the game “understands” the verb but also does not do anything with it, so for example, trying to break anything just says “it refuses to break.” Swearing possibilities are included.
6320 READ L4$ CVS “EAT” + GOSUB ” It’s inedible. ” : INPUT p
6325 READ L4$ CVS “BITE” + GOSUB ” You broke your tooth. ” : INPUT p
6330 READ L4$ CVS “LICK” + GOSUB ” Don’t be disgusting. ” : INPUT p
6335 READ L5$ CVS “BREAK” + GOSUB ” It refuses to break. ” : INPUT p
6345 READ L5$ CVS “SMASH” + GOSUB ” Nothing happens to it. ” : INPUT p
There are five items, including a ROM CARTRIDGE which looks to be the overall objective.
4000 READ ZZ CVS LE + GOSUB ” There is a bottle of lemonade in the middle of the room. ”
4010 READ ZZ CVS BL + GOSUB ” There is a blue disc lying in a folder. ”
4020 READ ZZ CVS RD MKD$ RD CVI + GOSUB ” There is a red disc lying against the wall. ”
4030 READ ZZ CVS WH + GOSUB ” There is a white disc lying on the floor. ”
4040 READ ZZ CVS RO + GOSUB ” An inconspicous ROM CARTRIDGE lies on the floor. “
The blue disc is used to open a bridge path, and the white disc is used to open a safe (with the rom cartridge).
3020 IFI$ CVS “BLUE DISC” MKD$ BL$ CVS I$ + GOSUB ” A bridge swung across the chasm. ” : BL$ CVS ” ” : CH CVS : INPUT [
3070 READ I$ CVS “WHITE DISC” ANDWH$ CVS I$ + GOSUB ” The safe opened. ” : RD CVS : WH$ CVS ” ” : INPUT USING
Regarding the ending, I’m wondering if I’ve missed some tech joke here, because the finale text suggests the cartridge is worth millions.
2220 VARPTR : GOSUB ” You have escaped with the valuable rom cartridge! You are RICH! ” : GOSUB ” By the way,will you lend me a few million? “
It is faintly possible the game is recoverable, since the textual errors seem to at least have consistent patterns, but for now let’s move on to the last game:
Memory Alpha
Memory Alpha had no garbled text, and I was able to run it with my regular emulator.
I played for a while, found it fairly broken still (including two crashes at random points) and did some searching around until I realized this was nearly the same game as Conquest of Memory Alpha, which I just wrote about. (To be clear: yes, I played Danny Browne’s version first.) It looks like Danny tried to modify the game to his own design but stopped halfway through. It may have been just to try to study the source code rather than make a game, or it could be the difficulty was such he wanted to hack it to see what the inside of Memory Alpha was like.
The arrows have been added in. If you try to blow the tank at the entrance up with a grenade the game crashes.
So, my apologies there wasn’t some delicious nugget of lost gaming history this time, just some experiments of a mysterious coder who will not appear again. In a sense, though, this gives a swath of what I can only imagine occurred with regularity: people in the early 80s who were interested in adventure games, but not quite capable of coding one all the way through, yet still fascinated enough to keep trying.
Renga in Blue 