I managed to finish the game, with some help from Rob digging through source code in the comments. I was in fact very close to the end, but it required a leap of absurdity to get through.
Back side of the packaging, from videogamegeek.
Specifically, on one of my runs I had found a POMME (apple). It was nowhere remarkable or specific, it was just another item in a room.
If you have a load of inventory you try to fence with the apple contained within, it gets no offer.
This is meant to be a pun. The apple is in fact an Apple, that is, an Apple Computer, the secret computer we are looking for! I was threw off by both the fact it was not very secret, but also the level of removal from the language; I think if I was holding an APPLE the pun might of occurred to me, but since I was mentally translating it, I only visualized it as a real apple, maybe for use in some specific event later where someone can be bribed with food.
Now, the problem is — as the instructions specify — we are supposed to then make a getaway with a vehicle. The VOLER (steal) verb comes into play again. Rob wasn’t sure where, but he knew that it was possible to steal some keys. I wasn’t seeing any scenes at either the bar or the restaurant until I realized it was possible to ASSEOIR (sit). You get offered a menu and then can order, and then have an encounter where you can try to steal.
You are told you need to order a dish so as to not raise suspicion.
In the scene above, we’ve been caught, and the manager searches Larcin and confiscates all the stolen items.
There’s a similar scene at the bar; I wasn’t able to steal anything resembling a car key in either one.
What actually worked was stealing at the register! Maybe there’s valet service such that the car keys get stored there?
You fortunately don’t need to say specifically you’re going for TROUSSEAU (keychain) but this was still quite random as the VOLER verb usually gives a “don’t understand” message.
I did have to go through the process twice. The first time through, I took the keys down to the parking lot and went trying to unlock doors none of them would open. Trying to steal again at the register led to failure, but if I ended the burglarizing session, and then went back to the register to try again on a fresh day, I was able to get another keychain. The second one worked.
Thus ends a very odd game that straddled between feeling like a strategy game and an adventure game. I would say it counts as an adventure: the chain is a puzzle which requires the magnet to solve, the moment-to-moment action felt more like roleplaying than the “big picture” style gaming that strategy normally involves, and realizing the odd pun with the apple is not something that’d be part of any strategy game. It’s still essentially a very minimal adventure game with strategy game dressing.
I’d like to end with another source that Rob found, of an interview done with the Louis-Philippe Hébert and the young authors of Logidisque’s first game (Têtards, or tadpoles). Roughly 1:19 is when Hébert starts speaking.
I’ll quote part:
Il ya un choc culturel parce que on découvre tout à coup un nouveau médium. Un nouveau médium donc une nouvelle possibilité, de créer de nouveaux objets … ça nous pousse que dans nos dans nos traditions, parce que évidemment la plupart d’entre nous avons une formation littéraire ou cinématographique …
There’s a cultural shock because we’ve suddenly discovered a new medium. A new medium, and therefore a new possibility, to create new objects … that pushes us in our traditions, because obviously most of us have a literary or cinematographic background …
We’ve only had a few people for All the Adventures (like Robert Lafore) who styled themselves in this period as “writers” or “artists”; Hébert here is recognizing that the leap over mediums is difficult to make, and he claims that young people in particular have a certain “banalité de demain”, that is, banality of tomorrow, where they have an easier time dealing with the new medium that seems to be “the future” as they were born into it.
Coming up: a large and very difficult puzzle-fest with an elaborate magic system. Back to roots!
Two quick corrections from my previous post before I move on with the game.
First off, it turns out you can’t just type (for example) RESTAURANT to jump from the third floor to the first floor and go all the way to the relevant room, at least in normal circumstances. I swear I had it happen once, but it may have been a glitch or me misunderstanding some text in the French. The right way to travel between floors is to hop in L’ASCENSEUR (the elevator) with the command ASC and then it will give you a choice of floors. Pressing a number will go to the relevant floor, then pressing “9” will step off. There’s still some extra movement conditions (like if you’re sneaking in a room, you have to use SORtir to get out first before you go somewhere else on the same floor) but that essentially covers everything.
Secondly, as more than one person has pointed out, “voler” (which can be typed as VOL) is described on the commands screenshot as taking a noun, so the meaning shifts from “fly” to “steal”. I was still baffled for a bit after because it seems like it doesn’t work for stealing items (it doesn’t work as a synonym for “take”).
I finally did find that at the roof of the hotel, there is a PISCENE (pool) with a locker room, and if you go in the locker room you can VOL the lockers and take money directly. For all the other thefts you make, you’re grabbing items to trade with a fence (which I’ll show off in a moment).
The overall structural design is that the night you go sneaking, you have fifty turns; after the fifty turns are over, you TERMINER, which finishes the session. After this, a fence comes and visits your room, and offers money for each of the items you’ve stolen that are considered “valuable”. You then pay off your bill and have a new bill to keep staying at the hotel.
The third item there is what FUMER (smoke) can be used on, although the game just tells you that you can’t because it’s very illegal. Given how much loot we’re swiping, it seems odd our main character has an issue with breaking the law.
Since the stealth happens at night, it is by default dark, and if you try to start stealing things without remedying this fact you’ll have a chance of simply tripping in the dark and giving yourself away in that fashion. Fortunately, room 001 seems to always have a LAMPE.
Although taking it doesn’t automatically work. Here, we hear noises and hide in a corner but it turns out to be a false alarm.
Once the lamp is safely taken (just random), the dark is no longer a problem. Now we normally can have free reign of the hotel: we can use the PASSE from our room to unlock any locked door, and the lamp will keep us from stumbling in the dark. Mind you, we still might randomly have an attempt at swiping an object fail:
Here, we wake the person by trying to pick up the brooch, and escape via having the reflexes of a cat.
There’s one other obstacle that can come up, which is a chain across the door.
The MAGNET I mentioned in my last post works; you can TIRer (pull) the chain and you get congratulated for being clever. I was originally puzzled because the use of the object is passive (that is, the magnet is used automatically if you’re holding it) so I didn’t realize the magnet was being used there. I was visualizing security so shoddy I could just yank the chain by hand and it’d break.
So this game technically had one puzzle (two if you count the light). You might also count the “square key” I’ve found, which I have yet to be able to use, and the fact I have no idea where the computer is. I’ve checked every single room; an excerpt:
Note these are randomized each game, and even randomized within a game; I had a save state where I went back to a room I had visited in a prior iteration and found a second object that wasn’t there before. I think that’s supposed to represent guests moving things around. I do suspect I might be missing something involving the various guests, but I have yet to get any commands to work when I see one.
Note that shot above shows the outside of one of the two penthouse suites (601, 602) but both of them were empty!
The only even vaguely suspicion room was one with a DISQUE, which I am assuming is of the computer variety. (The fence describes it as a DISQUE DE GRANDE VALEUR — that is, of high value — but only offers $10 for it. That wouldn’t buy even half a French-translated Sierra game.)
Perhaps if I’m lucky enough to run across DOCTEUR O’BRIEN in my travels there’s some action that works (maybe he’s toting around a device that unlocks a secret door?) Keep in mind (based on the interview from 1984) the author said sometimes he couldn’t beat the game, so it is quite possible I just rolled a bad seed and have to replay to see certain conditions.
On top of that I’m not sure what the square key is for. It could go to a vehicle; studying the instructions, after you swipe the computer you’re supposed to make a getaway in a car.
Or maybe something is supposed to happen only in later burglar jaunts? I’ve only tried out the first two, maybe there’s some developments when you hit number five. The game loop really just has you visiting each and every room so it’s not easy to check if something small has changed.
The source is in BASIC but has resisted my very light prodding to see if I can find any enlightenment; I might need to resort to fierce prodding instead.
The center of gravity of Canada’s computing history has always been Ontario. A group at the University of Toronto in 1945 started a committee and took a tour of the United states in 1946, visiting essentially every major computer. Planning started in 1948 on what would be dubbed the UTEC, with a functioning version assembled in 1951. The full-scale version ended up not being built, because it turned out to cost essentially the same to buy a Ferranti Mark I from Britain, but the UTEC was still essentially Canada’s first general-purpose computer.
IBM’s presence in Toronto dates all the way back to the 1920s, and hence when they started in electronic computing it became their major center of research.
1968 photo taken by George Dunbar of Leslie Mezei, showing computer art made at the University of Toronto on an IBM 7094. Source.
One of the (many) candidates for “world’s first personal computer” was the MCM/70, first shown in May 1973 at the Fifth International APL Users’ Conference in Toronto.
In 1969, a census of existing digital computers and process controllers found the majority (1045 out of 2037) being in Ontario. However, in second place there was Quebec, at 485.
Sperry Canada, for instance, started there in 1950 (the geographical positioning being somewhat motivated by military considerations, as Quebec had closer proximity to the by-plane Greenland route over to the USSR). Concerns with French-speaking separatists led the Canadian government to have an interest in developing the Quebec economy; thus while Circuit Design Corporation put a research group in Toronto, they put their manufacturing in Quebec City aided by funding from the Canadian government.
Our unity is not secure if people in some extensive regions have to put up with opportunities and standards well below those of other Canadians…
Jean Marchand, Canadian politician
It is still true an idle listing of Canadian computing accomplishments has the word “Ontario” appear a disproportionate number of times. While what has been argued to be the first videogame came out of Toronto (Bertie the Brain, 1950)…
Photo by Bernard Hoffman for LIFE Magazine.
…and while Peter Jennings (also Toronto) made what is arguably the first commercial Canadian game (MicroChess, which did well enough that it helped fund the making of VisiCalc) and the first Canadian game company we know of is not from Toronto but still Ontario (Speakeasy Software, 1978)…
By early 1978, we had four titles ready for the Apple II — “Bulls and Bears”, “Warlords”, “Microtrivia” and “Kidstuff”. Trying to fit them into 16k and make them worth buying was certainly a challenge. This was before floppy disks! The only means of reproduction was audio tape. I found a company in Ottawa that produced educational audio tapes for doctors and talked them into replicating our tapes. The only problem was that only 50% of them worked and we didn’t know which 50% they were! So our 8 and 10 year old kids would load them one at a time on our home machine and pick out the good ones. Talk about cheesy technology.
…Quebec did eventually have their own accomplishments in videogaming. For us, starting specifically with the company Logidisque, founded by Louis-Philippe Hébert.
Louis-Philippe Hébert was an author with a strong interest in computers and the intersection between the two; he did a thesis while at the University of the Montreal in the 60s entitled
Application de principes mathématiques à la lecture et l’écriture de textes
that is,
Application of Mathematical Principles to the Reading and Writing of Texts.
While writer in residence at the University of Ottawa from 1977-1978 he got a Apple II and learned to program, making his own word processor. He got to meet with Steve Wozniak himself a year later while visiting California, who asked:
How come a smart guy like you writes in French?
The same year he formed a group dedicated to computers, and two years after that he registered the trademark for Logidisque. They published their first games in 1982, and they appear to be the first original games from Quebec.
I should emphasize regarding the term original games. Hugo Labrande has identified companies that sold translations, most notably Computerre, some which came before Logidisque, so they’re not quite the first company from Quebec to sell games, just “original” games.
It makes sense given Louis-Philippe Hébert’s long interest in electronic text (and rugged continuing use of French despite ribbing by the Woz) that’d his company would release the first original French-Canadian adventure game, Arsène Larcin by Éric Primeau.
From boardgamegeek.
The author Primeau joins the ranks of many, many teenaged adventure authors: he was 17. A friend of his knew someone who worked in a company located close to Logidisque; both Primeau and his unnamed friend got invited by Hébert for a visit in May of 1982. While there Hébert showed off the trading simulation game Caraïbes; Primeau was invited to try making a port, which he finished in a month.
To follow up, Primeau pitched a text adventure game. He had seen Scott Adams on a friend’s TRS-80 (specifically, Mission Impossible) and was influenced to try his own game, which he worked on starting in June, finished in time to be published nearly the same time as Logidisque (and Quebec’s) first game, Têtards. As French games were just getting started it not only is Quebec’s first adventure but one of the first adventures worldwide to appear in French. It was sold as a “roman interactif”, or interactive novel, reflecting Hébert’s literary bent (this was before Infocom started using “interactive fiction”!)
As the name suggests this is a spin-off of Arsène Lupin, the gentleman-burglar created by the French author Maurice Leblanc in the early 20th century. I’m not going to go into lore, as there doesn’t seem to be any specific references in this game; just as an aside, note that the original author had Lupin face off against an “unlicensed” version of Sherlock Holmes (Herlock Sholmes) and while most his thefts were of “realistic” artifacts some of his stories involved fantasy items like the Fountain of Youth.
You, as, Arsène Lupin Larcin, have arrived at the Hotel Majestyk, and your task is to find a secret computer.
Unlike Mad Martha where you picked a name to separate yourself from the avatar, here you are picking what name to sign in with, which would no doubt be a pseudonym. So this doesn’t quite remove the player from the avatar in the same way; a player can choose to still pretend they are Larcin but sign in with their real name.
You start in your room, 303.
“OBJETS DE VALEUR VISIBLES: RIEN DE PARTICULAR…” is simply “visible valuable objects: nothing special”. The two money values represent the amount in your pocket (starting at $0) and the bill to pay for the hotel room (at $300).
Inside 303 there is a “GARDE-ROBE SECRET” (secret wardrobe). Entering the wardrobe you can find a PASSE (pass-key).
Movement is incidentally quite irregular compared to a regular adventure game. While the above was the result of using ENTRER (enter) and getting out again is a matter of using SORTIR (leave) once you leave the hotel room there are no compass directions. You are instead able to consult a map and type the name of the place you want to go.
While I’ve seen modern games go this route and it isn’t that dissimilar from, say, the “big map” view of a Lucasarts-style game where you just click on your destination instead of type it…
Return to Monkey Island map, via Mobygames.
…what is quite irregular is that you also travel between floors this way. For example, you can go straight to the restaurant on the ground floor by typing RESTAURANT.
There’s otherwise not a lot of direction as to which rooms to start poking around in; the main catch is that this is an adventure-roguelike. The location of the computer is randomly generated each game, and the various characters move around in random ways. In the interview I linked earlier, even Primeau himself admitted he couldn’t always beat the game.
Même moi qui ai conçu ce jeu, je ne suis jamais assuré de trouver l’ordinateur: je sais comment gagner, mais je ne suis pas certain d’y parvenir.
Even I, the designer of the game, am never sure of finding the computer; I know how to win, but I’m never certain I’ll succeed.
So this might get a bit fussy! There does seem to be things resembling “puzzles” (I have, for example, found a magnet, although I’m not sure what it’s for) but this might possibly fall on the side of a strategy game. (Even given the Scott Adams inspiration, this is understandable, given the author’s previous immediate job was porting the strategy game Caraïbes. The irregular movement concept likely comes from there; it is a game set in the Caribbean where you type the word of the place you want to go when you are at a port, kind of like the later game Pirates!)
A random room I’ve broken into. I’m pretty sure the “television” and “magnet” are placed at random and would be elsewhere on a different playthrough.
This means the game might be absolutely horrible to beat; while there’s nothing as confusing as Madness and the Minotaur there could be a situation with a puzzle where the only reason you can’t solve it is that the random number generator failed to go your way! There is one advantage I do have: the author was nice enough to put full command lists.
Ignoring the “location movement verbs” which are really just nouns, the game has a parser which clips the first three letters of each word, getting:
VER (verrouiller = lock)
TIR (tirer = pull)
PLO (plongée = dive)
SOR (sortir = leave)
PRE (prendre = take)
DEP (deposer = drop)
DEV (déverrouiler = unlock)
ASS (asseoir = sit)
LEV (lever = stand)
ECO (écouter = listen)
VOL (voler = fly)
ENT (entrer = enter)
NAG (nager = swim)
FUM (fumer = smoke)
BOI (boire = drink)
JOU (jouer = play)
What’s FLY there for? Are we escaping by helicopter? And it looks like you can’t be a cool French gentleman-burglar without some kind of cigarette.
I’ll try a stab at visiting every room (using the power of saving my game to not waste time) and report in next time what encounters I have.
(Thanks to Ethan Johnson and QuarterPast for help scrounging images, and Hugo Labrande for doing a great deal of research on this topic before I arrived. I also found John Vardalas’s book The Computer Revolution in Canada quite helpful.)
Renga in Blue 