Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game to the extent I’m calling this done; my previous post is needed for context.

The alternate cover of the Tandy Color Computer version of the game. Via the Internet Archive.

This unfortunately a case where the Bedlam’s ambitions described by the manual were technically correct but in practice nearly everything is a smokescreen. There are only three (3) endings, and one of those gets chosen at random. The game starts to approach a fascinating idea but the author doesn’t quite fully get there. I’ll get back to this thought after I’ve done showing off the game.

Before bringing up TRS-80 screens again, I want to pull one more thing out of the manual: it has a psychological questionnaire.

While this is in the external materials, I’ll still count it as part of the game, marking a first of sorts that gets picked up again by games like A Mind Forever Voyaging and Tender Loving Care. It’s in a format similar to the (in)famous Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test which gets used as a diagnostic tool. Here are some samples from the real one:

I think I would enjoy the work of a librarian.
I am easily awakened by noise.
My father is a good man (or if your father is dead) my father was a good man.
I like to read newspaper articles on crime.
My hands and feet are usually warm enough.

The test sometimes has the feeling of being “stacked” against the one doing the test and there are questions involving actions supposedly “everyone” has done so they are used to determine if someone is lying. For Beldam’s version, every question has no correct answer, so you are already determined to be psychologically unfit by the end:

Question 2 — Thinking you are smarter than others

Answering Yes points to a “Superiority Complex,” which may be corrected with time and shock treatment. Score 5 points for a Yes Answer.

Answering No indicates a feeling of inferiority, which may or may not be true. Further study is needed, so score 5 points for a No answer.

Unsure shows a very wishy-washy individual. Go back and answer with a Yes or a No, or else give yourself 10 points for your uncertainty.

Question 20 asks about the word PLUGH and is one of the “hints” for the game. PLUGH is from Crowther/Woods but here it is also useful, because if you’ve had the “lobotomy” it will cure it. (I’m fairly sure the neither the doctor nor nurse are licensed professionals, especially for a reason you’ll see shortly.)

Moving on:

To the west of the starting area there is a maintenance room with a “hook” intended for opening windows (there are no windows in this game) a BLUE PILL, and a cabinet with a red key trapped inside.

I tested after some thought GET RED KEY WITH HOOK and it worked. (The only reason it took me a little time is the hook’s description tags it for a totally different purpose which it never gets used for.) With the red key in hand it is possible to open all three doors to the south that are originally locked.

Two of the rooms are padded cells; note that they make for one of the available places that patients can show up them (I’ll give the full list of possibilities after I’m done showing off the landscape). The third red door (the farthest to the east) leads to a new hallway with some more padded rooms (these not locked), a kitchen with a refrigerator and MEAT, and finally an exit blocked by a GUARD DOG.

Now, I had some suspicions already about a branch right here, as I tested EAT PILL on a couple runs, and found sometimes it gets a YECCH, TASTES AWFUL! and sometimes it tastes like nothing:

SEEMS RISKY, BUT O.K. GULP! HMMM. NO EFFECT?

There is indeed no effect … if you’re the one that eats it. If you take the no-taste-for-humans pill and PUT PILL IN MEAT, giving it to the dog will eliminate the dog. (I would have expected the “yecch” pill to be the deadly one. The fact the game parsers the command and doesn’t let you deviate too far otherwise suggested to me I had to just keep trying, but it took until my sixth reset that I got the right effect.

This is close to a victory, but if you try to leave, you get tossed in a locked STORAGE SHED. You need to green key that the “nurse” was guarding. There are two ways of doing this.

One, the “normal adventurer” way, is to use the hook again. You can just GET GREEN KEY WITH HOOK while standing in the adjacent room. It’s unclear the hook visualization lets you reach that far, or that the green key was placed in such a way that this would even be practical, but it’s the sort of thing that was worth a try since it worked on the red key.

Two, the “thing I found out from a walkthrough” way, is to use the lobotomy. Specifically, when it happens, you start wandering randomly, the “wander” phase happens before the “nurse applies electro-therapy” phase, so you can pick up the green key, and have the brain damage trigger, escaping her clutches (and then PLUGH works to get out).

With the green key via either method, when tossed in to the shed you can then escape. (If you didn’t get the green key beforehand, you are stuck there forever. Bummer.)

This escape method only works if you randomly get selected the right ending.

If the game picks the BLUE-PILL-EXIT then you get BluePillA. Otherwise you get BluePillB. Both pills can be dissolved in the hamburger meat and fed to the dog. But BluePillA is poison and will kill the dog.

Before getting into the other two exits, let me briefly describe the characters.

HOUDINI and MERLIN we have already met last time. HOUDINI you can untie and he will follow you around trying to undo a straitjacket, but he’ll never manage (and there’s no way you can help). MERLIN will mutter about you being a demon but also is no help whatseover.

You can also run into a DOCTOR. Or “doctor”. Or “‘doctor'”. It’s hard to tell with this game.

Given the number of unlicensed procedures I experienced while playing, I think the fellow here might be telling the truth. Or maybe he’s only telling the truth on certain world-variants. Either way, he is of no importance to escape.

Next comes PICASSO. He wanders around — doesn’t necessarily follow you, I never quite worked out the logic — and paints doors on the walls.

This represents one of the exits! If this particular ending is the one chosen, then one of Picasso’s painted doors is a real door and you can open it.

THE PAINTED DOOR OPENS TO REVEAL AN ESCAPE ROUTE! YOU HAVE ESCAPED!

Another character you can run across is X-RAY RAY. He is genuinely useful for reasons I’ll get to.

Finally there’s NAPOLEON, the “MIGHTIEST LEADER IN THE WORLD”, as he tells us.

Napoleon being “mighty” is important as there’s a third possible ending. If you don’t have the dog-ending or the painted-door-ending you’ve got a secret-door ending, and you need to wandering around trying either EXAMINE ROOM (I looked this up, it’s pretty unusual parser use) or get Ray to help look at rooms. One of the rooms will have a secret door, but the door is stuck and you aren’t strong enough to open it. Napoleon is, and you can command him with NAPOLEON OPEN DOOR:

NAPOLEON GRABS THE SECRET DOOR AND BUSTS IT OPEN! THE SECRET DOOR LEADS TO ESACPE! YOU’VE MADE IT!

The actual gameplay is fairly chaotic with all the various people and it being unclear what use, if any, do the various people have. In the end, according to random roll,

* there’s an ending which doesn’t involve patients at all

* there’s an ending which involves one particular patient (Picasso)

* there’s an ending which involves a different particular patient (Napoleon)

with X-Ray Ray potentially helping with not only the Napoleon ending, but the Picasso one, as he can see the painted-door exit before it gets drawn in!

Still I feel like this game involved missed opportunity, as for the most part, the interactions you have with the characters is meaningless. It doesn’t always feel that way in practice — I enjoyed prodding Merlin trying to get him to react to things — but without a payoff it was akin to Deadline but without the character interaction model working, or the ability to command characters at all really.

NAPOLEON, GO NORTH
THE OBSTINATE REPLY IS “I DON’T WANT TO.”

What I was really hoping for is something along the lines of Maniac Mansion, where each character has suggested skills and rather than picking characters at the start there are patients randomly assigned to be “helpful”. This would lead to a variety of routes through the game where the skill availability itself is what determines what endings are available.

In actual practice with Bedlam, based on the various testimonials I’ve heard, people often never got as far as an ending; this was a tool to play around and mess around with Merlin and Co., and the randomization added an extra spice which gave it a mysterious aura. That is, by not resolving just exactly what was going on, the game becomes something more in the imagination.

Compared to Xenos, this game is more clever conceptually, while that game works better as an overall experience.

I do want to emphasize this wasn’t end of Arnstein writing games; in 1983 he wrote three action games (Radio Ball, Androne, Reactoid). I’m not sure his full story after, although he eventually returned to his electrical engineering roots. In 1993 his name is associated with three new companies: Rhotech Labs, R & R Labs, and PM Labs. In 1994 Rhotech started advertising a “cartridge emulator” for computers in order to “make your own video game workstation”.

Source.

You can see a picture here of their ROMulator.

Coming up: Zodiac Castle, which might be the last “traditional” game of 1982.

1970: the Association for Computing Machinery held a “Special Events” conference in New York City, which they dubbed THE UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTION. It was essentially oriented towards presenting the still-relatively-new idea of computers to the public. As the co-chairmen Monty Newborn and Kenneth King wrote:

Five events are scheduled: Town Hall I and Town Hall II are open free to the public and are intended to provide the public an opportunity to question experts on computer related matters; the Cinema Computer will show a series of movies on computer related subjects, computer generated movies, and a movie and a talk on a sophisticated robot; the Computer Arts Festival is featuring the most recent work in computer art and computer music along with a one day forum involving leading figures in the art, music, and education fields; the First United States Computer Chess Championship is the first tournament of its kind.

I admit I’m very interested in the movie schedule (given on page 8 of the source I just linked). It kicks off with the Bell Labs film The Incredible Machine from 1968…

…and somehow passes through the COMPUTER COMPOSED BALLET AND SWORD FIGHT provided by the Central Office of Information in the UK, a group more known in 1970s for PSAs warning children not to play on thin ice and to stay away from electrical substations.

Via “Careers for Your Daughter“.

The relevant event for us today from the UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTION is the chess championship, which (as advertised) was the first of its kind. As these games were played on giant mainframes located scattered about the country, play was done remotely, with moves being called in.

Chess Computer Loses Game in a King‐Size Blunder. New York Times, September 02, 1970. Source.

The first exception to this remote style of play happened during the 1977 running of the championship, as a microcomputer was entered in for the first time: 8080 Chess, designed by the electrical engineer Robert Arnstein of Dallas, Texas, using a S-100 bus.

Ply logic, from the manual for the game. The easiest way to play 8080 Chess now is via the SOL-20 version.

While I don’t have any videos from that particular championship, I do have one from the World Championship that happened the same year in Toronto, so you can watch the style of play.

8080 Chess ended up 9th out of 12 entries; remember every other program was on a large mainframe. 8080 Chess was not necessarily the best microcomputer chess out there, especially given when it was entered into a microcomputer tournament a year later it scored fifth out of 11 (the famous program Sargon won); still, the moment is one that puts Robert Arnstein in the history books.

I mention this because he seems neglected otherwise. We have here the last game we’ll be playing from Robert Arnstein; we started 9 years ago with playing Haunted House (1979) and end our journey here (although Xenos came later chronologically, I’ve covered that game already).

Historically, the trail followed by Ken and Roberta Williams is well-remembered; other Apple II games like Transylvania reflected the same style. Infocom’s Zork sold so well it is perhaps the only pure text-adventure a random modern person could name. Assorted British games like Pimania at least have some recognition in Europe.

The last three Arnstein games — Raäka-Tū, Bedlam, Xenos — also have strong recognition, but for an entirely different group of people. That’s because these were first party Radio Shack games.

When I originally played the game back in 1984, it was at a friend’s house, and it was the first adventure type game I had ever played. I was immediately intrigued that you could tell the game what to do by typing in commands such as go north, go south, open door, etc. Up until that point, the only videogames I had played were the arcade types which were only based on how fast you could push the button to shoot the enemy.

— Quoting “Karen” on Xenos from Figment Fly

Radio Shack was possessive about displaying product in their stores, and because there was a lot of them, any products they sold had massive exposure.

Via a 1981 Radio Shack Catalog.

While there was a book they sold which listed sources for “indie games”, there wasn’t the massive outflow of third-party boxed product like there was with the Apple II. The Arnstein games thus formed sort of a parallel history of early adventure games, where players who just had access to a TRS-80 had their strong childhood memories form around these games as opposed to The Hobbit or Mask of the Sun. I have no doubt there were people whose first exposure to Crowther/Woods was via Pyramid 2000.

To put it another way, in the major histories of text adventures in the 21st century (Twisty Little Passages, The Digital Antiquarian, 50 Years of Text Games) Arnstein’s name doesn’t appear at all. Now, there are bazillions of authors we have covered here who don’t, but many of those people aren’t well-known by anybody; for a particular subset of players in this particular cul-de-sac of time, these games were pillars in their imagination. I think maybe out of all the games Bedlam should be better remembered universally, because wow, it does something wildly ambitious.

From Figment Fly.

This has a “you’re in an asylum, get out” premise to its plot which suggests to me Arnstein was thinking of Deathmaze 5000 and Asylum, both which would have been well known to a TRS-80 author. From the manual:

There are no hidden treasures to find, no wealth to amass, no score to beat. There is only one goal–get out, if you can. Your success depends totally upon your resourcefulness and your ability to think clearly. There is always one way out, but be warned–the exit changes each time you load the game.

The fact the “exit changes each time you load the game” suggests Arnstein may have also been thinking of Madness and the Minotaur. This is a adventure-roguelike with a “light” amount of randomization: where the nature of the characters is randomized, and linked to that there are consequently multiple endings where only particular endings might be available on a particular playthrough.

To help you escape, you can try enlisting the aid of some of the people you meet. Just remember where you are. Can a man running around painting doors on walls and claiming to be Picasso really help? Can a man who says he is Houdini get you out? What about using “X-Ray” Johnson to burn a hole in the wall to gain freedom? Perhaps the guard dog just needs a little attention. Maybe the nurse or the doctor with the hypodermic needle (if he really is a doctor) can be persuaded to help you.

Their ability to help also changes each time you load the game. Depending on the active escape route, you will either be able to escape without help from anyone, or you will need help from one or more of the people you meet. Some of the inhabitants of Bedlam are neither friendly nor cooperative. They do not get along with other inmates and some will try to stop you from leaving.

Rather than starting in a cell that requires escape, the door is open and you are free to wander.

Except, you might run across a doctor who gets upset and gives you the needle:

After the lobotomy you start “wandering” at random. I did not type the WEST, NORTH, and WEST commands from the screenshot below, the game typed them for me.

While I have trouble saying for certain at this phase of my gameplay, I think the author designed this with a compact map in mind (compared to his other games) and with an emphasis on complex character interactions / random generation. My map so far:

Everything is laid out in a hallway where the north doors are green (unlocked) and the south doors are red (locked). To the far west is an office where the doctor lurks, although the doctor can wander at random; nearby the doctor is a “dispensary” with a locked cabinet (inside I could see a red key), a blue pill, and a hook meant for opening windows. (Please keep in mind some or all of this might be placed randomly, I’ll need to do more tests.)

To the far east is an electroshock therapy room with a women dressed in a roller derby uniform in a uniform that looks like she does roller derby. There’s a green key there but I can’t take it without getting a treatment (losing the green key in the process).

Of the green doors, two of them have patients (again, in my current save-file). “Houdini” is hanging in one:

I haven’t been able to FREE HOUDINI or otherwise help him.

“Merlin” is in another and he thinks I’m a demon he has summoned.

I’ll need to do some more experimentation to see how far down the rabbit hole this game really goes. I know, at the very least, the manual isn’t lying about the multiple endings.

(And for anyone who has played it, please no hints whatsoever, I’m in the “fun toybox” phase of the game despite the lobotomies. I have suffered four so far. I am now wondering if a lobotomy is required for one or more of the endings.)