Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

The game was mostly straightforward but there was one horrendously obscure part and two major bugs. My previous post is needed to understand this one.

This game was swiped by Keypunch on the same disk as the broken Cavern of Riches port; the one that made it impossible to score. Weirdly, the stolen C64 version of Castle Adventure might be less buggy than the original. Via eBay.

I had left off last time being captured and tossed in a cell with a “horny toad”. The most immediate obvious thing it seemed to try — given this was a princess-rescue expedition — was to try to KISS TOAD.

However, I had no method of getting through the locked door, so this was a dead end. The main catch to realize is that even though there’s a rope with grappling hook immediately adjacent to a place it gets used (arriving at the guard and then this scene) that doesn’t mean the rope gets used in that spot first! The right action is to grab the grappling hook, turn it around, and use it on the castle instead.

Doing this opens a significant amount of map since nearly the entire interior of the castle is now accessible.

New rooms marked in color.

You can technically scoop the rope up behind you as there’s a battle axe off in one tower that you can use to drop the castle’s drawbridge. I say “technically” because this was one of the bugs of the game: halfway through the drawbridge just disappeared for no reason and I had to restart.

Other fun items are the Baron’s best horse which you can steal away with…

…and some armor where the mere act of carrying it is enough to confuse wandering guards into thinking you are the Baron. (I assume it is passively intended that you wear the armor when you pick it up, but it still was funny the first time it happened.)

The bookcase here incidentally has two entirely different books, and both are needed. I got lucky and found one book on one playthrough and the other on a reset, so I knew they were both there, but this would be a case where it’d be quite easy to miss an item.

One book is a “horror” book that has a diamond inside which counts as a treasure, and the other is a rare edition of Scott which has the word “Ivanhoe” (as hinted at by the graffiti, so I guess it’d be fine to find the horror book first since there’s a hint that the second book exists, but I found them in the reverse order).

The “piano keys” are found by trying to play a piano. They get used later to unlock a door, because adventure game logic. The joke made sense in Kidnapped but not as much sense here.

The bookcase also hides a secret passage leading to a treasure room with gold bars and a silver cross. However, taking one of the treasure items causes the door to seal and lock (and not a lock openable via piano keys). What does work in the room is the word IVANHOE which teleports the player over to a dungeon area, but I wasn’t sure at first what use that was.

Another secret passage goes off of a fireplace (just ENTER FIREPLACE) and it leads into a family crypt with a talking skull.

The “vampire” being warned about is a little farther down, where there’s some rubies and the sound of flapping wings. At random, you might get bitten by the vampire bat and die (the silver cross offers protection, but it’s easier to just save your game and hope for the random luck, it seems like you get through about 90% of the time anyway).

The next move turned out to be slightly tricky: I had the means to escape the cell with the princess already. (You can try to attack a guard anywhere, like where the books are, and you’ll get sent there.) The guard is nice enough to send you to the cell while still holding a battle axe, so you can SMASH DOOR. It is unclear why smashing the door works there (and not any of the other locked doors); the three doors (guard in the cave, the door at the treasure room, and the cell) all have different methods of opening even though they look indistinguishable.

With the princess in hand you find yourself back in the dungeon, the same dungeon that IVANHOE works in to zip over to the treasure room. The problem is that the treasure room locks itself even if you don’t try to steal anything, so there doesn’t seem to be any escape. The trick (which I found out via walkthrough) is to wait around for a guard to appear, and then fight it. Fighting a guard before was useless other than to get captured, but the second time works out.

Now here’s the astonishingly bad part. Even though there’s no command to examine the guard further, and LOOK yields nothing new, you can still TAKE KEYS from the guard. I guess you’re supposed to assume he has some? This is so egregious I think it’s probably a bug. The keys from the guard work on the treasure room, so it’s now possible to escape (not only with the princess, but the gold bars and silver cross).

Almost done!

The last treasure is found back at the cave. The guard that was at a door is now unconscious in the dungeon, so you can open the door unmolested; this is where the piano keys work.

It’s a cute joke, but the game never previously established this kind of tilted-reality in the same way Kidnapped (which uses the same joke) or Mad Venture (where you pick up a “fork” in the road) does.

There’s a wrong route where you can end up LOST IN THE PET RAM (fine, there’s one other titled-reality moment), but the important part is the BARON’S SECRET STRONGHOLD.

The treasure just disappears if you try to get it, and I was past my patience at this point, so I just checked the walkthrough: the treasure teleported itself up to a previously-empty turret, so if you trudge up there you can pick up the chest (which I guess only has enough energy to teleport once).

This game had more charm than I think I’ve been getting across, but I really did have two massive bugs overshadow my gameplay and require resets. One was the previously-mentioned disappearing drawbridge (and it took a while to confirm that this was a bug, and not me messing up a puzzle); the other issue is the torch will suddenly start to run out of light, and then when it finally does rooms that previously don’t need a torch suddenly go dark. The torch is otherwise only used for a handful of cave rooms. Generally speaking, you can just drop the torch early in the game and ignore it and it won’t run out, so I feel like the author intended some kind of daemon which just broke hard.

Malmberg certainly kept it in mind because in 1987 he showed off his new AGT system with a game called Crusade, which is just a port of Castle Adventure.

You are in the midst of a thick woods. The ground is damp with dew. The night air is chilly and you shiver from the cold.
There are large trees all around you.
You see a crumpled-up piece of paper with writing on it.

(The paper is an ad for the AGT system.) One last noteworthy element that’s specifically in the AGT version: the author mentions the possibility of giving hints, but is emphatic that it should be done via letter. He is quite firm that you should NOT call his phone number, ever ever. This suggests the author had some unfortunate past encounters, given the number of exclamation marks used.

HOW TO GET INTO THE CASTLE, OR FOR SOME OTHER HINT!!! I will be glad to provide a solution, but I want to do it by letter, not by phone!!!

I have always been interested in adventure games — ever since I first played Scott Adams’ Adventureland and issued the command CLIMB TREE and I entered a whole new world.

Castle Adventure is another entry in the “early work of a person who would become notable” genre. Other examples include Temple of Disrondu, with two of the Magnetic Scrolls authors (Rob Steggles and Hugh Steers) in a team-up; Brian Fargo started his career with two adventure games including Demon’s Forge; the team for Dragon’s Keep included Al Lowe who would go on to pen the Leisure Suit Larry series.

David Malmberg was an executive by day, but would eventually become an important name in text adventures by modifying the GAGS text adventure system into the much more powerful AGT, Adventure Game Toolkit. In the late 80s and early 90s, for text adventure authors not using the older Quill or the more recent TADS, it was often the default game-writing system. It showed up in games like The Multi-Dimensional Thief (1991) and Shades of Grey (1992) which are still worth playing today.

After studying GAGS in detail, it became obvious that it was limited to very simple games with only a few verbs. I wanted to create Infocom-like games. GAGS in its current state would never make it. However, Mark had defined the essential data structures very well, e.g., ROOMs, NOUNs, and CREATUREs, but GAGS lacked flexibility in manipulating those objects. So I set about extending GAGS by adding what I called “meta-commands,” which really increased the power and flexibility of GAGS. These meta-commands allowed for an almost unlimited number of nouns, verbs, and objects (and synonyms for any of them) and the ability to manipulate them. It came close to my goal of creating games that were truly Infocom-like.

— From an interview with Stephen Granade

Malmberg’s interest in creating programming tools extended to making this LOGO/PILOT hybrid program for graphics, prior to writing Castle Adventure. Via eBay.

This impulse to extend an adventure-writing system did not come from nowhere; to make Castle Adventure, as published in the November 1982 issue of Micro, the author studied various articles by Scott Adams detailing how his own system worked.

Many of the ideas in CASTLE ADVENTURE, as well as other adventures that are widely available, owe a tremendous debt to Scott Adams. In the specific case of CASTLE, it uses a database structure and table-driven logic similar to those first described by Adams in several articles.

The articles in question are from Creative Computing (August 1979), Softside (July 1980) and BYTE (December 1980). According to this thread Malmberg took actual PET source from 1979 as a base (rather than just eyeballing the article) and Strident points out that there’s a biographical note from a year earlier that already mentions adventures…

David Malmberg is Director of Management Systems for Foremost-McKesson in San Francisco. He has a PET, as well as a VIC, and is interested in machine language utilities, strategy games, and writing his own “Adventures.” He’d like to hear from anyone who develops interesting VIC applications (with or without the light pen).

…meaning Castle Adventure may have existed in some form before 1982.

We are here to rescue a princess, somehow winning her hand in marriage in the process.

In CASTLE ADVENTURE you play the role of Godfrey de Goodheart, a bold, but impoverished knight. King Fredrick has dispatched you to rescue his only daughter, the beautiful Princess Fatima, from the dungeons of Baron von Evil’s castle. You have also been asked to capture the Baron’s treasures of gold, silver, and gems, which he enmassed by cruelly exploiting his serfs. If you can rescue the princess and return with all of the Baron’s ill-gotten treasures, King Fredrick has promised you Princess Fatima’s hand in marriage.

Oddly, despite the supposedly standard concept, princess-marriage doesn’t happen that often in early adventures. The prototypical example, Wizard and the Princess, doesn’t even give you half the kingdom. Dragon Quest at least gives the hero a pile of cash but they just get a kiss from the princess. Slaying the dragon in Treasure Hunt yields a “little black book with the addresses and phone numbers of every beautiful princess that lives in Vermont.” The princess in Program Power Adventure invites you to a banquet. Hezarin has a princess and a prince but not as the main goal, and where “only one offers their hand in marriage, but that ought to be enough for any normal Adventurer anyway. They can always marry each other if you don’t like the idea.”

What is quite standard is kicking off the proceedings in a forest.

Out of all games that start in a forest, this is one of them.

Don’t worry, though, the game gets abnormal again quite quickly.

Normally, the player starts with a knapsack containing some matches. However, the command JUMP will break your arm (!) and now you have a broken arm in inventory too. The broken arm has genuine effect; for example, you can’t CLIMB TREE with one (as suggested by Malmberg’s early moment of excitement in Adventureland)…

…nor can you go to a nearby cave, which has a torch at the entrance that can be lit by the matches.

If you hang around enough turns (15 or so?) the message YOUR ARM HAS HEALED appears and the adventure can resume as normal.

In addition to the above shenanigans, you can swim across the moat helpfully marked “NO SWIMMING — DANGER!” and hang out with some MAN-EATING PIRANHA. (In a nice detail, the matches go soggy if you’re carrying them in water.) If you’re just passing by you are safe, except past the moat is a raised drawbridge which isn’t too helpful. Hanging out with the killer fish results in YOU’VE MADE A TASTY MEAL! and a scene where you can try to pick the correct direction to resurrect yourself, early Scott Adams style.

Going the wrong direction leads to YOU ARE LOST IN THE PET ROMS and the game ending.

Weirdly, going through the death scene is how I first found the “treasure spot” of the game, as it is the landing point of a successful resurrection. Back at the cave (I showed a screenshot earlier where trying to go near is prevented by a broken arm) you can GO HILL to arrive at a new room. I’ve always hated this sort of “hidden exit” when it has happened, but at least there was an alternate method of finding the place!

Veering back to the cave, going in leads to a slight “maze” (just the author dropping some loops in), and a grappling hook with a rope right before a tall room where it gets used.

After climbing the rope, there’s a door with an angry guard. Doing battle lands the player in prison with a “horny toad”, and that seems like a good stopping point for now.

The Scott Adams influence is clearly showing up in gameplay already, with the “broken arm” scene, the matches that can go soggy, and the resurrection. As I’ve mentioned before, the “daemons” from the Scott Adams system add timing and condition elements; they tend to make games more complex than the norm, so I expect Castle Adventure to go above and beyond a typical type-in game.