Archive for the ‘catacombs’ Tag
(Continued from my previous posts on Catacombs, and in particular my last post which described how the 1981 PET version of the game was recently rescued.)
The disk copies we have are for the “4040” edition of the game. This is referring to a disk drive pair by Commodore; image via the Centre for Computing History. While the predecessors (2040 and 3040) were for the US and Europe respectively, this one seems to have gone international; it gets mentioned in an Italian book, for instance.
Catacombs was more frustrating to get to the finish than I expected because some aspects got changed, the fact I hadn’t put together a “full run” of the game before, and one extremely nasty bug. Regarding the second point on making a “full run”, there are some things that need to be done in a particular order, otherwise a softlock can happen. The easiest to point out is simply that you can’t drain the lake and enter Poseidon’s realm (an action that never even worked on the DOS version) until after you’ve swam over it to castle on the other side of the lake. In general, you have to look at the overall map and plan a general route before executing it. I have a meta-map below explaining the layout:
Points to note:
▸ The church is the starting point, and you can use keys to enter the catacombs directly or you can use a secret passage (pull a rope three times). You need to cut that same rope (with a sword you find early) to reach a jeweled clock hand on the top of the church which is one of the treasures, but that can be saved for the very end of the game.
▸ As I mentioned last time, you can cross the River Styx with a coin (as was required in the DOS version) but it counts as a treasure, so that particular route should be avoided.
The purring ball is a red herring.
▸ The other way to reach the Afterlife is via a lake, where you can drain it and enter via Poseidon’s domain, but there’s no way to refill the lake, so the castle you reach by swimming has to be done first.
▸ The afterlife also includes a spot where a geyser is blocking your way. There’s a “tap” in the living-world you can turn to stop it and get by, but by using the tap the place it is at gets blocked off. The secret entrance then becomes the only way to get into the catacombs.
▸ There’s an inventory limit of six. Usually this means a maximum of five held objects because the lamp is required for most of the game, so there’s at least some aspect of needing to sweep through for treasures first before starting to wreck things.
All this represents the “puzzle” that I missed solving by only worrying about getting individual treasures.
The bug I will get to in context, but let’s just say even though I was warned ahead of time and supposedly did everything “right” to avoid it, I was still struck by the bug and had to restart the game.
The Angel of Death appears quite frequently and does nothing (no manure drop like the DOS version, you just find it in the open). I did find out from Alastair that EXAMINE HOODED or EXAMINE HOODED FIGURE both work. EXAMINE FIGURE gets the response “I don’t understand that”. It generically applies to both misunderstood verbs and misunderstood nouns.
Based on the meta-ponderings, I planned an attack in this order:
a.) nab the keys and get the lamp/sword/coin and wand too (which is by the lake, does no magic, and is just a treasure)
b.) open the secret passage and nab treasures nearby, this includes a bottle for holy water
c.) fill the holy water, nab the cloak, and try killing Dracula with the holy water (in the DOS version killing the vampire was worthless, in this version of the game it gets you 27 points)
c.) with the cloak of invisibility-to-undead on, swim to the castle and take care of the actions there
d.) pull the plug and pass through the afterlife focused on getting into Heaven
e.) turn the tap, do a second pass through the afterlife with the geyser
f.) take care of the spider in the palace (with the flamethrower from the castle?) and any last treasures still lingering
g.) cut the rope and get the treasure from the clock as one final step
This went fine at least early on. When I tried killing Dracula I had a problem where I threw the bottle first before taking the cloak.
I had also been warned not to take the cloak but rather WEAR it directly off the floor, because it messes up the inventory otherwise.
From there it was time to visit the castle, which had a slightly different map layout than before. (For example, the flamethrower in Classic Quests is tossed in a cell to the side, whereas here it shows up in the torture chamber.)
The zombie stationed at the front, who was straight out buggy in the DOS version and could even cause the game to crash, will sometimes stop you from passing through at random, but you can just try again and you’ll get through.
There’s later a hint mentioned in the fireplace about killing undead with fire…
…and the flamethrower is still present, but I never got it to work.
The game doesn’t even allow the command CLEAR FLAMETHROWER WITH PEN from the first game (it cuts off before it reaches that many characters) and just CLEAR FLAMETHROWER gets a “huh!” message which appears when the verb is applied to most nouns.
Fortunately, you can ignore the flamethrower entirely. You still need to plant manure to get a purple cube…
…and nab a purple sphere too (still mysterious to me what their deal is, only the sphere counts as a treasure), and you can escape via a teleport like last time.
Following my process, I needed to go yank the plug next, and this is where I ran into trouble. This is with just the book in my inventory (for getting past the Pearly Gates) and the lamp:
Alex reported having this bug too, but it was fixed by using WEAR CLOAK rather than taking it, and also dropping the cloak once it was done being used. I did both things and still had the bug. I knew I could get through because on another attempt (before working my sequence out) I could pull the plug properly, so I’m still not sure why it shows up or is missing. I ended up going nuclear and pulling out Alex’s walkthrough and following it step by step, with the hope that the reason for the bug wasn’t pure randonmness.
Phew. Fortunately everything else followed straightforwardly; I nabbed the trident (not reachable in the DOS version) and I was able to use the book to get by the Pearly Gates.
Death decides to take a visit to the Pearly Gates as well.
Then I did a second loop (you can go into the drained lake) where I first turned the tap, shutting off the geyser…
The Angel of Death is persistent. It’s mildly hilarious in a story-implication sense. Imagine a TV show where a person with a skull helmet randomly shows up each episode but everyone ignores them.
…used the scissors to cut the grass at the Elysium Fields (still the weirdest-to-find treasure of the game) and did the whole section going by the geyser (which was now turned off), retrieving a cup.
This is a riddle. You’re supposed to say SILICON. I don’t remember it being in the DOS version.
The only thing remaining was the spider at the palace, previously completely impassable. It turns out you can just “clear web” here, no flamethrower required.
The final step involves using the sword to cut the rope (which was previously needed for entry into the secret part of the catacombs) and nabbing the jeweled short hand from the clock.
What I found most curious about the experience was how many “loose ends” were there in the original game. For example, in the palace, in the DOS version there’s a crown you find in a laundry bag, but in the original, the crown is just sitting out in the open, but the laundry bag is still there.
Why is the laundry bag there? It doesn’t add to atmosphere or even humor; it really seems like it was meant to hold the crown but Brian Cotton forgot to hook it up to the initial release; a bug that got fixed later, maybe? The hooded figure you just ignore was equally odd; did Cotton intend all along to have the manure appear because of the rider’s visit, but never got around to implementing it at first? Why make an entire ASCII art in the fireplace indicating you should kill undead with fire if you don’t need to bother with it?
These don’t feel like intentional red herrings but more like the author didn’t hook up everything he was planning. This suggests the DOS port is in some ways closer to the author’s intent, but of course that version is still broken (although at least, if someone ever gets hacking, they know what really is supposed to be happening).
The one thing that changed very little between versions was the general text in the rooms. None of the text was stored in memory, enabling Cotton to type more words than an in-memory game might allow. This has the downside that it runs very slow; I ended up playing most of the time at 3.5x PET speed. This would have been distressing to play otherwise; Cotton’s willingness to make the trade-off is what led to this very early British game (with long descriptions more like a proper late-80s game) existing in the first place.
Coming up: Some 1983 games. I’ve been doing a lot of pre-1983 mopping up lately, as so many things keep getting discovered; there’s a trilogy coming up (in perhaps a month?) in the same category.
(Continued from my previous posts on Catacombs, which you probably should read before this one if you want the full background.)
Last weekend, I received a message from Marcel Ingram Lansing that one of the most sought-after Commodore PET games had been rescued.
Specifically, Colin Haynes had copies of both Catacombs and Goblin Towers by Brian Cotton in Commodore PET disk format. They’re part of a series of five adventures from the author published by Supersoft starting in early 1981. Goblin Towers we already had in something close to the original form, but Catacombs we’ve only had as a broken DOS port from five years later which is impossible to beat.
Catacombs is one of the earliest commercial British text adventures, and given how many they eventually came out of the country, it’s not exaggerating to say a landmark has now been preserved.
LONG ASIDE: The first ad for Catacombs was from February 1981. Based on Gareth Pitchford’s research, we know of four (or maybe three) adventure games from earlier that were sold “commercially” (to at least some extent) of British origin.
1. Just one month earlier the magazine Computing Today had a classified ad for Dungeons of Death on the Commodore PET; the description makes it unclear if it’s an RPG, quasi-RPG, quasi-adventure, or adventure.
“Amusing, spifferoony game tape for 16K PET”. Source. Remember, for newsstand magazines the actual month is roughly one off from the one printed.
2. There’s an ad in Personal Computer World November 1980 for a mysterious game called Toxopholy by the equally mysterious Spider Software out of Croydon, Surrey. It was written for Apple II, which was not a common computer in England. (Not unknown either, to be clear!)
Given another ad from Spider Software elsewhere which includes games like Wizard and the Princess, they clearly were more of a “publisher” of Apple II software, although the Toxopholy ad is so early that game may still have originated with them.
From Windfall July 1982, an Apple magazine from the UK. Notice that Toxopholy is no longer advertised.
3. We know more about Galactic Hitchhiker for the UK101 than the other games, because I’ve played it and written about it here already. It is remarkable for having the “computer avatar” have its own voice and attitude, and is story-driven in a way rare for 1980. It was first advertised a month before Toxopholy.
4. There was an early adventure game by none other than Games Workshop, the company most known for Warhammer 40K and with 2025 revenue of £565 million. The earliest ad anyone has been able to find for their adventure appeared in a July 1980 issue of Practical Computing (so out by June) which puts it as the earliest commercial release of an original text adventure from Britain we know of.
Our own version of this classic computer moderated fantasy adventure game in which you explore an underground dungeon populated by snakes, trolls and menacing little goblins which constantly bar your way. As you explore, you give the computer commands such as – get gold, open lock, drop bottle, kill goblin etc. – and tell it which way you proceed. The computer responds with your revised situation and awaits your further instructions.
White Dwarf Issue 22 (Dec. 1980/Jan. 1981) mentions Games Day ’80 with pictures; Adventure was being shown off on a Commodore PET.
None of this undercuts Catacombs in importance. None of the games just mentioned had wide distribution; Steve Jackson describes sales of the PET games as a “disaster” (the biggest seller, a Star Wars game, sold 60 copies), and Dungeons of Death appearing once in a classified means it might have sold in the single digits. While the Cotton games didn’t quite have the reach of, say, Planet of Death, they still had a second printing by Supersoft, and generally got into the UK gaming consciousness; the only places on the Internet you can find Toxopholy mentioned as even existing are my page and Gareth’s.
Returning back to the recent rescue: the disks for Goblin Tower were easy to copy, but Catacombs was a tricky case because the disk seemed to be corrupted. There’s a long account here (along with downloads!) of what happened, but to shorten the story, Brian Cotton used text files for each individual room, and wanted to make sure the player couldn’t read them.
DirMaster is able to list the file correctly, but trying to take the directory on a real Commodore PET just produces corruption. What’s happening is the extra ” character followed by the @C which is sufficient to garble the text (when looked at with a PET) into junk. Furthermore, Cotton didn’t want people realizing the trick through the game’s BASIC source code. From Marcel’s video:
Look closely at line 2, which has a string of colons like this: “::::::::::::::::::::”. If run alone, that’s just a string of non-commands, but prior to that line there’s the SYS 15602 line. What that does is call a different spot in memory which overwrites the next line of BASIC source code while that code is running.
The spot filled with colons has been transformed into Z$=”0:”+CHR$(34)+CHR$(0)+CHR$(3). This provides a string that the game then uses to read the name of any text file representing a room, putting those characters at the start. Then, immediately after Z$ is assigned, the game covers its tracks by calling SYS15449, which rewrites the line of code that was just called back into a string of colons.
The web page includes the original version (which does run emulated) and also the “cracked” version with everything changed into plain-text. The issue for preservation is that it took a little more than a simple file-copy to preserve the disk (check the link for details). For us from here, though, we can focus on the game itself!
The game is genuinely close to its large Classic Quests iteration, although there’s one immediate change you can see from the start.
The result of READ BOARD.
The game has ASCII art! There’s files marked “pic1” through “pic11” (or to be more exact, funky characters followed by pic1 through pic11) and each one is an image that has a mere text description in the DOS version.
Your job is to explore the church that you start at and the catacombs beneath and retrieve all the treasures.
At least at the start, the game is very similar to the Classic Quests version, with room descriptions at least matching. However, inside the church, the book in the Classic Quests version uses text…
While the page is quite legible the content seems not to make much sense, however I can make out something about entering Heaven with the aid of certain holy writings.
…but uses ASCII art here. There’s no hint indicated like in the DOS version.
The map outside seems to be a slightly different maze than before (I probably will not map it out, but I’m always morbidly curious when a game undergoes slight changes). The keys are hidden under a lectern in the church just like before, and they unlock a tomb in the same way.
Inside is a coffin with a sword and lamp. The lamp lights with LIGHT LAMP but does not turn off with DOUSE LAMP (as the Classic Quests version) but rather OFF LAMP.
Just to the east is the vampire staked with the cloak, and the cloak has ASCII art. I haven’t tried messing with the vampire yet; in the current DOS version, you get a container for holy water from the church, then throw it at the vampire to kill it so you can safely take the stake, but the stake is used for absolutely nothing. It may not have the same behavior in the original!
Down is an OBOLUS coin as before, but again, some slight bit of art.
Just adjacent is the river with Chiron; I remember having to intentionally give a coin over in the DOS version (which is wrong to do! the coin is a treasure and you can cross the river a different way). Here, if you wait a turn at Styx, you will automatically cross.
One last difference I’ve noticed is that something that was previously broken definitely is here: the hooded rider. This was a rider that was supposed to appear randomly, but examining it would cause death.
You have looked upon the Dark Angel. This is the angel of death: to be more specific, your death. It has cost you your life to look upon it.
This game doesn’t let you examine! I’m not sure if I’m supposed to do something different here. It’s curious if it was added just for the DOS port.
Just as a reminder, other than this scene (which should result in some manure) I had a non-working flamethrower, no way of getting by a spider web (probably uses the flamethrower), a zombie and purple sphere with no clear use, and no way of pulling a “plug” in the water. On the last one, quoting Alex Dijkstra:
You need to remove this to get to Neptune’s bedroom and the Elysian field without paying Charon.
That is, previously the coin was getting used anyway because the alternate method wasn’t working! More investigation (and probably a finish) next time.
I have reached a point where I started to think I was hitting at least one of the “broken moments”, and after doing some more research I ended up reading all the way through this thread discussing the issue.
There’s enough “open threads” to the game that it is a mystery what might be caused by broken source code and what might be caused by our inability to solve the last lingering puzzles. From that thread, someone hacked the game in order to get a “dark hooded figure on horseback” to appear (which seems to be bugged to never appear).
>EXAMINE FIGURE
You have looked upon the Dark Angel. This is the angel of death: to be more specific, your death. It has cost you your life to look upon it.
If you avoid the death, the horse will drop some manure that will be useful later. Without that item it drops a whole chain of puzzles from being solvable, and there’s one moment after (testing with hacking in the manure in one of the rooms) where the game just outright crashes.
I’ll try to report what remains in the game that I needed to and was able to solve (less than I thought!) followed by what maybe is happening with the broken parts.
Returning to parts that did work — I had quite thoroughly checked all cardinal directions on my map, but I hadn’t tried all permutations of GO or ENTER or the like that seemed logical, and I realized at a lake, I had neglected to SWIM.
Instead of going east into the purple mist (which teleports you to the castle, as shown) you can dive and find a “plug” at the bottom of the lake, but let’s save the plug for later and explore the castle:
On the outside portion there’s a garden that will be important later.
Soon after I hit one of the gnarliest, most extreme examples ever of the Parallel Universe Problem. (Condensed: imagine you go from A to C in an adventure, with no issues. You restore a saved game. You try going from A to C but you get stuck at B, which you didn’t get stuck at before. What was different? You’re in a parallel universe but it is non-obvious what changed. That’s the Parallel Universe Problem.) I cheerfully explored around castle Gargantuan, including visiting a portcullis…
To either side of the portcullis stand two huge and imposing statues, their arms raised and holding huge swords.
…and went in what I thought in was another direction, to explore even more of the map.
Lots of juicy things over here: an emerald in a fireplace…
…a zombie nearby a weird room with a purple sphere…
…a flamethrower which explodes when you try to use it…
…and a decently clever way out, where you spot the same purple mist that teleported you to the castle, and jump on down to what otherwise seems like doom.
Mid-exploration I was wanting to try bringing in a different object, so restored a saved game and went through the swimming process again and…
…got stopped by the statues. First of all, I didn’t even know by going south I was entering the portcullis, I somehow had assumed it was to the north (given there is no description of opening and the like, it was a puzzle I had earmarked to check out fairly soon). Second, I was utterly baffled why I got stopped on one run-through but not the other.
Fortunately, there’s not that many items in the game, and some more experimentation revealed I had the cloak with me and worn on my first trip through, which makes the statues let you through. So I had solved a puzzle without realizing I had solved a puzzle!
Returning to thwacking at various puzzles throughout the game, I found that back at the church where there’s a rope at the bell, you can CUT ROPE rather than ring the bell. The rope then works at a railing up higher, allowing you to steal a minute hand off the church clock (which is a treasure).
Not really stealing, remember. This all goes to the altar.
I was now truly stuck — including puzzles from last time — on the spider, the creature, and the geyser. I also now had a flamethrower, zombie, garden, and purple sphere all puzzling me. I also found if I dived into the lake I could find a plug which the game suggests you can pull but I had no way of doing so.
Roger Durrant suggested in comments I check out the “Crystal Grotto” some more. I ran across a completely undescribed “wall” while poking around:
There doesn’t seem to be any way to reveal by normal means there’s a special “wall” object; I just was prodding for secret passages and gave the noun a try, despite it being unmentioned.
The tap will cause boiling water to start flowing. This affects the geyser out past the Charon area, and lets you go on through to a sewer and a train line:
If you avoid reading the warning sign (which only applies if you’ve read it, like Wile E. Coyote) then you can find a platinum cup, which was visible earlier as being on top of the geyser, then escape entirely through the geyser hole itself.
So all that was handy, but I was still horribly stuck, and I finally got around to reading that entire thread I mentioned at the top of this post. There I found I was stuck exactly where everyone else was, namely:
a.) the flamethrower doesn’t seem to do anything useful; it seems like it ought to fry the spider but it doesn’t work (the thread indicates some way to fix it with the pen so at least it doesn’t blow up, but I never could find the right verb combo for that; since it doesn’t work anyway, I didn’t try too hard)
b.) there seems to be no purpose to picking up the critter (that prevents you from picking up the harp, sticks to you when you try to set it down, etc.)
c.) there seems to be no purpose to killing the vampire (the stake does nothing)
d.) there seems to be no way of pulling up the plug
From game hacking, we know pulling up the plug lets you enter Neptune’s realm, which has a trident which is a treasure, but also, importantly, lets you enter Elysian and bypass Charon. This lets you also keep the coin (assuming the route can even be taken).
The missing and buggy-to-obtain manure can be dropped at the garden, to then obtain a purple cube which the gardener gives you, which can be taken to the purple sphere to get the purple sphere, and then have the game crash when the zombie tries to follow you.
Some or all of this might eventually be fixable by hacking the game to its intended form, so I will leave this game off on an open question mark for now. I’ve touched all the treasures but I don’t feel like optimizing a “run” when the run is obviously incomplete. I will keep an eye out for updates (or the PET version of Catacombs miraculously being found, although that one has been sought after now for a long, long, time).
Let’s return back to 1982 for now, shall we? I’ve got a trio of short games up next in the hopper (one where we need to pull off an assassination in a hospital) followed by an investigation game for Apple II which starts with a dead hitman in a hotel room.
I’ve made a smidge of progress nibbling at the edges, enough for an update.
The tough thing about writing about adventure games is how often progress isn’t plot really as much as baby steps not made with any continuity, and certainly not delivered in a way that lends to clean narrative.
For example, one of the things I tried that failed was handling the spider and web. I had a matchbox and I thought perhaps I needed to bring it over to causes a fire (I’ve set many a web on fire now in adventures) but I hadn’t opened the matchbox yet. It only contains one “spent match”!
Additionally, the web and spider both were parsing LIGHT in such a way I suspected fire was the wrong direction (LIGHT WEB: “The web can’t be lit.”) so I decided to go a weapons route instead.
So, a sword isn’t a weapon? That’s curious. (Neither is a wooden stake, which I’ll get a hold of later.) The parser message does suggest that the right weapon will work, as trying to kill random objects doesn’t provide a similar response (“I think you should see a psychologist about your kill happy tendency!”)
The next thing I had earmarked to try was filling the glass carafe with holy water, which I had more success with: it worked! I then took the holy water over to Dracula, where I struggled for a while with verbs (POUR WATER didn’t work, either before or after waking DRACULA) finally coming up with throwing the entire carafe (you can’t just throw the water):
The wooden stake is the only thing achieved from this, and I haven’t used it for anything yet. I still have the suspicion Dracula gets some other use before getting taken down.
Despite what seemed like a fairly robust parser, I was running into enough verb difficulty I decided I need to do my big list again:
That’s pretty sizable, but it is interesting how much I’m still running into gaps; for example, there’s a puzzle with a geyser and a hole (still haven’t solved, but it seems like the hole needs blocking) where I tried to INSERT CLOAK (which of course isn’t understood).
I incidentally went on and tried my “extended comedy list” of verbs that I’ve really only seen in one place (mainly because it was discussed in comments recently), and guess which verb I found?
I suspect this is fishing and not sailing a boat, but with this game who knows?
One other extended verb I tested was STAMP, being hinted at from the inscription at the catacombs. I had originally assumed an item that you then stamp things with, but the response indicated STAMP was standalone:
Little happens except your foot is smarting a bit.
Oho! I expected to try it in the catacombs and die (given the warning) but I got the same response. Not Subterranean Encounter style to the warnings, then. After some experimentation I found STAMP worked at the Cube rooms, allowing teleportation from one room to the other.
This doesn’t unlock anything new (you can simply walk between the cube rooms), but I suspect later there will be good logistical reasons to do this.
Having done all that, I browsed back in the sea of green verbs and looked for anything helpful. I was staring at the very first word (CUT, I have no idea why I have it first) and realized I could try it back at the grass at the Elysian Fields:
If you try to visualize in a completely literal way this makes no sense — an entire supernatural field, and scissors will really reveal a secret item? — but I think this suggests not to get too fixated on physical reality in this game, and as long as two things go together in some sense (cutting and grass) they might be a solution to a puzzle.
Speaking of puzzle solutions, another verb that struck me was PRAY, which for some curious reason I hadn’t tried yet at the lost souls.
The failure to enter the gates shown above might be necessary at some junction for logistics purposes, but there is a way through the gate — you just need to open that Good Book from the church.
Yes, the furry ball seems to mostly serve as a way to prevent you from picking up objects, much like my own cats. If you go down you’ll land in front of the church.
To recap what’s needed for this part of the narrative
a.) you need to hand a coin to Charon to enter the land of the dead
b.) you need to cut grass at the Elysian Fields, the immortal rest place where the heroes go, with some scissors, in order to find and take a large diamond
c.) you can then pray to get sent to heaven, and use a Good Book to enter within
d.) then use the opportunity just to swipe a golden harp and get away
A fun clash of kleptomaniac adventurer and religion. (Although remember all treasures go to the altar! The instructions even chidingly remind you that the treasures aren’t really yours. I think it best not to read too much into the symbology of it all.)
I’m not left with much to ponder over: just the spider and the geyser and the small creature. Maybe the creature and the spider will fight, I haven’t tried that yet. However, being a hunt-the-object adventure there are no doubt some hidden puzzles, so I should probably comb over the whole map again looking for things to poke at.
If nothing else, I should try putting together gathering all the treasures I’ve managed so far into one “run” to see where I’m at scoring-wise (technically out of 250, although remember due to bugs potentially only 240 are possible). The inventory limit is pretty tight so this is one of those games where you solve the puzzles first and then do the “real walkthrough” where you only take the items you need when you need them.
This continues directly from my previous post, although a brief technical note before getting to the blog post proper: there is a saved-game feature but it is very fussy to get to work on DOSBox (Canalboy in his instructions says it took five hours to figure it out). I am sidestepping all that entirely with the emulator DOSBox-X which has very good save state features so I can ignore the issue.
…
For any large-scale and relatively wide-open treasure hunt, the first order of business is mapping things out. Let me take you on a tour.
From a pamphlet advertising the Classic Quests.
The game starts at a church, and all treasures go on the altar.
There are a few dark niches which require a lamp we’ll get to fairly soon. It is in one of these niches that I ran across my first death.
You are in a high ceilinged chamber, there is an exit to the south and a dark passage leading up. The west wall looks as though it used to contain some kind of doorway, but not now. There is a rope hanging almost in the centre of the chamber, it disappears up into darkness.
>U
It is very dark in here.
>U
Something nasty in the dark has found you very tasty. You are between a hard place and a rock, with flames rising om the ground all around, seemingly fueled by the very rocks themselves.
When you die you go to Hell, and this might be like Acheton where there could be a way out. This is indicated by a Good Book elsewhere in the church.
The “entering Heaven with certain holy writings” bit at least suggests it might be possible to go to Heaven on death rather than Hell. The “defiling the holy altars” part incidentally also indicates swearing at the altar will also kill you; this is true, but not with the word “shit”, which is apparently a noun rather than a verb (it maps to “manure” which is an object, and I think the one that’s supposed to be buggy).
Nearby the Good Book — on the opposite side of an Aisle — is a podium hiding some keys. Open questions are:
there’s a font with holy water, where is there a container that allows getting it?
and
is there some secret associated with the “west wall looks as though it used to contain some kind of doorway”?
The holy water I incidentally suspect will got to a vampire we’ll see close to where the lamp is, and the west wall I suspect is one of those secrets that gets resolved “from the other side” (that is, this is a placeholder for arriving via elsewhere on the map) but with less confidence, as there’s some nonsensical map connections elsewhere.
(Nonsensical map connections are more of a schtick in ’77-’82 games than they are in ’86 games, but I suspect the geography is mostly matching the original. However, I’m going to try to avoid speculating too much about the early version of the game because whenever I play Brian Cotton’s next game, there’s both early and “revisited” versions so I can compare so I can get a sense of how much fiddling was going on.)
Popping around outside there’s a graveyard I got lost in last, but the maze is fairly small (don’t worry, there’s a bigger maze later) and I was able to get to a tomb, which unlocks with the keys.
Just inside there’s a closed coffin with a lamp and sword. I can’t confirm — that’s not a bizarre combo to just come up with independently — but I’m wondering if there was more influence from Zork than Adventure on this game. Zork had some religious bits with the Land of the Dead, but original Adventure is squarely secular (resurrection in that game is from the computer-narrator itself).
To the east of the coffin is Dracula. (Guessing it was his original hang-out point, but the big stake in the chest messed with his sleeping arrangements.)
Dracula doesn’t immediately try to kill you (“Count Dracula is looking around to see what’s for tea.”) so may have some utility behind putting him down again (you can’t stab again with the stake, alas). You can run away and he doesn’t follow, although he does take the stake from you, so there doesn’t seem to be a reason to wake him up early.
Just a bit farther there’s a coin marked OBOLUS and a ferry at the river Styxx. The coin can go to Charon for a one-way trip.
The “you can’t carry anymore” in the screen above hints at the fact there’s a fair number of items and the inventory limit is pretty rough. Based on Roger Durrant there’s going to be a lot of strategic juggling to get the right items to the right places. It isn’t done by absolute number of objects either, items have weight, so a cloak is heavier than some keys. Have I mentioned yet — like Zork — there’s limited battery to the lamp, so the whole game is under a timer?
The area isn’t large, or at least I haven’t made it large yet. The fuzzy ball covers a slab which indicates to watch for the fuzzy ball’s mother, and if you try to set the critter back down it just jumps back into your arms.
Is there something hidden in the grass at the Elysian fields?
How do you deal with the geyser?
You can also land yourself in a room just described as “Lost souls” with no apparent escape…
All about can be heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth of many lost souls, who cannot find their way to heaven or anywhere else.
…leading to the natural question: is the lost souls room just a trap or is there a way out?
Ignoring the river and proceeding on, there’s some catacombs. I have the “maze with no other purpose to be maze-y” rooms marked in blue.
There are two mysterious rooms that are “almost perfect cube[s]” where the north wall has a “shadowy figure”. What can be done in the cube rooms? Next to ne of the cube rooms is a “glass carafe” and a ruby. I have not yet had the opportunity to test if the carafe works on holy water.
There’s an “ancient room” with a message
N- S-AM--NG -N THE -ATA-OMB-
which I assume says NO STAMPING IN THE CATACOMBS, which is fine because I haven’t run across anything to do stamping with yet. I assume this is to prevent the traditional item-dropping solution to the maze, but honestly wouldn’t using a stamp be more clever?
One last section I explored — an offshoot of the catacombs — was a crystal palace.
There’s a treasure room with a “warning to all those who wouldn’t be king” adjacent to a room with some laundry. If you try to leave, you get told “not yet cretin”, but the laundry has a crown hidden within. If you wear the crown you can get out of the “cretin” passage.
The only real puzzle otherwise is a spider (“hairy with lots of legs”) with a web blocking one direction.
I scissors on me so I can safely say they aren’t the answer to how do I pass the spider web? It may be none of the puzzles are that hard individually but the logistics of solving order is where the real suffering lies.
For me to be sure, I have to solve a real puzzle first (I don’t count the crown or mapping out mazes as puzzles). Maybe next time?
The old Gothic church, so the locals say, used to have a veritable labyrinth of passages beneath it, but the whereabouts of the entrance to the passages has long since been forgotten. The church itself has fallen into disuse for a variety of reasons, the main one being the sinister aura that surrounds one of the large tombs in the church graveyard. The church’s treasures have long since disappeared without a trace.
An ancient local legend, all but forgotten now, tells of a vast underground land inhabited by weird monsters guarding wonderful treasures. Could there be any connection between this legend and the lost treasures? By the way, if you do find any treasure, take it back to the church, and lay it on the altar – after all, it doesn’t belong to you!
CATACOMBS is a large and complex adventure which is definitely not for beginners. Many of the puzzles to be solved are unusual, with ingenious solutions, and will stretch your imagination to its limits.
This is a game I vacillated on if I was even going to play it or not (or at least, play it anytime soon).
Back in the halcyon days of January 2020, when I was generating my 1981 list of games, one of the prominent “lost game” companies was Supersoft. We’ve seen them before with Hitch Hiker’s Guide and the saga involving a lawsuit.
They were not the only adventure game Supersoft published that year, and a Personal Computing Ad from November 1981 lists
Hitch-Hiker’s Guide £16
Goblin Towers £14
Cracks of Doom £14
Catacombs £27
Weird Wood £25
Cornucopia £35
Three of these are by Brian Cotton, and all are lost in their 1981 form (Commodore PET). Goblin Towers exists in a later 1984 form for C64. Brian Cotton eventually (through 1981-1982) had a series of five games (Catacombs, Witch Hunt, Cornucopia, Forestland, Goblin Towers) where I had them sorted as either 1984 games or “lost”.
Based on the earliest advertising anyone has been able to track (“anyone” mainly being Gareth Pitchford) Catacombs was the first of the games and started being advertised March 1981. The timing here — that is, the exact month of March 1981 — has an enormous amount of significance, as our Quest for the First Britventure in 1981 mostly stopped at The Golden Baton and a May 1981 ad. Our quest would have ended there had it not been blown away by the existence of A. Knight’s Galactic Hitchhiker from 1980. But Galactic Hitchhiker was a one-person-game sold by a one-person-company, that is, not sold by a real “professional” distributor like Molimerx or Supersoft.
By having an ad date of March 1981, Catacombs is the first original “professional distributed” British adventure game.
And… we don’t have the original anymore, nor the early C64 version (which, based on the Cotton games we do have, probably just involved copying the source code from the PET verbatim). There was yet another version made as part of a “Classics Revisited” set from 1986/1987, for a wide variety of platforms…
…but at least for Catacombs, those versions were all lost too in 2020. I had Catacombs sorted in my “I guess we’ll never see what it’s like” folder, marked with grim digital red. There I thought it would remain, until in 2022 a collector stepped forward and uploaded the entire Classic Revisited set to oldgames.ru (in DOS format). Suddenly, as of September of last year, it became possible to play all of them.
This stuck me with a dilemma; Catacombs is extremely important in British adventure game history. We can say British adventures on personal computer started with Galactic Hitchhiker but British adventure games as an industry started with Catacombs. But is it worth it to play a “remix” which I knew to be different?
Eh, whatever. I’ll be getting to playing this in the 2030s sometime anyway, might as well check it out early.
Some quick history on Supersoft before starting the journey–
Pearl Wellard (left) and Peter Calver (right) were accountants in 1978 who both worked at the same company. The company obtained a computer (a PET, the “proper business computer” of the Trinity) and the pair was the ones who ended up setting up the system. After that they got hooked enough to start writing and selling their own PET software under the name Supersoft.
There wasn’t software for the PET in those days. There were only about 1000 PETs in the country.
The pair ended up giving their jobs up after 18 months to work at Supersoft full-time.
Our turnover in the first year was £2000 — in the second year it increased to £100,000.
There’s not a great deal of info on the duo’s early years otherwise (Peter has done interviews, but mainly because of their purchase of Audiogenic in the mid-80s. Who cares about that old PET software, right?) I did want to share a bizarre excerpt I found from a freeform “gossip column” in the January 1981 issue of Personal Computer World, that is, from two months before Catacombs got published:
Supersoft’s Peter Calver has a PET name for partner Pearl Wellard. Pearl has threatened the Editor with all sorts of dire horrors if he reveals that it’s Pearl*****. (A prize for the first correct entry.)
I think we’ve had enough preface, but I should add one other thing: based on the thread at CASA, one puzzle has a bug that makes it unsolvable and one puzzle is currently unsolved. This is a hunt-the-treasure game where you are supposed to gather everything together, type SCORE, and pat yourself on the back for a job well done, so there’s no “ending text” anyway (people have extracted the text to confirm). I think the max score is ~240 out of 250? It is difficult to check without spoilers.
For my first session I decided to explore freeform, without even making a map, just to see what I was up against. Poking in the church I quickly found the altar where the treasures were destined to go (at least according to the ad copy in the catalog).
I found a notice board which felt Zork-ish.
Trying to wander away from the church, all I found was a maze.
Avast, casual exploration foiled! … I guess I’ll whip out the maps and start taking in things seriously next time, and share what some of the puzzles are like.
(In the meantime, could someone let me know what the actual theoretical high score is, given the bug?)
Renga in Blue 
