Last time I had reached but was stuck at a ravine (see screenshot above). I had available a flask, a breathing apparatus, a shovel, and glass from the glass case where I got the breathing apparatus from. I also was unable to pick up a dog head (due to germs) and in a “Testing Room” there was a rope from a ceiling I couldn’t get and two buttons that awakened a figure in a tank (with a key inside)
You can use the piece of glass to cut the rope. (This is a slight bit of visualization — I imagined the glass piece would be a little less jagged and cut-worthy, but we did cut it with a diamond.) You can then take the rope and THROW ROPE to get it attached to the ceiling at the ravine…
…followed by SWING ROPE.
The inventory limit switches from 6 to 3. (Note: dropping the glass while inventory juggling will cause it to break.) On the other side of the ravine is a room with a locked door to the south (the key is still back at the tank) and a “mutant” blocking the way north.
The being has a dog head so I went back and tried to get the other dog head but it still kept killing me with germs. I experimented with the electricity some more (it turns out the white/black buttons are red herrings, but it’s impossible to know that until the end of the game). I finally went back and tried THROW on random things, and found that the mutant caught them and gobbled them up. I tried everything I had (ferrying over items in small loads over the ravine) but nothing had an effect.
Perhaps you’ve already spotted it: it’s something I even consciously thought about as soon as I noticed the game was heavy on softlocks. Specifically, while puzzle-solving you need to check not only the items that are currently accessible, but the items that were accessible in the past.
I had forgotten I had broken the glass but I didn’t have to!
With that out of the way, it’s possible to go north and find a magnet. It was immediately clear to me what the magnet was for.
With the key, a new area opens up.
Things kick off with … more blood! Blood! It’s horror, it needs buckets of blood, or at least a vat in this case.
To the west are some surgical gloves, and to the south is a progression of rooms leading to a room that is so mossy any items you drop are swallowed up. The room has a GREEN SCUM and I don’t know what it is other than an amorphous blob.
Tiny evil Christmas tree, perhaps?
Using the same strategy as before, I tried throwing things at the “scum” and seeing if anything would cause indigestion. While nothing worked, I realized as I was going that the gloves might help with picking up the dog with the germs, and indeed they did, so I got to type one of the oddest parser commands that I’ve used in a while.
>THROW DOG AT SCUM
Okay, you throw a dog corpse at a green scum.
He rips open the dog and begins to gorge on the entrails. He dies from eating the infected body of the dog.
This clears out the scum but with no obvious result. I kept throwing out various “search” command possibilities until I hit EXAMINE MOSS, revealing a valve.
Turning the valve results in a “gurgling sound from the west wall” so I went back to the vat and found it empty. EXAMINE VAT mentions a drain opens a new exit going down (for a while I was trying GO DRAIN and didn’t notice the change) and down in the resulting hole is a hypodermic needle.
That eliminated everything in the area, so I was stuck considering anything left unsolved on the west side of the ravine. I still had the tank with the electro-buttons but I was starting to guess (correctly) those should just be ignored; I realized there was still a “jellied mass” in one of the rooms that previously just served as a trap.
The end result is a trapdoor you can pull open.
Going down is a one-way trip (remember, the game is not shy about softlocks) and you end up needing to take five specific items (and there’s no way of knowing ahead of time). I managed to guess reasonably well and got four out of five.
Creating a save game where I consolidate all the items at the top of the trapdoor.
You need the candle, flask, butterknife, shovel, and gloves. The flask and butterknife have still not been used; the gloves were used to pick up the dog but they are needed again for another purpose. The first time through I missed the gloves.
This lands you on a railway track system. At the landing point is a bunsen burner, to the west are some timbers and a blocked-off passage, and to the east is a torch and a giant dirt pile. The dirt pile is supposed to signal the use of the shovel.
I didn’t use any logic here. I just had been trying to dig in every room since the start of the game.
The passage leads down to a small area where there’s a barrel (with gunpowder) and a deathly high scream that kills you. We’ll come back here later.
The tracks also have an old switch. Pulling them causes a door to open to the west (where the timbers were) and you have to immediately plunge ahead to go inside before the door closes. On top of all this, a gust of wind blows out your candle if that’s what you are still using, so you need to have done LIGHT TORCH and swapped to that as a light source.
Or as I found out later, drop the candle somewhere safe and do all this in the dark. Except you have to know what’s here first!
This traps the player in a very small area with a fuse (the item that’s the reason to go in) and no apparent way out, although there’s a button that electrocutes you. You’re supposed to be wearing the surgical gloves to survive the electricity, and I admit I had to look that up. (Apparently surgical gloves can resist electricity but it is not entirely safe. However, it isn’t like anything else in the crypt has been safety approved!)
Heading back to the railway, and going south where the junction switch was, there’s a curious scene involving a “lard cake” and a dial. The dial is rusted and won’t move. The lard cake can’t be picked up.
I know this has been continuous through the whole game in terms of resources (and is so normal for adventures it’s like fretting over the realism of moments people start singing in a musical) but I was thrown for a “there’s no way that would have been just left there” moment with the lard cake. This might actually be a “it’s really a test” plot kind of like Zork III but let’s save discussing that for the ending.
Short on items, I eventually landed on CUT CAKE WITH KNIFE (the butterknife) resulting in a SLICE OF LARD CAKE. I then lit the bunsen burner lying around randomly on the tracks, put the slice of lard in the flask, and melted the slice. The parser struggled a bit but at least the steps came intuitively.
This finally results in the flask being filled with GREASE, and after struggling with PUT GREASE ON DIAL, POUR GREASE ON DIAL, etc. I came across GREASE DIAL as what the parser was fishing for. This causes the dial to spin and opens the passage up to the last part of the game.
Ahead and to the south there is a “trench”.
YOU ARE AT THE NORTH END OF A LONG DIRT ROOM. AN EVIL-SMELLING MUD TRENCH LIES IN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM. PUDDLES OF BLOOD LIE ON THE GROUND HERE.
Weirdly, the game doesn’t let you try to jump the trench or enter the mud, I was expecting a colorful death. It just doesn’t recognize any of the words used in the description as nouns for the parser. With this condition (and my eye on a verb list from the manual) I realized while holding the timbers I could BUILD BRIDGE.
This leads to a dead-end with a dead mole and earplugs. I don’t know why the mole is there other than for gross-out factor; it almost feels like the authors were running out of ways to describe blood and gore so they just tossed it in there.
The earplugs go to the screaming room, so you can get the barrel of gunpowder. There’s also an inscription but examining it kills you.
Note the comment about being not “worthy”.
Trying to get the fuse and barrel together was again a bit of a struggle but MAKE BOMB works; to repeat a point I’ve made whenever a lot of BUILD commands come up, it is always tricky to come up with a noun that doesn’t get mentioned in the text. (Maybe you’ll think of it as an “explosive”? I personally never thought of it as “making” something, just rigging the gunpowder barrel to explode without dying immediately, I didn’t have a name for that until the parser forced me to.)
Going back to where the bridge was, and heading west, there’s an axe. North there’s a steel door.
BODIES OF MEN ARE SMEARED PAPER-THIN AGAINST THE WALLS.
The problem is the bomb kept exploding right when I lit it, but I couldn’t find any way to extend the fuse, so I had to check for hints again. It turns out this section happens in real time (nothing else in the game does). So you LIGHT BOMB, DROP BOMB, GO SOUTH as fast as you can with the emulator speed set on “normal” rather than “maximum”.
There’s a wooden door after, but given the axe nearby is the only unused item, CHOP DOOR USE AXE came to me quickly.
And we can escape! Kind of. Finally we meet Medea in person.
If you say no, “Medea kills you for your stupidity.” If you say yes, you “have successfully escaped. Your game is now over.”
Weirdly, you’re still in the shallow grave, but I think this is an error along the lines of Mission: Asteroid having the asteroid still crash after you destroy it.
— so we escaped? By giving up our soul? Is that really escape?
I suppose if you’re cool with the “murdering her children because of her cheating husband” thing. And also all the dead people and deathtraps. 1887 painting of Medea by Germán Hernández Amores.
It does make for a twist I appreciated more than just battling Medea in combat. Perhaps horror as a genre lends itself to the “ambiguous ending” which makes it easier to have something that feels satisfyingly narrative-appropriate without having to do a denouement sequence like A Mind Forever Voyaging.
Despite the wobbly parser, I enjoyed myself in general. The structure lent itself to focus on one or two puzzles at a time without feeling too linear. The “horror” aspect was over the top in a teenager-writes-gore sense, none of the prose approached the kind from a serious author, and the art was mid-range for an Apple II game, but the whole package still felt satisfyingly “professional” in a way that many games of this time fumbled.
Two missing points to cover:
1.) This game has sound, which I haven’t discussed: especially unusual is it supports the Mockingboard hardware and you can flip an option to have the game read all text out loud. This video demonstrates the feature in action:
As far as I know this is the first adventure we’ve reached with an option to have this done with the text in general. (As opposed to having small voice clips in assorted spots.)
2.) Arthur Britto has a credit on Wizardry III: Legacy of Llylgamyn.
Title Page Digitized by: Arthur Britto.
It came out the same year as Crypt of Medea. While he does not have credits for Sir-Tech in years after, I do wonder if he did some more of their copy protection. (I can confirm that the broken aspect to early Crypt of Medea dumps was purely due to a faulty break of copy protection. 4am’s version is correct.) It probably would be possible to compare the Medea protection with other Sir-Tech games and see if there’s any similarity in code, indicating Britto was still working for them as an independent contractor, just uncredited (which would not be unusual for this kind of work).
Coming up: two games for children — seems like a good contrast from gore — followed by a game that I’d previously marked as “lost” which I now have a copy of.
Before getting into today’s bout with puzzles and mayhem, a brief comparison of two pictures, one from the Wizardry 1 manual and one from the Crypt of Medea manual.
The image above is from the cartoonist Will McLean, famous for drawing cartoons in the Dragon Master’s Guide of Dungeons and Dragons; his art in the Wizardry manual gave it a general aura of D&D. Rick Austin, as I mentioned in my last post, did the iconic dragon cover, which is even used in the modern Steam port.
Now, an image from the Crypt of Medea manual (this represents the starting room, and what I assume is the player character):
The manual art was done by Rick Austin, not McLean. Austin clearly has a different approach to the character, but the way the background wall line meanders clearly invokes the cartoony style of McLean. So it’s as if McLean established a “house style” connecting D&D to Wizardry that was subsequently used here. (I might follow with “even though it doesn’t have anything to do with D&D”, but the game’s score is given as “experience points”. While I’ve played adventures with experience points before I’ve never played one that was a traditional adventure that just used it as a substitute for “score”.)
Getting back into the gameplay…
The lab we left off on, with an empty vial and table.
…I’ve got a strong feel at least the general pattern, which isn’t exactly a “deathtrap maze” like Cauchemard-House but pretty close. You have access to a small set of rooms with lots of ways to die, but one of the ways to die has a solution, opening up a new place / getting a new item that will allow reckoning with another place that normally is fatal, and so on. I’m not far enough in to know if the pattern holds the whole game.
From here, you can allegedly exit west (back to the mausoleum with the glass case we still haven’t opened), south, or east. East is an arbitrary deathtrap:
Spikes pop out of the walls of the room you have entered. The walls begin to squeeze shut…
The spikes begin to pierce your body. They penetrate the temples of your head and enter your brain. You are dead.
There’s no warning: the whole idea is to spring the trap first, then use that foreknowledge on your next life. For now, let’s go south instead.
That’s a “corpse”, a “severed head”, and also an “orange button” which we’ll get to shortly. I ran here into an issue I neatly evaded recently with Leopard Lord but faceplanted into here. Namely: EXAMINE and SEARCH are considered different verbs. If you “examine” the corpse you find out it “has been badly mangled”; if you do the same on the head you’ll find it is skewered through a steel rod and there’s an ID card underneath.
Remember, the game is still updating graphics every time something changes; by finding the ID card it is now listed in the room and you can pick it up.
It was rather a bit later I tried to see if SEARCH was different and I found the body had something too, a vial with a sweet smell.
The passage continues south but first let me show off a side room you can open by pressing the orange button.
It has a light from above (which will later be important), a blue button, and a violet button. The blue button does nothing (for now) and the violet button fills the room with blood and you choke and die.
The wall slides closed behind you and warm blood spurts from small holes in the floor. The blood travels slowly up your body.
You choke to death on warm blood!
Going back to the land of the living (relatively speaking) and heading south, there’s a tape player and a dead dog…
…and the dead dog has germs that will leap up and kill you if you approach; you can take the tape player safely, though.
East then is a web blocking further passage:
Trying to cut the web (with that butterknife from earlier) predictably kills you. I was stumped a while until I fixed my SEARCH problem earlier at the corpse and found the vial. This is where the vial goes:
Moving farther east is a dead end with a “tape” and a “jellied mass”. Do I even need to explain what happens if you touch the mass?
If you put the tape player and tape together and play:
A click is heard in a distance room… then another click.
This is a softlock. You need to rewind to play the tape again, but the rewind button breaks when you try to push it. You need to find the right room to use the player in, and there’s no logic; you’re just supposed to SAVE/RESTORE and try every room. Not so onerous on an emulator, probably a pain on real hardware.
The room it’s supposed to go in is the lab. Playing the tape opens a small slot. You can then put the ID in the slot, which opens a “small cache” revealing a diamond.
Diamonds have a pretty standard use in adventures (especially when there’s no treasure-tracking): cutting things. You can go back to the glass case at the start and cut it open, revealing a “breathing apparatus”.
I immediately remembered the blood choking and tried it out in the “warm blood” room. It turns out you want to leave the candle in the room adjacent; the blood puts out the candle, and while the box of matches appears like you ought to be able to use more, the remaining matches are duds (so when the candle goes out, the game softlocks).
If you press the violet button and survive, you can go east, swimming through blood, and find a new room.
There’s a long rod, a yellow button, and an orange button. The yellow button makes a noise as if something distant opened; the orange button opens the “blood elevator” back up. You can use the previously non-working blue button to return to the top, with a very nasty dry cleaning budget.
The yellow button opens up a “testing room” next to the lab. There’s a tank with a humanoid figure, black and white buttons, and a rope attached to the ceiling. Pulling the rope, predictably, brings the ceiling down on you; I can’t cut the rope either (the butterknife is too dull, and that’s not really a diamond-cutting job).
The interior of the tank has a key, and trying to get the key gives a hint you need to USE XXXX; I assume it’s the rope, just I need to get it first. In the meantime, you can get yourself killed by pushing either the black or white button twice (in any combination).
That long rod from the bloody room also helps with the spikes, and will automatically jam up the trap if you’re holding it.
Further east is a ravine, although I’m stopped here for now. I figured it was a good moment to report in.
I’ll take creative ideas from the peanut gallery on the figure with the electricity, although that may just be a trap that needs to be ignored. Otherwise I’m still fine without hints (the manual comes with some, anyway, should I truly get stuck).
But as far as I was concerned, computers were business machines. They weren’t fun machines. You do things with them that you need. I certainly did not realize that there is such a relatively large segment of the population that has the computer only or mostly for pleasure.
Sir-Tech’s story is now well covered in many sources; I recommend Jimmy Maher’s essay or the transcript of They Create Worlds Episode 114 for anyone who wants the details going back to the Sirotecks fleeing from Communist Czechoslovakia. I’m going to give a briefer version as I have a focus different from the usual (the Wizardry series which would revolutionize gaming in both the US and Japan).
By the 1970s, Fred Sirotek was in multiple businesses in Canada, including manufacturing collectible spoons; he ended up investing with Janice Woodhead in New York, who had a resin company (the main components of said spoons).
Janice had a son (Robert Woodhead) who had a fascination with programming kicked off by a chance copy of Ahl’s 101 Basic Computer Games, but he had no computer at the time (nor access to time-sharing) so did “paper programming” using a device called the CARDIAC.
He eventually got access to the Dartmouth Time Sharing system, and finally went to college at Cornell which had access to the PLATO system, allowing him to leap from text-only games into graphics. The PLATO system was addicting enough he spent many more hours playing than studying, to the detriment of his grades. Simultaneously, he was working at a Computer Land to help pay tuition, which sold Apple IIs which he admired but were far past his price point.
That was when they were 4K. I remember a customer who had 12K in his machine and we all thought he was nuts. He could actually run hi-res graphics. We looked at them and said, ‘Enh, so what, good grief, lo-res is much better; more colors.’ We couldn’t see what you could do with hi-res. We weren’t ready for the potential of the machine.
He ended up going to a Radio Shack to obtain a TRS-80 instead, which directly led to him being fired by the Computer Land (as now he was using the hardware of a “competitor”).
Fred Sirotek and Janice Woodhead had the issue that the price for the raw materials involved kept changing price every week and constantly needed recalculation. Robert was asked to make a program to help; Fred bought one of the very expensive Apple IIs that Robert had been pining after to do production on. The program was eventually polished into Info-Tree and first showcased at the Trenton Computer Festival, April 1979.
Norman Sirotek drove Robert up to the event, and ended up interested enough in the computers at the show that he suggested working together as business partners. They founded a new company, Siro-tech, with capital provided by Fred. Norman at first worked on the weekends before becoming the director of finance and administration full-time. Norman’s brother, Robert Sirotek, joined not long after with a focus on marketing.
Robert Woodhead started work in 1979 on Galactic Attack, copying ideas from the PLATO game Empire. Empire has a lot of name-clashes, so to be clear, this one is a multi-player game by John Daleske and Silas Warner involving Romulans, Kazari, Federation, and Orions doing battle in a manner similar to the mainframe game Star Trek; the first version was from 1973, and multiple variations through the 70s added features, so it was up to Empire IV by the time Woodhead started work.
There was the catch that Woodhead wrote the game in Apple Pascal, and by the time Robert finished the game in 1980 a promised method (via Apple) of running Pascal on standard 48K Apple IIs had not yet surfaced; an extra memory expansion would have been needed, meaning it needed temporarily to be put on ice. Robert embarked then on another game called Paladin (also in Pascal) based again on a PLATO system game, this time the first-person RPG Oubliette.
At the same time as this, another Cornell student, Andrew Greenberg, was working on his own Apple II game. Greenberg was an administrator for the PLATO system, so had the job of booting pesky students off the system who were playing games when they were supposed to be using it for serious purposes (but had experience playing said games himself). Greenberg had been playing (in-person) D&D but was getting tired of playing with the group and ended up starting work on his own first-person game, Wizardry; his initial versions were in BASIC.
The pair of Robert and Andrew were connected up where they joined forces (settling on Pascal, Robert’s computer language, and Wizardry, Andrew’s title). They sold a “release beta” at the Boston Computer Society conference in 1981, followed by the full release of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord in the same year.
As I’ve already indicated, Wizardry has had its story well-told elsewhere, so I want to jump to 1982, when Wizardry was wildly successful, and the sequel Knight of Diamonds had just finished and was being shown off at the same conference in Boston.
In addition to Galactic Attack (their first game product) and Starmaze (designed by Robert Woodhead, programmed by Gordon Eastman over ten months on weekends) the company was now soliciting games from outside authors.
Authors … looking for recognition? We are eager to explain job opportunities and/or market your software masterpiece. For details, please ask for Robert Sirotek.
This resulted in new games, the first being Police Artist by Elizabeth Levin. She worked with Sesame Workshop and a year later released her own file system for children under the name Lizzycorp, so had no affiliation with Sir-Tech otherwise. This was the start of Sir-Tech as a pure publisher; despite the early “internal” work by Woodhead, they started to rely on outside developers.
In the November 1983 of Softalk, a whole page of Softalk was dedicated to Sir-Tech’s “other games”:
Rescue Raiders is notable: it has credits of Arthur Britto II and Gregory Hale and was played by both The Wargaming Scribe and Data-Driven Gamer; it’s one of the contenders for “first real-time strategy game”. (It’s Choplifter-esque where you can summon units by spending resources.) However, this is All the Adventures, so we’re instead focused on Crypt of Medea, with Arthur Britto II (again) and Allan Lamb.
Allan Lamb is the less famous of the two, so let’s do him first. Other than this program he’s credited with programming for a much later adventure game, Questmaster 1 (see here and here); that was meant to be the first of a series where experience points from the main character carry on to later iterations (kind of like Quest for Glory) but only one of the games came out. He contributed a Nibble article once but I otherwise haven’t been able to find any other instances that are definitely the same person.
Arthur Britto II is famous enough that some people probably arrived at this post looking for him. Out of the various cryptocurrencies, the most popular is Bitcoin, followed by Ethereum, followed by XRP. The three founders of XRP — starting from a 2011 forum discussion about “Bitcoin without mining” — are David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto. It was a (successful) attempt to make a more-energy efficient version of Bitcoin without the need for power-guzzling mining sites. Arthur Britto famously is reclusive (like Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of Bitcoin) and there has been speculation he isn’t even real, although he recently tweeted a single emoji on an account that had been around since 2011 with no messages. The upshot for a historian is that there have been crypto-enthusiasts combing the Internet already for his presence and the very real possibility some information was intentionally scrubbed.
For our purposes: through the 80s, at least, he remained an Apple tech maven, producing the Apple II version of Strategic Conquest and being one of the independent contractors producing software copy protection for companies.
Did you have any interaction (e.g. to compare methods, share code, etc) with other people (e.g. Mark Duchaineau from Sierra On-line) who were developing protections? What can you tell us about this?
Nope, it seems that copy protection was very secretive back then. I didn’t even know who else did copy protection, I was on my own! Only later did I talk to others who produced copy protection, mainly a guy by the name of Arthur Britto. If I’m not mistaken, he was the one that gave me some ideas regarding how to better control the stepper motor for the drive head.
A later patent he is named on (2007) entitled “Storing chunks within a file system” has some resemblance to file-protection methods, and while this isn’t the venue to do it in, it looks like XRP itself may have drawn some inspiration from old-school Apple II programming.
From Mobygames.
The pair produced an Apple II horror-themed adventure which Sir-Tech published in 1983, using the Penguin Software graphical tools. I am incidentally playing 4am’s dump as is usual, but I need to be alert to the fact that the game may be broken as-is as one of the earlier dumped copies was unfinishable; there’s a patch based on that version. I’m not clear if the bug was due to buggy copy protection removal or something “authentic” to the game, but I’m going to assume the former for the moment and stay ready to swap if something goes awry.
As you drive along the narrow and tortuous road, you feel an eerie sense of uneasiness. There is something about this night that just does not seem right, but you find it hard to put your finger on it. The sky is clear and cloudless, stars upon stars fill the sky, the moon glows with a mysterious aura, yet strangely enough, it is very, very dark. As a matter of fact, it’s so dark you find it increasingly difficult to see the road.
The plot, as the manual narrates, has you driving a car where “something terrible, shimmering grotesquely” appears in the road. You crash the car, go unconscious, and find yourself awake in a “crypt or mausoleum”.
WELCOME TO THE CRYPT OF MEDEA …
WE’VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU .. .
Your goal is escape.
This takes a different tack than our other graphical adventures so far; even our games with a graphical screen/text screen split like Saigon: The Final Days and Caves of Olympus have had some text on the graphical screens, but this seems to be a complete split. Graphics screens only have graphics on them, and you can press CTRL-P at any time to turn the graphics on or off. If the graphic screen changes you’ll get an update. For instance, the starting room has “six tombstones”, a “glass case”, and a “candle”; if you GET CANDLE the graphics will re-display with the candle removed:
You can try to OPEN TOMBSTONE and the game will tell you to try PULL; PULL TOMBSTONE will reveal a “crypt”.
>LOOK CRYPT
THOUSANDS OF MAGGOTS FEAST UPON THE REMAINS OF A BODY INSIDE THE CRYPT.
YOU FIND SOME MATCHES!
With the matches I tried lighting the candle and looking at the case — no dice — the item inside was “dark”. OPEN CASE doesn’t work, and for good measure I tried PULL CASE:
TRY PUSH….
Fine, PUSH:
MOVING IT REVEALS A PASSAGE DOWN!
The passage leads down to a “dirt tunnel”, dead-ending where there is a “severed hand” and a “shovel”.
Getting the hand is fatal.
THE HAND GRABS YOUR WRIST AND SLOWLY CLIMBS YOUR ARM. IT REACHES YOUR NECK AND RIPS A LARGE PIECE OF YOUR THROAT AWAY. YOU ARE DEAD.
The same thing happens if you try to get the shovel instead.
>BURN HAND
WITH WHAT? (TRY BURN XXXX WITH XXXX)
>BURN HAND WITH CANDLE
THE HAND BEGINS TO BUBBLE AND BLISTER.
THE HAND BURNS AND DISINTEGRATES!
This lets you grab the shovel and DIG. While digging underground does nothing, going back to the starting room and digging reveals a secret knob (how is it we know where in the entire room to dig?!?) Pulling the knob then opens a new passageway, with a BUTTERKNIFE along the way (that must be referred to as a KNIFE) followed by a secret laboratory.
YOU ARE IN A BLOODY LABORATORY. A TRAIL OF FRESH BLOOD LEADS SOUTH. SOUNDS EMANATE FROM BEHIND THE WALLS.
VISIBLE OBJECTS: A LAB TABLE, A FLASK
VISIBLE EXITS: SOUTH, EAST, WEST
This seems like a good place to stop, as this passes through an area which is explained in the manual complete with a map.
Renga in Blue 
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