Roger M. Wilcox has now had 19 games we’ve covered on this blog. This is the 20th and the last for 1981.
As a brief reminder, they were nearly all “private games” without much a notion for publication. The only exception was The Vial of Doom which the author tried to send to Captain 80 Book of Basic Adventures but missed the deadline on. All the games eventually made it to the author’s web site. Wilcox doesn’t give much background for Derelict 2147 other than he calls it a “ho-hum treasure hunt”; his next game for TRS-80 (The Last City, #21) was designed as his grand send-off as he was transitioning to DOS.
He mentions — as a complete coincidence — Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future (1987) also being set in the year 2147. It had toys that you could use while watching to interact with the show.
Derelict 2147 is rather like the Aardvark Software Derelict in that you are raiding an alien spaceship. This time the ship has appeared past Mars, and you start from Earth and need to steal a vehicle, killing a guard in the process.
This is akin to the opening of Odyssey 2: Treasure Island, where you have to murder a pilot and steal his plane to go over to the title island. I’m going to assume we know the guard is evil somehow and the ship would otherwise be used for the Evil Empire of Evil to do Bad Things. (Or. sticking with the Captain Power theme, used by Lord Dread in a quest to destroy humanity.)
The game is genuinely straightforward but I only found it that way because I’m used to playing both old games and Wilcox games in particular. For instance, at the very start, there’s a manhole which resists attempts at opening it.
>OPEN COVER
It’s beyond your power to do that.>GET COVER
It’s beyond your power to do that.>ENTER MANHOLE
I don’t know how to “enter” something.
PUSH? SLIDE? Nope. I whipped out my standard verb list and tested my way through before doing anything else, resulting in:
CUT, CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, CLOSE, KILL, UNLOCK, LOCK, PRESS, PUT, PUSH, PULL, MOVE, MAKE, SHOOT, EXAMINE, CONNECT
MOVE worked on the manhole. Incidentally, I keep trying to use ENTER for the entire rest of the game (this game uses GO only as the appropriate verb).
Hopping in the manhole:
You are in an ancient sewer. Visible items:
Long dead body.
Obvious exits: Up
The body has a gun license. Why do we need a gun license?
Well, the other location at the start is a “weapons shop” which contains guns and knives. You can grab a knife just fine, but if you try to get a gun it says you need a license, and I’m pretty sure grabbing some dead person’s gun license will make everyone happy.
With the gun and knife in hand we can now murder a guard (single guard) blocking an interplanetary spaceship in order to steal it.
>SHOOT GUARD
Zzap!
Wow! That was rather impressive!
>ENTER PLANETSHIP
I don’t know how to “enter” something.
>GO PLANETSHIP
Ok
The ship has a sign indicating *treasures* go here, and a red button with a joystick. Pressing the red button is sufficient to fly all the way to mars and dock with an alien ship.
Let’s rotate our way through the map, using the docking bay as a hub, and starting with far east and rotating counterclockwise.
Upon the first LOOK, the shelves reveal a “small device” with a green button that reverses gravity temporarily. The shelves are the kind you need to LOOK at more than once — the second time around, you’ll find a “five-pound key”. The “panel” is locking the “sliding doors” and need an identity device, which we’ll return with later.
Headed counterclockwise, the next place is a “antechamber” with a cryonics chamber and a lever. Pull the lever opens the chamber, revealing an alien who will now follow you around.
Trying to kill the alien has the game respond it is your friend, so I guess we don’t need to be trigger-happy anymore. I’m curious what the lore is behind the “you’re not a mutant” line; maybe the aliens were trying to escape mutants, so since we aren’t that’s why the alien is friendly?
Moving on to “up” from the docking bay (next on my map), there’s a tunnel with a hole in the ceiling. You can use the temporary gravity shut-off to float up through the hole and retrieve an octagonal crystal (a treasure) and an electric iron rod. The iron rod has a blue button which gives an electric shock.
Keeping our rotation, heading straight north from the docking bay leads to Large Quarters with “rows” of cryonics chambers. Looking at the console:
It has a lever on it.
… with a crystal attached!
An alien voice sounds in your mind:
‘Oh? You want that, eh? Sure thing!”
He removes the gem, opens a chamber, and seals himself off.
This gives a *parasite crystal*, another one of the treasures. Rotating again, my map has the exit “down”. This leads to a strange forcefield and possibly the most interesting part of the game. If you pass through the forcefield you die because of the difference in atmospheres between the inside and outside of the ship, but you see an alien with a metal belt before you die.
That is, the main text says:
>D
Ok
>LOOK FORCEFIELD
It’s very tenuous, only strong enough to impede gasses.
>GO FORCEFIELD
Ok
Your body couldn’t take the transition to zero pressure!
You were ripped apart!
But on the death screen you can see the room description:
You’re on a destroyed platform open to space. Visible items:
Alien wearing a steel belt.
Obvious exits: West
In another room (which we’ll arrive at shortly) there’s a copper coil. If we have the electric iron rod in copper coil in inventory, the command MAKE turns them into an electromagnet. Yes, this could have been very hard to find, but I found MAKE from verb-testing, and I knew both from the game’s response to MAKE (saying you don’t have the right materials yet) and previous Wilcox games that I didn’t need to specify a target. I only needed to use the verb MAKE, and the rest would happen by magic.
The electromagnet can then serve to pull in the alien, which we can only see because of the death screen!
A charge flows through the copper wire.
It was stronger than you thought! It pulled something in.
The alien has a treasure (an *advanced communicator*) as well as an identity amulet. The amulet goes back to the far-east storage room to open the sliding doors, leading to a cabinet with yet another treasure (a vial of Californium).
One last area:
There’s that copper coil I already mentioned, and also a treasure (a *platinum cube*) made deadly by being attached to a wire. If you LOOK CUBE you’ll see the wire, and the knife serves well enough to CUT WIRE, making the cube safe to take. The wire can also be pulled, revealing the pit you’re supposed to be dying in. This lets you climb into the pit safely and retrieve one of the spikes.
The spike turns out to be a “printed-circuit spike” and counts as a treasure. It’s all over!
Again, I want to emphasize: I found this straightforward, but I’m used enough to various conventions to recognize quickly what I’m looking at (and I have my secret weapon, the verb list). It does seem Mr. Wilcox’s heart wasn’t as much in this one; it’s lacking the satire of his other 1982 game, Followers Adventure, or the creativity of the Trash Island games. However, keep in mind this was not meant to be commercial; these are still private games, it’s just Roger Wilcox was gracious enough to eventually make them available.
This game does have one bit of satire, although it might be accidental. In addition to the button and joystick, your planetship has a fuel gauge. Upon docking, the fuel gauge is empty, and we never addressed that particular concern, implying the player character is now trapped on the alien ship albeit with their treasures, making for a grisly tomb instead of triumph.
Renga in Blue 
