There is no kind of computing that I enjoy more than either playing or writing ADVENTURES. These come closest of any programs currently available to matching my pre-computing-days-mythological-picture of what a computer should do. When you are playing an ADVENTURE the darn machine seems to speak English. Instead of inputing “1” to go up and “2” to go down, you just tell the computer “GO UP” and it does it. It even talks back to you in English.
— Rodger Olson, from the Aardvark June 1981 Journal
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
Playing Aardvark games has been a curious journey so far; their original development system has been a Ohio Scientific computer with an 8K capacity, and they’ve more or less stuck with that through their production process. Because they had some ambitions in terms of environmental complications (worlds that connect up mid-way in unexpected ways, having a submarine fill with water and all the rooms change accordingly) they’ve all had a strange complexity even though the parser only understands the first two letters of each word. This is still true for their 1982 output!
So they’ve had creatively cool concepts let down by high enough game difficulty that the parser’s flaws stick the player like mud. Earthquake (a collab between Bob Anderson and Rodger Olsen) is advertised as being “for beginners” so it had a little better chance of being good out of the gate. (Whether this difficulty designation was baked in to the game from the start or whether it was decided after the fact is unknown.) Less time struggling against difficult puzzles means less time for the parser to go awry.
At least, the general concept here is top-notch.
I’m playing on C64, it’s the only port I could find.
You’re in a mall: after one turn an earthquake happens.
Other than the man immediately needing help in the starting room when a truck flips on top of him (ow) various other people become trapped (under wooden beams, in stuck elevators, etc.) and you need to rescue all of them. As you rescue them they get added to your group and start following you. They don’t need to be rescued in any particular order but you need all of them to escape for perfectly logical reasons — this is a Collect All the Gems of Fnord Plot but made realistic.
Additionally, this is an open map — you have access to nearly everything in the mall straight away. You know how so many adventure games could be made easier with a single shopping trip? This lets you visit all the stores — you need a rope? gloves? a ladder? shovel? All of these things are accessible right away. There’s far too much to carry it all (and do you really need a jigsaw puzzle?) The general feel is hitting an obstacle and thinking back to what store might have the item you need. This is a major shift in thinking; one person who had acid fall on him, so I thought about where I’d get a base (grocery store) rather than run through a regular inventory list. (While it didn’t really go there, this briefly suggested to me an adventure game that was more like Scribblenauts, where there’s enough item accessibility that you are more limited by your creativity than by your access.)
Most of the map, nearly all accessible without puzzle solving.
There’s a man trapped in rubble in a theater; you get the shovel from the garden store to dig him out.
A woman trapped by fire in a bookstore is rescued via fire extinguisher.
Some acid is neutralized by baking soda.
For a woman trapped under a wooden beam you need to grab a saw from the hardware store to cut the beam out.
There’s a few trickier ones. A man trapped in a hole needs to be rescued via a rope tied to a statue. There’s some water dripping into the hole and there’s a valve that can be turned to increase the water flow (so the man could just swim up) but it does go fast enough to really fill up the hole.
A woman is trapped in a pet store; you only hear her first on the outside but can’t get in. You have to go in an access duct (using a flashlight + batteries) and then find the woman is trapped by a snake. You need to go through the animal cages and find a mongoose, who you then drop at the snake to scare it away.
There’s an elevator that’s stopped at higher than ground floor; you need to take a ladder to it first and climb up, to find a “reset switch” and turn it with a screwdriver.
The parser is absolutely unforgiving here. I tried INSERT PHILIPS and TURN PHILIPS and TURN RESET and FLIP SWITCH and lots of different variants.
The woman inside the elevator is unconscious but you can use smelling salts to revive her.
From the elevator you can also visit a second floor.
The remainder of the map.
One woman is trapped by an electric wire (get rubber gloves from the garden store) and one man has a broken leg (grab a splint from the medical store).
You can also get a jack from an auto store in order to rescue the man at the very beginning of the game. Once he’s rescued, you should have 10 people, which is enough to flip the truck over. Far more satisfying than gathering 10 random treasures. Then everyone can join the ride (I assume a roomy back where people can pile in) and you then turn the ignition and hit the gas to escape.
Fun! The parser is still rubbish but the easier puzzles make reckoning with it smoother (although plenty of objects are still described by two words where you have to guess which one works). The parser mangling still makes me sad because this is otherwise solid and it otherwise would make my “recommended” list for 1982. I don’t think this structure is one an author at the time would normally go for, but just like Nellan is Thirsty having a different target audience led to innovation.
Also, making a disaster game is an innovation in itself, even in modern times. Disaster Report went for 4 iterations, although the masterpiece in the genre is the SNES game SOS, involving a ship that’s flipped like The Poesidon Adventure. The Wikipedia page on disaster games is otherwise quite minimal except for firefighting games, which make their own genre.
EXTRA BONUS THOUGHT: Even though there’s lots of “useless objects” in the mall their presence works in practice; you might be toting around a wrench but it ends up being clear you don’t need it. In a more modern game this trick might get more annoying; people would expect an item description and interaction and the ability to combine things and so forth. Weirdly, the low-tech and even low-ability-parser kind of work for the game here, allowing a game design possibility that would otherwise be much more work and maybe not even feasible.
Tape cover of the game as later published by the company Mogul for C64. Via TZX Vault.
Next up I’ve something very different, a book review! This will be followed by two 1980 games I’ve been putting off (with graphics and sound) before arriving at the dreaded Very Hard Britgame, Pimania.
Renga in Blue 