In the April 1984 edition of Imagine magazine, intended mostly for tabletop gaming, Mike Costello (editor of Wargame News and Warmachine) started a column devoted to home computer gaming.
Many readers will already be familiar with the Adventure games that have been available on nearly all micros from the dawn of microcomputer history (about 1976). These sub-divide into a number of different types. The text-only Adventure is the most widespread, not because it is simpler than the others but because it is easier to rewrite a program of this kind for a variety of machines. The Scott Adams Adventures are the best known, but a number of authors have tried their hand at this type of game. In the UK, the machine-code Adventures by Marc Leduc and Brian Howarth have become well known to TRS-80 users, and the Brian Howarth Adventures are now being rewritten for a number of other machines.
Brian Howarth we’ve now seen quite a few times now (with games like The Arrow of Death and Circus); he’s given enough direct interviews that his history is mostly well-understood. (The exact story behind him switching to using the Scott Adams database format for his games is still messy, but at least we know enough about him for there to be a historical riddle in the first place.) Marc Leduc, mentioned in the same sentence, has not yet had any coverage here at all, and he’s had very little attention from modern writers.
The TRS-80/Genie Users Group of Nottingham was founded in 1980, meetings twice a month at the Wilford Moderns Rugby Club House. They had a club magazine, LPRINT, edited by Geoffrey Hillier.
2015 photo of the location. Source.
Marc Leduc was the chairman; what is unusual is he was also the chair of a second group, the National Colour Genie User’s Group. They had their own distinct magazine, Chewing Gum.
THROUGHOUT THIS MONTH’S MAGAZINE, YOU WILL FIND LOTS OF PROGRAMS TO TYPE IN. WE HOPE YOU ENJOY THEM ALL, AND WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO THANK ALL THE AUTHORS FOR THEIR TIME AND EFFORT.
I’ve gone through before how the Video Genie was a clone from EACA of the TRS-80; in Germany, the Video Genie name established itself well enough that EACA produced a color version. This was made without reference to the Tandy Color Computer. That is, even though the company started with a clone, they used that as a basis to make their own machine. Tandy’s CoCo is a hardware reset of sorts; the Colour Genie is instead more along the lines of “let’s just take a TRS-80 and add color to it”.
It is ultra-rare and mostly only known in Germany (where the Genie name held more stock than Tandy’s for historical reasons I’ve gone into detail about before). However, it did make it over to the UK, where it flopped in sales. Notice how Leduc is chair of a local TRS-80 group but a national Colour Genie group. The Colour Genie group even ended up making their own publishing label, Gumboot.
Leduc’s first Color Genie Game, via the Centre for Computing History. We’ll get back to this game in the future.
There’s a recollection from 2021 of the user group via Bernard Telemoid, who might have been the artist? Except there was a second cover from Gumboot used on their games generally, so I’m not sure which is his. Note Telemoid is not positive about Leduc’s games but I’m going to decide about that on my own (…weird to call adventure games in general “Scott Adams rip offs”…).
i used to go to the TRS-80 users group (later became the TRS-80/Video Genie user group, mainly cos my dad had started selling VG’s and he lobbied for the change) with my dad in the early/mid 80’s, held in a rugby club in wilford weekly, loads of great characters and discussions about EEPROM writing, machine language, programming the Z80 and the sublime beauty of the RS-232 interface (still a standard in many high level computing connections) of course i went for the crisps and fizzy drinks and of course the other children of electronics engineers, medical physicists and mathematicians.
It was through this i got my first paid work in the arts, designing awful cassette covers for Marc Leduc’s awful Scott Adams Adventure rip offs like ‘Find The Diamond Of Balmorlan’, i think it was he who showed me that if you press ‘break’ you could view the guts of the program and edit your own narritive into it, so i remixed a shit maze chase game into ‘Death Droid’ and gave it to people at school.
The Nottingham group was so prominent in the English-language Colour Genie space (essentially victory by default) that when EACA wrote a BASIC manual for the Colour Genie, it came with a free tape containing programs from the group.
Leduc wrote three games for TRS-80/Genie and then six for Colour Genie. The three for TRS-80 eventually ended up published by Molimerx (prior background here), and Harding’s spiel about the game is in his usual style of “honesty with no attempt at marketing spin whatsoever”.
“Although Brian Howarth’s series, Mysterious Adventures, essentially monopolizes the TRS-80/Genie (and now many other machines) adventure market, other English authors are still writing adventures from their own particular discrete viewpoint.” In other words: I know who my best-selling author is, but have you considered buying an adventure game from a different author?
A December 1982 catalog does not contain the game so it appears to not have been officially published until sometime in 1983, but awkwardly, not only did Leduc finish all three Epic Hero games with a copyright of 1982, he started his new Colour Genie series in 1982 as well. Especially given the role clubs played during this era in distribution (with “libraries” of games for sharing), I think it likely Epic Hero made it out at least to the local Nottingham area before being published; adding on the fact the Colour Genie games ended up more-or-less self-published, is a date of 1982 or 1983 more appropriate? (CASA uses 1983.) I’m listing both in the title but sorting in 1983 for now, but it’s possible some issue of LPRINT will emerge that throws this for a loop (I haven’t been able to find any copies).
I don’t have anything detailed yet about Leduc himself, other than based on his dedications to his wife and kids in various games I think it is safe to say he was not one of our 15-year-old prodigies.
Our goal is to go to the ocean, retrieve two treasures, and come back.
The Charlau I was puzzling over for a while as it is just described as a “beaut” but it is actually the name of a houseboat. Let’s stick with land first, by going east:
There are flowers hiding keys (your keys, I presume, since they go to the boat you end up heading to the ocean on). You can also climb the tree to find a rotten hole with a salt shaker.
From the wharf, picking up the quid and instead going south:
That’s not a quid, that’s a squid. Hilarious. (It likely borrowed this moment from Mystery Fun House with the “five dollar bill” but without the existential confusion of now carrying what I assume is a large squid.)
The leaflet just hints “Look closely at Kikimawa Island” which I haven’t gotten to yet; you can try to just take the reel but the merchant just shoots you. (Similar to The Golden Voyage, if we’re staying with the Scott Adams references.)
Hopping onto the boat, there’s a rope and a bar of chocolate (you can eat the chocolate, and the game says it is delicious, but with no further effect; I don’t know if this is a red herring style game yet or if everything is important). The door unlocks with the keys from the flowers.
Inside you can climb up to a bed and find shelves with some sharp repellent and some money (as long as you LOOK SHELVES more than once, but that’s pretty standard for this era).
After going inside (and only after going inside, this is essentially an event-based trigger rather than a time-based one) you find that the boat has now moved and you’re in the open ocean.
I would assume the rope could be used to tie the boat to the wharf, but I’ve tried TIE ROPE / WITH NOUN on every feasible noun both on the boat and on the wharf. I’m not sure what’s going on. The money presumably should be used to buy the reel before we take off for the ocean.
Even with the path being “wrong” we can still do a little preview of what it is like jumping into the ocean. It’s fine as long as you are holding the “sharp repellent”, and I’m not sure what to visualize that as.
The only way (seemingly) to go is down, or more specifically SWIM DOWN, but that just causes drowning.
I think I need pull out the bigger guns on this parser to make any progress. If all else fails, there is a walkthrough, but this is the only Leduc game out of his nine that has one, so it’s better for me to try to figure out his mindset as much as possible now while I still have a fallback. Everything is in machine code so I can’t just expect to prod at BASIC source code on his later games.
Renga in Blue 