Last time I wrote about Polynesian Adventure, an entry into the Falsoft contest for Tandy CoCo adventure games. It was written by an older couple, whereas today’s selection was written by a 15-year old. The REM statements in the code mention this was written in “early 1982” so we have an idea of the lag on this one (the game was written before the contest was announced).
Justin Paola, a 15-year-old high school student living in Berkeley, Calif., is a frequent caller of his local computer bulletin board systems with his 64K, 2 disk Color Computer bulletin board system. His interests include computer graphics, movie special effects, and adventure games.
I’m assuming the blurbs are honest (unlike the Captain 80 Book which made biographical details up) as this was part of a running magazine as opposed to a one-shot book.
This game has some similarity with the previous game (being set on an island) but also strong contrast (being much more dangerous). Our goal is to land on a jungle island and find a ruby chalice deep underground, avoiding “head hunters” along the way. It’s like if Invincible Island didn’t have as many biomes (and was smaller and easier to solve).
The plane that we land on can be used for escape with the chalice (just type FLY here) although there’s a completely different method of escape available as well. I don’t know why. Playing a weird prank on our pilot?
You start, helpfully, with some supplies. The gun is useless, but not for the typical reason in adventure games (that it is meant as a red herring and violence isn’t the answer). Rather, sometimes at random you’ll get attacked by a WILD CAT and need to SHOOT CAT, but the game doesn’t bother to check if the gun is in your inventory when you do this.
I suppose finger pistols were sufficient.
The SNAKE BITE KIT is for moments where you might randomly get bitten by a snake, although I’ve gone through an entire trip without the bite happening (it’s rarer than the cat, at least). The MAGNIFYING GLASS as far as I can tell is 100% useless, and the MATCHES are used for lighting a torch which happens to be just west of here.
Weird the torch is out on the island, not in your supplies. For the cloth: THE CLOTH IS VERY INTERESTING – YOU BETTER KEEP IT.
The map is wide open from here.
There isn’t much in the way of empty space: it’s one object or interesting thing per room. Just nearby you can scoop up a GOLD NUGGET, JADE NECKLACE, COIL OF ROPE…
…TRANSLATION BOOK, KIWI FRUIT, a WATER JUG (as long as you have the torch lit, it is in a dark part of the jungle) and a SPEAR WITH STRANGE LETTERING.
For the spear, if you are carrying the translation book you can read the spear.
Remember, our only goal is to get the ruby chalice. That might make the jade necklace and gold nugget seem puzzling — there’s not even a score — but one room as “head hunters” and they demand a treasure if you wander in.
The bizarre thing is this isn’t a real obstacle — the map is wide open and you just can avoid this room. Essentially, the game includes a method of preventing death as long as you are trying to get as far as possible without reloading, but via the normal practice of playing adventures there’s no reason someone wouldn’t just mark the map square and never go to the spot again.
To the far north there’s an AIR CYLINDER and a RAFT; holding both lets you INFLATE RAFT (we’ll come back to that). There’s also a ROCK SLAB which “LOOKS LIKE IT HAS SLID OPEN AND CLOSED MANY TIMES” but is too heavy to move.
Solving this took a moment of cross-genre thinking. Maybe we’re in a fantasy game, or at least one where there’s much higher technology than it appears? Using the word XYKO from the spear opens up a cave.
This is the only other section of the game.
Just to the south of the entrance are some hieroglyphics; with the translation book in hand you can read that you ought to be carrying that ancient cloth from earlier before going east of the vipers.
The “written recently” aspect is interesting and puts more credence into the idea that the voice recognition was high tech rather than “magic”.
The aforementioned vipers are hanging out at a pit with a conveniently placed hook.
You can TIE ROPE in order to snag the hook, the SWING ROPE to go across.
There’s a boring corridor next, at least boring if you are holding the ancient cloth. If you aren’t, then you die.
And finally … the chalice! No more tricks, you can just take it and go.
You can then make a beeline back to the plane and win.
Alternately, for reasons I don’t understand, you can inflate the raft, use it on the river at the start, and float out to the ocean.
It’s clear the author (Justin Paola) was thinking of this more as “simulate a region using my computer” rather than a tightly threaded narrative. (A good comparison is Johnson’s Castle Dracula which was designed as a series of scenes fishing for particular reactions from the player.) The editors of Rainbow Magazine had enough fun that they gave it a co-award as runner-up (in the non-graphical category) with a game called Lighthouse Adventure we will play sometime in the future.
There’s a tree you can climb purely for the scenery.
If you’re thinking of your text adventure as world-simulation more than a series of scenes, it makes more sense to have gratuitous mechanics like the head hunters and the raft. (And technically also the water jug — if you’re fast enough you don’t need to bother, but the game comes with a thirst timer.) A scene-minded author like Peter Kirsch would never allow loose ends like that.
From the Falsoft book, an image printed with the source code.
Oddly enough, this may have manifested in Mr. Paola’s later career. After graduating high school, he went to Berkeley (Electrical Engineering, Computer Science) and then to the University of Arizona (remote sensing). He then worked on imaging-related projects like LANDSAT and other geographically linked technologies.
I developed multiprocessor image processing algorithms in a UNIX environment. These included terrain data algorithms such as slope, shadowing and incidence from elevation, and land-use classification from multispectral and SAR imagery. Responsible for terrain delimitation overlay production for large aerial regions in support of DARPA contract efforts.
Thus, his game reflects “simulate a geographic area” more than “create a story”. “Authors whose text adventures reflected on their later careers” might be a bit too niche, but we can also toss the recent Crypt of Medea in there with Arthur Britto’s tricky copy protection and maybe … Strange Adventure and the author going into astronomy? I’m drawing blanks here.
I’ve finished the game. Given it was a 7k-byte type-in, it seemed inevitable, and it turns out there are almost no puzzles, but I had trouble anyway due to a particular decision by the authors. (And it is authors, plural, I’ll get into that later.)
The general pattern, from the starting point, is to hop on the Love Boat, then visit six islands in sequence, then go back to the start. If you ride the boat yet again you’ll go through the sequence as many times as you like. This pattern of a treasure-hunt where you rotate through the destinations has shown up in Alaskan Adventure but given that was in a December issue of Softside it is unlikely to have had an influence. (Also, unlike that game, this game doesn’t necessarily require a repeat, although for the one puzzle there is a good chance you’ll need to loop around.)
The main destinations are marked, although it is unknown where the player starts. I also didn’t work out exactly where the Maori village of the game might be in New Zealand.
Before plunging ahead, I should also highlight that the treasure hunting feels uncomfortable this time around. “You are in Maori Museum. You see: *valuable relics*.” Taken in a literal sense, this is a story of visiting some islands on a tourist boat and stealing their stuff. However, I don’t think the authors designed it in that sense. Rather, this is meant to be a light visit to some destinations and the presence of “treasures” in an abstract way of making it a game. (Think of them as replicas being found as part of a scavenger hunt, if that helps.) If the game was written later when puzzle-less was established more as a genre, I suspect they might instead make something like The Cove from 2000, which is purely all about exploring an environment and finding neat animals.
Picking up from last time, I was stuck with the parser command for filling a car with gas. It turns out that the game is fishing for a noun not mentioned in the text: FILL TANK. The really big issue is that if you try FILL CAR the game says you don’t have everything you need yet, leading players down the wrong path. This is a strong demonstration of how important unambiguous errors messages can be in making a parser game manageable.
The trick I was thinking of last time would have worked — you can jump to the boat with the PICK command, where it chastises you for picking flowers and teleports you to the boat. However, you do need to move the Trans Am in order to get back to the start.
READ PASS (from the boarding pass in the car) gets the message
YOUR CABIN NUMBER IS G7 AND YOUR TABLE NUMBER IS A1
and while at the tables, you can GO A1 to arrive at a table; while at the cabins you can GO G7. (Again, the error message you get otherwise isn’t super helpful, and I just took a shot in the dark at the specific letter/number being odd to mention.)
The table, A1, has some *silverware* which is the first treasure. (Again, the treasure collecting is super odd if we try to imagine it’s a “real” narrative.) I used this place as my stash point for treasures as I collected them whilst traversing the six islands.
By entering the cabin, G7, the boat starts to move. When you disembark you end up on the next island in the sequence. Here’s all of them, and the sequence is left to right then top to bottom:
At the first destination, Samoa, you can:
try to take the pink hibiscus you see and then get kicked back on the boat for breaking rules
go to a “Council House” which has a “basket full of pearls” you can freely take
see a fire knife dancer; there’s no text message, just a musical ditty which implies you are watching the dancing
I have the music in the clip below. Note that the “beep” that happens upon entering a room happens upon entering every single room of the game, every single time.
There are no obstacles other than avoiding the flower-based rules. The combination of parts is why I say it doesn’t seem like you’re doing a robbery; it’s showing off brief elements of place like it was a virtual travel tour or the clues of a Carmen Sandiego game (although baskets are associated with more islands than just Samoa).
Next is a Maori Village where you scarf valuable relics from a museum, and visit a Meeting House and a Lagoon while you are at it. (The closest I could find to this description is Whakarewarewa, video below.)
Next is a Fiji Village where you can find some Tongan coins (used later automatically — I never figured out where, they just disappeared) and a “diamond headed spear” in a “chief’s house”.
Next comes Tahiti, where the *Tahitian orchid* and *carving of a fish* count as the two treasures, and you find Boy Scouts singing for some reason.
…a Queen’s Bedroom (with a bird of paradise) and a Queen’s Bed (with a *beautiful woven mat*).
Last comes the Marquesas Village, which lands the player at an “active volcano” and has a guest house…
…a warrior’s house (with treasure)…
…and a cooking house, with a knife that is too hot.
The knife is the only real puzzle in the game (past the pesky parser business at the start). I realized the can that held the gas might hold water too, but got stuck for a while because I assumed the “waterfall” was the right place to fill up. Hence I started trying more and more outrageous parser messages, before finally realizing the “lagoon” from earlier could also have water. FILL CAN worked there; then I was able to POUR at the knife.
Then the remainder of the game was ferrying the remaining treasures back to the start.
I tried to check if the words earlier (like HA’E TOA for WARRIOR’S HOUSE) were from some actual indigenous language. If the only option was Marquesan, the answer seems to be no, but there’s multiple languages and dialects to account for and this is the sort of thing online resources are pretty bad at. It’s worth checking because this might represent the first time an indigenous language is represented in a computer game. (It is also of course possible the authors made those parts up, but that seems like an odd thing to make up.)
Earlier I mentioned there were two authors. The REM statements of the BASIC source mention Don and Linda Dunlap of Reynoldsburg, Ohio. The contest book only mentions Don Dunlap. I’m not sure if there was some one-person rule they were using but I’m going to change my links to mention both people.
From the perspective of the Falsoft people running the game, I could see how they perceived this as a “cute” sort of game which is a bit different from the norm so worth printing (“It is an enchanting land of adventure, charm and intrigue that seems apart from the rest of the world.”); they maybe also realized the HELP function worked to mention the FILL TANK issue that I was stuck on. Maybe they were more impressed with the sound than I was (at least, there are tiny bits of music throughout that substitute for visuals, albeit in a crude-old-computer-speaker way — the Boy Scouts singing and the Hula section are both included).
Coming up: another contest game from the book, followed by the recently-unearthed Tolkien game in Norwegian which has long been one of my Holy Grails.
Congrats to Ben Jackson who wrote the IFComp 2025 winner, Detritus, which received the highest voting average of any game entered in any of the years of the competition (as far back as data exists).
To recap from that post about Rainbow Adventure, text adventure creation competitions have long been a feature of the computing world (the previously mentioned IFComp has now run every year starting in 1995); the very first one came from publishing company Falsoft for their platform of choice, the Tandy Color Computer. While there had been plenty of adventures for TRS-80 (with Scott Adams leading the charge) there were less out for Tandy’s color machine (with less text resolution). Scott Adams hadn’t made it yet to CoCo, so when Lawrence C. Falk of Falsoft went to play an adventure game on his own system after seeing one on others, he didn’t have any choices.
I had just finished reading Byte’s Adventure issue of December, 1981, and seen one of Scott Adams’ famous Adventures on an Apple computer at my not-too-friendly local computer store. Just the day before I had discovered how to get by the snake in the Colossal Cave. But I wanted to play an Adventure on my CoCo.
The gaping hole led him to writing his own, but it was a private game, not a published one.
When Falk started publishing the Rainbow, there were some adventure submissions, and it led him wanting to have an entire book of them: hence, a contest. There were thirteen winners declared (that were printed in a compilation book); results were announced in the January 1983 edition of the Rainbow. As confirmed by L. Curtis Boyle, the Rainbow’s cover month matched the publication month, so January is correct (no shift back by a month); it does mean also that likely all the Falsoft contest games were written in 1982, even ones that don’t have a date listed in their comments.
Scott Adams and Infocom did finally make it to Tandy CoCo, but not until later in 1983 (Release 30 of Zork I was compiled in March). So at this point in time, the adventure universe was still very small for this system, and the book added a substantial new library.
Based on the magazine copy this seems to have been an honest to goodness contest and not just a situation where they published everything that was sent: “We’ve painstakingly whittled down the numbers to settle on a baker’s dozen.” (This may have been exaggerated.) Other than the two winners (one text game and one graphical game, which landed in that January 1983 issue of Rainbow on top of being in the book) the entries were not sorted but instead listed by alphabetical order.
GREGORY CLARK of Syracuse, New York, for Sir Randolf of the Moors
DON DUNLAP of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, for The Polynesian Adventure
CHRIS HARLAND of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, for The Deed of the York
ROBERT W. MANGUM. II of Titusville, Florida, for Horror House
JORGE MIR of New Berlin, Wisconsin, for Dreamer
JORGE MIR of New Berlin, Wisconsin, for Oneroom
JUSTIN PAOLA of Berkeley. California, for Search for the Ruby Chalice
GREGORY RICKETTS of Columbus, Ohio, for Dungeon Adventure
JEAN ROSEBOROUGH of New Berlin, Wisconsin, for Door
STEVE SHERRARD of Normal, Illinois, for Dungeon Adventure
SCOTT SLOMIANY of Downer’s Grove, Illinois, for Dr. Avaloe
RICK TOWNSEND of Bettendorf, Iowa, for Escape from Sparta
CHRIS WILKINSON of Larchmont, New York, for Lighthouse Adventure
The order is different in the book, and I’m starting with the first one in the book, Polynesian Adventure. The winners are in the middle, so again, no “ranking” logic. I’m not playing fully in sequence because some games group well together, but the start of the book seemed as logical a place to begin as any.
Each game includes a brief biography; here’s Don Dunlap’s:
Don Dunlap has been a professional programmer for 17 years. He is president of his employer-based computer club with nearly 350 members. He teaches BASIC, and also serves as a volunteer computer consultant and speaker for area schools, libraries, and civic groups.
This presents a puzzle if all 17 years were from Ohio (which may not be a correct assumption). The first computer science department in Ohio didn’t even start until 1969, with Bowling Green. My guess would be he worked for Nationwide Insurance and commuted to Columbus; although I don’t know what their computing was like, insurance companies did get on the programming bandwagon early. (If he moved or even just changed companies, there are other options out of Ohio in 1983, the most prominent being Compuserve.)
Color seems to be a major feature of the game so I didn’t switch to black-and-white this time. All that really happens is that colors switch randomly every few turns.
Our goal is to go over to a boat and find treasures, bringing them back to the Polynesian House at the start. I have found zero treasures, and you’ll see why in a moment.
Gameplay starts in a small set of rooms (seen above) where the goal simply seems to be to get in your car (a Trans Am) and drive over to where you’ll find the boat. The car is lacking in gas.
To the west is a discount store with an empty gas can (you can just grab it) and to the east is a gas station (FILL CAN works) but then try as I might I can’t put the two things together. Nor does DRIVE CAR work (I assume because of the gas). There’s a GLOVE COMPARTMENT with a BOARDING PASS for the boat, but in this area that’s as far as I’ve gotten. FILL CAR while at the car holding a filled gas can just gets the response YOU’RE MISSING SOMETHING.
I did my usual verb list…
Incredibly small, and I’ll go into SMELL and PICK in a moment.
…to which I can add DRIVE, but not REFUEL or SIPHON; I suspect FILL really is the right verb, but what could I be missing given the absolutely minimalist constraints? There’s no descriptions. The discount store is just YOU ARE IN DISCOUNT STORE with nothing else implied.
From here I might be tempted to hit the source code already, but I made some progress in a bizarre way. While testing my verb list, and reaching SMELL, I had a strange response about being stung by a bee and being sent back to the boat. This wasn’t replicable either. (Maybe some bug put me in proximity of the “flowers”?) I also had a weird reaction with PICK, which usually says I DON’T UNDERSTAND (verb known, but doesn’t make sense in the room) but I was able to (while in the car) get it to give me a response about not being allowed to pick the flowers, and I got sent back to the same boat.
Love, exciting and new / Come aboard, we’re expecting you
I hoped this would open up the main part of the game so I could play (with the caveat that maybe return is impossible) but alas, this only opens up another small four-room area.
I took some stabs in the dark, like GO TABLE in the dining room or GO CABIN in the cabin area, but no dice.
Again, by now I’d normally be plunging into source code, but the weird glitch has me interested enough to try stabbing at the problem a while longer. If anyone wants to take a shot themselves, you can download the game here and then use XRoar Online (link in the upper right) to run the file.
Renga in Blue 