(Reading my previous post on Fantasyland is necessary to understand this one.)
So yet again I put aside a game and one my readers (this time, K) decided to tear it apart to discover its secrets. I did achieve five out of five treasures and the method is wild enough it is worth an extra post rather than just a post edit.
This is a good time to mention two side discoveries regarding Canadian history. First off, I found out the Toronto PET Users’ Group put out a CD with every single disk they ever created. While I haven’t checked every platform, it includes a fair amount of PET material that is not available anywhere else I’ve seen. (Link on Internet Archive.)
Secondly, as Rob points out in the last post, there’s an earlier Canadian videogame company: Speakeasy Software, as mentioned in the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities. Bulls and Bears, their first title from 1978, estimates 7000 copies sold (very respectable for 1978!)
Their other top-selling title. I don’t think Wargaming Scribe has done this one yet.
My suspicion is there’s still some gold to be unearthed in the 1977-1982 period of Canada. This period in computer history is a mess in essentially every country in terms of historical knowledge; everything was diffuse and rarer.
Going back to the game: I had four out of five treasures but could not find the location for a fifth. That’s because I was missing a “direction”.
Specifically, there’s mention in the room A Whiff of Home that “Magic Works”. In literally every other game of the period this would mean there was a magic word like MAGIC or HOME that would cause effects to happen. This turns out to be the case here but it doesn’t get delivered in the same way; the game requires a verb AND a noun. SAY is recognized as SAVE (the parser only looks at the first two letters of each word). With those strictures in place I thought the game was just being weird (in some places it is definitely just being weird) and moved on.
The actual syntax is GO HOME and GO MAGIC. Those are two different “directions” that can be done in all the rooms. You need to be holding the BOOK OF SECRETS for this to work, except every command there’s a 1/10 chance that it will get stolen. However, you can USE PICTURE (the PICTURE OF MOM) to make the book reappear again. The only reason I knew about the latter is I used it correctly when trying to get the JEWELS from MOM (you’re supposed to DROP the picture so you can get the JEWELS — USE PICTURE doesn’t work for convincing MOM, and I realize for someone who dropped into this paragraph without context this makes no sense at all).
So the right movement patterns is to GO MAGIC and GO HOME in every room, while invoking USE PICTURE every time the book gets stolen. The stolen book of course gets irritating, but systematically checking every room also gets irritating (since you’d like to test both alter-directions, but if one of them works, it takes a while to get back to test the other). I ended up using save states to make things go faster.
ADD: check the comments — it is even more complicated than expected. GO MAGIC and GO HOME universally go to the same place (but it seems to be possibly a bug?) and there are rooms where the “alternate direction” is done via holding something other than the book, like a DEFOGGER.
Interestingly enough, I had a little bit of a puzzle-breakthrough in finding the final treasure. It might have just been accidental and there’s plenty of methods that work, but if you like, study the map and try to guess which room I went to in order to USE MAGIC and jump to the final treasure room.
The room that’s useful to use magic at is — Fantasyland!
With shovel in hand you can get the statue, the last treasure. There’s some other magic-hidden rooms, apparently, but this is the only important one. Since there’s no treasure-storing area you just need all five treasures in hand and can end the game right there.
The game was, in its own curious way, staggeringly ambitious. I didn’t even talk about the flashlight, which shows nearby items…
…or the fact that NEW GAME, which I speculated was a broken feature last time, is working as intended. It is broken that sometimes the game is literally impossible to solve, but it does make essentially a “full randomizer” function — every item is shuffled to a new place, including the player’s inventory. I guess this was a way to squeeze a little more longevity out of the game. The author, after all, was still in an era where he had to struggle to find games to play.
The result of another NEW GAME. The SOMETHING is a useful object that helps defeat the guard (or it would be useful if the guard wasn’t buggy anyway). We’ve had plenty of adventure-roguelikes but this is the first time I’ve seen a “default game” that can then be turned later into a roguelike on command. The only comparison I can think of is Adventure for Atari 2600, where Game 3 is the randomized version.
We’ve had lots of people writing adventure games from the United States and Britain; one person likely from Scotland; another few writing from Australia. There is a country that has been conspicuously absent: Canada.
It is odd they’d be left out; they do have a tradition of games that goes back to at least Microchess from 1976. The author, Peter Jennings, was later a member of the Toronto PET Users’ Group, founded in 1978 and still ongoing. They were at one point one of the largest Commodore enthusiast groups in the world.
It all started in the summer of 78. I decided to buy a TRS 80. Some how a Newfie friend of mine (Fred Wilson) convinced me to buy a PET instead … It came with a free program (Lunar Lander) and a copy of Pet Users Notes #2.
After tiring of Lunar Lander I typed in “NIM” from the Users Notes. Six times I typed it in and it wouldn’t work *@#$!! Humm! seems to be written by some chap from Toronto named Butterfield! I called him on the phone and he invited me down to his home. While I was there I met a friend of his (Peter Jennings) who was writing a program called Microchess. Impressive!!
— From “Lyman Duggan, TPUG’s Founding Father”, from the September 1982 issue of The TORPET
Vince Sorensen, the author of today’s game Fantasyland (aka Fantasia Land) hails from Regina. We know this because it says so in the source code.
1 REM MAY, 1982
2 REM VINCE SORENSEN
3 REM 55 LLOYD CRES. REGINA, SASK.
He was also a contributor to TORPET. Here’s a clip of his review of some C64 games in the September 1983 edition:
When I first got my C-64. the only game that I could find for it was called Froggee. It’s a fun game. but there’s only so long you can keep playing the same thing over and over. I almost went back to my VIC. but happened to run into another or TPUG member who had a C-64. and was saved. He directed me to a place that sold more C-64 games than one could imagine.
It is interesting from a game-history standpoint to have someone switch from VIC-20 to C64 but be tempted to switch back just due to game selection, despite the heavy technical advantage the C64 has. (He even points out later that Omega Race is better on the VIC than C64; to be fair, that might be the actual best of all the VIC-20 games.)
I would say this is the first time a game for the All the Adventures project is from Canada, but John O’Hare (who had three games from 1980) is mentioned as a member of the Toronto group in an issue of TORPET. So it is likely those were the first Canadian adventure games, just I didn’t have a nationality marked at the time. Sorry, Canadians! (UPDATE: No, O’Hare was just someone in Illinois who was a member, see the comment by jcompton. Alas.)
It is still safe to say Fantasyland, despite being all the way out in 1982, is extremely early in Canadian adventure game history. This isn’t as odd as it might sound; for instance, the first commercial game made for consoles in Canada had to wait until 1983 with BC’s Quest for Tires. (You can read the details as well as terrific pictures of every version at Ernst Krogtoft’s blog.) The earliest computer game company may have been Software Magic, which I quite recently wrote about, and they only started advertising in December of 1981. (ADD: Rob from the comments mentions Speakeasy which goes back to 1978.) So while the Toronto PET Users’ Group came early, the commercial market got a slow start, meaning a little lag time is understandable (while we’ve seen some freeware, the vast majority of adventure games have been commercial).
Vince Sorenson incidentally has credits for one other game, a version of hockey using ASCII characters which is two-player only. It later surfaced in the Keypunch Software series, which appropriated old “public domain” software and resold it (how public domain it really was is often unclear).
(If Keypunch sounds familiar, they were the ones with the Cavern of Riches port stuffed on an “Adventure Pak” that was impossible to beat due to a scoring bug.)
Returning back to Fantasyland, being written for VIC-20 (with the C64 literally just being copying the BASIC code) in under 8K it falls into the same club as other super-minimalist games.
FANTASYLAND
BY VINCE SORENSEN
SOME COMMANDS ARE…
QUIT, SAVE, HELP, GET,GO, LOAD, DROP, USE, LOOK, FIGHT, NEW.
REMINDER – ONE TREASURE IS DISGUISED!
We’ve seen various angles for how to handle extra-small sizes (like the Bruce Robinson games): reduced verb lists, cut-down parsers, room descriptions that are just the name and any items nearby. This game includes all of them with a streak of complete and total surrealism. I’ve played some very bizarre games for the Project, but this genuinely might top them all.
The opening room seems to be random; the item placement at first seems to be not. I say “at first” because one of the commands you can type is NEW GAME, and then things get weird indeed:
I’m going to suspect the above — which starts you with two items, including one I suspect is not meant to be portable — is a genuine memory bug. But the game is so utterly wild I wouldn’t put anything past it. Some screenshots to demonstrate:
The goal is to find five treasures. You just need them in your inventory, you don’t have to drop them anywhere.
A sample of the total chaos of the map. Click here if you want to see the whole thing.
I’ve only found four of the treasures, which I have marked above.
1. Find a chest of diamonds. You need to be holding KEYS in order to take them.
2. Find some jewels nearby MOM. MOM needs a picture of herself in order to let you take them. If you use the picture MOM will give you a BOOK OF SECRETS.
You can use the BOOK OF SECRETS to teleport to other places. If you hold the BOOK OF SECRETS for too long it will get stolen by a wizard.
Yes, the COPS are an inventory item in the above shot, and that isn’t a bug.
3. Take a crown by a guard. The game seems to have been designed so the guard stops you, but I haven’t been able to trigger that.
The source indicates multiple solutions (that involve you having the right item in inventory, one possible item being the COPS), and let me just quote:
4. The “secret” treasure is a toilet.
5. The source code indicates something about digging up a statue with a SHOVEL. I have the shovel but despite checking the map thoroughly I have not seen a statue.
Given the BOOK OF SECRETS does a teleport, and there are other rooms that vaguely hint at magic words…
…it is perhaps possible there is a secret area only reachable via magic, but the game hasn’t been welcoming enough for me to try to tussle with it longer.
I will say that Fantasyland is fascinating in the sense of — despite having just treasures to collect — being something entirely different. I can’t think of another game to quite compare it to. That is, even with the absolutely sparest of elements there’s still the potential for variety. There’s been a few truly erratic maps (see Intergalactic from Atom Adventures) but nothing at the level we have here, and where you have a MINISTER OF ROCKS who can’t even be referred to by the parser but is just there for color.
I tried bringing the ROCK and using it to see if the Minister would be impressed, but alas.
Renga in Blue 
