As I suspected, I didn’t have much game left to go. This continues from my previous post, where I was stepping off an elevator and getting electrocuted.
My confusion was thinking that the explosion was encompassing the entire house; that is, there would be no way to survive the explosion no matter what. However, assuming you can step out of the elevator and survive the electrical cords, while the explosion will cause the elevator to collapse, you will survive.
To be fair, the text upon dying says
LA GENERATRICE VIENT D’EXPLOSER LA MAISON N’EXISTE PLUS, VOUS NON PLUS
or
The generator just exploded. The house no longer exists, neither do you.
and I don’t think you’d normally read it other than “there was no way to survive that”? But moving on–
As long as you wait (either typing ATTENDRE, WAIT or RIEN, NOTHING) you can get the timing exactly right so that you step out of the elevator right as it collapses but also (because the generator is gone) you don’t have to worry about the electricity killing you either.
However, you still have to worry about the room immediately killing you some more. That “corde” (rope) is not takable, but it is oriented in such a way you might be tempted to climb. The verb list is confusing here but it turns out you can still jump, and the game prompts you to open the window first. If you do so, you die:
You crash to the ground
I don’t know what the deal with the rope is, but I appreciate the extra beat in there where you have to intentionally do an action leading incrementally to your doom rather than just wandering into death via a single step.
You should instead ignore the rope and window and just move on through the door:
The door has just closed. Hello…
How do you write this in 4 letters?
In French, this is COMMENT ECRIVEZ VOUS CECI EN 4 LETTERS, and is a word puzzle. The word puzzle works in both English and French; you’re just supposed to type THIS (or CECI) to move on. (There’s shades of the word puzzle in Avventura nel castello which worked equally well in Italian and in English.)
This allows you to find the Professor’s time machine.
There’s buttons to go to the PAST, PRESENT, or FUTURE, but if you try to do PAST or FUTURE (that is, do actual time travel) the game informs you that it isn’t a very good time machine and you die. With PRESENT:
There’s three pills on the ground and a laser gun. I bet you can guess at least one of the pills is poison. We’ll get back to the pills in a moment, though.
To the south is a mysterious black cube, and you can go up to a “saucer”. Neither serve any purpose other than make you hopeful you can … launch into space I guess?
From the cube room there’s one more room to the east, where you can find a book and rubber gloves. The rubber gloves need to be worn as there’s an electrified door to the west of the pills. The book is useless and can’t be read or opened. (I was hopeful it would kill the reader with a joke so good it makes you die laughing, but alas, this is another boring non-death room.)
Now, back to the pill room. With the gloves on you can go west into a room with a shower and a hole.
If you try to use the shower you find out it is full of acid. If you try to go DOWN (entering the hole) you find out it is full of water. So clearly the next step is either take the pills or use the laser gun.
The laser gun works with nothing, even though FIRE is a verb. I get the honest impression the author was starting to run out of space for puzzles and had something involving the gun and saucer which got cut.
With the pills:
1.) swallowing the Q pill is death
2.) swallowing the Z pill is not immediate death, but swallowing Z alone doesn’t help
3.) swallowing the K pill will make it so you can escape the house through the water
So you might think, horray, just swallow the K pill, and you’ve won? Well:
Phew, you found yourself outside, and irradiated. You die after a few days.
Hmm. What about the K pill and the Z pill?
Phew, you found yourself outside. But, you are all blue. It must be the pills.
And irradiated. You die after a few days.
So either you can escape the house and die of radiation, or escape the house and die of radiation while you’re also blue. And people were mad about Infidel’s ending.
I do appreciate the sense of humor the game had, and how it mostly invoked deaths in a “participatory” way, where the player is at least partly complicit (rather than choosing to turn left instead of right). A game like Revenge of Balrog which relies on stepping the wrong way for death doesn’t give off the same “death labyrinth” vibe (even when it is a literal labyrinth). Or to put it another way, navigating which action to take rather than what direction adds an extra edge. The fact deaths were almost in every room felt consistent rather than mean, and I was disappointed when there seemed to be no way for the saucer or book to result in yet another goofy demise.
I can at least explain where the author’s ending probably came from. Remember this was derived off of The City of Alzan, which the author admired. The game had two multiple routes through. One of them led you to catch the plague in the city (the whole reason you were trying to escape in the first place) and if enough turns pass, the plague kills you:
OH DEAR. YOU MUST HAVE CAUGHT THE PLAGUE IN THE TOMB. IT SEEMS THAT YOU HAVE DIED.
However, you can escape with the plague! The game will congratulate you like normal if you do so:
YOU MADE IT OUTSIDE THE CITY WALLS. THIS IS INDEED A RARE OCCASION. WELL DONE.
I speculated that maybe somehow leaving the city cured you, but taking a more realistic view, you “escaped” only to die just a little bit later. The author was clearly copying the same dismal ending.
ADDENDUM: I used the walkthrough in the Brutal Deluxe manual to confirm I had the “best ending”, but Gus Brazil in the comments points out there’s a way to survive still. The blue-generating pill also makes you immune to the acid in the shower, so if you swallow both pills, take a shower, and then escape, you won’t die of radiation. However, you still are permanently blue — it’s the exact same ending just the death is missing — and I do still think the author was thinking of Alzan when he wrote all that.
After this, Alain Brégeon did stay in games at least a little. Rob mentioned in the comments a 1985 RPG, Crystal 5, which he says has the “French touch”; by this he likely means something approaching this quote from The CRPG Addict:
French RPGs of the 1980s feature weird combinations of plot elements from mythology, fantasy, and sci-fi, NPC dialogue that makes little sense even in its original language, vague quests, and odd in-game asides. It’s as if their developers felt that RPGs were the next frontier for the Surrealist movement.
But what Brégeon is truly famous for is his later work on the Amstrad made with Patrick Beaujouan: the action-adventure game Carson City from 1986 and the traditional parser adventure Le passager du temps (The Passenger of Time) from a year later.
As far as direct influence of Professor Folibus, we have at least two games upcoming: Cauchemar House by an anonymous author in an unknown year (but almost certainly following Folibus) and The Manor of Dr. Genius from 1983. The latter was for the Oric but adapted the Toms engine. We’ll have to get deeper in adventure history in general to see if there are any other “trap labyrinth” games from France.
For now, though, let’s hop back over the Channel to England, and specifically, the start of the legendary company Magnetic Scrolls (kind of).
The title translates to The House of Professor Folibus, and yes, we’re back in France.
When I wrote about Des Cavernes dans le poquette I mentioned, as an aside, that the Sinclair ZX81 dominated more than the ZX Spectrum. As late as a May 1983 issue of Micro Systèmes (a magazine that had been around since 1978), the ZX81 gets twenty mentions and the ZX Spectrum gets zero. While the ZX Spectrum French debut was in June of 1982 (compare to the UK getting the product in April) the rollout was sluggish and I haven’t entirely deciphered why. My best guess is related to the SECAM format for televisions, which was France only (Europe otherwise used the entirely different format PAL). It already takes some effort to cope with linking the black-and-white ZX81 to SECAM, but the color format of the ZX Spectrum had even more trouble.
The competitor Oric-1, which took off at the same time in the same price category, was instead easily able to cope. Quoting the CPCWiki: “the Orics were the only machine in their price range to ship with an RGB output socket, which made them the only machine in their price range to be usable with French SECAM televisions, via their SCART(/Peritel) sockets.”
Thus, in a curious way, a ZX81 book from the UK — The ZX81 Pocket Book by Trevor Toms — ended up being more influential in France than its place of origin.
If that book sounds familiar, yes, we’ve covered it before. The City of Alzan was the sample adventure game. The system got used for Greedy Gulch (and two other games on the same tape I haven’t gotten to yet). It was derived off a 1980 article in Practical Computing, and that article was used for both the Artic games and the massively popular Quill system, but the Trevor Toms system itself in the UK didn’t go as far. The ZX Spectrum smashed up the ZX81 market enough that it became irrelevant by 1983.
In France, the book became the ur-text for early French adventures, kind of like Crowther/Woods Adventure for mainframe games and Omotesando Adventure for Japanese games. This is because of La maison du professeur Folibus by Alain Brégeon, which essentially kicked off French adventures as a real genre.
The game isn’t exactly the first French text adventure; Bilingual Adventure (1979) and Mission secrète à Colditz (1980) came before. But Bilingual Adventure was not well-distributed outside the US, and it was just a port of Adventure; Colditz was a private game for family and friends and only published later. If we want to be finicky, using Hugo Labrande’s phrasing in an interview with the author, we can say it is the first original French adventure game with wide distribution.
Alain Brégeon wanted to work with computers since he was a child and through the 70s he was, as he calls it, an “inspecteur” maintaining large systems (that is, mainframes). He started to get interested in “small systems” (home computers) in the 80s and got a ZX81 in kit form (as he notes, it wasn’t like IKEA, it required soldering). Given his expertise and interest in electronics, he started selling hardware for the system he made out of his garage (including, yes, SECAM adaptors).
Not long after, Brégeon obtained a copy of the Trevor Toms book (original from 1981, translation published early 1982). He became interested in the adventure system, especially City of Azlan, admiring the “codification quasi booléenne” (quasi-Boolean codification) of the logic.
This made him want to write his own adventure. He had already published a bowling game in an earlier issue of Micro-Systèmes, and in issue 24 (July/August 1982) his game appeared with both source code and, importantly, a detailed explanation of how it worked.
There are two “modern” versions of the game. One, by Xavier Martin, adds art in all the rooms. The other, by Antoine Vignau & Olivier Zardini at Brutal Deluxe Software, is a conversion to Apple II; it includes an English translation and manual that lists all the vocabulary the game uses.
You find yourself in Professor Folibus’ laboratory. To get there, you had to go through a thousand dangers and avoid as many traps. But you are not at the end of your troubles. This house is in fact a labyrinth from which you will have to discover the exit while showing intelligence and cunning because there is no shortage of traps on this route.
— From the Brutal Deluxe manual
I wanted to see the art so I tried out the Martin version some, got stuck, tried the Apple II version, and stayed stuck. I don’t think this game is long — there’s only so much space in the source code — but it starts with a frustrating sequence where I must be missing something.
This is, akin to Medieval Castle, a story where you go in somewhere for no obvious reason, and then the goal is to get out. Unlike Medieval Castle, this place you’re trapped is quite deadly.
You are in front of a house; the door is open.
I had a little trouble at the start; the directions (N/S/E/O) don’t work. You’re supposed to use ENTRER (ENTER), and the door closes behind you.
You are in a corridor. There is a door to the east and a door to the west. There is also: fire, candle
It seems quite natural to pick up the candle and light it, but that’s a mistake. Heading east, there is a room with a strange smell where it explodes and you die:
(To restart the game you’re supposed to type GOTO 10. This is normal for ZX81.)
I will say the deaths in this game are somewhat distinguished from the ones in my last game, Pharoah’s Curse. Heading east just on its own reveals the smell but you don’t die; with a little more caution you can avoid the death, and even on deaths you can’t avoid (as you’ll see shortly) you at least bring forward the death by actions a little more elaborate than going east rather than west (falling into a pit) or opening a box revealing a snake. It isn’t quite as elaborate a setup as the “hang you by your own rope” moments in Journey (1979), but it leans more in that direction.
Even without the candle-death the odor room doesn’t seem to provide any use. Going west instead leads to a room with a paper; after GET PAPER there’s a KEY you can also get. What you can’t do is read the paper or otherwise examine it, and I would have been fiddling with that moment for a while had I not had the Brutal Deluxe verb list in front of me.
Further west is a machine with a red button and a green button. If you push the green button it starts “getting carried away”; if you push the red button it simply “starts”, but either way, after a few turns the whole house will explode.
To the north from the exploding machine are a closet and some wires. You can find tools in the closet and REPAIR WIRES.
REPAIR is an uncommon verb to use here. I’ve had FIX in games, and MEND once, but I don’t think I’ve ever had REPAIR. One of the interesting things about playing non-English games is they’ll sometimes reach for verbs whose English equivalent isn’t in the typical stock of adventure verbs. Colditz had “assommer”; “knock out”, and distinct from “hit”, which I don’t think I’ve seen in an adventure otherwise.
Unfortunately, fixing the wires just leads to the same result as before with the machine. But maybe it is meant to fix the elevator to the north?
Going up just results in the game saying “the elevator does not move” and going down is not possible (I assume there’s no basement). If you hang out in the elevator, the cable breaks and you die, or as the Brutal Deluxe version says
You crash down: deaed
If you press the red button it does provide power, enough that you can go UP in the elevator, but immediately upon arriving there’s an unfortunate scene involving a damp room and an electrical wires.
“Une corde” is a rope.
There’s not a lot to noodle with! I suspect I am missing something very simple. I imagine the electricity comes from the generator, so if the generator were off, I’d be able to survive stepping south. However, I need the electricity to go up the elevator. Hence … ?
Here’s the verb (and noun) list from the manual if it helps any.
Renga in Blue 