An adventure is an undertaking that carries risk, surprise, and sometimes danger with it. There is no danger in these games. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I dislike computer games in which a player must pretend to pay the death penalty just because of a wrong choice at the fork of a path.
— Richard Ramella
These three games all come from the same column in 80 Microcomputing, March 1983.
The reason three games can all fit together is that they are all from Richard Ramella of Chico, California, who we saw last year with Fun House. He wrote small games for children, games intentionally designed small and straightforward enough to make them tempting to modify.
I’m going to admit only three kinds of people into Fun House: Kids, adults who have friends who are kids, and people who haven’t lost the sense of playfulness that kids have as standard equipment. Fun House is more about fun than houses.
He started with a book, Computer Carnival, which came out June 1982…
…and followed this after with his Fun House column in the September issue of 80 Microcomputing; the column ran until the April 1984 issue (as 80 Micro started cutting back on their games coverage). He followed with two books that combine “fiction and computer programs to form one giant fantasy for young readers” (Rainbow Quest and Lightyear Excuse). He was active enough that I might be missing something; there’s also the issue that books for children tend not to be preserved in libraries as well as other materials (paperbacks get beaten up and disposed of, and serious academic libraries tend not to collect them as a focus). If you want to see the hybrid fiction/type-in style of Lightyear Excuse, Ramella’s brief-lived column with Color Computing Magazine that started after Fun House should give you an idea.
The March 1983 column is titled Adventure Secrets, although — given the tiny-game restriction — it’s a fairly loose definition of “adventure”. Treasure Trove in particular counts even though it’s unusual in a way I’ve seen before.
Starting with The Gingerbread Caper, it’s a choice-based game where all the choices are “fake”, so to speak; Ramella calls it “linear” and marks the game as being for children seven and up. I want to emphasize that the age of seven guidance is not just reading or playing the game, but inputting and/or modifying it.
100 ‘ * THE GINGERBREAD CAPER * 4K BASIC LEVEL II
110 CLS
120 A$=STRING$(10,”*”)
130 INPUT”What is your name”;B$
140 PRINTB$;”, you are in the woods with Hansel and Gretel.”
150 PRINT”Hansel says: Leave a breadcrumb trail (1)”
160 PRINT”Gretel says: No, eat the bread (2).”
170 INPUT”Your choice”;X
180 PRINTA$
190 IFX=1THENPRINT”Birds eat the crumbs. You’re lost.”
200 IFX=2THENPRINT” You’re lost but not hungry.”
210 PRINT”You come to a fork in the path.”
220 PRINT”Hansel says Go left (1), Gretel says Go right (2)”
230 INPUT”What is your vote”;X
Maybe your seven-year-old novice doesn’t know what every element means, but they can still modify text strings, which is one way to start being a developer. (The legendary Tales of Maj’Eyal started as just a text-string hack of Angband to make it Tales of Middle Earth.) The actual choice turns out not to matter or make the player lose; the crumbs get eaten if a bread-trail is left. The remainder of the story is similarly low-stakes choices. You may want to pause and try the game yourself online (click “emulate edited program” and you’re good to go).
The column’s version of the game is all-caps. Whoever typed this version started putting in lowercase and then dropped halfway through.
The only “bad” choice is nibbling the gingerbread house at the end, which has an ELDERLY WOMAN come out to chase you and you get reset back to the start (not dead, just lost in the forest again where you can make choices again — something like the old Time Machine gamebooks). If you wait, the woman invites you inside and you can call your parents and stay over the night.
620 PRINT”THE HOUSE BELONGS TO RED RIDING HOOD’S GRANDMA.”
630 PRINT”GRANDMA INVITES YOU ALL TO VISIT.”
640 PRINT”YOU CALL YOUR PARENTS ON GRANDMA’S PHONE.”
650 PRINT”THEY SAY YOU MAY SPEND THE NIGHT.”
660 PRINT”AND EVERYONE LIVES HAPPILY EVER AFTER.”
670 END
This sort of bespoke-coding might be a bad idea in an adult game, especially when a parser is involved (see Johnson’s Castle Dracula for one I wrote about recently) but works fine for the context and low-stakes here.
The second game in the column, Treasure Trove, is the first one I came across. It was entirely without context. I have a collection of unsorted-by-year-or-author games and I found this one before realizing it connected with Ramella.
It is cryptic and I first wondered if something was broken or if the game was incomplete.
Treasure Trove is shorter than Gingerbread, but it does a lot more. You are put into a scene, told your location, given a tool, and told its use.
There’s no obvious goal on the start screen.
You go through a series of “tools” and try to use all of them in sequence. I first tried typing “W” to move and got the message “What, W a box with a feather? Impossible !!!”
Trying it again gets the message:
B-O-N-K !
which based on the article, is supposed to mean you went in a direction you couldn’t do. So I was briefly thrown for a loop by it seeming that: a.) you start by having a command to go west be misunderstood followed by b.) having the command to go west be understood, but have it run into a wall.
What’s really going on is that the game has two prompts, “action” followed by “direction”. It asks for an action even if you’re somewhere you aren’t supposed to be doing the action. So while the screen above has the player start at a box with a feather, “tickle” just lets you know the action is impossible; you might think you’d want to just specify a direction then, but you’ve got to go through the hoop of handling the “action” prompt first.
What, tickle a box with a feather?
Impossible !!!
I finally realized that the way to get from “action mode” to “direction mode” without an error message is to hit “enter”, that is, send a blank prompt.
550 INPUT “ACTION”; E$
560 IF E$=”” THEN RETURN
Once the game is in “direction mode”, it doesn’t exit it until you’ve successfully landed a direction (rather than just getting “B-O-N-K” to come out).
This would all be more troublesome with a larger map, but the entirety is a 2 by 2 grid.
The feather thus goes up to the dragon (who I wouldn’t assume is ticklish, but the only thing where the action “tickle” even makes sense).
The “key” then goes over to the box.
Good Move
The box produces a ladder
This is your new tool
Its purpose: climb
The ladder works on the beach tree:
Good Move
The tree produces a shovel
This is your new tool
Its purpose: dig
Finally, the shovel works on the beach.
Commands need to be typed in lowercase for the version I played; the original is all uppercase and doesn’t need to account for that.
While Treasure Trove technically counts as an adventure, it mainly held interest in watching someone reconstruct the concept of a parser from first principles in an effort to simplify things for children; unfortunately it made things more confusing for children instead.
Now on to the last game, Wonderland, which won’t have the same lower-case/upper-case issue as the other two, because it doesn’t seem to be archived at all. I had to type it in myself. You can find the code here.
Again the rules are irregular, but it isn’t as anti-intuitive as Treasure Trove.
This program borrows 10 characters and 10 items or scenes from the Lewis Carroll stories Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Each is assigned a different place on a 5-by-5 grid.
Note the regular grid this time only uses cardinal directions, as opposed to Treasure Trove which tried to hard-code in NE/NW/SE/SW into the program.
At the start, one of the characters is secretly made the mystery character. Your goal is to identify that character and then find its location.
The grid is set up at random. Some rooms are “locations”, some are “characters”. Some (independent of if they are a location or a character) have “clues”.
You might notice the count of 10 locations and 10 characters means that not all 25 squares are covered; some duplicates are included. Below is a complete map of one playthrough.
Clue-spots are marked in the corner, although I’m unclear their exact system; some spaces have more than one clue (that is, if you gather a clue and revisit, you’ll get another clue). To gather a clue, you need to solve an addition problem that briefly flashes on the screen. (For this age, it is testing both addition and paying attention; it’s fast enough — and the time even has randomness applied — that I sometimes missed seeing both numbers.)
Getting a clue right adds a “letter” to a list. The letter is simply a random letter chosen from the “mystery character” you’re supposed to be guessing.
If you reach a character, you’ll get prompted if you want to guess at the mystery character. You don’t have to guess at the character that is physically present; it just wants any guess typed in, and if you get it correct then the game says you need to find that character to win.
Although you are also welcome to guess the right place with the answer.
I found this oddly compelling, moreso than Treasure Trove at least. The main “parser” is just movement and getting interrupted by questions doesn’t feel too unnatural. The addition-problem aspect seems more of a vision quiz than a math puzzle so feels appropriate to the setting, and even though everything is just spread out references, the game benefits from the “fan fiction boost” of familiarity.
Two Queen’s Throne rooms. I guess she has a backup.
Despite these only barely qualifying as adventures (and I wouldn’t count Wonderland at all) I still found it interesting to see an approach to writing something intended as “adventure gaming” but not following the standard rules. This likely won’t be the last time we see this approach, despite “guides” starting to become common.
Even if his books never come up, Richard Ramella will come up again with a type-in in 1985; I also suspect once the Amiga steps in we’ll have a return performance as for many years he published the first Amiga diskmag, called Jumpdisk.
September 1986 issue, via eBay. Includes “Where’s Tom”, an “electronic time map” game of Tom Sawyer.
Coming up: assuming I can get over the technical hurdles (being more a pain than normal) our next game is from Japan, and it bears some resemblance to Wonderland.
Renga in Blue 