Every once in a while rather than playing a game I try to dig up a lost or unknown game. Recently I decided to take a shot and the wildly obscure 1979 adventure game Jungle Island, as published by Aladdin Automation, Inc (“a division of Aladdin Computer Corp”).
I first found out about Jungle Island scouring through old issues of Creative Computing; it is mentioned in an ad in the November 1979 edition, and I also found the same ad in an October 1979 issue of Byte. The game has an entry in MobyGames, presumably by someone (who goes by “vedder”) reading the same ad.
The game list is not that impressive: Math-Ter-Mind, Lunar Lander, Craps, Mastermind, Tic-Tac-Toe, Jungle Island, Stix, Super Pro Football. Nearly all of them had public domain versions already (here’s a 1976 port of Mastermind done by David G. Struble, printed in Creative Computing!) but that didn’t stop the folk(s) at Aladdin from writing hyperbolic prose for the ad copy.
Aladdin’s Stix™ can be played with 2 to 5 piles of sticks and between 1 and 19 sticks in each pile. The object: to be the one to pick up the last stick. Sounds simple? Yes, but you’re playing against the computer. Take heart, though, because you can control the degree of difficulty in this update of the ancient game of Nim. Stix™. Another first release from the Aladdin Old Favorites™ Series.
Nim had so many computer variants by this point. The 1939 New York’s World Fair even had an electro-mechanical version which you can argue (with some semantic hand-waving) was the first video game.
(Picture from Popular Science Monthly, 1940.)
Jungle Island was described in the ad thusly so, hoping the game would be the first in a series:
Now, I managed to find the game mentioned in Vanlove’s 1981 Apple II/III directory …
… which was sufficient to know it was a tape game. I also suspected, based on finding a 1980 directory, and the exact address and suite of the company, that they were out of the location by that year.
Unfortunately, Apple II tape preservation is not in a good state. The folks most interested in Apple II tapes are Antoine Vignau and Olivier Zardini at Brutal Deluxe Software, and they do have an Aladdin section. These are the two games they have:
STIX
8K version. By James J. Justin.TIC TAC TOE
8K version. By Mike McDonald.
(I’ve inquired if they have pictures or other information from the cassettes themselves, but haven’t heard word back yet.)
These companies tended to have one person (the founder) write all their software, so seeing two names was a bit of a surprise. I had no luck hunting for James J. Justin, but a Mike McDonald does show up in a couple places from that era as an author for articles in Practical Computing. But Practical Computing is a British magazine; what would Mike McDonald be doing contributing Apple II software to an obscure California company? (While Apple II products made it to Japan, it was not really a thing in the UK.)
Fortunately, being a company from California, there’s an easy way to check: California has an extremely good index of all businesses.
Initial Filing Date 08/28/1978
Status Forfeited - FTB
Standing - SOS Good
Standing - FTB Not Good
Standing - Agent Not Good
Standing - VCFCF Good
Inactive Date 06/01/1981
Formed In DELAWARE
Foreign Name ALADDIN COMPUTER CORPORATION
Entity Type Stock Corporation - Out of State - Stock
Principal Address N/A
Mailing Address 1300 MARKET ST
WILMINGTON, DE 19801
So not a California mailing address but Delaware! And also defunct quite quickly, as suspected. The initial filing does present the possibility Jungle Island came in 1978 (which would be super significant, in the same company as Adventureland). But also oddly, the 1980 North American Register of Business puts an entirely different business at 1300 Market St:
I normally would say I’ve hit a dead end otherwise, but there was one other angle possible: were these products only for Apple II? If the McDonald of Tic-Tac-Toe who was ripped off from I’m sure was well-paid is the one from the UK, then the game really needed to originate on a different platform. More curiously, the Math-Ter-Mind part of the ad mentions a song feature that is only present in the Apple II version of the game, suggesting other platforms.
And can you believe … I’m pretty sure I found it? Voila, the TRS-80:
1. The name, while elongated in this version (and a “MYSTERY ISLAND” on top), still matches (no other TRS-80 game that mentions Jungle does).
2. The game is less than 8K, that is, it fits on an 8K tape just like the other Aladdin games we have physical copies; the book also specifies 8K.
3. There’s a lack of Aladdin branding, but nearly the entirety of the catalog seems likely to be repurposed work anyway.
4. It fits the description given in the book of having three routes to go on starting the game followed by “which will you choose???” also suggests a sort of “choose your own adventure” feel as opposed to a discrete adventure-space, which also matches the gameplay. (There are technically only two starting directions, east and west, but it looks like from the opening screen there ought to be three.)
5. While the ad copy doesn’t mention hunting for treasure, the ultimate goal of the game is escape (you escape by helicopter). You can in fact completely skip the gold, it doesn’t matter at all.
So while the South American setting does not quite match the ad picture which suggests an African setting, I’m fairly confident this is the same game. (Also, this game has leopards, which are only an African thing, so clearly zero research was done anyway.)
Regarding the “choose your own adventure” feel, typing E gets you eaten by a shark. You can’t type W to go back.
The connectivity is pretty random, as I’ll illustrate with two more screens:
For some reason, one of the branches asks you to figure out a “word” made up by direction letters.
The game wants SNEW.
Eventually, YOU SEE A HELICOPTER LAND IN THE JUNGLE AHEAD. I tried typing ENTER HELICOPTER and the game crashed. Checking the source code, you need to type anything other than a direction (more on this in a moment) followed by GET IN or CLIMB IN.
This one’s coded extremely sloppy. It is sloppy enough I might be tempted to believe it was a 1978 product, maybe it did beat Adventureland? I’ll only bestow it that if I can find some more concrete evidence, so I’m leaving it in 1979 for now.
270 PRINT “YOU ARE STANDING ON THE EDGE OF A DEEP CANYON”
271 INPUT N$
272 IF N$”JUMP”GOTO 170
273 CLS
275 CLS
276 PRINT”THAT WASN’T TOO SMART!!…YOU’VE JUST JUMPED OFF A 300 METRE CLIFF….AND YOU’RE NOT TOO WELL RIGHT NOW!…… TRY AGAIN..PRESS ‘ENTER'”
In this scene, the game asks you to make some input; if you type JUMP, the game kills you, otherwise it moves you to 170:
170 PRINT”YOU ARE AT THE WALL OF THE VILLAGE….A TOUGH ”
171 PRINT “VINE HANGS FROM THE TOP”
Here, the game accepts, N, S, E, W, and CLIMB VINE. The directions all lead to the same place, “YOU HEAR THE CHANTING OF 100 WARRIORS.” CLIMB VINE leads you to
400 PRINT”THE VINE BREAKS!! YOU HEAR WARRIORS APPROACHING!”
401 INPUT V$
410 IF V$”RUN” GOTO 220
420 PRINT”YOU’RE RUNNING AS FAST AS YOU CAN!”
430 INPUT T$
440 IF T$”N”,”S”,”E”,”W” GOTO 310
450 PRINT”IT IS NOT ADVISABLE TO RUN THROUGH THE JUNGLE”
460 INPUT Q$
470 IF Q$”HELP” GOTO 280
480 PRINT”YOU FALL INTO A MANTRAP FULL OF HUNGRY LEOPARDS.”
490 PRINT”YOU’RE FINISHED……TOO BAD……IF YOU WOULD ”
500 PRINT”LIKE TO BE REINCARNATED, PRESS ‘ENTER’……”
Here, you are prompted for a string; if you type anything other than RUN, the game says
YOU’VE FALLEN INTO A MANTRAP INFESTED WITH
DEADLY SNAKES!! … YOU’RE FINISHED..
PRESS ‘ENTER’ TO TRY AGAIN………..
If you do type RUN, you are told you are running as fast as you can and must make another input. If you do a normal direction now, you go to “THE WARRIORS CHASE YOU THROUGH THE JUNGLE!!!!” If you instead type anything else, anything else at all, even nothing to do with running, the game warns you about running through the jungle (!?). Typing HELP right then will send you to the scene with finding the helicopter, otherwise, you end up in the mantrap of leopards.
Even Edward Packer at his wackiest never had logic like this.
If you really want to try a chance at the bespoke coding frenzy, the game is playable online here. I did not show you the scene with getting the gold, so there’s still something left to discover.
Despite the game being exactly as dodgy as I expected, I think it is fascinating how many companies felt obliged in this 1979-1980 era to try publishing one adventure. Clearly whoever was coding this was out of their depth but they still plowed ahead with the promise of using the computer to enter another world for a while, or at least attempting to cash in on the prospect.
Renga in Blue 