For All the Adventures we’ve gone through multiple diskmags and tapemags now, like Cursor for the Commodore PET, Softdisk for Apple II, and CLOAD for TRS-80 (along with its spinoff for Tandy Color Computer, Chromasette). One of the most prominent of the Tandy CoCo tape/diskmags was via T&D Subscription Software.
T&D, as founded by Tom Dykema, lasted all the way up to 1991, when Tandy stopped making computers. You can look at one of their late catalogs here.
Tom Dykema in the 80s, from his Facebook page.
Dykema was in college, aged 21, when he started selling subscriptions from his parents’ basement. Tom notes that he “hired a programming genius down the road” to help with producing content, and he wrote about “four programs a week”. The circumstances mean today’s game (Killer Mansion, on Coco-Cassette #1) may have been from Tom or it may have been from the unnamed programmer or a combination of the two; I haven’t been able to tell.
It is not, as the name might suggest, a horror-themed game set inside an abandoned house featuring supernatural creatures. It is, instead, a horror-themed game set inside an abandoned house featuring “an insane man” who is a killer. Note the difference!
We are a detective who has chased the killer to a house and must go inside, and I’m unclear why we can’t call for backup other than it’s the 80s and this sort of thing happened all the time.
The only goals here are to a.) deal with the killer without getting killed first and b.) find the money that was stolen.
As this is a single game on a multi-game tapemag it is not terribly complicated, especially if you realize one of the main gimmicks. There’s various items where it seems you might want to open them (a desk, trap door, dresser, chest) but the command OPEN will always kill you, even if applied to something that it doesn’t make sense to open.
It says “door” even if you try this on a desk, or a rat.
With that out of the way it is a little more plausible to make progress. There are what are allegedly clues scattered about, but they aren’t important to bother with.
In one room (“Coal Storage” on my map) the killer gets to you and the game informs you that you need to have taken the killer down first before entering that particular room.
Another nearby room (Hiding Room, where you can see a “silver key” before things start up) a fight sequence begins and then the game prompts you for an item to use.
There’s also a “maneating watchdog” who will also start to get testy unless you have the right item; fortunately, there’s a bone not far by it will take. After it will be “friendly”.
Then there is a control panel with three colors of lever, red, blue and yellow. All drop you in a trapdoor. Red kills you, yellow drops you on a bed in a nearby “Guest Room”, and yellow, the helpful one, plops you in a “dungeon”.
To the east of here is a skeleton where using MOVE on the skeleton reveals it is holding a knife. (Really, the only hard part of this game is communicating. Using the levers also takes MOVE, PULL and PUSH aren’t recognized.) To the north there’s an ice pick and a locked door, and of course trying to open the door kills you, but somehow doing USE PICK is a perfectly safe way to handle explosive materials and you get through.
Then you can use the knife to win the fight against the killer.
With the killer dead, you can safely go into Coal Storage, where a paper says “X marks the spot” and there’s a piece of dirt floor. Take the shovel nearby over to the floor, USE SHOVEL, and then USE KEY when a chest is revealed.
This is best compared to a game like Space Gorn; not meant to be a long experience, just a short vignette to fill another slot on a monthly tape. It has about as minimal a parser can be while still working.
The term that comes to mind is “fake facade”. Each room, if you peruse the map, has a couple elements to allegedly interact with, and for a while I was fooled into trying each item checking for deathtraps (I even used skull emojis at first to note each one down). So it gave the impression of a little bit of depth, even if the kind that’s trial-and-error death, but once I realized the gimmick, things came down to figuring out how to implement the parser commands successfully.
But hey, at least it took me 10 minutes to map out rather than 3 hours! (The compass rose helped.) I needed this kind of breather. Especially because, coming up: the final 1982 game of Level 9, which will likely be hard to map and come with at least one maze. Although I’ve got an update to do first on that French game for pocket computer.
Decks making copies of Coco-Cassette. From the “bonus photos” for the book CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy’s Underdog Computer.
Renga in Blue 