Well, I suppose it was inevitable. I announce I’m done with 197X and almost immediately afterwards I discover a game that’s been misfiled. To be fair, most copies state “copyright 1980” (and seem to be derived off the source code published in Byte magazine, December 1980) but the TRS-80 version at least is clear:
This game (and the followup, Spider Mountain Adventure) was written by Teri Li (a pseudonym for Terry Kepner). The goal is simply to find the secret Lost Dutchman’s Mine and retrieve four treasures.
Really, based on the first couple screens, this game has amazing atmosphere: you get full saddlebags, a rifle *and* a gun, a map, and a mule that you can load the saddlebags on.
As seen in the title screen shot, the “computer voice” is actually a dead character (“the ghost of Backpack Sam”) inside the game world. Later, you even find a room with PILE OF BONES (MINE). The default messages keep this unique flavor:
>GET MULE
JUST WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, PAUL BUNYON? YOU’RE NOT STRONG ENOUGH.>DIG
OK
DAG NAB IT! THAR’S NOTHIN’ HERE!
You can feed the mule and lead it around, and it can carry your saddlebags around for you. Nice!
Unfortunately, after this opening phase, things break down pretty quickly. To get to the mine, you need to be holding the map, and then in one of the locations type >FOLLOW ROAD. Note that >GO ROAD is actually parsed and goes to an entirely different location!
The saddlebags have some lovely mimesis, but they end up being a pain. While they can hold quite a bit, the the number of items you can hold in your hands is a low number. This means at nearly every action I was doing inventory juggling; this is similar to the issue I had in Adventure 501 where a smarter container system actually made for worse gameplay. Historically, this sort of thing is cured once automatic item juggling becomes common (that is, if you need to use the map, having the game automatically put items and take them out for you).
When I found my first treasure, *SPANISH COINS*, I had no idea how to pick it up. After checking the source code, I realized that unlike every other game of this time, the “*” marks aren’t just decoration noting the item is a treasure – you have to use them in the parser. That is, >GET SPANISH is unrecognized, but >GET *SPANISH is.
The mines are simplistic. You go to three different rooms and DIG to find the treasures. The only real danger is from the fact there’s a maze with no exit whatsoever.
Then there’s this:
THAR’S NOISE UP AHEAD.
SOUNDS LIKE INJUNS.
>GO BUSHES
YER BEHIND A BUSH.
YA SEE: INDIANS. BUSH.
OBVIOUS EXITS: WEST
It’s hard to come across this scene without feeling uncomfortable. The entire genre of Westerns has always had trouble with Native Americans, in the same fashion that a story about colonialism has intrinsic issues that can’t be shuffled away. Throughout much of its history the genre stomped through them without much self-consciousness; I think perhaps the turning point was John Ford’s last western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964), which nearly comes off as an apology for his earlier work. In any case, by the 1970s the genre was still out there, and books could still refer to “injuns”, but there was definite awareness of a Problem.
Oddly, the case here is redeemed, perhaps accidentally, by: a.) the line being delivered by a dead character in the story as opposed to a “modern narrator” and b.) the fact that if you try to fight, you will get killed. There is no way to “win” against them. This marks the third game I’ve played so far (here’s the first, here’s the second) where you are given a weapon (here two weapons!) that serves no purpose at all.
From the published game cover.
Still: the first adventure game western! (Not the first electronic game — there’s Highnoon (1970) and The Oregon Trail (1971) for instance.) It must also be said that computer-narrator-as-in-universe character is pretty unique for the time, so even though this game is extremely rough, it’s got genuinely intriguing innovation going for it.
A winner is me. I switched later in play to the Apple II version, which is why this screenshot looks different from the others.
Renga in Blue 