From the script of A Boy’s Life by Melissa Mathison, named before release as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.
Last time I was stuck on
a botanist and a geranium that was withered so they didn’t want it
the director John Carpenter (not an obstacle or anything, but he was clearly there for a trade)
a few assorted locked doors (no puzzle here, just waiting for the right key)
a guard (having already taken down one with a rocket)
On the guard, I had a contact mine that seemed like it might work on the second but it exploded just a little too well.
Guard #2.
Gus Brasil dropped some rot13 hints but just the topic alone was enough to help; he picked getting by the guard as the goal which let me know where to focus. What eventually broke the case open was looking again at the verb list and keeping in mind something could be a little broken (that is, a native German speaker might treat something in English a little unusually), just like CHOP was used with a truncheon.
The key turned out to be knock, which in the format “knock noun” means something like knocking on a door, but is used here for “knock guard” (without the “out” you’d normally want in English) or more specifically “knock guard with truncheon”.
This leads through another set of doors (locked and requiring random keys to open, nothing behind them) and a third guard guarding a third hall in the same manner as the first two …
… except not exactly in the same manner. This guard was more aggressive and trying to give him something or interact causes him to “tear you apart”.
I remembered back at the beginning of the game, there was a guard described as cruel that knocks you out and drags you into the second (dark) cell. The guard is triggered by yelling. Since this guard was more trigger-happy then the last two, I tried the contact mine method again: THROW MINE so it is right in front of the guard, heading back to the protective steel doors, and once they are up, using the command YELL.
I found this the most satisfying puzzle of the game.
Using their aggression as a weakness.
After the guard was dead I could check the third row of doors, and at the final one I met E.T.
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was a 1982 movie involving a friendly alien landing and a boy helping him go home. He causes bicycles to fly. He works out how to say things with a Speak and Spell.
A Speak and Spell, of course, I had in my inventory! Giving it over didn’t do anything, and I had to go back and look over the relevant section in the movie for a bit before I realized revivifying the flower is part of it too. If you’re holding the geranium and you hand over the Speak and Spell, he’ll repair the flower.
You know how I gave some latitude for Fairytale given the conditions it was written in, and even the baseball puzzle in Zork II gets a pass due to an alternate solution? Yeah, no such defense here.
The flower can then go back to the botanist, who will be pleased enough to give you a Rubik’s Cube.
I checked, and the Rubik’s Cube was first shown outside of Hungary at a German toy fair in 1979, and they had their own craze and familiarity with the toy. What I could not find is how it was linked to director John Carpenter. Maybe he mentioned it in some interview? At the very least we’re out of puzzles so this wasn’t hard to find.
Carpenter leaves behind a passkey, letting you unlock nearly every door in the game (you can dump the green, silver, gold and red). Back at the E.T. level there’s some more that needed to be mapped, and two doors that require the passkey.
It’s absolutely pure mapping with zero tricks, and perhaps a little odd for the very end of the game; using the passkey you can get the blue key behind one of the doors. The blue key then goes to a final locked door near the director door and you can walk out to victory.
The bottle doesn’t get used, except I think the implication is that the gunpowder was in the bottle to begin with, so you just get the empty one back?
Weirdly — and I know from the outside it might not seem that way — I enjoyed myself. It helped that I understood the context here of a game the author clearly liked and wanted to push the boundaries of and make their own. (I’m going with the assumption that Eberhard Mattes is the author of the toolkit as well as the game, although it is of course possible it was a team effort or a friend of his.) The “HAHAHA” part of the map which would have annoyed me in a professional case (Bard’s Tale 1, say) came across as somewhat charming knowing this was a way of conveying the joke.
The best troll setups are those which violate the player’s expectations. In order to do that, a setup needs to make the player think they know what they need to do, have them fail in a humorous way when they do it, and then let them know what it was that they were supposed to do instead. If any of these components is missing, a troll setup will fall flat. If a player doesn’t think they know what to do, they will not have an expectation to violate. If they don’t fail or there’s no humor, then they’ll wonder what the troll was. And if they don’t have an idea of what to do right the next time, they’ll just end up confused rather than amused. Make sure that each setup has all three components.
I still don’t think the setup-joke aspect always works as expected, but the fact we’re talking 1983 or so it’s fantastic that it works sometimes. The “nothing with a button on it” made me genuinely laugh; while I was slightly annoyed at the time with how the silver key was hidden leveraging the properties of the engine, looking backwards in an intellectual sense I find it fascinating that the trick was even possible. Anti-design for games prods at established wisdom; what’s odd is that there’s so little established wisdom in 1983 I wasn’t expecting to see much like it yet.
Despite an enormous amount of text adventures being produced by “toolkits” (especially once the Quill enters the scene) the toolkits are generally intended more in the way of a word processor trying to present things in the smoothest way possible; that is, doing something that “makes fun of” a property of The Quill is going to fall mostly flat because the players are just going to think of it as another text adventure, as opposed to the norms established by the Frank Corr-style game.
Frank Corr himself incidentally did have plans for Deathmaze 7000 in the works after Asylum II but just like his “octagonal” based space-game the new Deathmaze never surfaced. I’m not sure what happened and I hope to have the full story someday. If nothing else, I’d like his opinion on Madhouse, which until I started posting on last week was completely forgotten.
Coming up: A random Britgame, followed by the start of The Quill (sort of, it’s complicated).
I’m likely not far from the end, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy to get there.
Via an Asylum II ad in 80 Microcomputing Magazine, May 1982.
Last time I left off on the very simple problem of being able to press a button on a wall. (LOOK BUTTON says there is no button here, so I wasn’t even sure if it was a button.)
PRESS BUTTON and PUSH BUTTON did not work. I did discover while fiddling that VOCABULARY works just like Asylum so you can get a full list of verbs and nouns.
Even with this list I was having no luck (I went as far as guessing it was a HOLE instead of a button and trying things like INSERT GREEN KEY IN HOLE). Fortunately, Gus Brasil, who seemingly gravitates to the really obscure stuff I play, picked up the game and played all the way to the end. He let me know the right syntax is PUSH BUTTON ON WALL. Argh!
The syntax becomes relevant again shortly.
I was thus able to enact my plan: light a rocket, drop it at the guard, run to the steel walls, survive the explosion, and get past the guard to a new area.
The box the guard leaves behind has a rubber truncheon. You can also go all the way to the end of the four doors and use the green key to find a purse with some gold coins.
I already suspected the truncheon went to the mined area (either smashing a glass wall or a mirror) but I’ll save that for later and deal with the gold coins first, which directly go to an inmate near the start who wanted to trade them for a fuse.
Again, every character that isn’t a guard can be referred to as an INMATE.
With this, I was able to go to the transporter and … still not operate it. It was described as having a button on it, it had a fuse in a “fuseholder”, and it was too heavy to cart around (you can pick it up, but you have to drop it in place). The key turned out to be the highly (highly) unusual syntax which has you PUSH BUTTON ON TRANSPORTER.
Doing this fries the fuse, which is why we needed the New Fuse in the first place (I had originally thought the lack of working was the fuse, not the parser being finicky). This was followed by an incredibly long struggle with the parser to try to take the “Blown Fuse” out, and put the “New Fuse” in. GET BLOWN FUSE doesn’t work, nor did most of the variants I tried. (“GET BLOWN FUSE FROM TRANSPORTER”: “You can’t do that”.) The big issue on top of everything else is that the parser has a character limit so you can’t type in anything you want. If you try to TAKE BLOWN FUSE FROM TRANSPORTER you get stuck by not being able to type in the “R”. Trying to use REMOVE (off the verb list) is even worse:
This is the first time I’ve ever had difficulty with a parser because it refuses to type all the characters I need for a command. Gus Brasil mentioned (based on the Vocab list) that TRANS works as an abbreviation, and indeed it does: REMOVE BLOWN FUSE FROM TRANS gets the much desired Blown Fuse.
But things aren’t over yet because now I needed to put in the new one, which was another saga in itself, and I actually took a break from the puzzle and went exploring a little in case I missed stuff. Gus also incidentally pointed out that the teleport-to-nowhere I found which kept repeating had a clear message if you do the map-upside down:
This is exactly like troll levels in Mario Maker.
Finally being satisfied that I had everything resolved (except the truncheon, which I’m saving) I went back to the grind:
put new fuse
put new fuse in trans
insert new fuse in trans
put new fuse in fuseholder
insert new fuse in fuseholder
This wasn’t a problem with guess the verb or even guess the noun, but guess the preposition. The game needs “into”: INSERT NEW FUSE INTO TRANS.
There was one small benefit from all that fiddling. At one point I typed OPEN BOX rather than my usual command (I had PUT NEW FUSE which seemingly worked, but only set the item down). I discovered that the square also contained a silver key.
You can’t move off the square without dropping the transporter (again, too heavy, so it always would look like there is a box there no matter what). The silver key is being hidden by the property of the game always displaying a single box for any item being in a spot, no matter how many items there are. If anything in this game is a troll at the level of what a fangame normally does (rather than a professional game) this is it: this is the kind of glitch in reality that most authors try to hide (and as far as I remember, never got used by Corr/Denman) but the exact conditions here (you have to drop an item on the square to turn around and look at it, you can’t see a box in the square you are standing) are being exploited by a superfan to their limit. Compare with Super Mario romhacks that require using glitches to beat:
Moving on, as we still haven’t explored the area the transporter lands on:
It’s fairly straightforward except for yet another troll, which is somewhat dependent on the player’s keyboarding. They have to wind their way out a “wormy” passage, followed by a very long passage where one step before the end you need to turn left. This means you are hitting the “up” key a lot, and if you accidentally hit “up” one too many times you plunge into a pit. I didn’t have this happen since I was moving slow to make a map, but since I could tell what the author was aiming for, I made an animation demonstrating the fall:
The bottom of the pit has infinite hallways in any direction. You have to reload. (Again: The original Corr games did have some softlocks, but not of the kind where you realize you are in an impossible room or area.)
Turning correctly, you can make it over to pick up a magic map, which is the only other item here. Normally then this would be a jump back to where you started, followed by a trip up to the mined floor, but…
…it doesn’t land you back at the same place you started! (I marked the landing point as the swirly wormhole.) I’ve also simplified the map a bit here, as there’s some teleporters that loop you around (and I didn’t feel the need to find the exact positioning for each one) and I’ve also left off marking most of the doors, some which use a gold key (which we haven’t found yet); just note you need to come back here once you have the gold key in order to pick up the red key.
After some major map-fiddling I found the “escape” door (a door seen from the other side, but requiring a silver key to open) so finally made it back to the elevator and the mined level, with the truncheon and magic map in hand. I already knew the magic map was relevant because when examining it at first, it gives the same grid as before. Once you actually arrive there, a path is drawn out like this:
Clearly my own map was turned from the “real” compass the game was using (I hate not knowing how to orient things, grr) so I did some magic with Microsoft Paint in order to redraw the route on my original map.
To get through to the route in the first place involves busting the mirror. I had some difficulty because the typical HIT and SMASH and ATTACK weren’t in the list, so I had to go with CHOP. Chopping with a truncheon?
The path then follows mostly uneventfully as long as you don’t typo your keypress. There’s also a “big blue nothing with a button on the rear side” but that’s again just trolling, and to get through the last step you should look in the box as it contains a contact mine which needs to be picked up (don’t step on it!). In the end you can reach the corner box which has a gold key.
The route is changed on the way back, so you need to refer to the magic map (or do a lot of saving and loading) to make it to safety.
In the end I wasn’t too annoyed by the fact I mapped it first before finding a relevant item, as knowing the boundaries helped make sure I did the path correctly.
With the gold key in hand you can head back and get the red key, and then go on a spree of opening doors. This yields a Speak and Spell, a geranium, a botanist (who doesn’t want a shriveled geranium and kicks you out if you try to give it over), and John Carpenter, the director (in a room marked “Director”). Seriously:
This would be after he made The Thing, but I don’t know what that means for the game. I tried GIVE for every item I had and got no reaction.
The only other open area I have is back where I blew up the guard; there’s a second guard blocking the way further, and it seems like they need to be removed out of the way as well. You can step back and throw the contact mine, then throw an item at the contact mine to blow it up, but that blows you up as well.
Guard #2.
After throwing the contact mine to be next to the guard.
After THROW TRUNCHEON. You can’t throw farther.
So that leaves the botanist (and maybe getting a non-withered version of the plant over), the director, and the guard to deal with. I still have an empty wine bottle (the flower can’t go in it) and a Speak and Spell but I’m otherwise out of options.
Gus, you’re welcome to drop hints but ROT13 only please. Based on the vocabulary list there isn’t much left to find. Anyone else is welcome to speculate about wacky stuff to try and I’ll test it out.
No cereal boxes in the vocabulary, unfortunately. COME BACK ALI. COME BACK ALI’S SISTER.
One of the disadvantages to a write-as-I-play style is that I don’t get to plunge into the hex machine code until I’m done (or at least I get really, really, stuck); Rob in the comments searched through and found a copyright notice which explains quite a bit and also makes the whole experience even more terrifying. Previously I theorized this could be a “hacked” game but special tools were needed that didn’t exist at this time to do the kind of work required here. It appears a madlad from Germany custom-made his own.
ADVLIB Copyright (c) 1982/83 Eberhard Mattes
Eberhard Mattes was a Video Genie enthusiast and has his name linked to some “monitor software” which tracks what’s going on in machine code and a bios to use CP/M on Video Genie. The copyright statement above implies he made his own fangame program to modify the machine code of the Frank Corr engine. Without any other name attached I’m going to guess this game is likely by Mattes himself. (It could even be the tool ADVLIB never got released, just the game made with it.) I’m not clear yet which game was the “base” but the verb FART is included and only showed up in the first two (Deathmaze 5000 and Labyrinth) and the screen layout is closer to those games; the inmate graphics and some other elements only show up starting in Asylum.
Fangames often are harder and less fair than the originals of a game; the enthusiasts who have played through a game multiple times really want a challenge and/or to torment their friends. For example, the “troll levels” so now well-refined through the Super Mario Maker games are their own ecosystem far from the ethos of Nintendo-designed levels.
You might ask, how could a Deathmaze 5000 style game be less fair than the original? You’ll see.
Continuing from last time…
…I had traded some gun powder for a bottle and a firework rocket (the rocket indicates it has a cord if you LOOK at it). I also had in my inventory a green key (used everywhere I could manage), lighter fluid, and a golden lighter (which I had filled with the aforementioned fluid). On the obstacle side of things, there was an inmate who wanted five gold coins for a fuse, a “transporter” that seems to need aforementioned fuse, a guard that stops me on level 1, a place where steel “protective” doors fall on level 1, and (still unexplored as of my last post) I had a teleporter square to get through and a mine-laden level 3.
I’m going to do the teleporter first (which will be short), then the mine area (which will be frustrating), and finally the guard and the steel doors (which are connected).
After stepping into the teleporter and turning “south”.
I don’t have much to say about the teleporter area; it drops you in a region which “loops” the west to the east side and seems intended to just make you walk forever if you don’t notice what’s going on. I dropped items (which left behind boxes) to confirm the area is endless. Mind you, Deathmaze had something trigger with particular turn numbers in a static room, so there may be something to this area still, but I have no clues pointing here yet.
There is also the possibility there is something on one of the random walls (I have yet to face each and every one to check); there’s a wall with a special object on level 3 (the mined floor) as you’ll see next.
Arriving in the elevator to level 3 and turning “north”.
The level is mostly divided into a grid pattern, where the outermost circle is mine-free, but there are many dangerous squares that will blow you up if you step inside the grid.
The mines are hopefully self-explanatory (they’re invisible, I had to step on every single one to map them); some other points on the map above:
1. There are many doors marked “elevator”. Only the door you came in on is a real elevator; walking into any of the other “elevator” rooms lets you know the room is fake, and it drops you down into a 1 by 1 room with no apparent means of escape. This seems to be a softlock.
None of the Corr games had this kind of softlock; one reason why this one is more unfair.
2. In the upper right corner there’s a visible box, but it is blocked by glass walls to the west and south. I have been unable to break through the wall, even when using FART from all the way across the map, flying towards it, and ramming. (Before anyone asks, it doesn’t work to bypass mines either.) Animation below:
3. There are two squares marked “NOTHING”. Those are boxes, and when you open them, the game describes that you have found nothing. You are unable to take nothing. They are pure trolling. (Again, a few steps past anything Corr did, although he did have red herrings in Deathmaze.)
4. There’s one wall (the only place where the grid breaks) with a mirror. I haven’t been able to get anything useful to happen here but it does indicate looking at particular walls might be needed (meaning I need to comb over every area very carefully).
The map is no doubt incomplete since I haven’t made it to the inner area yet. My guess is I’ll bust past the glass wall (somehow) which will then give access, and I also guess that the box in the upper right corner has NOTHING just like the others. You might think the firework rocket would be helpful for the glass. Unfortunately, it’s a little too explosive; you can light the cord, drop it, and run away, but it always makes a big enough explosion to (presumably) smash the glass but also kill the player.
Now, the level with the guards. There’s not much to it at the start other than the guard telling you to go back to your cell…
…and the steel wall…
…but notice how it is protective. And we have a very powerful rocket. There’s enough time while the cord burns to drop the rocket next to the guard and make a beeline for the wall.
The wall that dropped has what looks like a button.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to press it! I might need to do some serious noun-hunting (again, this is a little more unfair than what Corr did). It could even be a “hole” rather than a button or some such nonsense. If there was a way to look at the wall that might help but the obvious candidates (LOOK WALL, LOOK STEEL WALL, LOOK AROUND) give no joy, and plain LOOK BUTTON says “I see no button.”
Enough events have happened this seemed like a good time to report in, at least. I don’t think this is going to go as long as the Asylum games but we’ll see.
Consolidating the information from Will Moczarski, Ernst Krogtoft, and a 1981 interview, Frank Corr was an 18-year-old student at MIT when he used his TRS-80 to make the game Rat’s Revenge in BASIC. Denman saw a copy and offered to publish it. While Corr didn’t originally write the game to sell, he agreed to a deal, as long as he was able to “learn machine language first.” (He managed to parley writing a research paper for English into one about machine language.)
During MIT’s summer break, Corr went back to make a machine code version of Rat’s Revenge, and followed up by adding enough content it went from straightforward maze game to an adventure game: Deathmaze 5000. (This started as a true outsider whim: he had never played an adventure until he was halfway through making Deathmaze.) This same engine was used (with collaboration by William Denman himself) for a follow-up, Labyrinth. All three were out by October.
In January 1981, he made improvements to a routine “that allows graphics to be stored as data”, leading to the more elaborate game Asylum (out by the release of their Spring 1981 catalog). Corr also claimed (post-Asylum) that he was going to write one more game with “octagonal rooms” and “use a space station or similar setting.” Corr is only credited on Asylum II with the “graphics”, so he apparently either relaxed on game development to focus on MIT or switched to working on the space station game (which never came out).
There are three other lost Med Systems we know about from the 1981 catalog, which all seem to be from Denman in 1980: Samurai, Starlord, and Bureaucracy (out at least by September). The first two may not be adventures, but the last one describes itself directly as such:
Bureaucracy, the adventure of government agencies, places you in the role of an amateur mechanic who has devised a way to get 80 mpg from your old Cadillac. Your mission is to bring this cheap technology to the attention of the Department of Energy Assistance (DOEA). You must get past hordes of secretaries, muddle through myriad forms, and mix with middle management. But don’t lose yourself in DOEA’s great office building, the Octagon, and be sure to get finished before 4:30. In addition to the standard adventure features, Bureaucracy offers soft-keys for short conversations with the various personalities you will encounter and a “mini” 3-D graphics display.
All this establishes a picture of a company whose history is settled, even though it has a couple lost games (that will hopefully turn up one day). Today’s game throws that for a loop. It is not listed in any advertisement or catalog for Med Systems, yet it clearly uses the Frank Corr engine and I am fairly certain it is by Frank Corr himself (with or without Denman helping). It is a lost game that we didn’t even know was lost.
I found it while searching the same German archive I found Geheimagent XP-05. For the most part, the games there I recognized, although there are some German translations that I hadn’t seen (like one of Assignment 45). On disk 15 I found a file called MADHOUSE.CMD. There is a known Mad House game from 1983 but that’s a regular text adventure by Peter Kirsch written in BASIC. The CMD suggested the file on disk 15 was machine code so I gave it a load and was shocked by what I saw.
Above is the starting screen when you boot the game; there’s no mention of Med Systems. It has the inventory to the right like Deathmaze 5000 and Labyrinth and feels like an intermediate game between Labyrinth and Asylum. Was it a test game of some sort? That suggests it was written perhaps starting in October 1980, and for some reason shelved before Asylum came out. (Maybe the routine Frank Corr found in January made him want to start over?)
If that’s the case, then how did it get out? (I also considered if it was possible this was a third-party hack. While people made their own games with the Scott Adams database format, Madhouse is pure machine code and doesn’t lend itself to getting modified without modern tools.)
I have played a fair amount and nothing matches either Asylum game. It could be the Asylum material will creep in or it could all be brand new. Either way I don’t understand how the Germans have a copy. Perhaps some content in the game itself will help (Denman appears in Asylum II, so cameos aren’t impossible).
You start in a 1×1 cell with no bed or items. The only thing I could find that worked was to YELL. This causes an elevator sound, and a “sadistic guard” to approach.
He drops a “green key” but it does not open the door. The only thing to do is to YELL again whereupon you get “hit by a rubber truncheon” and end up in another cell, in the dark.
The dark cell is a 2 by 1 room so you need to move slightly before finding the right wall where OPEN DOOR acknowledges there is a door there.
Now UNLOCK DOOR WITH GREEN KEY will work (just like Asylum 1 & 2 the game is fussy about complete sentences). This opens the map up wide:
Every door that has been passed through will unlock with the green key from the start of the game (except the elevator, which is already unlocked). Every other door either requires a different key (or lockpick, or grenade pin, or whatnot).
Facing “east” after leaving the starting room.
Near the start (to the “west” after passing through some locked doors, note there’s no compass so my directions are arbitrary) are two people in rooms. One of them wants to sell you a fuse for “5 gold coins”…
…and the other describes themselves as a “pyrotechnician” with no further clarification.
Past that is a section which can be confusing to map.
The Xes are placed so that in particular positions it looks the same in every direction. As long as you’re careful mapping it’s fine, but it does give the effect of a spinner or teleporter Wizardry-style without resorting to actually moving the player around.
That is, it is easy to lose track if you’re facing north, south, east, or west while passing through this “same visual in every direction” type of intersection.
Mind you, the game is perfectly happy to resort to teleporters like with Labyrinth; stepping on the northwest tile sends the player elsewhere, although I haven’t fully mapped out the result yet.
Out in the open to the south are some boxes (in the standard Med System style) with a variety of explode-y objects: gun powder, lighter fluid, and golden lighter. You can take the gun powder back to the “pyrotechnician” and they are willing to trade for a firework rocket and a bottle.
Fortunately you can use the word INMATE (like the Asylum games). The game runs out of characters if you attempt to type GIVE GUN POWDER TO PYROTECHNICIAN.
Finally, in addition to the teleport square in the corner (which I’m ignoring for now), there’s an elevator and a “transporter” device. The transporter is an item you can pick up but it is too heavy to move, and it has a button. It doesn’t work yet but there’s a “fuseholder with a fuse” that is suggestive.
Unfortunately, PRESS RED BUTTON gets the message “Bad construction” which might mean some kind of bug. My guess is the fuse needs to be replaced first, via the inmate who wants 5 gold coins.
The elevator works normally without issues as long as you close the door behind you.
Level one has a guard that says to go back to your cell.
You can also get yourself trapped by a “protective steel wall”. Nothing else is accessible (for now).
Level two is where the player starts, and level three represents another large map, although some squares have mines (the screen turns white, you die).
Clearly the next step is to work on the third floor and the area reached by the teleporter, but teleporting and death squares tend to make mapping take a long time, so I thought this would be a good place to report in.
If you want the game for yourself, I have a download link here. There are no hints or clues anywhere because there is no documentation that this game ever even existed.
Renga in Blue 