High Technologies, Inc., is a company now almost entirely forgotten, were it not for the fact they — as one of the small number of initial distributors for Apple — produced the first television ad for an Apple product, in 1977.
A second former Apple distributor — the one that is our focus today — also flamed out in a 1980 lawsuit: Omega Northwest (although this one for, as Apple claimed, “unpaid indebtedness to the Company and for fraud”).
To back up a little, in the 60s the businessman Richard Lawrence founded Omega Northwest as a camera company in Washington state; they extended to hi-fi audio and then eventually computers, with multiple branches (Seattle, Bellevue, Lynwood). For Apple, they made a spin-off subsidiary, Sigma Distributors, who focused entirely on Apple and worked on distributing across the northwest United States.
In 1981, a vice president at the Sigma subsidiary in the software section — Larry Franks — decided to get into the adventure business, hiring a software analyst at Boeing (Christopher Anson) to lead the effort, who himself hired the programmer, Alan Clark. Clark made a BASIC program first as a proof of concept for an adventure system, then the two of them (Clark and Anson) turned that into a machine language interpreter. By the end of the year Anson went to work on the spinoff company, Ultrasoft.
All this is from a Softline article, and I want to quote a specific part:
The moment of conception for Ultrasoft can be traced to an observation by Clark that most adventures, and most entertainment software in general, were written by hand. He had an idea that, with the tool-using approach that Anson had brought from Boeing, he could write better adventures more efficiently
This is a little true. You can certainly find random adventure games for sale in 1981 written from scratch (like Oo-Topos) but the most prominent adventures — the Scott Adams games and On-Line Systems games — both used tools like Clark is speaking of. So the statement about “most adventures” being written by hand isn’t incorrect, per se, but almost is misleading.
The main thing to keep in mind is that unlike almost every other game we’ve seen for the Project, The Mask of the Sun came from a long-standing company that was large enough to tussle with Apple in a lawsuit. This is not a “bad thing” in that they have a sense of organization that some of our other companies have lacked, and that means (for instance) they hired a professional artist, Margaret Anson, who had a team that did storyboarding (rather than making a single 19-year old produce so much art they had a mental breakdown).
There are some other parts of the Softline article worth highlighting — the company was very proud of Ultracode, their generalized game-writing tool which got touted on the back of the box — but I’ll spread the details out over my multiple posts on this game.
Now it’s time for plot!
Via Mobygames.
We are Max Steele, archaeologist in the Indiana Jones vein, and while we recently found “the scrolls of the monks of Lhasa” they were stolen by our “colleague” Francisco Roboff. In retribution we nab an amulet from said colleague, and do research back in the United States to find out it is a “Pre-Columbian artifact from central Mexico that is surrounded by legend and folklore.”
However, the amulet has some sort of “curse” that lands us in the hospital with our body fading away, and we find out that a mysterious “Mask of the Sun” affiliated with the amulet might hold a cure.
You immediately send a telegram to everyone you can think of who may know about the amulet. Finally, you receive a message from Professor de Perez, of the University of Mexico in Sanchez. He has a map from the University that relates the amulet and the Mask to several Aztec ruins. With only this to go on, you depart for South-Central Mexico, to meet Professor de Perez at an airfield near one of the potential sites. The rest of the adventure is for you to discover!
I’m playing with the most updated version published by Brøderbund.
You start right as the plane has landed, with the Professor and his student Raoul outside. You get both a jeep and some supplies to go with it (a map, a lantern, food, a shovel, and some rope). The food is described as “tasty food” so despite the fancy underpinnings the game is still rooted in Crowther/Woods.
This is “animated” with the image getting closer and closer. One of the touted features of the Ultra system is a fast enough drawing system to have animations.
The map is a nice touch; rather than just randomly wandering out and finding out directions arbitrarily on the fly, there’s a sense of goals.
To go anywhere we need to hop in the jeep first, and driving has an “animation” showing multiple slides.
There’s a branch where you choose to drive either west or northwest. Picking northwest, as it seems to lead to the closest ruin:
There’s a “darkened doorway” at the top of the stairs. Going inside causes the door to shut and there to be a hissing sound in darkness. Unfortunately, the lantern requires matches to light, and the game did not give any at the start.
This seems like a good place to stop while I scout out the territory. Certainly I can say from what I’ve seen so far this is one of the most polished of the games I’ve played for the Project so far; the art has the feel of late-80s Apple II as opposed to the vector squiggles of this time. (Queen of Phobos had animation and some really good style where it leveraged the vector art for a terrific atmosphere; the games with Incrocci illustrations like Masquerade didn’t have them added in until after 1982.)
Mask of the Sun’s parser, on the other hand, does not seem as polished as the authors want to claim, but I want to get a little deeper in the game before I make any over-arching claims about it.
Anson says that the company has defined 115 distinct tasks involved in putting out an adventure, and many of those tasks involve creating and refining a story. Everything is planned; frequent meetings are integral to every step of the production. Ideas for the plot of the game, the characters, the puzzles— all are tossed around at these bull sessions.
The manual for Mask of the Sun from the later Brøderbund printing, via the Internet Archive.
So before getting back into the gameplay, I wanted to discuss the game’s parser, which I hinted last time left something to be desired. The Softline article I quoted last time certainly tries to pump it up:
Ultrasoft’s parser is based on concepts of artificial intelligence. In any given message, it eliminates words that don’t make sense and attempts to make sense out of words that are relevant to the situation. This method frees the player from the verb-noun format of the typical adventure’s input. Consider: If you’re in a room with two men, one old and one young, in an adventure with a two-word parser, you might have to make several tries before finding the correct verb-and-noun combination that expresses your wish {as to what is correct, the arbitrary decision of the programmer is final).
In Serpent’s Star, there is just such a situation. But with the Ultrasoft parser, you can type, “Co sit with the old man at the table,” and the parser extracts the operative words “sit” and “old man” and sits you down next to him. Once you’re familiar with what the operative words are, you can just type “old man” and know the parser will understand. Many of the verbal “puzzles” of the two-word parsers are really only hindrances to realistic game play. After all, you can only put up for so long with messages like “I don’t know how to OLD something.”
I can’t comment on Serpent’s Star (Ultrasoft’s second game which we’ll visit in ’83). I will say this game’s parser has serious issues, and their handling of the issue cited above is terrible.
For example, there is a scene early with a jade bowl. You can GET BOWL and the game will react like you’d expect. However, immediately after, trying to EXAMINE BOWL gets:
I don’t recognize an object in “EXAMINE BOWL”.
??? I was seriously baffled for a while until I realized EXAMINE JADE BOWL was what worked. So not only do most actions require the adjective, the game inconsistently requires it, so one scene you can refer to the bowl as a bowl while the next you can’t.
As another example, let me pull up my verb-testing list for the game.
This represents me going through the list and typing each word alone. Sometimes the word genuinely works alone (DIG: “DIG doesn’t work here.”) but usually the response on one of the green-marked words is something like:
I don’t recognize a noun in “CLIMB”.
Fair enough, although I should point out using grammar terms isn’t the greatest way to do this; “you need to say what you want to climb” would be better. It’s better to explain why something went wrong in a game from the perspective of what the player needs to fix rather than from the perspective of what caused the computer to be confused. That isn’t what the main issue is, though. Take USE:
I don’t recognize a noun in “USE”.
This made me think USE OBJECT might be useful in some circumstances, but here’s the response to USE ROPE:
I don’t recognize a verb in “USE ROPE”.
Which straight up comes across as a bug. I’m still not sure what to make of it. Does this mean that USE will work somewhere, but only in a very specific place, just like you can refer to the “jade bowl” as just a “bowl” but only when taking it? This wild inconsistency is far, far, worse than dealing with a two-word parser.
At least two-word parser give you their restrictions up front. Here I’m paranoid about guess-the-phrase showing up, and it isn’t like removing “excess words” like THE is that big a deal (another thing the manual touts).
Enough grumping, let’s move on. Last time I entered a ruin and was cut off in darkness, lacking a match to light my lantern. I missed possibly the most obvious thing to try, which was to check my inventory in case I had something helpful to start.
So we get a box of matches, knife, bottle of pills, ancient amulet, and loaded revolver in our inventory as the adventure begins, added onto immediately by the shovel, lantern, food, rope, and map from the jeep. We’re actually well equipped! (Like you would expect to be true on a real adventure!) I’ve observed before getting a lot of tools to start is pretty rare, even though in a verisimilitude sense it would match better with the situation. I’m wondering if this is a positive effect of the “strategic planning” element of Ultrasoft; that is, they thought about adventures at a “meta level” and wondered themselves why so many of the games start you with nothing.
Of course, because this is the Ultrasoft parser, trying to refer to a the match box is futile, and I mean totally futile.
I don’t recognize a noun in “OPEN BOX”.
I don’t recognize a verb in “OPEN MATCH BOX”.
I don’t recognize a verb in “OPEN MATCHBOX”.
I don’t recognize a noun in “OPEN”.
(Just like USE, yes.) I eventually puzzled out I could just LIGHT MATCH straight up, so even though you don’t see individual matches in your inventory, you can still refer to them. Look, this sort of thing is a nice quality-of-life feature to jump straight to pulling out a match, but that doesn’t mean you get to skip the player being able to refer to the box itself. What if there’s a limit to the number of matches? Maybe there is, I don’t even know.
(Incidentally, back to the inventory, those pills are “your lifegiving pills” and you start with 97 of them. I assume you have moments where your curse-illness strikes, so they’re for lasting a little bit longer. Good atmosphere, that.)
With the lantern lit I was able to enter the first ruin properly, and see what was hissing. What you’re about to see is a series of animation screens, and the animation keeps going as you type. If you wait long enough you’ll die.
The final screen immediately triggers after typing SHOOT; you don’t even hit enter. (Bespoke! So much for their advanced parser. But this time it worked out in practice.)
This leads to a room with a pedestal and a left and right passage. Compass directions are now out. You have to type LEFT or RIGHT or FORWARD or BACKWARD to move, and sometimes the directions are relative (that is, if you enter from the east, going right will be north) and sometimes they’re not and just based on the image that you see on the screen (so the passage on the RIGHT will always be oriented that way in a particular room, no matter how you arrived at the room).
RIGHT and LEFT are both dead ends.
Your companion will lower a rope you can climb, so this is a “cinematic set piece” rather than a puzzle.
If you try to EXAMINE the pedestal the game says you should search further, so SEARCH PEDESTAL instead gets a secret door you can open:
Further in is the jade bowl I was complaining about earlier.
If you pick it a trap triggers and the room brings you down to another level.
In one direction is a teetering boulder, and it is honestly atmospheric as the boulder is animated teetering in real time. I haven’t managed to get it to trigger even on purpose for an amusing death message.
In another direction are some sarcophagi. You can get Raoul to help you open one, revealing a spirit.
Just waiting long enough seems to cause the spirit to go away, leaving a gold bowl.
In a third direction is another branching area. Moving a heavy urn from one pedestal to another opens a passage to the outside, so you can go back to the jeep.
Going to the “right” leads to some skeletons guarding a silver bowl (remember I already have jade and gold). However, the skeletons wake up and defend this one, Harryhausen-style, and even animate kind of like Harryhausen.
This animates as you are typing, just like the snake.
Again, waiting too long kills you, and this time (admittedly as expected) the gun doesn’t work. I’m still not sure how to deal with the skeletons; I don’t know if I’m supposed to be yet. I kind of want the boulder to kill the skeletons but I can’t get it to trigger and based on the map I don’t think it’s a straight shot. (If you run away, the skeletons just resume guarding position, so you can’t lead them over.)
The reason I feel like I should deal with them now is the game has been structured so far more like a gamebook than a standard text adventure. By which I mean: lots of self-contained set pieces, left or right branches that sometimes lead to nothing, and the general feel of “cinematic scenes” akin to Arabian Adventure more than a big looping puzzle-box. I’m not far enough in to be certain, though.
I never got any farther based the skeletons than I did last time, but I did scoot by to scout out the rest of the map and the remaining two ruins. My presumption that this is gamebook-style structure is holding out; it is very clear for reasons you’ll see that the ruins need to be done in order, and there is at least one “self-contained” road encounter which could come straight out of a Fighting Fantasy book. Just to give the basic map the game gives again first…
…followed by my own map, where I have squished the ruins into single rooms.
For out-on-the-road encounters, a straightforward early one (if you just head west) on the very first road has a hut with woman who asks for food and gives a flute in exchange. Straightforward as we start the game with food.
This is mid-animation of the woman disappearing.
Nearby there’s an idol with a head removed. You can pick up the head, put it back on, and have a jaguar walk away. Again, really a set piece rather than a puzzle (I haven’t seen the up-shot yet).
This is animated.
Then, City of Thieves style, a man somehow knows I am suffering under a curse, and offers to trade a cure.
This is set up to feel nominally like a puzzle as you GIVE every item in your inventory; the one the man wants is your REVOLVER.
This sort of encounter is not common in adventure games; it is, again, a set-piece, and it is very easy to back out and ignore the man on a re-try. It suggests, yet again, a different philosophical approach to writing the game (at least for the road parts). It is of course possible the scene of getting ripped off is needed for some later scene, but this game doesn’t give me that sort of vibe.
No puzzle even here: you just drive by faster and don’t even have the encounter (I have the feeling I’ll be meeting them after finishing with the second ruin).
Speaking of the second ruin, when entering you get an encounter with a creature who has been kept immortal and gives you a hint about using three bowls (jade, silver, gold) to get through the upcoming obstacles. I only have two out of the three, but it is nice the structure here is so explicit that Ruin 1 leads to Ruin 2.
Immediately after this you are blind in a room with toxic gas. I assume the jade bowl helps somehow but I have yet to puzzle out what to do (it might even be the missing silver bowl I have to use first, so I haven’t been trying too hard yet).
The third ruin can also be reached straightaway, and you can walk around a little, but you are stymied in all directions by doors that need keys. It seems nearly certain that Ruin 2 has the keys to get into Ruin 3 and make it to the end of the game.
I am perfectly happy to get spoilers on the boulder and/or skeletons in the first ruin, although please use ROT13.
So I had a slightly wrong presumption from last time; the ruins I had marked 1, 2, and 3 were out of order. You actually do “ruin 2” last and the other two in whichever order you like, or even skip them.
And yes, the “skip them” implies that what you get from them is technically speaking optional. I’ll explain when I get there. Let’s get back to the action:
Not to the skeletons, but to the phantom where you could just wait out before getting a gold bowl. You were in fact supposed to try to talking to it.
Yes, I looked that up. This hint is sufficient to realize the cursed amulet we’ve been toting around is somehow usable on the skeletons (even though USE AMULET and WAVE AMULET and so forth I tried were useless). You’re supposed to get rather more violent and HIT SKELETON WITH AMULET. Thus I could get away with the silver bowl
Let’s now go to Ruin 3:
Again, I looked this one up.
I had not bothered to SEARCH the various doors (just looking won’t work) so I missed the golden key as shown. Even on a SEARCH frenzy I wouldn’t have thought to apply it to the door. The golden key lets you enter the central area (only one of the doors is needed).
Down the stairs you can run across a slight bit of maze before encountering a pool. LOOK POOL gives you an image, and that’s the only thing you need from the ruin.
It didn’t register to me to pay close attention to the image — I thought this was indicating some kind of blessing / curse was laid down that would trigger (in a useful way) later.
With that taken care of, it was time to try to figure out the fog room past the corpse, where I kept dying and dying. Taking the bowls and putting them into the order mentioned by the corpse, here’s the pictures you get by examining them.
Maybe they’re meant to represents maps?
Remember, the way this game works is: outdoors you go compass directions, indoors you go forward, left, right, or back. Compass directions aren’t understood at all indoors.
Unless… you’re in this one room, and then you can go southwest.
Oh, and we lose our sidekick.
This fails both at the level of being a breach of game-interface trust (by having an exception indoors for a compass direction) and for making any sense (why would we know what direction southwest is)? I checked walkthroughs and none of them explain the connection of the bowls. Perhaps my trusty readers have an idea.
I’m guessing Ultrasoft extrapolated the puzzle from Crowther/Woods Adventure. That game had a much better use of the idea in the “maze of rooms all alike”. You are explicitly told by a pirate (as they steal your treasure) that they’re going to hide it in the maze, so you know there is supposed to be something there. While every exit in that particular maze is N/S/E/W, leading to a pattern, there is never the implication that the interface has really changed, and there’s another maze (All Different) which does include the diagonal directions. Combining those together makes it satisfying to find the one odd exit, northwest to find a chest:
That is, pure use of direction nevertheless built up a puzzle by making the player form an implicit rule that was not not really a rule, and realizing that facade causes a breakthrough. This differs greatly from the case in Mask, where by all appearances (for absolutely everything else in the game, including the moments after) being indoors shuts down the ability to navigate by compass directions for reasons that could not possibly change.
Ugh. Oh, by the way, we’re now on a timed puzzle, just like you’d expect from a later Sierra On-Line game.
It’s unique for this time, for sure. With the game on “authentic” timing it went too fast for me to react and I just had to guess until I got lucky. Getting past, there are faces on the wall:
They demand the word that marks us as an initiate of the sun. And here I have missed something, and it is kind of the fault of the parser, but more the fault of the way the world universe describes itself. We need to go back outside to the idol with the detached head. (Well, not on this save game. This save game is soft-locked. I mean restart with a fresh file and imagine we fast forward.)
Typing LOOK STATUE before repairing it gets “The idol is broken, but it looks like a stylized jaguar.”
If you GET OUT OF JEEP and then LOOK STATUE again, something different happens.
It was not clear to me at all anything was mechanically different here; there’s no visual indicator you’re in or out of the jeep. This isn’t quite as unfair as the fog puzzle — SEARCH STATUE gets the reply it “doesn’t work here” obliquely implying you aren’t close enough — but it still is the case that repairing the statue now causes the clue to be lost forever.
So, fast-forward back to the faces, with the new magic word in hand:
Searching the altar reveals a place you can drop the amulet.
I chipperly grabbed the mask and went on my way, and found myself sealed off. The game even suggests checking the altar for secrets, but it already was sealed off.
You have enough information that you may be able to figure out what happened. I don’t think it’s a good puzzle — this is a softlock moment, here — but it’s an interesting puzzle. Take a moment to think.
Back where the image was at the pool, the skull-person was holding two masks, one that had black eyes and one that had blue eyes. What this is meant to imply is there is a second mask, and we have the fake mask. We need to search again after finding the first one.
This is the True Mask. Once you wear it your disease is cured.
All the world colors go funky and it lets you see a secret passage to escape from the altar room.
The rest of the game is mostly straightforward except tedious. You need to wander through the ruin until you escape. There’s one direction that goes to a maze which is entirely useless to bother with. To make any progress you have to first answer a riddle.
Then there’s some wrong directions and more maze rooms and a maze which you don’t have to even map (according to Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure games) because if you take 52 steps eventually you’ll run across your rival, the one who set off all this curse business in the first place.
He demands the mask. Give it to him.
I hope you got the flute at the very start of the game!
I very much appreciated the “outsider” design, which led to having two major sections that were solely devoted to dispensing clues rather than items. This idea of information as an item isn’t exactly novel for 1982 but making entire sections devoted to just information definitely is. With a single author I’d call they were “enthusiastic and promising” and look forward to what they were doing next. With a whole company, who knows if they can learn from their mistakes, but at least there’s another Ultracode title we’ll eventually make it to.
As far as what we can learn from their “company” model, I did want to give one more quote from that Softline article:
“We do have a number of interlocking teams that generate these products, and we want to give credit where credit is due,” he [Larry Franks] says. “When a single author in a software firm is credited with a product, I really suspect that a lot of essential support is being ignored.” There were five authors listed for Mask of the Sun and seven for Serpent’s Star. “We’ll be sticking to that. The names will change some, as the original core management has gotten out of the production end and into just the tool-designing and business management end.”
In this era we had enough “bedroom coder” types that there often really was only one person involved; I think this quote applies better as prophecy more than ruminating about the years before. However, as games start to get more elaborate with coding and animation, we need to be careful about crediting everything to one person.
Renga in Blue 
