The IFComp has been a central fixture of the interactive fiction community since 1995, and before that, there was the AGT (Adventure Game Toolkit) contest that ran from 1989 to 1993, and even before that, a single contest in 1986 was dedicated to the predecessor of AGT, GAGS. You could consequently argue contests have been an essential fixture of the text adventure form since 1986. (Jimmy Maher has written more extensively about the contests here and here.)
However, there was a major contest which started even earlier! In 1983, 1985, 1987, and 1988, the company Falsoft, publisher of Rainbow Computer magazine (dedicated to the Tandy CoCo), had an adventure game contest culminating in the winners getting published in a book.
These were genuine contests with judging and a winner and a runner-up and so forth, but since the first contest showed up in 1983 I am going to wait on most of the details until then. Here’s an excerpt from Lawrence C. Falk (editor of the first book) just to give a sense of what was going on:
The idea for The Rainbow Book Of Adventures began before there was even a Rainbow. Thanks to Scott Adams, Byte magazine and those wonderful people who brought you the original Adventure on the big mainframes.
“Wouldn’t it be nice,” dreamed I one day, “if there could be a whole book of Adventures just for the Color Computer?”
I had just finished reading Byte’s Adventure issue of December, 1981, and seen one of Scott Adams’ famous Adventures on an Apple computer at my not-too-friendly local computer store. Just the day before I had discovered how to get by the snake in the Colossal Cave. But I wanted to play an Adventure on my CoCo.
None to be had. So I wrote one. Just to see whether I could do it. Name: Vampire! Play time: Around 30 minutes. But I did learn how to move things around, including myself.
(I know, you want to know what happened to Vampire! So do I. I let a friend market it for me and it sold, I think, about three copies. Besides, working on the thing late at night was scary, anyway.)
…
Well, yes, it would be nice if we could have a book of all Color Computer Adventures. But there weren’t many out there, so we began publishing a magazine called the Rainbow instead. (This isn’t exactly how it happened, but it is close enough.)
As the Rainbow grew, we started to get some Adventure submissions, and, pretty soon, started an Adventure contest. We decided that each winning entry would be published in a book. And here it is.
There’s some 1982 business to check in on, as a pair of articles showed up by Jorge Mir about how to write adventures for the Tandy CoCo.
July 1982 had “Rainbow Adventure”, essentially a sample game, and he expanded on the technical details for his August 1982 template he called ADVMAKER.
Aside: Mir mentions whipping together a short game using the template for gatherings.
The sample game, Rainbow Adventure, is not terribly impressive, but keep in mind the context here is like the Ken Rose articles, where the point is to explain how adventures work.
What I am going to talk about this month is writing an adventure. And, next month, we will be giving you an outline of an adventure generator that will help you write your own adventures. It is a sort of help for those who will be entering the RAINBOW Adventure Contest.
This was the era where the programming was the big roadblock; design could wait.
The player starts on a “Kentucky Street” (Rainbow was out of Prospect, Kentucky) with no real direction what to do. This is one of the sorts of games where you find out the final objective when you get there.
I incidentally had trouble finding a CoCo version so I played Jim Gerrie’s MC-10 port.
There is a very slight amount of maze-iness around the start, with two “winding road” rooms and the player starting with no inventory so not having a way to distinguish between the two (or even knowing there’s exactly two). I nabbed a “shiny object” from a dead end (turns out to be a key) and a sign at a pawn shop explaining you can sell jewelry there, and used those two items in order to confirm the map below.
The shiny object, as already mentioned, is a key, not jewelry, so you can’t sell it. Finding what you can sell is the most curious part of the game, and is interesting in a theoretical-ludic sense. Near the Pawn Shop is a Clothing Center with a mirror. The mirror informs you that you have a watch.
You don’t otherwise see the watch in inventory, and can’t READ WATCH or the like. I first thought the watch might be used to track some kind of timed puzzle, but no. Once learning you are wearing a watch by seeing it in the mirror, you can sell it.
This is one of the odder disjoints between player-knowledge and avatar-knowledge I’ve come across.
With the watch sold you have money, and you can go over to a computer store. There (using the key to help open a case) you can obtain a computer and a tape, and then use the very specific parser commands LOAD TAPE followed by RUN COMPUTER to learn about a bus.
With this powerful increase of knowledge, you can go over to a BUS STOP, hop on a bus, and end up a a post office. There you can open a mail box and find a copy of Rainbow Magazine, winning the game.
I wonder if anyone had come across the game without realizing it was meant to be a sample programming game; it feels very slight otherwise. Fortunately for posterity, we will see Jorge Mir again: he entered the first contest, with two fairly extreme programming specimens, one being an expansive adventure in 4K and the other being a one-room adventure in 32K. The latter is the first example we have of a “room escape game”.
But that will wait for 1983, which we are inching closer to! Honest! Next up: the last of the Charles Cecil games written for Artic Computing.
Renga in Blue 