This one was from a while ago, and while I’m not replaying (I beat the game, just not with a full score) I did check a walkthrough that was posted last year (after I had finished) because I was still bothered by the mazes.
It was a game on the Sol-20 that was clearly heavily inspired by both D&D in general and Tomb of Horrors in particular. It has the finale with the demi-lich that’s only a skull. As it now has come up in two adventure games (Skull Cave and Epic Hero #2), I think it’s worth it to go into a brief aside on the history of Tomb of Horrors itself, then I’ll return to the new(-ish) discovery about the mazes. This combines information from Playing at the World by Peterson, Gygax’s foreword to Return to the Tomb of Horrors, and Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History.
Alan Lucien was part of the same wargaming circles as Gary Gygax, joining the International Federation of Wargaming in 1969 and serving as one of their Senators in 1970. He also wrote an article in the same year about the board game Jetan, invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs for his John Carter series. (Excerpt below from The Chessmen of Mars.)
Gygax ran a play-by-mail game space-combat game (originally by Tullio Proni, revised by Gygax) called The War of the Empires. It ran for two years starting in 1969; Lucien tried to restart the game after it lapsed. Lucien was clearly known to Gygax as he gets mentioned in a letter by Gygax as potentially having interest in the newly-designed Dungeons & Dragons.
Lucien was indeed interested, and ran a Dungeons & Dragons campaign in California. In 1975 he sent to Gygax a new dungeon (handwritten on four pages, not including the map on graph paper): Tomb of Ra-Hotep. It was themed around an Egyptian tomb with many traps.
Passage turns into crawl space, and 6 [the end] contains 5-20 cobras! Can’t turn or run — crawl backwards away. Treasure is Ring of 3 wishes / Delusion (very hard to guess this one!) and Scroll of 7 cleric spells.
The final enemy, Ra-Hotep the lich, has a “jackal stick” with a Sphere of Annihilation at the end.
The sphere later got moved to a devil face at the end of the starting hallway. Source. The sphere causes instant annihilation to anything that touches it.
Gygax got back to Lucien (February 1975) that he had “reorganize[d] your excellent tomb area” and ran it through a trial. Quoting Gygax:
From his basis I developed the material that was to become the Tomb of Horrors, and I admit to chuckling evilly as I did so … Specifically I had in mind foiling Rob Kuntz’s PC, Robilar, and Ernie Gygax’s PC, Tenser. To make a pair of long tales truncated, Rob, by expending a lot of ore servants, managed to get through to the final encounter, and as the skull of the demilich rose to assail the one daring violation of his sanctum, Robilar swept all immediately visible treasure into his bag of holding and escaped. Ernie likewise managed to attain the ultimate, destroyed Acererak, and likewise left laden with loot.
All this eventually resulted in a “competition game” at the first Origins convention in the summer, where players were given two hours to get as far as they could through the Tomb of Horrors. The rules reflect the set in 1975, including mention of the later-scrapped character classes Divine and Mystic. The final enemy was now an unnamed lich that was merely a skull (that would become Acererak in the published version of 1978). Illustrations were included to be used during gameplay, made by a local 14-year-old, Tracy Lesch.
Lesch’s illustration of the lich at the end.
The illustrations were a genuinely novel element, but for my purposes I’d like to emphasize: so was the gameplay style. This was a game not about combat so much as puzzles. (I’ve run Tomb of Horrors before as a Dungeon Master, and one of the players was clearly getting irritated at the lack of combat rolls.) So much of the dungeon feels oriented around methods of survival while working out traps and magical items that it comes off more as an “adventure game” (in the computer-genre sense) than a “RPG” (again in the computer sense). The final battle against Acererak involves such an overpowered set of abilities that to win a player needs to do something clever rather than just attack.
If touched (or struck) the lich targets the strongest character and sucks their soul.
This was true in the competition as well; one team took a cursed crown/scepter pair meant to trap players, and put the set on the demi-lich, vaporizing it. (The problem with having your villain lair full of deathtraps is they can be used against you!)
When D&D became popular, while some adventures tried to embrace it as much as possible (see: Cornucopia) others struggled because combat in adventure games just isn’t that interesting except for small segments. (Zork I has memorable combat, but it uses the combat system for the troll and the thief and nothing else. Not a standard dungeon crawler!) Adventure games lean so hard into the player being more of a “trickster” than a “warrior” that it became routine in this era for weapons to be red herrings. The one famous D&D campaign whose gameplay matched this sense was Tomb of Horrors, so it doesn’t surprise me to see two explicit references (there may have been more general inspiration elsewhere).
Let’s get back to that Sol-20 game.
Map from impomatic.
The map is divided into a north area and a south area; the north area has a maze of passages “all different” and the south area has a maze of passages “all alike” (where a thief resides, and likely is meant to be the Zork thief). The problem is both mazes are, as I stated in my previous post, literally unmappable.
You cannot drop items (they get teleported away), and there are no sound clues or other messages. You might ask: how did the walkthrough (by benkid77) manage? By hacking the binary code of the game.
Each maze is a single room. There’s a series of five bytes giving the answer to maze 1 and six giving an answer to maze 2. There’s no representation of movement; the game simply checks the last five (or six) directions taken, and if they match the answer, the player is moved to the exit.
The part of impomatic’s map with the link to Maze 2, with the thief. There is no map of the maze because a.) there aren’t even any “rooms” in the normal sense and b.) benkid99 hadn’t done his hacking yet when this map was made.
Letting benkid77 take over:
There are three routes out of the first maze and two out of the second maze.
Four out of the five have been shown in the walkthrough above. For completeness, the fifth is from maze 1:- U, W, D, S, S -> Low east-west passage. But this was surplus to requirements.
The 32 maze route and destination bytes are found at game file offset (and therefore memory location) 0BA0:
Maze 1, the “all different” maze:-
0BA0:
02 02 02 02 02 16
S, S, S, S, S -> Witt’s End
0BA6:
01 03 06 02 0A 13
N, E, D, S, SW -> Big Junction
0BAC:
05 04 06 02 02 0A
U, W, D, S, S -> Low east-west passage
Maze 2, the “all alike” maze:-
0BB2:
02 03 02 03 02 03 2A
S, E, S, E, S, E -> Passage (to the east of Flame Room)
0BB9:
07 05 04 01 06 04 26
NE, U, W, N, D, W -> Thief’s Lair
He goes on to ask “how the player would find these routes without disassembling the game.”
The odds are astronomically unlikely to stumble upon the correct sequences and usual mapping methods do not work here. I wonder if there may have been some additional documentation or hints accompanying the game, or some other clues I might have missed?
The “some other clues” is the kicker here: does anyone want to give it a try? You’ll likely need to play the game or at least watch the video of the complete walkthrough (meaning this is not something I expect people to solve in five minutes in the comments, but you never know). Even if there really is no answer (maybe the author had a plan but never finished; keep in mind this is an “unpublished” game) I still thought this was worth highlighting for how outrageous the setup is.
Coming up: a story that begins in the depths of WW2.
In the history of personal computers, the first significant home computer was the Altair 8800, which briefly made a cameo on this blog with the game Kadath. Quite soon after — designed originally as a terminal to use the Altair before it became its own project — was the Sol line, which appeared on the July 1976 cover of Popular Electronics and was sold in three ways: in kit form, without expansion slots (Sol-10) and with expansion slots (Sol-20). At the time it was called the first complete small computer; it is now sometimes called the first “modern computer” or first “all-in-one” computer.
It did reasonably well — 10,000 units — but in historical memory it is overshadowed by the Altair and Apple I, and shortly after it landed it got bowled over by the Trinity of 1977 (TRS-80, Apple II, Commodore PET).
At the Smithsonian, from DigiBarn. The Apple I and Altair are on the table above, carefully labeled, while the SOL-20 is hiding underneath on the floor with no label at all. I’m not sure if the curator meant this as a metaphor.
The machine eventually was discontinued in 1979; the designer, Lee Felsenstein, ended up going on to design the first successful portable computer (the Osborne 1) but that’s a story for a different time.
Even when a computer is “discontinued” it still can have fans, and the SOL-20 has its diehards and events, like a 30th anniversary party. One such fan, Ray White, wrote what was more or less a private collection of games, including an RPG called Deathmaze. Skull Cave, his only text adventure (and what appears to be the SOL-20’s only text adventure) he estimates to be from 1982.
The setup has an Infidel vibe (“disease, hunger, monsters and desertion” taking their “toll” on your “hirelings”) but the better comparison is Dungeons and Dragons, especially because the final obstacle feels like a scene from one of the very famous early campaigns.
But also: there’s random enemies seeded around for combat. From the opening room above, you can head south (into the “mouth”) to do combat with a skeleton, or head up (through the “eyes”) to do combat with a goblin.
The author here ran into the same problem many adventure writers were running into: how to make the combat interesting? Adventure and Zork both used it a limited amount, so the encounter with (say) the Troll was colorful and not repetitive. Deadly Dungeon tried to give you arrows for a second method of attack, and Eamon added dynamic movement to the monsters, spells, RPG stats, and the possibility of emergent behavior.
Unfortunately, Skull Cave is just taking its cue from Adventure/Zork. Combat isn’t nearly as interesting as Eamon: the only thing possible to do is to ATTACK when entering a room with a monster and hope you win. You can’t even run away and choose to engage later.
YOU CAN’T JUST LEAVE IN THE MIDDLE OF A FIGHT!!!
Sometimes this sort of game has a “experience path” where if you’ve killed weaker enemies you’ll have an easier time against stronger ones. Unfortunately things are too random for me to be sure if this is true, and I found the best strategy is to attack as minimally as possible, because there’s always a chance of random death. You can spend some points for one reincarnation, but after a second death the game is over.
The game is in two sections. The first spans from the skull cave entrance to a locked gate, with a “Guardian of the Gate” enemy. Other than the initial skeleton-or-goblin fight the next one you have to do for certain is the guardian, and you just need to hope you get lucky and restart if you don’t (the game has no saved game capability, either).
I marked the start room at the top and the gate room at the bottom.
In the middle you can choose to fight a troglodyte and get a jeweled wristband, swipe a number of treasures (silver bars, emerald, painting), smash a statue to take its jeweled “eyes”, swipe a glass bottle and a chain, and battle a dragon (which drops gold if you defeat it).
There’s also a room with a magic word (“PLTMP”) which teleports you there and seems to work every time, being the only escape from combat (too bad I found it last when I was mapping!) There’s also a completely unmappable maze, and I’m not exaggerating “hard and annoying”, I do mean unmappable:
If the author meant to copy the “all different” maze, then separate rooms need separate messages. The item-dropping method doesn’t work; any items just disappear instantly. I think the author may have messed things up from their intent.
Going back to the locked gate, if you defeat the Guardian (again, I just made a beeline and crossed my fingers, no tactics whatsoever) then you still have the locked-ness of the gate to deal with. I had found SEARCH worked from my various tests but mostly it shows nothing. However, if you happen to use it at the skeleton room at the very start, you can find a skeleton key.
This is not a guaranteed search either! Again, I feel like the author might have had D&D in mind, but given SEARCH works almost nowhere, having it also possibly fail the one place it does work is just cruelty.
(The funky error line is because I made a typo and tried to hit BACKSPACE, which doesn’t work on this emulator. I assume SOL-20 had a backspace but I’m not sure how to trigger it.)
The key leads down to a slightly more interesting area.
Yes, slightly more interesting, just the usual Adventure puzzle where the bottle from the north side is useful to pour water on a plant to turn into a beanstalk. There’s also a scene with a “beautiful girl” which gives you a scroll with the spell NIGNOG which seems to be used for defeating one (1) enemy of your choice:
There’s a tiger attached to a pedestal where you can choose to walk away, but once you fight, you’re committed. Defeating the tiger reveals a gem. (I tried NIGNOG here and got no luck, but I think it was because I wasn’t technically fighting the enemy yet.)
With the gem in hand you can go back to reveal a sword stuck in a stone, and use the gem to free it. (MOUNT is a verb I got from the binary code of the game. Unfortunately it is in machine language so I can’t determine a lot of things otherwise.)
Then, with the sword, you can get to the scene which I mentioned reminded me quite directly of D&D.
Specifically, the infamous “Tomb of Horrors”, which originally debuted in 1975 in tournament conditions, then got published in 1978 and has been used by Game Masters to gleefully torture players ever since. It has traps on traps on traps on traps, and a battle with a lich at the end assuming players even get that far (which is just a skull which floats and sucks out one soul per turn).
From a larger piece of art by Jason Thompson describing an actual play session.
I think there might be some more resources, but just NIGNOG (which stuns but doesn’t destroy) plus the sword were enough to destroy the skull. Just NIGNOG alone doesn’t cut it. I assume our player is the “monk” class since they’ve been going without a weapon most of the game taking down skeletons and so forth, but sometimes you need a little magic even when you’ve got fists of fury.
There’s a map up at CASA Solution Archive which includes a place with a “ring” I never got to visit — if you look at the plant room there’s a hook where it seems a chain could go, but I could never find the right verb to make it work — and I also skipped entirely a spider guarding a room with a shield. These tools only came after the majority of combat in the game; Skull Cave really could have used spreading out some of the combat resources in a way that picking them up in the right order could have slowly leveled combat up so the player wouldn’t have to just roll the dice on the guardian or the tiger.
Oh, and I’ve failed to mention the thief. Ugh, yes, there’s a thief.
The thief grabs any treasures you’ve gotten — which seem to be purely for points — and stores them, I presume, in the maze. The problem is the mazes are broken! (In addition to the “all different” maze there’s an “all alike” maze which is equally broken.) So while the source code indicates a “lair” where presumably you can retrieve things…
YOU ARE IN THE THIEF’S LAIR. COMFORTABLE, (BUT CHEAP), FURNITURE LINES THE WALLS. IN THE CENTER OF THIS ROOM YOU SEE A LARGE ROCK.
…there is no plausible way to get there. Perhaps the author has the exact maze steps and if someone really was determined to hack at the binary code they could find out a way too, but as is, the treasure is all a sideshow to the main task of retrieving the pearl anyway.
For now, Skull Cave mainly serves as a warning as to how difficult it is to make combat fun in an adventure game without making any extra systems. The large number of adventures from this era where violence is actually a red herring seems to be linked to the same trouble: there need to be statistics, extra moves, a wealth of items, enemy AI, and so forth, none of which had an easy-to-copy model at the time–
From the printed Tomb of Horrors module.
–excepting Eamon, but if people wanted an Eamon game they just wrote it in that system. And incidentally, for those Eamon fans out there, yes, I might loop back sometime and do more than 2 adventures, even though they really lean much harder on the RPG than the adventure side. The backlog is just so, so long. And speaking of backlog, what I’ll be getting to next is a game which is very large, whose existence is recorded almost nowhere, and has only been available to the public quite recently.
Renga in Blue 
