I did get a victory screen, and I am surprised because I thought the whole game was going to collapse in a mess of bugs before I got there. I had Dunmark Pykro in my inventory when I won the game.
Continuing directly from last time, I had a robot guard where I was unclear what to do. Part my of issue is that using OPEN on the PURSE gives an error, and I had already been able to nab the food from the grocery store; combining the two facts, I assumed the purse was being implicitly used somehow. No: the purse is opened by using LOOK on it, at which point you find some GOLD. You can then GIVE GOLD which is effective on the guard, and even the main character is confused that the puzzle solution worked.
This opens up a new section of the game.
To the east of the guard is a “sewer entrance” and a “thiefs lair” and as far as I can tell you never get your objects stolen so the lair is just for color.
This might genuinely just be for atmosphere.
To the north of the sewer (… not even going to bother with the forward/backwards/left/right thing anymore …) there is an armory with a robot de-activator. You can cart the de-activator back over to where the ROBOT DOUBLE was and use it to fry the robot, leaving behind a robot hand.
Behind the fried robot there is a universal communicator, which you can take over to the alien — the one that was our informant but we couldn’t understand — to get the password for the keypad.
If you go back to the start which had a side entrance with a keyboard, trying to use the password just gets you tossed into jail.
I should give some attention to jail, as it is entirely optional — you just avoid anything that gets you caught — but it does something clever. The first time you’re caught, you end up in a “low security” cell where you can CUT MATTRESS (how? don’t know) and reveal some SPRINGS, then use the springs to PICK LOCK and escape. This deposits you at the LOCKERS and you can LOOK LOCKERS to retrieve all your stuff you had in your inventory. (This includes, still in my case, a TECH GUN, ROBOT GUARDS, ALARM, and SECRETARY. This will become important later.)
If you get caught again (in addition to the door trap, typing SLEEP will get you picked up) you land in a medium-security cell. This time there are WALLS you can look at to find a BOLT, and USE BOLT will free you (it is unclear what is being done with the bolt, but I assume it’s PICK LOCK again except there’s no lock object to refer to).
If you get caught yet again you land in a high-security cell, which you can escape with the power of your mind via THINK. The text clues it pretty well (I had also made my verb list by now and I knew THINK was on it).
Get caught a fourth time and you die. The “upgraded accommodation” trick I ended up finding the best part of the game (there’s shades of a similar trick in Legend of Kyrandia 3 but it is still uncommon).
Returning back to the action: the password needs to get stored under our hat for now, and fortunately there’s still another route to go, as heading east from the sewers will reach a Urr-Beast. The Beast blocks exits to the north and east but you can still go south to find a BEAST KEEPERS ROOM.
The side room has a GROOMING KIT; taking it back north, you can GROOM BEAST and it will purr happily and go to sleep in the corner. This opens access to a data library with a MANUAL…
There’s a MAGTAPE also that can’t be referred to. This game has a nasty tendency to put objects in the room description that don’t exist with respect to the parser.
…and the manual can be read in order to learn operation of a ANTI-ASSASSIN COMPUTER and shut it down.
I never found out what grisly death this prevents.
Back at the guard which was bribed with gold, there’s an exit to the west (I had the accidental fortune of finding it after I finished all the events above). There’s a palm scanner and you can use the robot hand from the double in order to activate it.
Now comes the hardest of the three minigames, as after you cross the bridge over the spikes you get swarmed with droids. They appear on all sides, and you move with the keys right, left, A (up), Z (down), with space for shooting.
This game is genuinely original. It feels somewhat like Solar Fox as far as flying around a middle space section and avoiding things from the side, but I can’t think of an exact equivalent. You’re still getting shot at just like the previous mini-game and once again you have to defeat all the enemies twice.
This was by far the hardest of the three mini-games due to having to keep track of all four directions. If you hit a wall you bounce, so there’s no wrecking on the sides, but it is very easy to keep trapped with no way out by a rogue bullet. It was possible to be trapped in the first mini-game but only at the very start with the initial volley of bullets all coming at the same time.
You can afford to get hit twice, and there’s colorful narrative text going along with the hit. This is another fairly novel idea but it gets tiresome when you are playing the arcade game on repeat, which you will be unless you make liberal use of save states.
Moving on to the third part of the game, it goes fairly linearly. First, there’s some toxic gas (wearing the breathing apparatus works to get through).
This is followed by a uniform storage closet.
You need to wear a uniform, as well as nab the makeup kit from the lockers and use that as well, so you appear like one of the regular guards. This lets you get past a security checkpoint…
…and a secretary (which our protagonist wants to skeevily hit on, 1930s noir style).
Just walking past takes you to a transport tube, where there’s another keypad. This time you can type the password (PYKRO RULES) without getting caught.
Finally our hero reaches the Dunmark Pykro’s office, and things go very strange indeed both at the reality level and at the game-bug level.
The cut-off part of the text says he’s SURE ACTING KINDA’ KINKY. I have no idea what the evil business overlord gave us, because it never appeared in the room or in my inventory. In fact, Dunmark Pykro isn’t in the room at all. (I can at least reassure you that no WHIP object exists in the game.)
Baffled and strongly suspecting the game might be unfinishable, I tried going LEFT and found myself back at a steel door with another keypad. Trying to use the password again got me caught and tossed into jail (I hadn’t burned all three iterations on this save file) so I broke out and looked over every location I visited in case something new had happened. Indeed:
That’s back at the beast keeper place, where there was also a newly-added pile of junk. The Dunmark Pykro object somehow got teleported over here, and furthermore, I was able to TAKE him and carry him in inventory the rest of the game.
Heading back to the steel door, you can just ignore it and move on to find an intersection. Off in one direction is a SMALL ARMORY with a spacesuit…
…and in the other is a spacecraft you can escape with.
Again, Pykro was still in inventory when I did LAUNCH. I did try to KILL PYKRO but the game said
IT DIDN’T WORK FOR SOME REASON.(!?)
and no other verb from my big list had any effect at all. It doesn’t matter because launching the spacecraft leads to the third mini-game, followed by victory.
Almost identical to the first mini-game, but the two rows of ships are moving in opposite directions and you’re shooting from the bottom.
As before, the ships move faster when there are less on the screen. Unlike before, you need to beat the screen four times — that is, after everything is killed, it resets and you have to do it again — before reaching victory.
Adventurecade #2 coming soon, eh?
Let’s check out of this by asking the question: why did the company disappear? First of all, as you can probably tell, the quality was wobbly; despite some clever moments, I would take any of the Sierra On-Line games over this one. The mini-games were not fun to play and tilted annoyingly hard, especially given the screen repeats. I will give the game the benefit of the doubt as far as the bugs go; like most Apple II games, this one needed to be “cracked” to be played due to copy protection, and it is possible something broke which caused a SECRETARY to show up in the player’s inventory immediately upon finishing the first mini-game.
Still, for Apple II circa 1982, it had a fighting chance in the market, especially because the graphics genuinely hovered around “decent”; all the people were clearly of the squished-head Sierra variety, but the environmental graphics shows some genuine artistic thought.
Mind you, even Sierra was struggling to sell their graphics starting in 1983 (when The Desecration finally hit general distribution) so possibly it was a game made a little too late.
Additionally, the Mind Games duo (Greg Segall and Gil Beyda) went entirely on their own: they turned down distributors at Applefest (which was, in retrospect, a mistake). A September 1983 profile from the magazine L’Ordinateur individuel notes they have “d’entreprise bien américain” and how it was admirable that they did everything up to and including distribution to retailers. The article claims it is “un exemple à suivre” (“an example to follow”) but I suspect low sales led to their downfall. I have never seen a copy of this game for sale so it is likely quite rare.
In my comments, Rob had found a Japanese article from 1979 involving a visit to Los Angeles and their computer stores. This picture is from Computers Are Fun in central LA, where Gil Beyda was working. The article notes the store mostly specialized in Apple II products but had trouble making their rent of $400 a month. (Image assistance from eientei and ftb1979.)
Maybe it was good for the experience. While I don’t know about Greg Segall, Gil Beyda at least went on to a successful career in technology and now works as a venture capitalist.
Coming up: Some small non-sci-fi games, just for a change of pace, including another early Tolkien game.
When I wrote about Dragon’s Keep, I discussed an event called Applefest that happened in December of 1982. (If you haven’t read that post, I recommend reading it before this one.) The company Sunnyside Soft met Ken and Roberta Williams there, leading to Sierra buying them out and Al Lowe eventually going on to write the Leisure Suit Larry series.
There was another software company at Applefest I’d like to discuss today, one rather less famous: Mind Games. It’s completely understandable if you haven’t heard of them, because they only published one game.
The Softline interview indicates that Segall and Beyda had met 8 years before (aged 11) at a Los Angeles Boy Scout troop; both were up for a “promotion” to a troop rank but the two decided to share the position rather than compete for it. They consequently became friends.
They joined the Beverly Hills computer club and did pranks with the DEC-1170 system (as the interview notes, it was one of the only high schools in the country with such a computer); they followed this with computer jobs at early ages, as Beyda got a job at a computer store at 15 (leading to contacts and consulting work on educational software) while Segall got a job at 14 working for Farmers Insurance (also helping Beyda with the consulting).
From Wikipedia.
In 1981 they got the urge to write a game. They wanted something “more complex” than a two-word parser while avoiding the “rigid conventions of the traditional adventure”. Quoting Segall:
Forget this North, South, East, West stuff; I just wanna go through the door!
They wanted multiple responses to commands that have “nothing to do with the adventure” and writing “like a pulp thriller”. Then as a “hook” they decided the game should be “the first adventure to have serious arcade-game levels”. Quoting Segall directly again:
You don’t want to do the obvious rip-offs — walk into an arcade and see what’s hot and copy it — but take an idea, or several ideas, and make a twist on them. So we put arcade games inside an adventure.
It started with Segall working on plot and design and Beyda doing the programming, but they ended up sometimes swapping responsibilities. The process took 11 months working out of their garage, and then they tried shopping it around to distributors with no takers. They decided to pool the rest of their money to get a booth at Applefest.
At Applefest there’s a story which intercrosses with the Dragon’s Keep one. Mind Games had “distributors” ask for copies of the game, who supposedly were told:
You sent back the one we gave you.
Going back to Dragon’s Keep, and the quote from Hackers about Ken Williams:
Ken tried to throw himself into the spirit of the show, and took Roberta, looking chic in designer jeans, high boots, and a black beret, on a quick tour of the displays. Ken was a natural schmoozer, and at almost every booth he was recognized and greeted warmly. He asked about half a dozen young programmers to come up to Oakhurst and get rich hacking for On-Line.
The adventure-game portions of The Desecration have a strong resemblance to Sierra in visual look. Given the prominence of Sierra in California, and the fact they recruited Sunnyside because of Dragon’s Keep being close in look to Sierra products, it seems almost guaranteed Mind Games was one of the companies that Ken Williams talked to; the exact “you sent back the one we gave you” line may have been spoken directly to him.
Mind Games has been Apple-oriented up to this point, but the company is now looking into Atari and Commodore systems to “see what they can be used for.”
“Programmers are coming to us, now. We give them their freedom because we want them to have the same freedom to create that we had.”
I’m not clear what caused this ambition to unravel, but this game is the only evidence I found of Mind Games publishing anything. Ads starting showing up in 1983.
We’ve seen mini-games before, but the ones here genuinely are more extensive than previous ones; the game is fully half arcade and half adventure. (The closest we’ve seen to that is Mad Martha from the UK, created roughly the same time as The Desecration.) The adventure and arcade sections alternate.
Our job is, according to the game, INTERGALACTIC ASSASSIN. Our assignment is to go to Pykron 9, part of the Pykro Corp. Mining Empire, and kill the chairman, Dunmark Pykro, as he has been “KNOWN TO HAVE AN EYE FOR EASY EXPANSION OF HIS CORPORATE EMPIRE.” Some of his “targets” have pooled money together to hire you for “your usual fee” of 10,000 galactic sovereigns.
Action continues directly after receiving the message.
The interview was fussy about games using NORTH, SOUTH, etc. for navigation, so as exact equivalents this game uses RIGHT, LEFT, FORWARDS, BACKWARDS (abbreviated to R, L, F, B). We’ve had authors thinking “but why compass directions” all the way back to Empire of the Over-Mind and Battlestar. As this game maps them as exact equivalents — you don’t have “relative directions” where entering a room from the opposite side means “forwards” is now “backwards” and so forth — I mentally just thought of them as the usual N/S/E/W.
The TRANSPORTER ROOM mentions transporter controls but as far as I can tell there is no way to examine them or refer to them other than KICK CONTROLS. This is equivalent to activating the transporter. Not a great start.
The opening is relatively short — you can make your way over to a ship, but when you try to sneak it you get caught and tossed in a jail.
It’s a laser door, there’s a mirror, and you can USE MIRROR to get out.
There’s a cell where the main character wonders if he should free the locked-up alien. This is what happens if you try.
LAUNCH SHIP is the right action to take off, leading to the arcade game. Before going there, I should point out two things:
a.) As I already alluded to, the parser is miserable; it seems to be completely not only location-bespoke but also looking for exact phrases. That is, it isn’t using a world-model as opposed to just hand-coding each individual scene; you can, for example, go back in the cell, and the mirror is back to where it was.
b.) The authors seem to have written their room descriptions with a particular sequence in mind, as you can turn south (I mean, “backwards”) instead of going straight to the field to find the cell area, and the description implies you are in the middle of making your escape from the cell (when you haven’t been thrown in yet).
Onto the arcade game!
This is, straightforwardly, horizontal Space Invaders. (So much about avoiding taking actual games from the arcade.) The screen above shows one of the vehicles already vaporized; you drop bombs and they shoot up at you while moving left to right. The start is the hardest as the screen is completely filled with projectiles, and as more enemies die while they move faster, there are gaps that you can sneak your spacecraft between. (If you’re playing on keyboard, note you can double-press to scoot over faster. I think the original intended control was paddle.) Here’s Highretrogamelord attempting to get through:
Note that both this walkthrough and the one from AppleAdventures give up at this mini-game, and both imply they somehow give a complete walkthrough of the adventure portion.
You have to not only kill all the enemies once, but twice. It is definitely a pain but it is possible to get a rhythm in after surviving the initial volley. You can die twice and still continue before hitting a game over.
Why did both video walkthroughs cut off there assuming they had seen the entire game? Well, it starts with a menu where you can choose the three mini-games to play individually. I’m guessing they thought there were four discrete sections, adventure-arcade-arcade-arcade, and not an alternating arrangement where if you pick “adventure” you get the “full game” with the arcade games interspersed in a longer experience.
Even I originally thought this might be four separate games where the adventure game is only at the start.
So with the enemies defeated, we can move on to the Dome City wherein our target awaits.
I added the second shot here to show off more of the writing, where they were aiming for “pulp”. It has the feel and quality of written-by-teenager but I appreciate the effort in giving the main character some attitude, which was not common in 1982.
Our inventory has an I.D. card for getting into the dome, but also, weirdly, a TECH GUN, SECRETARY, ALARM, AND ROBOT PATROL. I assume that’s a bug (it may be a cracking-the-disk bug rather than an “authentic” bug).
Heading down from here leads to a STEEL DOOR with a keyboard which I don’t have a password for yet. However, ahead there are doors where the I.D. card can be used to enter the main complex.
To the left (west, whatever), there’s a person with a “purse” you can steal in order to get some food from a supermarket…
…a breathing apparatus lying about a storage room…
…and PYKRO’S ROBOT DOUBLE. I am unable to interact with it in any way.
To the right (east) is a sleeping police officer and some lockers, which are describing as holding STUFF THAT BELONGS TO THE INMATES. Again, the game’s writing assumes a particular sequence, as it says I BET MY STUFF IS IN HERE SOMEWHERE.
To become an inmate, you go back to the main doors and head forward (north). There is a INFORMANT MEETING PLACE but this person is not the correct informant, so if you try to SMILE as the message at the start of the game suggests, you get arrested.
No progress here, and no luck applying any verbs to the mattress.
If you bypass the first “informant” and head north, there’s a second one talking in an alien language. That’s the real informant, and if you SMILE you get some KEYS.
Past that is a robot guard, and it implies there’s something past the guard, but I have (again) yet to get any verb I’ve tried so far to work.
Almost nostalgic for that dodgy Dark Star parser after playing this for a while. I’ll still keep persisting, for if nothing else, two adventure-walkthrough-makers have already made an attempt and fallen.
Renga in Blue 