I’ve finished the game, and I was fairly close to the end. The largest jump was simply understanding what the game was even trying to convey.
I had incidentally tried to run the car into the door (thinking this would be one method of “smashing” the door) and was simply told I couldn’t; I came close to the right idea, as you’re supposed to run the car into a regular wall, getting a good effect.
THE CAR MADE A STRANGE SOUND AND DIED.
You can hop out and turn the crank again to start it; what’s new is there’s now a hammer that fell out from somewhere.
With that hammer, SMASH DOOR now works, leading to a supply of boards.
Nice contrast with Mexican Adventure, where the wood being portable is part of what led me to not realize you could build a whole cart out of it.
I still had the nails from earlier and the hammer, and I also had the BUILD verb un-used off my original list. Given how this was clearly at the end of the game, I figured now was the time.
This is followed by one of the most unfortunate parser moments in the game. You can’t TAKE the ladder because it is too heavy, but you can’t LIFT if either. It is important to note that LIFT is considered a synonym to TAKE, while RAISE is its own verb.
I had already spent enough time puzzling over the verb list I figured out this issue quickly, but I could see someone getting stumped here at nearly the very end.
I decided, despite no ceiling exit in view, to follow with CLIMB LADDER.
This is on top of the maze. I originally didn’t think that because you can still walk around the maze and looks normal as before.
What kept me from wasting enormous time here was my constant attempts to experiment with ways to die. (Adventure game deaths can be funny, sometimes! Or they can give, as you’ll about to see, a hint.) While on top of the ladder where I had raised it I tried JUMP DOWN, not even realizing yet I had made it through the ceiling.
THAT WASN’T THE RIGHT PLACE!
This suggested there was a right place, and established for me, despite the odd way the graphics hadn’t changed, that I was in fact on the roof and just needed to find the right spot to apply JUMP DOWN.
Hence:
This is followed by a long and slow animation, and I have it here below at double speed.
Then text displays (again slowly, there’s a key to speed it up but I forgot what it was):
YOU STUMBLE OUT OF THE DIMLY LIT RECESSES OF THE MAZE, INTO THE STARTLINGLY BRIGHT FORMAL OINING ROOM OF PROFESSOR LA BRYNTHE. SEATED AROUND A LARGE TABLE ARE THE MEMBERS OF YOUR FACULTY COMMITTEE, HEADS BENT TO ONE ANOTHER IN WHISPERED DISCOURSE.
The professor then states that we have had our performance assessed through a real-life version of “the maze through which you have run so many of your experimental subjects” and they are now prepared to bestow a degree based on in-game performance.
TOTAL NUMBER OF MOVES -2145
NUMBER OF TIMES YOU ‘DIED’ -11
ATTEMPTS TO KILL SOMETHING -5
INVOCATIONS OF THE MAGIC WORD -16
NUMBER OF TIMES YOU QUIT -1
NUMBER OF HELPS YOU NEEDED -30
TIMES YOU TOOK INVENTORY -88
NUMBER OF PEEKS AT THE MAP -33
(This likely is inaccurate — it seems to be including things from the previous owner of the disk.) I find it interesting that it tried to account for so many things but aside from me finding move-optimization to be generally tedious without some extra gimmick, I take umbrage at having features like “taking inventory” and “looking at the map” somehow getting a negative tally. Yes, you could restart and avoid those (probably having to delete some sort of file on the disk) but it’s just uninteresting to do so, plus the whole ideal experience of an adventure game is to see the nooks and crannies and results of say, trying to wallop the wine snob.
This was shockingly polished (“polished” in a 1981 Apple II game sense) for a random unheard-of game that may or may not have been sold in a store. It did not make any magazines I could find, although that’s not equivalent to saying it wasn’t published; this was still an era where it was possible to just hang up a disk in a baggie somewhere. My current theory is that this was a college game (especially given the expensive model of Apple II needed for development on top of the collegiate references) and it could have landed in a computer store near a campus (maybe selling 30 copies). Even if this was just a disk swapped amongst students of the University of Rhode Island for fun, I hope one day we’ll get a better idea where this came from.
To bookend all this: the first-person adventures with views in multiple directions we’ve seen have had very different styles. Deathmaze 5000 and the other games from Med Systems (like Asylum) had sparse levels where just mapping them could be a challenge. The Haunted Palace was dense but eccentric and sometimes graphics at different angles didn’t match, but it otherwise went for a “narrow” view. The Japanese Mystery House had randomization and zoomed in views of objects. The Schrag games like Toxic Dumpsite kept the room count very low and didn’t feature any “hallway” sections, and come across the closest to the 90s games like Myst. While I still think it is possible the author(s) of The Maze saw Deathmaze 5000, it is also possible every single author mentioned above was coming up with the concept independently. Because none of them became a paradigm — even with Asylum getting respectable sales, and Mystery House being the first adventure in Japanese — there never was a “genre” established in the same manner as RPG “blobber” games.
UPDATE:
Not worth a new post, but–
I was asked by P-Tux7 in the comments, about the other possible titles. Here’s the relevant code:
9040 SC=NM+10DK+20KI-20MW+20QU+5HP+5IV+10*MP
9050 IF SC<2000 THEN 9060:P$=”THIRD GRADE FAILURE”: GOTO 9200
9060 IF SC<1500 THEN 9070:P$=”HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT”: GOTO 9200
9070 IF SC<1000 THEN 9080:P$=”HIGH SCHOOL EQUIVALENCY”: GOTO 9200
9080 IF SC<600 THEN 9090:P$=”ASSOCIATE OF SCIENCE”: GOTO 9200
9090 IF SC<400 THEN 9100:P$=”BACHELOR OF SCIENCE”: GOTO 9200
9100 IF SC<300 THEN 9110:P$=”MASTER OF SCIENCE”: GOTO 9200
9110 IF SC<200 THEN 9120:P$=”DOCTOR OF MAZEOLOGY”: GOTO 9200
9120 IF SC<50 THEN 9130:P$=”FULL PROFESSOR OF MAZEOLOGY”: GOTO 9200
9130 P$=”CHARLATAN OR TOTAL FOOL”
The curious thing is that “MW” (number of magic words uses) counts to SUBTRACT from the total score. The higher the score, the worse the diploma. What this implies is that at the very end of the game, you can drop the welcome mat, SAY WELCOME over and over to be “polite”, and change your degree from utter failure to a doctorate.
If you use it too many times, the number wraps over past negative into the very high positive numbers. (Correction: it’s <50 that's CHARLATAN, 50 to 200 that's FULL PROFESSOR. It whips from positive to negative conceptually, at least.)
Last time, I had a “wine snob” blocking the path, and I had just extracted cheese from a mousetrap (see below). To make further progress I had to overcome confusion about the game’s orientation of obstacles, in a big-picture-theory-of-games sense.
In many RPGs that use grid squares, obstacles are viewed from the squares immediately adjacent to them. If there’s a pit in Eye of the Beholder, and you approach the same square from a different angle, you’re viewing the “same pit” from an entirely new position.
I originally drew my map with this paradigm in mind; thinking of the mousetrap as a “pit”, I made my world-model such that the pit actually occupied the corner square, as the player faced that square.
However, it started to become clear farther in that obstacles only become “active” in the world-universe sense if the player is directly in the appropriate square. That is, if the player is one step away from a pit on the map, they can’t see or otherwise acknowledge the existence of a pit. This is a long-winded way of saying that the trap should have been placed one square up, and I had a blank on the map that I hadn’t reached yet.
I had understood this by the time I had reached the wine slob snob but the mousetrap was the very first thing I placed on my map, and since the puzzle stumped me for a while I hadn’t stopped to reconsider the placement. Going forward once leads to a wineglass on the ground.
This can be taken back to the snob, where you will need:
the uncorked wine bottle
the wineglass
the cheese
the crackers
and…. clean shoes.
To explain that last part, on walking back from stepping over the trap, there’s a strange “dotted” room which I assume represents dirt, or rat droppings, or something else messy.
I was never able to examine the dots. I just know that before there’s no special inventory object, and after there’s “something” on the player’s shoes.
Fortunately, CLEAN SHOES works back on the welcome mat (another use other than hiding a key and teleportation! I love how often what seems initially like scenery keeps showing up again).
With unclean shoes, the wine snob will not be able to smell the wine as you are pouring and you won’t make progress. Alternately, you can just teleport past the messy spot, but that requires using the welcome mat again since SAY WELCOME teleports you to wherever it happens to be.
With the wine poured, the wine snob now demands some cheese, followed by some crackers (here’s an alternate way to work out what that strange graphic is, but this moment would likely come long after finding the object).
And he’s still complaining! Given we’re in “adventure mode” the thing that seems most natural to do might not occur to a player. We can SAY NO.
The “metallic taste” is a hint. Fortunately (?) things are quite breakable in this game and just dropping the empty wine bottle anywhere will cause it to shatter, revealing a second key (the first got used for the violin case).
The map then turns north, leading by some nails…
…and then has two branches, one to the west and one to the east (and the NE corner).
The west branch leads to trouble quite quickly as there is a sign that warns about walking…
…and if you try to proceed on anyway the passage gets sealed off.
This feels like a moment from a CRPG. Now we just need some spinners and portions of the map with permanent darkness.
Fortunately, the remedy is down the other branch. First there’s what more or less look like a garage door…
…this is followed by a “bottle” (“CHATEAU PETROS 1929”) right next to a 1928 MODEL ‘A’ ROADSTER.
The car is empty of gas, but fortunately, the bottle is not the kind you want to drink.
Driving over to the northwest part of the map (you can GO CAR and any movement drives the car by default), the only thing there is a “wood shop”. The door is locked, although BREAK DOOR indicates “you can’t do that yet” indicating we might finally get to use the power of violence.
I’m stumped from here although I haven’t tried much. The only other thing I’ve found is a “bumper jack” left behind at the car’s start point.
I suspect I am quite close to the end; maybe get into the wood shop, and then something from that will help make it to the exit?
Just to recap from last time, I had a WELCOME MAT, TUNING FORK, VIOLIN, CASE, CORKSCREW, and CRACKERS. There was a mousetrap with cheese that would snap upon taking the cheese (I’ll be solving that one, but I’ll save discussing it for later). The beast was where I first focused my efforts.
With the case/box thing resolved, after some testing I realized somehow my attempts at playing the violin were while the game assumed it was in the case (I think if you’re holding both of them at once?) When the violin is out you can successfully PLAY VIOLIN and it does a tune, albeit not necessarily a great one:
Whoops! Fortunately I had the TUNING FORK, and after some fiddling I found TUNE VIOLIN worked while holding the fork. Then playing the violin is more succesful.
You can now refer to the beast as a CAT.
Just past the cat are some eyeglasses. With the eyeglasses worn you don’t have the “dim light” message anymore when pulling up the map with the M key, although the exact system is still a little cryptic:
What appears to be the case is that there’s no real “automap” as far as keeping track of where you’ve been. Rather, the game automatically shows a region near where you are standing, plus some of the area south, with the result you might see a good chunk of map or very little.
This suggests a secret room — see the isolated 1 by 1 spot — but my attempts at HIT WALL and SMASH WALL were for naught. At least WALL is a recognized word. CLIMB WALL gets the response SO IT’S COME TO THAT, HAS IT?
The eyeglasses have an unfortunate side effect. Previously, if you run into a wall, the game just says “OUCH!” but no adverse effects happen. With the eyeglasses on, your eyes start to swim and go blind.
Moving on from there, the hall turns and briefly stops by a niche with a wine bottle…
‘STRAWTOWN CELLARS 1982’
‘WE SHALL SELL NO WINE BEFORE MONDAY’
…with the route eventually stopped by a “wine snob”.
Trying to kill the man is fatal.
You can UNCORK BOTTLE (with the corkscrew) and try to pour it but the result is wine on the floor.
Given the emphasis on politeness, I thought maybe I needed to open with some sort of conversational word via SAY before I could offer CRACKERS or CHEESE or WINE (I don’t have the cheese yet, but I will in a moment). No luck. I even tried YELLing the words given the mention of the man being somewhat deaf, but I got no helpful response there either.
WHAT SHALL I DO? YELL PLEASE
OK – PLEASE
THANK YOU
(That’s the parser responding, not the man, since this happens elsewhere too.)
I did find in the process of this that SAY WELCOME teleports you back to the location of the welcome mat. I don’t know if this is for a puzzle or just meant to be a way to make travel faster. The welcome mat can be moved so I’d expect somewhere you could toss the mat under a door to teleport in, but I haven’t seen any circumstance like that yet.
While being frustrated at the wine snob, I figured out the cheese in the trap, via the process of dropping every item in my inventory.
With this done I could get the cheese safely. After process of elimination I found that either the welcome mat alone or the violin case alone both work; the violin case seems the clear better choice given the teleportation property of the mat.
I will take any suggestions at all. I’m also happy to hear from people who have beaten or otherwise hacked the game (use ROT13 if this is the case, though).
I promised last time to create my verb list. Since it’s been a while since I’ve explained: over the years I have collected verbs that are quite common in adventure games in this era, all the way to verbs that are rare, and I made a list. I then go through each verb on the list testing to see if that verb is accepted or not.
Some games have parsers which give almost no feedback so this trick doesn’t work (like, for example, “HUH?” for anything that isn’t interpreted) but as long as you give a verb and a noun this game not only gives feedback if a verb is misunderstood it displays the word flashing.
Just like Sierra On-Line games and others at this time, hitting ENTER will turn off the graphics temporarily and just show text.
By doing this, I’m able to get an idea of what kind of commands I should be focused on. Understood words are in green:
DRAW incidentally goes with DRAW MAP but the game says you need to make your own (weirdly enough, this isn’t quite true — I’ll explain in a moment). YELL and SAY both have “open” nouns meaning you can yell or say any text and it will be repeated back, indicating some possible future code word puzzle. SMELL working is notable (and not the sort of thing I’d automatically check), BUILD and MAKE are in (meaning we likely have at least one instance of combining together things into a new thing where we have to guess the noun) and START is probably the rarest verb on there. It’s also been a while since I’ve seen CLEAN.
None of these really suggested to me what the strange item was last time, but I first need to clarify that I was confused, as CASE and BOX are treated in the game as synonyms.
So when I did OPEN BOX, the game actually dropped the violin, and that picture to the left is a smashed violin. You can pick the violin up and see it described in textual form. That means that the real mystery is the “box object” which isn’t a box.
The game does not have GET ALL or LOOK FLOOR or any of the other types of commands you might think would reveal nearby objects. I did go ahead and test all the other one-letter possibilities past L (turn left), R (turn right), F (move forward), and A (turn around) and on top of the usual I (inventory) I came across two more. Z full on quits the game, which at the very least allows LISTing the BASIC code if I ever need to go there.
M shows the map as visited so far with a message about how “the dim light really hurts my eyes”. The map only shows temporarily before disappearing, although you can see what is most likely the exit in the process:
If the same object density keeps up, filling this in could represent the entire territory of the game. Or maybe there’s a second level and this game’s going to stick around a while.
Bizarrely, using the feature again repeats drawing a map but makes it smaller.
The map keeps getting tinier and tinier, down to just being a squiggle in the corner. I guess this is meant to simulate the dim light, but also in a game sense, discourage too much use of the automap. I’m needing to make a map in order to keep a track of objects anyway, but still, it’s wildly unusual to put the effort into making a feature but also yank it away. Just as a reminder:
With that sideline done, and no helpful commands found, it was time to crack on getting that word figured out. I wanted to try some more generalized crowdsourcing, so I made posts on both Mastodon and Bluesky.
Other tries were JOURNAL, PARCEL, BRICK, SUITCASE, and INTERNET (??). One of the guessers (@ericgerhardt.com) took it upon themselves to find and download the game to try things out themselves, and they discovered that HELP is contextual.
A METALLIC VOICE ECHOES DOWN THE HALL: IT SAYS ‘REG. PENNA. DEPT. AGR.’ THINK IT THROUGH
I admit I had found HELP was acknowledged, but I wasn’t thinking of using it here as I wasn’t considering this to be a puzzle but rather a user-interface frustration. However, based on the fact that even HELP is cryptic here, the author was clearly thinking “figure out what the object is so you can pick it up” was a genuine puzzle!
The Department of Agriculture reference means this is a food. These are CRACKERS.
It’s a good example of how (as I’ve put it before) early adventure game authors didn’t fully distinguish between difficult to solve and difficult to play
That is, while realizing what you’re looking at in order to pick it up would be considered by most modern standards a bug — but what logical reason would you not be able to grab the thing otherwise — with this game the author genuinely blithely ignores the meta-narrative confusion of the whole thing and makes it a puzzle. The most comparable puzzle I can think of is The Sands of Egypt which made guess-the-verb into a puzzle and also gave a hint whilst trying to get off a camel that was slightly indirect.
The hint was “The opposite of mount is?” You’re supposed to type DISMOUNT.
More actual progress next time! I hope! The Beast doesn’t like crackers, though:
I’d guess it’s really a “giant rat” given the context and I need the cheese, but I haven’t figured out the trap yet, and none of the verbs — and I tried all of them — were helpful.
IT IS SATURDAY MIDNIGHT, AND A LATE SUMMER STORM IS BREWING OUTSIDE.
YOU HAVE BEEN STUDYING LATE, TRYING IN VAIN TO AVERT A THESIS CRISIS — IN LAST MONTH’S ISSUE OF THE RAT RUNNER’S JOURNAL (A PUBLICATION DEVOTED TO YOUR FELLOW INVESTIGATORS OF LEARNING PROCESSES), AN ACADEMIC RIVAL OF YOURS HAS JUST PUBLISHED THE RESULTS YOU’VE SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF GRADUATE STUDY STRIVING TO COMPLETE.
I’m not sure why this game slipped by me before in my 1981 sequence. It is possible I saw the title screen and skipped on by immediately.
1982’s Wayout (by Sirius, of Kabul Spy, etc.) has similar map generation but allows full 360 degree movement.
From Mobygames. I think you’re supposed to be the clown.
However, The Maze is another game along the lines of Deathmaze 5000 or Asylum, with objects and puzzles scattered throughout and plot designed in a way that places it firmly in the rare “adventure blobber” camp.
YOU BEGIN TO DRIFT OFF INTO A FITFUL DOZE, DREAMING OF RATS CAUGHT IN MAZES, WHEN SUDDENLY THE TELEPHONE STARTLES YOU FULLY AWAKE.
I know nothing about Fermented Software, the only credits given on the title screen. This particular disk landed on the Internet in 2006 when someone on Usenet named “Astrp3” listed The Maze amongst disks that were being uploaded to Asimov (a still-extant Apple II archive). There’s otherwise no information, and “Fermented Software” doesn’t ring up any hits in the usual places.
The game requires 64K (not the default) so the author(s) were using a relatively beefy computer, and Deathmaze 5000 did have an Apple II version so it is possible it was an influence. The reference to a thesis crisis suggests an academic (it’d be an odd plot for someone outside of that particular “rat race” to make up). Perhaps more will be revealed as we get in deeper.
WITH YOUR HEART POUNDING, YOU PICK UP THE RECEIVER ANO HEAR THE VOICE OF DR. LA BRYNTHE, THE NOTED PSYCHOLOGIST AND YOUR THESIS ADVISOR, ON THE OTHER END: ‘JASON, I’M AT MY LABORATORY, AND I THINK I’VE FOUND A WAY YOU CAN USE THE RESULTS FROM YOUR MAZE STUDIES TO COMPLETE YOUR THESIS AND RECEIVE YOUR DEGREE. NOW LISTEN CAREFULLY AND I’LL GIVE YOU THE…
WHO’S THERE??…
WHAT’S GOING ON… HELP! HELP!
SUDDENLY, THE LINE GOES DEAD…
You grab a raincoat and head to the laboratory, musing about the Professor’s “classified experiments” and “experiments on animals” that were rumored to be done on humans. Ominous!
The opening mat seen above can be taken; this reveals a key, which can also be taken, giving the first two items of the game.
Movement is not by arrow keys; you can type “R” and “L” to turn right and left respectively, or “F” to go forward. Just “A” flips 180 degrees but I don’t think there’s any way to walk backwards.
Only any “close” walls are shaded, any farther away get the outlined black and white treatment.
It is much more dense than Asylum, and I suspect the map is smaller overall. Here’s what I have so far.
Starting with the “trap” in the lower left corner, that’s a giant mousetrap with some cheese. Any attempt to take the cheese are step forward kills you, although you restart at the beginning with the feeling like you’ve been “drugged”.
I tried throwing the mat to trigger the trap but no luck; picking up the mat afterwards causes the same effect.
Rotating around the spaces on the map, there’s a violin case that’s locked. The key fortunately works (although it gets stuck), and inside there is a violin. The game says you can’t play it yet if you try (I suspect you need a bow).
Further along the same path you can scoop up a TUNING FORK…
…a CORKSCREW…
…and a ????.
The question marks are here because while OPEN BOX works to get a thing out of it…
…I have no idea what the thing is or how to pick it up. I have tried various permutations of LOOK and have no textual description of what’s nearby. Any guesses?
It may help to know whatever it is will possibly resolve the one other obstacle (other than the trap) I need to deal with, a “BEAST”.
I haven’t made a verb list yet, but the cryptic object flummoxed me enough — and since it is the sort of thing I can crowdsource to you, my dear readers, I decided it was time to stop for a post. I will do verb testing next time (and knowing the verbs might help figure out what some of the pictures are, if there really is no “describe all the stuff near you in text” command).
Renga in Blue 