Today sees the return of the tapemag T&D Subscription Software, which we last saw with the game Killer Mansion. The tapemag was started in 1982 by Tom Dykema to distribute Tandy Color Computer tapes monthly and was successful enough to last until 1991.
Tom wrote a great deal of the software himself (“at the rate of about four programs a week”) but had a “programming genius down the street” help him and accepted contributions otherwise. A Facebook post by Youngstown Ken talks about several games of his taken in on the tapemag, including a clone of Trek that was published in the September 1983 issue.
The publication as a whole lands on CASA as having 77 adventure games (!!) so we’ll eventually be seeing a lot more of them. Just to be thorough I checked the T & D catalog for anything they described as in the “adventure” genre after Killer Mansion. There are two tagged from 1982, Quest for Lenore (Issue 2)…
…and Terrestrial Adventure (Issue 4).
Neither quite fits what I’m calling an adventure, although Terrestrial Adventure is sort of a top-down “choose your own adventure” style game with mild action elements; you control a little green dot and if you run into anything on the map you die. (This almost feels like it is meant to parody the gameplay of the Atari 2600 game E.T. with the infamous pits, but Issue 4 was in October 1982 which is before the Atari game came out.)
The controls make a room like this perilous.
After that, there’s a long gap until the next adventure, which the listing guide calls College Adventure but the game itself calls University Adventure. Confusingly, the file is called COLLADV/BAS.
YOU MUST TREK ACROSS THE COLLEGE CAMPUS IN SEARCH OF YOUR GOAL, with no clarity what that goal might be.
The verb list is unusual in that only the first three letters from the applicable verbs can be used. That is, from the starting room…
…and you can type GET NOTE just fine, in order to read it you must type REA NOTE, not READ NOTE. I’ve never seen this particular piece of jank before, indicating this is an author we haven’t met yet.
I’m so unused to the “shortened verbs only” setup that I accidentally typed READ in full twice.
As the note indicates, someone is being held captive in the computer center. With the beer, you can DRI (not DRINK) it until you finally end up drink.
We’re definitely on a University Adventure now! This moment where you could keep hitting Y made me laugh out loud.
If you pick up the beer and take it to the west, a resident assistant will stop you and end your adventure prematurely.
The trick is to not pick up the beer, walk on past, slip into another dorm and grab a key, avoid meeting the gang of girls down the south hall…
…and then unlock a closed door across your own dorm room…
…and pick up a pizza. While the pizza and beer are held, there is a different gang (presumably of men) who will let you pass.
Go east for long enough and you’ll find a random piece of wood.
From here the only way to go is outside, and I’m going to switch to isometric mode!
I’ve left items off as the remainder of the map is mostly a red herring. There is, for instance, a cafeteria.
None of these items are useful except technically the I.D. card, where if you go south you’ll run into a safety official who will cause a game over.
However, this encounter isn’t necessary at all, because you can just avoid that spot on the map! (Not like it matters too much — the game has no inventory limit so you can scoop up everything. The only moment where this causes a problem is with the beer.)
The important item is instead down in a classroom where you can find a computer card in a classroom.
Scooping up the pencil too, because why not.
This can be taken over to the east where there’s a river that you need to USE WOOD in order to pass over…
…followed by the computer card which gets applied to a security door.
Head south and you’ll win, with no further plot explanation of who needed rescuing or if the note was just some kind of prank.
I get the impression the author was aiming for something a little more dense. The opening made me hopeful we were going to get a “my university” satire with lots of obscure references; that’s not a bad thing in this context because it means the author would be aiming at a particular target and trying to say something, even if that something is an observation on the overzealousness of campus patrol. However, they clearly gave up by the end and the red herrings start to feel more like parts of the game the author never finished with (potentially due to lack of memory space). The opening spiel to the T&D newsletter for this issue even says
WOW! The programs on this month’s tape are so long that we could barely put two copies of each on the tape…
…indicating the game couldn’t have been longer even if the author wanted it to be. At least “every verb must be written in three letters” is an odd enough aspect it will be clear if they pop up again.
Coming up: assuming I get the tech issues resolved, an early hybrid action/text adventure game in Japanese.
Renga in Blue 