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Planet Interactive Fiction

Tuesday, 29. April 2025

Choice of Games LLC

Heart’s Choice Author Interview: Erin Rowlands, “Spellbound: Malachite Coven”

Your magic awakes in your new college town—and so does your heart! Can you discover who is trying to steal your power before it’s too late? Spellbound: Malachite Coven is a 147,000 word interactive romance novel by Erin Rowlands. I sat down with Erin to talk about her upcoming game and the process of writing an interactive romance. Spellbound: Malachite Coven releases next Thursday, May 8th.

Your magic awakes in your new college town—and so does your heart! Can you discover who is trying to steal your power before it’s too late?

Spellbound: Malachite Coven is a 147,000 word interactive romance novel by Erin Rowlands. I sat down with Erin to talk about her upcoming game and the process of writing an interactive romance. Spellbound: Malachite Coven releases next Thursday, May 8th. You can wishlist it on Steam now!

This is your first time publishing interactive fiction, but certainly not your first time writing romance or longer fiction. Tell me about your background.

For many years, I wrote short stories for literary magazines and then over the pandemic, I was craving something more upbeat and I got really into romance novels. Reading and writing rom-coms has been my obsession ever since!

What inspired this extremely cozy supernatural game and its setting?

I grew up in a quaint university town and I always loved walking around the campus in the fall so it was fun and nostalgic for me to write about that kind of place. For the supernatural element, I’m a fan of shows like Charmed and The Vampire Diaries…I like when TV shows feature both magical shenanigans and smooching. I tried to bring that type of energy to this game.

What surprised you most about working with ChoiceScript?

I don’t have a coding background so it was a pretty sharp learning curve for me but once I got the hang of it, I really enjoyed it! I bought a bunch of highlighters and I have a notebook where I tracked all of the branches and I also had Post-it notes with various bits of code stuck all over the walls. For a while my office was giving a misunderstood conspiracy theorist vibe. In terms of the process, my editor Abby was so patient and awesome and the beta feedback I received was so insightful and helpful. I’m used to writing being a solitary endeavour so it was really lovely to get advice and input from more experienced folks.

Did you play any Heart’s Choice games to prepare for writing one?

I played and really enjoyed Brimstone Manor by Frances Pauli, Changeling Charade by Ruth Vincent and Their Majesties’ Pleasure by Leia Talon. The first game I ever played was Crème de la Crème by Harris Powell-Smith which is not a Heart’s Choice game but I loved the relationships in it.

Which of your NPCs would you want to go on a date with?

I love them all equally (I say diplomatically, as though they might hear me and get offended). But today it is raining in my city so I’d like to get tea and wander around a bookstore with River.

What are you working on next?

I’m writing a romantic comedy novel that incorporates two of my favourite things…the fake dating trope and board games. I also had an idea about necromancers and psychics that I always thought would be a novel but now I’m like, hmm, could this be a game?


Renga in Blue

Mexican Adventure: That Age-Old Problem

Dobbs was too much occupied with other thoughts to take any account of how he was sitting. Just then he was looking for a solution to that age-old problem which makes so many people forget all other thoughts and things. He worked his mind to answer the question: How can I get some money right […]

Dobbs was too much occupied with other thoughts to take any account of how he was sitting. Just then he was looking for a solution to that age-old problem which makes so many people forget all other thoughts and things. He worked his mind to answer the question: How can I get some money right now?

— B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

I have finished the game. (Previous posts here.)

I like what this game was aiming for conceptually but the technology (that is, a late-70s or early-80s computer) didn’t hold up with the goal. The basic idea here was to use the MAKE command to build a number of things — far more than any prior game I’ve seen in this chronology — turning combinatorial object creation into a regular mechanic rather than a one-off novelty. The idea works in games like Return to Mysterious Island but that game has pictures of the objects and a UI that clarifies what’s going on. Let’s return to the issue in context and go back to a chunk of map I missed —

Right where I bribed the guard and got a FILE, I used it to nab a CHAIN, get a BAR out of a skylight, and escape. I did not think about the fact the DOOR is also now described as OPEN.

Implicitly I think I was imagining there’d just be guards back there; I was half-right but the half-wrong part was vital.

If you don’t GO WEST as shown above, you can nab some keys, then break into an office and two cells. The office has a map showing the town as well as a FULL CANTEEN (don’t drink it, it isn’t water).

One cell has a hanging body with a paper that has TRANSLUCENT PARTS. You can also use the file on the rope to get it (I did not figure this out straight away and had to loop back long after, but I’m saving time in the narrative). Across of the same cell, reflective of the general prison standards, there is a man who isn’t dead yet but drops over a turn after he gives you a message.

Searching the second man reveals some SPECTACLES. I’m going to condense my prolonged narrative and mention that USE SPECTACLES will cause them to light the paper on fire, revealing a message.

(I have never ever seen any spectacles with this effect, and this won’t be the last bit of dodgy science you’re going to see. ADD: OK, I checked and there are extreme enough reading glasses to make it work. Mea culpa.) This code ends up being useful at the bank — and I even knew immediately it must go to the bank — but I had to check a walkthrough (via Strident) to know how to phrase it. I’m guessing the Spectrum version (which he played) was more helpful about this?

Dark Star gave the syntax out when asking for HELP, but this game does not give any. As far as I can tell the only way to know this syntax is to imagine the same thing carries over between games, because the assertion doesn’t follow a verb-noun pattern.

This gives a SAFE DEPOSIT BOX. The box contains a passport but the passport is in need of a photo. I already had the bottle of developer, tray, photo sheet, and room that could be made dark, but the game let me know about a lack of CAMERA. It turns out — and I had to look this one up too — the safety deposit box and a SKEWER from a house can be used to MAKE CAMERA.

?!??

Here is how I visualize a safe deposit box:

Could a skewer poke a hole in that? Is that even the right shape for a camera? Is a pinhole camera really enough to make a passport photo? (Indeed the author could have been visualizing the box “correctly” but just saying IT’S EMPTY upon examining it is not sufficient to avoid disjoint visualization.)

At least the game is very specific about the verb FIX here which is not being used in the “repair” sense like it normally is.

Before hitting the cavalcade where things getting even wilder, here’s the remaining object list: BLANKET, SOME WOOD, EMPTY CONTAINER, WIRE, METAL STRIP, IRON BAR, WHEELS, CANTEEN. There’s also a HORSE in a stable, petrol pump and an ENGINE that is too big to carry, the GOLD INGOTS equally too big to carry, and a JEEP that is stuck in QUICKSAND.

The container is used at the petrol pump to get some gas over to the jeep and fill it. I got that far, at least. I also got part of the way to figuring out the WINCH; there’s a pulley that can be mended as long as you’re holding the IRON BAR (shown above) and then MAKE WINCH while holding the chain. Except:

It turns out you can ENTER JEEP … except for the quicksand, which you can cross by USE BLANKET. Why THROW BLANKET does not work is beyond me (leaving the jeep, you don’t use the blanket again, so you ought to get stopped by the quicksand; best just not to think about it to much).

Here, you have to put together the fact the CANTEEN is in fact holding acid, the wire, and the metal strip to MAKE BATTERY. This does not sound safe or even like it would work.

However, you also need the ENGINE. Going back to the HORSE, the only unused items are the WOOD, the ROPE, and the WHEELS, which is sufficient — without nails, a hammer, or any supplies really — to MAKE CART.

MAKE is such a risky verb when any noun in the universe is technically possible, especially if the author is fishing for something specific. This was way too specific for me. I did not visualize the wood as being of the volume for this kind of thing, or the wheels as the kind of thing that would somehow attach without any extra bolts or assistance. Again, I get where the author was going, but with minimal descriptions or no descriptions at all this requires abductive reasoning of colossal size.

The cart allows picking up the ENGINE and delivering it to the JEEP. You can move the GOLD closer while you’re at it if you want. With that done you can START IGNITION, LEAVE JEEP, and MAKE WINCH, finally pulling the jeep out.

The gold fits into the jeep, and apparently we are just getting waved through because it’s the 80s.

Flashing so I couldn’t quite get the whole word “ANOTHER”.

In a narrative sense this had a theme of greed rarely seen in an adventure game from this time. That might seem like a bizarre statement given the number of Treasure Hunts we’ve experienced, but the emphasis has very rarely been on Getting Rich; the treasures are treated as a generalized mechanic for sending the player in all directions. (In some games, the treasures are being moved inside the dungeon/pyramid/complex rather than “liberated”.) Here, there’s no reason we have to take the risk to also get the gold; the passport would normally be enough for an escape, but the protagonist is suffering from That Age-Old Problem. Hence I got more interesting narrative out of this game than the same author’s Haunted House (which is pure treasure hunt) but the leaps of disjoint visualization required to MAKE the objects required left me feeling sour.

Via MZ Sharp Archive.

Still not a terrible game to end the Sharpsoft saga (for now) on. Five 1982 games to go!


The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

April 2025 PR-IF Post-Mortem

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, April 28, 2025 over Zoom. Mike Stage, Andrew Stephens, anjchang, Hugh, Josh, , Matt Griffin, Jim Tyhurst and zarf. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories. Meeting platform discussion about using Zoom, Google Meet,
April 2025 PR-IF attendees. not pictured: Zarf, Jim and Mike.

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, April 28, 2025 over Zoom. Mike Stage, Andrew Stephens, anjchang, HughJosh, , Matt GriffinJim Tyhurst and zarfWarning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

  • Josh is playing Moondrop Isle, an IF written by Ryan Veeder with 8 other authors
    Josh will also be playing typehelp with the Seattle/Tacoma group next month. They meet next on Sunday, 5-7PM Pacific, May 18th. Fyi you can learn about Seatac IF group announcements on intfiction.org here.
  • Matt Griffin on Narrascope happening. Registrations open. He has an ELO paper on Choicescript in the ELO conference.
  • Zarf working on ifdb archive and search archive.
  • Mike playing South Park Video Game :The Stick of Truth”
  • Hugh’s been busy debugging and fixing pedestrian bugs in frame rate, writing a character scropt generator, working with scripts making maps in trizbort
  • Jim is taking a class at on IF at Portland State University. Learning to write IF in Twine and Inform.
  • Anj attended Nick Montfort’s Experimental Writing class project presentations. Students might be interested in publishing their work at ELO, Narrascope games showcase, HTML.review.

Meeting platform discussion about using Zoom, Google Meet, Discord. Discord requires an account. Here’s tne Narrascope Discord (invite). We decide to use Google Meet next month and later also try Discord.

Celebrating Narrascope potential for in-person meetup was discussed. Anj can meet in Cambridge or Providence. J

Play Spring Thing! Go here: https://www.springthing.net/2025/ and nominate your favorite 30+ games that are available to play before May 9th. Here are games mentioned:

Monday, 28. April 2025

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

March 2025 Post Mortem

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 over Zoom. Mike Stage, anjchang Josh Grams, Hugh, Pinkunz, Matt Griffin, and welcomed newcomer Jim Tyhurst. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories. On the gamebook front, there was a good […]

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 over Zoom. Mike Stage, anjchang Josh Grams, Hugh, Pinkunz, Matt Griffin, and welcomed newcomer Jim Tyhurst. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

On the gamebook front, there was a good lightning talk at Roguelike Celebration 2021 about ways to do pencil-and-paper adventuring sorts of things and some interesting ideas about how to have the player keep state while also kind of hiding it from themselves?

Media Shelf Roguellikes and Game Books


Key & Compass Blog

New walkthroughs for April 2025

On Monday, April 28, 2025, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi. Andromeda Awakening (2011-2012) by Marco Innocenti You play […]

On Monday, April 28, 2025, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive fiction at Patreon and Ko-fi.


Andromeda Awakening (2011-2012) by Marco Innocenti

You play as Ektor Mastiff, a science researcher on Monarch in the Andromeda galaxy. Your colleague, Dr. Andy Re’s, was recently murdered. You intend to present Andy’s findings to the Council as soon as possible, but a horrific train accident strands you deep underground where you will make startling discoveries of your own.

This game was entered in IF Comp 2011 where it took 17th place; it was a Z-machine platform game then. The “Final Cut” version is for the Glulx platform; it was released in January 2012.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


Deephome (1999) by Joshua Wise

In this fantasy game set on the world of Malli, you play as a dwarf. It is your duty as a Reclaimer to make the abandoned Mountain Kingdom of Deephome ready for your king’s return. Restore the city’s power and water, open the gates, and make sure the city is safe, emphasis on safe.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


The Prairie House (2022) by Chris Hay (aka Eldritch Renaissance Cake)

In this mildly-spooky game, you play as a prairie researcher in Manitoba. Collect up your soil samples and spend the night at the field house that the committee provided for you. You’ll learn a little about the area and about the woman who once lived there.

This game was written in Adventuron and was an entry in the Main Festival of Spring Thing 2022.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Locked Door (2022) by Cody Gaisser

In this extremely minimalist trivial game, you need to unlock a locked door.

It’s the first of eleven games in the Locked Door series where each game is an augmentation of the previous game in the series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Locked Door II: Fair Trade (2022) by Cody Gaisser

In this trivial and minimalist game, you need to unlock a locked door. Introducing Bob, an apple, and a glass case.

It’s the second of eleven games in the Locked Door series where each game is an augmentation of the previous game in the series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Locked Door III: Crate Expectations (2022) by Cody Gaisser

In this trivial and minimalist game, you need to unlock a locked door. Introducing a crate, a crowbar, and a shed.

It’s the third of eleven games in the Locked Door series where each game is an augmentation of the previous game in the series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Locked Door IV: Safety In Numbers (2022) by Cody Gaisser

In this small game, you need to unlock a locked door. Introducing a safe, a step ladder, a sledgehammer, and more rooms.

It’s the fourth of eleven games in the Locked Door series where each game is an augmentation of the previous game in the series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Locked Door V: Switched On (2022) by Cody Gaisser

In this small-ish game, you need to unlock a locked door. Introducing a dog named Rex, a flashlight, and a grabber.

It’s the fifth of eleven games in the Locked Door series where each game is an augmentation of the previous game in the series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Locked Door VI: It Takes Two (2022) by Cody Gaisser

In this sparse iteration of the Locked Door series, you still need to unlock a locked door. Introducing an ingot, scales, a red herring, and a doorknob.

It’s the sixth of eleven games in the Locked Door series where each game is an augmentation of the previous game in the series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Locked Door VII: Out Of Line (2022) by Cody Gaisser

In this iteration of the Locked Door series, you still need to unlock a locked door. Introducing many more locations including an old garage, a chasm with a rusty drawbridge, a softball field, a locker room, and a mysterious passage.

It’s the seventh of eleven games in the Locked Door series where each game is an augmentation of the previous game in the series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


Locked Door VIII: Enemy Mine (2022) by Cody Gaisser

In this iteration of the Locked Door series, you still need to unlock a locked door. Introducing the dwarven halls.

It’s the eighth of eleven games in the Locked Door series where each game is an augmentation of the previous game in the series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


Locked Door IX: Under Obstruction (2022) by Cody Gaisser

In this iteration of the Locked Door series, you still need to unlock a locked door. Introducing a strength-gain puzzle.

It’s the ninth of eleven games in the Locked Door series where each game is an augmentation of the previous game in the series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


Locked Door X: The Workprint (2022) by Cody Gaisser

In this iteration of the Locked Door series, you still need to unlock a locked door. Introducing an unlocked cupboard and some statues. That’s it? Really?

It’s the tenth of eleven games in the Locked Door series where each game is an augmentation of the previous game in the series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


Locked Door XI: The US Theatrical Cut (2022) by Cody Gaisser

In this final iteration of the Locked Door series, you still need to unlock a locked door. Introducing no new gameplay, but there’s a new ABOUT menu and a slightly more dramatic intro and outro.

It’s the eleventh of eleven games in the Locked Door series where each game is an augmentation of the previous game in the series.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps


Baretegi (2016) by Alex Meltsner

In this short fantasy game, you play as a student at Limax University who slips on something slimy and wakes up in a weird cave dripping with mucus. Get ready for a slug-filled underground adventure!

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Lime Ergot (2014) by Caleb Wilson (as “Rust Blight”)

In this short surreal game, you play as Lieutenant Musco, the lowest ranking soldier left in St. Stellio. The General asks you to fix her a drink, a green skull, using the mechanical bar-tender. The first ingredient is “1 over-ripe St. Stellio lime, whole.”

This game was an entry in Ectocomp 2014 where it took 6th place. In the 2019 edition of the “Interactive Fiction Top 50 of all time” list, it tied at 36th place; in the 2023 edition, it tied at 49th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


NEST (2023) by Ryan Veeder

In this short game, you’re on a quest. Travel to all four corners of the map and find the answer to this question: What is the opposite of east?

This game was written for day two of #EnigMarch 2023. At the IF Short Games Showcase 2023, NEST took 1st place in the Best Puzzle-Focused Game category, and 29th place in the Best in Show category.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map


Yet another experiment (2020) by He4eT

In this game written as a coding exercise for TADS 3, you play as a test subject for an experiment you know nothing about. The door to your quarters isn’t locked, but every other door you find is locked. Something bad happened here. Try to escape if you can.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Sunday, 27. April 2025

Renga in Blue

Mexican Adventure: I DO NOT THINK THERE IS A RICK

I’ve made progress, shockingly without hints (previous post here). Strident in the comments pointed out that a download for this game also exists in MZ-700 format, with color. I have tested the two versions and the major difference is that the first line is missing in the MZ-700 edition. It has two POKE commands followed […]

I’ve made progress, shockingly without hints (previous post here).

Strident in the comments pointed out that a download for this game also exists in MZ-700 format, with color. I have tested the two versions and the major difference is that the first line is missing in the MZ-700 edition. It has two POKE commands followed by REM BY GEOFF CLARK JULY 82. I think it likely whatever shenanigans caused by POKE wasn’t needed and the removal of the author name was an unintended side effect — especially given the name stayed on Secret Kingdom — but swapping back and forth they’re essentially the same just with the addition of color.

From the Sharp MZ Archive.

To recap, I was in a cell with a blanket on a bed but otherwise no apparent resources. The guard was noted as bribable but I didn’t have anything to bribe with.

Now with color! Here I was trying to GET a BRICK. TAKE BRICK properly mentions a BRICK rather than a RICK. I assume the game trims the first five characters (“T”, “A”, “K”, “E”, “ ”) but the author forgot the synonym was shorter, causing the effect.

I had already tested verbs thoroughly, so maybe the problem was nouns. I thought I had tested those thoroughly too, trying LOOK FLOOR, LOOK WALL, LOOK CEILING, LOOK BAR, and LOOK CHAIN. The latter two give YOU CANNOT SEE IT HERE rather than the “doesn’t exist” kind of feedback which is important information, but doesn’t quite help set off the chain of events.

I had a problem of visualization. The skylight is BARRED AND AT GROUND LEVEL, but I assumed this was just to indicate it was a funny kind of skylight that wasn’t strictly aimed at the sky. What didn’t occur to me was that this also indicates GROUND is a recognized noun, and that I should be visualizing the cell as not having a FLOOR but rather just being GROUND.

FEEL at least was on my verb list although I think SEARCH should map to the same action (I would visualize someone searching a floor after seeing a glint as using their hands). The glint is a GOLD COIN. You can then SHOW COIN to the guard, followed by GIVE COIN.

GUARD TAKES IT AND DROPS SOMETHING

The something is a FILE. Since I already had the two nouns mentally stored, FILE CHAIN and FILE BAR came to me right after (both give a CHAIN and a BAR respectively), and I was further able to ENTER SKYLIGHT to escape.

Now the game puts up a hilarious contrast with the opening constrained section, as there’s a lot of rooms. I’m going to give the whole map at once (at least as I have it so far), then explain it in pieces.

To start with, there’s a giant 7 by 10 plain. There’s no thirst meter or concern about timing; you can map out at your leisure a series of rooms which are mostly all the same.

This reminds me of Dark Star having the giant 8 by 8 crater with random items tossed in. This is not typical for adventures of this period; even Time Zone wasn’t quite so blatant. This essentially encourages CRPG-like “lawnmowering” checking each square. This game has the fortunate interface addition of being able to move around with the arrow keys so this isn’t as bad as it sounds.

One thing I do find fascinating in a historical-analysis sense is that Dark Star was by the other Sharpsoft author. The authors essentially formed a miniature “school of design” with common patterns, just like artists from the same Renaissance workshop have the same affectations. We’ve also seen that with the multiple authors from Aardvark who tended to use interesting geography tricks — also the same bad parser, but the geography tricks are not something determined by a common codebase as much as overarching choices in design.

Returning to the game at hand…

…just a bit northwest from the start is a stuck jeep and a large rock. The jeep is described as having a PULLEY IN THE FRONT. There’s also an ENGINE nearby — which I presume goes in the jeep — but it is TOO HEAVY AND YOU NEED SOME TYPE OF TRANSPORT.

I’ll just skip ahead and mention there’s a town with a whole slew of items, including a SHOVEL. With the shovel I tested each and every room in the big plain using DIG before hitting literal paydirt.

We’ll visit the town in a moment; two more stops. To the north is a garage with a petrol pump, and the garage itself has SOME WHEELS. I assume these also go to the jeep.

Farther north still is the US-Mexico border where you need your papers to cross.

The overall quest seems to be thus: a.) put together the Jeep with various parts b.) pick up the gold with it c.) get a passport somehow d.) escape with profit assuming they don’t ask too many questions at the border. It’s sort of the plot of Three Kings without the war in the background. I assume we don’t get to shoot a bazooka either.

As far as “various parts” for the jeep go, let’s hit the town.

Most of the locations are empty of people and serve to deliver items. This includes a SKEWER, METAL STRIP, WIRE, SHOVEL (as already used), PLASTIC TRAY, EMPTY CONTAINER, SOME WOOD, a PHOTOGRAPHIC SHEET, and a BOTTLE with some developer fluid. The latter two are in the same building and there’s additionally some curtains that can be “DRAWN” to make the room dark.

I assume the plastic tray also gets used in this procedure. I do not have a CAMERA yet but the game recognizes it (there’s no I DO NOT THINK THERE IS A AMERA message upon trying to GET one).

Of special note is the stables which in addition to having the EMPTY CONTAINER also has a HORSE. You can GET HORSE like a regular object and I assume do something with it hauling the jeep out of the quicksand but I haven’t tested this far yet.

There’s also a bank (BANK’S ARE SMALL if you try to enter with a horse) and I’m not sure what I should be doing. I am unable to GET CASH or GET LOAN or anything like that but none of the shops have shopkeepers to take money anyway.

That’s everything so far! I’m definitely just stopping to report in rather than stuck, as I have to try to build something to pull a jeep. I accidentally hit MAKE WINDOW while in the cell and found the command was recognized (YOU DO NOT HAVE EVERYTHING YOU NEED) although my guess is the “WIN” in the three-letter parser is standing in for WINCH instead.

Saturday, 26. April 2025

Zarf Updates

IF Archive search feature

A many years ago, the IF Archive existed, and it was an FTP site. It lived at ftp.gmd.de. That was a long time ago. (1992, but who's counting.) Slightly less long ago, the World Wide Web existed, and I said "I bet there could be a web mirror ...

A many years ago, the IF Archive existed, and it was an FTP site. It lived at ftp.gmd.de. That was a long time ago. (1992, but who's counting.)

Slightly less long ago, the World Wide Web existed, and I said "I bet there could be a web mirror of the FTP site." So I (along with my co-conspirator Paul) built that as a holiday break project. It was just a static mirror of the files, with HTML index pages. I announced it on the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup.

A few days later, someone posted "How Do You Find Anything?"

Fair question. The favored answer was "Download the Master-Index text file and search through that." Nobody even mentioned the idea of a web search engine.

It wasn't a very complicated archive at that point, though. If you were looking for a game, you went to games/zcode or games/tads or whatever and all the games were listed. Hierarchical folders; you probably knew where you were going.

More files and more folders were added over the years, but people still mostly knew their way around. Then Google turned up and that helped a lot. And then in 2007, Mike Roberts launched IFDB, which was an extremely searchable database of IF games -- with links to the IF Archive. So that solved the problem completely!

Mostly. Ish.

IFDB is very comprehensive for games, but it doesn't try to cover interpreters, zines, articles, or the rest of the eclectic material which the Archive has collected over the decades. Google is still okay for this purpose (with the "search web" option and site:ifarchive.org). But the idea of a locally hosted search tool kept coming up.

Last weekend I finally said, "Eh, how hard could this be?" Answer: not hard at all! I had a first draft working in about two days. Don't I feel silly now?

Behold: the IF Archive search page.

This is still a feature in progress. Should there be a mini-search bar on each page of the site? Should I be sorting results by date? More than ten results per result page? Suggestions welcome.


Here's the code for that search tool. I wound up using a Python search library called Whoosh. Whoosh is pretty old; it hasn't been much updated since 2016. But it works just fine. (There's a more recent fork called Whoosh-Reloaded but I have not dug into that.)

The nice thing about Whoosh is that it's not a web search engine per se. It's a library for full-text search of whatever data you've got. You feed in "documents", which are really just key-value collections. Whoosh builds an on-disk database of that data, and then it can search it very efficiently. I set up a script to feed in that Master-Index file I mentioned earlier, and Gretchen's your aunt.

(In fact we keep an XML version of Master-Index. So the problem of parsing that into key-value data is already handled.) (Click on Master-Index.xml if you like, but it's 15 MB of XML and browsers aren't great at that.)

I had to build a web-service wrapper for Whoosh. Well, hey, I built tinyapp for a different IFTF service; I'll just use that. It's a Flask-alike. (Yeah, I could have used Flask, but tinyapp is a habit now.)


Someone suggested Pagefind as an alternative. This is a client-side search script: a JS widget that loads its index data from the web server. Then there's a static server-side component that generates this index data. Unlike Whoosh, it works by scraping your static HTML.

This is an interesting tradeoff. You save the CPU cost of server-side search, but you pay the bandwidth cost of handing out the search index to each user. (Don't worry, it's segmented, not served in a giant lump.)

However, this model doesn't fit the Archive case very well. The Archive generates HTML files from Master-Index, so scraping the HTML back in to regenerate the index metadata is just clunky. (And requires a lot of tuning of the HTML.) Also, I want search items to refer to parts of an index page -- there are lots of items per index page. Whoosh doesn't see anything weird about that; the item's URL can have a #fragment, Whoosh doesn't care. But Pagefind is pretty solidly set on the idea that one page is one index item.

Anyhow, server load doesn't seem to be a problem yet. (Maybe this post will change that!) IFDB search is undoubtedly more useful for most people.

So, for many reasons, Whoosh it was.

(However, I'm considering Pagefind as a search tool for this blog! The DuckDuckGo search you see in the sidebar works okay -- but DDG is ad-supported, and ad-supported services gonna getcha sooner or later.)


While I'm on about the Archive, let me mention the development model.

It's a mess. A deep, historic mess. I originally wrote the Archive's index generator in 1999... in C, bless that child's heart. I converted that nightmare to Python in 2017, looks like, while I was moving the site over to IFTF hosting. But it was just a Python script that ran on some files. I tested it locally by running it on some test files.

Over time, more projects got folded into the Archive setup. There's the upload script, the admin tool, the Unbox service. Now search. Each one has its own git repository. And oh yeah, while I'm in there, shouldn't the front page and stylesheet be under version control too?

It's all pretty well organized on the server. (Except Unbox, which is well-organized on a second server.) However, to get everything installed, I just... shove the files into place. When I update a script or something, I shove it in where it goes. There's no automation at all. Every repo has a private NOTES or TODO file where I scribbled down what I did last time.

This is not good devops zen.

A couple of years ago, Dan Fabulich suggested Docker. I am fairly Docker-resistant, but he set up the admin tool repo with a Docker config to test that component (just that one) in a test container. It seemed workable.

I am now slowly constructing a testframe repository which will assemble all the Archive components in a test container. It includes the other repos as submodules. (I know, sigh, submodules.) You'll be able to browse a set of test files, search the files, upload files, etc -- all in a pocket universe, so to speak.

This isn't even slightly ready for road testing yet. The original index generator is the only part that works. I'm still feeling my way through the right way to construct it in Docker. (I've barely even scratched Docker-Compose.) I'm having to tweak many parts of the system to work in a test environment.

To be clear, I'm not working on Dockerizing the actual IF Archive. I am very conservative about making changes in production! The testframe is meant for testing and development, and also as documentation-by-model for how the Archive is configured. Once it's stable... I'll probably put it on the shelf and let the Archive keep running. I love things that just keep running on their own. Big life goal there.

But someday, there will be automation to build the production Archive setup too. As my partner said: this is how archivists deal with mortality.


Renga in Blue

Mexican Adventure (1982)

Here is the last of the Sharpsoft set of games from 1982, the series that included Secret Kingdom, Haunted House, and Dark Star. I’ve got historical background here from writing about Secret Kingdom and here writing about Sharpsoft’s 1981 game Escape from Colditz. Like Secret Kingdom, this one didn’t have A.J. Josey involved, but was […]

Here is the last of the Sharpsoft set of games from 1982, the series that included Secret Kingdom, Haunted House, and Dark Star.

I’ve got historical background here from writing about Secret Kingdom and here writing about Sharpsoft’s 1981 game Escape from Colditz. Like Secret Kingdom, this one didn’t have A.J. Josey involved, but was solely the work of Geoff Clark.

Sharp MZ-80K keys, via Marcin Wichary in the Museum of Computing in Swindon. Attribution license.

The only current available version of the game is for the original, Sharp MZ-80K, the computer originally intended as a kit with the calculator-like keys (see above).

You have just come to from concussion, you have lost your memory. You find yourself in a Mexican prison, your aim is to escape from prison and return to Texas a rich man.

(ADD: Strident points out the MZ-700 version of the game with color is also available.)

Often our protagonists start in jail for crimes they didn’t commit; this time I’m wondering if the player is jail for a crime they did commit. In a gameplay sense, we’ve seen approaches all over the map for opening prison escapes, it being something like a mini one-room game to start proceedings. They sometimes involve breaking out a window (Escape from Rungistan) or out the front (Devil’s Island, which memorably involved having to start by waiting 2 minutes in real time before killing a guard).

From doing LOOK BED you can find a BLANKET. LOOK DOOR reveals THERE IS A GUARD OUTSIDE and LOOK GUARD notes

GUARD LOOKS GREEDY

and I’m not sure what this means, but this is clearly signaling some kind of bribe to start (which I think is new!) BRIBE GUARD gets the response

SHOW IT TO HIM FIRST

but there’s the slight problem that you don’t start with anything valuable.

The SKYLIGHT is BARRED AND AT GROUND LEVEL but doesn’t seem to respond to commands otherwise.

And … that’s as far as I’ve gotten. This is another kick opening where it’s hard to do anything. I did manage to crash the game by typing GET without an object

but I have made no progress past this point. Here’s my verb list attempt:

STA gets NOT YET so I don’t know if that verb is STAND, STAB, or START.

The verbs at least have distinct failure messages. DRINK responds I THINK YOU HAD TOO MUCH TO DRINK ALREADY (not sure our memory issues are just from a concussion!), BURN chides the player with YOU ARSONIST!, DIG responds YOU DO NOT HAVE A SHOVEL, and CONNECT cryptically responds THINK.

I could of course prod open the source code (it’s BASIC) but I feel awkward doing so on the very first puzzle. Having a “kick opening” (start of the game with a tough puzzle) is extremely risky and makes it seem to the player like something might be broken; Wizard and the Princess starting putting cards in packages explaining how to solve the first puzzle. I’m wondering if Sharpsoft received any grumpy letters or anyone who bought this game just coped.

I’ll take speculation from anyone who hasn’t played, but if someone has managed to get farther on their own, I don’t want any “real” hints yet.

(For those who were anticipating the Misadventures rather than this game, there were technical issues severe enough I’m kicking the games to my loop-back list. This means once Mexican Adventure is done I’ll have five games left to go for 1982.)

Thursday, 24. April 2025

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The 2025 Hosted Games Hidden Gems Sale is here!

You’ve cast your votes and chosen five underrated Hosted Games—ChoiceScript games created by players like you and published by us—that haven’t (yet) gotten the attention they deserve! These “Hidden Gems,” selected by a highly scientific poll conducted on our forums, are on sale on all platforms this week! Pick them up for discounts up to 40% off until May 1st on the platform of your choice: Android, the Android Omnibus app, the iOS Omnibus app, the website, and on the Amazon Android Marketplace! Don’t Wake Me Up and Community College Hero: Fun and Games are also available on Steam.


Renga in Blue

Zodiac Castle: Most Magic Is Merely Illusion

This is my victory post, so my previous posts on this game are needed for context. I was originally going to title this post “Outsmarting the Parser” but one puzzle near the end (the last treasure I couldn’t get) dropped me with a pile driver from the top rope. Continuing from last time, I started […]

This is my victory post, so my previous posts on this game are needed for context.

From the North Star Catalog, January 1978, via Bitsavers. I tested the North Star version of this game some and the only major difference I found was that the oil for the lamp was placed one room over.

I was originally going to title this post “Outsmarting the Parser” but one puzzle near the end (the last treasure I couldn’t get) dropped me with a pile driver from the top rope.

Continuing from last time, I started prodding at various elements in the environment trying to get them to be recognized. I came across some luck with a suit of armor in the entry hall.

ARMOR MAKES SENSE–BUT TOUCH??

This is different than the usual message which would be TOUCH ARMOR??, so I ended up just jamming through the various possibilities on my verb list.

OPEN turned out to get a different reaction, meaning it was possible for OPEN ARMOR to do something useful, but what item was I missing? I had a piece of cheese still which didn’t seem right, but maybe the hammer?

I would not have gotten that without some of the parser juking there. The whole sequence gave me pause, though, because even in some circumstances with an item I knew was usable, (like the lamp I was holding) I wasn’t getting the “MAKES SENSE” message. I played around some more and realized not only was the parser cutting at five letters, to get the “MAKES SENSE” message on an noun that can be used it needs to be typed in at exactly five letters: no more, no less. That is, the command “TOUCH LAMP” gets

TOUCH LAMP???

but “TOUCH LAMP ” with the extra space at the end gets

LAMP  MAKES SENSE-BUT TOUCH??

This turns out to be a vitally important fact which helped me break most of the rest of the game. Going back to the drawbridge puzzle from last time:

The screen above shows the state of the drawbridge room before having applied the oil to the gears. If you do any verb followed by GEARS, the game will recognize the noun GEARS. Even a non-real-verb works; after Z GEARS:

GEARS MAKES SENSE-BUT Z??

Getting this important message means that the gears is a recognized noun in the state of the room at this exact moment. After doing OIL GEARS, gears no longer is recognized, so Z GEARS gets the regular message of

Z GEARS???

and you’re instead supposed to refer to the TEETH, so that noun gets activated. Then, after PULL TEETH, the game reaches the horribly stuck condition I was in last time.

I had already rammed through a verb list (ROTATE, TURN, MOVE, LOWER, OPEN, OPERATE, USE, PUSH, PULL, SPIN) with the DRAWBRIDGE, MECHANISM, GEARS, and TEETH. Rather than futilely testing the whole set on every noun in the universe, I could now check to see what noun was actually recognized through the “MAKES SENSE” trick! I did Z on every plausible and non-plausible object that might be referred to in the room before finally hitting paydirt on … the noun BRIDGE. Not DRAWBRIDGE, but BRIDGE. Sigh.

Doing this unleashes some RATS. I was able to give the rats the cheese I had been hanging on to (turning them into FAT, LAZY RATS) and then I could take the rats whilst holding the sack. They’ll be useful later.

I was then able to use the MAKES SENSE trick to figure out the heraldry room. (I want to emphasize I would not have found the trick at all except the word ARMOR had exactly five letters in it. This feels a bit like when a speedrunner finds a glitch that allows skipping a level just because the exit was made 80 pixels high rather than 78 pixels high.)

Mind you, no noun in the entire room description succumbed to the trick: I did Z LARGE, Z COAT (with that crucial extra space after), Z ARMS (ditto), Z HOLE (ditto again), Z VOLUM, Z BOOKC, Z SHELV. This meant I could say with confidence that the solution was not “verb + some noun in the room”. This of course assumes that there is a solution, but the hole in the volume was screaming for something to happen.

Excluding the magic words (which I tried) this left “verb + some noun I was carrying”. I remembered (or rather, noticed from my map) that the SIGNET RING started in the room, so I took that item over and crawled through every verb on my standard verb list, hitting paydirt with INSERT.

Does this feel like “adventure gaming”? Not in the slightest. But at this point I’m satisfied with beating the computer.

The passage leads to the last area of the game, where things mostly went smoother.

The area is mostly dark which means the dragon is in play. I ended up having to get the bow/arrow setup just in case; just note that the dragon can come back any time after being shot, even the exact same turn it gets shot! A much better solution — which I found out when I was done with the game — is to carry the “friendly dog” around which scares the dragon, kind of like the kitten in ADV.CAVES. (The dog is needed anyway because it counts as a treasure.)

The “through happiness” hint applied soon after, as there’s a wine room with a wine bottle (treasure) in a rack.

With some intuition I tried Z RACKS and hit paydirt (that is, it gave the MAKES SENSE message so I knew the noun was recognized), so I just needed to roll through a (very long) verb list before finally reaching SLIDE RACKS.

Those treasures I could cart back “by hand” to the start if I wanted. Moving on, there’s a guard room with a key (useful in a second), a dungeon with bones (not useful at all) and a torture room which looked like it held a secret.

Again using the noun-reference trick, I found that the GRATE did not count as a noun as far as the parser was concerned so any method of opening it required referring to something else. Going through my very small inventory (barring the whole pile of treasures, none which seemed applicable) I came across dropping the rats.

The passage this opens leads through a “bottomless room” (door which needs a key) up to a “meditation room” with a chair. The chair again can’t be referred to, but I decided to try SIT with no noun.

The dragon remained annoying through all this.

Once I managed to coordinate sitting in the chair with no dragon, I tried various meditation-adjacent verbs until I hit THINK, which teleported me to a “round room”. Going in a random direction led to a THRONE ROOM with more treasure.

The round room otherwise teleports back into the castle somewhere random, so after a bit of dragon juggling (and some issues with randomness because I had to take a second loop; the round room’s destination is purely random, rather than always landing you in the throne room first) I was able to get out with nearly every treasure in the game. The dog and book with the spells also count as treasures and were non-obvious at first; however, even with those I was short some points.

I needed the walkthrough from this, via Alex, and I’m going to take a guess Alex looked at source code. I don’t know how anyone was supposed to solve this.

Back in the study — which to be fair was on my strong suspicion list — I had found via The Trick that no nouns were recognized. The picture of Merlin made me think of magic, so tried bringing over the various magic gizmos like the ring that had previously summoned a genie to see if I could get an effect: no dice. I finally — and fortunately — gave up, to find the right command is USE MAGIC.

Look, your guess is as good as mine. That’s one of the worst parser abuses I’ve ever seen, including the entire 40 years I’ve been playing adventure games.

Taking the pouch of rubies over (and the book which I hadn’t dropped yet) triggered an endgame, which is tricky as well but at least it’s a different kind of tricky.

There’s a SORCERER’S ROOM, a MAGIC ROOM and a STAR ROOM. Between the rooms there’s a sorcerer’s hat, a book of black magic, a rod, and a star. After some experimentation I realized you could not carry the book the same time as the hat; I started sensing the kind of logic used in Chinese Puzzle with an arbitrary set of object flags that need to be set. I was also suspicious that this was the sort of puzzle where the meta-command HINT was necessary to get anywhere.

MOST MAGIC IS MERELY ILLUSION, BUT YOU DO NEED THE RIGHT PROPS.

Needing the right props suggested to me I needed to make a thing; the only thing that seemed reasonable was putting together the star and rod to get a wand. Some parser struggle followed as MAKE WAND and PUT STAR don’t work at all. The right conditions are:

a.) you’re in the MAGIC ROOM

b.) you’re holding the STAR and ROD, and only those two items

c.) you type ATTACH STAR

Going back to the STAR ROOM and waving the wand, I was clearly on the right track.

After some fiddling I finally got HOKUS POKUS out again and got an ending, but not the right ending.

All the points, though! Maybe we can call this a real alternate ending because our protagonist deserved it.

I finally succumbed to the walkthrough … which told me to do exactly the same thing I was doing. It said

HOKUS POKUS (you must carry the hat or else the wand explodes).

and I was, in fact, carrying the hat. I finally got a success and I think it simply involves making sure the black magic book doesn’t get touched ever at all, but I’m still unclear on this. At least I got a win.

Windmere Estate, despite having the same parser system, was a much better game; it had mostly reasonable actions, it had better pacing, and it had a map that was memorably interconnected with multiple routes. This game’s emphasis on magic was its downfall for the same reason fantasy has had issues in other early text adventures: the lack of rules makes it tempting for authors to make arbitrary puzzles.

Mind you, it’s possible to make carefully crafted rules that elevate fantasy game puzzles to a high level, like Enchanter (1983) did, but we have to get there first. Lurching ever closer! Coming up: Misadventures 5 and 6. Mexican Adventure. (Change of plans, technical issues plus one of them looks to be a bad dump.)

Wednesday, 23. April 2025

Renga in Blue

Zodiac Castle: As in the Fairy Tale

(Continued from my last post.) Since last time I’ve prodded open the easily-accessible treasures, as well as one of the less-accessible treasures, but I’m stuck with major parser issues. Let’s start with the dragon. As Rob observed in the comments last time, the appearances in dark rooms makes it akin to the vampire bat from […]

(Continued from my last post.)

Since last time I’ve prodded open the easily-accessible treasures, as well as one of the less-accessible treasures, but I’m stuck with major parser issues.

Let’s start with the dragon. As Rob observed in the comments last time, the appearances in dark rooms makes it akin to the vampire bat from Windmere, but making less sense. The Windmere bat can also be easily fended off with a cross, whereas here the dragon is more annoying as it can only be dealt with temporarily.

Specifically: if you have the arrow head and shaft, and you’re standing in the “carpenter’s shop”, you can MAKE ARROW.

You don’t need to bother with lighting the room up first either. The dragon is just as likely to appear with the room lit as with the room dark.

With the BOW back at the cottage from the start of the game, you can then shoot the dragon and reduce it to ashes.

YOU LOOSE YOUR ‘ARROW’ AND IT NEATLY PIERCES THE BEAST’S HEART. HE WRITHES ABOUT AND FINALLY DISAPPEARS LEAVING ONLY A SMALL PILE OF ASHES.

However, dragons continue to occur with roughly the same frequency, so this is only a temporary reprieve. I found it better to simply grab the object in each dragon-guarded room (if there is one) and leave. In the rare case where more than one action was required, I went elsewhere a while and came back to re-roll the dragon appearing. (It doesn’t seem to be “random” so much as “alternating” in appearances but I’m not certain about that.)

I tried to find an iconic “tiny dragon” from this time period, and the closest I could get to was the dragon on the 1981 printing of the Basic Rules for Dungeons & Dragons. It might fit in a bedroom? Via eBay.

Heading back to another issue, that of wondering if you can refer to anything that’s not a separate object: above the guard room is some busted machinery for the closed drawbridge. Remembering the lamp had regular OIL in it straight from a kitchen, I tried OIL GEARS and it made some progress.

Following this with PULL TEETH seemingly resolves the problem with the drawbridge for good.

THIS ROOM CONTAINS THE DRAWBRIDGE MECHANISM. THE GEARS ARE WELL OILED AND FREE AND THE DRAWBRIDGE IS RAISED.

However, no command I’ve tried has gotten farther than this. No LOWER DRAWBRIDGE, or TURN GEARS, or PULL (imaginary) LEVER. (The last one is obviously a stretch but I ran out of options, and this seems to be bespoke-coded anyway where it’s just fishing for a specific phrase rather than referring to a world-model.) The puzzle appears to be optional anyway, because it is possible to traverse the catacombs to return to the treasure-drop point. An even easier way is to use the magic words HOKUS POKUS from the book back at the library.

This either zaps everything in inventory (except the lamp) back to the the treasure room or takes everything from the treasure room and drops it at the player’s feet. This seems to be based on a.) if the player has a item to be teleported in the first place and b.) if the player has already just used HOKUS POKUS but I’m not 100% clear on the logic. I muddled through enough that I was able to use it to rack up close to 60% of the points, so it works sufficiently well.

(If SHAZAM or ABRA CADABRA work anywhere, it must be in a very specific scenario, because the game usually just says SHAZAM??? or ABRA CADABRA??? like my character has just spoken nonsense.)

Out of those points I’ve attained, a good chunk of them are the treasures from the second floor like a ruby ring, an emerald necklace, and a diamond brooch. A dragon would occasionally show up but the treasure can be nabbed in one turn so an arrow is not required.

One room has a dog, fortunately straightforwardly defused by the MEAT.

Thank goodness it didn’t need to be poisoned like in Bedlam.

On the ground floor there was an atrium with some dirt, and bean elsewhere that it was possible to PLANT. The game said the beans needed more, so I took the MANURE from the stables (needed the sack to get it in the first place) and dropped it, getting a little but not enough result.

I took the CHALICES over to where the water in the fountain to the north was and tried GET WATER, and the message I got indicated the keg of ale got filled instead (??). This is just the game being buggy again: it expects the keg and will claim to use it even when it is in an entirely different room. Getting the hint, I drunk the ale out, took the empty keg over, did GET WATER, and after some failed attempts (like DROP WATER, assuming the interaction would mirror that of the manure) found POUR WATER works.

This leads to a tower with a spinning wheel and some flax. In order to avoid dragon-trouble I nabbed each item away, and then tried SPIN FLAX only to get an error. Fortunately, I was persistent in testing things out and tried SPIN FLAX while still in the tower, and the command worked. This is another bug: the command is location based, not based on where the spinning wheel is!

This represents the only new room of the game I’ve found since last time.

Hence with only one exception I’m stabbing at “secrets” where I’m not sure if there’s a secret, and the parser’s difficulty makes the whole process painful (since I might be doing the right thing, just phrasing it in the wrong way). The one exception I just mentioned is the well to the south of the Castle out in the open:

I’ve got a pillow I tried tossing in — no dice, you can only drop it — and I’ve tried forming a rope out of various items like the silk and/or the thread, again without luck. This could of course be the sort of passage that can only be entered from below rather than above.

Potential secrets include:

1.) A study with a portrait of OLD MERLIN. The portrait seemingly cannot be referred to, but I don’t take anything for granted with this parser. The DESK might also yield something (but not with OPEN DESK or OPEN DRAWER).

2.) A heraldry room which originally held a signet ring. There’s a suspicious hole that is resistant to all my attempts to refer to it.

3.) The balcony I showed off in my last post. You can jump to your death, very exciting. But maybe you can climb somewhere?

4.) Any other room in the entire game.

Even a random nondescript catacomb-room might react to one of the magic words. I am thrilled about the possibility of testing the two unused words (SHAZAM and ABRA CADABRA) in every single one. This is my thrilled face.

Monday, 21. April 2025

Renga in Blue

Zodiac Castle (1982)

WELCOME TO THE KINGDOM OF ZODIAC. IT IS A SMALL BUT VERY INTERESTING KINGDOM. THE LANDS ARE MOSTLY WOODED WITH LARGE OAK FORESTS. THE CASTLE ITSELF IS QUITE LARGE FOR THE SIZE OF THE KINGDOM BUT THE RULER ALWAYS HAS BELIEVED THAT HIS SUBJECTS SHOULD SUPPORT HIM WELL. This is the last of the North […]

WELCOME TO THE KINGDOM OF ZODIAC. IT IS A SMALL BUT VERY INTERESTING KINGDOM. THE LANDS ARE MOSTLY WOODED WITH LARGE OAK FORESTS. THE CASTLE ITSELF IS QUITE LARGE FOR THE SIZE OF THE KINGDOM BUT THE RULER ALWAYS HAS BELIEVED THAT HIS SUBJECTS SHOULD SUPPORT HIM WELL.

This is the last of the North Star adventure games we’ll be playing that was published by Dynacomp (see Uncle Harry’s Will for historical context; Whembly Castle and Windmere Estate were the other two games). Like Windmere Estate, this game is from the mysterious Dennis N. Strong.

I threw everything I could out but could not locate Mr. Strong. The Dennis Strong mentioned here who is a transportation engineer is actually Dennis W. Strong. That means all we’re left with is the Dynacomp ad copy, which compares Zodiac Castle to Windmere and says says:

This time you start in a glen near the castle and must find and accumulate treasures. The play is the same, but the treasures and circumstances are different.

Again, there are both North Star version and Apple II version again; this time the original Apple II version was broken but now has been fixed thanks to LanHawk. Apple II seems to be the optimal version now for both Strong games. My guess is it was written second in both cases and the author used the opportunity to make some bug fixes (and add a fatal bug in the case of Zodiac Castle, which now has been fixed).

THERE ARE MANY PLACES TO EXPLORE, RIDDLES TO SOLVE, AND TREASURES TO GATHER. THE ‘GUILDED COCK’ IS WHERE TREASURES ARE DROPPED TO SCORE.

Mind you, the game still isn’t bug-free, as you’ll see.

Action starts in a GLEN next to the usual forest-style area…

…with a DENSE FOREST room meant to catch anyone who goes the wrong direction. The game then (upon moving any direction from the dense forest) will either loop back to the same room are send the player to the glen. I am grateful there is no maze.

The tavern with the colorful name is where the treasures go. There’s a LAMP and ALE there that can be taken; the lamp uses oil, as an emphasis on while Windmere Estate was in a “realistic modern” area, this one’s set in a fantasy castle.

To the north is a cottage with a BOW (but no arrows). The sleeping loft above requires light (just the command ON to use the lamp). Upon entering I made a curious discovery:

Either the dragon is very small or the cottage is very large! In all seriousness, in various “dark rooms” across the map the dragon can appear in any of them so I assume does a fair amount of magical teleportation. It isn’t 100% aggressive, and if you grab the cheese and go you’ll be safe, but any hanging around or especially threatening the dragon will result in death.

Petting is considered a threat. In seriousness, this seems to intercept any verb connected to DRAGON to have this result, even a nonsense one. That is, every action is “blacklisted” here and there likely is only one or two “whitelisted” actions that will help defeat / scare away / make friends with the dragon.

The castle has its drawbridge up so can’t be entered directly; if you jump in to swim while holding the lamp, it will get ruined. The trick is to go to the south where there’s a visible ledge and THROW LAMP.

This dumps out the oil if done anywhere else, which is annoyingly inconsistent. If I were giving author advice I’d say to simply prevent THROW LAMP working elsewhere with some message about “that’s risky because the oil might come out, you should only do that where you really need it”.

With that done you can SWIM over (finding a SILVER GOBLET on the way) and then head southeast down a DARK SLOPING PASSAGE into some CATACOMBS. You might expect with that name and the predictability of being a Treasure Hunt that this is a maze, but only sort of.

In nearly every room, there is only one entrance and one exit. The “maze” is just a linear path. Mapping it still involved significant work because no directions are specified, so I had to keep testing all ten possibilities (N/S/E/W/NE/SE/SW/NW/U/D) in every room, and I had to keep testing even after finding the exit just in case there was some deviation from the pattern.

It is essentially the type of labyrinth without branches, where walking the path is meant as a spiritual experience. Picture via the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres website.

There was in fact such a deviation, where you can go north, south and east from the room in the middle; this is reminiscent of the Crowther/Woods all-alike maze having a “diagonal” exit hiding the pirate treasure, when every other exit was normal cardinal directions. That is, the intent is to trick the player into thinking there is a universal pattern when there is one slight deviation that holds a treasure.

Both the magic ring and jade idol you get from rubbing it count as treasures.

At the end of the catacombs my lamp burned out, so I ran through again with the lamp off and had a unique problem.

The game doesn’t stop you from walking through darkness with grues or inconvenient pits to tumble into. However, at intervals along the path there are rooms where the code is broken (“YOU ARE”) and if the player walks into one they are now in a “Void”. Just like the similar rooms in Bilingual Adventure the game is now broken and softlocked.

It turns out there’s no need to be conservative: having the lamp run out upon leaving the catacombs is a hard-coded event! So the author sacrificed simulationism for a dramatic moment of getting out of the darkness just in time. After, there’s some oil in a vat (seemingly unlimited) you can find and FILL LAMP, which gives exactly 100 turns. In other words, the game switches from a drama-time treatment of the light source to a simulationist treatment.

Just past the catacombs is a small castle worker area; guard station, stables, blacksmith, carpenter. All of these locations are dark (you need to get the oil from a vat in the castle itself and then come back) and all of them potentially have the dragon show up.

All together there’s a MUSLIN SACK, THIN WOODEN SHAFT, HAMMER, MANURE, and ARROW HEAD. The quote marks around SHAFT in the screenshot above means you’re supposed to refer to the THIN WOODEN SHAFT as just a “shaft” in the parser.

The game does understand MAKE ARROW but says I don’t have the right tools yet. I haven’t experimented with this sufficiently to know if this message is location-based or object-based or both.

Trekking into the castle proper next:

The game tries hard to add color to the room descriptions.

I’m having the issue — which happened in Windmere as well — of not knowing what I should be paying attention to. The objects are clearly separate and able to be picked up, but is anything else in a room description interactive? The main issue here is that — assuming the answer is yes — then most nouns in the room descriptions don’t work. So this is a scenario where playing requires dealing with a lot of error messages trying to see if there’s anything special.

For example, you can’t find if the chair might unlock some secret until you try actions like SIT CHAIR. (The game just says SIT CHAIR??? if you try it. GET CHAIR and the game claims “THERE ISN’T ANY CHAIR YOU CAN GET”.)

The book above incidentally indicates some spells, it “MUST HAVE BEEN MERLIN’S BOOK OF MAGIC” and mentions “SHAZAM”, “HOKUS POKUS” and “ABRA CADABRA” as possibilities. Only HOKUS POKUS is recognized although the result is mysterious.

THERE ARE STRANGE RUMBLINGS FROM SOMEWHERE UNDER THE GROUND!

YOU ARE IN A LIBRARY

THERE IS A SILVER ‘GOBLET’

The goblet was not there before; it was a treasure I had stored back in the Guilded Cock. My guess would be the word lets you warp treasures back and forth somehow so you don’t have to go in person to deliver all of them, but it feels broken, and might even be buggy enough that the effect is supposed to be something totally different (like opening a particular secret passage).

Elsewhere in the castle there’s a VAT OF OIL for refilling the lamp, some MEAT, CHALICES, a SIGNET RING, and some BEANS. The BEANS can go over to some DIRT at the Atrium but the game claims the beans must need “SOMETHING ELSE”.

On to upstairs now:

The upstairs room are almost purely treasure dispensers. In a row there’s a blue bedroom (DIAMOND BROOCH), a pink bedroom (SATIN PILLOW), red bedroom (RUBY RING), and green bedroom (EMERALD NECKLACE). The only wrinkle in just snatching and leaving is that the rooms are dark and so the dragon can visit.

There’s some SILK in a Maid Room, a CAMEO BROOCH and DIAMOND NECKLACE in a Sitting Room, and JEWELED DAGGER and ferocious dog in the Master Bedroom. OK, I suppose the dog isn’t a treasure. Meat would be the most obvious thing to try on the dog but I haven’t experimented yet.

Finally, just like Windmere Estate, there’s a balcony with a view.

The issue that made Windmere difficult was a plethora of secrets to open (and those secrets ended up having some sequences where the puzzles got tricky). My intuition is telling me this isn’t as hard a game, but Windmere didn’t seem that hard at first either.

One bit I skimmed over outside: there’s a well to the south of the castle with no rope.

I’m not really “stuck” in that there’s many things I haven’t tried yet, but I’ve reached the edge of the obvious map so I’ll have to start prodding for those secrets soon.


Gold Machine

Leather Goddesses of Phobos: We’re so Back

I think there will always be people impressed by a marriage between entertainment and exploration of serious topics; and I think there will always be people who say “screw that message shit; I’m here to have a fun time.” (Steve Meretzky, 2013) Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986) Play and read along with game and source […] The post Leather Goddesses of Phobos: We’re so Back a

I think there will always be people impressed by a marriage between entertainment and exploration of serious topics; and I think there will always be people who say “screw that message shit; I’m here to have a fun time.” (Steve Meretzky, 2013)

Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986)

Play and read along with game and source files (Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog)
Packaging, copy protection, etc. (MoCAGH archive)
Packaging, copy protection, etc. (Infodoc archive)
Internet Archive query: “Leather Goddesses of Phobos”
HTML Invisiclues
Archived (z5) Invisiclues
Map (Infodoc archive)

Opening Crawl

  Some material in this story may not be suitable for children, especially the parts involving sex, which no one should know anything about until reaching the age of eighteen (twenty-one in certain states). This story is also unsuitable for censors, members of the Moral Majority, and anyone else who thinks that sex is dirty rather than fun.

The attitudes expressed and language used in this story are representative only of the views of the author, and in no way represent the views of Infocom, Inc. or its employees, many of whom are children, censors, and members of the Moral Majority. (But very few of whom, based on last year's Christmas Party, think that sex is dirty.)

By now, all the folks who might be offended by LEATHER GODDESSES OF PHOBOS have whipped their disk out of their drive and, evidence in hand, are indignantly huffing toward their dealer, their lawyer, or their favorite repression-oriented politico. So... Hit the RETURN/ENTER key to begin!


...


The place: Upper Sandusky, Ohio. The time: 1936. The beer: at a nickel a mug, you don't ask for brand names. All you know is that your fifth one tasted as bad as the first.

LEATHER GODDESSES OF PHOBOS
Infocom interactive fiction -- a racy space-age spoof
Copyright (c) 1986 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
LEATHER GODDESSES OF PHOBOS is a trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Release 4 / Serial number 880405 / Interpreter 0 Version


Joe's Bar
An undistinguished bar, yet the social center of Upper Sandusky. The front door is almost lost amidst the hazy maze of neon that shrouds the grimy glass of the south wall. Doors marked "Ladies" and "Gents" lead, respectively, northeast and northwest.

You feel an urge.

A Critical Introduction to Leather GOddesses of Phobos

This August will mark the 40th anniversary of Steve Meretzky’s A Mind Forever Voyaging. It is the sort of game that attracts critics, and that attraction has only grown over the years. Hand-wringing over “fairness to Reagan” has perhaps been displaced by anxiety over more recent political developments. AMFV turns up on “best of” lists rather frequently. Even critics who dislike it acknowledge it (sometimes begrudgingly) as a milestone in the evolution of interactive media. I, myself, wrote ten posts about it. Only Brian Moriarty’s Trinity has (or will) receive so much attention.

And yet, for all that, it was both a commercial bomb and an indicator of the future shape of Infocom’s fortunes. To be fair, it was hardly an outlier in terms of its performance. In fact, 1985’s Wishbringer was the lone interruption of the slump that followed The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Bolstered by widespread love for Douglas Adams and his works, HHGG proved to be a misleading sales blip promising a widening audience that never materialized. While it had something to offer Adams fans (particularly those who invested in Invisiclues), it might have been less popular among fans of the genre, especially those who took pride in solving games without hints.

In any case, the game did not appear to make interactive fiction believers of anyone. Or if it did, those new converts were not interested in Suspect (Lebling 1984), A Mind Forever Voyaging (Meretzky 1985), Spellbreaker (Lebling 1985), Ballyhoo (O’Neill 1986), or Trinity (Moriarty 1986). That is to say nothing of other abuses of the Z-machine: Cornerstone (1985) and Fooblitzky (1986).

How and why did Leather Goddesses of Phobos manage to break that dismal streak? The ready, easy answer is that “sex sells.” I could not avoid the phrase during a literature review of this work. It would be naive to dispute the commercial value of sexualized content, certainly, but leaving things there is a critical abdication. While Leather Goddesses of Phobos is the sixth best-selling Infocom game, the fifth was decidedly unsexualized Wishbringer. The problem with overemphasizing the naughty bits is that one might get the idea that we have on our hands a kind of “dirtbag Ballyhoo” that slavering consumers could not resist.

The contrary truth is that Leather Goddesses of Phobos is Infocom’s last, great puzzler. You may have other games in the back half of the catalog that you enjoy. I certainly do! But if Trinity is Infocom’s highest expression of the cave game as a literary genre, then Leather Goddesses of Phobos is its rambunctious, pulpy counterpart. The voice and setting are a knowing and pitch-perfect send up of classic late night science fiction. Monsters, ray guns, rocket ships. Cave people in animal print swimwear. Ambiguously fetish-inspired alien royalty. LGoP is smart, funny, and giddy with amused affection over its source material.

Since there is only one review of Leather Goddesses of Phobos at the Interactive Fiction Database, I worry that many readers may not realize that this is, in fact, one of Infocom’s best games. Yes, it is bawdy, and that’s an attraction to be sure, but the real story is that people came for the sex and stayed for the game. I have long said that Steve Meretzky was Infocom’s best puzzle designer, and here we find him at his best.

It’s worth noting that, while Leather Goddesses of Phobos is often portrayed as Infocom’s and Meretzky’s retreat from social and political content, it openly mocks the hypocrisy of religious conservatism that was, at that time, an emergent force in Republican politics. LGoP is, for all its apparent silliness, a stunning culmination of Meretzky’s career to date: well-designed, intertextual, humorous, and socially aware: an absolute knockout.

It may be Infocom’s last, great commercial hit, but what a way to go.

Next

We’ll examine the text itself, discussing its craft qualities and elements of play.

The post Leather Goddesses of Phobos: We’re so Back appeared first on Gold Machine.


Renga in Blue

Bedlam: Corrected With Time and Shock Treatment

I’ve finished the game to the extent I’m calling this done; my previous post is needed for context. This unfortunately a case where the Bedlam’s ambitions described by the manual were technically correct but in practice nearly everything is a smokescreen. There are only three (3) endings, and one of those gets chosen at random. […]

I’ve finished the game to the extent I’m calling this done; my previous post is needed for context.

The alternate cover of the Tandy Color Computer version of the game. Via the Internet Archive.

This unfortunately a case where the Bedlam’s ambitions described by the manual were technically correct but in practice nearly everything is a smokescreen. There are only three (3) endings, and one of those gets chosen at random. The game starts to approach a fascinating idea but the author doesn’t quite fully get there. I’ll get back to this thought after I’ve done showing off the game.

Before bringing up TRS-80 screens again, I want to pull one more thing out of the manual: it has a psychological questionnaire.

While this is in the external materials, I’ll still count it as part of the game, marking a first of sorts that gets picked up again by games like A Mind Forever Voyaging and Tender Loving Care. It’s in a format similar to the (in)famous Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test which gets used as a diagnostic tool. Here are some samples from the real one:

I think I would enjoy the work of a librarian.
I am easily awakened by noise.
My father is a good man (or if your father is dead) my father was a good man.
I like to read newspaper articles on crime.
My hands and feet are usually warm enough.

The test sometimes has the feeling of being “stacked” against the one doing the test and there are questions involving actions supposedly “everyone” has done so they are used to determine if someone is lying. For Beldam’s version, every question has no correct answer, so you are already determined to be psychologically unfit by the end:

Question 2 — Thinking you are smarter than others

Answering Yes points to a “Superiority Complex,” which may be corrected with time and shock treatment. Score 5 points for a Yes Answer.

Answering No indicates a feeling of inferiority, which may or may not be true. Further study is needed, so score 5 points for a No answer.

Unsure shows a very wishy-washy individual. Go back and answer with a Yes or a No, or else give yourself 10 points for your uncertainty.

Question 20 asks about the word PLUGH and is one of the “hints” for the game. PLUGH is from Crowther/Woods but here it is also useful, because if you’ve had the “lobotomy” it will cure it. (I’m fairly sure the neither the doctor nor nurse are licensed professionals, especially for a reason you’ll see shortly.)

Moving on:

To the west of the starting area there is a maintenance room with a “hook” intended for opening windows (there are no windows in this game) a BLUE PILL, and a cabinet with a red key trapped inside.

I tested after some thought GET RED KEY WITH HOOK and it worked. (The only reason it took me a little time is the hook’s description tags it for a totally different purpose which it never gets used for.) With the red key in hand it is possible to open all three doors to the south that are originally locked.

Two of the rooms are padded cells; note that they make for one of the available places that patients can show up them (I’ll give the full list of possibilities after I’m done showing off the landscape). The third red door (the farthest to the east) leads to a new hallway with some more padded rooms (these not locked), a kitchen with a refrigerator and MEAT, and finally an exit blocked by a GUARD DOG.

Now, I had some suspicions already about a branch right here, as I tested EAT PILL on a couple runs, and found sometimes it gets a YECCH, TASTES AWFUL! and sometimes it tastes like nothing:

SEEMS RISKY, BUT O.K. GULP! HMMM. NO EFFECT?

There is indeed no effect … if you’re the one that eats it. If you take the no-taste-for-humans pill and PUT PILL IN MEAT, giving it to the dog will eliminate the dog. (I would have expected the “yecch” pill to be the deadly one. The fact the game parsers the command and doesn’t let you deviate too far otherwise suggested to me I had to just keep trying, but it took until my sixth reset that I got the right effect.

This is close to a victory, but if you try to leave, you get tossed in a locked STORAGE SHED. You need to green key that the “nurse” was guarding. There are two ways of doing this.

One, the “normal adventurer” way, is to use the hook again. You can just GET GREEN KEY WITH HOOK while standing in the adjacent room. It’s unclear the hook visualization lets you reach that far, or that the green key was placed in such a way that this would even be practical, but it’s the sort of thing that was worth a try since it worked on the red key.

Two, the “thing I found out from a walkthrough” way, is to use the lobotomy. Specifically, when it happens, you start wandering randomly, the “wander” phase happens before the “nurse applies electro-therapy” phase, so you can pick up the green key, and have the brain damage trigger, escaping her clutches (and then PLUGH works to get out).

With the green key via either method, when tossed in to the shed you can then escape. (If you didn’t get the green key beforehand, you are stuck there forever. Bummer.)

This escape method only works if you randomly get selected the right ending.

If the game picks the BLUE-PILL-EXIT then you get BluePillA. Otherwise you get BluePillB. Both pills can be dissolved in the hamburger meat and fed to the dog. But BluePillA is poison and will kill the dog.

Before getting into the other two exits, let me briefly describe the characters.

HOUDINI and MERLIN we have already met last time. HOUDINI you can untie and he will follow you around trying to undo a straitjacket, but he’ll never manage (and there’s no way you can help). MERLIN will mutter about you being a demon but also is no help whatseover.

You can also run into a DOCTOR. Or “doctor”. Or “‘doctor'”. It’s hard to tell with this game.

Given the number of unlicensed procedures I experienced while playing, I think the fellow here might be telling the truth. Or maybe he’s only telling the truth on certain world-variants. Either way, he is of no importance to escape.

Next comes PICASSO. He wanders around — doesn’t necessarily follow you, I never quite worked out the logic — and paints doors on the walls.

This represents one of the exits! If this particular ending is the one chosen, then one of Picasso’s painted doors is a real door and you can open it.

THE PAINTED DOOR OPENS TO REVEAL AN ESCAPE ROUTE! YOU HAVE ESCAPED!

Another character you can run across is X-RAY RAY. He is genuinely useful for reasons I’ll get to.

Finally there’s NAPOLEON, the “MIGHTIEST LEADER IN THE WORLD”, as he tells us.

Napoleon being “mighty” is important as there’s a third possible ending. If you don’t have the dog-ending or the painted-door-ending you’ve got a secret-door ending, and you need to wandering around trying either EXAMINE ROOM (I looked this up, it’s pretty unusual parser use) or get Ray to help look at rooms. One of the rooms will have a secret door, but the door is stuck and you aren’t strong enough to open it. Napoleon is, and you can command him with NAPOLEON OPEN DOOR:

NAPOLEON GRABS THE SECRET DOOR AND BUSTS IT OPEN! THE SECRET DOOR LEADS TO ESACPE! YOU’VE MADE IT!

The actual gameplay is fairly chaotic with all the various people and it being unclear what use, if any, do the various people have. In the end, according to random roll,

* there’s an ending which doesn’t involve patients at all

* there’s an ending which involves one particular patient (Picasso)

* there’s an ending which involves a different particular patient (Napoleon)

with X-Ray Ray potentially helping with not only the Napoleon ending, but the Picasso one, as he can see the painted-door exit before it gets drawn in!

Still I feel like this game involved missed opportunity, as for the most part, the interactions you have with the characters is meaningless. It doesn’t always feel that way in practice — I enjoyed prodding Merlin trying to get him to react to things — but without a payoff it was akin to Deadline but without the character interaction model working, or the ability to command characters at all really.

NAPOLEON, GO NORTH
THE OBSTINATE REPLY IS “I DON’T WANT TO.”

What I was really hoping for is something along the lines of Maniac Mansion, where each character has suggested skills and rather than picking characters at the start there are patients randomly assigned to be “helpful”. This would lead to a variety of routes through the game where the skill availability itself is what determines what endings are available.

In actual practice with Bedlam, based on the various testimonials I’ve heard, people often never got as far as an ending; this was a tool to play around and mess around with Merlin and Co., and the randomization added an extra spice which gave it a mysterious aura. That is, by not resolving just exactly what was going on, the game becomes something more in the imagination.

Compared to Xenos, this game is more clever conceptually, while that game works better as an overall experience.

I do want to emphasize this wasn’t end of Arnstein writing games; in 1983 he wrote three action games (Radio Ball, Androne, Reactoid). I’m not sure his full story after, although he eventually returned to his electrical engineering roots. In 1993 his name is associated with three new companies: Rhotech Labs, R & R Labs, and PM Labs. In 1994 Rhotech started advertising a “cartridge emulator” for computers in order to “make your own video game workstation”.

You can see a picture here of their ROMulator.

Coming up: Zodiac Castle, which might be the last “traditional” game of 1982.

Saturday, 19. April 2025

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

April meeting (online)

The Boston IF meetup for March will be Monday, April 28, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting. Note that while the April meeting will be on Zoom, future meetings may jump to other platforms. One of the topics for April is […]

The Boston IF meetup for March will be Monday, April 28, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

Note that while the April meeting will be on Zoom, future meetings may jump to other platforms. One of the topics for April is to discuss what platforms might be good.


Renga in Blue

Bedlam (1982)

1970: the Association for Computing Machinery held a “Special Events” conference in New York City, which they dubbed THE UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTION. It was essentially oriented towards presenting the still-relatively-new idea of computers to the public. As the co-chairmen Monty Newborn and Kenneth King wrote: Five events are scheduled: Town Hall I and Town Hall II […]

1970: the Association for Computing Machinery held a “Special Events” conference in New York City, which they dubbed THE UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTION. It was essentially oriented towards presenting the still-relatively-new idea of computers to the public. As the co-chairmen Monty Newborn and Kenneth King wrote:

Five events are scheduled: Town Hall I and Town Hall II are open free to the public and are intended to provide the public an opportunity to question experts on computer related matters; the Cinema Computer will show a series of movies on computer related subjects, computer generated movies, and a movie and a talk on a sophisticated robot; the Computer Arts Festival is featuring the most recent work in computer art and computer music along with a one day forum involving leading figures in the art, music, and education fields; the First United States Computer Chess Championship is the first tournament of its kind.

I admit I’m very interested in the movie schedule (given on page 8 of the source I just linked). It kicks off with the Bell Labs film The Incredible Machine from 1968…

…and somehow passes through the COMPUTER COMPOSED BALLET AND SWORD FIGHT provided by the Central Office of Information in the UK, a group more known in 1970s for PSAs warning children not to play on thin ice and to stay away from electrical substations.

The relevant event for us today from the UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTION is the chess championship, which (as advertised) was the first of its kind. As these games were played on giant mainframes located scattered about the country, play was done remotely, with moves being called in.

Chess Computer Loses Game in a King‐Size Blunder. New York Times, September 02, 1970. Source.

The first exception to this remote style of play happened during the 1977 running of the championship, as a microcomputer was entered in for the first time: 8080 Chess, designed by the electrical engineer Robert Arnstein of Dallas, Texas, using a S-100 bus.

Ply logic, from the manual for the game. The easiest way to play 8080 Chess now is via the SOL-20 version.

While I don’t have any videos from that particular championship, I do have one from the World Championship that happened the same year in Toronto, so you can watch the style of play.

8080 Chess ended up 9th out of 12 entries; remember every other program was on a large mainframe. 8080 Chess was not necessarily the best microcomputer chess out there, especially given when it was entered into a microcomputer tournament a year later it scored fifth out of 11 (the famous program Sargon won); still, the moment is one that puts Robert Arnstein in the history books.

I mention this because he seems neglected otherwise. We have here the last game we’ll be playing from Robert Arnstein; we started 9 years ago with playing Haunted House (1979) and end our journey here (although Xenos came later chronologically, I’ve covered that game already).

Historically, the trail followed by Ken and Roberta Williams is well-remembered; other Apple II games like Transylvania reflected the same style. Infocom’s Zork sold so well it is perhaps the only pure text-adventure a random modern person could name. Assorted British games like Pimania at least have some recognition in Europe.

The last three Arnstein games — Raäka-Tū, Bedlam, Xenos — also have strong recognition, but for an entirely different group of people. That’s because these were first party Radio Shack games.

When I originally played the game back in 1984, it was at a friend’s house, and it was the first adventure type game I had ever played. I was immediately intrigued that you could tell the game what to do by typing in commands such as go north, go south, open door, etc. Up until that point, the only videogames I had played were the arcade types which were only based on how fast you could push the button to shoot the enemy.

Quoting “Karen” on Xenos from Figment Fly

Radio Shack was possessive about displaying product in their stores, and because there was a lot of them, any products they sold had massive exposure.

While there was a book they sold which listed sources for “indie games”, there wasn’t the massive outflow of third-party boxed product like there was with the Apple II. The Arnstein games thus formed sort of a parallel history of early adventure games, where players who just had access to a TRS-80 had their strong childhood memories form around these games as opposed to The Hobbit or Mask of the Sun. I have no doubt there were people whose first exposure to Crowther/Woods was via Pyramid 2000.

To put it another way, in the major histories of text adventures in the 21st century (Twisty Little Passages, The Digital Antiquarian, 50 Years of Text Games) Arnstein’s name doesn’t appear at all. Now, there are bazillions of authors we have covered here who don’t, but many of those people aren’t well-known by anybody; for a particular subset of players in this particular cul-de-sac of time, these games were pillars in their imagination. I think maybe out of all the games Bedlam should be better remembered universally, because wow, it does something wildly ambitious.

From Figment Fly.

This has a “you’re in an asylum, get out” premise to its plot which suggests to me Arnstein was thinking of Deathmaze 5000 and Asylum, both which would have been well known to a TRS-80 author. From the manual:

There are no hidden treasures to find, no wealth to amass, no score to beat. There is only one goal–get out, if you can. Your success depends totally upon your resourcefulness and your ability to think clearly. There is always one way out, but be warned–the exit changes each time you load the game.

The fact the “exit changes each time you load the game” suggests Arnstein may have also been thinking of Madness and the Minotaur. This is a adventure-roguelike with a “light” amount of randomization: where the nature of the characters is randomized, and linked to that there are consequently multiple endings where only particular endings might be available on a particular playthrough.

To help you escape, you can try enlisting the aid of some of the people you meet. Just remember where you are. Can a man running around painting doors on walls and claiming to be Picasso really help? Can a man who says he is Houdini get you out? What about using “X-Ray” Johnson to burn a hole in the wall to gain freedom? Perhaps the guard dog just needs a little attention. Maybe the nurse or the doctor with the hypodermic needle (if he really is a doctor) can be persuaded to help you.

Their ability to help also changes each time you load the game. Depending on the active escape route, you will either be able to escape without help from anyone, or you will need help from one or more of the people you meet. Some of the inhabitants of Bedlam are neither friendly nor cooperative. They do not get along with other inmates and some will try to stop you from leaving.

Rather than starting in a cell that requires escape, the door is open and you are free to wander.

Except, you might run across a doctor who gets upset and gives you the needle:

After the lobotomy you start “wandering” at random. I did not type the WEST, NORTH, and WEST commands from the screenshot below, the game typed them for me.

While I have trouble saying for certain at this phase of my gameplay, I think the author designed this with a compact map in mind (compared to his other games) and with an emphasis on complex character interactions / random generation. My map so far:

Everything is laid out in a hallway where the north doors are green (unlocked) and the south doors are red (locked). To the far west is an office where the doctor lurks, although the doctor can wander at random; nearby the doctor is a “dispensary” with a locked cabinet (inside I could see a red key), a blue pill, and a hook meant for opening windows. (Please keep in mind some or all of this might be placed randomly, I’ll need to do more tests.)

To the far east is an electroshock therapy room with a women dressed in a roller derby uniform in a uniform that looks like she does roller derby. There’s a green key there but I can’t take it without getting a treatment (losing the green key in the process).

Of the green doors, two of them have patients (again, in my current save-file). “Houdini” is hanging in one:

I haven’t been able to FREE HOUDINI or otherwise help him.

“Merlin” is in another and he thinks I’m a demon he has summoned.

I’ll need to do some more experimentation to see how far down the rabbit hole this game really goes. I know, at the very least, the manual isn’t lying about the multiple endings.

(And for anyone who has played it, please no hints whatsoever, I’m in the “fun toybox” phase of the game despite the lobotomies. I have suffered four so far. I am now wondering if a lobotomy is required for one or more of the endings.)

Friday, 18. April 2025

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian

The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 2: The Scandal

That’s the challenge: giving the public a formula they know and feel comfortable with, but making it different from anything they’ve seen or experienced before. — Roberta Williams Although Ken Williams left his office at Sierra On-Line for the last time on November 1, 1997, his wife Roberta Williams stayed on for another year, working […]

That’s the challenge: giving the public a formula they know and feel comfortable with, but making it different from anything they’ve seen or experienced before.

— Roberta Williams

Although Ken Williams left his office at Sierra On-Line for the last time on November 1, 1997, his wife Roberta Williams stayed on for another year, working on the eighth entry in her iconic King’s Quest series. King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity turned into the most protracted and tortured project of her long career.

Roberta had long since fallen into a pattern of alternating new King’s Quest games with other, original creations. Thus after Phantasmagoria shipped in the summer of 1995, it was time for her to begin to sculpt a King’s Quest VIII. Yet she was unusually slow to get going in earnest this time around; perhaps she was feeling some of the same sense of exhaustion that her husband was struggling with in a very different professional context. She tinkered with ideas for the better part of a year, during which the fateful acquisition of Sierra by CUC came to pass. By the time a team was finally assembled around her to make King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity in mid-1996, Sierra’s day-to-day operations were teetering on the cusp of enormous changes, not the least of which would be Ken Williams’s dramatically circumscribed authority. To further punctuate the sense of a new era in the offing, Mask of Eternity was to be the first King’s Quest game ever not to be made in Oakhurst, California; this one would come out of the new offices in Bellevue, Washington. Most members of the team assigned to it were new as well, with the most prominent exception being producer Mark Seibert, who had filled the same role on the hugely successful King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride and Phantasmagoria.

By this point, the lack of any subsequent point-and-click adventure games that had sold in similar numbers to Phantasmagoria, from Sierra or anyone else, was sufficient to raise concerns about the genre’s health in any thoughtful observer of the state of the industry. Roberta Williams apparently was such an observer, for it was she herself who decided to make Mask of Eternity different from all of the King’s Quest games that had come before, in order to better meet the desires of contemporary gamers as she understood them. Using Mark Seibert, who had played a lot more of the recent popular non-adventure games than she had, as something of a spirit guide to the new normal, she conceived a King’s Quest that would run in a real-time 3D engine, combining her usual focus on storytelling and puzzle-solving with some action elements. The broader goal would be to create a dynamic living world full of emergent potential, rather than another collection of set-piece puzzles linked together by semi-interactive conversations and non-interactive cutscenes. “We didn’t want to make it so you go here and solve a puzzle, then go there to solve a puzzle, then go to a puzzle somewhere else,” she told an early journalist on the scene. “What we really wanted to bring was that sense of going on an adventure, of going on a quest. It’s not just a word in the title. We want you to feel like you’re really doing it.”

Taken in the abstract, her understanding of what she needed to do in order to keep King’s Quest relevant wasn’t by any means completely misguided. Yet circumstances almost immediately began to militate against it cohering into a solid, playable game. SCI, the venerable adventure engine that had powered the last four King’s Quest games and Phantasmagoria, along with dozens of other products from Sierra, was totally unsuited for this one. To replace it, the team wound up borrowing a 3D engine that had been developed by Sierra’s subsidiary Dynamix with flight simulators in mind. They never were able to fully wrestle it into a form suitable for this application; the finished game remains a festival of jank, sporting walls that you can literally walk right through if you hit them just right.

Roberta Williams felt her own authority being gradually undermined as the new order at Sierra, now merely one part of the software arm of CUC, became a fact of life. In the past, she had enjoyed privileges that were granted to none of Sierra’s other designers — such were the benefits of sleeping with the boss, as she herself sometimes joked. She had worked from home most days, emailing her design documents to the people entrusted with implementing them and then supervising their labor only loosely from afar. But she now found that her ability to set her own working hours and location and even to make fundamental decisions about her own game was waning in tandem with her husband’s fading star. “Suddenly finding that she was expected to build another bestselling King’s Quest game, but that the developers didn’t really have to do what she said, was something Roberta had never had to face,” writes Ken in his memoir. “There were days when she would come home crying.”

In the last week of 1996, Blizzard Entertainment, that rising star of the CUC software arm, shipped Diablo to instant, smashing success. A decree came down from above to make Mask of Eternity more like Diablo, by adding extensive monster-killing and other CRPG-like elements to the design. Roberta Williams was utterly out of her depth. Increasingly, she felt like a third wheel on her own bicycle. And yet there was no other confident and empowered voice and vision to replace hers, just a babble of opinions — hers among them, of course — trying to arrive at some sort of consensus on every new question that came up. Whatever his other faults as an administrator and organizer, Ken Williams had never allowed this to happen. His rule had always been that there was one lead designer on each project, and that person called the shots. If the lead designer “wanted something done, whether the team agreed or not, it didn’t matter. It’s her game and her career on the line.” Now, though, this philosophy no longer held sway at Sierra, even as there was no coherent alternative one to take its place.

So, the Mask of Eternity team bumbled along with no clear ship date in sight, more a mob of wayward peasants than a well-honed army. In the meantime, there were more big changes at the corporate level: as we learned in the last article, the merger of CUC with HFS was announced in May of 1997. It was to be consummated that December, with the conjoined corporation taking the name of “Cendant,” from the Latin root that has given us the verb “to ascend” in English. The name was chosen by Walter Forbes, reflecting the conceit of a culture-vulture sophisticate in which he so loved to cloak himself. For his part, Henry Silverman of HFS, who was all about facts and figures and bottom lines, thought one name was as good as another, as long as his marketing people told him it would pass muster on Wall Street.

Well before the merger was completed, there were signs that this shotgun marriage of opposites was going to be a more challenging relationship than either had anticipated. Silverman ran a tight, focused ship, while Forbes’s board of directors and senior managers were, as Ken Williams had experienced firsthand, more inclined to discuss their golf handicaps than matters of vital interest to the company. “They were like children playing at business,” says one of Silverman’s top lieutenants of his counterparts from CUC. Growing concerned about the overall competence level and work ethic of Forbes himself, Silverman suggested to him in November of 1997, before the merger was even completed, that it might be best if he, Silverman, stayed on a little longer as CEO instead of turning over that position on January 1, 2000, as stipulated in the merger contract.

This was not music to Forbes’s ears. He had already been complaining for a while about Silverman’s high-handed style — about the way he was treating CUC as if it was being bought rather than being an equal partner in a merger — and he didn’t even deign to reply to this latest proof of his allegations. The relationship between the two executives grew so poisonous that Silverman hired a private detective to investigate rumors of womanizing and sexual harassment on Forbes’s part, hoping to find some leverage to use against him. Much to his disappointment, the detective failed to dig up enough actionable dirt.

Again, it should be remembered that all of this jockeying was taking place before the merger had even come off. Given the warning signs that were blinking red everywhere by November, one does wonder why Henry Silverman went through with the deal. The best answer anyone has come up with is that he was a creature of the stock market right down to his bones, and both companies’ stock prices had been sent soaring by the news of the merger. To call it off now would cause the stock to crater just as quickly.

So, the marriage was consummated on schedule, with Henry Silverman as the first CEO of the new Cendant Corporation. By virtue of his job title, he ought to have had access to every aspect of the former CUC’s operations and finances. Yet he ran into a baffling resistance from Forbes’s middle managers whenever he tried to dig beneath the surface. When he called on Forbes directly to intercede and get him the numbers he wanted, Forbes said blithely that he would prefer to preserve the “financial-reporting autonomy” of his half of the company. Silverman, whose temper could be volcanic, had to expend great effort to keep it under control now. He explained to his new chairman of the board, as clearly and calmly as he could, that that wasn’t how a merger worked. Forbes seemed to accept this. And yet at the end of February, more than two months after the merger had ostensibly been effected, Silverman still had no clear figures on his desk. His accountants were now telling him that, if these didn’t surface soon, they would be unable to make a legally mandated filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Silverman would have to be a far less perceptive businessman than he was not to smell a rat of considerable proportions.

On March 6, 1998, he dispatched his chief accounting officer Scott Forbes — no relation to Walter — from Cendant’s new headquarters in Manhattan to CUC’s old ones in Stamford, Connecticut. The accountant’s orders were to get the numbers he needed by any means necessary, even if it required getting Silverman himself to come onto the speakerphone and threaten somebody’s job. He met with E. Kirk Shelton, Walter Forbes’s right-hand man. Caving at last, Shelton sheepishly explained that there was a little problem — only a little one, mind you — with the former CUC’s books. Its actual revenues during its last year had come in about $165 million under the figures it had reported. While Scott Forbes was still shaking his head at this piece of news, wondering if he had heard correctly, Shelton rushed to add that the problem was easily fixable, by reporting equity from the merger as operating revenue. “We want you to help us figure out how to creatively do this,” said Shelton, as if committing accounting fraud was just another day at the office — which to him it was, as would soon become all too clear.

Henry Silverman was predictably livid when Scott Forbes told him what had just transpired in Connecticut. He tried to contact Walter Forbes, but learned that that gentleman of leisure was on vacation in Hawaii and wasn’t receiving calls. Walter did eventually deign to send an email in response to the CEO’s increasingly furious queries, saying that they would get together and sort everything out when he came home in a few weeks. Like Shelton, he seemed to believe that the discovery of a $165 million shortfall was no big deal — or else he had made a strategic decision to act as if it was.

Not realizing that he would soon be wishing that $165 million was the full extent of the discrepancy in CUC’s books, Silverman said nothing publicly, hoping this could all still be swept under the rug as the mere teething problems that always accompany big mergers, even as he privately vowed to be rid of Walter Forbes by hook or by crook. “I can’t have people working with me that lie to me!” he raged.

Rather belying his own attempt to treat CUC’s accounting irregularities as No Big Deal, Walter Forbes, upon his return from Hawaii, refused to meet with Silverman at the headquarters of the company that they supposedly ran together. Instead he insisted that Silverman and his closest lieutenants talk with him and his on neutral ground, in a Manhattan hotel suite. This meeting took place on April 1, which must have struck Silverman as an appropriate date, seeing how Forbes had fooled him into merging their companies. Brushing off all of Forbes’s efforts at preliminary light conversation, Silverman got straight to the point — or rather to the ultimatum. He was prepared, he said, to look for a way to keep CUC’s shortfall from becoming public and placing Forbes in serious legal jeopardy. He would do this not for Forbes’s sake — for Forbes, he made it clear, he had nothing but contempt — but for that of Cendant’s employees and shareholders. As a condition, though, Forbes, Skelton, and the rest of the old CUC inner circle would have to open their books to him at long last — full transparency across the board. Then they would need to leave the company, just as soon as the necessary severance contracts and press releases could be crafted. According to most reports of the meeting, Forbes and his people agreed to this.

Having vented his rage on these eminently deserving targets, Silverman left the hotel suite feeling cautiously optimistic. The shortfall was ugly, but it shouldn’t be enough to sink the business as a whole. And the upshot of the whole affair was that he would get Walter Forbes and rest of the CUC amateurs out of his hair once and for all. Silverman ordered his accountants to conduct a thorough audit of CUC’s books, to provide him at last with that which he had been seeking for so long, the same thing that Ken Williams had sought much more lackadaisically before him: a proper picture of what exactly CUC did, how it did it, and where its money was coming from and going to. He gave them two weeks.

The day of reckoning was April 15, 1998. Silverman might have suspected the worst when he saw that his own people had brought two mid-level CUC accountants with them, and insisted that they give the presentation, as if afraid of becoming collateral damage of the CEO’s temper. Their fear was thoroughly understandable. For what was revealed on that day was a tale of fraud on a scale literally unprecedented in the history of American business. Over the past three years alone, CUC had conjured out of thin air more than half a billion dollars in revenue that had never actually existed in the real world. To Walter Forbes, business had been a shell game. Now you see it, now you don’t.

CUC’s long tradition of financial malfeasance had apparently begun, as these things so often do, with dubious short-term measures that were intended merely to grease the wheels of the company’s legitimate operations as they passed from a slow-moving present to a doubtless supersonic future. Already before the end of the 1980s, CUC had taken to booking pledged membership fees — fees that would be realized only if the members in question didn’t cancel, which they frequently did — as guaranteed revenues at the start of each fiscal year. More and more such schemes came into play as Walter Forbes and his cronies fell further and further down the slippery slope of fraud. When a new fiscal year began, they would figure out how much money they needed to have made during the last one to slightly outperform Wall Street’s expectations, then fiddle with the books appropriately. Jerry Bowerman of Sierra, in other words, had been onto something when he pointed out to Ken Williams how weirdly consistent CUC’s revenue growth had been for years and years. “That’s categorically impossible,” he had said. “Does not happen.”

Except, that is, in the case of fraud. The scope of the malfeasance was breathtaking, permeating every layer of the company, as later described by the forensic accountant Ron Rimkus.

According to later testimony by the company and the SEC, CUC managers would analyze the difference between actual financial results and the estimates put out by Wall Street analysts at the end of each quarter. They would then target specific aspects of the business to adjust in order to inflate earnings. After determining the best areas to change, the managers would then instruct others in the company hierarchy to adjust the various accounts — thus creating a false income statement and balance sheet. Their methods included under-funding reserves, accelerating recognition of revenues, deferring expenses, and drawing money from a merger account to boost income. After lower-level managers made the accounting changes to the financials, the cycle would be completed by adjusting the top line of quarterly changes and, subsequently, making back-dated journal entries at the division level to get the general ledger to balance. CUC’s leadership was able to hide the irregularities through misrepresented accounting entries, often moving certain transactions off the books. For a company of this size to maintain two sets of books requires a widespread internal effort to produce the second set of books so the company can present a blend of truth and fiction to the auditor without getting caught.

Eventually, CUC started to run out of internal revenue streams to which it could apply its portfolio of tricks. It was at this point that Walter Forbes began aggressively buying up other companies, among them Sierra On-Line and Davidson and Associates. These transactions were always conducted in stocks, never cash. The fraud that followed depended on the concept of the “merger reserve,” meaning the cash profits and assets that the acquired company brought with it into the new relationship. CUC reported this reserve as operating income for the parent company. In order to keep the hamster wheel spinning, of course, CUC had to keep buying more companies with the funny money it had “earned” from its last round of acquisitions. Underneath his unruffled exterior, Walter Forbes had been paddling as furiously as a duck on a placid pond.

But there had to come an end point, when neither the internal shenanigans nor the acquisitions could continue to paper over the discrepancy between the money CUC said it was making and the money it was really making. This limit point was looming by 1997. And this was what had set Walter Forbes down at a table with Henry Silverman, to negotiate a merger on a whole different scale from the acquisitions he had carried out to date. That said, it’s hard to identify what his real endgame in all of this actually was. He had to know that the fraud would come to light soon after the merger was consummated, and even he could hardly have been delusional enough to believe that Silverman would be willing and able to cover it up and let bygones be bygones. We can only conclude that chicanery had become such a way of life that the deal was worth it to him just to keep the wheel spinning for a few more months. When you get down to it, everything he and his people had done before negotiating the merger had been equally short-term. It was just a question of surviving and continuing to play the rich and successful businessman for today. Tomorrow could be dealt with when it came.

For once, even Henry Silverman was rendered speechless when he was told all of this about the man to whom he had shackled himself. After he picked his jaw up off the floor of his office, his analytical mind went to work. He knew right away that there could be no attempt to hide, minimize, or excuse this fraud; to do so would be to run the risk that the legal authorities would suspect that he and his people were also complicit in it in one way or another. The only way to save Cendant, and with it his own reputation, was to get out in front of the scandal before it broke on its own. He prepared a press release, to be sent out just after the markets closed on that very day. It spoke vaguely of “accounting irregularities” that had been perpetrated by “certain members of the former CUC management,” then announced matter-of-factly that the latter company’s earnings for 1997 would have to be adjusted — reduced, that is — by $165 million immediately, with more such adjustments very likely to come later. Having fired off this bombshell, Henry Silverman went home to get a good night’s sleep, knowing the storm that would break over his head when the next day’s trading began.

The tempest was as violent as he had anticipated, if not worse. Almost 110 million Cendant shares were traded that day, setting a Wall Street record. The stock price plunged from $36 to $19, reducing the company’s market cap by $14 billion. The first three shareholder lawsuits had already been filed before the trading day was over. In the weeks that followed, Cendant adjusted the figure of $165 million to $260 million in missing revenue for 1997 alone, with yet more years full of “irregularities” still craving investigation. Within six months, the stock price would be down to $9, the shareholder lawsuits numbering more than 70.

With characteristic brazenness, Walter Forbes contended that he had known nothing of the fraud committed on his watch — a claim of innocence that was, even if believed, as damning in its way as a confession, what with the degree of incompetence and negligence it would have to reveal. Nevertheless, forgetting what had been discussed in that Manhattan hotel suite on April 1, he fought to stay on as the current chairman of the board and the CEO in waiting of Cendant. He urged stonewalling opacity to the rest of the board as an alternative to Silverman’s strategy of transparency. The ruthless Wall Street money man thus found himself cast in the unwonted role of Cendant’s voice of conscience. “To urge me, as you seem to do, to not properly portray accurate information about our businesses,” wrote Silverman to Forbes in a letter (“I had difficulty looking at him” face to face, he admits), “appears to be of similar ilk to the conduct that brought us to this situation. I will not do that.”

Silverman didn’t manage to force Forbes out once and for all until July of 1998. When Forbes did leave, he took with him ten members of his board (good riddance, thought Silverman!) and a $47.5 million severance check. Whatever the long-term future held for Walter Forbes, he would have no problem continuing to enjoy his current lifestyle for the time being.

While Forbes was doing so, Henry Silverman rolled up his sleeves and set to work repairing the damage the disastrous merger had done to his own, legitimately profitable company. It was a daunting task, but it would prove not to be an impossible one. Hewing still to his strategy of powering through the heart of scandal so as to put it behind him as quickly as possible, Silverman agreed to shell out $2.83 billion in December of 1999 to settle the various shareholder lawsuits. The fact that Cendant, the name now associated with the biggest accounting scandal in American business history, was almost unknown to the American public in any other context, being hidden behind a welter of other brand names that they did know well, was an immeasurable aid to its survival; few consumers made any mental connection to the scandal when they booked a room at a Days Inn or rented a car from Avis. Indeed, most of those rental-car, hotel, and real-estate franchises which Cendant administered were still doing pretty darn well out there in the real world. For all of its difficulties, then, Cendant still had real money coming in, enough to offset the missing funny money of CUC over the long arc of time. It would survive and even expand its franchising reach well into the new millennium. In 2005, it voluntarily broke itself up into four separate companies to better service its increasingly diverse portfolio of brands. Henry Silverman, the first, last, and only CEO of Cendant, walked away from that culmination of fifteen years of work with a cool $250 million. Seen from this perspective, the CUC merger seemed like little more than a bump in the road.

As for Walter Forbes: the pace of criminal law for white-collar offenders like him is regrettably slow in the United States, but, in some cases at least, some form of justice is served in the end. After eight years of legal wrangling, he was convicted of conspiracy to defraud and two counts of submitting false reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission in October of 2006. (E. Kirk Shelton had been found guilty of a similar collection of charges a year earlier.) Forbes was sentenced to twelve years in prison and $3.28 billion in fines and restitution — fines which, needless to say, nobody expected him to ever be able to pay. By the time he was released from prison in July of 2018, the financial scandal that had made him and CUC infamous for a while had been all but forgotten, eclipsed by even bigger ones like the collapse of Enron and the machinations of Bernie Madoff. As far as I know, he is still alive today. If you asked the current 82-year-old Walter Forbes about his history, and if he happened to be in an honest mood when you did so, perhaps he would tell you that his halcyon decades as a jet-setting titan of industry were worth the twelve years of his life he had had to spend in prison to pay for them. He booked his revenue well ahead of his debt to society, just the way CUC always did it.



The infamous merger between CUC and HFS was actually a brilliant stroke of luck for the former Sierra On-line. For if that deal hadn’t gone through, CUC would almost certainly have crashed and burned at some point during late 1997 or early 1998, with no Henry Silverman to hand to clean up the mess. Blizzard Entertainment was doing so well by then that someone would probably have found a way to scoop it out of the wreckage, but Sierra, which could boast of no similar run of recent hits — Ken Williams’s parting gift to his old company of Half-Life wouldn’t be released until November of 1998 — might very well have been permanently buried under the rubble.

As it was, Silverman had no long-term interest in maintaining the software arm of Cendant. For him, games studios and publishers were a distraction from Cendant’s core business, to be unloaded as quickly as possible. To accomplish this, he replaced the rather clueless Chris McLeod — yet another legacy of Walter Forbes whom he couldn’t be rid of fast enough — with a well-respected games-industry executive named David Grenewetzki, whose last job had been with the publisher Accolade. While Blizzard was obviously doing just fine as it was, Grenewetzki’s brief when it came to Sierra and the rest of the software arm was to trim the fat, to finish and ship whatever was reasonably far along and worth the effort, and to cancel whatever was not, all in order to make this superfluous part of Cendant look as attractive as possible to potential buyers. If he did a good enough job that a buyer wanted to keep him on afterward, more power to him.

By this point, King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity had been dawdling along without any firm sense of direction for some eighteen months. Grenewetzki ordered Roberta Williams, Mark Siebert, and the rest of their unruly crew to kick it into gear and get the game done in time for Christmas, assigning them a new set of minders to settle their disputes and make sure they met their milestones. These were effective enough: the game shipped on November 24, 1998. Roberta Williams was largely missing in action during the last few months, choosing to join her husband on a vacation to France while the rest of the team was crunching.

Playing the game today puts me in mind of Douglas Adams’s description of an aye-aye lemur: “a very strange-looking creature that seems to have been assembled from bits of other animals.” Or perhaps the old joke about a camel being a horse that was designed by a committee is more apropos. Collaboration, feedback, and testing are of incalculable importance in any kind of game development, mind you; in fact, I would argue that one of the biggest problems with virtually all of Roberta Williams’s earlier games was that she didn’t engage in enough of these things. Yet a game also needs to have a firm sense of its own identity, which usually translates into having a decisive final arbiter in charge of it. Mask of Eternity all too clearly didn’t have that; neither Roberta nor anyone else was allowed to fill that role. In the absence of an empowered lead designer, Mask of Eternity became a game of bits, a collection of disparate parts that clash more often than they gel.

This strange-looking digital creature that was assembled from bits of other popular games sports the acrobatic challenges of Tomb Raider, the ultra-violent action of DOOM and Quake, the CRPG-lite trappings of Diablo, and even from time to time the puzzle-solving of a traditional King’s Quest, all of it implemented more or less badly. The floating camera is an especial pain, requiring constant fiddly adjustments that break up whatever sense of flow the rest of the game permits you to establish. The writing veers all over the place, from Roberta Williams’s trademark fairy-tale whimsy to adolescent gross-out humor that wouldn’t have felt out of place in Duke Nukem 3D. The dialog is delivered for some reason in a pseudo-Shakespearian diction, all “thee” and “thou” and “by your leave, milady,” read by dulcet-toned British voice actors who clearly have no idea what the characters they’re playing are on about and don’t much care. The game is very hard to connect with King’s Quest at all for long periods, until someone seems suddenly to remember the name on the box and throws in a few gratuitous references to King Graham’s earlier adventures or the history of Castle Daventry. I’m not the best person to wax outraged over all the ways that Mask of Eternity betrays its lineage, given that I’m the farthest thing from a hardcore fan of King’s Quest in general. Yet even I can see why so many gamers who are much more invested in the series than I am consider this, its final official entry prior to a brief-lived and almost equally underwhelming 2015 revival, such an insult to everything that came before.

As is the case with so many such Frankenstein’s monsters, it’s hard to figure out just whom Mask of Eternity was supposed to be for. The series’s usual pool of players — who tended to skew younger and to include more women and girls than was the norm even for the adventure genre in general — would be put off the first time they punched a monster in the face and saw its head fly off in a shower of blood and gore. And yet the demographic that enjoyed more violent and visceral games would be equally put off by the harsh reality that Mask of Eternity just wasn’t a very good action game long before they came across the first convoluted adventure-style puzzle to cement their indifference. You can’t be all things to all people — especially not with all-around execution as poor as this.

If anything, reviewers were kinder to the game than it deserved. Computer Gaming World magazine gave it four out of five stars, whilst admitting that it “required an open mind” and that “the old-school puzzles may frustrate newbies, while the veterans may be annoyed at the jumping and the combat.”[1]Reviewer Thierry Nguyen seemed not to have played any game since the early 1980s. “If you wanted to pull a switch in an earlier game,” he wrote, “you probably would have typed, ‘push box,’ then ‘get on box,’ and finally ‘pull switch.’ Here, you have to literally push the box, jump on top of it, and look up to pull the switch.” What a revelation! The website GameSpot called it “enjoyable” but “occasionally maddening”: “Sierra should be applauded for trying something new, even if its reach somewhat exceeds its grasp.”

But gamers weren’t buying such prevarications, and didn’t buy many copies of Mask of Eternity. Its commercial failure killed the longest-running series in the adventure genre as dead as one of its pixelated goblins. It marked the final nail in the coffin as well of Roberta Williams’s tenure as the “Queen of Adventure Games.” She wouldn’t design another game for a quarter of a century. The times, they were a-changing.


Sierra’s decision to drop the Roman numeral from the eighth King’s Quest game is indicative of the confused, have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too quality of all of its messaging around Mask of Eternity. The logic was that the new generation of gamers Sierra was hoping to attract would be intimidated by its being the eighth game in a series, might even feel they shouldn’t bother with it if they hadn’t played the previous seven. But then, if you are so concerned about reaching these people, why call it a King’s Quest game at all? The only cachet that brand might have held for most of them was the negative cachet of the “kiddie games” their moms or sisters used to play.

Mask of Eternity’s hero Connor looks like he could break Sir Grahame or any of the other protagonists from the first seven King’s Quest games in two without straining his tree-trunk-sized arms.

This level — err, area — is Egyptian-themed. What does this have to do with King’s Quest? Beats me… but Stargate SG-1 was popular on television at the time. Got to tick those boxes…

“Oh, great, another jumping challenge! I love those, especially with these extra clunky controls!” said no player of Mask of Eternity ever.



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.


Sources: The books Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams, Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports by Howard Schilit, Stay Awhile and Listen, Book II: Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels by David L. Craddock, Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, and Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. Wired of November 1997; New York Times of May 27 1997, July 4 1998, July 5 1998, and June 16 2000; Wall Street Journal of July 29 1998; Fortune of November 1998; Next Generation of June 1997; Sierra’s customer magazine InterAction of Fall 1996, Holiday 1996, and Fall 1997; Computer Gaming World of April 1999.

Online sources include “How Sierra was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud” by Duncan Fyfe at Vice, Ron Rimkus’s analysis of the CUC/Cendant debacle for the CFA Institute, “A Pathological Probe of a Pool of Pervasive Perversion” by Abraham J. Briloff of Baruch College, Forbes’s report of Walter Forbes’s sentencing, and the vintage GameSpot review of King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity.

I also made use of the materials held in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

Where to Get It: King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com, packaged together with the more fondly remembered King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 Reviewer Thierry Nguyen seemed not to have played any game since the early 1980s. “If you wanted to pull a switch in an earlier game,” he wrote, “you probably would have typed, ‘push box,’ then ‘get on box,’ and finally ‘pull switch.’ Here, you have to literally push the box, jump on top of it, and look up to pull the switch.” What a revelation!

Renga in Blue

Grave Robbers (1982)

Working with only 3500 bytes is tough. Only using the first two letters of a word was by necessity. We had to save every byte that we could. The parser just looked at the first word and last word that the player entered. Hence ‘GET THE RIFLE’ would be parsed to ‘GE RI’. We simply […]

Working with only 3500 bytes is tough. Only using the first two letters of a word was by necessity. We had to save every byte that we could. The parser just looked at the first word and last word that the player entered. Hence ‘GET THE RIFLE’ would be parsed to ‘GE RI’. We simply did not have the space.

Each room had a string variable that contained a list of rooms that the player could go to. As an example, if you were in the kitchen and you could go OUTSIDE, DEN, STAIRS, BASEMENT, the string would be ‘OUDESTBA’. This method also allowed dynamic changing of what rooms you could go to depending on actions that you took. If you could no longer go to the DEN, the string would be changed to ‘OUSTBA’. If a new room that you could go to was added such as the GARAGE, the string would be changed to ‘OUDESTBAGA’.

When we programmed, we had to squeeze every byte out of each line of code. There were almost no comments in the code. That was a luxury that we could not afford. Microsoft Basic only used the first two letters of a variable, so our variable names were not terribly descriptive.

While we would have liked to use variable names like ‘MeteorDistance’, we had to settle on ‘MD’.

Bruce Robinson

In the department of high-wire acts in making complicated games for simple machines, I bring you a VIC-20 games with graphics, sound, and animation. It the last 1982 game by Bruce Robinson, who brought us such minimalist fare as Jack and the Beantstalk.

See how the tape cover still indicates unmodified VIC-20.

I was initially wondering how the game might pull such a thing off, even given Bruce Robinson’s talent for putting content in a tiny space. I was fully prepared to talk about the book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 and how a complex graphical effect could be made using a small algorithm, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The code uses line-by-line printing of text-character graphics with only a moderate use of repeats.

Where the tricks really happen is to have lightning effects, which is just past the opening room. Each screen has two versions, a “dark” version and a “lit” version when a lightning strike happens. I’ll show this off more clearly with some screenshots in a moment; for now, I should note we’re given a starting inventory

DYNAMITE MATCHES RADIO SANDWICH IN FOIL

and to make any progress, the first step is to OPEN GATE. There is no text description of the fact it’s a gate; you’re just supposed to assume from the picture. This usually isn’t a problem, but unfortunately, just like the original Mystery House, there’s a moment later which requires parsing some ambiguity in the image.

Opening the gate reveals a sign, which you can see alone with GO NORTH. This is when the lightning and rain start.

I could not get a screenshot of the lightning the conventional way — it only shows in full for roughly a frame before disappearing — so I had to run a video and do a capture.

Going north leads to another sign, with the same effect.

Remember, while this is going on there’s the occasional flashing background and sound effects.

Then comes a room that seems to be completely dark, with even more infrequent lightning. You get an indicator of what’s wrong if you keep trying to go north…

…but it almost feels like understanding the animation itself is a very light puzzle. It took me a couple flashes before I realized that I was looking at a dog (rather than, say, a mailbox).

The sandwich is the right tool here vs. the dog, although it took some effort to figure out how to remove the foil. REMOVE FOIL, OPEN FOIL, OPEN SANDWICH, and various other combinations don’t work; I went to refer to the manual (which is really just the backside of the tape packaging) and it gave this verb list:

buy, call, charm, chisel, chop, climb, close, connect, cross, cut, dig, drop, dump, feed, get, go, inventory, jump, kill, light, look, open, order, press, pull, push, put, return, siphon, start, throw, tie, turn, unwrap, yell

This is a verb list for all the Victory Software games from this time period; “siphon” shows up in the game Bomb Threat. Still, I quickly zeroed in on UNWRAP which is yet another new verb for the collection. UNWRAP FOIL followed by FEED DOG was enough to placate the vicious ASCII representation, and then I could move forward to the last room of this particular area.

Just giving the lit version this time. I originally thought the zeros-instead-of-letter-O spots were just a “graphical effect” but they become important.

There’s no shovel, but we do have dynamite. (I admit going back through the rooms and peering quite carefully at the flashing lights in case I missed an item. There’s nothing lying around, though.) However, because it is raining we can’t light the matches (they turn out to be a complete red herring). What you’re supposed to do instead is LOOK RADIO and find an antenna, then PUT ANTENNA followed by PUT DYNAMITE. This will eventually attract a lightning strike which blows up the dynamite. I don’t think that’s how that’s supposed to work.

I realize that might have been tricky to follow with the dark/light screen tricks, so here’s a video of the opening of the game given by Highretrogamelord, and be forewarned the sound is loud:

If you stay to the end, you’ll see the video stops at LOADING PART II. My guess is the Youtuber hit the same issue I did here: the game crashes with the currently existing copy. So I had to switch to the later C64 version to finish the game, which also gives a fresh title screen:

This reveals both authors, Bruce Robinson and Dr Alan Stankiewicz; according to Robinson himself in my comments the latter was also an author on Hospital Adventure.

The first part of the game is almost identical between the C64 and VIC-20 versions, except that you don’t start with the sandwich; there’s a side room with a TRASH that you need to look in to find the SANDWICH IN FOIL. Ew. I’m not sure what this adds to the game other than making it only 98% linear at the start rather than 100% linear.

The shaded room is only on the C64 version.

Going back to the explosion and going down, we now enter Part II of the game (the C64 just has everything as one file).

Here was my major point of “parse the picture” puzzlement. I originally thought that “high voltage” message was on a sign or poster, but it’s meant to be marking a box, and not just any box, but a FUSEBOX. OPEN FUSEBOX led me to more puzzlement…

…in that I wasn’t sure what the circles were supposed to mean. They’re fuses where one of the fuses is missing and needs a replacement. This is where the FOIL goes. (This allegedly works and is quite unsafe, but we’re just trying to rob a dead person here.) Incidentally, that LE0 0IL logo makes a reprise, and it took a long time for me to realize it’s probably meant to be a chunk of gravestone.

With the fusebox fixed, you can ENTER ELEVATOR — and yes, you have to make another jump to realize you’re looking at an elevator in the distance, but at least I made the correct guess this time.

After some fiddling, 4 is the current floor; 3 doesn’t work, 1 is locked (that’s a keyhole under the buttons there, represented by a playing card spade), so 2 is the only option.

You can move the picture to reveal a safe; trying to OPEN SAFE then has the game request a combination. This is honestly — and unusually for a puzzle like this — the most interesting puzzle in the game. I’ve given enough hints you can solve the puzzle if you want to try before moving on.

The LE0 0IL thing is the code. Flip that 180 degrees to get: 710037 (or as the game enforces by adding dashes as you type, 71-00-37).

Despite my complaining, that’s impressively recognizable as a key.

The elevator is stuck between floors so you can’t go back in. What you can do is douse the fire by using soil from the plant, and then GO FIREPLACE to a dark room, leading up to the third floor we had to skip, and then using JUMP to get back on the elevator.

The key then unlocks floor 1, and essentially right at victory.

You need to CUT GLASS (with the diamond) to get out.

I’m vaguely reminded of the Japanese game Diamond Adventure (just in the shortness of form and diamond as a goal) except there is essentially 0% chance the authors would have heard of it. The comparable aspect is technical, in that both cases the author(s) had to deal with creating a graphics system from scratch, leaving not as much room for the usual aspects of an adventure game.

The tight requirements mean this is a marvel as an artifact even if it doesn’t play as well to the modern player as a game. This was a product of sheer determination to see something resembling a graphical adventure on the VIC-20.

With more memory to work with, this certainly won’t be the last time we’ll see C64 character graphics as an art style; the games by the Australian Brian J. Betts starting in 1983 all fall in this category.

92 through 94 with all the POKE commands is where I think all the flashing happens. Those commands essentially execute assembly language in BASIC and so can cause fast graphical effects.

Coming up: Bedlam.

BONUS UPDATE: Gunther in the comments came up with a method of fixing the VIC-20 original, so it can now be played all the way through. Download here. I have some screenshots of the second part of the game, which is mostly the same, except the fire in the fireplace doesn’t need dousing.

Thursday, 17. April 2025

Renga in Blue

The Mysterious Mansion Adventure: Fixed Version, Plus True Ending

I have two bits of update from my previous posts on this game that make it worth a bonus post. One, I have a version of the game which is very near to the intended experience. You can download it here, and be sure when you start to say YES to loading a save game. […]

I have two bits of update from my previous posts on this game that make it worth a bonus post.

One, I have a version of the game which is very near to the intended experience. You can download it here, and be sure when you start to say YES to loading a save game. (In the emulator DCHector, this moves your tape from 31/63 to 32/63. If you want to rewind the tape back a step, go to Tools/Tape Unit and use the single left arrow to move the 32 back to 31. This lets you overwrite the save file with a new one, or reload the same save file on restart without having to reboot the emulator.) The save file is identical to the normal start of the game, except that the beaker in the laboratory is now bubbling, meaning you can skip using the apparatus (which is broken in the machine code somewhere).

Two, possibly more importantly, is that Gus Brasil figured out the last step in the game. I had realized it had to be a reference to the “FOR EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON” song/Bible verse and I spent most of my time trying out various permutations of SAY THING with no luck.

Gus had made an observation based on something I provided a screenshot of straight from the hexadecimal.

The very end of the clip (BIG3SMA4TIN5BEL6TUR) is providing nouns. That is, there’s a BIG KEY, a SMALL KEY, a TINY KEY, a BELL CORD, and a … TUR?

This had briefly flitted in my consciousness when I tried SAY TURN, and it did lead me to wonder if I had messed up some other flag in the game and SAY TURN (either done once, or SAY TURN typed three times in a row like in the song) was the key. Knowing Gus had won the game, I pondered the extra possibilities and … surely not?

Yes, TURN TURN wins the game. Even though it’s a two-word parser, TURN TURN TURN also works (the parser doesn’t accept any more characters, so SAY TURN TURN TURN isn’t even typable).

First of all, what is the character actually doing at this moment? Clearly not saying the words out loud, since saying them doesn’t work (as I amply proved lots of times before writing my post yesterday). TURN TURN is an “non-reality” command, kind of like in Warp how the game asked you to REGISTER SHORT ROPE. At least in Warp you were “talking” to the underlying computer running the game, here it isn’t clear at all how to interpret this final act. (You could be a spoilsport and claim that SAY not working is just a bug, and TURN TURN is being said out loud, but there’s enough intentionality going on I am fairly sure this is what the author intended.)

Second, what happens after? Somehow the player has won, but the game doesn’t narrate escape (as Gus points out, while there is an escape message, it doesn’t get printed in the game). Also, just like how the ending of La maison du professeur Folibus left the main character blue permanently, here there is no indication that the shrinking has been “cured” upon escape.

With the Roger M. Wilcox game Derelict 2147 there was a similarly ambiguous ending, where the player seemed to be trapped on the Derelict of the title even though they had won by gathering all the treasures. Roger made the insightful comment that:

The fate of the craft is probably the same as the fate of being stuck on Trash Island with an empty gas tank. Except there was no “Escape from Derelict 2147” sequel (nor did I ever think about writing one). Basically, once you get all the treasures, the universe ends.

With Mysterious Mansion it is quite possible the author never thought through any of what I just outlined — there’s a victory screen, so the universe ended. Don’t worry about what happened after. Maybe the tiny person who escaped from Mysterious Mansion and the blue person who escaped from the world of Folibus team up and fight crime. Your imagination can take you anywhere.

Since you’re still reading, a quick bonus: here’s the remainder of the 1982 games before we can declare it done, as seen in my post on the final stretch. There’s already a few games in 1983 I suspect will get pushed back, and some 1980 and 1981 discoveries made that will need to be attended to in the future, but after this list is done we can officially embark on 1983 games. Feel free to guess what the order will be!

Bedlam (TRS-80, by the author of Xenos)
Countdown to Doom (from the Cambridge mainframe that brought Acheton, Hezarin, Avon, etc.)
The Curse of the Pharaoh (Peter Kirsch does graphics)
Enchanted Forest (TRS-80 Color Computer does graphics)
Geheim-agent XP-05 (Early German game)
Grave Robbers (Unmodified VIC-20 game with graphics)
The Hobbit (The famous one)
Mexican Adventure (The last Sharpsoft game)
Misadventures 5 and 6 (Two more bawdy games from Ohio)
Zodiac Castle (follow-up to Windmere Estate)

Wednesday, 16. April 2025

Renga in Blue

The Mysterious Mansion Adventure: A Time to Gather Stones Together

(My previous posts on Mysterious Mansion are needed to understand this one.) Unfortunately, not long after my last post, I reached what looks like a fatal bug in the game. Fortunately, I was able to hack my own save file to give myself the required item. I’m glad I did, because what happens after is […]

(My previous posts on Mysterious Mansion are needed to understand this one.)

Unfortunately, not long after my last post, I reached what looks like a fatal bug in the game.

Fortunately, I was able to hack my own save file to give myself the required item. I’m glad I did, because what happens after is astonishing.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t finished the game. I am what I am certain is at the ending but I am unclear if the part I’m on is broken or not. I’m calling this my last post on the game for now.

It’s very likely the programmer of the two Interact text adventures was John Stout, shown on the left in a fall 1982 Micro Video newsletter. He is described as having “a hand in almost every piece of software in our last two catalogs” — that includes Mysterious Mansion — and he had just finished with the CRPG Mazes and Monsters. I think a comparison of coding style might help make the case solid but I’m satisfied enough for now. He’s described as having both B.A. and M.A. degrees in Composition and writing music for the University of Michigan Marching Band. He died in 2017 of cancer.

The one (1) action I still had left I could have simply figured out — although I’ll admit I don’t know how I would have figured this out — is getting the key from the crystal ball. If you have the crystal ball and play the organ, the ball shatters in such a way you can get the key (why this works and just shattering the ball by hand doesn’t, I don’t know). The small key then opens the door in the clock to reveal yet another door. We need a tiny key now.

It turned out all my problems after this point stemmed from a bug. I was unable to operate an APPARATUS in a lab. I should mention this bug wasn’t isolated; when you wear the invisibility ring, it becomes described as a RING IM WEARING even when dropped, and if the SKULL is dropped in a random place it turns into the skeleton of the summoning portal, and you can get a second skull due to inventory bugs that causes the portal to the laboratory to be summoned anywhere.

I had found that if I did PUT LIQUID after the apparatus asked for some juice, I ended up with a RING on the ground. This is true even if you are currently wearing the ring, and it is possible to pick up the second ring (except they’ll merge if you wear the second ring). I am 100% now certain this is meant to be a different object, BUBBLING LIQUID.

Unfortunately the game would normally stop from there, but I felt unusually determined yesterday so I started invoking the spirit of Hackerman. Remember, with great processing power comes great responsibility.

My first step was just seeing what I could find by plowing through the relevant file

The Mysterious Mansion Adventure (1982)(Micro Video).k7

in a text editor. The most relevant item I found was a list of objects…

BED
CANOPY BED
COLLAPSED BED
CRYSTAL BALL
STOOL
STOOL
CROSS
LARGE HOLE
2 MOUSE HOLES
A MOUSE HOLE
DAGGER
DAGGER IN BED

…which continued on sequentially for every object in the game. Notice the two STOOLs. The way object state is handled is to repeat an object multiple times, so there isn’t one RING, but rather a RING and a RING IM WEARING as two separate objects. This why you can hold two rings at once, except when you wear the second ring the rings now “merge” into one.

There are three BEAKERS. The first I believe is empty, the second is the starting one with poison, and the third has the BUBBLING LIQUID that the apparatus is supposed to produce (as opposed to making another RING).

What the parser list of the game looks like in a hex editor.

The emulator DCHector I was using does handle save files properly, although they get saved directly to the tape file (write protection needs to be turned off). I made three save files, one where I did a save from the very start of the game, one where I did LOOK ORGAN, and one where I did LOOK ORGAN followed by TAKE PIPE. I used the program HxD and its comparison feature to figure out where the changes were happening. I also for good measure made a fourth save file for right after I picked up the SKULL at the witch (my inventory had a SKULL, RING IM WEARING, CROSS, DAGGER, and PIPE).

For example, with a save file made after doing LOOK ORGAN, at byte 4010 the first six bytes in hexadecimal were

02 05 05 1c 11 11

after TAKE PIPE they changed to

02 05 05 1c 11 ff

It turns out that that sixth position is the location for the PIPE object, at what happened is it got moved from 11 (the starting room of the game, 17 in decimal) to FF, which is what the game uses to indicate an item is in the player’s inventory. This was sufficient for me to make a chart of different item locations in data.

Ultimate hacker mode, PENCIL AND PAPER.

While I also identified the player’s inventory count number, I didn’t want to fiddle with that. I ended up taking my game-in-progress and turning the CROSS and DAGGER into “00” and giving my player the BUBBLING BEAKER and TINY KEY. After some more experimentation I backtracked and just swapped the cross into the beaker, as the tiny key is only found after using the beaker (so it isn’t busted like the beaker is).

I have a modified save file here where the player is holding the bubbling beaker if anyone wants to try it out. I also have a version giving the player a tiny key as well if you want to jump straight to the end of the game.

Moving on with normal gameplay:

DRINK LIQUID results in the message I SHRINK VERY VERY SMALL.

Also, don’t drink it while you’re at the cat, who then thinks you’re a mouse, whoops!

All items are dropped. There is in fact only one item you can carry while tiny, the TINY KEY (which we’ll get later). Before getting there, I should mention the cat above is a preparation puzzle — there’s a spot on the map later where you need to go through one of the mouse holes and out the other, so the solution is to prepare yourself.

I’ve been on the record as being quite fond of preparation puzzles, but they’re very hard to do without a vicious softlock (you won’t find out about needing the pipe here until later, and you have to backtrack to before shrinking to use the pipe as shown).

Shrinking modifies the player’s ability to traverse the map. (This feels like Retelle’s game Nuclear Sub when you flood the sub; everything is irreversibly changed.) You can’t go from the master bedroom to the attic anymore; what you can do is go in the fireplace and go in the chimney that was previously too small.

This puts you on a roof. You can approach edges on the north, south, east, and west sides. I admit I was stuck for a while here; I tried jumping but it just resulted in death.

However, one of the four sides — the west side — has a balcony below and you can jump down to safety. I don’t know if there’s a way to get a hint for this, I just started testing sides when I realized object-based gameplay was now out the window so my options were low.

You can then find the tiny key, which is the whole point of going through the sequence in the first place. The tiny key can be picked up by our tiny avatar.

If you’ve put the pipe down, you can safely get by the cat; the mouse-hole passage links you down to the starting room of the game.

Then (I assume with some unmentioned climbing about) you can OPEN CLOCK at the last tiny door.

It took me a few beats to realize that the PLAQUE that says FOR EVERYTHING is meant to be combined with the book’s message of THERE IS A SEASON. That is, it is actually reconstructing text of Ecclesiastes 3, the verse that Pete Seeger derived the song There is a Season from.

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.

Unfortunately now I’m at a hard stop. Remember, we’re permanently small. The tiny key disappears upon using it. That means no inventory at all.

The maze never got used for anything, but I’ve done a pass through with the torch (in case the dim light means an object is hidden) and also while small. Because of the cat, the latter is only possible if you drink the liquid at the cubbyhole…

…and it really feels like there ought to be something to this, given how much work was put into the maze with no reward, but absolutely nothing new is revealed while small I could find. I’m wondering if the Attic was originally designed so that you couldn’t backtrack but had to pass through the maze to get out, but the author left in a “bug” allowing leaving by a simpler route.

There is the SAY verb. It will repeat what the player says as long as it is between one and six characters. So the ending could be some matter of code-word, but I’ve tried everything both reasonable and unreasonable (TURN, PEACE, LIFE, DEATH, SEASON, SPRING, SUMMER, WINTER, FALL, HEAVEN, etc.). I also went and used the actual verb TURN on everything including the clock multiple times.

I’ve checked over closely the machine code and see nothing in the plaintext that suggests a code-word. Given how many broken spots the game has I’m not inclined to push farther as the ending could be just as broken as the lab puzzle was. (Or at least, by skipping over the lab puzzle, some other element needed for the end never got triggered.) However, I feel like I’ve experienced everything the game has to offer (and the ending just shows YOU HAVE ESCAPED) so I’m satisfied with moving on. Readers are still welcome to take a whack in the comments with my fixed file, but coming up, continuing with the minimalism theme: a VIC-20 adventure game that manages with graphics somehow.

From the last of the Hector line, the MX from 1985 by Micronique. Source. This game never got translated into French. We will be returning to this computer in the future with a very nice-looking graphical adventure.

Tuesday, 15. April 2025

Zarf Updates

Whence metroidvania

A few days ago, Kate Willaert wrote: As much as I love the word "Metroidvania," I dislike people calling these games Metroidbrainias because it makes it sound like their root is in Metroid games when they're just standard Adventure games in ...

A few days ago, Kate Willaert wrote:

As much as I love the word "Metroidvania," I dislike people calling these games Metroidbrainias because it makes it sound like their root is in Metroid games when they're just standard Adventure games in real-time. But Adventure is now obscure compared to Metroid, so we have to say it's that? [...] Although I completely admit I might be misunderstanding some essential component of what classifies a thing as a MetroidBrainia. Perhaps the first one would be MYST, which you can beat in 5 minutes if you already have all the knowledge? -- @katewillaert.bsky.social, April 7

Kicking at fuzzy genre boundaries is one of my favorite things in the world, and indeed I had some thoughts there! Let me expand them into a blog post.

First up: genre boundaries aren't defined. I mean, they're not created by definitions. It's a "what I mean when I say X" game. No, worse: it's a "what this community means when they say X" game, and who's the community, anyhow? But I'll lay my own tracks; you can decide whether to follow.

I did not play Metroid or Castlevania because I didn't have Nintendo. My first console was a Playstation. Okay, PS1 had Symphony of the Night, but I didn't play that. I played Soul Reaver, which is where I encountered the gameplay model that people would later start calling "metroidvania".

I wrote (in 2001!):

You spent your time and brainpower exploring, trying to work through some remote corner of Nosgoth, and at the end of each journey was a creature that you fought. Killing the creature gave you some new ability -- climbing, swimming, and so on -- which let you enter the next chapter. -- me, recalling Soul Reaver in my review of SR2

I didn't specify "going back to an earlier area to discover new paths, using that ability." That was a vital aspect though. I loved the feeling of having to think about the game world as a whole. Gained swimming powers? Gotta remember that lake you crossed earlier! You couldn't just think about the current location, because the key to progress might not be in the current area.

So yes: this is absolutely a model drawn from adventure games. The most basic trope of adventure games is "find a thing, then go find where to use it." THE LITTLE BIRD ATTACKS THE GREEN SNAKE, AND IN AN ASTOUNDING FLURRY DRIVES THE SNAKE AWAY! The world must be open and freely explorable so you can make these connections.

Let's extend this concept. Instead of locations and things, track the set of locations you can reach and the set of things you've found. We're no longer interested in where you are, only where you can get to. Every time you open a locked door, your set-of-locations grows larger.

On the left is a traditional adventure map with three locations: Garden, Clearing (beyond a hidden gap in the hedge), and Shed (beyond a locked door). On the right is a linear sequence of three sets of locations: Garden, Garden plus Clearing, Garden plus Clearing plus Shed.

See what this means? A game with no backtracking is a game where you never lose progress or get stuck. That's exactly the Loom/Myst adventure model! To revisit an "earlier state", you'd have to make a move that destroys an item or blocks access to a location. Infocom games and the early point-and-clicks were full of such situations -- but that kind of design fell out of vogue in the 90s.

...It sure sounds like the older, "cruel" adventure style is the real open-world game, while the newer "merciful" style is narrower and doesn't make you think about the whole game. Isn't that what I'm saying?

Kind of! There is a quality I miss about the old games. Not just because I was young in the old days... My pocket example is the Dispel Magic scroll in Enchanter. You could solve several puzzles with it, but it was a one-shot spell. Where to spend it? Figuring this out meant -- yep -- considering all the possible world states you could get into by using up the spell. A world where the guarded door was unlocked? A world where the tangled box was open? What other solutions would work in these worlds? A meta-open-world game!

But of course with Infocom's primitive play system, exploring these worlds meant a lot of save-file juggling. Not fun -- especially on floppy disk. But that was life in the 1980s. See this post for a deeper exploration of that era and what those "you can lose" games brought to the table.

How do we keep that sense of exploring alternatives, but avoid the frustration of juggling save files? (Or even the guilt -- you save-scummer!) Obviously, you make resetting the world a game mechanic, complete with an in-story explanation and a convenient UI for managing state. Which is how I got to Hadean Lands, of course.

And that brings us back to "metroidbrainia" land. You don't need a time loop for a metroidbrainia game; Hadean Lands isn't really a time loop. But it sure is easy to think of the metroidbrainia genre as "time loop puzzles".

Let's unpick this. We got to the metroidbrainia by taking the metroidvania idea -- "go back to an earlier area with a new tool or ability" -- and substituting "new knowledge". You don't have to defeat the swim-demon or buy a shovel or pick up a spell scroll; you just have to know what to do. You could have done it at any time, if only you'd known. That's the key.

A problem that you can solve only if you know how? We call that a "puzzle;" that's what the word means. This is what Kate Willaert is getting at above, and she's quite right.

And yet, Outer Wilds really did feel electrically new. It wasn't a retread of that Myst fireplace puzzle. (Which, to repeat the original comment, you could solve right off the bat if you knew the combination. Bypass all four puzzle Ages and go straight to Atrus.) So what was different about Outer Wilds?

It isn't the time loop. The time loop is a way to emphasize the pure-knowledge nature of the puzzles. The game wipes out all mechanical progress every loop, so you only have your accumulated understanding. And, of course, the time loop means that the game can let you get lost, get stuck, blow up your spaceship, crash into the sun (oh, so much crashing into the sun) -- no biggie, just reset. All the "unwinnability" annoyances get swept away with a single broom.

But, strictly, none of those knowledge puzzles have to do with the time loop. You could imagine doing the same kinds of puzzles in a game which had other workarounds for death and unwinnability. Tougher spaceship, tougher skin, whatever. You'd fly around and try things multiple times, instead of resetting the world on each try.

(Obviously the story of Outer Wilds is all about the time loop. That's not what I'm talking about here.)

It isn't the idea of going back to an earlier location and doing something different. That's been a popular adventure trope since, oh, Zork 1. (When you put all the treasures in the trophy case, you discover a map that shows a new path from the very first location.) "Back to the beginning" is simply good narrative closure. It doesn't give that sense of if only you'd known -- after all, Zork's map isn't an information puzzle. The hidden path is genuinely not accessible until you solve the rest of the game.

(Jason Dyer had to remind me about The Prisoner. O the embarrassment! The layout is a lot like Zork 1. You reach the finale by going back to the Caretaker -- #2, one of the first characters you encounter -- and saying a specific thing. But again, this ending move isn't available until you've gotten at least 850 points by playing other parts of the game.)

No, the division I want to draw between Myst and Outer Wilds is about the intended play experience. That's always shaky ground; people play the game in front of them, not the game the author wants them to play. But the assumption of Myst is that your play-through is a story, your personal exploration story. You begin at the beginning, explore, take notes, solve puzzles, and eventually (since there are no dead ends) reach the end. If you were writing a journal (popular!) then you might omit some of the repetitive fruitless wandering, but you'd write down every single clue, right? Same goes for the published strategy guide, which is inevitably presented as a journal. Shortcutting the puzzles is possible but the notional protagonist didn't do that! That's speedrun-fodder, and speedruns are a glitch aesthetic.

Yeah, the bad endings are a hitch in this seamless-narrative picture. But you only reach them late in the game, by which time you almost certainly have a save file. Or a bank of save files if you're an adventure-game fanatic. Almost nobody would have reached a bad ending and then started over from the beginning! And these days, Myst has autosave. So you can effectively UNDO with a couple of clicks. This very much reads as "how the game should always have been", even for us old-timers.

The other hitch is that the older '80s adventures are anything but a seamless narrative. You die constantly! You waste critical items on stupid ideas! You have to keep a bank of save files! We just discussed this.

We wanted to believe in a narrative through-line. Graham Nelson's seminal "Bill of Player's Rights" (May 1993) talks up the implicit assumption of continuous narrative:

Bill of Player's Rights [...] 3. To be able to win without experience of past lives 4. To be able to win without knowledge of future events

But Graham immediately has to hedge. In an expanded version (Jan 1995), he notes "This rule [3] is very hard to abide by." He gives three examples of puzzles that break the rule, but which still might be considered "fair" by contemporary adventurers. You just can't get through the Infocom era without a reckless attitude: try everything, see what fails horribly, restore an earlier game and try again.

Outer Wilds unquestionably calls for the same attitude; except the "restore" is a diegetic time loop. It's a game of trying wild stuff and dying. And yet, Outer Wilds feels nothing like Zork either! What am I trying to get at?

I think this: solving a puzzle in Zork or Myst feels like, well, solving a puzzle. It's right in front of you. You have a machine or a giant mirror or a row of buttons, and you mess with them. The puzzle responds. You might realize that another part of the puzzle is elsewhere (Myst loves pipes!) and then you run over there to mess with that, but it's still stuff that's right in front of you.

Solving a puzzle in Outer Wilds always happens elsewhere. Is "puzzle" even the right word? It's research; it's discovering secrets. You go out and try things and make discoveries and let them ferment in your brain. Then there's a moment of synthesis, and you shout "Holy crap! The secret was right there in front of me!" And then you go back and apply what you've learned.

...You know, that moment did exist in '80s adventures. It wasn't solving a puzzle; it was solving a puzzle in the shower. (For me that was the Elvish-runes door in Journey.) It was when you said "argh" and walked away from the game, took a walk, ate dinner... and then the lightning struck.

Every classic-adventure fan has experienced that moment -- but it's a rarity. You solve most puzzles by sitting in front of them. The metroidbrainia model ensures that every puzzle you solve feels like that thunderbolt. That's the genre keynote.

This lets us pry open another confusion: why games like Animal Well and Tunic regularly get labelled as "metroidbrainias". (Not to mention Blue Prince, the game that you don't need another review of so I'm writing this post instead.) In these games, you do go out and gather items and powers and treasures. (And put them in the trophy case.) But the game is careful to put more weight on what you do with the power than on the power itself. You may have to do a lot of platforming (Animal Well) or combat (Tunic, if you don't disable it) but the knowledge-based "brania" gameplay remains at least as important.

So there's my account. The Nature of the Metroidbrania Revealed. Does this help us create new and better games? I dunno, maybe. I'm describing a feeling rather than a strict definition. Much less a recipe -- you don't get recipes for better games; you have to do the work. But maybe it's a way to talk about that work. Let me know.


Renga in Blue

The Mysterious Mansion Adventure: A Time to Cast Away Stones

Progress! I think have most of the rooms, but that doesn’t mean I’m through yet. My prior post is needed for context. I flailed at nothing for a while before checking a hint Gus Brasil dropped; he suggested I MOVE the bed. I’m pretty sure I tried PUSH with no luck, ugh. This opens up […]

Progress! I think have most of the rooms, but that doesn’t mean I’m through yet. My prior post is needed for context.

Victor Lamba II HR, one of the French offshoots of the Interact. Notice the AZERTY keyboard. Every time I boot my emulator (which is French) I have to remap a few keys to turn it into QWERTY configuration. Via Retro Ordenadores Orty.

I flailed at nothing for a while before checking a hint Gus Brasil dropped; he suggested I MOVE the bed. I’m pretty sure I tried PUSH with no luck, ugh.

This opens up a HOLE, although it isn’t clear from the description the orientation, so I was a bit surprised when I tried GO HOLE and plummeted to my doom. Oops.

I had worked out the ROPE / SHORT ROPE business earlier — and I could see how that could be a huge hassle for someone who didn’t visualize the fact they weren’t reaching high enough to cut the rope — so fortunately TIE ROPE / CLIMB ROPE was now easy to come by. The landing place is dark.

I also had the MATCH from up in the high cupboard and the TORCH still, so I took these too back to the dark room to find a HOLE with a CROSS and nothing else of note.

Where things get interesting (in the “may you live in interesting times” sense) is upon trying to leave. This requires passing through the hallway with the cobwebs I found no use for.

Dropping the torch before entering is possible, but carrying over my knowledge from Troll Hole, I remembered the dark rooms in this parser allow moving around and dealing with items with no penalty. That is, you can go in the dark room, GET CROSS, and leave with CLIMB ROPE without ever turning on a light. So for my current run I still have a preserved match and torch in case I need it later (which might evade solving some puzzle involving clearing out the cobwebs first, and clearing out the cobwebs might reveal an item, so I can’t forget this entirely).

With the CROSS in hand the most immediately obvious next step was to try it on the vampire.

The vampire drops a ring, and just past the vampire is a skeleton with a missing skull. I figured I needed the skull from the witch, but the witch not only prevents passing through but also prevents taking the skull.

Fortunately, the ring that was just dropped presents a solution to this. I tried WEAR RING in case I could do a magic spell or some such (even though there’s no feedback given) and it turns out there’s a spell at work the whole time.

That is, the ring has turned us invisible! The skull can now be grabbed. The cat with two mouse holes is still hanging out in the same room but doesn’t present an immediate obstacle or threat so I’m guessing we’ll deal with that later.

Before showing off the skull, I should mention that going into the PASSAGE the witch was guarding leads to a CUBBYHOLE with a LEVER. Pulling the lever drops the player into a maze.

This took a bit of work to map at first, and I had to run the clock out once just trying out directions.

I still had the “turn, turn, turn” hint in mind, and thought it might apply here, since rather than the verb TURN it could apply to simple directional movement. The layout finally dawned on me, and the hint indeed helped:

Unfortunately, this doesn’t help me at all; the route here lets you go from the witch area down to the pantry next to the kitchen, but there’s no treasures in between. In Troll Hole, there was a maze where if you hadn’t found the gold nugget yet (too large to take out the normal way) the maze would also seem similarly useless, so that’s what I suspect here: this is intended as an alternate route later in the game.

Returning to that skull I mentioned, and doing PUT SKULL while at the headless skeleton in the vampire section:

The portal leads to a laboratory which is a dead end, with an APPARATUS, LOOSE WIRE, and BEAKER that has LIQUID.

The apparatus is described as having a loose wire and doing TIE WIRE gives the message

IT IS NOW FIXED
BUT NEEDS JUICE

but I’m unclear how to work things past that. I tried POUR LIQUID and the game said O.K. but with no apparent result. I’m worried that the parser is wanting something very specific, here (although it is also faintly possible it wants something other than the liquid). I did incidentally try drinking it…

…with little surprise as to the result. To summarize everything that’s a blatant loose end:

  • There’s an angry cat at some mouse holes (this likely won’t come into play later)
  • I can traverse a maze but didn’t find anything (this likely is meant as a through-route, but maybe I missed a secret)
  • I still can’t get at the small key in the crystal ball, in order to unlock the door in the clock
  • I need to operate the apparatus in the laboratory somehow
  • There’s a chimney too narrow to enter

This is leaving out the possibility of more secrets (like from clearing cobwebs; there’s also an apparently empty closet but maybe something happens there?) I don’t know how close I am to when Gus Brasil got stuck but I’ll take any hints or spectulation whatsoever.

Updated map, with new rooms marked.

Monday, 14. April 2025

Renga in Blue

The Mysterious Mansion Adventure (1982)

This is, as the manual notes, the “spine-tingling successor” to the Troll Hole Adventure, the game we played recently for the rare Interact computer from Michigan (and the less-rare-but-still-unusual Hector computer in France). The historical background is over at that link, so I’ll just dive in. This game is published by Micro Video, rather than […]

This is, as the manual notes, the “spine-tingling successor” to the Troll Hole Adventure, the game we played recently for the rare Interact computer from Michigan (and the less-rare-but-still-unusual Hector computer in France). The historical background is over at that link, so I’ll just dive in.

Well, maybe one piece of history. There’s a story in a 1983 edition of the Micro Video newsletter which talks about a Don Stockton of Ft. Lauderdale who modified his Corvette using an Interact computer. “Besides monitoring the car’s basic electrical functions, the Interact uses a ‘simple BASIC program’ to display a series of menus which Don uses to control gear shifting and other operations when driving.” As Don points out, the chunky character screen ends up being an asset for car visbility.

This game is published by Micro Video, rather than the Long Playing Software label I theorized was just an imaginary “subsidiary” which only used the name once.

There’s no treasure: this one’s just an escape from the spooky house, and with a time limit of 240 moves, ending at midnight. The time limit is emphasized enough the game gives warnings at 180, 120, and 60 moves from midnight. Aardvark’s Haunted House we just played had exactly the same trick (running to midnight with a minute per action) but it ended up being a fairly generous limit (only pushed closer to the limit because of the weird bug that forced me to take out treasures one at a time). However, that was just due to the straightforward nature of the actions. Based on Troll Hole and the parts of the game I’ve seen so far, this one will still have a tight map but might have lots of backtracking, so turn optimization may come into play later.

Not until I’ve solved more puzzles, though!

The layout is the typical multi-floor house with rooms like “kitchen” and “library” and “hallway” and etc.

The text is still chunky. Behold.

This is one step in, after doing LOOK ORGAN and finding the PIPE, which can be taken.

The sign is a warning (“DANGER DO NOT PLAY THE ORGAN”) and if you try that right away without taking away the pipe first, this happens:

NICE LITTLE TUNE
LOOSE PIPE FALLS
ON TOP OF ME
I AM DEAD WITH 236 MOVES TILL MIDNIGHT

The fireplace can be entered; there is a BIG KEY (which can be taken) and a CHIMNEY which is too narrow to enter.

Back at the drawing room, the clock is said (via LOOK CLOCK) to HAVE A BIG DOOR. OPEN CLOCK gets the response

DONT HAVE A KEY

but if you grab the big key from the fireplace first, it will open, revealing a second, smaller door.

I’ll talk later about the small key corresponding to the second door, so let’s visit other places, east first:

THERE IS A SEASON made me immediately think of the following “TURN, TURN, TURN”, so I assume something somewhere needs to be TURNed, but nothing I’ve tried the verb on so far (including the book) has had an effect.

(I went with their Ed Sullivan appearance since The Byrds already made an appearance with Deathmaze 5000.)

Further there’s a WINE CELLAR (with nothing) and stairs down lead to a VAMPIRE who is HUNGRY FOR BLOOD. He prevents going up the stairs or entering an ARCH. The Dracula in Aardvark Haunted House technically doesn’t “kill” you, he just softlocks the game if you don’t have the sledgehammer/stick handy since he prevents you from leaving, whereas here the difference is a death scene.

UNSAFE FOR CHILDREN.

Heading back to the drawing room, there’s a dining room to the north with a TABLE, TORCH, and BELL CORD. You can just pick up the torch, the table doesn’t do anything (?? not a safe assumption given this company’s last game) and the BELL CORD makes noise if you pull it.

We’ll come back to the cord later, and also to the room to the east, which has a kitchen with a cupboard that is out of reach.

For now, heading back to the start and going up:

You can’t take the cobwebs, and TURNing them has no effect either.

Here’s my map for now, but I’m sure it is incomplete:

To the south is a bedroom with bed; trying to TURN it gave me the cryptic message.

DONT SEE IT

After experimenting more, it seems like “fixed” objects give this message, but it’s possible the parser is leaking here in such a way I can figure out which objects are important and which are not. That is, trying to TURN COBWEBS gives a message of O.K. while TURN BED has the odd DONT SEE IT which might imply the cobwebs are important but the bed is not.

To the west of the hallway there’s a crystal ball…

…where LOOKing at it shows the small key (THERE IS A SMALL KEY INSIDE). However, you can’t get it (DONT SEE IT). In other circumstances I’d call that message a bug, but the layer of enigma makes it work. Trying to break the ball is unhelpful…

BREAKS INTO TINY PIECES

…so let’s try EAST of the hallway instead, with a bathroom that has a SINK, STOOL, and MIRROR.

The mirror and stool are both portable, and I assume we can fill something with water from the sink later (like Troll Hole). There is nothing behind the mirror, unlike Troll Hole.

The stool can go downstairs and be used to reach the cupboard in the kitchen. There is a match inside the cupboard which I haven’t used yet, so let’s go north of the hallway to a MASTER BEDROOM with a CANOPY BED. LOOKing notes there is something inside, and going in you find a DAGGER.

It’s a structural dagger! Taking the dagger causes the bed to collapse, and if you’re holding the pipe it lets you survive.

In a game design sense it is likely the player will have found the pipe by now, but it’s possible they won’t be holding it on their current loop through the game.

The collapse reveals a new exit, to an attic with “2 mouse holes”, “passage”, “cat”, “witch”, and “skull”, as well as a passage the witch prevents the player from entering.

The mouse holes are described as being across from each other, the cat is described as mean, and the witch is described as ugly. I tried bringing the mirror in just in case the witch’s ugliness was somehow “magical” but no luck.

One more thing! The stool works to get a match from the high cupboard, but it’s also useful with the ringing cord. If you take the dagger over to the cord you can try to CUT it and get a SHORT ROPE.

Trying to TIE ROPE after gets the message it is too short; the game here is broken. If you take the stool from earlier, drop it, and stand on it before cutting the cord, the result is now a ROPE (rather than a SHORT ROPE) evading the problem.

This feels much denser to describe than is typical for a game this size; the style here has not only any object potentially come into play (multiple times) but the possibility of using an item wrong (so while playing I have to keep track of items from the past and not just what I happen to be holding). There is no walkthrough or video available of this game and even Gus Brasil (who defeated Troll Hole before me) hasn’t been able to beat this game. I’ll take any suggestions people have!

Sunday, 13. April 2025

Renga in Blue

Haunted House: Alfred Hitchcock Presents

I’ve finished the game (previous post here), but the actual gameplay was made horribly intense due to a bug, and a very obnoxious final puzzle. Not a difficult-to-find-bug either — it is one that everyone playing the game and trying to win is guaranteed to hit. I think this was a victim of the Aardvark […]

I’ve finished the game (previous post here), but the actual gameplay was made horribly intense due to a bug, and a very obnoxious final puzzle. Not a difficult-to-find-bug either — it is one that everyone playing the game and trying to win is guaranteed to hit. I think this was a victim of the Aardvark bug-fixing philosophy as mentioned by Bob Anderson:

After 15 revisions of my “Time Trek” game, Rodger took to tossing the cassettes with the new revisions in the trash, rather than fix the production “masters” to quash the bugs.

I don’t know how this particular game would have shipped with this particular bug without the level of apathy Rodger Olson displayed. (Maybe this was a bug not in the Ohio Scientific that got introduced on the Coco?)

From last time, I went back over every room carefully, only finding a handful of extra messages. I did realize the ANTIQUE CHAIR from the den was considered a treasure (I didn’t realize I could carry it, but I was referring to it as a CHAIR, not an ANTIQUE as the game was wanting. Silly me.)

I went back to the desk and drawer that gave me trouble last time, did OPEN DRAWER to receive an empty prompt, and then did LOOK to find there was now a KEY and some SILVER BULLETS visible. I think I did LOOK DRAWER (which just gives A DRAWER, both before and after opening it) and didn’t think to LOOK at the room as a whole again.

The silver bullets and the gun, when both held, mean the GUN is now able to be used on the WOLFMAN. The game decides to spin a random roll to find out if you hit or not, and as I’ve hammered at many times with RNG, this means a player might get in a situation with 10+ rolls where they miss their shot; most adventure games this would mean they’re doing something wrong. (I did have this happen during one of my loops … and I’ll explain why I needed to do some loops in a moment.)

Also, his description is WOLFMAN (WEREWOLF) but you have to use WOLFMAN instead of WEREWOLF, otherwise the parser gets confused.

Killing the wolfman opens the remainder of the top floor.

Going up, straightforwardly, leads to an attic. The attic has an AX and a TRUNK with a BAR OF GOLD, and if a vampire bat comes by and filches a treasure at random (it works like the Pirate of Crowther/Woods, but completely random and you can’t stop it) it ends up here.

North of the wolfman is a bedroom with an extra DOOR. Doing OPEN on the DOOR reveals a skeleton blocking the way.

You can open the jewelry box to find diamonds (treasure) and a watch (not, although I had to test it to find out). The furniture is meaningless other than atmosphere.

You can just GET SKELETON and it will fall out of the way (leaving a SKULL and PILE OF BONES, again useless).

The package of money is another treasure, the flashlight is the method of getting light to the cellar (well, “CELLER”) without having wind blow it out. We’ll go down there in a second, but first south of the WOLFMAN.

The RARE STAMPS makes for a treasure, but it is hooked up to cause the front door to slam and be jammed permanently. The only way out is now through the cellar. (This is the one moment of Aardvark-style geographic interest for the game.) The BLACK BOOK has a combination for the safe (36, 27, 45) which has a KEY (needed to get out of the cellar door) and GOLD COINS (another treasure).

Taking the flashlight down to the cellar, the huge thing blocking our way is FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER. You can KILL FRANK but have to specify AXE (if you try the knife from the kitchen, it turns into a bent knife).

It was around this time I decided to start depositing treasures, and around this time I made a horrid discovery. The DROP command of the game is broken. If you drop any item, it drops all items in inventory, and not only that, it doesn’t properly reset the item count. So if you’re holding 6 items, and drop one, your inventory capacity just went down by five. Again, I have no idea how this slipped by given even a minor attempt at playing through will reveal this issue.

Arms full with only two items in inventory.

After a few loops where I fully deciphered what was going on, I ended up only winning by starting out via taking treasures to the entrance one at a time. If you are holding one item, and drop it, no damage is done to your inventory capacity. The ANTIQUE CHAIR, VAN GOUGH PAINTING, GOLD COINS (from the desk) and CRYSTAL BOWL are all available this way. Getting more requires killing the Wolfman which requires both a gun and bullets, so I did that next while only holding those items, then dropping them off after; this damaged my inventory by 1 but this was workable. (This game is for children, eh?)

I then decided to go more gung-ho and tried to carry the rest I needed all at once: PACKAGE OF MONEY, DIAMONDS, BAR OF GOLD, RARE STAMPS, KEY, AXE, FLASHLIGHT. Grabbing the stamps blocks off the front door, but the flashlight + axe can be used to bust through Frankenstein, and then past the monster is the NORTH CELLER with an exit.

The problem is this is still only nine out of ten treasures. I thought maybe the watch or jewelry box itself would count, but no. The items in the NORTH CELLAR come into play here: specifically the shovel, sledgehammer, and stick.

I knew already DIG was a verb and so I tested it dutifully outside and kept getting rebuffed. It turns out digging only works in the south cellar:

Two more DIGs gets the message “AHA!”, and looking reveals a coffin. Opening it up:

I already knew POUND was a verb (yes, this is another one I’ve never seen in an adventure before, I lucked out from the prefix PO being on my list as POKE) and I found via a lot of trial and error that POUND STICK worked. The game asked me “INTO WHAT” so I assumed this was a “make” kind of command and tried STAKE, but no dice.

The stick is already considered a stake. You’re supposed to POUND STICK / DRACULA.

Fortunately I hadn’t broken my inventory too much during this loop and was able to bring the ring over to victory.

I can see why the “for children” tag landed, just considering the puzzles from a bird’s-eye level: kill a wolfman with silver bullets, open a safe with a clearly-visible combination, kill a monster with an axe, kill Dracula with stick and hammer. The actual implementation (especially with the broken DROP command) makes it highly unlikely to be beaten by children or adults without some source-diving.

Dropping the “for children” part, and just considering this as a game, it comes tantalizingly close again to some interesting choices; having the items that don’t get used like the lunch and knife and fire actually work for the atmosphere. This is combined with such an obstinate parser that all value here is nullified, and of course the very last act requires a giant leap of parser finesse.

There’s one more Aardvark game to go but it lands pretty late in 1983; maybe they’ll have finally tweaked their parser by then? In the meantime, coming up: the other mysterious and mostly-undocumented game for the Interact computer, the appropriately titled Mysterious Mansion.