Planet Interactive Fiction Last Update: Sunday, 14. December 2025 03:01

(Continued from my previous posts.)

“Giza-003 The Great Sphinx” by kairoinfo4u. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Things didn’t quite go down as expected. When I was mapping the ancient caves, I had apparently accidentally looped to a room I had already reached and thought the area was larger than it really was.

I am now marking rooms with treasures in blue.

The only benefit of entering them (as far as I can tell) is getting a moonstone.

This cave is more like a tall shaft. When you look up, you see stars instead of the sun. Exits lead north and northeast.
There is a beautiful pale moonstone here, as big as your hand.

It’s atmospheric at least?

This cave is almost circular, and the walls are painted with an astounded collection of colorful paintings of animals and birds. A cramped passage leads off to the northeast, and some broader paths go to the northwest, southwest, and south.

I’m still wondering if I’m missing something just because of structural solving reasons. That is, the section was relatively tricky to get to; asking the tour guide to take you to the Sphinx really is the only way in (more on that in a moment) hence entering the caves felt like a dramatic “break in” akin to finding the underground in Hermit. I combed over multiple times for missing exits or possible uses of “magic” and no luck.

Somewhat stumped, I decided at least to work out the orientation of the Sphinx with the rest of the map. It attaches to the desert such that there are one-way exits to the north. If you go directly north from the Sphinx you’ll arrive at the temple (the one where going down led to a lyre and a rockfall); keep going directly north and you’ll end up going by the pyramid, and then the tour guide.

Not sure what to tackle next, I tried various attempts at the hungry crocodile. My best guess was taking some “rotting meat” that was up near the base-camp tomb and feeding it. This seemed to be the wrong approach.

You have reached the bank of the Nile, at a narrow cleft in the surrounding rocks. The Valley of the Kings is north of you, and the river bank stretches off to the east. Across the river you can see the modern buildings of new Luxor. A twenty-foot crocodile is resting lazily on the bank, sunning himself. He looks asleep, but his beady little eyes are open.
FEED CROCODILE
Your offering isn’t acceptable.
GIVE MEAT
It’s not hungry.

Just for fun, given I had an “axe” from the fanatic, I tried KILL CROCODILE and died in an unexpected way.

An Egyptian wildlife official appears from behind a rock, where he was studying the migratory habits of the black ibis, and is so furious that he drowns you in the Nile.

Oh dear, I think … I’m afraid … yep, you’ve gotten yourself killed. I could try to resurrect you. Would you like me to give it a try?

As this is a derived-from-Adventure-source game, of course it includes the same resurrection code. It does seem appropriate for an ancient Egypt game, so I tried yes.

Okay, here goes, but remember that I’m not really up on the reincarnation methods of the ancient Egyptians. I never have used that old spell in The Book of the Dead, but it goes something like “Oh King, live foreve…”

****** Ka-Pow! ******

Wow! That was spectacular. A huge gout of blue smoke, smelling of incense, exploded all over the place. I feel a bit dizzy myself. Take a look around, and you’ll see …

You are at the Visitor’s Center in the Valley of the Kings. A dark-skinned tourguide, wearing a bright red fez and a white linen suit, bows and asks, “Where would you like to go?”

I should point out the “live forever” line doesn’t show up in the actual Egyptian Book of the Dead, but it does show up in a book by that name published by the “Supreme Council of the Order of Rameses” in the early 20th century. Maybe that’s where the fanatics with axes come from.

Source.

For more slightly off-canon underworld fun, Grunion Guy (who blogs about text adventures) discovered you can ask the tour guide to take you to HELL.

A dark-skinned tourguide, wearing a bright red fez and a white linen suit, bows and asks, “Where would you like to go?”
HELL
You are standing in the middle of a blazing inferno. Your skin sears, and your hair is begining to burn off. You can see the shapes of other hapless humans around you, and hear their awful shrieks of pain as their flesh eternally cooks in the flames.
GO EAST
This is the shore of a great featureless ocean, an endless sea that stretches out to the ends of eternity.

Exemptus (who has already beaten the game) reports in the comments this is an “Easter egg” and it is possible to escape from Hell, but I’ll work that out some other time. In the meantime I was still trying to make regular progress, and I had still had lurking parts of my map unfinished, so I decided to crunch through.

Specifically, lots of exits that went to “mountains” but I never figured out where the landing points were. I went to the mountains adjacent to the desert (with the assumption they would form some or all of the landing points) and dropped unique objects in every room, plundering even from my already-deposited treasure to have every room uniquely tagged.

I then went to those previously red-marked exits and tried each one, using a saved game in order to make things go faster.

I found that all the red-marked exits went to already-mapped mountain territory. (The hope would be I would find a new set of rooms, but it appears Dian decided not to hide anything this way. I can’t discount the possibility I’ve made a mistake, though; this is a big map.)

I went back and combed over the puzzles I had remaining:

1.) The camel near the base camp, which “spits at you”, and “playfully tries to kick your head off”. He blocks your way east, but you can enter from the other direction, so there doesn’t seem to be any reason to bother. Just like the meat with the crocodile, the carrot seemed to be the most promising, but I got the same responses as before (“it’s not hungry” / “your offering isn’t acceptable”) and that even happened while giving the meat, so this seemed to be barking up the wrong tree.

2.) The door with a seal that has a “dog, with nine little men.” We get stopped with “magic” (a “shimmering figure” and “mysterious force”) and I did test a few items out in case I could WAVE CHARM and get a result but nothing worked. (WAVE gets interpreted as digging by the parser, it’s a little confused.)

3.) The rockfall near the lyre didn’t even like me referring to it as a noun, so likely anything that needed to be done there doesn’t make direct reference (like blowing a horn; and before you ask, playing the lyre does nothing there).

4.) A statue of Ramses I believe I forgot to mention previously, close to the crocodile area, which is blocking a path from a canyon to the east.

You are walking along the base of a sheer cliff. A paved road leads off to the north, and the face of the cliff continues to the east, where it runs against the hills to form a canyon. The east end of the canyon, hardly more than a crevice at this point, is blocked by a monumental statue of Rameses The Great. The only visible exit from this area is back out to the west.
GO EAST
There is no way to get through in that direction.

5.) Any possible other tourist destinations, although I think I may have run the guide dry.

6.) The crocodile from earlier.

I finally looped back to the crocodile, which I will remind you, the game said was not hungry. However, the game also said my offering wasn’t acceptable, and the parser was having the occasional error, so … maybe …?

FEED MEAT TO CROCODILE
The croc snatches the stinking hunk of carrion and waddles off into the river with it, his beady eyes glistening with greed.

You need to use the entire phrase; the two-word command doesn’t work. Usually this sort of moment where you have to contradict a previous parser message to solve a puzzle makes me audibly growl at my computer (see Pillage Village for some of that) but it did seem so appropriate to give the meat to the crocodile it felt worth giving it a few more tries.

Past the crocodile you can walk along the Nile and find a plank (haven’t used yet) and climb up a rockfall which appears to be on the other side of that temple…

A narrow trail leads up to the northwest from here, along the canyon wall. The canyon used to extend north, but now it is blocked by a rockslide. The only other exit goes to the west.
NW
You are on a very dangerous trail, just above the floor of the chasm. A path leads up from here to an awkward clamber, and another trail goes southeast down to the bottom of the chasm.
U
You are inching along an awkward clamber on the wall of a very steep canyon. A steep trail leads up from here, and a dangerous looking trail extends down into the darkness.

…and find yourself in a jungle.

Again, mostly just for the scenery and atmosphere, and dispensing one treasure: a Roman helmet.

You are walking through a humid tropical jungle, surrounded on all sides by waving ferns, tall palms, and clumps of papyrus.
W
You are wandering through the jungle. There is a tumbled mound of rocks here, and next to it a skeleton dressed in the rotted shreds of Roman armor. He was probably trying to mark his path.
A dented, but still impressive, ancient Roman helmet is here.

However, I was again now stuck. It took me a few more beats — mainly because of the sequence I had tested things — to realize while I had tried feeding a carrot to the camel, I did it using the “bad” parser syntax. Heading back with carrot in hand, and using GIVE CARROT TO CAMEL:

The camel takes the carrot as if he’s doing you a great favor. He turns his back on you, kicks a little dirt in your face, and pretends he’s never met you. Typical camel, actually.
E
You are in the desolate Theban Mountains, at a narrow rift. A section of stony cliff has been smoothed off sometime in the past, and a massive door, dark with age, is set into it. The door is held firmly shut by an ancient iron lock.

The key I just have from the outside (it was north of the carrot).

UNLOCK DOOR
The huge door creaks open slowly, its hinges stiff with age. Behind it, to the south, you can see a dark, sloping hallway.
S
It is now pitch dark. If you go on, something may eat you.
TURN ON FLASHLIGHT
The flashlight is now on.
This is the west end of a long sloping corridor. The east end of it leads down into a what looks like a large room. A door in the north wall is open to the bright light of day.

And this seems like a good place to pause for now! It turns out all I was really stuck on was a syntax issue, but that dragged me down for a few hours (at least enough time to get those mountains mapped). I’m hoping I’ll be able to coast to victory next time barring any last moment surprises.

We’re proud to announce that Cheerleader’s Choice: New York Spirit!, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app. It’s 30% off until December 18th! Charli Battersby’s other Choice of Games title, Kidnapped! A Royal Birthday is 40% off for this week as well!

Be! Heroic! B-E heroic! When villainy rules the streets of New York, it’s up to you to grab your pompoms, lead the cheer squad, and climb to the top of the pyramid to save the city!

Cheerleader’s Choice: New York Spirit! is an interactive novel by former cheerleader Charli Battersby. Your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 295,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, fueled by the vast unstoppable power of your imagination. You’ll cheer and you’ll lead, in a game that you read!

As a member of one of New York’s fiercest cheer squads, you and your friends keep up the city’s spirits. New York desperately needs good cheer these days: masked vigilantes rule its chaotic dystopian streets, frightening locals and tourists alike. Can you turn this city’s frown upside down? Or maybe just turn yourself upside down, in high-flying stunts that wow the crowds!

Cheer your way from Central Park to Coney Island. (Can you win the hotdog eating contest and lead your squad to victory?) Will you B-E aggressive and fight off the villains? You can use your squad’s teamwork and cheerleading skills to solve mysteries, win dance-offs, and live a life of altruism, turning New York back into a utopia! Or will you become a pompom vigilante yourself? Either way, you might just be the cheerleader that your city needs.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; cis or trans; gay, straight, or bi; young or old
• Choose your position within the stunt pod: base, backspot, or flyer.
• Romance enthusiastic Wendi, glitter-loving Robbie, athletic long-time friend Pepper, altruistic flyer Bryttany, himbo Bryan, glamorous Rikki, sweet anxious Carrie, shy leader Johnny, or outgoing Larry.
• Choose your team’s name and signature colors, and design their uniform! Be classic, sexy, sporty, or bizarre.
• Climb the pyramid to become captain of your team, or storm off to form a rival squad!
• Discover the secret identity of the masked crime-fighter known as “The Spirit Stick.”
• Shatter every cheerleader stereotype! Or, like, embrace them? Like, sincerely or subversively?

We’ve got spirit! How about you?

We hope you enjoy playing Cheerleader’s Choice: New York Spirit!. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

The Boston IF meetup for December will be Monday, December 15, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Google Meet link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

I hereby raise awareness of Nighthawk's Solstice, which celebrates the day of the earliest sunset of the winter.

Of course the astronomical solstice is December 21st. That's the shortest day of the year, sunrise to sunset. But I never see sunrise, do I? For me, the shortest day is measured from when I wake up to sunset. Assume I wake up at some average time (nobody's business but mine), then my solstice is the day of the earliest sunset.

And very possibly yours too.

It's a bit tricky to pin down which day this is. There's a million ad-encrusted sites which show you sunset times, but they mostly work in minutes, which means there's a stretch of days which are "the earliest". It's the bottom of a long flat curve.

(Really, I'm not sure there is a sunset time which is precise to the second. I suppose I could sit on the Race Point shoreline by Provincetown and watch the last edge of sunlight disappear into Cape Cod Bay. Nah. Chilly.)

Anyhow, I polled a bunch of sources and decided that December 8th is close enough. It's the day I posted last year, anyhow.

As I said then:

Celebrate by drinking a mug of coffee (or cocoa or whatever) under weird fluorescent lighting while wearing a fedora. Or a red dress. Or a red fedora. (Linux support optional.)

Spread the word. Buy the cocoa.

Update, afterward

Several people point out (see comments below) that "earliest sunset" and "latest sunrise" are latitude-dependent. Whoops!

I confess I find this hard to visualize, since of course the astronomical solstice (when they're closest together) is the same day for everyone. (Modulo arguments about whether it's winter or summer.) But the charts are clear enough. Nighthawk's is December 6th in DC, November 30th in Miami, November 25th in Mexico City, etc. Oslo has a few days yet to go.

Well, in future years you'll have to do your own calculations. December 8th is shared by Detroit, Dubuque, Rome, and Tbilisi.

Me, I took a nice walk around the neighborhood and tried to catch the sunset. Didn't work; there are no good southwest sightlines, even up on the hill where the high school sits. Nice sky, though. Near froze my ears off when the wind came up.

We’re excited to announce that Cheerleader’s Choice: New York Spirit is releasing this Thursday, December 11th! You can play the first three chapters for free today, see the trailer on YouTube, and check out the author interview as well! And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam! The more wishlists we get, the better the game will do on Steam on release day.

Be! Heroic! B-E heroic! When villainy rules the streets of New York, it’s up to you to grab your pompoms, lead the cheer squad, and climb to the top of the pyramid to save the city!

Cheerleader’s Choice: New York Spirit is an interactive novel by former cheerleader Charli Battersby. Your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 295,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, fueled by the vast unstoppable power of your imagination. You’ll cheer and you’ll lead, in a game that you read!

As a member of one of New York’s fiercest cheer squads, you and your friends keep up the city’s spirits. New York desperately needs good cheer these days: masked vigilantes rule its chaotic dystopian streets, frightening locals and tourists alike. Can you turn this city’s frown upside down? Or maybe just turn yourself upside down, in high-flying stunts that wow the crowds!

Cheer your way from Central Park to Coney Island. (Can you win the hotdog eating contest and lead your squad to victory?) Will you B-E aggressive and fight off the villains? You can use your squad’s teamwork and cheerleading skills to solve mysteries, win dance-offs, and live a life of altruism, turning New York back into a utopia! Or will you become a pompom vigilante yourself? Either way, you might just be the cheerleader that your city needs.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; cis or trans; gay, straight, or bi; young or old
• Choose your position within the stunt pod: base, backspot, or flyer.
• Romance enthusiastic Wendi, glitter-loving Robbie, athletic long-time friend Pepper, altruistic flyer Bryttany, himbo Bryan, glamorous Rikki, sweet anxious Carrie, shy leader Johnny, or outgoing Larry.
• Choose your team’s name and signature colors, and design their uniform! Be classic, sexy, sporty, or bizarre.
• Climb the pyramid to become captain of your team, or storm off to form a rival squad!
• Discover the secret identity of the masked crime-fighter known as “The Spirit Stick.”
• Shatter every cheerleader stereotype! Or, like, embrace them? Like, sincerely or subversively?

We’ve got spirit! How about you?

The heart of winter is months off yet, but the darkness already presses in. (Remember about Nighthawk's Solstice!) I have gotten into the latest crop of deduction-investigation games... and a few others as well.

• A Case of Fraud
• Ambrosia Sky: Act One
• The Apothecary of Trubiz
• Mind Diver
• Orbyss

A Case of Fraud

• by Hesperus Games -- game site

A detective game following the Roottrees model. You're filling out a business org chart instead of a family tree, but same idea. Family members are not included (after the initial tutorial step), but pets are. Enjoy your kitty pictures.

This is pleasant in a small-stakes way. Most of the workplace hanky-panky is illicit smoochies rather than the titular fraud. It would count as cozy except, oh yes, the CEO turned up dead in a pool of blood.

The last act, after you've got all the names and faces sorted out, involves investigating that murder. This is where the game gets wobbly. The final questionnaire is rudimentary. I scored 100% on it, but it didn't ask me about all the things I'd figured out, and then the closing screen revealed some stuff that I hadn't figured out but was apparently supposed to have. An anticlimactic end. But I enjoyed the first couple of hours of document-peering.

Ambrosia Sky: Act One

• by Soft Rains -- game site

The colonies around Saturn's rings were supposed to be the breadbasket of the solar system... until weird fungus started sprouting in the corners. And then in people. Now you have to go in with your fungicide pistol, power-wash the mess, and find out how it all went wrong.

This is an odd, off-balance mix. The narrative is a dense mycelial (sorry) network of environmental journals and live commentary from the protagonist. Delia has prior history in the Cluster, and then the Cluster has its own history as the fungal crisis crept up on it. All of this is well-written, and well-acted in the few voiced parts (mostly the protagonist).

But I never felt like it came together into a narrative, or any kind of sequence at all. What happened to Delia? She left to pursue a career in world-saving, and she misses the people she left. What happened to the Cluster? Well, you're hosing down stations full of corpses, so take a guess. Some people were worried about this "Cluster-lung" epidemic; others wanted to paper over the problem. Delia has regrets along the way.

It's on-point for today's news but nothing happens. Or is revealed to have happened. The only actual mystery is what happened to Delia's old flame Maeve, and that's not resolved in this release. Gotta wait for Act 3.

The gameplay is fine. Fungus-washing is most of what you do in the game, and it's reasonably fun. Maybe not as tactilely satisfying as it could have been? Cleaning up the sprawling strands of blue crystal feels good. But then there's times when you're squirting at a dense outcrop of fungus, and it feels like you're drilling holes in a block of wood.

(Your pistol has a couple of spray settings but I never found them efficient enough to bother with.)

(You know what I wanted? For the chunky fungus to shrink back a bit when you spray it. Just a half-second of melting away from where the spray hits, a vertex or two. That would have felt great.)

It's not just mindless spraying. You need to harvest fruiting bodies to upgrade your gear. That requires some careful carve-and-grab work. And then there are nifty environmental effects, notably electrical cables that you can clean, reroute, or (later) lay down your own connections for. Good solid exploration stuff, if not as "immersive-sim" as the game wants to claim. It's fun when the gravity goes out, too.

Like I said, mixed. I had a very satisfying six hours with Ambrosia Sky. (Turn off the mission timer, so it's pure contemplative fungus-carving and cable puzzles.) The art has a delightfully scratchy psychedelic palette that evokes sci-fi posters without being slavishly four-color about it. I could listen to Bailey Wolfe emote in contralto all day. I will play Act 2. I can tell that a lot of work went into all the pieces of this. I'm just not sure they all fit together into a game.

The Apothecary of Trubiz

• by Kinjo Games Lab -- game site

Another tiny little deduction game, this time on the Horticulture side of the yard. You're sent to concoct potions and cure diseases for a village, guided by an medical tract you can't read.

This has the form of a language puzzle, but it's simple symbol association, really. You never have to analyze the alphabet or the linguistics. On the up side, it's got explorable and discoverable mechanics, which is what we loved about Horticulture/Antiquities.

It's snack-sized and easy. Although I admit that I stumbled into one critical discovery by dumb luck. If I'd missed that I might have gotten entirely stuck. As it was, a charming diversion.

Mind Diver

• by Indoor Sunglasses -- game site

A young woman turns up at a police station with traumatic memory damage and a missing boyfriend. You're a forensic technician who reconstructs memories. In you go!

This is a narrative-deduction hybrid. Does that make sense? The deduction genre is a narrative genre, even if the narrative is usually history or frozen snapshots. (Which is why I like saying static deduction.) But this one is strong on the narrative side and light on the inference puzzles, so I'll call it a crossbreed. One quarter deduction on the mother's side.

You explore memory-scenes -- frozen, yes, but key moments are narrated. Each scene has gaps. You have to slurp up memory-objects (with your memory-slurping gun, just go with it) and squirt the appropriate object into each memory-hole. Sometimes the required object is misplaced in the scenery; sometimes it's camouflaged; sometimes you have to locate it in an earlier memory-scene.

Mind Diver doesn't lean into the intricate pigeonhole logic of Golden Idol or Obra Dinn. You're mostly listening to the dialogue, looking around, and then figuring out what object makes narrative sense at a given point. What fits the logic of the story? Like I said, not puzzle-heavy.

But that's fine, because the narrative is the backbone of the game. It's a time-scrambled journey through Lina's relationship with Sebastian: how it started, how it ended, why it ended. The backdrop is lightly science-fictional (you're a mind-diver, after all) but it's a character story at root.

The visuals are deliberately janky -- you explore distorted photogrammetric renderings of real scenes, which is a neat and thematically appropriate technique. The impact is all in the voice acting.

My only complaint is that the pacing falls apart at the end. Most of the game works fine; each chapter lays out more of the story, nonlinearly but dramatically effective. But once you have the whole picture, there's sort of nowhere to go with it. The game offers a final "boss puzzle" (easier and less engaging than the previous material), and then a couple of story denouements in sequence. It's strung-out rather than all landing at once.

But hey, I said this was a narrative game, and the story lands its ending. A wrenching and effective moment. It's the sync with the gameplay that I'm complaining about, and only under my breath. Mind Diver is great little game. It might not satisfy the hard-core logic puzzlers -- but then it might be perfect for enticing story-game fans into the joys of deductive puzzlery.

Orbyss

• by Misty Whale -- game site

You're a marble, solving marble-rolling puzzles in a neon-lit megastructure. (Took me a minute to catch it was the "Orb Abyss.")

I have loved marble-rolling puzzles since Oxyd. I don't need to remind you how I feel about Tron. So, really, my thumbs-up is overdetermined.

Orbyss starts out with good ol' gates and pressure plates, except that instead of good ol' crates, it's marbles. (Just like you, except obedient.) The game then introduces time-freezing (for all marbles but you), as well as some audio puzzles which would be annoying if not for the "show visual cues" preference.

(I strongly recommend that preference. I enjoy audio puzzles! But trying to keep track of five different beebly noises on top of a maze of switch-gates melted down my situational awareness. If the authors think that's a fun challenge, I want to meet them. Don't worry though; the visual cues snapped it all into place, without spoiling the fun.)

The later levels shift into the kind of puzzle where you have to coordinate with your former self. Or selves. (Marbles.) This is not, to be honest, my favorite kind of puzzle. I can do it; I finished both Talos Principles. I just find it somewhat exhausting. I don't bother unless I'm enjoying the rest of the game.

Which I was! Orbyss is beautiful. It feels great to play. No dexterity-rolling. The programmed-path puzzles are timed puzzles by definition, but the timing is generous and I never got too frustrated. The audio design is sample-perfect. (That's pixel-perfect for your ears.) And did I mention it's beautiful? Chasms of light, planes of force, little green marbles puttering around.

Everybody steals Tron's neon pinstriping. It's the subtle backlit shine of the surfaces that's hard. Orbyss nails it.

The game has a quiet agenda of cooperation, which I appreciated. When you're working with other marbles, or your past self (marble), that's a puzzle mechanic -- but Orbyss makes it thematic as well. You can often spot puzzle maps off in the distance that you never reach. There's other marbles beavering away at them! They commute past you in their little flying saucers! Occasionally you open up a gate for a sibling-marble, or one of them opens up a gate for you. Not in the usual puzzle way; just a favor from a colleague. The final "boss" level is even more down this road.

This is good. These are the days to keep collective action in view. Yes, even in our single-player puzzle games. If Talos 2 and Psychonauts 2 can do it, so can you. I'm happy to see that Orbyss joins in.

Anyway, great game, great puzzles. Go for it.

Footnote on game soundtracks

I'll buy any game soundtrack that I enjoy, but particularly the techno/vapor-wave-y ones. Cloudpunk, SOLAS 128, Entropy Centre, Solar Ash, Rez -- of course Rez. And more. I've been coding to this background music for decades.

The Orbyss soundtrack... I bought it, and then I didn't get into it. Which is weird! I said the audio environment was perfect, right? All the little electronic noises as you move around and trigger things are awesome. The audio puzzle markers are hard to keep track of but they sound great. The menu UI noises made me smile in gentle bliss.

But this doesn't add up to a soundtrack. When I put the Orbyss OST on in my office, it drops out of my awareness. Then it ends and I say "Whoops, it's quiet in here."

Right now I've got the Cocoon soundtrack up. Cocoon is a marble-rolling puzzle game with a Tron-ish vibe, superficially similar to Orbyss. The soundtrack is great; exactly the right balance of present and not distracting. I have no idea how to explain the difference, though.

Funny story: A couple of years ago, I walked past Cocoon at the GDC IGF pavilion. Someone was standing next to the machine. I thought, "Oh, the developer, I should tell him I liked it." Then I saw it was Jakob Schmid, the music composer. I was even more excited! Surely he wasn't expecting anybody to recognize his name and compliment him specifically on his soundtrack work. So I went up to him and did that.

He asked, "What did you like about it?"

I was completely flummoxed. I mumbled something about "good work music" and slithered away.

I hope Schmid wasn't disappointed at my lack of vocabulary. I guess now I could say "Unlike the Orbyss soundtrack, it doesn't disappear from my attention when I play it!" But that wouldn't be very satisfying either.

I apologize to Pierre Estève, the Orbyss composer and sound designer, for this footnote. It works great in the game! I'm just talking about the album presentation.

Estève has a long and illustrious career in gaming, going back to the Atlantis adventure games in the 90s. I had no idea until I looked him up.

Oh, gods, I went and checked my Atlantis 2 review. Twenty-five years ago, I wrote:

Even the music managed to impress me a couple of times, and soundtracks rarely attract my attention.

What a cad. I really am embarrassed now. Time to buy the Atlantis soundtracks off Bandcamp and give them another listen.

With the Wing Commander movie having gone down in flames, there was nothing left for Chris Roberts and the rest of Digital Anvil to do but go back to making games. This undoubtedly pleased Microsoft, which had been waiting for some return on its generous investment in what it had thought was a new games studio for more than two years now. Yet Microsoft must have been considerably less pleased by the actual states of the game projects being undertaken by Digital Anvil. For they rather belied Roberts’s repeated assurances that doing the special effects for the movie wouldn’t affect the games at all. Of the five game projects that had been begun before the movies came calling, Robert Rodriguez’s Tribe had ended with his departure and Highway Knight had also been quietly abandoned. Two of the other projects — the real-time-strategy game Conquest and the crazily ambitious alternative-life-in-a-box Freelancer — were spinning their wheels with no firm timetable.

That did at least leave Starlancer to stand out as a rare example of good sense. At the height of his brother’s movie mania, Erin Roberts had flown to Britain, to place his Starlancer design documents in the hands of a new outfit called Warthog, located in the Robertses’ old hometown of Manchester. The first tangible product to result from Microsoft’s investment in Digital Anvil would thus come from a sub-contractor rather than from the studio itself.

Starlancer shipped in April of 2000, whereupon it became clear that, while Warthog had done a competent job with it, they hadn’t been able to make it feel fresh or exciting. “An interest-killing combination of ennui and déjà vu snakes through the whole endeavor,” wrote Computer Gaming World. In terms of presentation, it most resembled a higher-resolution version of Wing Commander II, the last game in the series before digitized human actors entered the picture. It too made do with straightforward mission briefings and the occasional computer-generated cutscene. By no means ought this to have been an automatically bad thing. Yet Starlancer lacked the spark that might have let it challenge the previous year’s Freespace 2 for the title of the 1990s space sim’s crowning glory. It sold like the afterthought it felt like.

In the meantime, Chris Roberts had picked up the pieces after the disappointment of the Wing Commander movie’s reception and unleashed his prodigious capacity for enthusiasm upon the Freelancer project. As he told gaming magazines and websites throughout 1999 and 2000, his goal was to create a “detailed, dynamic, living world” — or rather a galaxy, in which you could travel from planet to planet in your customized spaceship, doing just about anything you could imagine.

Freelancer is way beyond anything I’ve done in the Wing Commander universe. It’s going to be a fully functioning, living, breathing universe with a whole ecosystem. You can see the promise in something like Privateer, but this is geometrically [exponentially?] beyond that game. It’s like building a city. [?] Compared to Privateer, the scope, the dynamic universe  — it’s all 3D — is much more interesting. There’s much more intrigue the player can get involved in. Everything’s rules-based versus scripted. Commerce happens, trade happens, and piracy happens because of what’s going on in the game universe and not because of scripted events.

Freelancer could be played alone, but would well and truly come alive only when played online, as described by Computer Gaming World:

Freelancer’s multiplayer game will be a massively-multiplayer universe where thousands of players will be able to fly around and interact with each other in a variety of capacities. Digital Anvil envisions a dynamic, socially-oriented game that features the single-player game’s politics and clans as a backdrop. This multiplayer game will also permit you to ally with one of the main houses in the game, or go it alone.

Perhaps the coolest potential feature is the ability to own your own base…

Any of you reading this article who have been following the more recent career of Chris Roberts will readily recognize the themes here. Roberts is not a designer with a huge number of grand conceptual ideas, but once he has one he likes, he holds onto it like a dog does a bone.

Alas, by the summer of 2000 Microsoft was finally running out of patience. Seeing Digital Anvil’s lack of concrete progress toward finishing Freelancer as their fourth anniversary as a studio approached, the mega-corp was becoming restless. Even Erin Roberts seemed to be losing patience with his brother. With Chris’s acquiescence, he set up his own studio in Austin, called Fever Pitch Studios, to finish Digital Anvil’s long back-burnered real-time-strategy game Conquest. It would emerge in August of 2001 under the name of Conquest: Frontier Wars, the second Digital Anvil game that had had to leave its place of birth in order to come to fruition. It would prove no more successful than Starlancer, drowning in a sea of similar games.

Well before then, Microsoft reluctantly concluded that Chris Roberts, the whole reason it had invested so heavily in Digital Anvil in the first place, was the primary reason that the studio couldn’t finish a single game on its own. Still not wanting to raise a scandal the year before the Xbox launched to signal an even deeper commitment to games, it “offered” to buy Roberts out, a transaction which would give it a majority stake in the studio. On December 5, 2000, the press release went out: “Microsoft has reached a preliminary agreement to buy Digital Anvil. The acquisition will strengthen our commitment to producing top-quality PC and Xbox titles.” Roberts was to be given the face-saving ongoing role of “creative consultant” on Freelancer, but the reality was that he had been fired from his own company for his inability to keep to a schedule and hold to a plan. His time at Digital Anvil had resulted in one commercially failed and critically panned movie, plus two games that had had to be sub-contracted out to other developers in order to get them finished; both of them as well had been or would become commercial failures. Yet Chris Roberts walked away from Digital Anvil much wealthier than when he had gone in. He told the press that he would “take some time off to kind of rethink what I want to do in the interactive-entertainment field.” When he was done thinking, he would decide to go back to movies instead of games.

In the meantime, Microsoft installed a new management team down in Austin, with orders to sort through the unfocused sprawl that Freelancer had become and find out if there was a game in there that was worth saving. Perhaps surprisingly, they decided that there was, and turned the project over to a producer named Phil Wattenberger and a lead designer named Jörg Neumann, both Origin Systems alumni who had worked on the old Wing Commander games. At Microsoft’s behest, they steered Freelancer in a slightly more casual direction, making the player’s ship easily — in fact, optimally — controllable using a mouse alone. The mouse-driven approach had actually originated during Roberts’s tenure, but there it had been tied to a customizable and upgradable “Neuronet,” an onboard artificial intelligence that was supposed to let you vibe-sim your way to glory. That got jettisoned, as did many other similarly unwieldy complications. The massively-multiplayer living galaxy, for example, became a single-player or locally multiplayer one that wasn’t quite so living as once envisioned.

When it finally shipped in March of 2003, Freelancer garnered unexpectedly strong reviews; Computer Gaming World called it “the best Chris Roberts space sim Chris Roberts didn’t actually make.” But it wasn’t rewarded commensurately in the marketplace. Even with its newfound accessibility, it was hard for it to shake the odor of an anachronism of the previous decade among gamers in general; meanwhile the dwindling number of TIE Fighter and Freespace enthusiasts had a tendency to reject it for being irredeemably dumbed-down. Instead of marking the beginning of a new era for the space sim, it went down in history as a belated coda: the very last space sim to be put out by a major publisher with real promotional efforts and the hope — unrealized in this case — of relatively high sales behind it.

As for Digital Anvil: it was shut down by Microsoft once and for all in November of 2005, after completing just one more game, a painfully unoriginal Xbox shoot-em-up called Brute Force. Two games finished in almost nine years, neither of them strong sellers; the most remarkable thing about Digital Anvil is that Microsoft allowed it to continue for as long as it did.

By the time his games studio shuffled off this mortal coil, Chris Roberts had been living in Hollywood for a number of years. And he had found a way to do pretty well for himself there, albeit in a role that he had never anticipated going in.

The decade that Chris Roberts spent in Hollywood is undoubtedly the least understood period of his career today, among both his detractors and his partisans. It is no secret why: documentation of his activities during the decade in question is far thinner on the ground than during any other time. Roberts arrived in Hollywood as just another semi-anonymous striver, not as the “game god” who had given the world Wing Commander. No one in Tinsel Town was lining up to interview him, and no one in the press paid all that much attention to what he got up to. Still, we can piece together a picture of his trajectory in which we can have reasonable confidence, even if some of the details remain hazy.

Roberts moved to Hollywood in the spring of 2001 with his windfall from the Digital Anvil buyout burning a hole in his pocket. Notwithstanding the fiasco that had been Wing Commander: The Movie, he still harbored serious ambitions of becoming a director, probably assuming that his ability to finance at least part of the budget of any film he was placed in charge of would give him a leg up. He even brought a preliminary script to show around town. It was called The American Knight, being a cinematic reinterpretation of another computer game: in this case, Origin Systems’s 1995 game Wings of Glory, which was itself yet another variation on the Wing Commander theme, dealing with the life of a World War I fighter ace in the air and on the ground. In an even more marked triumph of hope over experience, Roberts also nursed a dream of making a live-action Wing Commander television series. He founded a production company of his own, called Point of No Return Films, to forward both of these agendas. January of 2002 found Point of No Return at the Sundance Film Festival; according to E! Online, they “threw an after-hours shindig that attracted 250 revelers, with Treach and De La Soul among them.” It really did help Roberts’s cause to have some money to splash around.

But Roberts soon found that the people he met in Hollywood knew Wing Commander, if they knew it at all, only as a misbegotten flop of a film. And they weren’t much more interested in his World War I movie. They were, on the other hand, always ready to talk backroom business with someone who had some number of millions in his pocket, as Roberts did. What followed was a gradual but inexorable pivot away from being a filmmaker and toward being a film enabler, one of those who secured the cash that the creative types needed to do their thing. A watershed was reached in March of 2002, when Point of No Return Films morphed into Ascendant Pictures, whose focus was to be “improving film value in foreign territories (presales), attracting top talent and film projects, and generating equity investment in films.” It wasn’t the romantic life of an auteur, but it did show that Chris Roberts was learning to talk the talk of back-office Hollywood, aided and abetted by a network of more experienced hands that he was assembling around him. Among them was a German immigrant named Ortwin Freyermuth, who would become the most important and enduring business partner of Roberts’s post-Origin career.

Ortwin Freyermuth, right, discusses a director’s cut of Das Boot with the film’s original editor Hannes Nikel circa 1997. Like Chris Roberts, Freyermuth really does love movies.

Freyermuth was renowned in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of Hollywood for having pioneered an incredibly useful funding model for American films. It hinged on a peculiarity of German tax law that had been intended to encourage local film-making but instead wound up becoming a demonstration of the law of unintended consequences, played out on an international stage. The original rule, as implemented by the German Ministry of Finance in the 1970s, stated that any money that a German resident invested into a film production could be immediately deducted from his or her taxable income as if it was a total loss. It was hoped that this would encourage more well-heeled Germans to invest in homegrown movies, in order to combat the creeping mono-culture of Hollywood and ensure that Germans would have films to see that dealt with contemporary life in their own country. In time, this well-meaning measure would produce just the opposite result.

Enter Ortwin Freyermuth, a lawyer who enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the mid-1980s to study international copyright law. When he stumbled across the German law I’ve just described in the course of his studies, he noted with no small excitement what it didn’t say: that the films that were deemed eligible for the tax deduction had to be German films. He arranged to fund the 1990 movie The Neverending Story II almost exclusively with German money. This first experiment in the field was not so egregious compared to what would come later, given that the movie was also shot in Germany, albeit using mostly American actors. Then again, it was only a proof of concept. Freyermuth co-founded Capella Films thereafter to make German financing a veritable way of life for Hollywood. “In the best Hollywood tradition,” wrote Variety in 1994, “the company is rife with layers of relationships, both contractual and personal, here and abroad, such that an organizational chart, if one existed, would have more lines and intersections than fractal math.” Such byzantine structures, which had a way of obscuring realities upon which people might otherwise look askance, were standard operating procedure for Freyermuth.

The Freyermuth model spread throughout Hollywood as the 1990s wore on. It seemed like a win-win, both to those in California and to the Germans who were suddenly funding so many of their movies. In some cases, you could just borrow the money you wanted to invest, use your investment to reduce your taxable income dramatically, then pay off the loan from the returns a year or two later. And there was nothing keeping you from doing this over and over, year after year. Large private-equity funds emerged in Germany, pooling the contributions of hundreds of shareholders to invest them in movies, 80 percent of them made outside of the country. These Medienfonds became as ordinary as any other form of financial planning for Herr und Frau Deutschland. They were great for people on the verge of retirement: make an investment just before retiring, then enjoy the return afterward when your tax rate was lower. They were great for spreading out and reducing the tax liability that accompanied a major windfall, great for parents wishing to move money into the hands of their grown children without getting hit by high inheritance taxes. For Hollywood, meanwhile, they turned into a money spigot like no other. Insiders took to calling it “stupid German money,” because the people behind the spigot tended to take it in stride even if the films they were investing in never turned much of a profit. The real point of the investment was the tax relief; any additional profits that emerged were just gravy. The highest tax bracket in Germany at the time was about 51.5 percent. If you were in this tax bracket, then as long as you got at least half of your money back, you came out ahead.

The sheer ubiquity of these media funds placed the German people’s elected representatives in Berlin in a delicate situation; a growing number of their own constituents were benefiting from the current state of the law. Nevertheless, in 1999 the Ministry of Finance made an attempt to stop the madness. It revised the rules to bring them into closer alignment with those that governed other, superficially similar European incentive schemes: to qualify, a film now had to either be made in Germany at least partially or have a German copyright owner. (A law of this sort in Luxembourg was the reason that the Wing Commander movie had been shot in that country.) But stupid German money was now too entrenched as a modus operandi for people on either side of the Atlantic to walk away from it without putting up a fight. Artful dodgers like Ortwin Freyermuth realized that they could sell the copyright to a Hollywood production to a German media fund, whilst inserting into the sales contract a right to buy it back at a future date for an agreed-upon price. Far from being hobbled by the change in law, they realized that they could use it to charge a premium for the tax relief they were providing to the citizens of Germany. For example, the Germans paid $94 million to Paramount Pictures for the copyright to the 2001 videogame adaptation Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. When they sold it back, the Germans were paid only $83.8 million. The tax benefits were so great that it was still worth it. By now, half of all the foreign money pouring into Hollywood was coming from the single country of Germany: $1.1 billion in 2004 alone.

Despite their ongoing popularity among the well-heeled classes, the media funds became more and more controversial in Germany as the young millennium wore on. Germany was, it was more and more loudly complained, effectively subsidizing Hollywood using money that ought to have been going to roads, schools, hospitals, and defense. Stefan Arndt, the producer of the rather wonderful German movies Run Lola Run and Good Bye Lenin!, noted that he had had to go outside his homeland to finance them because his fellow citizens all had their gazes fixed so firmly on Hollywood. “It’s crazy,” he said. “Every other country in the world ties strings to its film subsidies.” Even a group of hardcore Tolkien fans sleeping in line the night of the premiere of The Return of the King, the third film in Peter Jackson’s disproportionately German-funded Lord of the Rings trilogy, thought the situation a little bit absurd when they were told about it: “I don’t think that’s good, because I think that the three films carry themselves, that they put in enough money, that it doesn’t necessarily have to be financed with taxes.”

Whether we wish to see him as a devil tempting a young Faust named Chris Roberts, or just as a savvy man of business who found a mentee he deemed well worth his time, Ortwin Freyermuth showed our once and future game developer how this particular game was played. In April of 2004, Roberts was credited onscreen for the first time in a finished wide-release film as an executive producer. As if to underscore the transition he had made from creator to enabler, it was not a terribly Chris Roberts sort of movie. The Punisher was based on a Marvel Comics character, but it was no family-friendly superhero movie either. It was a grim, dark, and brutally violent revenge fantasy that made Dirty Harry look cute and cuddly. “At the end,” wrote the late great Roger Ebert in his review, “we feel battered down and depressed, emotions we probably don’t seek from comic-book heroes.” Whatever else you can say about Wing Commander, it does care deeply about the nobler human virtues which The Punisher submerges under fountains of blood, even if Chris Roberts is often irredeemably clumsy at presenting them.

Although The Punisher may have had a B-movie attitude, it wasn’t a B-movie, any more than Wing Commander had been. It was made for a budget of $33 million, with a cast that included John Travolta. (Admittedly, he sleepwalks through his performance as if he can barely be bothered to learn his lines, but one can’t have everything.) However joyless fuddy-duddies like yours truly and Roger Ebert may find movies like this, there was and is a market for them. The Punisher earned $20 million more than it had cost to make at the box office even before the long tail of cable-television showings and home-video rentals was factored into the equation.

Chris Roberts was off and running as a backstage Hollywood player. At the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2005, his name could be seen alongside those of George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh among the producer credits for The Jacket, an arty but flawed science-fiction film starring Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, and the future Agent 007 Daniel Craig, with a soundtrack by Brian Eno. Again, these names are not the stuff of B-movies.

After The Jacket, Ascendant Pictures graduated from being an ancillary source of funding to becoming one of the primary production houses behind four reasonably high-profile independent features during 2005 and 2006. None of Lord of War, The Big White, Ask the Dust, or Lucky Number Slevin has gone down in film history as a deathless classic. Yet all of them could boast of A-list actors: Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto, Ethan Hawke, Robin Williams, Holly Hunter, Woody Harrelson, Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek, Donald Sutherland, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, and Bruce Willis can all be found amongst their casts.

As you have probably guessed, all of these films were funded primarily with German money. The aggregate return on them was middling at best. Lord of War and Lucky Number Slevin did pretty well; The Big White and Ask the Dust flopped miserably. As already noted, though, the fact that most of their investors were more concerned about the tax benefits than a more conventional return on investment made this less of an issue than it might otherwise have been. Then, too, like mutual funds on the conventional stock market, the German media funds put money into many movies in order to avoid a single point of failure. A film that became an unexpected hit could easily offset two or three duds.

Chris Roberts had arrived in the Hollywood inner circle — perhaps still the outer edge of the inner circle, but still. He had come a long way from that nerdy bedroom coder who had bumped into an artist from Origin Systems one day in an Austin games shop. Now he was living in a luxury condo in the Hollywood Hills, with one live-in girlfriend and a former one stalking him. (Oddly, it would be the latter whom he would wind up marrying.) I’ve been pretty hard on Roberts in these articles, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to be so again — harder than ever, in fact — before we’re finished. But two things he most definitely is not are stupid or lazy. I wrote at the outset of this pair of articles that few people have ever stretched so thin a thread of creative talent as far as he has. Let me amend that bit of snark now by acknowledging that he could never have done so if he wasn’t smart and driven in a very different sort of way. And let me make it crystal clear as well that nothing I’ve written about Roberts’s tenure in Hollywood so far should necessarily lead us to criticize him in any but the most tempered of ways. In exploiting a loophole in German tax law for all it was worth, he wasn’t doing anything that tons of others — a full-fledged cottage industry worth of them, on both sides of the Atlantic — weren’t also doing. But there’s more to the story in his case. Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth were actually near the center of one of the biggest financial scandals in modern German history, where dubious ethics crossed over into outright fraud.

Hollywood accounting is never simple. In that spirit, Ascendant Pictures spun off another company not long after its own founding. The wholly-owned subsidiary Rising Star Pictures was created to “closely cooperate with VIP Medienfonds Film and Entertainment”; this was the largest of all the German media funds, which collected almost half a billion Euros every year from its shareholders. Rising Star’s purpose was to be VIP’s anointed agent on the left side of the Atlantic, directing that fire hose of stupid German money around Hollywood. This meant the films of Ascendant, yes, but also those of others, to which Rising Star presumably charged a brokering fee. The final incarnation of Ascendant’s website, which is for some reason still extant, claims that Rising Star was involved in the funding of fourteen films in 2003 alone. A version of their site from March of 2005, accessible today via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, heavily stresses the relationship with VIP, calling Rising Star the latter’s “primary placement agent.” This was a big, big deal, given the sheer quantity of money that VIP was taking in and paying out; more than $250 million came into Rising Star from VIP during 2003. The speed and scale of Chris Roberts’s rise in Hollywood becomes even more impressive when figures like these are taken into consideration.

Andreas Schmid

Unfortunately, Andreas Schmid, the head of VIP, was arrested for tax fraud in Cologne in October of 2005. It seemed that he had not been putting most of the money he collected into movies with even ostensibly German owners, as the law required. At regular intervals, Schmid dutifully gave his shareholders a list of films into which he claimed to have invested their contributions. In actuality, however, VIP used only 20 percent of their money for its advertised purpose of funding movies. Schmid deposited the remaining 80 percent into his bank, either parking it there to earn long-term interest or sending it elsewhere from there, to places where he thought he could get a higher rate of return. He then sent fake earnings reports to his shareholders. By defrauding both the government and his clients in this way, he could make a lot of money for himself and his partners in crime. There is reason to believe that Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth were among said partners, working the scam with him through Rising Star. I’ll return to that subject shortly.

For now, though, know that Schmid may have gotten so greedy because he knew the jig was soon to be up. Rumors were swirling in both Hollywood and Berlin throughout 2005 that the German Ministry of Finance had just about had enough of watching its tax money fly out of the country. The VIP Media scandal proved the last straw, if one was needed. In November of 2005, just one month after Schmid’s arrest, it was announced that blanket tax write-offs for film investments of any stripe were a thing of the past. Going forward, Hollywood would have to find another golden goose.

Even if they weren’t in on the fix, so to speak, the arrest of Schmid and the elimination of their primary funding mechanism could only have had a deleterious effect on Ascendant Pictures. Just when they had seemed to be hitting the big time, the ground had shifted beneath their feet. Those films that were already paid for by Germans could still be made, but there would be no more like them. The last Ascendant movie from the salad days to emerge from the pipeline was Outlander, their most expensive one ever and arguably also their worst one yet; not released until 2008 due to a whole host of difficulties getting it done, it managed to lose $40 million on a $47 million budget.

Deprived of the golden eggs, Ascendant blundered from lowlight to lowlight. They had to renege on a promise to Kevin Costner to line up the financing for a movie called Taming Ben Taylor, about “a grouchy, divorced man who refuses to sell his failing vineyard to the golf course next door.” Costner, who had been so excited about the movie that he had co-written the screenplay himself, sued Ascendant for $8 million for breach of contract; the case was settled in March of 2008 under undisclosed terms.

The first and only film that Ascendant helped to fund without German money only served to advertise how far down they had come in the world. Keeping with the golf theme, the low-rent Caddyshack ripoff Who’s Your Caddy?, which made Wing Commander look like Hamlet, was released in 2007 and failed to earn back its $7 million budget. It’s best remembered today for an anecdotal report that Bill Clinton loved it. By this point, Ascendant was little more than Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth; everyone else had jumped ship. (Freyermuth seems genuinely fond of Roberts. He has stuck with him through thick and thin.) The company would nominally continue to exist for another three years, but would shepherd no more movies to completion. Its final notices in the Hollywood trade press were in association with Black Water Transit, a locus of chaos, conflict, and dysfunction that culminated in a film so incoherent that it would never be released.

Over in Germany, Andreas Schmid was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison in November of 2007. Yet the fallout from the VIP scandal was still ongoing. Shortly after his conviction in criminal court, 250 former shareholders in his fund, from whom the German government was aggressively demanding the taxes they ought to have paid earlier, launched a civil lawsuit against Schmid and the UniCredit Bank of Munich, where he had been depositing the money he claimed was being used to fund movies. The case hinged on a single deceptively simple question: had the information that Schmid sent to his shareholders in the reports issued by his fund been knowingly falsified? Some of the documents from these court proceedings, which would be decided in favor of the plaintiffs on December 30, 2011, can be accessed online at the German Ministry of Justice. I’ve spent some time going over them in the hope of learning more about the role played by Roberts and Freyermuth.

It’s been a challenge because the documents in question are not the trial transcripts, transcripts of witness interviews, nor the detailed briefs one might wish to have. They are rather strictly procedural documents, used by the court to schedule its sessions, outline the arguments being made before it, and handle the other logistics of the proceedings. Nonetheless, they contain some tantalizing tidbits that point more in the direction of Roberts and Freyermuth as co-conspirators with Schmid than as his innocent victims. I’ll tell you now what I’ve been able to glean from them as a non-lawyer and non-accountant. I’ve also made them available for download from this site, for any readers who might happen to have a more nuanced command of the German language and German law than I do.

The claimants in the lawsuit show great interest in Ascendant’s daughter company Rising Star, which they believe had no legitimate reason for existing at all, a judgment which is confirmed by the court in a preliminary draft of the final ruling. A document dated June 27, 2008, contains the startling charge that Rising Star “never produced films, but were merely an intermediary layer used for concealment,”^[1]Diese produzierten nie Filme, sondern waren lediglich eine zur Verschleierung eingeschaltete Zwischenebene. citing emails written by Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth to Andreas Schmid between 2003 and 2005 that have been submitted into evidence. (Sadly, they are not included among these papers.) Another document, dated May 15, 2009, calls Rising Star “an artificially imposed layer.”^[2]Eine künstlich dazwischen geschaltete Ebene. The final judgment concludes that Rising Star was an essential conduit of the fraud. What with Rising Star being “the primary placement agency for VIP,” as was acknowledged on the Ascendant website, all of the money passed through it. But instead of putting the entirety of the money into movies, it only used 20 percent of it for that purpose, funneling the rest of it back to the UniCredit Bank of Munich, Andreas Schmid’s co-defendant in the shareholder lawsuit. Even the 20 percent that stayed in Hollywood was placed with other production companies that took over the responsibility of overseeing the actual movies. Rising Star, in other words, was nothing but a shell company, a false front for getting the money from the investment fund into Schmid’s bank.

Both Roberts and Freyermuth were interviewed at least once, presumably in the United States, by investigators from the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office; this must have been done in the run-up to Schmid’s earlier, criminal trial. They were witnesses in that trial rather than defendants, yet the facts from their testimony that are cited here leave one wondering why that should be the case. From a document dated May 15, 2009: “The structure provided by VIP was a ‘pro forma transaction,’ solely intended to achieve a certain tax advantage. This was also explained by witness Freyermuth.”^[3]Die von VIP vorgegebene Struktur sei ein „Pro-Forma-Geschäft“ gewesen, alleine mit der Zielsetzung einen gewissen Steuervorteil zu erreichen. Dies habe auch der Zeuge Freyermuth so erläutert. The claimants cite the testimony of Roberts and Freyermuth as evidence that “the fund managers therefore instructed their American partners to submit inflated estimates.”^[4]Die Fondsverantwortlichen hätten deshalb ihre amerikanischen Partner veranlasst, überhöhte Schätzungen abzugeben. Likewise, it is written that Roberts and Freyermuth confessed to a falsified “profit distribution for the film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, which, according to the fund’s information, was 45 percent produced by VIP. In reality, the profit distribution did not correspond to the alleged 45-percent co-production share; it was significantly less favorable.”^[5]Insoweit greift die Klageseite auf eine Gewinnverteilung (sog „waterfall“) für den Film „Das Parfum“ zurück, der nach den Fondsangaben zu 45 % von VIP 4 produziert worden sei (sog. Coproduktion). Tatsächlich habe die Gewinnverteilung keinesfalls dem angeblichen Co.-Produktionsanteil von 45 % entsprochen, sie sei wesentlich ungünstiger gewesen. Even with the most open of minds, it is very hard to read statements like this and conclude that Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth were anything other than active, willing co-conspirators in a large-scale, concerted fraud perpetrated on German investors and ordinary taxpayers.

In a document dated May 17, 2010, it is stated that Freyermuth and Roberts are being summoned to appear as witnesses before this court, on the morning and afternoon respectively of July 16, 2010. But a report dated July 8, 2010, states that “the hearing scheduled for July 16, 2010, is cancelled after witness Freyermuth informed the court that he could not appear on such short notice, and the summons for witness Chris Roberts was returned to the court as undeliverable.”^[6]Der Termin vom 16. Juli 2010 wird aufgehoben, nachdem der Zeuge Freyermuth mitgeteilt hat, nicht so kurzfristig erscheinen zu können, und die Ladung des Zeugen Chris Roberts als unzustellbar wieder in den Gerichtseinlauf gekommen ist. On August 3, 2010, the court states that they will be ordered to appear again, this time on September 20, 2010, saying that Freyermuth will be told to inform Roberts, who apparently still cannot be reached, about the summons.^[7]Zu diesem Termin sind die Zeugen Freyermuth und Roberts, letzterer über Freyermuth, zu laden. However, the paper trail ends there. It seems most likely that the two never did come to Munich to answer questions before the court.

Assuming all of this really is as bad as it looks, the final question we are left with is why and how Roberts and Freyermuth escaped prosecution. This question I cannot even begin to answer, other than to say that international prosecutions for financial malfeasance are notoriously difficult to coordinate and carry off. Perhaps the German authorities decided they had the ringleader in Andreas Schmid, and that was good enough. Perhaps Roberts and Freyermuth were given immunity in return for their testimony about the mechanics of the fraud in the United States. Or maybe there were some extenuating circumstances of which I am not aware, hard as it is to imagine what they might be.

In July of 2010, Roberts and Freyermuth sold Ascendant Pictures and all of its intellectual property to a film studio, film school, film distributor, real-estate developer, venture-capital house, and children’s charity — never put all your eggs in one basket! — called Bigfoot, located in, of all places, the Philippines. Roberts had left Hollywood some weeks or months before this transaction was finalized; thus the undeliverable court summons from Germany, addressed to the old Ascendant office. I do not know whether or how much he and Freyermuth ended up profiting personally from the VIP Media affair when all was said and done. I can only say that he does not seem to have been a poor man when he moved back to Austin to think about his next steps in life.

Most of you probably know what Chris Roberts got up to after leaving Hollywood, but a brief precis may be in order by way of conclusion, given that it will be many years at best before we meet him again in these histories.

Man of good timing that he was, Roberts started looking for fresh opportunities just as the new Kickstarter crowd-funding platform was tempting dozens of figures from the old days of gaming to launch new projects. In 2012, he joined together with a number of his earlier business partners, from both Digital Anvil and Ascendant Pictures — Erin Roberts, Tony Zurovec, and Ortwin Freyermuth were all among them — to found Cloud Imperium Games and kick-start Star Citizen, the “virtual life in space” game that he had once thought Freelancer would become. Brilliantly executed from a promotional standpoint, it turned into the biggest crowd-funded game ever, raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

As of this writing, thirteen years later, Star Citizen is officially still in the early alpha stage of development, although it is actively played every day by tens of thousands of subscribers who are willing to pay for the privilege. A single-player variant called Squadron 42 — the Starlancer to Star Citizen’s Freelancer — was originally slated for release in 2014, and is thus now eleven years behind schedule. Cloud Imperium promises that it is coming soon. (If and when it finally does surface, it will include motion-captured footage, shot in 2015, of Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson, Andy Serkis, and Gary Oldman.)

Having long since exhausted its initial rounds of crowd-funding, Cloud Imperium now pays its bills largely through pay-to-win schemes involving in-game spaceships and other equipment, often exorbitantly priced; Ars Technica reported in January of 2024 that buying the full hangar of ships would set up you back a cool $48,000, almost enough to make you start looking around for the real spaceship in the deal. By any standard, the amount of money Cloud Imperium has brought in over the years is staggering. Assuming the whole thing doesn’t implode in the coming months, Star Citizen seems set to become the world’s first $1-billion videogame. While we wait, Wing Commander IV, the last game Chris Roberts actually finished, looks forward to its swift-approaching 30-year anniversary.

Naturally, all of this has made Cloud Imperium and Chris Roberts himself magnets for controversy. The loyal fans who continue to log on every day insist that the scale of what Star Citizen is trying to achieve is so enormous that the time and money being spent on it are unavoidable. Others accuse the game of being nothing but a giant scam, of a size and shameless audacity that would put a twinkle in even Andreas Schmid’s jaundiced eyes. Some of those who think the truth is most likely somewhere in between these extremes — a group that includes me — wonder if we should really be encouraging people to upload so much of their existence into a game in the first place. It seems to me that games that are meant to be enjoyed in the real world are healthier than those that set themselves up as a replacement for it.

Even if everything about Star Citizen is on the up-and-up, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that breathtaking incompetence has played as big a part as over-ambition in running up the budget and pushing out the timeline. I tend to suspect that some sort of spectacular collapse is more probable than a triumphant version 1.0 as the climax of the Star Citizen saga. But we shall see… we shall see. Either way, I have a feeling that Chris Roberts will emerge unscathed. Some guys just have all the luck, don’t they?

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: Computer Gaming World of November 1999, August 2000, and May 2003; PC Gamer of November 2000; Los Angeles Times of August 14 2008; Der Spiegel of June 13 1993; Variety of February 24 1994 and November 13 2007; Los Angeles Daily News of March 5 2008; Billboard of April 19 2005, May 10 2005, September 20 2005, October 4 2005, and October 11 2005; Austin Business Journal of April 20 2001; Die Welt of December 6 2009; Deutsches Ärzteblatt of May 2 2003; New York Times of December 13 2004; Forbes of May 31 2019.

Online sources about games include a 2002 Wing Commander retrospective by the German website PC Player Forever; a 2000 GameSpot interview with Chris Roberts; Freelancer previews on ActionTrip and Games Domain; the old Freelancer News site; and the GameSpot review of Freelancer. Vintage reports of Digital Anvil’s acquisition by Microsoft can be found on GameSpot, IGN, Microsoft’s home page, and EuroGamer.

Online sources about movies include “Send in the Clowns (But Beware of Their Funny Money)” by Doug Richardson, Roger Ebert’s review of The Punisher, a profile of Ortwin Freyermuth at Alumniportal Deutschland, “How to Finance a Hollywood Blockbuster” and “Hollywood’s Big Loss” by Edward Jay Epstein at Slate, the current zombie version of Ascendant’s website and the more incriminating 2005 version, Bigfoot’s 2011-vintage website, E! Online’s report from the 2002 Sundance festival, “Medienfonds als ‘Stupid German Money'” by Dr. Matthias Kurp at Medienmaerkte.de, “Filmfonds für Reiche” at ansTageslicht.de, “Was sind Medienfonds?” at Investoren Beteiligung, and “Stupid German Money” by Günter Jagenburg at Deutschlandfunk. I made extensive use of the Wing Commander Combat Information Center, and especially its voluminous news archives that stretch all the way back to 1998.

As noted above, I’ve made the documents I found relating to Rising Star in the class-action lawsuit against Andreas Schmid available for local download. By all means, German speakers, dive in and tell me if you can find anything I’ve missed! I retrieved them from the official German Federal Gazette, or Bundesanzeiger.

My invaluable cheat sheet for this article, as for the last, was “The Chris Roberts Theory of Everything” by Nick Monroe from Gameranx.

But my superhero and secret weapon was our own stalwart commenter Busca, who used his far greater familiarity with the German Web and the German language to find most of the German-language sources shown above, and even provided some brief summaries of their content for orientation purposes. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude. Do note, however, that the buck stops with me as far as factual accuracy goes, and that all of the opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are strictly my own.

We’re proud to announce that House of the Golden Mask, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.

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Awaken your magic and break an ancient curse at this secret school of sorcery! What mysteries will you uncover at the crossroads between realms?

House of the Golden Mask is an interactive fantasy novel by Miranda Eastwood, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 300,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

The House of the Golden Mask is a school where worlds collide, and where sorcerers from all of those worlds must remain while they learn to control their magic enough to be able to use it safely. You are its newest and most gifted student, learning alchemy, linguistics, the occult, and more.

As lectures and labs take place within the House’s ancient chambers, a ruthless battle for control plays out. Will you side with the honorable Arbiters, or seek freedom from the established order alongside the Transgressors? Or will you leave politics aside to focus on your magical power?

All of the instructors have their secrets—but can you believe the rumors that one is a vampire and another a fallen angel? Who left that mysterious journal in your room, and what happened to its missing pages? And that is nothing compared to the ancient riddles woven into the very building and grounds of the House.

Summon demons, decipher centuries-old inscriptions, and uncover a massive curse that threatens to dissolve the House and everyone in it. Vie with your fellow students for academic advantage and arcane artifacts alike. In a place where realms collide and any alchemist can brew an illusion potion, nothing is what it seems!

• Play as male, female, nonbinary, or genderfluid; gay, straight, pan, bi, ace; poly or monogamous
• Specialize in Alchemy, Linguistics, or the Occult—or try to balance all three at once
• Shape your familiar from a mystical substance: choose a cat, snake, weasel, or bat (or just leave it as a sad and strangely adorable pile of goo)
• Compete in the tournament at the Festival of the Blood Moon to win the Golden Mask itself
• Decipher riddles, delve deep into history, and unravel the curse that haunts the school
• Uncover the carefully guarded secrets of your fellow sorcerers, forging deep bonds with instructors and students alike

If knowledge is power, then the House of the Golden Mask is your doorway to the greatest magical power in all the realms.

We hope you enjoy playing House of the Golden Mask. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

(Continued from my previous posts; they are needed for context to understand this one.)

Kazuma Satou made the point in my comments that even for people who are proficient in Japanese (I am not) this game can be rough, as the poems are in ancient Japanese. With the puzzle I left off on last time I ran into the issue directly.

ウナハノノ サシトハナクニ アトヒルニ

The old man’s hint was about “it is by block” and in the context of the previous puzzle, it seemed to indicate this was another anagram, except each of the three segments would be self-contained.

I focused on the first part, which had u, na, ha, no, and no. (Not only did it seem simple, but when searching for poetry, it’s easier to search for the first line.) My first suspicion, rolling with the idea Matt T. used last time on looking for common poetry words, was the word “hana”, or flower, which is the sort of thing that goes in poetry everywhere. I knew from binge-reading ancient poetry over the last two days that “no hana no” or “hana no no” were both possible, but the “u” was rather tricky, I ended up putting it at the beginning as an exclamation of sorts. While both regular Google and the Internet Archive were struggling, Google Books gave me some hits, and I finally hit victory with a book by Frederick Victor Dickins from 1908.

This is the right poem, as all the syllables for the other anagrams work correctly. I came across so many flower poems with the same first line but a miss on everything else. (Keep in mind also: while figuring this out I had no idea if I was using the right method of solving, and tried some weird theories involving the gojūon arrangement — more on that later. There’s at least some valid comparison with my discussion of second-order puzzles with no confirmation in the middle if you’re on the right track; once I hit upon “no hana no” it felt close enough I had at least partial confirmation I was doing something right.)

This incidentally isn’t even using text I expected (u no hana no), but rather all as one word. Modern Japanese dictionaries do not think it is a word.

However, we’re looking at very old poetry. According to a dictionary on ancient Japanese texts, unohanano refers to the Deutzia scabra plant (Japanese snow flower) when it blooms.

Source. CC BY-NC 4.0.

I still needed to find the next sage for delivery; again, I had to use brute force and I have no idea how the visual relates to which sage is the next one in sequence.

I put the pictures for sage 3 and sage 4 (this one) next to each other as image files in a directory, then rapidly went back and forth between them. The image did not change at all.

First the puzzle, then the old man’s clue to go with it:

You might notice the English letters tossed in there. Indeed, the ciphertext this time appears to have no Japanese in it.

AA CA ED QBA GB
   JA ID FA BD QDC IA QCB
      AC IC FA CB BB

The hint says to refer to the 50-symbol chart, and also asks “what is Q?”

The chart in question is the chart that hiragana or katakana characters can be arranged on, where the vowels go a, i, u, e, o in order on one side, and the consonants go the other direction. I took the chart from Wikipedia, and guessed that the letters were coordinates; for example, GB would be row G (or 7), column B (or 2). I then used this to plot all of them on the Katakana chart. There are three with a “Q” that I’ve marked in a different color.

(I actually did with the previous puzzle too! I was thinking maybe the chart was a “block”, but my answer didn’t go anywhere.)

Getting in mind my last search, I broke things up and typed a-sa-ne-ka-mi-wa-re and got a hit:

There are some slight differences having to do with Japanese phonetics; all I needed anyway was the poem and the last two lines. Just like before, they were enough to satisfy the next sage.

Thus the code is…

65 93 51 51 54
   25 33 74 45 55 +64 24
      35 23 65 55 51

…and the hint is that it’s like what we’ve seen except it is broken or twisted. (Also it gives as a hint, “what is the +”?) I have no idea what this means and I haven’t started yet, but it seems like the sort of thing to kick over to you, the readers.

We’re fairly close to the end; there are six puzzles and we’re on sage number 5. (There are seven sages, but you only need to solve six, at least according to the walkthrough, I assume because the seventh is there to take delivery of the last puzzle.)

Yokohama, the location of today’s company.

The previous game I played, Wonderland by Richard Ramella, was based on a five by five grid, with randomly distributed characters and a word puzzle to solve. This all applies to Puzzle Adventure as well, except the grid includes confusing teleport exits, the characters need to be talked to in a particular order otherwise it’s game over, and there are multiple word puzzles involving 1400-year-old Japanese poetry. Pretty much the same, right?

Part of the Man’yōshū, a compilation of poems from about 600 to 759 CE, via the Kyoto University Rare Materials Digital Archive.

In all seriousness, Wonderland is the best comparison game I can think of that we’ve played before; maybe a bit of Dennis Koble’s Chinese Puzzle. This is an “abstract” adventure where you are supposed to find six sages and answer their puzzles. Each puzzle involves a line of poetry.

The game was published by Micom City (マイコン・シティー) and written by Ryuhei Suzuki. Micom’s publishing seemed to last from late 1982 to late 1983 and then drop off from there. Their first game I’ve been able to find is a space shooter. Helpfully, the title screen gives a date of November 21st, 1982.

The ad in the Youtube thumbnail is from I/O Magazine, September 1983. It shows all four of their adventure games.

From top to bottom they are: Time Bomb Adventure (“disassemble the time bomb on the screen within the time limit”), Date Adventure (“overcome obstacles to get a kiss from your girlfriend”), Ninja Adventure (“steal the secret document”) and today’s game, Puzzle Adventure (“the biggest mystery with the fewest words”).

They were originally for PC-8001 (the same platform Omotesando Adventure was on). The Game Preservation Society lists the latter three games as being from January 1983 and the earliest issue I can find of the various ads for the company is from March 1983, putting a release at January or February; the Date/Ninja/Puzzle trio thus represent the earliest new adventures of 1983, alongside The Palms.

Time Bomb Adventure is listed as “upcoming” for March but may not have come out until later in the year; a Japan Travel Adventure was slated for the same month but seems to have never been released. The ads in general state the company wants software that they will purchase at a “high price” and they prioritize “originality”. The author of Puzzle Adventure, Ryuhei Suzuki, was likely an independent author who took the solicitation to heart (Ninja and Date are also by him, I don’t know about Time Bomb).

Close-up of the Puzzle Adventure cover.

Before diving into the game itself, I should mention my emulation setup. I’m using Quasi88, which you can find on the author’s page here. The most recent version includes a katakana keyboard. I have a download here with everything packaged together including a save state which will jump you right to the start so you don’t have to bother with tape loading (go to the second to the last tab on the menu, press the button marked ロード).

Officially, the title is パズル アドベンチャー.

The phrase “anata wa totemo fushigina sekai ni imasu” or “you are in a mysterious world” repeats with essentially every room. If you want to see anything you need to look around (“miru”). You do not start alone.

You can see an old man.
You are in a mysterious world.

The structure of the game is to go around and find sages (like the sitting person on the cover) and talk with them. Then you can go back to the old man in the center and ask for a hint, which will give more information to solve the puzzle. The puzzle will resolve to be a line from a poem. You need to then find the next sage, who will first ask for the previous puzzle’s answer; if you give it correctly, you’ll get the next puzzle.

You can wander the landscape with north/south/east/west (or rather, kita/minami/hisashi/nishi) although as I hinted at from the start, this isn’t a straightforward grid. There are some landmarks around like “rabbit” and “flower” that can help but many of the non-character rooms have nothing. There are no items to drop to help with the mapping, either. I was having enough trouble I threw in the towel part-way and just went for the walkthrough’s map which I will reproduce here.

(Note that I know this walkthrough map has errors; north-west-south-east from the start does not lead back to the start, for instance. I’m just coping with random flailing when I need it, to be honest.)

The green spots are where the sages are located, and while those spaces always have sages in them, which sage goes in which spot is random. “Which sage” is very important. The randomization happens when you meet a sage, not when the game starts. Talking with the wrong sage is a game over…

“Idiot fool! You aren’t ready to talk to me yet! Start over and come back when you’re ready!”

…and they are indistinguishable in text. You need to use ヲミル which will “examine” the sage and the game will give a picture.

The different sages look very similar and while the walkthrough has a guide to this I haven’t looked at that yet. I know the picture above is of sage 1. With this sage I’m not sure…

…but I’ve also seen sage 2, and they look indistinguishable to me from sage 1. I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve just had to use brute force.

Once finding the proper sage, you can type セイシンニキク (ask the sage) and you’ll get the appropriate puzzle.

The last part is:

Very well! This is my puzzle!

ヘルシコト ムキテﾞクムロヒﾞ フナモムス

How is it? Can you solve it?

I did not translate the puzzle itself because I can’t. This is a ciphertext puzzle. (You know what this reminds me of also? An Andrew Schultz game. Except the author is Japanese and in the early 80s rather than writing a new English wordplay game for seemingly every single IFComp.) It’s possible to just solve the puzzle from here (assuming you’re good at cryptograms in Japanese) but the old man’s hint at least makes this a smidge less painful.

Assuming you can get back and find him (if you eyeball the map, you’ll notice you can only enter the start going to the east) he says “the characters are shifted”. This is essentially a Caesar shift, using the standard order katakana letters. Move each back by one and you’ll get something that makes sense. (For example, “コ” or “ko” turns into “ケ” or “ke”.) This causes the text to turn into

フリサケテ ミカツキミレハ ヒトメミシ

which is direct from the Man’yōshū compilation of poems. Specifically, Poem No. 6-994 by Ōtomo Yakamochi (who likely was the one who compiled the collection in the first place), starting with “furisakete mikazuki mireba hitome mishi”. He wrote the poem when he was sixteen.

From A Warbler’s Song in the Dusk: The Life and Work of Otomo Yakamochi by Paula Doe.

After multiple stalled attempts I found the second sage (middle east side of the map, but remember it is random) which quizzed me on what the puzzle’s answer was. I confidently gave the shifted translation but I was told it was wrong, and asked if I had gotten a hint from the old man yet. (This is how you are supposed to know you ask for hints!) I finally realized that the poem connection wasn’t just a reference, but essential to the puzzle. The answer isn’t the first part of the poem, but the completion of the poem.

That is, pawing through ancient poetry is required to beat the game.

In any case, I now have a new puzzle. It also doesn’t make sense as-is so must be another cipher somehow.

ナリノメノ ルゲサニミケシ ヒノユシノ

Getting the old man’s hint I got something like “This is a character exchange. Pay attention to the nature of the symmetry!”. I’m happy to hear suggestions from anyone who hasn’t looked at the walkthrough (even if you don’t know any Japanese, you might have some idea that will work!) I’m riding far past the edge of my ability but I’ll try plowing ahead anyway.

An adventure is an undertaking that carries risk, surprise, and sometimes danger with it. There is no danger in these games. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I dislike computer games in which a player must pretend to pay the death penalty just because of a wrong choice at the fork of a path.

— Richard Ramella

These three games all come from the same column in 80 Microcomputing, March 1983.

The reason three games can all fit together is that they are all from Richard Ramella of Chico, California, who we saw last year with Fun House. He wrote small games for children, games intentionally designed small and straightforward enough to make them tempting to modify.

I’m going to admit only three kinds of people into Fun House: Kids, adults who have friends who are kids, and people who haven’t lost the sense of playfulness that kids have as standard equipment. Fun House is more about fun than houses.

He started with a book, Computer Carnival, which came out June 1982…

Via eBay.

…and followed this after with his Fun House column in the September issue of 80 Microcomputing; the column ran until the April 1984 issue (as 80 Micro started cutting back on their games coverage). He followed with two books that combine “fiction and computer programs to form one giant fantasy for young readers” (Rainbow Quest and Lightyear Excuse). He was active enough that I might be missing something; there’s also the issue that books for children tend not to be preserved in libraries as well as other materials (paperbacks get beaten up and disposed of, and serious academic libraries tend not to collect them as a focus). If you want to see the hybrid fiction/type-in style of Lightyear Excuse, Ramella’s brief-lived column with Color Computing Magazine that started after Fun House should give you an idea.

The March 1983 column is titled Adventure Secrets, although — given the tiny-game restriction — it’s a fairly loose definition of “adventure”. Treasure Trove in particular counts even though it’s unusual in a way I’ve seen before.

Starting with The Gingerbread Caper, it’s a choice-based game where all the choices are “fake”, so to speak; Ramella calls it “linear” and marks the game as being for children seven and up. I want to emphasize that the age of seven guidance is not just reading or playing the game, but inputting and/or modifying it.

100 ‘ * THE GINGERBREAD CAPER * 4K BASIC LEVEL II
110 CLS
120 A$=STRING$(10,”*”)
130 INPUT”What is your name”;B$
140 PRINTB$;”, you are in the woods with Hansel and Gretel.”
150 PRINT”Hansel says: Leave a breadcrumb trail (1)”
160 PRINT”Gretel says: No, eat the bread (2).”
170 INPUT”Your choice”;X
180 PRINTA$
190 IFX=1THENPRINT”Birds eat the crumbs. You’re lost.”
200 IFX=2THENPRINT” You’re lost but not hungry.”
210 PRINT”You come to a fork in the path.”
220 PRINT”Hansel says Go left (1), Gretel says Go right (2)”
230 INPUT”What is your vote”;X

Maybe your seven-year-old novice doesn’t know what every element means, but they can still modify text strings, which is one way to start being a developer. (The legendary Tales of Maj’Eyal started as just a text-string hack of Angband to make it Tales of Middle Earth.) The actual choice turns out not to matter or make the player lose; the crumbs get eaten if a bread-trail is left. The remainder of the story is similarly low-stakes choices. You may want to pause and try the game yourself online (click “emulate edited program” and you’re good to go).

The column’s version of the game is all-caps. Whoever typed this version started putting in lowercase and then dropped halfway through.

The only “bad” choice is nibbling the gingerbread house at the end, which has an ELDERLY WOMAN come out to chase you and you get reset back to the start (not dead, just lost in the forest again where you can make choices again — something like the old Time Machine gamebooks). If you wait, the woman invites you inside and you can call your parents and stay over the night.

620 PRINT”THE HOUSE BELONGS TO RED RIDING HOOD’S GRANDMA.”
630 PRINT”GRANDMA INVITES YOU ALL TO VISIT.”
640 PRINT”YOU CALL YOUR PARENTS ON GRANDMA’S PHONE.”
650 PRINT”THEY SAY YOU MAY SPEND THE NIGHT.”
660 PRINT”AND EVERYONE LIVES HAPPILY EVER AFTER.”
670 END

This sort of bespoke-coding might be a bad idea in an adult game, especially when a parser is involved (see Johnson’s Castle Dracula for one I wrote about recently) but works fine for the context and low-stakes here.

The second game in the column, Treasure Trove, is the first one I came across. It was entirely without context. I have a collection of unsorted-by-year-or-author games and I found this one before realizing it connected with Ramella.

It is cryptic and I first wondered if something was broken or if the game was incomplete.

Treasure Trove is shorter than Gingerbread, but it does a lot more. You are put into a scene, told your location, given a tool, and told its use.

There’s no obvious goal on the start screen.

You go through a series of “tools” and try to use all of them in sequence. I first tried typing “W” to move and got the message “What, W a box with a feather? Impossible !!!”

Trying it again gets the message:

B-O-N-K !

which based on the article, is supposed to mean you went in a direction you couldn’t do. So I was briefly thrown for a loop by it seeming that: a.) you start by having a command to go west be misunderstood followed by b.) having the command to go west be understood, but have it run into a wall.

What’s really going on is that the game has two prompts, “action” followed by “direction”. It asks for an action even if you’re somewhere you aren’t supposed to be doing the action. So while the screen above has the player start at a box with a feather, “tickle” just lets you know the action is impossible; you might think you’d want to just specify a direction then, but you’ve got to go through the hoop of handling the “action” prompt first.

What, tickle a box with a feather?
Impossible !!!

I finally realized that the way to get from “action mode” to “direction mode” without an error message is to hit “enter”, that is, send a blank prompt.

550 INPUT “ACTION”; E$
560 IF E$=”” THEN RETURN

Once the game is in “direction mode”, it doesn’t exit it until you’ve successfully landed a direction (rather than just getting “B-O-N-K” to come out).

This would all be more troublesome with a larger map, but the entirety is a 2 by 2 grid.

The feather thus goes up to the dragon (who I wouldn’t assume is ticklish, but the only thing where the action “tickle” even makes sense).

The “key” then goes over to the box.

Good Move
The box produces a ladder
This is your new tool
Its purpose: climb

The ladder works on the beach tree:

Good Move
The tree produces a shovel
This is your new tool
Its purpose: dig

Finally, the shovel works on the beach.

Commands need to be typed in lowercase for the version I played; the original is all uppercase and doesn’t need to account for that.

While Treasure Trove technically counts as an adventure, it mainly held interest in watching someone reconstruct the concept of a parser from first principles in an effort to simplify things for children; unfortunately it made things more confusing for children instead.

Now on to the last game, Wonderland, which won’t have the same lower-case/upper-case issue as the other two, because it doesn’t seem to be archived at all. I had to type it in myself. You can find the code here.

Again the rules are irregular, but it isn’t as anti-intuitive as Treasure Trove.

This program borrows 10 characters and 10 items or scenes from the Lewis Carroll stories Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Each is assigned a different place on a 5-by-5 grid.

Note the regular grid this time only uses cardinal directions, as opposed to Treasure Trove which tried to hard-code in NE/NW/SE/SW into the program.

At the start, one of the characters is secretly made the mystery character. Your goal is to identify that character and then find its location.

The grid is set up at random. Some rooms are “locations”, some are “characters”. Some (independent of if they are a location or a character) have “clues”.

You might notice the count of 10 locations and 10 characters means that not all 25 squares are covered; some duplicates are included. Below is a complete map of one playthrough.

Clue-spots are marked in the corner, although I’m unclear their exact system; some spaces have more than one clue (that is, if you gather a clue and revisit, you’ll get another clue). To gather a clue, you need to solve an addition problem that briefly flashes on the screen. (For this age, it is testing both addition and paying attention; it’s fast enough — and the time even has randomness applied — that I sometimes missed seeing both numbers.)

Getting a clue right adds a “letter” to a list. The letter is simply a random letter chosen from the “mystery character” you’re supposed to be guessing.

If you reach a character, you’ll get prompted if you want to guess at the mystery character. You don’t have to guess at the character that is physically present; it just wants any guess typed in, and if you get it correct then the game says you need to find that character to win.

Although you are also welcome to guess the right place with the answer.

I found this oddly compelling, moreso than Treasure Trove at least. The main “parser” is just movement and getting interrupted by questions doesn’t feel too unnatural. The addition-problem aspect seems more of a vision quiz than a math puzzle so feels appropriate to the setting, and even though everything is just spread out references, the game benefits from the “fan fiction boost” of familiarity.

Two Queen’s Throne rooms. I guess she has a backup.

Despite these only barely qualifying as adventures (and I wouldn’t count Wonderland at all) I still found it interesting to see an approach to writing something intended as “adventure gaming” but not following the standard rules. This likely won’t be the last time we see this approach, despite “guides” starting to become common.

Even if his books never come up, Richard Ramella will come up again with a type-in in 1985; I also suspect once the Amiga steps in we’ll have a return performance as for many years he published the first Amiga diskmag, called Jumpdisk.

September 1986 issue, via eBay. Includes “Where’s Tom”, an “electronic time map” game of Tom Sawyer.

Coming up: assuming I can get over the technical hurdles (being more a pain than normal) our next game is from Japan, and it bears some resemblance to Wonderland.

(This post about Gilsoft continues the story after Time-Line, so you should read about that game first.)

Three months after Time-Line started being offered, Tim Gilberts attended one of the legendary ZX Microfairs with his parents (Number 7, Alexandria Palace in London, June 4th).

Popular Computing Weekly, 9-15 June 1983.

As mentioned last time, his parents were quite supportive of his efforts to start a company; his father Howard was a telephone engineer who was always into electronics (building a TV Tennis game for his son as a birthday present) and he always had a “sideline” job (that is, he supported entrepreneurship).

The younger Tim’s experience with computers in school was originally quite minimal, with no access to hardware. Coding was done in the language CESIL (Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language) and sent to a central location for processing (most likely being returned later to the student with an error).

Students didn’t even use punch cards, they wrote on a “Coding Sheet” to be passed on to an operator. Reproduction from Ian Dunmore.

He had two maths teachers interested enough in computing (and displeased with the paper situation) that they wrangled not only a desktop…

Personal Computing World, October 1978. The 380Z also featured in Pete Cooke’s story, but he was on the teacher’s end.

…but a terminal that connected directly to the school’s mainframe.

CESIL was still being used in the classroom — it was part of the O-Levels — and Tim Gilberts was tasked with one of the teachers (Mr Danks) to make a CESIL interpreter, lending a TRS-80 for the purpose.

This was probably my first commission for software – unpaid of course.

This is why one of Gilsoft’s earliest products was not a game at all, but a CESIL interpreter.

From Spectrum Computing.

He was able to buy a ZX81 with money he saved, and being supportive of what looked to be a budding career, his father purchased him a ZX Spectrum right when it came out. (Tim was still in school at the time working on his A Levels.)

But back to that Microfair in June–

Tim with his mother Pam and his father Howard. Source.

This was actually their second public sales event, after a small one in Bristol (where they made “a small quantity of mail order sales”). Gilsoft was positioned at stand E2, right next to the company Bytewell (one local to Barry that Gilberts had written a game for). Unfortunately, sales did not pick up in London; while they made money, this was because they had their Spectrum hooked up to a DK’Tronics keyboard that attracted attention, so they walked across the hall to where DK’Tronics was selling the keyboards and bought a set in bulk at vendor-cost to resell at their own stand.

The total turnover on the day when we counted the cash in our caravan in the Alexandra Palace carpark was some £1200 pounds with only a very small percentage from the sale of software. Disappointing as this was the production costs were low, the artwork for the cassette inlays being the most expensive items” but, they were not very advanced at the start.

This would change by their next Microfair, around Christmas, when it would be Gilsoft’s software attracting attention.

For now, we aren’t quite that far, as while Yeandle had made an adventure, Tim Gilberts wanted to try his hand at one too. He used the same database setup that Yeandle had made. This wasn’t just based on his interest but also on marketing savvy.

You must remember from the early industry people just wrote anything and threw it at the wall. [We] commonly called the magazines in advertising [to] see what sold. Adventure games seemed to be selling so I wrote one.

His game was called Diamond Trail.

Just before its long awaited premiere, the priceless Sinclive Diamond was stolen from the Jewel room of Spectraisia’s Capital, Microdrivia.

You must restore it in as short a time as possible, before the public begins to doubt its existence. Also bring the fake back to headquarters.

Unlike Time-Line, there are multiple ports, as after the initial Spectrum-only game it was moved to the actual Quill system, and from there taken to other machines. In fact, I was unable to find a non-Quill version of the game (I tried eight different versions) so I just went with it.

From the Commodore Plus/4 version.

This game takes multiple cues from Time-Line, both in a technical and design sense, but I think it came out stronger in the end just from having a more coherent setting (with some clearer British-urban-satire applied with a dose of Wales).

Our base of operations is an apparently abandoned secret police base. It is so secret that nobody is around and it’s possible (likely even, given a few circumstances) to be arrested for stealing. Maybe we’re one of the Slow Horses.

The secret police HQ also has an “armoury” with a long knife and an “office” with a bag. Neither seem to be helpful at first (the bag I never found helpful at all; maybe it increases inventory capacity somehow but I didn’t get it to work). Where the knife’s failure as an armoury-tool becomes clearly apparent is going east from the HQ, where you get immediately ambushed by a man with a gun. Once this starts, the man keeps shooting at you until you die.

I am in a seedy back road which goes SOUTH. Doors open to the EAST and WEST.
A man appears and takes a shot at me, he missed!

I was puzzled trying to USE KNIFE and KILL MAN with no effect, but I finally came across THROW KNIFE.

>throw knife
The Knife skims past his head & falls to the ground.

I’m hungry!
A man appears and takes a shot at me, he missed!

Done Crowther/Woods style this might just involve throwing the knife enough times and getting lucky with RNG, but the knife will never hit. You instead need to use a different weapon instead entirely.

You might also notice the “I’m hungry!” Just like Time-Line, there’s an almost immediate and deadly hunger timer. It took me a while before I could resolve it, for reasons I’ll go into shortly.

Heading west from HQ thankfully is bullet-free, as you are described as on the east side of a busy road. Trying to enter the road was deadly.

The death does the word cut-off just like both Reed’s article and Time-Line.

Avoiding that for the moment, heading north leads to a “large junk shop” with a “small purse” where you can open it and find a one-pound note. I do not know why taking it doesn’t count as stealing.

I am inside a large junk shop.
The exit is SOUTH.
I can also see:-
A small purse.

>get purse
OK.

>open purse
I am inside a large junk shop.
The exit is SOUTH.
I can also see:-
A £1.00 NOTE.

Just south there is a cathedral with a ladder outside, and a collection plate inside with a 50p coin. If you take the 50p coin and just walk off your game is over.

You need to instead drop the note first, and then you are safe. The police are watching that closely (but can’t help with a bloke shooting at you, apparently, or do anything other than flail their arms around when it comes to a stolen jewel).

The ladder incidentally feels a bit like the one from Time-Line; in that game, you could try CLIMB LADDER but the game would say you check and there’s nothing up there. In this case, CLIMB LADDER is the actual right thing to do, as in the same area as an entrance to an Underground Tube Station there’s a ledge described as up high.

Try to go down into the station and you will be asked for a ticket. We’ll get that later.

The key is useful for when you go a bit farther south to a “small museum”. The museum has an old lamp and a locked door. You can go around a back alley to CLIMB DUSTBINS and find a back room with a “laser cutter”, then use the key from the ledge to get back into the small museum via the back way. The reason to do this (other than snagging the cutter) is that if you try to take the old lamp away you’ll get busted for stealing again.

So after getting the lamp you just go back out the back window and then you’ll be safe. (Maybe it’s all those surveillance cameras London is known for … except they weren’t known for that yet in 1983. Thatcher something something?)

All this time there’s been “you’re hungry” messages and I admit being stuck a while. I also tried running past the shooting man to explore past a little; there’s a travel office with a ticket (but no way to pay for it, neither the note nor 50p coin work) and a closed/sealed manhole going the other way.

Exploring while cheerfully ignoring impending doom. The number of turns it takes to die is entirely random. The shooter can appear anywhere on the map. I originally thought maybe there was a way to get him run over by traffic.

What broke the case was my thinking, oddly enough, of a hint given in the prior game.

The hint here is complete nonsense in Time-Line, but of course maybe LOOKing both ways is the right way to approach the road?

sigh

This is one of those makes-sense-in-the-text-universe only puzzles, since of course normally you’d see the crossing. CROSS CROSSING will safely move to the west side of the road.

This alleviates the hunger issue as there is a deli with a vending machine that accepts the 50p coin from the cathedral; you can get a hamburger and then not worry about hunger thereafter.

Also about is the tower with the missing jewel (there’s a fake one you need to take back to HQ, as per the instructions) and while trying to go back there’s a fire hydrant that sprays acidic water on you which is a problem unless you’re wearing a mackintosh that happens to be lying around near the tower.

This seems to be random rather than timed so I think you could get lucky rather than wearing the raincoat.

Finally — and I admit I missed an exit for a while so it took me a moment to find it — you can go west from the hydrant to find a library which has a book (logical) and a gun (???).

The book gives directions on using the laser cutter from back at the museum (“twiddle” the knobs). With the gun, you can shoot down the person who has been after you…

…leaving the way open to bust open the drain cover with the laser cutter.

>twiddle knobs
I am in a Cul-de-Sac, The exit is NORTH.
There are some NEW WEEDS here.
I can also see:-
A drain cover with a neat round
hole cut in it.

This leads down to a maze, again invoking the spirit (and some of the literal code-base) of Time-Line.

One of the rooms has the sound of water falling which indicates this is the one spot in the maze you should use “down” (as opposed to N/S/E/W) — this is exactly analogous to the “draft” in the Time-Line maze which indicated it was possible to go up.

Going down reveals a “credit card” in the sewer; moving along farther reveals the secret hideout of the jewel thieves, although they’ve already left.

You don’t ever apprehend them; you’re just trying to get the diamond back.

From the hideout you can go into the tower the “back way”; this will be handy later. For now, let’s use the credit card and try the train ticket.

Random cheeky red herring, just like Time-Line.

The trick here is to simply WAIT TRAIN again and get on the second train, not the first one.

The inside of the “lost property office” has a crate. If you have the knife from the start of the game (the one useless as a weapon) you can use it to open the crate and get the diamond.

I am in a lost property office.
It seems deserted. The platform is to the WEST.
I can also see:-
A real diamond.
Some splintered wood.

Now winning is just a matter of returning the real diamond to the tower, although if you try to do it from the front, you get arrested for stealing! (…..??…..) You need to instead sneak through the sewers and drop it off where the fake diamond was.

I am in the Jewel Room, a spiral staircase leads DOWN.
I can also see:-
A real diamond.

I’m ready for your instructions.

>d
I am inside a room at the base of the tower. A spiral staircase goes UP, and an open door leads to the NORTH.
I can also see:-
A sign which says;
“Tower closed to PUBLIC”

Now you can walk back to the HQ and victory.

I have no interest in optimizing.

The action to Time-Line boiled down to eating food, finding pliers and a key, cutting a fence, using the key, and using a battery to get home; in a story-sense, not terribly exciting. The action here was a bit cryptic (why does nobody care someone is shooting at us all over London? why all the arrests for stealing even when we are returning a diamond?) but still more compelling to deal with, and even though the puzzles were straightforward the game was still substantial enough to get through I didn’t feel like it was cut short.

Via Spectrum Computing.

I’m curious how many of the design elements from the first two games keep holding in later Quill ones. I’ll be pausing the Quill story for now; we’ll eventually return to the first game that was actually written directly with the Quill (rather than ported). For now: Some rare adventures or at least adventure-adjacent games, including one that isn’t archived anywhere and I had to type up.

(Continued from my previous post.)

Shabti of Seti I, via The Met. Found in the Valley of the Kings. These would be inscribed with a spell to bring them up in the afterlife in order to do the work for the ruler.

Some background points to get through before diving into the game itself–

First, I’m putting the author name as Dian Girard. I am doing this because on the previous Dian games we’ve covered (Hermit’s Secret, Phantom) there is ad copy that says they are by “Dian Girard”. The games themselves do not give a credit. The article she wrote later (where she is credited with the 1983 games) uses the last name Crayne, but it also says she writes her fiction under Girard, so my assumption is she is including “interactive fiction” under her pseudonym.

Second, quoting her from the aforementioned article:

My own adventure games are built from two basic parts: the driver program and the text files or “script.” The script contains all of the vocabulary words that the driver recognizes, plus the object and place descriptions. There is also a builder program that converts the text in the script to machine-readable tables. Because the games are script-driven. I can build 70 to 80 percent of a new game without ever touching the actual program source code.

The original engine seems to be based on a Charles Crayne port of Adventure, so subsequent uses of the engine keep the same elements. There is always a pirate (in Valley of the Kings, tomb robber) stealing treasure; there are always dwarves throwing axes (in this game, a “slender young man with a rather fanatical gleam in his eye”). There are always “magic words” that jump you around; here, they are given as instructions to the tour guide rather than “real” teleports. Phantom managed to creatively put in a plot despite the constraints; this game doesn’t try as hard, but does manage to build an atmosphere of Egypt that is more linked in reality than other games of this time period.

The Curse of the Pharaoh (1982), for instance, had a pyramid and a mummy, but was mostly freeform (giant clam with a fuse in it, pit with a snake); the cultural touchstones of ancient Egypt imagery without any of the content.

By contrast, in Valley of the Kings, to the west of the start point, near a “souvenir shop”, there’s a tomb of “Thothmes I” made by “the architect Ineni during the Eighteenth Dynasty”. Ineni was a real architect from Ancient Egypt we have biographical information about.

Inspection was made for me, I was the reckoner. Source.

Just inside is the “ushabti room” (see top of this post) where

Display cases hold the collection of ushabti, or “answerer” figures that were found in the tomb.

(Also called “shabti”.) Realistically for a random tomb in the Valley that’s easily accessible, the sarcophagus is no longer there.

This is the sarcophagus room, where the coffin holding the pharoah’s mummy was placed. The only exit is to the northwest.
Someone has left an interesting old silver charm here.

(The charm is a treasure, though!)

To the west of the room with the charm is a room purely there for scenery.

This large chamber was probably used to hold the great king’s hunting equipment. Nothing was found in it, but the paintings on the wall show the pharoah hunting antelope from a chariot. A doorway in the north wall is the only exit from the room.

There’s one other section of the tomb that’s also been cleared out, although someone left a hacksaw (remember that for later).

There are enough small touches that I get the impression the author at least touched an archaeology book at some point, rather than making everything up. This is comparable to Crystal Caves, which had a realistic cave at the upper level (including a park ranger that would follow you around), and you had to solve a puzzle in order to get to the “magic section”.

From TT81, also known as Ineni’s Tomb. By unbekannt, Maler im Alten Ägypten – Eberhard Dziobek: Das Grab des Ineni. Theben Nr. 81, Tafel 13, FAL. Source.

The “magic” in this case is in the tomb of Thothmes I, a piece of paper with the shabtis:

Hmmm. It’s a prayer of some sort — “Lion of the Sun, hear my prayer …” It’s written in Coptic, and looks very old.

I’ll use this at the end of the post. (Also, another small touch: would our previous Egyptian adventures reference “Coptic”?) In the meantime let’s get familiar with the aboveground, starting with a metamap.

This simplifies the overarching map structure into its general areas. You start at the tour guide, you can go south to a “desert” area with a pyramid and temple, north to a “Valley of the Kings” area which has its own downward entrance, go west to the Thothmes tomb (already seen) and the base camp (ditto, from the last post). The mountains interconnect everything and they were enough of an annoyance to mapping, I sometimes just marked an exit in red if it went to mountains. Finally, the Sphinx I was unable to reach by conventional methods (…maybe if I bothered to map the mountains more…) but could only reach via the tour guide.

Near the “Thothmes tomb” is a “parking lot” which has an “iron key” to the north (I haven’t used it yet), a “wilted carrot” within, and the Nile to the south with a “crocodile”.

There is a large asphalt-paved parking lot here. Driveways to the north and east lead out onto a paved road. The banks of the Nile river are south, and mountains rise to the west. There is a large orange carrot here, wilted from the heat.
S
You have reached the bank of the Nile, at a narrow cleft in the surrounding rocks. The Valley of the Kings is north of you, and the river bank stretches off to the east. Across the river you can see the modern buildings of new Luxor. A twenty-foot crocodile is resting lazily on the bank, sunning himself. He looks asleep, but his beady little eyes are open.

The crocodile snaps at me if I try to go east. It is not hungry for carrots.

Going over to the Valley of the Kings next, where you’ll see some of those red-exit-means-mountains spots:

The map has a lot of loop-back-to-the-same-room exits, so many I marked them as stubs rather than with arrow-loops.

You are at the Visitor’s Center in the Valley of the Kings. A dark-skinned tourguide, wearing a bright red fez and a white linen suit, bows and asks, “Where would you like to go?”
N
You are wandering around in the Valley of the Kings.
W
You are wandering around in the Valley of the Kings.
There’s a piece of rare coral here, carved into a fish.
SW
You are wandering around in the Valley of the Kings.
There’s a piece of rare coral here, carved into a fish.

The only important spot (other than the coral) is a “rectangle”. Just as a reminder, the base camp tomb included a “shovel”, a “crowbar”, and a “flashlight”; here both the shovel and flashlight are useful.

You are wandering around in the Valley of the Kings.
S
You are near the center of the bleak Valley of the Kings. An eroded rectangle of sandstone, about three feet long by about 10 inches wide shows above the surface of the sands.
DIG
You dig for several hours, moving what feels like tons of sand. Eventually you uncover a flight of sandstone steps that lead down into the ground — the entrance to a hidden tomb!
D
It is now pitch dark. If you go on, something may eat you.

(If you DIG somewhere random, the game says “Sure, go ahead. It’s not going to accomplish anything.”) Applying the flashlight:

The flashlight is now on.
This is a sunken stairway entrance leading down below the sands of the desert, where it roofs over to become a passage some ten feet high by six feet wide that continues down.
D
You are at an open doorway. Through it, to the east, you can see a passageway that leads down into silent darkness. To the west there is a staircase leading up to the sunlit desert. There is a large seal impression over the lintel of the door.
READ SEAL
It’s a picture of what looks like a dog, with nine little men.
E
You start forward, but a shimmering figure appears in the doorway and some mysterious force holds you back!

I haven’t gotten past here yet; I assume some item or set of items is needed.

Anubis, from The Met. I don’t think this is necessarily the dog meant here.

Moving on the desert with the pyramid (and some of the mountains):

The exits off to the west are another route to the base camp; to the far southeast there is a “prehistoric egg” which counts as a treasure. The important point of note is not the pyramid (at least, not that I can find) but the temple a bit south. Instead of using the shovel we’re using the crowbar:

You are wandering through the burning sands of the desert.
S
There is a tiny ruined temple here, its roof long vanished and half of its yellow columns fallen. There is desert all around you, and on the horizon to the north you can see the silhouette of an immense pyramid etched against the blue sky. The center of the floor is made up of one huge sandstone slab.
LIFT SLAB
The end of the bar fits easily into the crack around the slab and, straining every muscle, you manage to pry it up and move it aside. There is a dark passage of some sort down below.

Again, though, we can’t get too far.

D
You are in a small, square, room, hardly big enough to turn around in. A flight of well-worn stone steps leads south. The ceiling slab has been moved aside, letting the sunlight stream in from the desert above.

The steps go down to a “chasm floor” where there’s a “beautiful lyre” (a treasure) but a rockfall immediately after.

This is the floor of a narrow, high canyon, hardly more than a chasm. It used to extend down to the south, but a massive rockslide has tumbled down and blocked the passage. Now the only exit is the chasm floor to the north.

If we can pass through I assume it comes later. (Maybe through the other side; the Dian games have been big on opening up alternate exits throughout the game.) Where the big break comes is instead at the Sphinx:

You are at the Visitor’s Center in the Valley of the Kings. A dark-skinned tourguide, wearing a bright red fez and a white linen suit, bows and asks, “Where would you like to go?”
SPHINX
You are standing between the front paws of an enormous sphinx, carved out of a monolithic sandstone rock. There is a small dark doorway to the north, that leads inside the monument.
N
You are in a tiny room, carved out of the solid sandstone. It is about 12 feet square, and there is an exit on the south. A ancient stone altar, eroded by time, fills most of the space.
READ PAPER
Hmmm. It’s a prayer of some sort — “Lion of the Sun, hear my prayer …” It’s written in Coptic, and looks very old.
PRAY
As you chant the ancient prayer the dim light streaming into the small room gets strangely brighter, and to your amazement the ancient altar slowly turns in the middle of the floor!

This opens the secret temple of the Sun God.

This is the secret Hall of Amon-Re, god of the sun. A dark hallway leads out of the east wall, into a huge chamber.

Upon trying to step in, I was attacked by the “dwarf stand-in” for this game. I guess we’re supposed to be American.

A slender young man with a rather fanatical gleam in his eye runs around a corner, throws an axe at you — which misses — and then runs off into the darkness yelling something about “Yankee imperialism.”

Just to show off the temple a little:

You have reached the secret Temple of Amon-Re. All around you are fantastic carvings and paintings, showing the Sun God on his journeys across the world. The great altar, lit by some incredible light, is to the south. A doorway in the west wall leads to a large hall, and another door goes east.
S
A brilliant flame, giving off a strong scent of petroleum, lights up this end of the vast Temple of Amon-Re. There is a huge stone altar here, with carved figures of the ancient Egyptian gods. The great Temple stretches out to the north.
A roll of papyrus has been carefully set down on the floor.

The papyrus is a treasure, and the game is even clear that it is a fragile historical artifact and you should be carting it over to the archaeologists rather than noodling with it.

Close-up of the Egyptian Sun God, via the British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Not much farther there are some bars, but here is when the hacksaw comes in.

There is a hint of dampness in the air, and the surprising sound of dripping water. Your flashlight reflects from a tiny natural spring that wells up in one corner of the room. Irregular openings lead out to the north and southwest.
SW
This is an ancient corridor, part natural, and partially finished off by human hands. You can go east or west. A set of heavy iron bars have been set in concrete across the passage to the west. Through them you can see a large cavern.
CUT BARS
The hacksaw is rather dull, but you eventually cut through several of the bars and are able to pry them apart enough to get through.
W
This is the entrance to a complex of ancient caves. There are some marks on the walls that may have been made by stone-age men. A passage goes north, and an ancient corridor leads east. There are strong iron bars across the passage to the east. Some of the bars have been cut through and pried apart.

From here the caves kept going and going and I suspect this is the main entrance to the “dungeon” part of the game so it seemed like a good place to pause. So far the puzzles are straightforward, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing; the atmosphere seems to be more the point this time around than any kind of mental stumpers.

Ostracon with Pharaoh Spearing a Lion and a Royal Hymn on its Back, New Kingdom, Ramesside period, found in the Valley of the Kings in 1920 during the Carnarvon/Carter excavations.

Norrell Data Systems published three games by the end of 1982, and I’ve now played all of them: a port of Adventure with 375 points, and two games by Dian Girard, The Hermit’s Secret and The Phantom’s Revenge. If you want a full historical background (including how they tie into the ultra-obscure Sphere computer) you should read about those games first; I’ll just briefly re-summarize here.

PC World, April 1983.

In particular, Dian Girard (or Crayne, depending on circumstances) is one of our earliest multi-game female authors of text adventures; she wrote an article in PC Magazine, September 1983 which outlined her methods and gave a brief biography:

Dian Crayne is the author of several adventure games published by Norell Data Systems: The Phantom’s Revenge, The Hermit’s Secret, Monster Rally, Valley of the Kings, and Elsinore. She has been a programmer/analyst for 10 years. Her science fiction writings are published under the pseudonym Dian Girard.

That’s five games, although she actually mentions having written six games in the article itself; the game that is unmentioned is the adult game Granny’s Place. In general the Norrell versions have never surfaced, but fortunately the games were republished under the name Temple Software in 1993.

Of the 1983 games (Monster Rally, Valley of the Kings, Elsinore, Granny’s Place), we’ve had Elsinore and Granny’s Place for a while, and Monster Rally was thought lost but got rescued in January 2024 off the website of Charles A. Crayne by way of the Internet Archive. There’s the additional wrinkle that despite the article explicitly stating Dian wrote the games, Charles is given the author credit in the rescued version. CASA right now credits both as authors. JTN analyzes the situation here (with some follow-ups in the thread); I’ll dig more into the situation when I reach Monster Rally.

The game not discussed in the thread at all is Valley of the Kings, because at the time it was considered completely lost, and described as lost as recently as August 2025. I was cross-checking my database recently against the Total DOS Collection and was surprised to find an entry:

Valley of the Kings (1983)(Temple Software, Inc.) [Adventure, Interactive Fiction].zip

I am not fully clear when it got added; with these sort of all-encompassing archives there’s often a delay between when something gets placed vs. when it gets found by people who care about playing it.

Softalk, December 1983.

Just like the other games in the series, this is based off what seems to be a Crowther/Woods style engine and so still is all about gathering all the treasures and putting them in a particular spot.

You are about to take a trip into Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, a fantastic place where the ancient pharoahs were buried with all their treasures. Some of that treasure can be found by you! Of course, you may have some trouble with the fanatical Priests of Set. They don’t like intruders. One word of warning: Don’t go into any dark places without a flashlight. It’s dangerous. There is a tomb robber working around this area too. He isn’t dangerous, but if you find anything valuable, he may take it.

The treasures go to the “storage room that the digging team uses to keep their finds until they can be taken to the museum” so I guess there’s a difference between us and a “tomb robber” this time; we are doing “official research”.

This is the Visitor’s Center, a shady pavilion with maps of the local area, tourist brochures, and a snack shop. A paved road leads west from here, across the Valley of the Kings. To the east, there are the desolate Theban Mountains. Some distance to the south you can see a spectacular pyramid. A dark-skinned tourguide, wearing a bright red fez and a white linen suit, bows and asks, “Where would you like to go?”

The game’s structure here is a little unusual. Trying to wander lands you in a desert which is somewhat maze-y (like Hermit’s Secret)…

NE
You are wandering around in the Valley of the Kings.
N
You are wandering around in the Valley of the Kings.
W
You are wandering around in the Valley of the Kings.
There’s a piece of rare coral here, carved into a fish.

…but as the coral indicates (treasure, 5 points) I’m going to still need to map out all the sections to be sure I have everything. However, there’s still some connectivity implied by some room descriptions; you can head south from the starting room to a pyramid, for instance…

S
You are walking through the burning sands of the desert. There is an immense pyramid to the south of you, and to the north you can see the silhouette of the Visitor’s Center against the sky.
S
You are walking along the outside of an immense pyramid.

…but more importantly and uniquely, you can GO LOCATION while at the tour guide at the start to warp somewhere, as long as the tour guide considers it available. This takes the “shortcut method” of travel used in Crowther/Woods, where you can sometimes type a word to jump somewhere…

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
GRATE
You are in a 20-foot depression floored with bare dirt. Set into the dirt is a strong steel grate mounted in concrete. A dry streambed leads into the depression.
The grate is locked.

…and turns it into a puzzle of sorts. There’s no indicator of where a good destination might be, you have to guess. I tried CAVE and got a fascinating response.

GO CAVE

The guide looks startled. “Who told you about the caves? That’s an old legend, that there are some caves under the sands of the desert.” He laughs and adds, “Maybe the sphinx knows!”

This implies GO SPHINX works, and indeed it does.

You are standing between the front paws of an enormous sphinx, carved out of a monolithic sandstone rock. There is a small dark doorway to the north, that leads inside the monument.
N
You are in a tiny room, carved out of the solid sandstone. It is about 12 feet square, and there is an exit on the south. A ancient stone altar, eroded by time, fills most of the space.

Typing GO TOMB turns out to lead the player to the base camp.

You are in a small square chamber that forms the entrance to the tomb of Seti II. The tomb is rather uninteresting and is being used as a field headquarters for the archaeologist. The corridors into the tomb go north and west. The exit is south. Some rather exotic fertility rituals are carved on one wall.

The previously mentioned “storage room” is here, along with a “crowbar”, “flashlight”, and “shovel”.

The markings show “guide landing” spots; GO MOUNTAINS lands you next to a camel, although the camel does not let you pass by to the east.

This is a narrow trail that leads through the hot dusty rocks of the Theban Mountains. The trail ends here, with the only easy access being to the south. There is a narrow rift in the rocks to the east, and nothing but desolate mountains nearby. There is a large camel here, with the usual sneer on its face.
E
The camel spits at you, and rather playfully tries to kick your head off. You’d better just leave him alone for now.

Knowing Dian’s other games I’m going to need to spend a while mapping so I’m not going to try to give the full lay of the land just yet. This kind of feel where I’m able to jump around an interconnected map really does provide a mysterious atmosphere; I’m sure it will be ruined soon enough by me trying to figure out why exit X connects to room Y but for now I’m enjoying myself just wandering a little.

There’s no walkthrough or maps out there; if anyone wants to follow along I have the game here. It needs to be played with DOS.

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I’ve finished the game; a lot of what I had to deal with in the end was parser struggles.

Let’s take the antique shop first. I had approached it, was told the showcase couldn’t be accessed, and tried various varieties of BREAK to get in. I also tried WITH ITEM knowing that the game allowed skipping over the original command (WITH CROWBAR, WITH BRICK, WITH LADDER, etc.) Some games map USE to a synonym but this game just responds “TRY TO USE IT YOURSELF” with the command USE even though applying WITH here is essentially the same thing.

My problem was I was standing too close! The game was fine with you breaking the window, but you needed to be standing just a bit to the west, in the “street”, and then WITH BRICK would work appropriately. (I understood the point — the glass on the inside is somehow stronger than the glass on the outside — but it still left me grouchy.)

Also, weirdly, you don’t see the result of the action on the visual unless you either LOOK or leave the room and come back.

Nearby, just to the south, was the bank. The bank had a sign about seeing a teller. I had done lots of different actions to try to summon a teller, thinking I was at the teller window — and it certainly looks that way — but you’re supposed to just type GO TELLER.

Then there’s even more guess-the-phrase as you’re supposed to WITHDRAW CASH. The fact you have some in the bank suggests you are a local deciding to crush your old neighborhoods.

Again, the result has already happened: there’s CASH now sitting here. You won’t see it unless you LOOK.

Speaking of guess-the-phrase, it’s time to steal the car. (I just checked the walkthrough for this.) It turns out you can type TEST DRIVE.

So trusting, given he’s already living in a village that’s been raided dry by whatever thieves have come before our protagonist. This takes care of a couple puzzles at once, because not only do we now have access to both houses (Mr. Smith’s keys work on the Hughes mansion as well), but we can use the car to pick up the boat trailer and other large things.

Let’s raid the house first, though. Then we’ll pick up the large items, then finally hit the mansion.

Helpfully, Mr. Smith has a copy of the Picasso in the art museum (pretty clear what’s going to happen with that in a moment) and it is covering a safe. Trying to OPEN SAFE has the game respond that it needs the combo.

Fortunately, our trusting Mr. Smith is the sort to just write the combo on a paper two rooms over.

Unfortunately, this game is the sort to make it impossible to figure out how to input anything. TURN DIAL, ENTER COMBO, OPEN SAFE while having the paper open, etc. failed on me; I just went straight for the walkthrough again because the game had officially crossed my threshold. You’re just supposed to type L15 R7 (that’s verb L15, noun R7) and it works:

THE SAFE OPENED UP FOR A SHORT MINUTE. SOMETHING FELL OUT.

The “something” here is a set of stock certificates and some diamonds. The keys work on the mansion, too, but let’s handle the painting in the art gallery first since we have the copy.

Oops! I don’t know if this is an issue because of the crack or an issue with the original game (based on the parser’s absurdity, I’m about 50-50) but you need to SWITCH PAINTING (not SWAP, CHANGE, HANG, etc. I absolutely hate this parser) in order to keep the game from hanging.

OK! A FORGERY IS HANGING ON THE WALL!

Oddly, the painting looks different when dropped off with the stash.

This stash is going to start to look quite crowded by the end of the game.

Next up I promised to go for the “big items”. One of them is the “raft” from last time. As suggested by arcanetrivia in the comments, ROW worked to move it (I usually don’t associate ROW with rafts, but it does get described as having paddles).

Eventually the only way you can paddle is up to the the same boat dock the *boat* is at. We’re going to steal both the boat and the raft at once, and it is going to look very silly.

With the keys Mr. Smith gave over, you can just hop in the Corvette and type DRIVE CAR. Then the bottom of the car serves as a sort of frame as you drive around town.

Sadly, the game doesn’t let you drive into buildings.

I drove over to where the boat trailer was, stopped the car, and tried ATTACH TRAILER. No luck. HITCH TRAILER? No. PUT TRAILER? Nyet. LINK TRAILER? Also no.

I confess, reader: walkthrough again (#3 if you’re counting). It’s TOW TRAILER. Grrrr. While I was at this, I tried to tie the rope to the trailer and to the car, found that didn’t work either, but when I started driving again my raft was tied to the back of the car along with the trailer (even though I had left the raft back on the dock!) At least it didn’t crash the game this time.

Driving on over to the dock with both a trailer and a raft bouncing along connected to a rope, I was able to GET BOAT … I mean MOVE BOAT … no, PUSH BOAT, LOAD BOAT, LOAD TRAILER, FILL TRAILER …

The game wants PUT BOAT.

I was then able to tote everything all at once over to the truck and drop it off (rope, raft, Corvette, boat) for some megapoints. The police really only care about stereo systems and paintings, I guess? (Remember those are two items that set off the police. I already did the painting swap, the stereo puzzle is the very last one I solved.)

Now it’s time to raid the mansion. I hiked back over to the southeast side of town, waving at David in the office on the way (….yes, the car is still being … tested …) and found a much larger area than I expected.

Not this part in particular being large, but where the Tram goes.

Heading west and south leads down to a basement with a will (*will* rather) that is stuck in place.

I was confused about the Patty reference until I went back up and east.

This is *Patricia* Hughes and she counts as a treasure. If you KISS her she will jump in your arms and you can then go over the will and she’ll be able to pick that up too somehow. (I solved this later in the game, but it’s faster to just go through it now.)

There’s also a door to the south of Patricia and that needs the crowbar (“WITH CROWBAR”) to pry open. By doing that you can go down to the tram and what I’ll call The 1% Area.

This is only part of it.

To the south is a “yacht club” with a valuable record…

…and to the north is a wild animal reserve club, with a tiger that will eat you.

Oh, to reach the 1% Area, you need to flip the disk over.

Fortunately off to the side before the tiger is a Clubhouse with a rifle, although trying to SHOOT TIGER just results in a “CLICK”. You need to take a leap of faith and GET BULLETS while in the Clubhouse (even though they aren’t visible) and somehow it works and you can then LOAD RIFLE.

Then you can shoot the tiger dead, grab a valuable *fork* that’s there at the fork in the road (hilarious), and west to an elephant.

If you kept the peanuts from the very start of the game you can FEED ELEPHANT, who will obligingly let you then take … his tusks? I’m past looking for logic.

You can also go east and there’s a maze, but while mappable it is entirely useless to do so. I don’t know why it’s there.

Going back to the main road, you can reach a golf course and yet another hard-game crash. If you go to the 18th hole and LOOK HOLE, you’ll “see something”, and just like any other discovery in the game, you have to LOOK to find out what that discovery is. The problem is — even if you have the graphics off — the game will crash when you do so.

So you need to crash the game, reload, and blindly pick up the ball that you know is there. Then it can go safely back to the treasures.

One more section to the 1% Area:

This mainly serves to have a gate that taunts you…

No way in.

…a shark that eats you…

…and a metal detector that’s just sitting around ready for swiping. The metal detector gets used on the same beach as the shark is hovering around, and it turns out to be the most infuriating parser moment in the game. All the way through it has been chastising you for applying the verb USE to anything; the way to use the metal detector is USE DETECTOR.

A low point in a game with already awful parser moments.

You can then DIG. The game asks WHAT WITH and you need to say WITH HANDS (fortunately I’ve seen this trick enough times, but it always bothers me).

With all that done I was very close to the end of the game. I still had the stereo to deal with.

If you try to GET STEREO in the hi-fi place, the game asks “are you wanting to steal it?” and you’re supposed to respond STEAL STEREO in order to try. The police then catch you and toss you in jail.

You can then PICK LOCK (using nothing in particular, I guess we’re that good) and then OPEN DOOR and ESCAPE. (According to Grunion Guy in the comments, escape can sometimes fail at random. Joy!) After doing this, you can go back to the stereo and try to steal again, at which point the police will not spot you.

As I’ve mentioned before, the closest comparison game I can think of is Urban Upstart. Somehow, the overall effect of the grunge in that game was to feel like social commentary (“Grime Street, where all things are possible”) whereas here it just felt — I suppose the best word is “immature”? It hits some of the same points so I’m not entirely sure why; maybe because the protagonist in Urban Upstart was clearly hapless whereas this one is stealing absolutely everything. In a way, I think Pillage Village’s satirical target may have been more along the lines of adventure games themselves, taking to the limit the concept of a treasure collect-a-thon into complete absurdity, but that’s not quite as strong a target as Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

In other words, the game has more to say about the Apple II and computer ecosystem than the world at large.

It also helped the people weren’t smudges.

I’m still glad I got to play Pillage Village and I hope the real disk comes up someday because I’m morbidly curious about the missing title screen. I’m also curious out of the “eight different games” Stuart wrote (I assume the rest really were unpublished) if there were any other adventure buried in there. While this game wasn’t terrific it certainly committed to the bit which suggests a second try might be equally creative but with a better parser.

Coming up: another long-sought after game only unearthed quite recently.

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I swear I’m not trying to break my blog posts up into convenient chunks this way but … I missed another section of the map. Look, the streets are very bland and it is easy to think you’ve tested an exit when you haven’t. Two cases in point:

East of the room facing the bank is the section I hadn’t gotten to yet; not an enormous chunk, but I did find one amusing encounter, one puzzle that I solved, and one baffling bit of geography.

The baffling geography first: upon going east from the bank area you see a court house. “YOU ARE FACING EAST” and “IN THE DISTANCE YOU CAN SEE THE COUNTY COURT HOUSE.”

Head north and you’ll get the message “YOU ARE JUST PAST BY THE COURT HOUSE.” The same will happen going east from there. In neither case does it seem to be possible to go into the court house. GO HOUSE gets the response “WHY DON’T YOU TRY A DIRECTION?” and GO COURT gets the response “YOU CAN’T GET TO IT FROM HERE”. Diagonal directions (NE/NW/SE/SW) don’t work and don’t seem to be in the game. I have no idea what’s going on here.

What I did figure out is the museum just past the court house, with a *ruby*.

The ruby is protected by a laser (and you’ll get tossed in what I assume is softlock-jail if you go for it). Moving on just a little bit farther is the electrical plant I only saw the backside of before.

Unfortunately what comes next is a game of guess-the-phrase. PULL LEVER, FLIP SWITCH, TURN OFF, YANK LEVER, PUSH DOWN, TOUCH POWER, POWER DOWN, and many more don’t work; the game is hunting for CUT POWER.

ALMOST ALL THE POWER THROUGHOUT THE VILLAGE HAS BEEN SHUT OFF!

By doing this you can grab the ruby safely and stash it with the rest of the treasures in the truck.

One last encounter is the hospital, which I’m pretty sure is just intended to be a dead end, but I can’t take anything for granted.

Maybe we can segue from here into playing The Institute.

The other new area I explored was the sewers, which was, as I feared, a maze, but not a large or terrible one. While I had tried GO DOWN, ENTER GUTTER, PRY GUTTER, FEEL GUTTER, CLIMB DOWN, and numerous other variations, it was a while before I tried GO GUTTER. (In my defense, GO for most things has the game encourage you to try a direction instead. The reason I tried GO out is that message from the court house earlier being special.)

The maze, as I already indicated, is thankfully not terrible, although I did need to drop items to be certain of my map. If you go in a direction and “loop” you need to LOOK in order to see what’s there; it’s almost as if the engine doesn’t want to support the classic Crowther/Woods maze style.

The useful items (besides the “ladder above) are a “ring” and a “wallet” full of credit cards.

There’s also a one way path to the lake which has a *raft* and a rope. Trying to go in any direction says something about needing a water vehicle, which is confusing because the raft is right there. I am 99% certain this area is a matter of guessing the right phrase but I haven’t guessed yet.

Everyone seems to struggle with syntax for launching water craft, including Sierra.

I’ve used all three of the sewer items. First, straightforwardly, the ladder lets you grab the chandelier.

Despite the “knocking down” message you don’t have to worry about breaking it.

The ring is described as rusted. Keeping the blacksmith’s note in mind, I went over there and tried to drop the ring and trade the ring and converse with the proprietor and so forth but nothing happened. Using guess the phrase again, I needed to CLEAN RING, which turns it into a valuable *ring*.

Finally there’s the wallet. I knew the gas station had a price on it, and I found from experimenting with phrases again I could FILL CAN while there, whereupon the owner of the gas station demands that you pay before any more progress is made. BUY GAS then gets the prompt “with what” and WITH WALLET didn’t work, leading to a moment of stunned confusion. The game wants WITH CARD, even though that’s not given as the primary noun in the object.

I’m still only just over a third of the way on the score.

Even given all the treasures I haven’t scooped yet (the *Picasso*, the *raft*, the *boat*, the *Corvette*, the *stereo*) I feel like I’m missing quite a bit. Maybe the mansion and Mr. Smith’s house are loaded, but none of the logical commands I can come up with a crowbar and/or brick are doing anything.

It’s much easier to grind on this sort of game when you know it is playing fair, but with the guess-the-phrase aspect I could easily have done the right command but in the wrong way hours ago. I’ll still stick with it a little longer before breaking open the walkthrough. Surely there’s a way to use the raft, right?

(Continued directly from my previous post.)

Before getting into the action — and there’s a fair amount to report, given I missed a section of town last time — I want to discuss the game’s parser, which tries to model itself after Sierra On-Line but is more dubious.

The chart above shows the result of my testing every verb in the game. DIG for example has the game respond WITH WHAT? Typing THROW has the game respond DROP WHAT? For anything not understood the game says YOU CAN’T DO THAT HERE! This is true even if you put in absolute nonsense words.

The game turns out to allow locations with “bespoke verbs” that only are acknowledged in the right place to use them. This might seem like it theoretically works with “you can’t do that here” on wrong commands but the end effect on the player is to make feedback muddy and for parser messages to end up being deceptive anyway (not being able to do the verb “kick” in a particular place, for instance, implies it ought to work elsewhere).

The other oddity is the “WITH WHAT?” response. This response has been with us in both Scott Adams and Roberta Williams games. Essentially, you are asked to do some action, and the game asks “with what”, and so you type WITH NAMEOFITEM as a response. The side-effect here is that you can — depending on the system — sometimes skip the initial command entirely, and type WITH NAMEOFITEM straightaway. This a.) saves a turn (which was important for the ending of Time Zone) and b.) allows lawnmowering through using WITH on every object held, like a point-and-click adventure where you try every single item on an obstacle.

The sum effect of the items above has been for me to wander around certain spots trying WITH X on random inventory items rather than thinking in terms of a regular text adventure.

Last time I had mentioned in passing a jewelry shop that was shut tight. I had a hat, a brick, a gas can, some peanuts, and some stamps (a treasure); there was also a nearby sledgehammer at the Pawn Shop where the owner said I was allowed to “borrow” it. This requires the full command BORROW HAMMER.

The sledgehammer and the jewelry store went together, but the end result was not what you might think.

Using WITH HAMMER twice (no need to say BREAK) you can get the window busted open and an alarm to sound. I asked in my last post what the standpoint of the police is, and what would cause them to care about a crime; apparently, setting off an alarm at a jewelry shop (or at least this jewelry shop) did not cause them to care. No police ever show up.

The sign says “jeweler has jewels”. The store has already been cleaned out! You might think, “oh, they were just taking their stock and fleeing”, but if you are responsible and return the hammer quickly (just smash the window and go back, check out the vault after) you get rewarded by the pawn shop owner.

He gives you some “jewelry”. This implies not that the jeweler took everything thinking the vault wasn’t safe enough, but had to pawn everything in order to escape. This isn’t just idle plot-theorizing — I need to know if there’s still a puzzle ongoing. For example, the bank that mentions the teller (which I still haven’t been able to summon) might have jewels in a safe-deposit box if I pretend to be the jeweler; or, this may be entirely a closed thread and I shouldn’t even be thinking in terms of the vault leading to another puzzle. I’m about 50-50 on the possibilities; at the very least, this is a game that implies some very bad things have happened in the village causing both shopkeepers and the postal workers to flee.

I mentioned not being able to resolve the bank; I did manage to figure out the hardware store with the cutters.

The sign says that wire cutters are in Aisle 2 but none of the regular directions work. I finally hit upon GO AISLE where the game prompted me WHICH AISLE. Some more struggle led me to GO 2. Hence I could finally pick up the wire cutters.

A second aisle implies the existence of a first, so I tried GO 1 and found a crowbar.

No aisle 3+, sadly.

I immediately thought this was great and there so many places that could use either item but … I haven’t been able to use either yet. The antique store showcase, for instance, implies a crowbar to me, but no dice.

The hardware store was next to a kennel with a guard dog; normally food is needed to befriend/distract in such a case, but here I just needed to PET DOG.

You can now TAKE DOG. The guard dog is an inventory item!

That leaves the Picasso, the hi-fi system, and the gas station to deal with in the areas I’ve been in; I’ll also toss in the gutter I mentioned where if you LOOK GUTTER the game says you see something but is not specific what that something is.

But that’s ok, because there’s a whole new area to talk about! I had some slight issues in room placement which led me to missing some exits at the car lot.

Trying to take the *Corvette* at the lot suggests you need some keys, and nearby there is a dealer office. The sign on the desk says DAVID SMITH but I have not been able to provoke Mr. Smith or get any car keys from him.

Huzzah for more janky-looking people, though! I know you’ve been missing this.

Near the auto dealer is another gutter (LOOK says there’s something there, nothing I’ve tried works) and the jail, where just walking into the jail gets you imprisoned into it (again much like Urban Upstart).

South from the gutter leads to another new big chunk of village (possibly the last, although I suspect there might be a sewer system to dive into in our future).

First comes a “Blacksmith’s Office” with a Blacksmith inside (not abandoned!) who has a sign about cleaning while you wait. I don’t have anything to clean.

Not far from the blacksmith is a glass shop with a *chandelier* too high to reach.

Also near is a “ship lot” with a boat trailer. Trying to pick up the trailer implies it is too heavy, and PUSH, MOVE, and other verbs I’ve tested have also had no effect.

In addition to the boat trailer there’s an actual boat next to a lake, or rather a *boat*. You need to steal a boat! I think that’s a first; I’ve never had a boat be a treasure.

As there’s the lake mentioned to the south, it may be the trailer is a fake-out and you somehow need to move the boat to where you need it. DRIVE BOAT mentions you need keys.

You might notice the name “Howard” there. Nearby there are three residences. One of them is the “Hughes” mansion hence I assume it is a Howard Hughes reference; I haven’t been able to break in. The same applies for Mr. Smith’s house (Mr. Smith was the auto dealer).

There is one house you can go into right away, and that’s the domicile of Mr. Jones.

He has a *T.V.* and the asterisks mean you need to steal it. If you just try to take it you will die (the only death I’ve found in the game).

MR. JONES DOES NOT LIKE THIEVES, SO HE SHOOTS YOU BEFORE YOU HAVE THE CHANCE AND THEN CALLS JOLLYVILLE MORGUE.

There’s one last place I haven’t mentioned yet: an insurance office. It includes a memo pad with a note about repossessing the television set. If you take the note over and then get the T.V. he’ll think you’re there on valid business.

So this is a little more grim than our standard treasure hunt? I at least appreciate what the authors were trying to do by adding thematic heft. The parser and graphics aren’t quite matching the ambition, but I’ve also still got more game to go so we’ll see how things shake out.

To recap, my obstacles are:

• Getting the Picasso without alerting police
• Getting the stereo without alerting police
• Getting the jewels, if any still even exist
• Getting the chandelier that’s too high
• Opening or at least getting the thing from the gutter
• Breaking into the houses of Hughes and Smith
• Stealing a car and a boat (likely the houses need to come first)
• Possibly doing secret things at the bank or electric company or city dump

Oh and one last treasure! You can LOOK HAT (the hat you start the game with) and find a GOLD PIN which nets you 3 points on your score straight off the bat. I only have the stamps and jewelry and T.V. to contribute extra so there’s still a ways to go.

Origin, the company based in Texas formed by Richard and Robert Garriott, is now mostly known for publishing the Ultima games and Wing Commander; it was founded due to Richard’s issues publishing Ultima 1 and Ultima 2 with other companies. Origin did keep a steady outflow of other products, including their first non-Ultima game, Caverns of Callisto (1983). It was written by Chuck Bueche, aka “Chuckles” (famous for appearing as a jester in some of the Ultima games).

One of those non-Ultima games — published a year before Wing Commander — was OMEGA.

Via Mobygames.

OMEGA was a game with a long gestation; Stuart B. Marks first had the concept in 1984, wanting to make a military robot game with vehicles controlled by the player’s programming. (An Apple II buff, he likely was influenced by Robot War.) Quoting Stuart himself:

I was so fascinated by the idea, that I continued refining the design and by late 1986 was calling it “Tank Battle”.

The design kept evolving, and Marks, who was living in Austin local to Origin already, eventually got the company interested enough by the summer of 1987 to publish the project. It still went through many rounds of modifications from there…

The idea of making the player an employee of the Organization for Strategic Intelligence, grew from a conversation with friends during a round of beers at a local tavern. Later, Richard Garriott, the author of the Ultima series, contributed a workable method of including manual control of the cybertanks, and Paul Neurath, the author of Space Rogue, came up with the idea for team play.

…with the product finally landing in 1989, after the publication of Ultima V (which Marks is credited on as a designer).

Stuart B. Marks posing with his game. Source.

The game is truly a product of the 80s, with a 270 page manual titled CYBERTANK ENGINEER’S HANDBOOK with programming instructions, a free BBS people could log in on to share creations, and an official tournament sponsored by Computer Gaming World:

It was exciting to see all of the tanks duking it out trying to make it to the final round of six tanks, and even more exciting to actually see the final round. Glued to the computer screen I tried to decipher how each tank was working.

I was having trouble finding a video of the game playing it “seriously” (with programming / commentary) but I picked one that at least gives an idea of what the combat is like.

All this, you may notice, is way past 1982, and according to at least the manual nothing Stuart wrote was published that year. After first going into his “professional” level play in tennis and golf:

Stuart attended the University of Texas, studying accounting to learn new methods of depreciating his Apple II computer. Ostensibly purchased to “help with homework”, the computer soon became a tool for dealing with his lifelong fascination with games… and VisiCalc was replaced by Pong. Fortunately, there weren’t many games that really captured Stuart’s attention, and he began developing his own entertainment ideas.

Since 1981, Stuart has created eight different games for the personal computer. The first to be published is OMEGA. As long as Stuart has to take time away from sports to have his rackets restrung and his golf clubs regripped, you can bet he’ll continue his pursuit of the software side of gaming.

We’ve seen this sort of “early adventure amnesia” before (like with Eldorado Gold); what this biography leaves out is a game Marks co-wrote with Richard A. Bliss titled Pillage Village. It was published by “R & S Software Marketing Services”.

I have not found the name of this company elsewhere and the “R” and “S” (I assume standing for Richard and Stuart respectively) mean this was probably a self-published game, and one with not very much reach at all because the only copy I’ve been able to find is one with a long “cracker” message in the intro.

It isn’t listed on Mobygames or any of the other regular sites; I only learned about it when Adam L. (who comments regularly on my Apple II posts) found a copy while digging through his files. (It’s also on the ASIMOV Apple II archive.)

I assume there was a title screen but I don’t know if it can be rescued off the disk. The copyright / author / company information I just pulled straight from the disk’s files, they don’t show anywhere on the opening screens.

This scrolls up over the Ghostbusters logo.

I think the second author Richard A. Bliss is the same one who worked on software interfaces for the Army — basically the real life version of OMEGA — but I don’t have certainty so let’s segue into the game itself.

The game opens with you standing on the streets of a town village called Jollyville, with only a hat mentioned in your inventory. There are various stores, some of which have items with little asterisks around them (like *stamps*) indicating they are treasures. The goal is nab the treasures except in this case you are quite explicitly committing crime. That is, you must pillage the village.

The treasures go into the truck you start the game at (which has an empty gas can and peanuts to start with). Even the main character of It Takes a Thief was a little more subtle.

Despite us having many, many treasure hunts now…

…they aren’t actually that common on the Apple II! (Or at least, the Apple II game with Sierra-graphics style.) The big exception, Cranston Manor, was a port. Otherwise, the big looming influence has been the Roberta Williams games which didn’t use the Crowther/Woods/Scott Adams formula. Even games you might expect lean into the treasure aspect like Mummy’s Curse tended to focus on one treasure item rather than many.

Just carting away valuable items is a good way to get caught by the omnipresent invisible police, who hover nearby at all times like Urban Upstart.

For example, just to the south of the start is an art gallery. Go in and you’ll find a *Picasso*…

…and if you try to take it, you’ll be “SHOT ON THE SPOT FOR THINKING ABOUT STEALING A PAINTING IN HERE”. With a non-lethal bullet apparently, since this lands you in the jail.

Along the same street to the south is a toy store, and a sporting goods store, and both appear to be empty.

If there was some manual text (or info on the first disk erased by the crackers) I might expect some context about the village being abandoned for some reason. Most shops are either empty or they contain one treasure (with the alert police ready to spring if you take it). The overall feeling is more like post-apocalyptic rather than just urban sleaze.

I’ve divided the map into three regions, starting with the one above (the southwest side). In addition to the art gallery that somehow has a Picasso, and the empty toy and sporting stores, there’s a City Dump (smelly), a boarded up jewelry store, and a pawn shop with the only visible person in town. The pawn shop’s only available item is a sledgehammer.

Moving on to the southeast side of town…

…there’s a lone telephone booth, just like Urban Upstart, but unlike in that game you can’t use it because the phone has simply been ripped out.

There’s a kennel and a hardware store at the same corner. The hardware store apparently has nothing although there’s a sign about wire cutters in aisle 2. I have not been able to find any but I might be missing some kind of search verb. (Although knowing this game, it might be just adding some extra dose of dystopia.)

The kennel has a guard dog. I haven’t tried to interact with it yet.

There are two other places in this area of note, one being a giant auto lot, which apparently managed to sustain whatever … happened to Jollyville.

There’s a *Corvette* here.

The Jollyville Post Office is abandoned because the workers are on strike. There are *stamps* here and you can take them without the police doing anything.

On to the northeast side, which is almost just as chipper as the other two sections!

There’s a bank with a sign about how TELLERS HELP IN ALL TRANSACTIONS but no teller. Here’s where I really suspect I’m missing a verb of some sort.

There’s also an antique shop with an inaccessible showcase…

…a gas station (with gas at $8.69 per gallon, which is meant to be comically ludicrous)…

…and a hi-fi center with a stereo that the police are watching like a hawk.

I should also mention there’s a “gutter” (which can’t seem to be entered, pried at, etc. at least for now) and a place “behind” an electric company but no way to get in.

All this leads to a curious atmosphere where I’m not sure where I should be prodding. The only logical thing is the sledge hammer, where the pawn shop owner won’t let you take it but he will let you “borrow” it for ten minutes for what I assume is a smash-a-thon. There’s a brick out in a random spot but I haven’t been able to do any smashing with that, nor have I experimented much yet with the other items; I figured I needed the layout of the map first.

This is the sort of game where I need to work out what the norms are. Just how violent is our character being? Is this like Williamsburg Adventure where anything goes, including rolling an entire cannon to a shop and shooting someone dead with it? When do the police care about something and when do they not care? Will the game be sad if I steal from the pawn store owner (or attack him) or is that entirely within the fair bounds of what the game expects? I think the most clear example of this being a problem is how in It Takes a Thief we could shoot a person dead but not a dog. I can’t make any assumptions about where the game’s moral limits are.

I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context.

Part of Book 15 the Man’yōshū via eBay.

There were two puzzles to go to get to the end, with a bonus puzzle of sorts afterwards. Sage number 5 first, though:

65 93 51 51 54
   25 33 74 45 55 +64 24
      35 23 65 55 51

This had the hint (I was initially wobbly on translating) that it’s related to previous puzzles except given a twist. I realized perhaps the numbers duplicated the same chart as last time but with digits rather than letters; for the “twist” I needed to either flip the diagram over or turn it. It turns out a right-left reflection was correct: rather than counting columns from left to right I needed to count from right to left. The entire grid “twists” in the process. The third cipher line (35 23 65 55 51) as an example:

I had the extra hurdle of running across archaic pronunciation.

Pierson again. His translation: “On the springfields, mist draws in layers till the blossoming flowers are in full bloom, ah, won’t I meet you my lord?”

The third line is “saku hana no” but you might notice it says “vana”. This reflects a shift in sound that happened in Japanese (it originally didn’t have an “h” sound), which of course wreaked havoc with my searches, but I eventually muddled through.

BONUS NOTE: The “h” sounds were originally pronounced with a “p”, but sometime near when the Man’yōshū was compiled the sound shifted to be the “voiceless bilabial fricative” before landing on the modern sound. (That is, pa went to ɸa went to ha.) The “ɸ” sound still shows up in “fu” in modern Japanese, which you can hear in the video below:

The choice of “v” is Pierson’s own; this volume came out in 1929 and he notes that multiple sounds appear for the “ha” character and so he tries to split the difference:

…the “v” I want to introduce is familiar to the eye, easy to pronounce and can serve in the modern spelling as well.

That’s enough historiography-of-linguistics, let’s get over to the sixth sage–

The presence of the @ character gave me immediate suspicion what I was looking at…

GNT@8H NAKUT@W0 HLQQ

…but I went over to pick up the hint anyway, which said that the answer was “in front of your eyes”. This is meant to be the literal PC-8001 keyboard the game is being typed on.

Via eBay.

Each letter and symbol has a corresponding character. If you simply line those up, you get the right answer – no other shifting or turning or anagramming or anything like that. I found it to be the easiest of the six puzzles (especially as I could just type most of the letters directly on my emulator!) The @ mark corresponds with the dakuten (that can turn, say, ウ into ヴ)

From Classical Japanese – A Grammar.

Despite being the easiest, I found it the most interesting of the puzzles because of the history behind this particular poem. First, an alternate translation.

Oh for a heavenly fire!
I would reel in
The distant road you travel,
Fold it up,
And burn it to ashes.

This poem is by the attendant Sano no Chigami no Otome, part of a series of 63 poems in a “poem-tale” regarding her lover Nakatomi no Yakamori who was exiled.

The second account of travel and longing in Book Fifteen (verses 3723–85), attributed to the exiled courtier Nakatomi no Yakamori and his lover Sano no Otogami, comprises sixty-three tanka, arranged in four pairs of multiverse exchanges between the man and the woman, plus a seven-verse coda … it appears to have been based on historical realities; there was an actual Nakatomi no Yakamori who was exiled to Echizen in early 739 for an unknown transgression and who was pardoned in 741. The Nakatomi-Sano set constitutes a compendium of the conventions of courtly longing.

It includes a hapax legomenon. That’s a word that shows up nowhere else in a set of texts; in this case, the word tatane (“to fold”). It is close to tatam (also “to fold”). This could be a mere typo, but it shows this way in multiple manuscripts of Book 15.

From here the answer (including the invocation of heavenly fire) goes to the seventh sage. I was curious what would happen, given I knew (from the walkthrough) there were only six required answers. It turns out the sage gives yet another puzzle…

…and you’re supposed to send your answer to Micom City for a prize.

I’m leaving the puzzle as an exercise for the reader. This was exhausting enough already. You’re all ready to tackle this now, right?

In all seriousness, it did feel satisfying to finally get the overall pattern of what was going on and how to approach each puzzle, even though I was far out of my comfort zone. One open question is: does the game represent a hapax legomenon of its own? The back of the box emphasizes how “unique” the game is. While it’s not the only word game text adventure, and not even the only one written in Japanese in 1983 (we’ll get there eventually), it might be the only one ever written (including to the modern day) which requires close interaction with ancient texts. So if we narrowly point at that aspect, yes, the game is totally unique and out of time.

Rob did some more sleuthing and found that of the Micom City adventures, Date Adventure was advertised first and would have landed in January, and this game and Ninja Adventure came in February. This is still before the flood of games really starts, so even an oddball game like this might have had more distribution than you’d expect.

The months aren’t exact; I went by first-magazine-ad-I-had-minus-1-month but these are computer stores who might sell something a bit earlier than that. The red-marked games I don’t have copies of so haven’t played yet. There’s at least one more Japanese game in February (at least according to my secondary source that I haven’t cross-checked yet) but March/April 1983 is where the adventures really starts to arrive.

Special thanks to gschmidl who helped me get the file up and running and everyone in the comments who chipped in. And very special thanks to the author of the walkthrough; I likely never would have even figured out the premise of the game without initial guidance. I’m expecting/hoping if Date or Ninja Adventure pop up sometime they’ll be a little less stressful to play.

I know a lot about Infocom but a lot less about Infocom's competitors -- particularly their UK competitors. Magnetic Scrolls, Topologika, and Level 9 were landmarks in the field, but I was barely aware of them in the 80s and never really followed up in the modern era.

(I think I had a pirated copy of Knight Orc circa 1990, but I never finished it. And what I remember doesn't match Knight Orc so maybe I'm thinking of another game entirely? O the embarrassment.)

Happily, my ignorance does not impede anybody else. Mike Austin, one of the original Level 9 crew, has just released a treasure trove of Level 9 material scanned from (a treasure trove of) old floppy disks.

As the announcement post says, this includes the source code for Level 9's A-Code compiler (yes, directly inspired by Infocom's Z-code). Also documentation, specifications, and the source code for many of the games.

Everything is presented as found on the floppies, so don't expect to get a toolchain up and running in a hurry. Some of tools have been organized under "sys sources", but a whole lot more is just dumped out in the "floppy disk archive" tree. And almost all the code in sight is assembly.

The readme refers to the "acode compiler, squasher and interpreters". I'm not entirely sure what the "squasher" stage is; my guess is that it turns a compiled game into a runnable disk image (for Atari, PC, or whatever).

In any case, work continues. Another 500 floppies remain to be scanned, along with a large pile of paper documents. "More are coming fairly soon," comments Mike.

I don't know the games, but I know this is tremendous news. Thanks and congratulations to Mike and everybody who is helping.

UPDATE: Roberto Colnaghi kindly reminded me of Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian post about Level 9. That post mentions the extremely efficient (for the era) compression system, which was used for both game text and compiled game code (A-machine opcodes). That's what the "squasher" was.

Comments on that post also explain that HUGE was a graphical game engine, Level 9's attempt to move out of the text IF world.

(Continued from my previous post.)

As found by Rob on Yahoo Auctions. The front cover’s sign says “those who rush are lost” and “think carefully”; the back cover says that by the author’s choice “no explanatory text is included”, and there are “tricks” for “those who are not satisfied with conventional games”.

The game’s instructions (see auction above) mainly emphasize we are trying to solve the puzzles from the sages, and how sometimes “you won’t even know where you are”. It also explains the game uses katakana with no spaces and that

For detailed information, please try the game and figure it out for yourself.

From last time I was stuck on a particular code:

ナリノメノ ルゲサニミケシ ヒノユシノ

The old man’s hint said something about exchanging and symmetry. This is meant to indicate some of the characters swap places. Somehow (“recognizing jumbled phrases likely to appear in a Man’yoshu poem, and searching for them”), Matt. T. managed to work out this was poem 8.1500 which I’ll talk about in a moment; this was enough for me to pull up the starting characters of the result:

ナツノノノ シゲミニサケル ヒメユリノ

All the even-positioned characters swap places, in the manner shown…

…which is both elegant and hard to figure out. You don’t technically need to do this step, as long as you realize the initial 17 characters have been jumbled somehow. Remember from the first puzzle, you need to give the completion of the poem. It was written by Lady Ōtomo of Sakanoue (695–750).

From Pierson’s version of the Man’yōshū.

I checked multiple translations, and I prefer this one:

As the fields in summer,
Awash with blooming
Scarlet lilies, is
Love unknown and unrequited,
A bitter thing, indeed

To give the answer I needed sage number 3, which is one of the sages with a marked forehead. This one was just to the southwest of the start. I still don’t know what the logic is; I just got lucky.

This is the same text as the previous sage, except the code is now…

ウナハノノ サシトハナクニ アトヒルニ

…and the old man’s clue is something about the puzzle being by ブロック, by “block”.

I don’t think the game means this kind of block, but I still like doing image-searches for vocabulary. Source.

You may notice that all our clues have been in the format 5-7-5; waka poetry in general follows the pattern 5-7-5-7-7, so the idea behind each puzzle has been to identify the 5-7-5 part in order to figure out the missing 14 characters at the end of each poem. Going long back historically, the term waka was actually a more general term for poem, but 5-7-5-7-7 predominated enough to become synonymous with the form. I mention this in case the solution has to do with the exact numerical aspect somehow, like perhaps arranging the characters in a grid of some sort…

…although it could be just whatever operation being done stays within the “block” of each section. I tried struggling a bit with simply rearranging ウナハノノ (u, na, ha, no, no) and while “hana” is promising (the word for flower), and I got “hana no” in one poem…

…I did not get a full hit. The problem is that this may be entirely the wrong method, so if someone who is happy to peek at the walkthrough wants to check, I’ll take a hint that either I’m on the right or entirely wrong track.

We’re excited to announce that House of the Golden Mask is releasing this Thursday, December 4th! You can play the first three chapters for free today, see the trailer on YouTube, and check out the author interview as well! And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam! The more wishlists we get, the better the game will do on Steam on release day.

Awaken your magic and break an ancient curse at this secret school of sorcery! What mysteries will you uncover at the crossroads between realms?

House of the Golden Mask is an interactive fantasy novel by Miranda Eastwood, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 300,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

The House of the Golden Mask is a school where worlds collide, and where sorcerers from all of those worlds must remain while they learn to control their magic enough to be able to use it safely. You are its newest and most gifted student, learning alchemy, linguistics, the occult, and more.

As lectures and labs take place within the House’s ancient chambers, a ruthless battle for control plays out. Will you side with the honorable Arbiters, or seek freedom from the established order alongside the Transgressors? Or will you leave politics aside to focus on your magical power?

All of the instructors have their secrets—but can you believe the rumors that one is a vampire and another a fallen angel? Who left that mysterious journal in your room, and what happened to its missing pages? And that is nothing compared to the ancient riddles woven into the very building and grounds of the House.

Summon demons, decipher centuries-old inscriptions, and uncover a massive curse that threatens to dissolve the House and everyone in it. Vie with your fellow students for academic advantage and arcane artifacts alike. In a place where realms collide and any alchemist can brew an illusion potion, nothing is what it seems!

• Play as male, female, nonbinary, or genderfluid; gay, straight, pan, bi, ace; poly or monogamous
• Specialize in Alchemy, Linguistics, or the Occult—or try to balance all three at once
• Shape your familiar from a mystical substance: choose a cat, snake, weasel, or bat (or just leave it as a sad and strangely adorable pile of goo)
• Compete in the tournament at the Festival of the Blood Moon to win the Golden Mask itself
• Decipher riddles, delve deep into history, and unravel the curse that haunts the school
• Uncover the carefully guarded secrets of your fellow sorcerers, forging deep bonds with instructors and students alike

If knowledge is power, then the House of the Golden Mask is your doorway to the greatest magical power in all the realms.

On Saturday, November 29, 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.

Veritas (1995) by James T. Reese

In this old-school-style scavenger hunt, you play as a Harvard student about to graduate. But to graduate, you must find everything listed on a memo and hand them over to the Senior tutor in the middle courtyard. You begin in your college dorm in Winthrop House that you share with your roommate, the psycho mathematician.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata? (2025) by Damon L. Wakes

In this mystery game, you once again play as Bubble Gumshoe, a police detective in Sugar City. In a padlocked garage, you and Officer Bagel find a hanging corpse. Explore the area, gather evidence, conduct interviews, and ACCUSE the culprit once you’ve determined… Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata?

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2025 where it tied for 12th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Guma Adventure III (2024) by Alex Guma

In this Zorkian game, you play as an adventurer in the mysterious land of Erewhon. This is a treasure hunt. Collect everything valuable and put them in the nearby treehouse. Get the maximum score of 1400 to win.

It’s based on legacy HP2000 BASIC “Adventure ]I[” code and data, original authors(s) unknown.

IFDB | My walkthrough and maps

Rise of the Necropolis (2018) by Noelle Correa and Amiel Cox

In this adventure game, you play as Sir Louen de Galand. King Girard of Carentan informs you that the long dead necromancer-king Osiris has awoken and is now raising armies of the undead. Osiris intends nothing less than to turn the entire world into sand and dust, just like his own forgotten nation of Abydos. Gather a party of warriors and mages and end his threat. Good luck, Sir Louen.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

AardVarK Versus the Hype (2021) by Truthcraze

In this plot-driven sci-fi comedy, you are playing as Jenni, Lewis, Amanda, and Paul: the four teen members of the garage band AardVark! A new soda called HYPE is turning everyone into zombies! Or mind-controlled puppets. Or are they possessed by aliens? Does it matter? Stop them! You have no choice.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2021 where it took 32nd place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Monkeys and Car Keys (2025) by Jim Fisher

After being lost in the jungle for hours, you finally find your Jeep again, now trashed by small brown monkeys. Then a large, yellow primate climbs out of the backseat and strides away with your car keys! You give chase, of course, then find yourself at a rock wall. You see no monkeys. You can hear monkeys. But can you speak to monkeys?

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2025 where it took 23rd place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

Return to the Castle (2020) by John Wilson

In this low-stakes humourous game, you once again play as Algy, a pleasant chap who’s been basking in the fading glory from an adventure he had thirty years ago. Perhaps it’s time to return to Castle Toidi and do battle with the mighty Dragon. Or at least check and see how it’s been doing after all this time.

This game is the sequel to Retarded Creatures and Caverns (1989) by the same author. Versions are also available for the Commodore 64, Amiga, Apple II, and Atari ST.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

The Semantagician’s Assistant (2025) by Lance Nathan

In this one-room wordplay game, you play as someone applying to be the semantagician’s assistant. After you pull Weldon the Magic Rabbit out of a hat, he explains that all you need to do is escape from the doorless dressing room you find yourself in. You see a vanity, a dollhouse, and six magical devices.

This game was an entry in IF Comp 2025 where it tied for 12th place.

IFDB | My walkthrough and map

I’ve finished the game (previous post here).

From Spectrum Computing.

This was definitely in the “gonzo” style of design, with red herrings dropped wherever the author felt like, and only a vague gesture at some kind of consistent plot/universe. Why is the time machine locked where it is? Why is the key needed to win stuck in a particular spot in a maze? Why does an ordinary battery that happens to be nearby work for the last step?

We’ll need this later.

To continue from last time, I had four places (ditch, river, chasm, fence) I was unable to pass by, as well as a sleeping bull and a spider to deal with. The main overarching issue was the game starts with a hunger timer; while it was possible to pick up a “toadstool” and reset the timer, eating the toadstool eventually turns the player into a fungus so it’s game over as well. Keep the toadstool in mind for later, though.

I had a ladder I had been trying places (including USE LADDER while down below) but I apparently hadn’t tried USE LADDER yet in the starting room.

The mushroom in the greenhouse is safe to eat, alleviating the hunger puzzle. The ladder is now fixed in place so can’t be used again.

From here the game is mostly straightforward. I had already suspected the PLIERS from the Phone Booth might go to cut the fence (and while I didn’t learn this until after finishing the game, DIAL 999 at the phone both explicitly gives the hint “use the pliers on the fence”).

The inside has a “grandfather clock” that it describes as needing winding.

USE KEY from the maze (the one where you go UP at the draft to find) will cause you to enter the clock.

I am inside the clock which is really a time machine, but there is no source of power to operate it.

Once again the command USE comes in handy, which is good, because I really don’t know what we’re actually doing with the battery. Does the TARDIS come with D cell plug-in slots?

The number of red herrings was colossal, and at least some of them (maybe all of them) were intentional (rather than the author deciding to bail on a puzzle but leaving the items in for fun). For example, with the “sleeping bull” and “sword” at the start, you can go as far as killing the sleeping bull, and then trying to eat it.

The sword is otherwise useless and doesn’t do anything helpful at the spider. The whole gas mask / poison message is an additional red herring and is cheeky enough that the walkthrough at CASA gets genuinely upset about it:

This game depends of some random elements, but it is possible to give an exact step by step solution anyway. Here will be given two solutions. The first one is the most logical solution.

The “logical” solution includes wearing the gas mask as part of the gameplay and remembering to remove it to consume the mushroom at an appropriate moment. The second, allegedly illogical solution skips the mask entirely. I’m unclear why there would be so many red herrings but it would be considered outrageous for the gas mask to also be one?

The was even a red herring in the instructions:

Perhaps if I was British in the 80s I would have spotted this faster, but the GREEN CROSS CODE is simply referring to remembering to look both ways before crossing the street. The British made things rather more elaborate with the acronym SPLINK, which you can hear explained in 1976 by Jon Pertwee of Dr. Who fame:

(I defy you to find a 30 second public service announcement that’s any more British than that.)

The end screen did suggest that the player try to optimize their turns. You can completely drop having a light source and do everything in the dark.

You can still feel the maze’s draft in the dark. Nice coding!

What I failed to do, sadly, was optimize even further. Remember the toadstool? It does technically work to extend your life, sometimes.

Trying to do a no-mushroom run.

I got all the way back to the fence but I needed three more turns in order to win. According to Exemptus there’s some randomization in the timers so it may be with a best-possible-scenario on both the hunger timer and the toadstool timer (which can kill you after as little as 1 turn, if you’re unlucky) you can a.) run to underground and pick up the toadstool and battery b.) grab the key from the maze c.) grab the pliers, at which point the player should be starving d.) eat the toadstool e.) use the pliers, key, and battery to win. I was unable to get it to happen, but if it somehow could happen it’d be like The City of Alzan where you escape and win but have a deadly disease anyway (cured off camera? maybe?).

Via Spectrum Computing.

Speaking of City of Alzan, you might wonder — given the death-timer feels very similar between the two games — if Mr. Yeandle had exposure to the Trevor Toms system in addition to the 1980 Reed article. However, that’s not really necessary, as the Reed article includes a vampire bite, and in the text even has the “cutting off the language” trick that happens with Time-Line:

“I Think I’m dy…”

I know death-timers in Quill games tend to be more a Thing than average text adventures from this era; I think you can trace this to the source code above.

Coming up: the second part of the Quill story, as Tim Gilberts writes a game. Then we’ll go to the United States for two very unusual adventures from a magazine column, followed by a journey back to Japan.