Planet Interactive Fiction Last Update: Sunday, 15. September 2024 12:03

(Continued from my previous post.)

This time around I’ve stopped at a good progress point to give an update rather than getting stopped by the game, so that’s a good sign.

Via the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

The character of this game is very different from both Colossal Adventure and Adventure Quest. I might even declare it easier than both of them but I know things can always ramp up. For an outside observer not used to adventure games they might seem enormously similar; even the graphics are being rendered from the same set (notice the forest hasn’t changed over three games).

In Adventure Quest the very first biome after the start was a desert with a sandworm puzzle where a player will generally map it out first while being harassed by the sand worm, and only later reach the insight that it was being attracted to the sound of your movement (so stopping would reduce the danger); this represents a “large-scale” puzzle over many rooms. The swimming sections involving keeping track of your breath had me breaking out the paint program (well, vector software) in order to count steps. I had to think holistically about the entire route and plan my object placements accordingly.

Colossal Adventure (really just Crowther/Woods Adventure for most of it) requires complex mapping and dealing with puzzles and solutions that are far apart from each other; especially in the Level 9 incarnation which had a 4-item inventory limit, this ends up making for a large-scale logistics puzzle as you have to coordinate your travels carefully.

Dungeon Adventure is (so far) more compact. It has (again, so far) many more single-room puzzles than Adventure Quest, and gives items and the things they solve not far apart. Even with things a little bit spread out the games seems more focused on small “riddles” more than large-scale coordination. (I described Adventure Quest as approaching the feeling of a time travel game where you keep track of space rather than time.) It also has everything (yet again, so far) packed in, and nothing even resembling a maze or the wild interconnections of Colossal Adventure.

I am of course hedging with “so far” because all this could go awry at any moment. It wouldn’t even be a bad spot of design; perhaps the authors wanted to “bottleneck” with an easier section at the start before things get complicated. Clearly, from the comments on the inventory limit (where they changed it due to popular demand) they were thinking about user feedback; maybe they wanted people to actually enjoy their games a bit before they start bringing out the brain-breakers.

Or maybe the light timers are really tight. I have “finished” the outside section and there’s a sunset going while this is happening, and once darkness hits you’re likely to be eaten by a ghoul. The area is so small it isn’t hard to optimize in such a way that you go in the cave before the sun sets, but maybe the light source you can make (which I’ll get to later) will burn out in the underground section unless you handle things optimally.

With the outdoors, last time, I had a puzzling scene with Rakshasa.

As Andrew Plotkin pointed out in the comments, in conjunction with the “flames of your soul” reference this might have to do with the classic science fiction novel Lord of Light (1967), by Zelanzy.

Art by Jack Kirby, coloring by Englert for a later poster printing. This art was made for a theoretical Lord of Light movie that never happened, but the script ended up getting re-purposed by the CIA in order to rescue US citizens stuck at the Canadian Embassy in Iran. There was a movie about this that won the Best Picture Oscar.

However, the Rakshasa, being from Hindu mythology, entered popular culture through all sorts of vectors. One appeared in the 70s TV show Kolchak: The Night Stalker and that specific episode (where Kolchak used a crossbow) was confirmed by Gary Gygax as the inspiration for D&D’s Rakasha monster type, which requires holy bolts to defeat. On top of that the manual for Dungeon Adventure claims D&D inspriation:

Dungeon Adventure is based around the D&D magic system as modified and used by the Cambridge University Wargames society in the mid 70s. All items and architectural features can be made under this system (or equivalent ones including extensions for demon-produced items), and if you are a D&D player you might like to work out how this can be done.

Still, the “soul” treatment feels very Lord-of-Light-ish, but maybe thinking about the D&D reference in the pencil and paper campaign led to the other one?

The reason the scene was puzzling is I couldn’t get it to trigger again. I ended up trying out the BBC Micro 1982 version (text-only) because I remember from Adventure Quest the RNG working slightly differently. While it wasn’t quite that, what I found is just making a beeline to have the Rakshasa scene first before anything always works.

Saying YES does seem to be a literal RNG die, and you will die if you get 1 to 3 and live if you get 4 to 6. (There is a way to tweak this which I’ll talk about later.) I still don’t know what effect this has.

I theorized the scene might give me a free resurrection, but trying it out failed. The manual mentions anyway how resurrection can work:

Resurrection is possible, and uses a machine which is initially situated very close to where you start the game. By default it only works while you remain close to this machine, and you must register your body pattern for it to work at all.

The “machine” is that button that scans your body inside the case that you can carry around. (Now that I know pieces of this are taken from a D&D campaign, was the Mordenkainen’s magnificent mansion spell in 1st edition? That gives an extradimensional building you can tote around just like this game.)

I had incidentally (in the effort to make my move count as low as possible) tried to nab the driftwood and case before having the Rakasha scene, and while they don’t appear if you make the side trip, clearly something is trying to happen.

This also looks like a scene from Lord of Light. The Atari version of this game seems to be buggier than its predecessors.

With that resolved, what about the other puzzles! Two of them were solved by the same object, specifically, a poppy seed pod that makes loud noises when you drop it. I had kept playing with the BBC version for a bit and noticed the bird on the nest is described as having “large ears”. The same description is in the graphical version but somehow my brain didn’t zero in on the hint in that setting. (This may have been a circumstance that I’ve mentioned before where playing the same section in two different ways — even if there’s no change in text at all — can have my brain approach it “fresh”, like I had a second person helping cooperatively over my shoulder giving advice.)

I also tried the noise out on the siren; while it didn’t get her upset, it made my protagonist deaf long enough to approach.

Heading further north (at the moment) is death because one of the six branches of the tree grabs you; I’ll return to this later.

The mirror left behind is described in the graphical version as “very valuable”, “enchanted”, and “reflects things”. In the BBC version, instead of just “reflects things”, it says

This mirror reflects more than it should

(I don’t remember this much difference in the previous games! I guess they were running out of room on the disk by game number 3?)

This takes care of the sleep spell in the forest (the one which kicked off the story, and the one you can run into later and land elsewhere). This time the BBC version is much clearer about what’s going on. Atari first for contrast:

Now BBC Micro:

Your foot breaks a twig: SNAP! A masked man leaps up and flees
You are in a clump of bushes on the edge of the forest
An assortment of coins is here
A magic wand is here
A dice rests on the ground

So the masked man is omitted in the graphical version. I admit I might be worrying the twig was a puzzle somehow in the Atari version. (And yes, I started thinking maybe I should just swap over to text, but given I’ve been showing off the graphics of the other two games I want to take this to the end. Plus: sometimes having less text can be helpful, because it reduces obsessing over details that are there just for color. One thing I can say is that I have found zero Tolkien references in the original ’82 version except for a Minas Tirith reference in the manual.)

The coins are just “valuable”, the wand is described as having “Z-runes” — I haven’t used it yet, so I don’t know what means — and the dice are described as being weighted. Yes, if you take them over to the Rakasha now you can use them to cheat that die roll so it’s no longer RNG. I was able to test this in the BBC version only. Still no detail on what the result is.

It’s a 6! YOU WIN! The Rakshasa envelop you briefly before leaving

Now, back to that tree with the branches. You can throw things and the tree will grab them. However, the tree is very specifically described as having six branches, so:

Say YES to the Dryad: she will give you a “valuable” carving and make the tree drop all the stuff it is holding. (One thing I should point out that Level 9 has been doing that not many companies have — this puzzle does not care which objects you throw, only that there are six of them. The berry I threw at the giant at my last post can be any item at all. The mere presence of a object sometimes solves things in Level 9 games, without reference to what that object is.)

That’s everything (?) outdoors. There’s nothing going on with the giant tower, although the BBC version includes a reference to it as a “ruined tower” in another description. I think it’s either for decoration or going to be the last place visited in the game. Colossal Adventure had a plot twist once you gathered all the treasures; this might be going for something similar where we still have to defeat some Ancient Evil for the real ending. Still, maybe not, especially because the game lets you flat-out leave whenever you want. Back at the sleep-trap the exit to the east has a “referee” announce that going that way will end the game, and you are welcome to do so and take whatever points (and treasures) you have gathered. The world is not described as ending because of this.

A hollow voice intones: “This is your referee speaking. If you continue on this road you will return safe to civilisation and the game will end Are you sure that you want to?”

Going indoors, my incomplete map so far:

The flame that’s near the trap-treasure room can be used to light the driftwood. The miner’s lamp may be a fake-out (it counts as a treasure, still) or it may be a wick and fuel get found later and the driftwood will run out before we have time to finish our treasure-gathering.

This is an “explore an direction you want” hub, although SW gives the message “archers only” and SE gives the message “not authorised”. Both of those are taken care of by nearby items. For the archers, going west leads to a pillared hall with two rooms. One has a metal cube (that sticks to metal); I haven’t used it yet. The other has a corpse with a bow and an orange collar described as magical.

Holding the bow allows bypassing the “archer” barrier and to some steps with skeletons that kill you. (I have the solution to this, but we’ll come back later.)

East from the hub leads, straightforwardly, to stables and a haystack. The word “needle” is recognized but any type of SEARCH HAYSTACK is for naught, unless you happen to be holding the cube. (There’s been multiple “passive” solutions where the player just needs to be holding an item. This makes the larger inventory kind of interesting since you can luck out into things. I think part of the reason authors of this time were very tight about inventory is to avoid this situation, but the Austin brothers seem to be fine with being more player-friendly with this game.)

Northwest of the hub is a “black room” with an octopus figurine (described as enchanted — this seems to be true of any item that has a magic use so people won’t be waving their coins everywhere). Northeast is a room too dark to see anything, unless you happen to be holding the octopus (passive solution again) in which case you’ll find a staff of bone and a yellow collar.

The yellow collar works on the SE “not authorised” exit. This gives two branches, one leading to some carnivorous jellies I haven’t dealt with yet…

…and a door with three stones. If you PUSH or ROTATE each of the three stones the door will open, as “no stone is left unturned”.

This is part of what I mean about this game being more about “riddles” than the other two games.

This is followed by a room with an exit blocked by a boulder, but the boulder is on moss, and seems to be another proverb reference (“a rolling stone gathers no moss”).

PUSH BOULDER takes care of the issue, leading to a dead end that has a sword in some stones. The sword is marked with a dragon and if you try to drop it the sword talks to you, saying you really should be using it for dragon-slaying instead first.

Finally… if you’ve been watching the items and thinking about the obstacles out there, you might have thought that the bone staff would have something to do with the skeletons, and you’d be right.

Shake the staff after you enter and the skeletons will scutter off and the dwarf will offer to lead you to a treasure. There’s plenty of juicy exits but this seemed like enough info-dump to deposit on everyone at the moment.

Here’s my item list so far:

packing case (the portable house)
axe (use on the tree to summon the Dryad)
ripe berry (tastes bad when you try to eat it, no apparent effect)
resinous driftwood, serving as a torch
a carving (from the Dryad)
metal cube (magnet, used to get needle)
jeweled needle
coins
magical mirror (reflected the sleep spell)
octopus figurine (lit the dark room)
a jade egg (treasure from the nest)
magic wand (unused)
weighted dice (can cheat at soul game)
poppy seed pod (noises, twice)
bone staff (controlling the skeletons)
short bow (hold to get by “archer” exit)
yellow collar (other restricted exit)
orange collar (unused)
sword (magical, wants to slay dragons)

The only obvious obstacles I haven’t resolved yet are the carnivorous jellies I already showed off, and one exit back at the hub; there’s a demon if you go north and you die. This might just be a trap, as there’s a pride of lions over the door (“pride cometh before a fall”, given the two other proverbs). The “red pedestal” in the room is also unused, though.

We're a little behind the book this time, but the game is now in progress!

Coming soon on Steam and Itch.IO! Wishlist today!

The Beyond is an adventure beyond the boundaries of life, death, and the covers of a book. Romance! Pirates! Probably a giant squid lurking somewhere!

When can you play The Beyond? No promises, but you might want to keep an eye on the AdventureX Steam sale in November.

The hardback edition is already available. (In fact, so is Samurai vs. Ninja, Adventuregame Comics #3. Yes, there will be a game release for that too -- probably next year.)

By the way, I apologize for the fact that Leviathan still isn't available for iPhone. I started the port last year, but something about the UI didn't work right and I just haven't managed to dig in and track it down yet. I promise it'll happen.

Anyhow, here's the traditional sneak peek of The Beyond:

For All the Adventures we’ve gone through multiple diskmags and tapemags now, like Cursor for the Commodore PET, Softdisk for Apple II, and CLOAD for TRS-80 (along with its spinoff for Tandy Color Computer, Chromasette). One of the most prominent of the Tandy CoCo tape/diskmags was via T&D Subscription Software.

T&D, as founded by Tom Dykema, lasted all the way up to 1991, when Tandy stopped making computers. You can look at one of their late catalogs here.

Tom Dykema in the 80s, from his Facebook page.

Dykema was in college, aged 21, when he started selling subscriptions from his parents’ basement. Tom notes that he “hired a programming genius down the road” to help with producing content, and he wrote about “four programs a week”. The circumstances mean today’s game (Killer Mansion, on Coco-Cassette #1) may have been from Tom or it may have been from the unnamed programmer or a combination of the two; I haven’t been able to tell.

It is not, as the name might suggest, a horror-themed game set inside an abandoned house featuring supernatural creatures. It is, instead, a horror-themed game set inside an abandoned house featuring “an insane man” who is a killer. Note the difference!

We are a detective who has chased the killer to a house and must go inside, and I’m unclear why we can’t call for backup other than it’s the 80s and this sort of thing happened all the time.

The only goals here are to a.) deal with the killer without getting killed first and b.) find the money that was stolen.

As this is a single game on a multi-game tapemag it is not terribly complicated, especially if you realize one of the main gimmicks. There’s various items where it seems you might want to open them (a desk, trap door, dresser, chest) but the command OPEN will always kill you, even if applied to something that it doesn’t make sense to open.

It says “door” even if you try this on a desk, or a rat.

With that out of the way it is a little more plausible to make progress. There are what are allegedly clues scattered about, but they aren’t important to bother with.

In one room (“Coal Storage” on my map) the killer gets to you and the game informs you that you need to have taken the killer down first before entering that particular room.

Another nearby room (Hiding Room, where you can see a “silver key” before things start up) a fight sequence begins and then the game prompts you for an item to use.

There’s also a “maneating watchdog” who will also start to get testy unless you have the right item; fortunately, there’s a bone not far by it will take. After it will be “friendly”.

Then there is a control panel with three colors of lever, red, blue and yellow. All drop you in a trapdoor. Red kills you, yellow drops you on a bed in a nearby “Guest Room”, and yellow, the helpful one, plops you in a “dungeon”.

To the east of here is a skeleton where using MOVE on the skeleton reveals it is holding a knife. (Really, the only hard part of this game is communicating. Using the levers also takes MOVE, PULL and PUSH aren’t recognized.) To the north there’s an ice pick and a locked door, and of course trying to open the door kills you, but somehow doing USE PICK is a perfectly safe way to handle explosive materials and you get through.

Then you can use the knife to win the fight against the killer.

With the killer dead, you can safely go into Coal Storage, where a paper says “X marks the spot” and there’s a piece of dirt floor. Take the shovel nearby over to the floor, USE SHOVEL, and then USE KEY when a chest is revealed.

This is best compared to a game like Space Gorn; not meant to be a long experience, just a short vignette to fill another slot on a monthly tape. It has about as minimal a parser can be while still working.

The term that comes to mind is “fake facade”. Each room, if you peruse the map, has a couple elements to allegedly interact with, and for a while I was fooled into trying each item checking for deathtraps (I even used skull emojis at first to note each one down). So it gave the impression of a little bit of depth, even if the kind that’s trial-and-error death, but once I realized the gimmick, things came down to figuring out how to implement the parser commands successfully.

But hey, at least it took me 10 minutes to map out rather than 3 hours! (The compass rose helped.) I needed this kind of breather. Especially because, coming up: the final 1982 game of Level 9, which will likely be hard to map and come with at least one maze. Although I’ve got an update to do first on that French game for pocket computer.

Decks making copies of Coco-Cassette. From the “bonus photos” for the book CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy’s Underdog Computer.

3 days ago

Continuing to build a “frame” for our varied texts.

where were we.

Last time, we looked at some ways that we can use text substitution to print different texts within simple rules and statements. Experiments included the printed names of things and kinds. Need a refresher? Have a look here.

let’s keep going.

Looking over our code so far, I can see that we have some bare-bones code for the following:

• a room description that does not vary.
• a printed name of a room (ABR) that varies according to a “print order”
• a table with an empty description “[the table text]”
• four cards: red, blue, green, orange with fixed names and no descriptions
• a custom action, card-picking, that uses the printed name of the noun

Let’s focus on the output for card-picking now. That’s the main mechanic of the game: choosing cards. We are using a “say” definition at the moment for our card-picking rule. Here’s everything so far:

card-picking is an action applying to one thing.
understand "pick [something]" as card-picking.

check card-picking (this is the must pick a tarot rule):
	if the noun is not a tarot:
		say "That's not a card, silly!" instead.
		
carry out card-picking (this is the basic card-picking rule):
	say "[the relevant fortune]".
	
to say the relevant fortune:
	say "My goodness! The [printed name of the noun]! This must be your lucky day."

As-is, I think we can stick with the actions and look out output. Let’s run through some options. Note that I’m not worrying about writing the text itself at the moment. Let’s get the structure in place and then we can think about that.

The tried-and-true “[one of]” construction

We’ve done this before. What might it look like?

to say the relevant fortune:
	if the noun is redc:
		say "You've picked [the noun] [one of]1[or]2[or]3[or]4[or]5[or]6[or][bold type]a lot[roman type] of [stopping] [one of]time[or]times[stopping]!";
	if the noun is bluec:
		say "You've picked [the noun] [one of]1[or]2[or]3[or]4[or]5[or]6[or][bold type]a lot[roman type] of [stopping] [one of]time[or]times[stopping]!";	
	if the noun is greenc:
		say "You've picked [the noun] [one of]1[or]2[or]3[or]4[or]5[or]6[or][bold type]a lot[roman type] of [stopping] [one of]time[or]times[stopping]!";	
	if the noun is orangec:
		say "You've picked [the noun] [one of]1[or]2[or]3[or]4[or]5[or]6[or][bold type]a lot[roman type] of [stopping] [one of]time[or]times[stopping]!";	

This looks bad, doesn’t it? Imagine if we had full sentences instead of numbers in our conditional text! It would be very hard to read. Avoid hard-to-read code! That’s not the only issue, though. We also probably want some kind of state tracking, don’t we? There’s no mechanism here or in the rule itself for tracking the number of cards taken. Yes, Inform does know how many times we’ve taken these cards, but the method isn’t ideal for our needs. Besides, we’ll want to use our own handmade variables for readability and ease of use.

keeping track.

Let’s make some counters. We do this kind of thing all the time.

a tarot has a number called clicker.
a clicker is usually zero.

I called it “clicker” because I imagined something like cookie clicker. You can name it anything you want! I could have done this other ways. I could have had variables that weren’t affiliated with nouns:

red card clicker is a number that varies.
red card clicker is zero.

That option isn’t great for us, though, because can’t deal with clickers in a general way. With the second example, we’d have to have unique code lines for each tarot:

carry out card-picking redc:
	say the relevant fortune;
	increment the red card clicker.

If we use clicker in a more generalized way, we can say

carry out card-picking:
	say the relevant fortune;
	increment the clicker of the noun.

As much as we can, I’d like to avoid making rules that only apply to one card. Let’s use a kind (tarot) if possible.

what numbers are for.

A couple of posts ago, we tried to use a number “[print order]” in our [one of] constructions. It wasn’t optimal. As in today’s case, it seems we’re out of gas with our [one of] approach. That’s great for adding a bit of spice to a text, but my goal with this design is to have a lot of variation. I want to be able to read the options easily, instead of combing through a glob. How would that work? I think the answer is to use a table. If you’ve been with me for long, you probably saw this coming. A table is a good way for us to organize text. There are lots of ways we can use code to get at it, too. Let’s make one. This isn’t actually my final table design, but let’s get started with something easy.

Tables are a little intimidating, but don’t worry! We’ll talk through it. To start, you just need a name.

table of picked cards

What kinds of things can you put in a table? Our big focus is text; we want to have 1) a place to put text and 2) a way to find it. We could keep other things there: nouns, actions, numbers, really any kind could go in the column of a table. Inform’s big requirement is that everything in a table be the same kind of thing. At least one of our columns will be text. The other will be a number. How about this:

table of picked cards
index	red	blue	green	orange
1	"red"	"blue"	"green"	"orange"
2	"red"	"blue"	"green"	"orange"
3	"red"	"blue"	"green"	"orange"
4	"red"	"blue"	"green"	"orange"

After our title, we name our columns. In the example above, I’ve made five columns: an “index” column that holds a number, and four more columns representing our four cards. Inform is usually smart about recognizing a column’s contents by looking at the first row of data. It will know we are dealing with text and a number without any special effort from us. I’ve gone ahead and made four rows, just to give us a little room for experimentation: Inform doesn’t like it when it tries to find something in an empty row!

“Index” is a fairly common name for a column that contains a row number. You don’t have to call it that, you can call it anything! But I’m used to “index,” so that’s what I’m going with. If we could tie “index” to something, we’d have a way to look up our information.

(side note: Inform could just reference row number. The actual “index” column is for us, because it’s easier for us to read. We don’t want to manually count rows when we’re checking our code)

We have clickers for our cards, but let’s also have a single, general number.

magic number is a number that varies.
magic number is one.

Ok. How do we look up some text according to a magic number? We need an action processing rule. Let’s change our “to say” definition for what we’re calling “the relevant fortune.”

First, we need to tell Inform which the row (and table) where our information is located. We can base this off of our so-called “magic number.”

to say the relevant fortune:
	choose row with an index of the magic number from the table of picked cards;

Since we haven’t made a way for the magic number to change, that means Inform will choose row one because it has an index of one, which matches the magic number. Once the row is picked, it will stick. Now, we can have a look at the rest of the row.

to say the relevant fortune:
	choose row with an index of the magic number from the table of picked cards;
	if the noun is bluec:
		say blue entry;
	otherwise if the noun is redc:
		say red entry;
	otherwise if the noun is greenc:
		say green entry;
	otherwise if the noun is orangec:
		say orange entry.

That yields this:

>pick red
red
>pick blue
blue
>pick green
green
>pick orange
orange
>pick red
red

This isn’t very exciting, but we are getting data out of a table. We have places to put our text! Still, this isn’t really baked yet. Some to-do items and observations:

• Formatting-wise, our “fortunes” need a line break. This is because there aren’t periods or other sentence ending punctuation marks to tell Inform to add a break. We will ultimately be using sentences in these fields, so that’s ok. Otherwise, we’d want to add “[line break]” to our texts.
• The above example is just reading from row one again and again. We need to push the number up (without letting it get higher than the number of filled rows).
• This all looks a little busy. If we had full sentences in our table of picked cards, it would be difficult to hunt down what we were looking for (or proofread, probably).
• I don’t personally like the large number of [if] statements. I think I’d prefer individual rules for each noun, or, better yet, a single, short rule that can do it all. Reminder, my goal is to use kinds (instead of specific things) as often as I can in action rules.
• I haven’t used the clickers yet!

How would we do these things? This is more of a data organization problem than a code problem, believe it or not. If we can come up with a solid plan for organizing our texts, we can have simple code and readable tables. That will help us come up with some (hopefully) good fortunes that will be easy to track and revise. We’ll focus on that next time, hopefully coming up with a model we can use for all of our variable text in titles, card names, room descriptions, and more! Don’t miss it.

Once we get everything scaffolded, we can start laying down some text.

today’s source

next.

There’s a table in my table.

...

My clinical-sounding and admittedly cynical summation of House Of Wolves by Shruti Deo might be, "Depression Quest but shorter and with you forced to suffer at others' hands as well." I correctly predicted what kind of experience was ahead when the first choice I picked from three offered basically said, "You can't do that yet, pick a different choice." Then the second choice I picked said, "You can't do that either, pick a different choice."

This is a mostly metaphorical(?) Twine piece that looks to me about being completely depressed, broken and non-functional, hiding these facts from the world, and also being in an environment of zero care or flexibility and where you are forced to go against your own wishes in terms of what you want to do, or when, or even what to eat. This manifests as having a round of chores to do each day, unsatisfactory eating supervised by some unspecified They at night, and visiting three other storylets on the way.

The storylets were the best parts, I thought, because they offered specificity. They approached character and situation. Learning, friends, college, those kinds of things. Returning to the House Of Wolves at night returns the prose to heartfelt but too generic prose of the dirge of hopelessness. That is what most annoyed me about this piece in the end, its non-specific version of hopelessness. I know I've made this same criticism of many other pieces of this type over time.

I also didn't understand the wolf metaphor. I am extraordinarily glad it all ended on a note of hope, but it doesn't actually feel like it should. There's not much hope on the way, so the end feels like a deus ex, and I view this shape as the outcome of both thematic and writing problems.

Paradoxically, content warnings don't have to evince much detail before I find fault with them, and this piece's were highly detailed and did it no favours. Too long, too much detail, robbing the piece of surprise, overstimulating the listed effects before they'd even been attempted to be executed by art. Shopping-listed out of their context, I felt worse from the content warnings than I did from the fiction itself. This is a reminder of one of many reasons I don't believe in what are called trigger warnings, or overly specific content warnings. I believe they make people over-believe in their own vulnerabilities. They do that and they spoil stuff, too.

House Of Wolves was plainly not my cup of tea, and I regard its trajectory as unsatisfactory, but it does have a simple grace of execution and presentation on its own terms.

...

PS (September 9)- Having written, "I don't believe in what are called trigger warnings," in the review, I thought afterwards this isn't a personal belief issue, and I should not be treading diplomatically like that and framing it as one. Shouldn't we believe or not believe in the usefulness of these warnings (in a broad context, that they have spread to) based on the best scientific evidence? I used to work at the Medical Journal of Australia and I am interested in evidence from good research.

I googled the topic anew with "is there any scientific evidence for trigger warnings". The results of a series of peer-reviewed articles and meta-analyses clearly sum up the answer in 2024 as "no". I tried to coax google to produce an opposition to these results, "a scientific study that supports trigger warnings". There isn't one. This is not contentious. There are effects from trigger warnings, they just don't help people's mental health. The most consistent finding is that being presented with them and reading them generates anticipatory anxiety for most people.

Anyone can find all of the same research I found with any google search on this topic, as it is all of the multiple front pages, but here are a few specific links:

A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings, and Content Notes (in Sage, from Clinical Psychological Research, 2023)

Typology of content warnings and trigger warnings: Systematic review (PLoS One, 2022)

Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories (in Sage, from Clinical Psychological Research, 2020)

Trigger warning: Empirical Evidence Ahead (Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 2018)

(Continued from my previous post.)

I did finally get to grips with the monstrous map, and I even included the whole thing so far as a 4143 by 2839 image file, but first a few words on rallies vs. races, and the tradition of “gimmick rallies”.

There’s a very important difference between rallies and races which is best exemplified by the final leg of The Gumball Rally movie:

It looks like Franco’s team loses by just a few seconds (thanks partially due to a stop for Linda Vaughn). In reality, this is a rally, and the thing that counts is overall time. There was a time difference of 10 seconds at the start, meaning he actually won!

Rallies (needing to travel along real roads) are asynchronous and are scored by all sorts of things. I already alluded to the use of puzzles in “gimmick rallies”; they often track ability to navigate more than speed, which is why rallies tend are done in teams (one driver, one navigator). For a recent real life example, here’s a clip from a gimmick rally cued up to some directions being read:

This is all relevant to Uncle Harry’s Will because I think the poem that serves as instructions really does give the vibe of the slightly-corny directions you’d get in a gimmick rally. They were certainly around in 1981; Jean Calvin’s Rallying to Win (still available in an updated edition) was first published in 1974 and mentions different species like the photograph rally (where all directions are in the form of photographs of locations), the scavenger hunt, or what the book calls the “grand old man” of gimmick rallies, the poker rally:

The instructions call out route-following procedure, but ordinarily there is no tight time schedule. There will be an elapsed time for the entire run, and along the route either five or seven checkpoints. Instead of receiving a time at the control, each team draws a card from a standard deck of playing cards. At the finish, the team with the best poker hand is the winner.

Here’s the map I mentioned; click the image to view its high-resolution glory. Dark blue marks positions that hold items, showing how few objects there have been so far.

The freeway took an enormous amount of time to map but it was the kind of map where I wasn’t discovering new things but just figuring out what looped back to where, and then repositioning multiple times to have the map make a modicum of sense. It’s still incredibly messy.

There are two gas stations (marked in orange). It takes much longer to happen than with Gumball Rally Adventure but your car does eventually run out of gas, essentially the equivalent of the lamp in Adventure. It takes so long it no longer has the incessant simulationist feel of the previous game. However, while the gas station lets you buy GAS, OIL, and a TIRE (letting you get by that one road I mentioned last time) it initially tells you that you have no money.

I was able to find a way to get access to the gas station’s services which I’ll show off shortly. Note on the map the Border Crossing on the west side. Just a bit to the east there’s a Passport Office with a border pass you can use:

YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR CAR
YOU ARE IN THE PASSPORT OFFICE
HEAPS OF OLD PAPERS COVER THE COUNTER
THERE IS A BORDER PASS LAYING ON A COUNTER HERE

However, as you can see from the map, the border doesn’t really go anywhere! All you can find is a “BOTTLE OF COKE”, and if you try to take it with you it turns out to be the other kind of coke.

YOU HAVE BEEN CAUGHT WITH A BOTTLE OF COCAINE. YOU GO TO JAIL!
GEE WHIZ! JUST WHEN YOU WERE GETTING SOMEPLACE!
WELL, BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME. AT LEAST YOU’LL KNOW
BETTER THAN TO DO THAT AGAIN!

Turning over to that poem now, the first part of the poem seems to indicate the final destination:

BEHIND THE WALL, BELOW THE RISE,
IN THE ROOM MY TREASURE LIES
IN ALL DIRECTIONS YOU SHOULD DRIVE
TO FIND IT, YOU MUST STAY ALIVE
ON YOUR WAY ACROSS THE NATION

I think this might be the house right at the start; if you go around to the back there’s some stairs down and a second locked door. (“Below the rise”?)

YOU ARE ON THE WALKWAY AT THE BASE OF THE FRONT PORCH
STEPS LEAD WEST TO THE FRONT PORCH
ANOTHER WALKWAY LEADS NORTH AROUND THE SIDE OF THE HOUSE
>N
YOU ARE ON A WALKWAY AT THE NE CORNER OF THE HOUSE
THE WALKWAY CURVES WEST AND SOUTH HERE
THERE IS A WIRE FENCE ALONG THE BORDERS
>W
YOU ARE ON THE NORTH SIDE OF THE HOUSE
STEPS HERE LEAD DOWN TO THE BASEMENT
THE WALKWAY HERE LEADS EAST AND WEST
>D
YOU ARE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE STEPS
A SMALL DOOR IS SET INTO THE NORTH SIDE OF THE HOUSE HERE
THE DOOR IS LOCKED FROM THE INSIDE

The next part of the poem refers to a “station”, presumably a gas station, and says there is a “smoky hill” that will lead the way.

YOU’LL HAVE NEED TO FIND A STATION
THE SMOKEY HILL WILL LEAD THE WAY
I KNOW YOU’LL FIND IT, COME WHAT MAY

The hill in question is visible one of the western towns, Lakecity.

Specifically, at the ferry:

YOU ARE AT A FERRY DOCK
A FERRY IS HERE WAITING TO LOAD
ACROSS THE LAKE SMOKE CAN BE SEEN
RISING BEHIND SOME HILLS
>N
YOU ARE ON THE FERRY CROSSING A LONG LAKE
THE FERRY PULLS INTO A DOCK ON THE EAST SHORE
YOU CAN SEE SMOKE BEHIND SOME HILLS AHEAD
THE DOCK IS TO THE NORTH

This leads to a route which culminates in a “paper bag” by a road which has a card for free service at a gas station. Once you get the car you can BUY OIL, BUY GAS, and BUY TIRES while at one. I’m still puzzling over if the card is meant to be the goal of following the ferry directions, or if there’s something else entirely going on. (Or maybe even if the map is bugged. There’s one road where one part is inexplicably one-way such that I’m almost sure it was unintentional.)

If it wasn’t for the direction that makes your tires go flat, you could go to the paper bag in a much more direct way. It only affects the car going westbound, so if you go east you can land right back at the starting town.

I’m also still unclear about the next part of the poem:

FOLLOW THE SUN AT THE END OF DAY
TO GET ACROSS, YOU’LL FIND A WAY
STAY ON THE ROAD OF THE GOLDEN BAR

“Follow the sun at the end of day” surely means that we’re driving west, but there are only two places on the map where I have the opportunity to drive west and are unable to; everything else is mapped out. First, most straightforwardly, is a “RICKITY” bridge near the Passport Office that collapses. I suspect this is meant as a trap rather than a puzzle.

YOU ARE ON RICKITY ROAD
THERE IS A BRIDGE TO THE WEST
A SIGN READS: RICKITY BRIDGE
>W
YOU ARE ON A RICKITY BRIDGE
THE BRIDGE BEGINS TO SWAY AND ROCK
IT FALLS WITH A CRASH INTO THE RIVER
YOU ARE KILLED! TSK. TSK.
GEE WHIZ! JUST WHEN YOU WERE GETTING SOMEPLACE!
WELL, BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME. AT LEAST YOU’LL KNOW
BETTER THAN TO DO THAT AGAIN!

This even happens if you’re on foot! (By the way, the way the game treats walking on the street while out of your car is repeatedly saying IF YOU’RE GOING TO WALK, IT’LL TAKE FOREVER. If you walk over the spot on the map that pops your tire, the game will still claim the tire-popping happens, but you can walk back to the car and drive off like normal.)

The other more likely possibility for going west is back at the lake. If you drive southwest there’s a sign about tuning into the station KXXX, which is a hint that you should try to PLAY the RADIO:

THANKS FOR TUNING KXXX
AND NOW FOR THE NEWS:
MOUNT SAINT TROY ERUPTED TODAY SPEWING ASH AS FAR EAST AS AMIKAY
ROUTE 14 IS COVERED WITH UP TO FOUR FEET OF ASH IN PLACES
BE SURE TO CARRY A SHOVEL IF TRAVELING THAT WAY
MOTORISTS ARE CAUTIONED NOT TO GET TOO CLOSE TO THE VOLCANO
AS FURTHER ERUPTIONS ARE EXPECTED AT ANY TIME
THE NEAREST ACCESS ROAD IS COUNTY ROAD T8
HAVE A NICE TRIP

Just a bit further, a “great pile of ash” is blocking the way.

YOU ARE ON ROUTE 14
A GREAT PILE OF ASH BLOCKS THE ROAD HERE

However, weirdly enough, if you have the shovel with you, the way is blocked (“YOU CAN’T DO THAT”). The way to get through is to not have the shovel. This is 100% clearly a bug; the author must have swapped a logic statement somewhere. (Or there was a very slight corruption of the file which did the same thing, that has happened here before.)

YOU ARE ON ROUTE 14 A N-S ROAD
A DIRT SIDE ROAD LEADS EAST
>S
YOU ARE AT THE MAIN INTERSECTION IN THE
TOWN OF AMIKAY. MOST OF THE TOWN IS COVERED
WITH A FINE WHITE ASH

Going west you are blocked by a “locked gate” and … that’s it. I’m stuck from here. The map is big enough I’m sure it might be worthwhile to check over everything again, but the shovel bug in particular has lowered my confidence significantly and I might poke in the source code before too long.

A “gimmick map” from the 1974 road rally book.

8 days ago

Uncle Harry has died! You are called to his house on the east coast of the country to hear the will. The will leaves everything to you! The only problem is that he failed to tell where “everything” is located. Not even a map! The only thing that might help is a poem which gives clues on where to look.

1973 Xerox stock, via eBay.

In 1975, Art Walsh and Fred Ruckdeschel were both working at Xerox in the area of Rochester, New York. Fred was Art’s supervisor. In 1975, Ruckdeschel had just bought an Altair:

… it only came in kit form, cost $495, I think. And you you got a a box full of components in a in a shell which look like a big bread basket. And, he put one together.

He said this is neat. And, so that we could use it in our laboratories and have our machines directly input their output, into a computer and do all sorts of image analysis on it. Which we were able to do. And he, he tried getting me interested in the computers, and I’m used to working on mainframes, but, and it was also cheap.

Both Fred and Art got further into computers, writing articles for Byte magazine.

Ruckdeschel’s articles were fairly technical and eventually he wrote a two-part book of over 1000 pages on mathematical algorithms in BASIC. From November 1978 Byte.

Art had a lull between assignments where he programmed his computer to play bridge, and around the same time Fred had made an oil tanker simulator. Ruckdeschel had the notion that they since the pair had two programs already, and they could produce a few more and a start a new company together.

We formed a company, and it was one of the first software companies [1978], and the name is Dynacomp. And we ran ads in Byte Magazine … we started getting an order here and there for our software.

This was all while they were still at Xerox. The pair eventually had a personality conflict and by 1981 decided to split their company (and catalog) in two, with Art going one way with the company Artworx, and Ruckdeschel keeping under the Dynacomp name. (Some titles were kept in both, which is why both had a version of Cranston Manor Adventure.) For our purposes today, Dynacomp is more our target of interest, because Fred Ruckdeschel had a North Star Horizon at home and it was one of his favored computers, meaning his company kept the North Star part of the catalog.

Dynacomp incidentally lasted a bit longer than many other mail-order kings; they got up at least to the early 90s. Artworx had similar longevity, but at least I can explain theirs: their Bridge game was an evergreen product. With Dynacomp, I’m not entirely sure why they lasted so long. It may have been they didn’t focus entirely on the “hip” computers (like Apple and Commodore) but rather went for unusual niches, most with some variant of the CP/M operating system. In addition to their large collection — really the only large collection — for the North Star Horizon, later catalogues list support for:

Osborne, North Star CP/M, SuperBrain, NEC PC 8000 CP/M, KAYPRO II MORROW DESIGNS, HEATH ZENITH Z-100, HEATH ZENITH H-89 8″, CROMEMCO, ALTOS, XEROX 820, IBM PC/PC Jr., SANYO (with MS DOS), PANASONIC, COMPAQ Z or BA, CANON AS-100, DEC RAINBOW 100 (with MS DOS), and other CP/M IBM 3740 systems.

SuperBrain, now that’s a oddball computer. I found a Usenet thread from ’88 with someone trying to locate a commercial C compiler for CP/M and getting a recommendation for Dynacomp (a company that “no one has heard of”).

The SuperBrain came out in 1979. Check out that 70s design aesthetic! From Wikipedia.

The North Star Horizon has only come up here recently due to the discovery of a new cache of software thanks to f15sim, essentially a gigantic chunk of the Dynacomp catalog (given there are disks supposedly still left to upload, maybe the entire Dynacomp catalog). I wanted to try out three games from I hadn’t heard of before: Gumball Rally Adventure, Uncle Harry’s Will, and Windmere Estate, all (probably) by R.L. Turner. They’d been out there in the Dynacomp catalog already (see the Winter ’82 one here) but uncatalogued on Mobygames and elsewhere; the North Star just never has gotten much attention.

From DeRamp.

I unfortunately have not dredged up any details on R. L. Turner other than he seems to have been a car enthusiast, as his first game in the Dynacomp catalog (probably) is Gumball Rally Adventure. The (probably) is because it is listed as copyright 1980 from Novel Software, but there’s a Turner Motel, and the theming matches quite strongly with Uncle Harry which we’re about to get to, and they’re right next to each other in the catalogue, so–

YOU ARE IN GOOFY’S GARAGE ON THE EAST SIDE OF BIGTOWN. THERE ARE FIVE CARS PARKED HERE. YOU MAY CHOOSE ANY ONE TO DRIVE. EACH CAR HAS BEEN PREPARED FOR RACING AND IS GASSED UP READY TO GO. ALL FIVE CARS HAVE A SPARE TIRE IN THE TRUNK. THERE IS AN EMPTY 1 GALLON CAN HERE. ALONG ONE WALL IS A GAS PUMP, AIR & WATER HOSES, GREASE GUNS, ETC. THE EXIT IS ON THE WEST SIDE OF THE BUILDING AND LEADS ONTO A NORTH-SOUTH STREET. WHICH CAR WILL YOU DRIVE?

1. PORSCHE 2. FERARRI 3. COBRA 4. RABBIT 5. HOTROD FORD

(1 – 5) >

This is essentially a simulation game in the vein of Camel, The Oregon Trail, etc. where you are trying to get from point A to point B. Except if you don’t have the map which presumably came with the game, it’s super easy to get to lost trying to get from one coast to the other.

This is based on the ’76 movie and even some of the vehicle choices seem to match what’s on the show.

(The trailer references It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World from more than a decade before, which is a comedy where people were racing across the country to find a treasure hidden at the Big W. This movie was also part of the trend invoking the brief fame held by Cannonball Runs, getting from one coast to the other coast of the US as fast as possible, like Will Wright did in 1980.)

I have no doubt there’s an “optimal” vehicle choice (they allegedly have different gas consumption and handling) but I wasn’t interested enough in the proceedings to figure out.

The basic idea is:

1. Type START to start your engine, STOP to stop.
2. Type a number to change your speed.
3. If something is a “sharp” curve the car needs to be fairly low or it’ll slide, 25 or sometimes lower.
4. You’ll lose a shocking number of tires to flats, you need to CHANGE TIRE when it happens.
5. At various gas stations you can BUY GAS, BUY OIL, or BUY TIRE. Make sure you buy more than one spare because of the aforementioned flats.
6. There’s the occasional police radar speed trap.
7. There’s the occasional other special encounter, like school bus and a hitchhiker (who will, according to the source code, steal your car if you try to stop, but I was never able to get her to trigger).

YOU STOP FOR THE BLONDE. SHE GETS IN AND PULLS A GUN. SHE TAKES ALL YOUR MONEY AND YOUR CAR. YOU LOSE!

8. There’s a bit where it “goes dark” and you are supposed to type LIGHTS ON. It’s a car, after all, not the middle of a dungeon.
9. I’m not entirely sure if the map is bug-free; I managed to get to one point where it “overlapped” a road in a way that didn’t make sense, and I checked every route going west and all of them dead-ended.

(Orange is a gas station, red is a tire blow-out spot, blue is police radar.)

Despite the very mild gesture to special encounters this is entirely “simulation” gameplay without anything resembling a puzzle. However, it does get at something I’ve wondered, which is the Route to Adventure Without Adventure; that is, if we didn’t have Crowther/Woods or Wander, and we somehow got to an Adventure archetype, by what route would it come? By adding a map a game like Camel gets close to feeling like an adventure, maybe? However, that’s not what happened here as the author is clearly aware of adventures and adds a response to PLUGH:

MAGIC WORDS DON’T WORK HERE

It was worth spending the time here because of Uncle Harry’s Will, which is clearly playing with the same idea, but dumps the speed/gas simulation aspect.

UNCLE HARRY HAS DIED! UNCLE HARRY HASN’T BEEN HEARD FROM IN A NUMBER OF YEARS. HE WAS PRETTY MUCH A RECLUSE AND DIDN’T HAVE MUCH CONTACT WITH THE FAMILY. IT WAS SAID THAT UNCLE HARRY WAS RICH AND HAD HIDDEN A LARGE TREASURE WORTH MILLIONS.

WHEN THE LAWYER CALLED, HE STATED THAT YOU ARE THE LONE BENIFICIARY. HE ASKED THAT YOU COME TO HARRY’S HOUSE FOR A READING OF THE WILL. THE WILL WAS QUITE SIMPLE. IT STATED THAT THE MONEY WAS YOURS IF YOU COULD FIND IT. THE ONLY CLUES TO THE LOCATION WERE IN THE FORM OF A POEM. NO OTHER CLUES! NOT EVEN A MAP. I GUESS YOU’LL HAVE TO MAKE A MAP AS YOU TRAVEL.

Looking at 1981, the only other “rich person dies with an eccentric will” game is Stoneville Manor; the rich person in that game wasn’t technically our relative! So this is arguably the first “claim your inheritance” adventure plot (eventually followed by games like Hollywood Hijinx and The Mulldoon Legacy and…. IFDB lists 14 games and I’m pretty sure it is missing a few).

BEHIND THE WALL, BELOW THE RISE,
IN THE ROOM MY TREASURE LIES
IN ALL DIRECTIONS YOU SHOULD DRIVE
TO FIND IT, YOU MUST STAY ALIVE
ON YOUR WAY ACROSS THE NATION
YOU’LL HAVE NEED TO FIND A STATION
THE SMOKEY HILL WILL LEAD THE WAY
I KNOW YOU’LL FIND IT, COME WHAT MAY
FOLLOW THE SUN AT THE END OF DAY
TO GET ACROSS, YOU’LL FIND A WAY
STAY ON THE ROAD OF THE GOLDEN BAR
‘TILL YOU FIND THE PLACE WITH THE PARKED CAR
FOLLOW THE LION ‘TILL YOU FIND THE SCHOOL
CLIMB ON UP AND SEE THE JEWEL
FROM THE TOP YOU CAN SEE REAL GOOD
THE THING YOU WANT’S BENEATH THE WOOD
TAKE THE THING THAT YOU’LL FIND THERE
THEN GO AND SEARCH; YOU’LL KNOW WHERE

The big difference here between this wacky uncle and his later variants as that this one is asking you to drive cross-country. It’s possible R. L. Turner (and the fictional uncle) are fans of road rallies with a puzzle element. These are road races where the racers need to follow instructions and there are puzzles embedded within.

Here’s an example of an easy gimmick: a misspelled street name. Let’s say that your current Route Instruction is “Turn right at Smith” when you come to Smyth Street. According to the General Instructions, the word “Smith” must appear on a sign where you do this Route Instruction, but the word “Smith” does not appear on the “Smyth St” sign.

I have no idea if Uncle Harry’s Will is really following this tradition (which includes straight puzzle hunts), because I still have yet to get that far. The map alone is a serious time investment; there are multiple connected towns and a freeway to map out, and finally one-way exits make sense. You spend most of the time in your car, although you can LEAVE CAR to enter locations on foot. The only adventure I’ve played that I can think of that’s remotely comparable is Amnesia (1986), which put in every intersection in Manhattan.

You can go to every intersection on this map. From the Internet Archive.

Rather like Amnesia, most locations in Uncle Harry’s Will are bare-bones. Amnesia doesn’t make the player map things out, but we have to. Driving onward!

YOU ARE ON MAIN ST. IN THE TOWN OF EASTPORT
MAIN RUNS NORTH-SOUTH
>N
YOU ARE AT THE INTERSECTION OF MAIN AND FIR
>E
YOU ARE AT THE INTERSECTION OF DOCK AND FIR
>N
YOU ARE AT THE CORNER OF DOCK AND PINE
>W
YOU ARE AT THE INTERSECTION OF MAIN AND PINE
>N
YOU ARE AT THE EASTPORT ZOO. THE ZOO IS CLOSED

Before driving away too far I should mention there’s a by-foot location right where you start in the town of Eastport: you can walk up to a house which is locked and the game asks for a key you don’t have.

>LEAVE CAR
OK, YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR CAR
>W
YOU ARE ON THE STEPS LEADING TO A WALKWAY UP TO THE FRONT PORCH THE WALKWAY HAS A WIRE FENCE ALONG BOTH SIDES HERE
TO THE WEST IS THE FRONT PORCH
>W
YOU ARE ON THE WALKWAY AT THE BASE OF THE FRONT PORCH STEPS LEAD WEST TO THE FRONT PORCH ANOTHER WALKWAY LEADS NORTH AROUND THE SIDE OF THE HOUSE
>W
YOU ARE ON THE FRONT PORCH THE FRONT DOOR IS TO THE WEST TO THE EAST STEPS LEAD DOWN TO A FENCED WALKWAY
>W
YOU HAVE NO KEY

I can give the starting town at least, which has no items to nab.

However, the freeway (which you can see a part of) makes things very confusing, as it is possible to have it merge with an existing freeway without it being clear.

YOU ARE ON A NORTHBOUND FREEWAY
>N
YOU ARE ON A NORTHBOUND FREEWAY
THE FREEWAY PASSES THROUGH MOUNTAINS HERE
>N
YOU ARE ON A NORTHBOUND FREEWAY
>N
YOU ARE ON A NORTHBOUND FREEWAY
THERE IS AN EXIT TO THE NE AHEAD
>NE
YOU ARE AT THE CORNER OF PARK AND OAK

(In the clip above, we landed back in the starting town, but it wasn’t clear that’s what was going to happen until I tried the exit, and sometimes exits just lead to more freeways.)

Here are some highway rooms where I’m fairly sure I did a loop and have some duplication:

Taking Route 60 south from Eastport I was able to find a dirt road with a chainsaw, my first item.

YOU AT THE END OF THE ROAD
THERE ARE CUT TREES EVERYWHERE
THIS IS AN OLD LOGGING CAMP
THERE IS A CHAINSAW LAYING NEAR A LOG HERE

Further down there’s the town of Baycity where I was able to find a shovel in an old hardware store and a ferry ticket in the dump. Everything seems to be totally abandoned.

The abandonment (so far) means no police radars, but I did find a spot that clearly invoked Gumball Rally with a flat tire trying to go west from the starting town.

YOU ARE ON FORD ROAD
THERE IS A BRIDGE TO THE WEST
THERE IS A LOUD POP! YOU HAVE A FLAT TIRE!
>CHANGE TIRE
YOU HAVE NO SPARE TIRE
THERE YOU SIT WITH A FLAT TIRE!
AND NO SPARE! NEXT TIME, GET MORE SPARES!
READY

Well. I would buy one if I could find a store with living people! I’m sure they are somewhere. This seems to now be treated more like a puzzle than a simulationist checkbox.

I’ll try my best to get more of a full map next time and maybe reckon with the poem. Even with the abandoned towns this could end up being a neat idea but the number of rooms (over 300, according to the advertising) is overwhelming.

At least the reward ought to be better than a gumball machine! Although I could see the plot having a twist at the end.

9 days ago

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Descend to the Underworld and live among myths as the deity of spring!

Fields of Asphodel is 33% off until September 12th!

Fields of Asphodel is a 1.3 million-word interactive novel by JJ Laurier. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Forced into an arranged marriage with the God of the Dead, only you can decide what to make of your new life. Befriend misfit deities, repel giant attacks, find the culprit behind the river goddess’s mysterious illness, and use your powers to nudge Fate in your favor! Decide what kind of deity you want to be—whether you’ll answer prayers, how you’ll develop your powers, and what role you’ll take in governance. 

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, asexual, or poly.
• Play as neurodivergent or neurotypical.
• Take on the powers of spring and life.
• Find love and friendship among the gods of the ancient Greek Underworld.
• Develop your abilities and hobbies, and choose the kind of life you want to live.
• Grow a garden in the Underworld.
• Defend the realm, advise the King, and solve a mystery.
• Make a new home, or seize the opportunity to return to your old one.

Can you bring light to the darkest of realms?

JJ developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

Just a quick note that since it’s the start of September, IFComp 2024 is on.

LINK HERE FOR ALL THE GAMES

For the old-school type readers, only 20 of them are parser this time, although it does include a explicitly Zork-based game. Also the return of C.E.J. Pacian with a survival horror game.

One thing I didn’t comment on last year but I should note — there is allowed the use of artificial intelligence in cover art. The rules require they be labeled (although it is 100% obvious which ones are using it, they have all the same bizarro glossy sheen). Note well, please — this is the one sort of competition where it is totally OK to scrawl something out in Microsoft Paint. It will have much more soul. I’m sure you mean well and I’m not holding it against anyone, but still please consider if you enter in the future to simply not include a piece of cover art. It’ll be fine!

There’s a thread about the issue here at intfic.

Where will all of this text go?

planning things out.

So far, we’ve been looking at ways to vary text in simple but effective ways. But where should the text go? As a reminder, this series is meant to demonstrate an actual design for a small widget/toy/thingy. I have said it’s a fortune telling game. My plan for this series is to focus on the design, rather than on my own text. Why? I want you to be surprised when you play it in next year’s Spring Thing (you are going to play it, aren’t you?)! Here’s the basic idea.

Large/broad ideas

• A single room.
• Very few nouns.
• Completable by entering one-letter commands (a choice design).
• Multiple endings with one “true” ending (like a visual novel)
• Imitate gameplay of “single choice” jam games
• Experience is made up of single screens in which all printed text varies.

Mechanics (to start)

• Four cards are on a table. Every turn, the player can pick one of four cards. The player’s choice will dictate what the output is.
• After eight draws, the player will reach an “ending.”
• A cycle of endings based on which cards have been chosen.

a bare-bones setup.

To get started, we’ll need some cards on the table. That’s not too hard. I’ll set it up, and then we can talk about it.

a redc is on the table.
the printed name of redc is "red card".
understand "red / card" as redc.

a bluec is on the table.
the printed name of bluec is "blue card".
understand "blue / card" as bluec.

a greenc is on the table.
the printed name of greenc is "green card".
understand "green / card" as greenc.

an orangec is on the table.
the printed name of orangec is "orange card".
understand "orange / card" as orangec.

If you’ve been reading along, this might look like overkill. Why non-English thing names? Creating separate printed names and “understand” phrases is extra work. That’s definitely true! I have a couple of things in mind:

• We are going to be using these things a lot. I don’t want to type out a long, two-word name every time I do something with a card.
• Printed name is text, and we are varying all text, remember? So we’d be declaring a printed name no matter what.
• I am interested in minimizing what the player has to type, and I may need to tinker with what Inform recognizes as names for the cards. The current “understand” phrases are just placeholders for future experiments.

That’s not all. We are definitely going to need a way to refer to the cards as a general category. That’s easy! We will define a kind.

tarot is a kind of thing.
the plural of tarot is tarots.

redc is a tarot.
bluec is a tarot.
greenc is a tarot.
orangec is a tarot.

I like declaring a plural when I set a kind up. I may never use it, but since I’m there, why not? The kind will be very helpful, since it lets us say things like

carry out taking a tarot:

…and so forth.

an action.

We have cards. What should we do with them? It’s time for a new action.

card-picking is an action applying to one thing.
understand "pick [something]" as card-picking.

Alright. Note that “card-picking” is a long action name. We won’t be typing it too many times. Most of our code is going to refer to values and nouns. You might be wondering why I didn’t strictly define the pick command as something used with a tarot. The answer is simple: that will create a generic “parser error” message, which, yes, we can customize, but it’s best to keep those things simple. Parser errors are “under the hood,” so to speak, and we’ll be better off using our own code and feedback to handle people card-picking the wrong stuff. This is a good place for a check rule. Check rules are gates, essentially, permitting somethings while preventing others.

check card-picking:
	if the noun is not a tarot:
		say "That's not a card, silly!" instead.

By default, check rules don’t stop actions. Unless the action triggers our instead phrase, (if the noun is not a tarot), the action will continue without comment. That’s what we want, here! We can handle the actual act of picking a card with a carry out rule.

Since we’re just getting started, let’s set up a basic framework for printing varied responses.

carry out card-picking:
	say "[the relevant fortune]".

As you probably recall, the text in brackets is a substitution. In this case, our substitution doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as “the relevant fortune” in our code. I’ll cook something up using a specific kind of definition.

to say the relevant fortune:
	say "My goodness! The [printed name of the noun]! This must be your lucky day."

This is mostly a placeholder for varied text. Even in this simple state, it allows for a bit of variation: the response will include our own printed name for the noun involved. This will prove handy if we decide to vary the printed names of cards. & we do! A design goal is varying all onscreen text. Here’s what that gets us:

>pick orange
My goodness! The orange card! This must be your lucky day.

>pick green
My goodness! The green card! This must be your lucky day.

>pick blue
My goodness! The blue card! This must be your lucky day.

what’s next.

This is a framework, but not an experience. At the moment, we have a room description, a table description, card names, and a response to picking cards. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, we’re looking to have eight different texts, since a “cycle” consists of eight card-picking actions. Here’s some next steps for the project:

• come up with a strategy for what text prints when (random, deterministic, etc). That is, if a player picks eight cat cards in a row, what should that experience be like?
• devise simple method for varying text that we can use for multiple responses, descriptions, etc.
• devise reasonable (maybe “simple” is asking too much) method for organizing printed text, allowing for easy proofreading and editing.
• consider QOL needs for action input, minimizing player friction.
• determine what happens when a cycle ends.

The title of this series is “Let’s WRITE IF,” but I haven’t talked about writing in this post. Think about this: the format determines what we can write, just as our writing dictates a format. This design is absolutely about setting up a method for us to write in a specific and hopefully interesting way. Form, as we said in the old MFA days, is inseparable from content. I hope the writing opportunities of this design will become clear as we continue.

current source

2024 IFComp Logo, by Lauren Davies

We’re glad you’re here. If this is your first time joining us, welcome! If you’re already familiar with us, welcome back! Either way, we hope you have a great time and enjoy exploring some of the over sixty new games we have for you this year.

What’s next? 

• Check out the games, now live at ifcomp.org 
• You have until October 15, 2023 at 11:59pm Eastern to vote. 
• You only have to play & rate 5 games to be a judge! (Yep, just five!)

We would love to expand the number of judges! You can help!

Talk about the competition on social media, and encourage others to check out all these new games. Consider playing with a friend or family member who is new to interactive fiction, talk about the games together, and encourage them to vote as well. Thanks! 

We will do a post-competition survey to capture your ideas for improving the competition in the future, so if you have thoughts about improvements, please watch for the survey in October.

Email us at [email protected] if you have any questions.

Thank you in advance for judging!

—Jacqueline Ashwell, September 2024

From nowhen to somewhen: narrative vignettes, cumulative storytelling, and a bad day at the beach.

Further discussion of Narrative and Geographical Modularity In Trinity

In a previous post, I discussed the wide, middle part of Trinity‘s structure. This so-called “Wabe” is a highly effective design, unifying both storytelling and mechanics. Narratively, it establishes Trinity as a richly intertextual work, alluding to literature, art, science, and history. The game world delineated by the Wabe is surreal and, in terms of its contrasting blend of whimsy and lethality, absurdist.

In terms of Trinity‘s story, the Wabe is home to a central, multi-part challenge that requires the player to visit significantly varied times and places to retrieve ingredients for a magic spell. In contemporary game criticism, this kind of geography is often referred to as a “hub” or “overworld” design: a central area connects isolated geographies that often have unique goals, aesthetics, or even mechanics. In this sense, Trinity seems an evolution from Infocom’s previous experiments in modular narrative design: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (also referred to as HHGG) and Spellbreaker.

Similarities between the world designs of HHGG and Trinity ought to be acknowledged. In both cases, the player must travel to different temporal and geographic locations to retrieve items required to resolve. These narrative modules hide treasures needed to solve central, overarching problems in their respective hub worlds. Mechanically, there is little to distinguish them in terms of gameplay and structure. By finding the treasures and overcoming their primary obstacles, the player can move on to a so-called “master game” or endgame.

Similarities between the world designs of “HHGG” and “Trinity” ought to be acknowledged.

Narratively, though, the modular or hub designs of both works have vastly different impacts. This is largely a matter of what might be termed Trinity‘s overt or signifying unities. The hub or overworld design of the Wabe is visually and mechanically apparent. That is, when viewed as a classic parser IF map of square rooms connected by lines, it assumes a square shape with entrances to “modules” at all but one of its cardinal and ordinal extremities. Its central, defining topographical feature, a giant sundial “mountain,” determines which of these modules (represented as doors in giant mushrooms) can be accessed.

This hub is a sundial, then, its gnomon casting shadows on different doorways, and each door leads to a different temporal location. The Wabe is a physical representation of Trinity‘s concern with time and history, and, perhaps, a fantastic–or deluded–hope of changing either. Beyond these doors lie locations and problems that tie back to the central themes of the game: nuclear devastation, human folly and hubris, and the inexorability of time. I hope there isn’t a need to belabor how and why HHGG is different.

That’s not a critique of HHGG. It isn’t trying to do what Trinity does, and a Trinity-style narrative hub would not improve it.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Bombs

Excepting the endgame set in the New Mexico desert, the vignettes beyond the mushroom doors “tell the truth, but tell it slant.” They are largely concerned with significant parts rather than they are with any grand, dramatic whole. This approach, ideally scaled for modular storytelling, allows for powerful thematic sucker punches like the one in which the protagonist visits Elugelab moments before American military scientists detonate an atomic bomb (Ivy Mike, presumably) there. Exiting a thicket of horrible machinery, the Wabewalker finds themselves in a lovely place marred by American–not merely human–techo-military power:

South Beach

The waters of a peaceful lagoon reflect the tropical dawn like a fiery mirror. A few stars are still visible in the rosy sky.

The glorified tool shed dominates this little island, leaving room only for a narrow strip of sand that curves to the northeast and northwest. A red button is mounted on the wall beside the open sliding doors of the shed.

Phrases and tems like “dominates” and “leaving room only” are well-chosen, stopping just short of editorialization. Again and again, Moriarty proves himself an agile writer, seasoning lovely descriptions what often feels like profound disappointment in humanity. Since players have only narrowly escaped the destruction of London, they may well know where things are headed when they encounter this memorable character:

>z
Time passes.

The distant islet is shrinking in the rising tide.

With a sudden splash, the gray fin shoots upward! You shriek and cover your face with your hands as a mouthful of sharp teeth leaps from the lagoon...

A friendly chatter encourages you to open your eyes. It's a bottle-nosed dolphin, standing on its tail just offshore.

>wave at dolphin
The dolphin responds with a happy squeal.

If I may lower my critical mask for a moment: this sequence is one of the most effectively unpleasant–narratively speaking–in-game sequences I have ever experienced. This is the truth, slanted, as this scene’s emotional impact is the product of events inferred rather than witnessed. Some sensitive readers may be bothered by a necessary imposition: we have come to ask a favor of the soon-to-be-vaporized dolphin.

>z
Time passes.

The coconut floats away from the distant islet on the rising tide.

The dolphin gives you a playful splash.

>point at coconut
The dolphin sees the floating coconut, snatches it out of the lagoon and tosses it into the sand at your feet.

>get coconut
Taken.

[Your score just went up by 3 points. The total is now 35 out of 100.]

No other scene in the Infocom canon does so much. The puzzle–pointing at the coconut–affords a simple, intuitive satisfaction. The dolphin’s playful charisma is conveyed through actions printed every turn. Moriarty’s emphasis on action yields short sentences that charm rather than cloy. Mercifully, the dolphin’s fate is never dramatized, though that won’t stop many players from imagining the destruction wrought by 67 atomic tests over 12 years by the American military in the Marshall Islands. That’s a lot of dolphins!

The Human Animal

To return to my personal response to the dolphin scene: I stopped playing for a while. I can’t say how long, now, but I was bothered enough to put the game down. I wanted different things from adventure games in those days: escapism, fantasies of power and mastery, and, increasingly, a way to feel like a “good guy.” This is a new sort of video game fantasy that we have not yet discussed: the moral fantasy, in which a protagonist can exalt in a sort of ethical sandbox, where they can enjoy virtuous or evil behaviors that might be impossible or unpleasantly consequential in their own lives. Despite the many advancements made in narrative storytelling, morality in video games can sometimes feel clumsy or shallow. In its least compelling formulation, morality is merely a bifurcation into polite and sarcastic conversation paths.

One reason Infidel remains bracing today is that its un-hero is a jerk. He is not a laughing, hand-rubbing villain, but a cut-rate narcissist and con man. This is a subversion of the moral fantasy. Trinity is no less subversive, but players and critics have had far less to say regarding its moral ambivalence. Perhaps the shortcomings of its protagonist are too vividly unremarkable. If Trinity were a tragedy–I insist that it is not–the Wabewalker’s fatal flaw would be their self-involvement. At the game’s outset, the looming threat of nuclear war is an unwelcome distraction that might disrupt their package vacation.

Sharp words between the superpowers. Tanks in East Berlin. And now, reports the BBC, rumors of a satellite blackout. It's enough to spoil your continental breakfast.

But the world will have to wait. This is the last day of your $599 London Getaway Package, and you're determined to soak up as much of that authentic English ambience as you can. So you've left the tour bus behind, ditched the camera and escaped to Hyde Park for a contemplative stroll through the Kensington Gardens.

Just as the dolphin is one of an uncountable many, so, too, is the Wabewalker. They are not a developed character, and that isn’t so that the player can enjoy a self-inserted fantasy of their heroic deeds. Rather, the Wabewalker is a stand-in representation of the generalized American character: too self-involved to be malevolent, too distracted to demand change, and too acquiescent to question the depravities that, by 1986, had granted their leaders the godlike power to annihilate not only humanity but most species of flora and fauna occupying the planet’s surface.

Some fantasy!

As I have already said: there is nothing in Infocom like this. Thanks to Moriarty’s careful work balancing tone and action, we players are invited to reflection rather than called to atonement. This is not a lecturing work, for all its seriousness. In terms of narrative craft, the dolphin scene may well be Infocom’s greatest: short, evocative, thematically rich. Interactive, but not intrusively so. The dolphin is, in all its tersely characterized whimsey, as memorable as Planetfall‘s Floyd or Zork‘s thief.

“Now, now,” you might say. “This is a game about human history. We see Oppenheimer for a second, even! What’s all this animal talk?” Sure, it’s about history. Elugelab was a real place, after all. A lot has been written about that. Infocom themselves made a lot of marketing hay about Moriarty’s historical research.

Still, one ought to pay attention to the contents of the text itself: behind every door and in every location, there are always animals or their representations, and most of them are doomed. Trinity is concerned with humanity’s place in creation, and the ways in which technological superiority has granted humans power without wisdom. Humanity’s relationship with the world is unnatural and distorted, and, rather heartbreakingly, the Wabewalker cannot change that.

In fact, the Wabewalker never tries to change humanity’s place in the natural world. That never even comes up. The Wabewalker–and perhaps we players, too–wrongly hoped to solve cultural and moral problems by solving technical problems.

The dolphin, as a crucial bit of tone-setting for the game entire, deserves a post all their own. Next time, I’ll look at the other vignettes, all of them textually and thematically rich.

Elsewhere…

I was recently interviewed by the kind people at the What’s New in IF ‘zine. Therein, I talk about Gold Machine, Inform 7 content at my other blog Top Expert, and my own parser game Repeat the Ending.

The post “Tell the Truth, but Tell It Slant:” Modularity and Sacrifice appeared first on Gold Machine.

A day has passed since the success of Adventure Quest and jubilation reigns in Valaii! At sunset yesterday the city was beseiged by a sea of orcs, with more arriving every hour, and it seemed that the defenders were doomed. But at sunrise, the watch looked out over an empty plain – the attackers had given up the assault when on the point of victory.

Initially, the only reaction was stunned amazement. But gradually a rumour began to spread: first whispered in quiet corners, lest the telling should make it untrue, but eventually shouted in every street…

“The Demon Lord is dead!!!”

Dungeon Adventure marks the third of a trilogy that the Austins (Pete, Mike, and Nick) of Level 9 produced in 1982 (previously: Colossal Adventure, Adventure Quest). It was originally (or at least as soon as marketing started on the second game) the Middle-Earth Trilogy but later had Middle Earth references ripped out. To be consistent with my prior playthroughs, I again am playing the non-Tolkien Atari version made with graphics.

I managed to get through Adventure Quest without hints, but to be honest it was a near thing. I have heard this game is harder. I’ll try my best.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

This continues directly from the previous game, during the celebrations of the Demon Lord’s defeat. It doesn’t seem to be the same character, though! You (not being as heroic as Prior Protaganist) realize the Demon Lord “must have been very rich” and decide to make a beeline for the Black Tower, when about “a mile from the tower itself” you are hit by a sleep spell.

Some time later you wake, cold and wet, on a mudbank below a bridge spanning a wide river. All of your weapons and magic are lost. It seems that you were robbed and then your body was thrown into the river but that, rather than drowning, you have survived long enough to be washed up on the shore.

You clamber soggily up onto the bridge and ponder over your fate. Can you take on the Dungeons of the Demon Lord unaided? It seems you have little choice, as this is where the adventure starts….

Ah, the Metroid reset! You know, where an experienced bounty hunter really ought to have a full armament of gear and all the special suits acquired from previous adventure, but due to early happenstance of the plot has nothing.

This reverts back to a “collect the treasures” plot, which is curious since most companies/people get it out of their system (so to speak) and move on, but we have had games like Ghost Town go back to basics. It does make things a bit more modern because, as the manual indicates, there was popular demand for a way to carry more items (the previous games had a max inventory of four) so there’s now more than one way to exceed that.

You start at the entrance of the suitably grim dungeon of the title, although the earlier BBC version has you in a slightly different position, down from here.

I’m not sure what the deal with the driftwood is yet (described as “resinous” in inventory). The “huge” packing case is large enough to enter.

You can go in yet further and find a “store room” where the treasures go.

The button “scans your body”. I’m not sure yet past that.

Checking out the rest of the layout of the outside, there’s:

a.) Two sleeping giants where you can climb a tree next them. Grab a nearby berry and throw it, and they’ll get mad at each other and run off.

b.) Past that puzzle (the only one I’ve solved) there’s a belt and the berry you just tossed. The belt makes you stronger and that four-item inventory limit is already increased. (I think the “portable treasure room” is the other way the manual was talking about of having more lugging capacity.)

c.) Other oddities include a part of the forest where you get hit by a sleep spell and wake up back at the mud bank; a large bird in an “untidy nest”; an impressive tower that seems to be impossible to refer to; a “seed pod” by some poppies that makes lots of noise when you drop it; a “circle of distorted monoliths”.

I don’t understand how and why I got this scene. I experimented later and it never came up, even after waiting a long time and repeating the same actions.

d.) There’s a siren that kills you. SWIM is not one of the verbs in the game. Oops.

That’s it for outside, for now. If enough time passes the sun eventually sets and a ghoul kills you, so there isn’t unlimited time to hang out without a light source.

Speaking of light sources–

This is as far as I’ve gotten popping into the ugly orc mouth before hitting darkness. Right before the darkness is a jeweled crucifix (counts as a treasure, but might also count to fend off a vampire or some such) and a miner’s hat with a lamp (which has “neither fuel nor wick”, also counts as a treasure).

The only other place worth mentioning is a trap, but at least it is an obvious one.

It’d be fun if the treasures were accessible right away, but you still need more treasures, since our goal is to catch them all.

(This continues from my previous post about this French game for the Tandy PC-1 Pocket Computer.)

From Byte, February 1982.

Last time, my two issues with Des Cavernes were

(a.) I only had a “simulator” and not an “emulator” and it doesn’t handle memory like the original PC-1 (or the equivalent Sharp 1211)

and

(b.) Jim Gerrie had a port but it seemed to be buggy.

Unfortunately, as of this writing nobody has dumped the BIOS for a PC-1 or 1211, so (a.) remains an issue, but Jim Gerrie has fixed his code, and the issue it had is fascinating and reflects on the raw ingenuity of early 80s programmers.

Before getting into that (and how the fixed game plays) I wanted to mention a second article from Trace Issue #2, the same one that Des Cavernes was printed in. There’s a page-long introduction to Crowther/Woods Adventure that gives a good window into the French knowledge of adventures circa September 1982.

A comic that goes with the article. The computer is saying “you are alone in a dark room… what should you do??”, with the responses “Oh… lighting…” and “don’t forget it”.

The article announces that the “famous” game Adventure, originally in FORTRAN for a PDP-10 can now run on a TRS-80. (This is referring to Microsoft Adventure, based on the version Gordon Letwin originally wrote for Heathkit.) It is “enough to entertain you for long hours, but in English”. I am not clear if the author was aware of Bilingual Adventure; probably not given it was written for the CP/M operating system.

The article goes on to say…

La disquette “adventure” inaugure un nouveau type de jeu où le participant tient un rôle et vit des aventures dont le déroulement est fonction de ses actes. Aux Etats-Unis, on achète une “disquette” d’aventures comme nous achèterions un “livre” d’aventures. Les auteurs ne sont plus Stevenson ou Conan Doyle mais Scott Adams et Microsoft … C’est le progrès !

…translating as:

“Adventure” inaugurates a new type of game in which the participant takes on a role and experiences adventures that unfold according to their actions. In the US, we buy an adventure “disk” like we would buy an adventure “book”. The authors are no longer Stevenson or Conan Doyle but Scott Adams and Microsoft … it’s progress!

Note the “new type of game” comment. This echoes the same line used introducing Omotesando Adventure to Japanese audiences. Additionally this gives the concurrent idea of “bookware”, that text adventures are about to supplant books, something that would briefly catch the imagination of the real publishing industry before disappearing shortly after.

Then, the publication’s “14 year old tester” named Stéphane (who “perfected his English with this game”) gives some “tips and tricks” for tackling Adventure. One section is on “Phrases magiques, passages secrets, objects énigmatiques” and mentions the magic words XYZZY and LWPI. (LWPI is specifically from Microsoft Adventure, and transports the player to a Software Den that’s only in that version and spinoffs. I really should write about it as a standalone article someday, although the differences are really quite minor.)

So while Folibus had technically just come out in a different publication, it was for an entirely different system and it isn’t like awareness of what an adventure even was would spread out immediately, and Adventure in particular was being played in English, not French, despite the technical existence of one translation.

This means that while Crowther/Woods Adventure was “famous”, Des Cavernes would be for some readers the first real encounter with anything like an adventure game.

Now, I’m hedging with “like” an adventure game because even with fixes in, Les Cavernes is a bit unusual, as it is an adventure-roguelike with everything randomly generated. Other than some language fixes, the big issue Jim Gerrie ran into with his port was with the quasi-random number generator itself.

In a technical sense, there is no such things as a random number generated by a regular computer chip. (It’s possible to hook up radio receivers to use atmospheric noise like the website random.org does, or use some related manner of gizmo; I’m meaning normal traditional computer chips.) The best they can do is apply a mathematical algorithm which provides a sequence which gives the appearance of randomness, and this can sometimes go awry. Usually this randomness gets kicked off by a “seed” of some sort, perhaps taken from the system clock (concatenate hours, minutes, and seconds, for instance, into one number) but it can be given explicitly, as Des Cavernes does.

10 “A”:INPUT “NO.=”;D,”L=”;F : F=4*F

In order to then turn this into something appearing “random”, the original game uses the SIN (sine) function. Quoting from Jim Gerrie:

In the end I realized the problem was also a result of a slightly lower level of mathematical accuracy between the MC-10 and Pocket PC. The game relies heavily on the mathematical accuracy of the Pocket PC and its BASIC. Simply put, it needs 10 decimal digits to come out of SIN, whereas the MC-10 could only give 9. That is because the decimal is multiplied by 100 to give two hole number digits, which are used for combat calculations, plus 8 decimal numbers, which are used to store maze node information for 4 directions of moves. The Pocket PC apparently could give you a number like

90.12345678

Whereas the MC-10 can only give you

90.1234567

The 8 decimal number give 4 groups of 2 numbers which store the node information for the four directions of movement. If the first digit is 4 – 9 then you can go in that direction. If the second digit is odd and there is a monster present, then you will be blocked. If you defeat the monster then you will be allowed to move to a new room by adding one to that digit to make it an even number and then a new SIN number will be generated based on the current number. Since I was missing an 8th decimal digit I made it so that it is simply replaced by a zero.

In other words, using 90.12345678 as an example, it was supposed to give the “random” two digit numbers of

12, 34, 56, 78

but instead was giving

12, 34, 56, 70

due to the pocket computer having one more digit of precision than the desktop computer, and since individual digits matter in terms of generating the rooms, always delivering a 0 was causing an issue.

This put together with other fixes create something resembling a game, although I did find I could still run into a “trap seed”, with a no-win scenario. For example, seed 1111, any difficulty:

Here’s the complete map of the level:

There are 10 rings scattered around (some may start in your inventory). If you have the appropriate ring, you can kill a particular monster. In the seed above, I only had RING #1, which apparently is no good with dragons. (KILL DRAGON just has a response of NO!, or if you prefer the French, NON!)

After mucking about with multiple failures, I found a better seed: 2321234. This starts you with rings 1 and 10, so there are technically 8 more rings to find. I played at difficulty 1 (the choices are 0 through 5); higher difficulties add more monsters so are more opportunities to get stopped.

This comes out to be a mess, but at least it is manageable with some persistence. The important thing is not to treat this like a game of Solitaire where you get one shot at a seed. There are far too many dead-end spots like the lion above, or long dead-end loops (which I’ll show off in a second). No, what makes this playable (once you find a seed that works) is to keep returning to that same seed and add to the map you made last time.

For the map above (not complete) I “died” around 10 times hitting various impossible spots. The thing to keep in mind is that monsters generally don’t have to be killed (although killing one will get a point), and will only block some of the exits (or maybe even none of them).

Monsters will respawn when you re-enter a room. It may seem at first there is no such thing as re-entering a room — nearly everything is a one-way exit, and the two-ways exits I found I think were by luck only — but the map does create “loops” that will eventually return to sections. This is both good and bad; good in that there is some sort of continuity that makes it feel not like I’m just plotting the output of a spreadsheet, but bad in that the impossible loops I alluded to can happen.

Here I have marked out in yellow one such loop. If you enter into the loop without any way of killing the monsters within (vampire and dragon) you are stuck in a softlock with no way out and need to reset. This is very discouraging if you try a new seed each time, but it feels a little like a “discovery” when repeating multiple attempts on the same seed.

It turns out that this seed does have Ring #6 in a reachable spot, and that ring kills vampires (helpfully — and almost certainly by coincidence — there was a vampire in the same room as the ring so I could test it).

Since monsters respawn and each kill gets you a point, you can technically get an infinite score if you can find a loop that brings you by a monster you are able to kill. I found a perfect such spot, as either ring 1 or 10 (I have no way of knowing which) works on wizards.

Yes, that’s a two-way exit. This seems to be complete coincidence, although I do think the map-making algorithm (which I still don’t fully understand) does have “regions” where it is more likely to loop to a room that’s close than a room that’s far. I might be wrong about that guess, though. Since there are two killable monsters in adjacent rooms, it is possible to get any score at all desired by just hopping back and forth and using the KILL command over and over.

I confess I did not persist to try to get absolutely every ring, but in the end this is only adventure-adjacent; this is more of a strategy game like Wumpus which generates a layout you have to reckon with, and what you reckon with just might be impossible, but there’s nothing more complex than mapping going on (and keeping track of if you’re repeating a room you’ve already visited).

Still, I’m glad I got to play this, as it makes for another terrific example in the roguelike-adventure stash (they all take radically different approaches to how they generate their maps; probably the game most comparable to this one is The 6 Keys of Tangrin) and I got to boggle a bit over the sheer technical achievement: remember, this was on a pocket computer. I could see myself playing this more if the PC-1 was the only computer I had, and it was the only way to get at those new famous “adventures” and experience the “objects énigmatiques” within.

Also, despite the room names being generative off a list of descriptors, some of them briefly felt like real locations. Here, I’ve entered a teenager’s bedroom.

3 days ago

I have a lot to talk about at this point in the development of my C# interactive fiction authoring platform called Sharpee. The "design" of the system is coming to a working and well-defined point.

One of the first things I had envisioned in developing this platform was to use modern software architecture patterns. I think inherently the world model in an IF story is a graph and I very much wanted to implement an in-memory Node/Edge graph to reflect the world model.

That part of this project has reached a completed and tested state.

Here we have the INode and IEdge interfaces, which are very simple representations of a standard bi-directional graph.

We then consume the DataStore in the "IF" World Model, which is the translation layer between raw graph logic and "IF" logic.

This is where we develop our core world model 'things" to be leveraged by the standard library and the author's story. The base "things" in our world model implement INode so they become nodes in our data store.

public class Thing : INode
public class Animal : Thing
public class Person : Animal
public class Room : Thing
public class Container : Thing, IContainer

And within the lower-level graph, nodes are connected by various types of edges like "in/contains".

I also took the time to add a language capability so all text can be contained in a language class and the author can augment with story-based language class. This allows for any one game to designed for multiple languages.

namespace Language
{
    [Language("en-US")]
    public static class EnglishUS
    {
        // Graph Properties
        public const string Room_Description = "{description}";
        public const string Object_Description = "{description}";

        // Verbs
        public const string Verb_Go = "go";
        public const string Verb_Look = "look";
        public const string Verb_Take = "take";
        public const string Verb_Get = "get";
        public const string Verb_Inventory = "inventory";
        public const string Verb_I = "i";
        public const string Verb_Drop = "drop";
        public const string Verb_Put = "put";

        // Go Action
        public const string Go_WherePrompt = "Go where?";
        public const string Go_CannotGoDirection = "You can't go {0}.";
        public const string Go_Success = "You go {0}.";

        // Take Action
        public const string Take_WhatPrompt = "What do you want to take?";
        public const string Take_NotSeen = "You don't see any {0} here.";
        public const string Take_CannotTake = "You can't take the {0}.";
        public const string Take_Success = "You take the {0}.";
        public const string Take_Fail = "You can't seem to take the {0}.";

        // Look Action
        public const string Look_Nowhere = "You are nowhere.";
        public const string Look_TooDark = "It's too dark to see anything.";
        public const string Look_YouSee = "\n\nYou see: {0}";
        public const string Look_Exits = "\n\nExits: {0}";
        public const string Look_DontSee = "You don't see any {0} here.";
        public const string Look_ContainerClosed = " It is closed.";
        public const string Look_ContainerEmpty = " It is empty.";
        public const string Look_ContainerContents = " It contains: {0}.";

        // Drop Action
        public const string Drop_WhatPrompt = "What do you want to drop?";
        public const string Drop_DontHave = "You don't have a {0} to drop.";
        public const string Drop_Success = "You drop the {0}.";
        public const string Drop_Fail = "You can't seem to drop the {0}.";

        // Inventory Action
        public const string Inventory_Empty = "You are not carrying anything.";
        public const string Inventory_List = "You are carrying: {0}";

        // Parser
        public const string Parse_ValidCommand = "Valid command";
        public const string Parse_UnknownCommand = "I don't understand that command.";
        public const string Parse_ItemNotVisible = "I don't see any {0} here.";
        public const string Parse_ItemsNotVisible = "I don't see any {0} here.";
        public const string Parse_SomethingNotVisible = "Something you mentioned isn't here.";
        public const string Parse_Or = " or ";

        // Story Runner
        public const string StoryRunner_GameOver = "Game Over. Thanks for playing!";
        public const string StoryRunner_ItemsInRoom = "You see the following items:";
    }
}

And so far, Cloak of Darkness looks like this:

using CloakOfDarkness.Actions;
using CloakOfDarkness.Language;
using Common;
using IFWorldModel;
using Language;
using ParserLibrary;
using StandardLibrary;
using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Collections.Generic;

namespace CloakOfDarkness
{
    public class CloakOfDarknessStory : IStory
    {
        private WorldModel _worldModel;
        private Parser _parser;
        private Scope _scope;
        private ActionExecutor _actionExecutor;
        private Guid _playerId;
        private bool _gameOver;
        private const int MAX_DARK_MOVES = 3;

        public void Initialize()
        {
            LanguageManager.Initialize("en-US", typeof(StoryLanguageExtensions_EnUS));

            _worldModel = new WorldModel();
            CreateWorld();
            _scope = new Scope(_worldModel, _playerId);
            _parser = new Parser(_scope);
            _actionExecutor = new ActionExecutor(_worldModel, _scope);
            RegisterCustomActions(_actionExecutor);
            _gameOver = false;
        }

        public Scope GetScope() => _scope;

        public WorldModel GetWorldModel() => _worldModel;

        public Guid GetPlayerId() => _playerId;

        public string GetIntroText() => LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Story_Intro);

        public bool IsGameOver() => _gameOver;

        public ParsedActionResult ProcessAction(ParsedAction action)
        {
            var result = _actionExecutor.ExecuteAction(action, _playerId);
            result = CheckGameState(result);
            _scope.UpdateScope();
            return result;
        }

        public void RegisterCustomActions(ActionExecutor actionExecutor)
        {
            actionExecutor.RegisterAction(LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Verb_Hang), new HangAction(_worldModel, _scope));
        }

        private ParsedActionResult CheckGameState(ParsedActionResult result)
        {
            var playerLocation = _worldModel.GetPlayerLocation(_playerId);

            if (result.Results.Any(r => r.Parameters.ContainsKey("message") &&
                r.Parameters["message"].ToString().Contains(LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Message_StumbledInDark))))
            {
                _gameOver = true;
                return result.AddResult(new ActionResult("game_over", new Dictionary<string, object>
                {
                    { "message", LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Message_GameOverDarkness) }
                }));
            }

            if (playerLocation is Room room &&
                room.Name == LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Location_Bar) &&
                !_worldModel.GetPlayerItems(_playerId).Any(n => n.Name == LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Item_Cloak)))
            {
                _gameOver = true;
                return result.AddResult(new ActionResult("game_won", new Dictionary<string, object>
                {
                    { "message", LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Message_GameWon) }
                }));
            }

            return result;
        }

        private void CreateWorld()
        {
            // Create rooms
            Room foyer = (Room)_worldModel.CreateRoom(
                LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Location_Foyer),
                LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Description_Foyer))
                .SetPropertyValue("IsDark", false);

            Room cloakroom = (Room)_worldModel.CreateRoom(
                LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Location_Cloakroom),
                LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Description_Cloakroom))
                .SetPropertyValue("IsDark", false);

            Room bar = (Room)_worldModel.CreateRoom(
                LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Location_Bar),
                LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Description_Bar))
                .SetPropertyValue("IsDark", true)
                .SetPropertyValue("MessageCounter", 0);

            // Connect rooms
            _worldModel.CreateExit(foyer, bar, LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Direction_North));
            _worldModel.CreateExit(foyer, cloakroom, LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Direction_West));

            // Create player
            Person player = (Person)_worldModel.CreatePerson(
                LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Character_Player),
                LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Description_Player),
                foyer);
            _playerId = player.Id;

            // Create cloak
            Thing cloak = (Thing)_worldModel.CreateThing(
                LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Item_Cloak),
                LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Description_Cloak),
                player);

            // Add hook to cloakroom
            Scenery hook = (Scenery)_worldModel.CreateScenery(
                LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Item_Hook),
                LanguageManager.GetText(CloakOfDarknessKeys.Description_Hook),
                cloakroom);
        }
    }
}

There is much to clean up in the IF World Model classes to improve fluency and consistent behaviors.

I'm currently going through unit testing and improving how the parser and grammar work, which is a fun back and forth exercise.

And the Text Service is coming into focus. I had always wanted to have turn processing send all of the activities of a turn into a text service, but what I ended up doing is creating an ActionResult class that can contain a list of actions that occur within the turn loop.

namespace Common
{
    public class ActionResult
    {
        public string Key { get; }
        public Dictionary<string, object> Parameters { get; }

        public ActionResult(string key, Dictionary<string, object> parameters = null)
        {
            Key = key ?? throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(key));
            Parameters = parameters ?? new Dictionary<string, object>();
        }

        public ActionResult AddParameter(string key, object value)
        {
            Parameters[key] = value;
            return this;
        }
    }
}

This has led to implementing event sourcing within the Text Service where we send all ActionResults to the text service. Once all activities for the turn have completed, we ask the text service to build the text for those activities and the current world model state relevant to the player's character. A fun aspect of this will enable the ability to have events for NPC's in the event source and being able to ask for a summary from the perspective of an NPC.

This is a critical change on how an IF platform emits text. Instead of a stream of concatenation logic, we have everything in a list of activities and can build a logical template for emitting text for a turn.

I'm actually starting to see potential commercial viability for this project and at this point, I'd love someone else to think through what I'm building and add value.

After enjoying The Killings in Wasacona (KIW) so much, I got wind that another Twine IFComp game, Winter-Over by Emery Joyce and N. Cormier, might present a similar experience, and a comparable one for reviewing purposes. It does and it does. Were you to read no more of this review, what I would say about Winter-Over is that it's fairly dense and challenging on various fronts, and even with the help of its excellent auto-taking Notes feature and character summaries, it's probably best approached not in a hurry, and with mental resources to spare.

The game's sublimely atmopsheric cover image is a real photograph that looks unreal, and this primes the player to enter the strangely cloistered reality of Pickering Station in Antarctica. The PC is Pickering's "mechanic, handyman, and general jack-of-all-trades", and they've brought along their somewhat edgy brother, Daniel. This makes for a complement of about fourteen working at the station, a mixture of men and women, scientists and maintenance staff. When one of them murders Daniel, the PC is driven to try to solve the case themselves because the New Zealand Police are ten days away.

The game's title refers to Winter-over syndrome, a kind of stir craziness particular to workers enduring the long (two thirds of the year) winters at the Earth's poles. The irritableness, depression and aggression from the syndrome potentially affects the behaviour of all the characters in this game. Having paranoid characters trapped in a dangerous situation in the Antarctic immediately recalls John Carpenter's film The Thing (1982), and the game acknowledges this and dispenses with any need to dwell on it by having copies of both The Thing and its same-named 2011 prequel present in the game's rec room video library. This gesture says: You know about The Thing, we know about The Thing. Let's just continue.

Winter-Over (WO) presents as a more cerebrally veiled mystery than KIW. This grows out of its more restricted setting, and the fact that its PC is not letting on, while questioning suspects, that Daniel's death is suspicious. It's being passed off as an accident. Characters and geography tended to be tied together in KIW. You would explore the map, meet different characters and speak to them on their own turf about their experiences. Memories were easier to anchor because each interviewee could be visualised in a particular place. In WO, all the characters work and live together in a finite space. Their work is interconnected. They are not met in discrete venues but roam the station. You will meet almost every character in every location at some point. In fact, a challenge is just working out where particular characters will be at given times when you need to speak to them. It is all challenging; remembering who's who, what to go back and ask someone about, or whom to spend more time with to butter them up. These elements would allow a player to investigate smarter on a replay, though.

WO also offers considerably less commentary on physical environment than KIW, which makes sense as WO's environment is closed and more uniform. This puts the focus on the character dialogue and the PC's thoughts on their interactions. It's a tricky balance keeping dialogue sufficiently lively while also indulging enough repetition that the player can grab onto some routines. While it is a bit drab to be given the exact same questions to ask every major NPC, it means the answers can be more easily compared, even as a samey feeling does threaten the first few questioning sessions.

The characters perhaps need more tics to enable them or their interrelated pecadilloes to be distinguished in the long run. Again, it's tough when they have to frame themselves almost without action, just by responding to similar questions asked repeatedly. It is exciting when you find something that will allow you to goad more out of someone you've already met, whether that something is revelations from a security camera, info about their medical problems or evidence of their handedness (the killer was not a lefty). But just finding a target character can be tough. If you haven't developed their schedule, which is collated for you in the automated Notes section as you play, you can spend many game days trying to encounter them again.

There is some dense plotting in WO, and while I always enjoyed learning new things during play, and feeling the tension of the looming deadline, events often felt like they were floating away from me. I couldn't find people I needed to find, or the PC would become too sleepy and need to take a break, or an exciting one-off event would occur (e.g. the lights go out) that would interrupt both my physical progress and train of thought.

Perhaps this is all less stressful if you consider, going in, that you might need to play again. Given the level of detailed I uncovered, I wasn't sure if I'd be prepared to try again (at least during IFComp) if I didn't succeed. The thought was more stressful than warming. I'd not acquired a sense of how important saving the game would be, either. Maybe I still don't have one. I don't think you can die during the investigation, but can you identify any landmark moments? The investigation is all cumulative. And there is ultimately a lot to enjoy, from the mystery and revelations, and the claustrophobic atmosphere, to the odd violent shock or attack upon the PC.

Comparing it to the broadly similar KIW, I enjoyed KIW more for its varied presentation of characters and the possibilities presented by its skill system, but both games offer a stiff mystery challenge coupled with a lot of helpful features. Both can be replayed. I think KIW offers more replay appeal.

I have finished the game. For reasons you will discover I may have been the first person to finish the game since the author.

(You can read my entries on Uncle Harry’s Will in order here.)

The copyright date on this game is 1981 although it may not have been published until 1982 (when it first shows up in the Dynacomp catalog). This is the year of the first Cannonball Run movie, sort of like the Gumball Rally movie but even sillier.

When I left off, I was enormously stuck on either crossing a collapsing bridge or getting by a locked gate. As I guessed, the bridge was just a trap, and the gate was the way to go. What I did not guess is that the locked gate would open more or less by magic.

This was down where there was a volcano erupting and lots of ash. You could PLAY RADIO (as hinted at by a sign nearby) to hear an update on the volcano:

THANKS FOR TUNING KXXX
AND NOW FOR THE NEWS:
MOUNT SAINT TROY ERUPTED TODAY SPEWING ASH AS FAR EAST AS AMIKAY
ROUTE 14 IS COVERED WITH UP TO FOUR FEET OF ASH IN PLACES
BE SURE TO CARRY A SHOVEL IF TRAVELING THAT WAY
MOTORISTS ARE CAUTIONED NOT TO GET TOO CLOSE TO THE VOLCANO
AS FURTHER ERUPTIONS ARE EXPECTED AT ANY TIME
THE NEAREST ACCESS ROAD IS COUNTY ROAD T8
HAVE A NICE TRIP

I had also found to approach further I needed to not be holding the shovel (“YOU ARE ON ROUTE 14 / A GREAT PILE OF ASH BLOCKS THE ROAD HERE”) and for some reason I was able to get by, which was clearly a bug, since holding the shovel means the player is stopped. Playing around with the bug some more I finally was able to SHOVEL ASH and get a message about clearing the ash away, and progress is possible.

Studying the radio message carefully, while I knew I had already checked every exit from every room in the volcano area, I wondered if I had checked any of them before listening to the radio, with the idea that hearing about “COUNTRY ROAD T8” might be the trigger to find such a road in the first place. I tested every exit and while I was at it tested the locked gate, and…

YOU ARE ON COUNTY FIRE ROAD T8
T8 LEADS INTO THE HILLS TO THE WEST
TO THE NORTHWEST IS MOUNT ST. TROY
SMOKE AND ASH POURS FROM THE MOUTH OF THE VOLCANO
THERE IS A LOUD POP! YOU HAVE A FLAT TIRE!

…what? Somehow the radio (plus the shoveling, I think?) was enough to trigger the door being open, which makes no sense at all. I’ve certainly had games with secret passages not revealed until you have the relevant info (as I had been testing here) but I’ve never had that be what triggers a lock to open.

Ugh. My first time through here, I didn’t have the spare tire replacement and had to re-do my steps so I had one before going through the tire-blowing. It happens both east-bound and west-bound so once through you can’t go back the same way.

Next is just a small maze-area of intersections, including a picnic table with a transit coupon you need to get through a toll gate later.

Also, if you like death scenes, there’s a volcano if you go the wrong way.

YOU ARE AT THE BASE OF THE VOLCANO
PLUMES OF SMOKE AND ASH RISE INTO THE AIR ABOVE YOU SUDDENLY, THE VOLCANO ERUPTS! PYROCLASTIC FLOWS POUR OVER THE RIM OF THE CRATER. GREAT BLACK CLOUDS OF ASH AND SMOKE COVER THE AREA. YOU ARE CHOKING! THE TEMPERATURE RISES TO 800 DEGREES. YOU ARE PAR-BROILED.TOO BAD
BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME!

Heading past the maze north runs you into “T5 WESTBOUND THROUGH A FOREST” where going west results in “A LOG BLOCKS YOUR WAY”. Fortunately, I had a chainsaw at the ready (my very first item picked up in the game) and did SAW LOG.

The road then turns south to an ENDLESS TUNNEL and this is a sort of gag to the player who might be wondering “did the code turns this into an infinite loop so it really is endless?

YOU ARE ON THE COAST ROAD
THERE IS A TUNNEL AHEAD TO THE SOUTH
A SIGN READS: ENDLESS TUNNEL
>S
YOU ARE IN THE ENDLESS TUNNEL
>S
YOU ARE IN THE ENDLESS TUNNEL
>S
YOU ARE IN THE ENDLESS TUNNEL
>S
YOU ARE IN THE ENDLESS TUNNEL
>S

It is not literally endless and you end up in the small town of Endless on the other side. The only things to do in Endless are take a toll road east back to Bordertown (using the coupon from the picnic table) or take a ferry ride over to the next town.

You may be thinking, “didn’t we use our ferry ticket already to get at the gas station card and be able to fuel up the car?” You’d be absolutely right. Fortunately, in the throes of being stuck on other things, I combed back over the original towns and found that if you use the ferry ticket up, it (“another one” I mean) magically re-appears back at the dump where it first appears.

YOU ARE AT THE ENDLESS FERRY
A BOAT IS WAITING TO LOAD
HAVE YOUR TICKET READY
>W
YOU ARE ON THE FERRY TO GOLD ISLAND
THE SEA IS ROUGH AND YOU ARE SEASICK
THE FERRY FINALLY DOCKS ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE ISLAND
TO THE NORTH CAN BE SEEN A SMALL TOWN

The town of Yellowbar is large, annoying to map out, and a lot of it consists of recently built homes on “Simba Estates”. To be fair this describes my experience sometimes in navigating such communities. Would it kill them to use a grid?

>NW
YOU ARE ON GOLDEN DRIVE
THERE IS A CAR PARKED HERE
A SIGN TO THE NORTH READS:
SIMBA ESTATES
>N
YOU ARE AT THE INTERSECTION OF GOLDEN DRIVE AND ANDERSON
THERE ARE MANY NEW HOMES HERE
>W
YOU ARE AT THE CORNER OF MARCUS AND ANDERSON
>N
YOU ARE AT THE INTERSECTION OF MARCUS AND BARBER

With the “CAR PARKED HERE” I should put up a reminder we’ve been chasing the directions of a poem.

STAY ON THE ROAD OF THE GOLDEN BAR
‘TILL YOU FIND THE PLACE WITH THE PARKED CAR
FOLLOW THE LION ‘TILL YOU FIND THE SCHOOL

I guess Uncle Marcus is highly confident the parked car is just going to stay there forever. In a planned community? Maybe it’s one of the slacker Home Owner Associations. (To be fair, we’re in Imaginary Country Gamma, not the real United States or Canada or whatever.)

I spent a while searching for a “lion” and the general feel was oddly like a real road rally scavenger hunt as I went through the variety of road names (Jones, Miller, Johnson, Adams, Jackson, Barber, Anderson, Murphy, Thorp, Lomac, Todd, Owens…) searching for a potential pun, but no luck. However, I hadn’t tried messing around with the railroad tracks yet.

There are a couple points where there’s a railroad crossing, and trying to go along the railroad says you can’t go in a car. You have to disembark here and walk. Going in a tunnel collects another death.

OK, YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR CAR
>E
YOU ARE ON A W-E SET OF TRACKS
THERE IS A MOUNTAIN TO THE SOUTH
>E
YOU ARE ON THE TRACKS
THERE IS A TUNNEL ENTRANCE TO THE EAST
>E
YOU ARE IN A RAILROAD TUNNEL
IT IS VERY DARK BUT TO THE NORTH
YOU CAN SEE A LIGHT. IT IS GETTING CLOSER AND CLOSER. IT IS A TRAIN!!
YOU ARE RUN OVER. TOUGH LUCK!

However, one part of the tracks leads you to a “roaring” noise that surely is what was meant by the lion.

YOU ARE ON THE TRACKS EAST OF TOWN
THE TRACKS SWING SE AND WEST HERE
>SE
YOU ARE ON THE TRACKS SOUTH OF A LARGE MOUNTAIN
A SIDING TO THE NORTH PARALLELS THE TRACKS HERE
THERE IS A CABOOSE SETTING ON THE SIDING YOU CAN HERE A ROARING SOUND COMING FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CABOOSE
>N
YOU ARE AT THE EAST END OF THE CABOOSE
THERE IS A DOOR INTO THE CABOOSE HERE
THE ROARING SOUND IS LOUDER HERE
>W
YOU ARE IN THE CABOOSE
THERE IS A DOOR AT THE EAST END
THERE IS A SMALL CROWBAR LAYING HERE

The roaring is not a train about to run us over (as the game intentionally seems to indicate) but a waterfall.

YOU ARE ON THE EDGE OF A CLIFF
IN A CANYON BELOW TO THE NORTH IS A RAGING RIVER FILLED WITH ROCKS A HIGH WATERFALL TO THE NE POURS TONS OF WATER INTO THE RIVER
A BOILING CLOUD OF MIST RISES FROM THE BASE OF THE FALLS
THERE IS A TRAIL LEADING INTO THE CANYON TO THE NW

The trail leads to the penultimate section of the game.

A fork in a trail leads one way to Bradley Academy (abandoned) and the other way to a baseball field (also abandoned).

THE TRAIL HERE RUN N-S
TO THE EAST IS THE ROARING RIVER
TO THE WEST A HIGH CLIFF RISES 200 FEET
>N
YOU ARE AT A FORK IN THE TRAIL
THE NW FORK LEADS UP THE SIDE OF THE CLIFF
THE NE FORK CONTINUES ALONG THE WEST BANK OF THE RIVER
A SIGN TO THE NW READS: BRADLEY ACADEMY
A TRAIL LEADS SOUTH
>NW
YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE CLIFF
THERE IS AN OLD SCHOOLYARD HERE
THE SCHOOL BUILDING HAS BEEN TORN DOWN
SOME SCATTERED LUMBER LIES ABOUT HERE
TO THE WEST IS A LARGE BOULDER
TO THE EAST IS THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF
A FENCE BORDERS THE OTHER THREE SIDES OF THE YARD

Just a reminder of the last part of the poem:

FOLLOW THE LION ‘TILL YOU FIND THE SCHOOL
CLIMB ON UP AND SEE THE JEWEL
FROM THE TOP YOU CAN SEE REAL GOOD
THE THING YOU WANT’S BENEATH THE WOOD
TAKE THE THING THAT YOU’LL FIND THERE
THEN GO AND SEARCH; YOU’LL KNOW WHERE

“Climb on up” seems to refer to a fir tree that you can climb.

YOU ARE ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF A LARGE POOL
THE POOL IS A CALM BACKWATER OF THE RIVER
THE RIVER BENDS TO THE EAST HERE
THERE ARE MANY FISH IN THE POOL
A SIGN READS: NO FISHING
THE TRAIL TURNS WEST AROUND THE POOL AND TO THE SOUTH
>W
YOU ARE ON THE NORTH SIDE OF THE POOL
THERE IS A LARGE FIR TREE HERE
THE TRAIL LEADS TO THE EAST
AND WEST FROM HERE
>U
YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE TREE
YOU CAN SEE A BASEBALL FIELD TO THE NE
ON TOP OF THE CLIFF
THERE IS A TRAIL TO THE NE LEADING UP THE CLIFF
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL IS HIDDEN IN BUSHES
AT THE BASE OF THE CLIFF

Specifically, at right field in the baseball field, you can find a piece of wood and a boulder. At the SW corner of the Bradley Academy, you can also find a piece of wood (a “board”) and a boulder.

YOU ARE AT THE SW CORNER OF THE SCHOOLYARD
THERE IS A LARGE BOULDER HERE
THERE IS A SMALL BOARD LAYING ON THE GROUND HERE

However, despite the crowbar in hand, neither boulder wants to budge (with PULL or PUSH or MOVE) and there is nothing under either piece of wood.

For a time, I felt quite a nice vibe from the game here, as I started searching around both the baseball diamond and the school looking for some way of thinking of “BENEATH THE WOOD” in a less literal way, kind of like the lion. Since I had it mapped out the game felt briefly like a real scavenger hunt.

Unfortunately, yes, “briefly”, especially when I found out what was required. At least I had the right suspicion: home plate at the baseball field.

YOU ARE IN RIGHT FIELD
THERE IS A LARGE BOULDER HERE
THERE IS A PIECE OF WOOD LAYING ON THE GROUND HERE
>W
YOU ARE ON FIRST BASE
>W
YOU ARE AT THE SW END OF THE FIELD
THERE IS A WOODEN PLATE IN THE GROUND HERE
CHALK LINES LEAD TO FIRST AND THIRD BASE

Home plate is made out of wood! The other two pieces of wood were deceptions. This would be classy if the game did not then

a.) require guess the verb

b.) require guess the noun

c.) hard crash upon resolving both a.) and b.)

PUSH PLATE (“NOTHING HAPPENS!”), MOVE PLATE (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND MOVE PLATE”), and LIFT PLATE (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND LIFT PLATE”) don’t work. You also can’t take the item, either. No, the game is fishing for the exact verb and noun LIFT HOME (and yes, it seems like a moment before LIFT isn’t even an understood verb!)

>LIFT PLATE
I DON’T UNDERSTAND LIFT PLATE
>LIFT HOME
THERE IS AN ENVELOPE UNDER HOME
SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE 1730
READY

This could have been the best moment in the game — I really did puzzle the answer out carefully, and the boulder plus crowbar led to enough side-deception to make this work.

1730!V0$\P1=1\X(12)=L\\GOTO300

The double-slash at the end (before GOTO 300) is wrong. There should be only one. This is not the sort of error that would be done by disk corruption; I’m fairly sure this was an authentic author-typo, meaning nobody bothered to test the game to the end (and nobody complained because who would find LIFT HOME?)

Rather than fixing the code (before starting with the RUN command, type that 1730 line but with only one double-slash before GOTO 300) and going through everything again hoping it wouldn’t break, I changed the code to give me the envelope at the very start. The envelope has a ferry ticket (so you can go back across, you can then take the toll road to freeway-country) a latchkey, and a note.

THE NOTE READS: GO SEARCH MY HOUSE IN EASTPORT-WHERE YOU STARTED!

Weirdly, UNLOCK DOOR never works and always claims you don’t have a key, while you’re holding a key. You can just go WEST while at the locked front door with the key in hand, though.

Now we’re in a relatively normal house-searching game! No more driving.

YOU ARE IN THE MASTER BEDROOM
THERE IS AN LARGE OLD BED AND A
SMALL DRESSER HERE
A DOOR LEADS NORTH
>OPEN DRESSER
THERE IS A PAPER WITH NUMBERS ON IT IN THE DRESSER DRAWER
>GET PAPER
OK
>READ PAPER
THE SLIP OF PAPER READS: 22R-12L-45R-7L

In addition to the safe combo in a dresser, there’s a padlock key in a desk. This lets you tromp downstairs through a padlocked door into a storage room and the final challenge of the game: fiddling with the parser, yet again.

YOU ARE IN A STORAGE ROOM
THERE IS MUCH JUNK SETTING AROUND THE ROOM
THERE IS A FRAMED PICTURE OF UNCLE HARRY ON THE NORTH WALL
ON THE EAST WALL IS A LARGE MOOSE HEAD
THERE IS A DOOR TO THE WEST AND SOUTH

I was out of places to go and this came after the locked door and its picture, it ought to be hiding the safe, right? Still, it was infuriatingly hard to come up with the only verb that would work, SLIDE.

>SLIDE PICTURE
THE PICTURE SLIDES TO THE SIDE REVEALING A SAFE IN THE WALL

Fortunately, you do not then have to master a parser syntax for working out how to spin right 22 times etc.

>OPEN SAFE
AS YOU DIAL THE COMBINATION THE SAFE CLICKS OPEN
THERE IS A RUMBLING SOUND
A SECTION OF THE NORTH WALL SLIDES BACK
REVEALING A ROOM UNDER THE OUTSIDE STAIRS
>N
YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM UNDER
THE OUTSIDE STAIRWAY TO THE COAL SHUTE
THERE IS A LARGE CHEST HERE
THERE IS A DOOR TO THE SOUTH
>OPEN CHEST
THERE IS A STACK OF TWENTYS AND A LETTER IN THE CHEST
>GET LETTER
I DON’T UNDERSTAND GET LETTER

Sure, let’s give the parser one last quirk. No, just read:

READ LETTER
THE LETTER READS:
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE PERSERVERED TO THE END OF THE SEARCH! THE MONEY YOU HAVE FOUND IN MY CHEST WILL PAY YOUR WAY TO ENGLAND THERE, YOU’LL FIND YOUR NEXT ADVENTURE. SOMEWHERE IN WHEMBLY CASTLE LIES HIDDEN A HUGE TREASURE OF JEWELS AND GOLD. HIDDEN THERE BY YOUR GREAT, GREAT, GRANDFATHER ALMOST TWOHUNDRED YEARS AGO. MANY HAVE SEARCHED, BUT NO ONE HAS FOUND IT. WITH YOUR LOGIC AND INTELIGENCE I KNOW YOU WILL BE ABLE TO FIND IT! GOOD LUCK!
UNCLE HARRY

“LOGIC AND INTELIGENCE”, eh?

Thus the sequel (published with this game by Dynacomp) is now set up. However, I’m not sure how obvious it was from the size of the maps (and the moments of parser struggle, and the hard game crash): this took a lot of energy to play, so I’m going to kick the sequel (Whembly Castle) further down my 1982 list.

Some aspects had a unique aura. I’ve never seen an attempt (in computer game form) to capture the gimmick rally and while the riddle was not airtight it did give the experience a stronger feel than Just One Map Section After Another. The sheer amount of mapping went far too extreme but I can at least see conceptually what the author was going for. The noble failures of history can be just as useful to look at as the masterworks.

From the Japanese movie poster for Cannonball Run III (aka Speed Zone), via eBay. Cannonball Run (1981) and Cannonball Run II (1984) were followed by one last sequel to make a trilogy in 1989, where the racers all get arrested right before the event starts and the sponsors need to find new drivers.

7 days ago

The idea that there are visitors to the planet, that they are not only visiting now but have been visiting since prehistory, and how it affects us is a very interesting idea. I suppose, just looking up into the night sky at all those millions of stars up there, you wonder if it’s possible. I have a pet theory that everyone wants to have that experience where they’re driving down a desert road at night, and they see something and can’t explain what it is. I think it’s all about religion. Not necessarily Christian religion, but it’s about beliefs — and meaning and truth and why are we here and why are they here and who’s lying to us. Encountering a UFO would be like witnessing a miracle.

— Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files

In July of 1993 — or maybe it was 1992 — a British music archivist named Ray Santilli traveled to Cleveland, Ohio, a city which had been a hotbed of early rock and roll three and a half decades previously, hosting concerts by everyone from Bill Haley to Elvis Presley. Now, Santilli was hoping to unearth some buried treasures of that era for the sake of posterity and profit: audio recordings, pictures, or, best of all if possible, video footage of one of the most important cultural movements of the twentieth century in its nascent stage.

Santilli put an announcement in a local newspaper, explaining who he was and what he had come for, dangling the prospect of generous compensation for any artifacts that fit the bill. Amidst a lot of dross and false leads, he received a call from a fellow whose 82-year-old father, so the caller claimed, had just what the energetic Briton dreamed of finding here in the American heartland. The elderly man in question, whom Santilli would later identify only as “Jack B.,” had worked a big open-air concert in Cleveland in 1957 as a cameraman. While some of the footage he had shot there was already a part of the public record, he had some additional reels of heretofore unseen film stashed in his attic in Florida, the state to which he had retired some years ago.

Santilli secured an invitation to visit Jack in Florida the next time he came to the United States; luckily, this was to happen in just a few months. When he arrived at the former cameraman’s snug little home, he was gratified to learn that his host was a straight shooter. Just as promised, Jack produced footage of a lean and hungry Elvis Presley giving the staid America of the Eisenhower era a good solid rocking and rolling. The transaction was quickly concluded: Santilli handed Jack a wad of cash, and Jack handed over the film, which Santilli would go on to include in a videotape compilation of early Elvis and Johnny Cash concert performances.

He was packing his suitcase in his hotel room the next morning, feeling quite pleased with himself at having gotten what he had come for, when Jack unexpectedly rang him up again. “Ray, are you interested in other material as well?” asked the old man at the other end of the line. Santilli said cautiously that he might be, depending on what it was. “Then come over here again,” said Jack. “I have something here that may be even more interesting than the Elvis film.”

Intrigued despite himself, Santilli swung by the house on his way to the airport. Jack sat him down on the couch and pointed to a raggedy cardboard box that sat on the living-room floor. It was full of 16-millimeter film canisters. “Ray, have you ever heard of the Roswell incident?” asked Jack. Santilli shook his head. “Well,” said Jack, “a UFO crashed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. I filmed the salvaging.”

Jack went on to explain that he had been drafted into the United States Army during the Second World War, but that a childhood bout with polio had rendered him unfit for combat duty in the eyes of the military. Instead he had worked as a cameraman for the Army during and after the war; he hadn’t left the service until 1952. During his near-decade in uniform, he had filmed various top-secret projects and tests, including the very first explosion of an atomic bomb in another part of the New Mexico desert. But nothing compared to the day in 1947 when he was sent to Roswell to document everything that was going on there. He filmed extensively at the crash site of the UFO. And then he was flown to a military base near Dallas, Texas, to film the autopsies of two alien corpses that had been recovered from the wreckage. This was the footage that he had been storing in his attic all this time. According to him, the Army had simply forgotten to send anyone around to pick it up. Now, at long last, he had decided to sell it, in order to pay for a big wedding for his favorite granddaughter. He wanted $150,000 in cash — “owing to the taxes, you know. You get the film. I get the money. And you tell nobody where you got the film from.”

Santilli told Jack that he wasn’t the sort of person to buy anything sight unseen. Acceding to the wisdom of this policy, Jack set up the same projector on which they had watched Elvis’s gyrations the day before, pulled the curtains down over the windows, and started the machine clack-clacking into motion. On a clear patch of wall in front of him, Santilli saw the flickering images that would transfix the world a couple of years later. A humanoid but plainly inhuman corpse lay on a bare metal table. It had a bulbous head and eyes and a shrunken, childlike body with a distended belly that caused him to wonder if it was pregnant. It had two arms and two legs, but six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. It appeared to be completely hairless, its skin vaguely fish-like in pallor and texture. Two presumably human doctors, their faces hidden beneath the hooded contamination suits they wore, examined and then cut the body open while a third man in a face mask looked on from behind a pane of safety glass.

Passionate about music though he was, Santilli recognized immediately that this was more important — and vastly more valuable — than all of the lost rock-and-roll footage in the world combined. If, that is, it really was what Jack claimed it to be.

The reels were stamped with the Kodak name. So, Santilli placed a call right then and there to that company’s headquarters in Rochester, New York, and asked to be forwarded to the records department. “I have some old 16-millimeter film which is supposed to date back to 1947,” he said to the man who came on the line. “How can I tell whether this is true?”

“We have a simple system for that,” answered the man from Kodak. “There should be a geometric code on the edge of the film. What symbols do you see there?”

“A square and a triangle,” said Santilli.

“Good. Just a moment… yes, that was 1947.”

Santilli was satisfied. Unfortunately, though, he wasn’t a wealthy man; he certainly didn’t have $150,000 in his pocket to hand to give to Jack there and then. Telling the old man that he would get in touch again just as soon as he could, he flew home to London to start beating the bushes for the funds.

It proved harder to raise the money than he had ever anticipated. Even leaving aside how absurd this claim of an alien-autopsy film sounded on the face of it, few would have been eager under any circumstances to pony up $150,000 for a source whose real identity they didn’t even know, for a piece of merchandise that only Santilli himself had seen. Convinced that he was on the cusp of a coup that would make the revelations of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein seem like small potatoes, Santilli called every number in his Rolodex in a near panic. For he knew that Jack’s health was not particularly good, and he lived in fear that the old man would die on him before he could come up with the money. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until November of 1994 that he was able to convince a German music producer named Volker Spielberg to finance the purchase. That same month, Santilli made the round trip to Florida again, returning this time with the 22 reels of film in his luggage.

Ray Santilli and his financial backer Volker Spielberg.

Being nearly 50 years old and having been stored in less than ideal conditions throughout that time, many of the reels were in extremely bad shape. Santilli therefore sent them first to a conservator, to be restored as much as possible and then copied onto other media for long-term preservation. Once that had been done, it was finally time to announce the film’s existence to the world.

On March 11, 1995, Santilli invited to a London movie theater a bizarre cross-section of public figures: serious journalists along with not-so-serious entertainers; prominent UFO believers along with skeptics; noted scientists along with representatives of most of the world’s major religious faiths; even the former head of the British Ministry of Defence’s controversial, recently concluded “UFO Project.” That project had declared in its final summary that it could find no evidence that extraterrestrials had ever visited our planet, much less that any terrestrial government had conspired to cover up such an event. Perhaps its director would now feel compelled to revisit the matter.

Or maybe not. “The result [of the first screening] was absolute, total rejection,” lamented Santilli later on. “They all considered it a swindle. Some even left in the middle of the show.”

Undaunted, Santilli kept right on knocking on doors. Most of the news organizations he contacted wanted to do a full forensic examination of the film before they would agree to license it; this Santilli did not wish to allow. Rupert Murdoch, however, was not so scrupulous.

Already at that time, Murdoch was the worldwide king of tabloid journalism and much else in mass media besides. He was by then well along in the process of building a staggering fortune out of the understanding that many or most consumers of “news” don’t want objective facts; they want news that will entertain them, at the same time that it confirms the worldviews to which they are most predisposed. His fortune would only continue to grow over the decades to come, as he continued to put this understanding into ruthless practice.

Murdoch came out of a private screening of the alien-autopsy film knowing that he simply had to have it. He prepared a contract which made Santilli and his largely silent partner Volker Spielberg rich men overnight. Then he made plans to show the film to maximum advantage all over the world — including in the biggest media market of them all, the country of its alleged origin. He passed the film to Robert Kiviat, the coordinating producer of an American “documentary” series called Encounters. Airing on Murdoch’s young and scrappy Fox television network, Encounters dealt in alien abductions, crop circles, ghosts, Bigfoot, and similar paranormal and/or conspiratorial fodder.

On Tuesday, August 28, 1995, Fox broadcast a program called Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?, whose one-hour running time — or rather 45 minutes with commercials — included about four of the nineteen and a half minutes of footage which Santilli had provided to Murdoch. The balance of the time was spent talking about the film, plus the long-rumored UFO crash at Roswell whose veracity it might prove.

The host of the program was Jonathan Frakes, the actor who had played Commander Will Riker of the starship Enterprise on the recently concluded television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, and was thereby presumed to have some special insight into aliens from outer space. Although the title of the show seemed to describe it as an inquiry into the authenticity of the film, the affirmative case was given a lot more air time than the negative. “It was not what you would expect from a major network that thought it was broadcasting a history-making film,” noted the magazine Skeptical Inquirer later on. “It was, however, what you would expect from a network trying very hard not to spoil an illusion.” The show’s field director, John Jopson, claims today that he was told in no uncertain terms to can it when he persisted in asking too many questions of Ray Santilli. “Cut the Perry Mason act and finish the show,” is what he says that Robert Kiviat told him. “It was made clear to me that, if the footage was exposed as a hoax, the ratings would suffer,” he elaborates. (Kiviat denies that these exchanges ever took place.)

In place of a hard-hitting interrogation of Santilli, an expert from Kodak testified that the film stock  appeared to stem from 1927, 1947, or 1967 (it turned out that the geometric codes were periodically reused); a former military cameraman who had worked during the same era as Jack B. testified that the film was consistent with the equipment and shooting techniques he had employed; the prominent pathologist Cyril Wecht testified that the men seen performing the autopsy in the film were, judging from the procedures they followed, “either [themselves] pathologists or surgeons who have done a fair number of autopsies”; the Hollywood special-effects guru Stan Winston testified that “my hats are off to the people who created it — or [to] the poor alien who is dead on the table.”

Like his fellow Star Trek alumnus William Shatner before him, Jonathan Frakes wasn’t one to look the gift horse of a paying gig in the mouth. “Patrick Stewart turns all this shit down,” he told journalist Emily Nussbaum decades later. “Because I’m such a whore, I took this, and the producer hired me for another couple of jobs.” He even became an executive producer and occasional guest star on a scripted television series called… you guessed it, Roswell.

The program proved every bit the cultural bombshell and ratings bonanza Rupert Murdoch had thought it could be. It became the most-watched show in its time slot that evening, a major achievement for Fox, which normally still lagged well behind CBS, NBC, and ABC, the older “Big Three” American networks. From one day to the next, the water-cooler discourse in the country switched from such comparatively prosaic matters as the Oklahoma City bombing and the O.J. Simpson murder trial to aliens and UFOs and Roswell, Roswell, Roswell. The demand from those who had missed the program’s first airing was so enormous that Fox showed it again a week later, with three precious additional minutes of footage from the film appended onto the end. Even more households tuned in to watch this encore.

Meanwhile Murdoch was using his far-flung media empire to bring the same show to other markets, with much the same results. The buzz eventually reached all the way to the ears of the most powerful man in the world. On November 30, 1995, during a state visit to Northern Ireland, President Bill Clinton was asked by a twelve-year-old boy what he knew about Roswell and the alien-autopsy film. Cracking an awkward smile, he answered, “If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn’t tell me about it.”

Skeptical voices had a hard time cutting through the excitement. Even they had to acknowledge that, if it was a fake, the film wasn’t an entirely inept or thoughtless one. For example, the clock and the telephone that could be seen on the wall of the examination room, even the metal tray used to hold the doctors’ saws and scalpels, were period correct.

All the same, there were some serious discordances to be espied as well, discordances which only became clearer once it was possible to view all nineteen and a half minutes at once on the inevitable home-video release. “Ufologists” wondered why the aliens in the film didn’t fully agree with the eye-witness accounts of people who had supposedly seen the bodies after the crash at Roswell; their aliens had no ears and four fingers, whereas these ones had small ears and six fingers. Scientists wondered at the strange suits worn by the doctors, which could have protected them from neither radiation nor biological contaminants; the one useful purpose they did seem to serve was to conceal the faces and thus the identities of the doctors themselves. And then, you didn’t have to be a ufologist or a scientist to wonder why an historic event such as this one would have had only four witnesses including the cameraman, why the autopsy was done as if everyone involved had someplace else he urgently needed to be in an hour or so, and why the cameraman was so gosh-darned bad at his job, allowing his camera to go out of focus and stay that way every time he zoomed in for a closeup.

For that matter, where was the cameraman anyway? Even if Ray Santilli himself refused to share any further information — thus honoring, so he said, the promise of anonymity which he had made to the old man — couldn’t any competent private investigator track down a man in his mid-eighties who currently lived in Florida, had formerly lived in Ohio, had contracted polio as a child, and had been drafted into the Army during the Second World War and continued to serve until 1952? Many investigators tried, but none could locate him.

To make matters worse, the details of Santilli’s story kept changing, much to the dismay of those who craved just one set of facts to check. For example, as I alluded to at the beginning of this article, sometimes it was 1992 and sometimes 1993 when he first encountered the film. His story wasn’t even internally consistent when you really stopped to think about it. Why was Jack B. worried about taxes when he expected to be paid under the table with a proverbial unmarked envelope full of cash?

More information emerged from Kodak, revealing that the film they had examined had consisted only of five frames of blank leader, a tiny snippet of celluloid which could have come from anywhere: “Sure, it could be an old film, but it doesn’t mean it is what the aliens were filmed on.”

Arguably the most devastating criticisms came from a legion of pathologists, who, in marked contrast to their credulous colleagues on the Fox special, saw all sorts of oddities and inconsistencies in the footage.^[1]It turned out that Cyril Wecht, Fox’s chosen pathologist, had a penchant for conspiracy theories long before the alien-autopsy special was aired. In 1978, he was one of four pathologists who were allowed to reexamine all of the material gathered during the John F. Kennedy autopsy; he was the only one who insisted that the president’s wounds were inconsistent with the conclusion of the Warren Commission that there had been only one shooter. He went on to write several books on the subject, and served as a consultant to Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, which pushed the theory of an inside job by the CIA. They said that the doctors held their instruments awkwardly and seemed to have no method whatsoever to their madness, making random slices and scooping out the aliens’ organs willy-nilly. Speaking of which: the aliens themselves seemed more like grotty Halloween piñatas than formerly living organisms, mere sacks filled with amorphous lumps of viscera. “I cannot fathom that an alien who had external organs so much like ours could not have some sort of definitive structural organs internally,” said one pathologist by the name of Ed Uthman. Similarly, special-effects experts — the ones not contacted by Fox — said that, while the film was not a terrible fake by any means, these dead aliens were nevertheless well within the scope of their craft to provide to a filmmaker of even modest means. Based on testimony like this, even many ardent ufologists became convinced that the film was a fraud, possibly deliberately planted by a government that was eager to discredit their avocation.

Finally, there was the central absurdity that always dogged all of the talk of Roswell: that these aliens had made their way to Earth over distances of which the human mind can scarcely conceive, avoiding meteors and black holes and all sorts of other cosmic perils that are equally far removed from our capability to even imagine, only to get a stray pigeon or something stuck in their spaceship’s engine grille and wipe out in some farmer’s field. It could happen, one had to assume, but boy, did the odds seem stacked against it.

Despite all of these commonsense objections, the public consensus that the film was as likely real as not held for quite some time across much of the Western world. Interestingly, the one outlier here was Germany, a country which had lived through another embarrassing hoax at the beginning of the previous decade, when a rogue journalist from the respected magazine Stern and an underworld document forger had produced a set of purported diaries written by Adolf Hitler that had equally entranced the world. Call it a case of once bitten, twice shy; both Stern and its arch-rival Der Spiegel came out stridently against the film’s authenticity from the start. Obviously relishing the chance to pour a bit more salt into an old wound, Der Spiegel explicitly called the alien-autopsy film the 1990s equivalent to the Hitler diaries. Stern didn’t go quite that far, but it did roundly chastise the film’s peddlers. “If you want to fool us, you have to try a little harder,” it wrote with the hard-won wisdom of experience.

The Germans and the other skeptics were right, of course. The origin story I passed on to you at the beginning of this article — at least everything after Santilli’s acquisition of his footage of Elvis Presley in concert — is a complete lie. Facing increasing pressure to explain the many aspects of his story that didn’t fully make sense, Santilli committed a blatant self-own in 1997, when he showed pictures of the canisters in which, so he claimed, the film had been stored when he acquired it. (He was still refusing to provide the artifacts themselves for forensic examination.) The canisters were neatly labeled, “Property of the Department of Defense.” But, sadly for him, no agency of the American government had yet existed under that name at the time the autopsy was supposed to have been conducted.

And so the fever dream broke. Switching tacks without missing a beat, Fox in 1998 included the film in a television special called World’s Greatest Hoaxes, as if they had had nothing to do with this hoax’s dissemination. The producer and mastermind of that show was… Robert Kiviat, the man behind the original alien-autopsy special. You can’t make this stuff up.

In 2004, long after the cultural moment that had produced the alien-autopsy sensation had passed into history, Ray Santilli finally came clean — partially, at any rate. He admitted to the British television presenter Eamonn Holmes that he and a few friends had faked the film in a vacant London flat, using “aliens” that had been made out of plaster and stuffed with sheep brains, chicken entrails, and other assorted offal picked up at a local butcher shop. (The smell in the apartment, the hoaxers said, was “horrendous.”) After the filming was complete, they had cut what was left of the aliens up into small pieces and dropped them into dumpsters all over the city, as you do when you’re looking to hide the evidence of a crime.

Plainly worried about his legal exposure for perpetrating this fraud that had made him a millionaire, Santilli hedged his bets by insisting that he really had bought an alien-autopsy film from Jack B. in Florida, but that the reels that held it had literally crumbled into dust within a few days of being exposed to the air in London. (Was pollution particularly bad that year?) The film he had sold to Rupert Murdoch had been a “reconstruction” of what he had seen on the original reels. “It’s no different from restoring a work of art like the Mona Lisa,” he insisted. This might be true — if, that is, an art restorer’s job involved painting from scratch a new version of a work he had once glimpsed briefly, then passing it off as the original. As it is, this process goes by the alternative name of “forgery” in most circles. Even Santilli could hardly keep a straight face as he spouted this nonsense to a wide-eyed Eamonn Holmes. His tell is his smirk.

The reason Santilli suddenly decided at this late date to share even this much of the truth is equally plain. A new scripted cinema film was in the offing, entitled simply Alien Autopsy, telling a heavily fictionalized, comedic version of his story. There was now more money to be made from the truth than from the lie, in other words.

Since then, the forgery that made Santilli rich has well and truly passed into history as a classic piece of 1990s kitsch. Der Spiegel was correct; the alien-autopsy film did indeed become the 1990s’ closest equivalent to the Hitler diaries, complete with the same “what the hell was everyone thinking?” quality when looked back upon from the perspective of posterity. Unlike the two main perpetrators of that fraud, both of whom did time in West German prisons, Ray Santilli and his partners have never suffered any legal or financial consequences for their actions. For all that far worse criminals have gone equally unpunished, one still can’t help but feel that there is some injustice in this. The fact is, however, that Rupert Murdoch’s operation had no reason to pursue the matter. They had gotten many times their purchase price out of the film, whose authenticity had never been of any real concern to them. Only the rubes were duped. Ah, well… at least the 2006 cinema film was a flop. Its subject matter felt as outmoded by then as grunge music and Britpop.

Today only the most committed of UFO evangelists still believe in the original alien-autopsy film. Getting the burden of proof hopelessly muddled, these folks now demand that Santilli substantiate not his old claim that the film is genuine but his new one that he faked it. Naturally, his ongoing failure to do so demonstrates that he must have been intimidated by shadowy government agents into concocting the bogus tale of forgery. There’s something touching about people who want to believe so very, very badly, people for whom aliens have become a sort of religion.

To the jaded eyes of the rest of us, on the other hand, the conspiracy theories of the 1990s now seem charmingly quaint. We might even be tempted to see them as proof of an axiom that, when we humans lack sufficient stuff to worry about, we invent worries to fill that space. In a time when North America and Western Europe were at peace, were as wealthy as they had ever been, and seemed to have definitively demonstrated that liberal democracy and free markets were political perfection achieved — “the end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama so infamously put it — what else was there to satisfy their citizens’ need to worry than alien abductions, alien technologies, and a myriad of equally improbable government conspiracies surrounding it all? Then, as soon as September 11, 2001, showed that history just keeps marching on and that we actually had had something substantive to worry about during the previous decade, if only we had recognized it, all of that stuff blew away like tinfoil hats in the wind.

For all that this point of view is inevitably oversimplified, I do feel like there’s a kernel of truth there. More unnerving, however, is the structural pattern of 1990s conspiracy theories, a pattern which has proved more enduring than their content. Like the tabloid-news outlets which did so much to feed them, they blurred the lines between entertainment and information. People believed them mostly, it seems to me, not so much because they needed something to worry about as because they were fun. It was fun to speculate about what the next layer of the onion might be, fun to feel oneself to be privy to so many secrets and lies. For many people, it was fun as well to have a longstanding suspicion that “the system” had always been out to get them confirmed. Despite all their nefarious deeds and actors, conspiracy theories, then as now, were a sort of comfort food, keeping the truly difficult questions in life and politics, which don’t tend to have such bright neon lines separating good from evil, firmly at bay.

When all was said and done, did their adherents during the 1990s really believe aliens were everywhere? From the outside, it was hard to say for any given individual — and maybe from the inside as well. Following the tales about Roswell and crop circles and human abductions and all the rest became a form of fandom, not that far removed from the fannish dissection of each new episode of, say, Twin Peaks — or of The X-Files.

Yes, we have finally arrived at the real elephant in this particular room. While the alien-autopsy film was only a blip on the pop-culture radar, grist for the mill of Jeopardy! and Trivial Pursuit in the decades that followed, The X-Files, which likewise aired on Rupert Murdoch’s young Fox television network, became a veritable way of life for its most committed fans. Its first episode was broadcast in September of 1993, two years before the alien-autopsy special. By popularizing the ideas of alien visitations and government conspiracies to conceal their existence — ideas which it did not invent, but which were largely confined to the cultural fringe prior to its arrival on the scene — it laid the groundwork for Ray Santilli’s hoax. Then it continued on for years after that bit of excitement had come and gone, to become not just a footnote to but an enduring icon of 1990s pop culture, guaranteed to appear on any top-ten list of the decade’s biggest hits.

“The X-Files is that rare show that seems to exist both in the time it aired and in the present,” notes Emily St. James, the coauthor of a recent book about the series. “It is, beyond all reason, timeless, despite being perhaps the ultimate TV show of the 1990s.” The X-Files changed the nature of television, the nature of popular entertainment writ large — and, for good or for ill, it also changed us, as people and as a people. A poll conducted by Time magazine and the news channel CNN in 1997 found that 64 percent of Americans believed that aliens were in the habit of visiting Earth. Absent The X-Files, the number would surely have been a small fraction of that size.

The story of The X-Files as a cultural phenomenon is something of a postmodern Gordian knot. The show borrowed much of its central mythology from fringe conspiracy theories. Then it went on to popularize such theories to such an extent that they could be introduced into the mainstream real-world discourse via organs like Ray Santilli’s film. And then, the show’s ongoing fiction began responding to the very same real-world currents which it itself had set in motion.

On April 12, 1996, just eight months after the alien-autopsy special, Fox aired the X-Files episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” one of the most bizarre of the series’s entire run. In it, FBI Agent Fox Mulder, the more credulous by far of the show’s two protagonists, has purchased an alien-autopsy film via mail order, prompting his more skeptical partner Dana Scully to complain that it is “even hokier than the one that aired on the Fox network.”  To provide the final dollop of irony, the real-world Fox network ran commercials for yet another repeat showing of the selfsame alien-autopsy special during the episode in question. The world had never seen a feedback loop quite like this before. It was an early example of a weird hyper-reality that has since become commonplace, such that mediated experiences of all descriptions have become more subjectively real to many of us than the objectively real people and places around us.

Another example of postmodern hyper-reality, from the grandiosely titled International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico. The biggest single exhibit in the place is a diorama which proudly depicts the scene in Santilli’s film, despite the fact that the latter has been so widely dismissed even by most ufologists. Is the museum meant to get at the truth of what happened in Roswell in 1947, or is it really about reveling in all the fantasies that have been spun from what was almost certainly a fallen espionage balloon? One senses that even the proprietors of the museum aren’t quite sure anymore. One thing only is crystal clear: that the museum and the town of Roswell make a lot of money from being the UFO capital of the world.

Next time, then, we will delve into the origin story of this other 1990s media artifact, whose influence was so pervasive throughout the decade — including in computer games, my usual beat around here. Take heart, for I can tell you that the truth is sometimes out there: this origin story will actually be true. Would I lie to you?

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

Sources: The books UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here — and Out There by Garrett M. Graff; “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X-Files, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright; The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien Abductions, and Government Coverups, edited by Kendrick Frazier, Barry Karr, and Joe Nickell; Beyond Roswell: The Alien Autopsy Film, Area 51, & the U.S. Government Coverup of UFOs by Michael Hesemann & Philip Mantle; The UFO Diaries: Travels in the Weird World of High Strangeness by Martin Plowman; Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files by Peter Knight; Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files by Zack Handlen & Emily St. James; X-Files Confidential: The Unauthorized X-Philes Compendium by Ed Edwards, The Little Book of Aliens by Adam Frank, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum, and Selling Hitler: The Classic Account of the Hitler Diaries by Robert Harris.

Online sources include Ray Santilli’s story of his acquisition of the alien-autopsy film at Aquarian Age Information Central and “How an Alien Autopsy Hoax Captured the World’s Imagination for a Decade” by Nathalie Lagerfeld at Time. Video sources include the 2004 episode of Eamonn Investigates in which Ray Santilli and friends finally come (partially) clean, the original Fox alien-autopsy special, and the full nineteen-minute alien-autopsy film.

Minor tech note: Planet IF seems to display a white gulf at the head of my blog post if I add a graphic, so I may not share the cover graphics of reviewed games any more, or I may at least experiment with placing them at the bottom of the posts instead of the head.

The Killings in Wasacona (KIW) by Steve Kollmansberger is a thoroughly involving and suspenseful police procedural murder-mystery game in which the player, a fresh FBI graduate, is tasked with unravelling the reasons behind an abruptly rising bodycount in the eponymous town. It comes as a choice-clicking Twine with some minor graphical embellishment in the form of maps. It also utilises a skill mechanics system. Whenever the agent's skills are challenged, the skill test is delivered transparently as a die roll, with the modifiers and results announced. The player can pick from various classes at the start to decide where they'd like their skill emphases to be. I picked Analyst because (a) I liked the sound of it and (b) Claudio Daffra recommended it in his review on intfiction.org (link to that review)

In my experience, games where you have to solve crimes by producing solutions are extremely challenging to beat. They're probably as difficult to create. Players will perceive all kinds of patterns in everything, assuming they get much of the everything – it's often part of the game design that just getting the information is half the challenge – and they can divine wild solutions that are rarely what the game wants when it's piper-paying time. Often these solutions can't even really be inputted, leading to frustration or disappointment.

KIW pretty much avoids all these problems. It has tight mechanics that focus the player on the clue-gathering, prose that summarises what the clues might mean in relation to clues already gathered, and it offers an ultimate refresher on gathered evidence.

The game's writing mode has a Visual Novel kind of feel. I don't refer to graphics. I mean that the characters are perhaps a little overlit. They speak with a touch too many exclamation marks, a touch too much exposition and too many gestures. This isn't my preferred mode, but by the end, I realised I probably actually needed this extra illumination in order to have been able to take in the amount of info the game was dispensing. The prose is efficient, at times rising to a level of strong perceptiveness that I'd have liked to have seen more of:

"The house is clearly lived in, but with the deferred maintenance one might expect from a single person trying to keep up with the demands of life and inflation."

KIW follows a cycle where turns usually take up an hour of the day, and there are on average five locations or people available to visit on any turn. The player can choose from amongst all the necessary tasks for the investigation: Visiting crime scenes, the morgue, the local college, interviewing other officers, interviewing townies, following hunches, even just driving around at random to see what hits. (Remember that Ted Bundy was twice caught red-handed by randomly patrolling officers in cars, just because they thought he was acting suspiciously, so don't neglect this option.)

KIW emphasises efficient use of the player's time, and a clock up in the corner creates a pleasurable suspense and urgency, even though technically, the game is generous in allowing you to get a lot done. The amount of apparently cross-referenced knowledge of the player's progress, used to cue developments in the prose, is also impressive. The game state looks to be complex but the game knows its state, and the player's. (Don't get me started on games that don't know their own state.)

Perhaps the only incident I found too unrealistic, and disconnected from other events, was when I was given the opportunity to accuse only the second officer I spoke to on the case of actually murdering the apparent drug overdose victim whose corpse she'd found – just because this officer displayed a prejudicial attitude towards drug dealers. With great bloody-mindedness, I took the game up on this offer. I admit I only did this because I'd yet to realise that the presentation of the skill-testing options (the first one had gone great! I'd had +3 on my roll) seemed to endorse them. Big font, imperative mode. I then realised all the choices appear this way. Lesson learnt, I botched this accusational die roll with a -6 modifier and thoroughly pissed off officer Amanda. However, I don't think Clarice Starling would ever have entertained this option in the first place.

There's finite time to solve the crimes, and when that time is up, the player chooses their solutions from an incredibly detailed menu of possibilities, considering the gathered evidence for each case in handy point form. Perhaps this has been done before, but I've not seen it, and it seemed a great compromise of all the systems involved. It helps the player a lot, but also doesn't make it at all easy to just guess solutions if one's not on the right track.

The results screen is also lots of fun, showing how the player's outcomes fare against everyone else who's played the game. I felt very positive during my investigation that I was handling KIW at an above average skill level for me re: this genre, but my outcomes were all those shared by the majority of players to date, probably indicating my averageness. I didn't feel bad about this. The Killings in Wasacona is a game with a lot of details, but which makes those details accessible. It made me feel the pressure of the investigation, the opening of possibilities, of mysteries, the thrill of discovery, the possibility of solution – and still give that final reminder that yes, solving crimes is  hard. I think future crime-solving games could take leafs from this one.

Dragon of Steelthorne by Vance Chance has been updated with two new chapters—30,000 words of new content. This update is free for all customers who have already purchased the game. For those who haven’t:

You can get Dragon of Steelthorne for 40% off until September 12th!

Rule a mighty city, fight battles, and embark on quests in a steampunk-fantasy land. As the Ardent or Ardessa of Lake Steelthorne, find love, power and a secret which could change the world.

Dragon of Steelthorne is a 170,000-word interactive novel by Vance Chance, weaving together story, city management and combat in a unique take on choice-based Interactive Fiction. Customize the level of challenge with four difficulty settings. It’s entirely text-based—without animation or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Now with two new chapters! Join your companions on more misadventures at the Great Carnival. Enjoy a night of dancing with them at the Windrose Ball.

• Play as male or female, straight or gay.
• Explore a story set in a world with steampunk and fantasy elements.
• Find romance from one of five possible love interests. Enjoy a romantic night with them at the Eternal Festival.
• Choose from one of five classes, with different effects on story, city management and combat.
• Manage a city and train soldiers to fight for you on missions.
• Enjoy a three-slot save system which provides the flexibility to try different options without losing progress or having to start over.

Decide the future of your mighty city as its leader and ruler.

This lists, straightforwardly, the games I know about that are missing, or have some technical barrier to playing them. Most of these were unearthed by people other than myself. Many are from the folks at CASA Solution Archive.

This is no doubt incomplete so feel free to reply with other possibilities. (Note I am not being super-inclusive; if something seems much more like an RPG but maybe-sorta could be an adventure, I am not including it.)

Wander (1974 original, Peter Langston, Mainframe)

I’ve played the modules for these now. This was a system originally made before Adventure, and the modules have a different feel from the normal mainstream of adventures, but people didn’t pay them much notice at the time.

castle: you explore a rural area and a castle searching for a beautiful damsel.
a3: you are the diplomat Retief (A sf character written by Keith Laumer) assigned to save earthmen on Aldebaran III
library: You explore a library after civilization has been destroyed.
tut: the player receives a tutorial in binary arithmetic.

However, these were made in a later port, and the original written in HP Basic is lost.

As I remember I came up with the idea for Wander and wrote an early version in HP Basic while I was still teaching at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA (that system limited names to six letters, so: WANDER, EMPIRE, CONVOY, SDRECK, GALAXY, etc.). Then I rewrote Wander in C on Harvard’s Unix V5 system shortly after our band moved to Boston in 1974. I got around to putting a copyright notice on it in 1978.

Underground (1978, Gary Kleppe, Mainframe)

According to David Cornelson, this was on the Milwaukee Public School’s mainframe in PDP Basic. While the original tape is lost it is possible the game made its way elsewhere.

Gary Kleppe himself later has added some details. The full list is in the comments, but here’s a few relevant parts that might help identify the game:

* At the entrance to the caves is a robot, but you have a laser pistol with which you can shoot it.

* There is a chess set locked down by a computer. If you initially play against the computer you will lose, but if you’ve found and read a certain book then you can beat it and it will give you a trophy (a treasure). After that you can blast the computer to take the set which is also a treasure.

* There’s a room where the description is written backwards, as is any message that gets displayed to you while you’re there. You also need to type commands backwards for the parser to understand them.

Miscellaneous Adventure Variants (19xx, Mainframe)

There’s a list of various lost adventure variants here as pulled from recollections.

I first played Adventure at Colorado State University (almost finished the game then the administrators did away with it :-( ). That version had a jeweled “loaf” in a cottage in the forest (evil witch, Hanzel and Gretel type cottage (made of candy)).

There’s also a “700 point” adventure variant apparently written in PL/I, which would make it the only game other than Ferret I know of to use the language; I also find the version from Norway written in NORD-FORTRAN 77 (for NORD computers) to be unique.

World of Odyssey (1979, Powersoft, Apple II)

A new ADVENTURE game utilizing the full power of DISK II, which enables the player to explore 353 rooms on six different levels full of dragons, orcs, dwarves, goblins, gold and jewels.

I incorrectly stated Will O’ the Wisp was Mark Capella’s only game when I wrote about it. He had an earlier one. Via Popular Mechanics, October 1980:

The same technique is used in programs such as World of Odyssey, from Powersoft, and Journey, from Softape. Their “maps,” however, are different from the original Adventure caves. Journey features some entertaining twists and traps and is written in a tongue-in-cheek style. Odyssey is another complete, complex, computerized cavern.

We have the manual, but not the game.

Pacifica (1979, Rainbow Computing, Apple II)

Discover the floating island and rescue the beautiful princess. To win you must recover the enchanted crown, but you face the threat of magic spells and demons.

This might be a CRPG. This might be an ambiguous hybrid. This is all the information we have.

New Adventure (1979/1980, Mark Niemiec)

Martian Adventure (1979/1980, Brad Templeton and Kieran Carroll)

These were written at the University of Waterloo and it mentions here that “Archive tapes for this mainframe exist and it might prove possible to get at the source code for these games.”

Adventure 751 (1980, David Long, Mainframe)

Written about in detail here. Has the unusual condition of an attempt at a BASIC port made without any access to the source code, but I’ve never been able to get it to run properly. Was on Compuserve, and there was a poster sold of the map; here is a portion that includes the section unique to Adventure 751:

The BASIC port was by Carl Ruby. The source code is up there if anyone wants to give it a try. It was giving me legions of errors.

In April, 1982, Carl Ruby, a junior at California Lutheran college, discovered this game and attempted to write a version in BASIC for the school’s Apple II computers. However, it wasn’t until 1986 when his father bought an Apple IIc that he was able to get any real work done. Learning machine language, and the data compression trick, he almost squeezed the entire program into memory, but in 1994 he discovered Microsoft QBASIC and the Apple Adventure project was abandoned. He completed a Microsoft version in 11 days, and it was completely debugged in October 1996.

The Pits (1980, Jim Walters and Dave Broadhurst, Mainframe)

This was on online services like The Source for a while and supposedly ran on a Prime minicomputer. the source code is stored at the Library of Congress, just like Castlequest was so getting at this is just a matter of process. Lots more research on the game here.

From a manual for Prime computers.

(Note that one of the lost Adventure variants from the earlier link was also on Prime systems, described as having over 1000 points. It is faintly possible the correspondent was confusing The Pits with Adventure.)

Sinbad (1980, Highland Computer Services, Apple II)

From the folks that brought you The Tarturian. Compute Sep./Oct. 1980 called it a “hires adventure-like game using over 100 pictures.”

This was in the company’s Oldorf/Tarturian phase so I’d expect a game like that.

From The Tarturian.

Spaceship to Nowhere (1981, Algray?, TRS-80)

Mentioned in a 1981 Algray catalog. Controlled with the arrow keys. Algray distributed games from other companies so it may not be the ones who made the game.

A Remarkable Experience (1981, Hoyle & Hoyle, Heathkit/TRS-80)

A Physical Experience (1981, Hoyle & Hoyle, Heathkit/TRS-80)

Discussed in this thread. This is the first and third of a trilogy. We have the second game (I haven’t played it yet) although here’s the cover of that one:

CPS Games Entire Collection (1982, Atari/ZX81/ZX Spectrum)

All of these games from a single company have had some magazine mentions but are gone. Here’s a giant ad from Popular Computing Weekly.

The Domed City
The Fourth Kind
The Ghost of Radun
Hasha the Thief
The Lord of the Rings: Part 1
Peter Rabbit and Father Willow
Peter Rabbit and the Magic Carrot
Peter Rabbit and the Naughty Owl
The Seven Cities of Cibola
The Tower of Brasht
Tummy Digs Goes Shopping
Tummy Digs Goes Walking in the Forest
The Wizard of Sham

You can check the ad for descriptions (and some wargames which I think are also lost); The Fourth Kind, intriguingly, is all about trying to communicate with extraterrestrials.

Love (1982, Remsoft, ZX81)

A game written “by women for women”. “A 16K ZX81 women’s adventure game set in the riotously funny Poke Hall. Meet the voluptuous Griselda, the rude Sinclair, Indian mystic Mr. Ram Pac, and more.”

Doom Valley (1982, Superior Software, Apple II)

This one rather famously is in the Book of Adventure Games but no copy exists. So we have the map and walkthrough but no game.

An aeroplane carrying UN ambassadors crashes near to a ski lodge where you are staying. For some unknown reason, unknown parties have captured the ambassadors. Your job is to rescue these ambassadors and return them to the ski lodge.

Also weirdly, appears in a legal guide to software copyright notices and gives a copyright of 1984 (rather than 1982).

Cathedral Adventure (1982, Phillip Joy, ZX81)

Mentioned in Sinclair User Issue 3. 15K of Basic, “describes more parts of a cathedral than I ever knew existed—more than 30 in fact. Shortish descriptions are given, sometimes including a cryptic clue—no pun intended—and more than 70 words are recognised.” The writer was stuck on the Mad Monk and couldn’t get farther.

Exciting Adventure (1982, Russed Software, ZX Spectrum)

This might not even be the real title! This is how it gets advertised:

Entire Software Magic Catalog (1982/1983, TRS-80)

I wrote about this company here.

The three adventure games are

Gods of Mt. Olympus
Marooned in Time
Lunar Mission

although absolutely everything listed in the catalog is gone. The catalog is the only evidence we have of the games or the company even existing.

Some of PAL Creations Catalog (1982, Tandy Color Computer)

They did Eno, Stalag, and Mansion of Doom, which I’ve written about before. They had other games listed in the ad here which are lost. (Space Escape isn’t, but it lands in 1983.) Eyeballing them, I think the adventures are

Isle of Fortune
Scavange Hunt (with that spelling in the ad)
Dark Castle
Witches Knight
Beacon
Evasion (sequel to Stalag)
Funhouse
Scatterbrain
Mother Lode

although they are mixed together with non-adventures so it’s hard to tell. Beacon is “can you signal the ship before it runs aground?” — I could see that easily being almost a mini-board game. Without the game we can’t tell.

Adventure (1982, Simpson Software, ZX81)

Helpful title, eh? Mentioned here in issue 2 of Sinclair User as being “set in a mythical castle containing evidence of an extraordinary mixture of living beings – hobbits, dwarves and pirates, among others. It is a non-graphics adventure with 25 logically-connected locations written in 11/2 K of Basic.”

Fun House (1982, ASD&D, TI-99)

We have the manual. We even have a picture of the disk. We don’t have access to the game, though. I’ve played games from the series before starting with 007: Aqua Base.

Takeda Building Adventure (1982, Micro Cabin, MZ-700/MZ-1200)

The only Japanese game I’m missing for 1982, published the same time as Diamond Adventure. (Totally different author. Diamond Adventure was by N. Minami. This was by Akimasa Tako when he was a junior high student and the game was sent to Micro Cabin by family/friends without his knowledge; he later did an Alice in Wonderland game.) I’ve seen copies come up for this before but they’ve been expensive. Please note there’s a part 1 (from 1982) and a part 2 (from 1983) but they look very similar and some websites confuse them.

Part 1 (red font) on top, part 2 (black font) on bottom. Source.

Weirdly, I have enough I could technically make an entry for this game because more than a decade ago someone made a website re-creating the game in HTML format. It’s essentially a death maze. Unfortunately the website is long gone and only a very small part has been stored at the Internet Archive, but I was able to play for one move.

Glamis Castle (1982, John Bell, Apple II)

This is the sequel to Haunted Palace, by Crystalware, the funky 3d-game that had a mystery attached which wasn’t solved in the game but through a contest.

There’s also an Atari version, and I know who has a disk, but there’s logistical issues in dumping it (please don’t bother with this at the moment).

However, the Apple II version is totally lost, and based on the predecessor (Haunted Palace) it would be different enough from the Atari version to be worth having, plus it will be easier to get a dump.

From Atarimania.

ICL Quest (1980-1983, Doug Urquhart, Keith Sheppard and Jerry McCarthy, Mainframe)

I’ve written about the Windows 95 version here. It is somewhat buggy, but there’s a version that’s for C which needs technical help porting it to be playable on modern systems. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, ping me and I’ll re-direct you for access.

Your score would be 400 (total of 400 points), in 507 moves.

You can read my prior posts on Starcross at this link. For those avoiding the ending, now is the time to veer away.

From bryron9 on Twitter, who points out the sticker on the shrinkwrap means 100% full preservation would technically need sealed packages to get the sticker variants. Also, based on Jimmy Maher’s writeup it looks like not everyone was aware the saucer is the player’s ship, the Starcross itself (“there were no actual flying saucers in the game”)?

I was rather close to done. The globe puzzle I was especially close on. As arcanetrivia pointed out in the comments, I essentially described how to solve while lamenting being unsure how to solve it.

The most obvious behavior to play with is still the fact you can put things under the globe and on top of the globe … I tried having the teleport on the floor so that the thing from above lands on it and teleports, but no dice (additionally, why would that help?)

As far as my understanding of the mechanism goes, I was confused by two things:

1.) I thought the blue rod simply did not exist on the other settings, and the globe was of equal thinness on every setting. The real idea is that the blue rod is always present under the “force wall” even if you can’t see it. This meant my thinking that required the last step be to have the globe at its smallest setting was wrong.

2.) I thought the way the teleporter worked was simply to teleport all items that step on it. Instead, it teleports things that step on it and things that are close enough. I do not know why you would think this before it happens.

I managed to finally get the thing to work by mucking about, and I’m fairly sure I tried this combination before in almost exactly the same way, but I must have had something slightly off: Set the dial to medium (2 or 3) so there’s room on top. Slide one teleport disk under the globe while in small mode. Drop the other teleport disk on the floor as normal. Put an item on the globe. Set the dial to max size (4). The item will fall and trigger the teleport, and the teleport will teleport both the item and the rod to outside the globe.

>SET DIAL TO 3
The globe flickers out for an instant and then reappears, expanded. The silvery globe is the size of a beachball.

>PUT BASKET ON GLOBE
The metal basket is now on the globe.

>SET DIAL TO 4
The globe flickers out for an instant and then reappears, expanded. The silvery globe is the size of four feet and seems embedded in the floor. You hear the hum of the transporter disk activating. There is a loud click, and then the metal basket appears resting comfortably on the red disk. The blue rod must have been in range of the disk, because it appeared as well!

Looking at the image from the Zork User Group hint guide (see above) I may have not visually have placed the globe quite as much into the ground. In addition, I always assumed the rod was on the top, so even with a teleport that gets “close items” the rod doesn’t seem like it’d be close. I think it’s meant to be jammed in the middle somehow, even without the globe to anchor it? You know what, I still don’t understand this puzzle.

With that done, all I had to do was figure out what was going wrong with my ray gun so that I could get extra charges (and as a reminder, flying via shooting the gun is the only puzzle I remembered, so I knew it was running short). I needed Invisiclues for this. I previously went through my verb list and maybe didn’t pay enough attention to the SHAKE verb, especially because of a bug:

>SHAKE GUN
It rattles loudly.

This happens before you’ve shot it at all. Afterwards, SHAKE GUN gives a blank prompt.

Just to prove that it isn’t just a modern interpreter issue, here’s the same bug in the Macintosh version.

The bug implied to me that no useful information was being given and I was just hitting a glitch, but no: the rattle is very important. It implies something is stuck in the gun.

>LOOK IN GUN
In the barrel is a silver rod!

>GET SILVER ROD
Taken.

With the silver rod out, there’s no “backfire shot” and you have 3 shots rather than just 2. This is enough to make the Newton-propelled flight. Before showing that off, I should demonstrate the use of the silver rod:

>JUMP
Gravity is almost non-existent here, so your jump easily carries you to the hatch of the drive bubble.

Drive Bubble Entrance
You are floating (clinging?) outside the drive bubble, a crystalline half-sphere covering the aft end of the artifact’s axis of rotation. Small knobs like handholds lead up the surface of the bubble, away from the end of the cylinder. The drive bubble is transparent and through it you can see the controls for the main engines of the artifact, which must be aft of here. The only way in is a hatch which is closed. Beside the hatch is a silver slot.

>PUT SILVER ROD IN SILVER SLOT
The silver rod slides into the slot and the hatch opens.

>IN
Drive Bubble
The drive bubble is on the axis of rotation at the aft end of the artifact, so there is no “gravity” here. It is transparent and you can see the tips of the tallest trees of the forest beyond. Far off, at the opposite end of the axis, is another bubble much like this one. The room is a featureless gray except for one small white slot. One way out is the hatch, which is open.
Floating near a white slot in the wall is a white rod.

>GET WHITE ROD
Taken.

>PUT WHITE ROD IN WHITE SLOT
As you insert the rod, the walls come alive with a white tracery of controls, dials, and gauges. In addition, a black slot surrounded by an ominous dead-black circle appears.

Putting the black rod in the black slot is an emergency stop and the game ends. The black slot (which you are required to pick up to enter the artifact) is otherwise useless.

You do need to go through the silver rod-white rod process because otherwise there’s a later moment where a button mysteriously fails (without mentioning it is because the drive bubble hasn’t been properly set, and also there’s no way to go back).

Just to be clear on our inventory now, our rods (after using up silver) are clear, violet, brown, blue, pink, black (boo!), gold, and green. Yellow and red got used on repair, and white was found right where it gets used.

The repair hatch in the forest.

Let’s go flying. To be clear on the visual, here, we’re at the aft of the cylinder where there’s a “drive bubble” and we’re flying to the opposite end where there’s a “control bubble” and the end of the game.

>JUMP
You push against the surface of the bubble, and because there is no weight here, you shoot into the air and away along the axis!

Floating in Air
You are floating at the axis of rotation of the cylinder, near the drive bubble. There are enormous trees “below.” There is no gravity here.

>SHOOT GUN AT DRIVE BUBBLE
A blast of orange flame issues from the gun, and the recoil propels you at an impressive speed through the air. Eventually, air resistance slows you down, but you are still in the weightless area near the center of the cylinder.

Floating in Air
You are floating at the axis of rotation of the cylinder. There is grassland “below.” There is no gravity here.

>SHOOT GUN AT DRIVE BUBBLE
A blast of orange flame issues from the gun, and the recoil propels you at an impressive speed through the air. Eventually, air resistance slows you down, but you are still in the weightless area near the center of the cylinder.

Floating in Air
You are floating at the axis of rotation of the cylinder. There is a metal band “below.” There is no gravity here.

>SHOOT GUN AT DRIVE BUBBLE
A blast of orange flame issues from the gun, and the recoil propels you at an impressive speed through the air. Eventually, air resistance slows you down, but you are still in the weightless area near the center of the cylinder.

On Control Bubble
You are floating outside a 100 meter crystal bubble which protrudes from the fore end of the cylinder. Inside, you can make out shadowy mechanisms and odd constructions. There are odd knobs of some sort which you could use to pull yourself down the bubble. At the other end of the cylinder you can see the drive bubble in the midst of enormous trees.

>U
There is only air there.

>D
Control Bubble Entrance
You are floating outside a 100 meter crystal dome which protrudes from the fore end of the cylinder. Inside, you can discern shadowy mechanisms and odd constructions. Near you is an entrance which is closed. A small slot surrounded by gold crystal is next to the hatch. Small knobs which might make good handholds dot the surface of the bubble from the axis to the hatch.

You must specify you are shooting at the drive bubble, otherwise your path goes awry and you plummet (fortunately, I was already doing this by default, I discovered the interesting death later).

To get inside the Control Bubble you need the gold rod:

Control Bubble
This room must be the main control room of the artifact. The control bubble itself is transparent and you can look out upon the interior of the artifact. Far off, hidden among the tallest trees of the forest, is the matching drive bubble. One way out is the hatch, which is open.
The walls are gray except for a single small slot surrounded by clear crystal.

Clear activates the mechanism, and the remaining colors (brown, green, blue, violet and pink) all activate particular controls. I like how we are in a typical Collect the Twelve Orb McGuffins of McGuffinville but they get used for specific technical purposes (rather than the typical fantasy plot where It Just Works when you have the right number).

>PUT PINK ROD IN PINK SLOT
When the pink rod is inserted into the pink slot, a ghostly image appears on the wall alongside it, but the clear slot and its contents fade from view. The pink screen includes a small square, a large square, and a display showing nearby space. This view shows an empty area with a stylized depiction of the artifact itself.

The other colors all give “spots” which are buttons to activate some control.

To make things work, you first use the small and large squares as zoom-in / zoom-out controls; you want the view to be of the solar system. Once you’ve done this, the brown button will swap between planets. (In practice, I was hitting buttons more or less randomly until i had my first reaction, and then it started to be possible to “puzzle out” the rest.)

>PUSH LARGE SQUARE
The view screen now shows the inner solar system, from the sun out to Jupiter.

>PUSH BROWN SPOT
The view screen now shows the Sun brightly highlighted.

>PUSH BROWN SPOT
The view screen now shows Mercury brightly highlighted.

>PUSH BROWN SPOT
The view screen now shows Venus brightly highlighted.

>PUSH BROWN SPOT
The view screen now shows Earth brightly highlighted.

Your goal is to fly to Earth. I was hoping we could get an alternate ending by flying to Jupiter (“ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA”) but alas, the game just informs you that the ship knows where you came from, so it shuts down and you’ve failed the trial.

>PUSH VIOLET SPOT
The highlighted image of Earth now is connected to that of the artifact. The line terminates in the center of Earth.

>PUSH VIOLET SPOT
The highlighted image of Earth now is connected to that of the artifact. The line terminates in a parabola looping around Earth.

>PUSH VIOLET SPOT
The highlighted image of Earth now is connected to that of the artifact. The line terminates in an ellipse surrounding Earth.

>PUSH VIOLET SPOT
The highlighted image of Earth now is connected to that of the artifact. The line terminates in a circle around Earth.

>LOOK
Control Bubble
This room must be the main control room of the artifact. The control bubble itself is transparent and you can look out upon the interior of the artifact. Far off, hidden among the tallest trees of the forest, is the matching drive bubble. One way out is the hatch, which is open.
The walls are gray except for five small color-coded slots (pink, brown, violet, green, and blue) arranged in a pentagon.
Of the colored slots, the pink one contains a pink rod and the blue, green, violet and brown rods are in place in the like-colored slots. Alongside each of those are spots of the same color.
The pink screen includes a small square, a large square, and a display showing nearby space. This view shows the inner solar system, from the sun out to Jupiter. The symbol representing Earth is lit. A line on the display connects the position of the artifact with that of Earth, and terminating in a circle around Earth.

Green adds dots (and this is where the step fails if you haven’t prepared the Drive Bubble) and then blue launches. Finis.

All the displays flash once. There is a sensation of movement as the artifact positions itself to follow the course you have set.

The artifact, under your assured control, moves serenely toward Earth, where the knowledge it contains will immeasureably benefit mankind. Within a few years, there could be human ships flying out to the stars, and all because of your daring and cunning…

A holographic projection of a humanoid figure appears before you. The being, tall and thin, swathed in shimmering robes, speaks in your own language. “Congratulations, you who have passed our test. You have succeeded where others failed. Your race shall benefit thereby.” He smiles. “I expect to see you in person, someday.” The projection fades.

Your score would be 400 (total of 400 points), in 507 moves.
This score gives you the rank of Galactic Overlord.

One word (“immeasureably”) might be a typo; no dictionary I’ve found spells it that way (no “e”), although there are some old religious books that do.

There’s questions that have been built up, not only historical, but in terms of understanding the plot. I’ll be referring both to Jimmy Maher’s and Drew Cook’s commentary.

The most immediate question, for me, goes back to the 1982 Lebling quote I started with (which was said when the game was done but not out yet to the public):

Starcross is intended as an entry level game for people who like science fiction but who haven’t played many adventure games before.

Why does Lebling call it “entry-level”?

There is of course aspiration vs. reality; there’s also marketing vs. reality (no doubt why Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, surely one of the hardest of Infocom’s games by any metric, got marked “Standard” level). I’m not sure either quite explain the circumstance here. For one thing, his statement is targeted at “people who like science fiction” — that is, this is meant for a hard sci-fi buff who would no doubt realize the life support dot puzzle at glance. I can compare my past self with my modern self here: I remember first coming across the dots and being utterly baffled but I was too young for a chemistry class, and here (even though I didn’t remember anything other than suffering) it took me roughly five seconds to get. It was, at this point in my life — keeping in mind I now work on educational software professionally — quite “easy”.

I have now seen multiple people say they couldn’t get past the opening puzzle, even though (for those who have dealt with polar coordinates) it isn’t really a puzzle.

Still, I think Lebling was overlooking some of the tougher spots, especially the ray gun. The silver rod inside might seem from a designer standpoint almost trivial, but from a player standpoint it is extraordinarily tricky. On top of that, thinking to use the ray gun as a propulsion method is an audacious jump even for a physics buff; there are so many opportunities that feel like the ray gun ought to be used to shoot things that get passed by, for it only to show up at the end — this is a structural trick of the highest order, arguably the climax in my history of nonviolence (the cavalcade of games that give the players weapons that don’t get used as weapons). I can understand now why this was the only puzzle where I remembered the solution.

(The Invisiclues even mention there’s a ray-gun based way to get the blue rod! So someone might get stuck only with two shots and not realize they solved the globe puzzle wrong.)

In the end I’m going to attribute this to a combination of only being partially aware of how hard things will be for the audience (surely they would have tweaked the map puzzle otherwise) but also the truth that this game is a bit easier for a sci-fi buff who really needs everything to work logically. For such a person it is easier than a fantasy world with arbitrary rules (even if those rules are “simpler” in essence: do bell, book, and candle in order). When I made my first post I even had one person on Mastodon mention they found the game a “breeze”:

…what makes Starcross good is that it’s goals unravel in a natural way. Yes, death happens in the game… and is part of that natural way of explaining goals to the player. I totally get that that isn’t everyone’s favored play style, but for me, that clicked very easily. With the adventure genre, everyone experiences them VERY differently.

Both Maher and Cook struggled with a question that can be condensed as:

What’s up with the ending?

There are clear markers we are in some sort of test. (I’ll call the test-makers the Creators.) The original title of the game (as also given in Lebling’s notes from November 1981) was The Gift from the Stars: this is intended to give technology to a race who proved worthy. The spider was first, followed by the weasels, followed by the now-expired lizard.

“I can’t help you there, I’m afraid. I’m quite a stay-at-home, I haven’t left my ship for ages; nothing interesting out there any more. Those furry ones were interesting for a while but they’re stagnant now.”

Lebling’s notes explicitly say “The ship contains secrets which wish to be discovered, but only by a race advanced enough (and clever enough and lucky enough) to penetrate its mysteries.” (I should caution the notes are from the game-in-development and not all of them match the final product. This part seems to be unchanged.)

I still hold what I’ve already established, that this cannot be a full-environmental-control sort of test. Zork III had the Dungeon Master pretend to be needing bread in order to point out a secret door. He set the puzzle up entirely himself, where every piece is controlled. The weasels and spider here, instead, are their own beings. They were previously ones given the test. There was no reason to expect, as a guarantee, that the chief weasel’s brown rod held around his neck would be an object of trade.

Perhaps originally the Creators had more of a controlled method in mind, but things have been going wrong and they’ve worked around the issues. I would suspect, for instance, the ray gun being left behind with the silver rod left inside the Weapons Deck was their doing:

Weapons Deck
This was the armory of the artifact. A massive bulkhead has been burned away, giving free access to the weaponry. Unfortunately, it appears that the vast stock of futuristic armaments has been mostly destroyed. Gigantic projectors are scorched and shattered, strange battle armor is reduced to splinters, and wall racks for small arms are mostly empty.
Mounted in a wall-rack is a genuine-looking ray gun, large and formidable, with a long, ugly barrel. It’s difficult to tell whether or not the gun is fully charged.

Why would anyone but the Creators do that? But the blasted deck itself I don’t think was the doing of the Creators. Here’s Lelbing’s Nov. ’81 take; notice the change in setup, and the idea there would be other weapons:

You find a zap gun here, which has an enormous recoil to it (you can use it to propel you to the control room). It has only a certain number of charges, of course. It also has a key in its barrel which tints the blast its color. None of the other weapons works.

I believe the Creators did not burn the Weapons Deck simply because other aspects of change (the built village, the debris at the yellow deck which requires using the safety line) are from independently-thinking entities, not from the Creators. My guess is the weasels (the “furry ones” as Gurthark-tun-Besnap calls them) were of a much more complicated group than we see: they were advanced enough to be flying around in a ship. I further surmise there were factions in a war, and the chief (“a perfect example of barbarian dignity and splendor”) is the one who won. The group has intentionally taken the lower-tech route, possibly in response to whatever happened with the futuristic armaments; possibly lower-tech won out over higher-tech.

Drew Cook discusses their context in reference to attitudes to colonialism; I think they do fit the stereotypes (as the Earthling is tasked by the Creators to steal an item from their sacred idol) but there are two layers making this complicated: first, that the Creators are the ones making the Earthling do this in the first place, and second, the weasels had to intentionally pick what we think of as a “lower-tech” society. They fit the model of the “savages” that Lebling originally sketched out (he uses the exact word in his ’81 notes) but their decision not to play along with the Creator’s game makes them more advanced in a way.

Drew had another question — “is this a ‘big store’ con?” — which I already explained my answer is no. Now, we could still wonder why we have the exact means of getting by obstacles, but that’s true of any adventure game whatsoever, and we don’t think of all their narratives (in the meta-textual aspect) giant controlled tests. There is always necessary elision and simplification to present the world to the player.

This also means the obstacles would necessarily be different. That is, when Maher comments…

The only problem I have with that is that, absent all those challenges that arose from the general chaos inside the ship, actually figuring out the controls isn’t really that difficult, especially given (presumably) at least a few days to do it. Surely this spider fellow could have pulled it off.

…yes, that is true, but this was likely a matter of the Creators working around things; there likely were other obstacles we didn’t see that others being tested did. Perhaps, even, rather than the weasels being split, they faced some sort of enemy which required massive warfare (landing them at their current state).

The other aspect to this that’s worth considering is the dead lizard. Based on the “rules” of the game, resurrection and time-rewind ought to be possible for each candidate a set number of times. According to the source code, in the section titled DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION, it is four times.

The expressionless voice seems despairing. “Four failures. They would not be pleased. Such promising candidates, too. If only…”
The voice trails off into background hiss. Nothing more happens, ever.

The lizard has already been through trials, and finally has resolved to escape, burning his last life. Had the pink rod (clearly necessary for the win) gone flying after the last failure, the Creators would have given a replacement, but all they needed was an open possibility for the one being tested to find it.

Regarding life support starting to fail immediately upon the player’s arrival: it brings the artifact test to a full end, and consequently it does it in a way I don’t think the other candidates had to face. Nothing I’ve mentioned is contradicted if the Creators decided to kick off the crisis themselves, but I should add that the docking procedure (and the artifact essentially hitting themselves with a foreign ship) could have caused just enough stress to push everything over the edge. Indeed, the life support is only flashing with low urgency at first, indicating it got pushed to malfunctioning as slightly as it could go. (That would mean, the red rod wouldn’t necessarily be used? Sure, but they also definitely were the ones that placed the black rod, and that one doesn’t get used.) I think one upshot of all this (just like a wonky design gone awry in a real escape room) failure might not have been because of the subjects themselves; again, there was no absolute guarantee the player could have gotten the brown rod from the chief. Perhaps the reason the spider decided not to venture forth is they landed in a “buggy” scenario that was impossible to solve so they knew to give up. Lebling’s notes say the winner needs to be clever and lucky enough. How many deaths and transfigurations did they suffer before they decided it was enough?

I’ve avoided what I suppose really ought to be the main question, which is how does this play?

For the conditions, extraordinarily well. I’ve heard this characterized as a step back from Deadline, but it’s more of a lateral step: leaning into simulating as many conditions of the environment as possible, and hewing closing enough to real physics that puzzle solutions present themselves as the natural result of these conditions. I did end up blowing my perfect-no-hints streak, although I technically never had one in the first place since the ray gun use was in my memory. This still felt the most solvable of all the Infocom games so far to me, and I need to distinguish hard and solvable. Hard allows for hiding things obscurely and requiring death and keeping track of events from the past; solvable means if you’re paying close enough attention you can get through all those things.

Coming up next: based on a suggestion of LanHawk, I’m going to make a megapost explaining which adventure games I know about are currently either lost or behind so-far insurmountable technical barriers. This is good timing as I’m also about to play two games for the North Star Horizon that were previously lost media. I’m also about to hit my “lock” threshold where I solidify my 1982 list. After I pass the 75% mark, any new games I find — even from 1982 — will land on my “loop back” list. (Keep in mind I’ve been putting loop backs in my queue at any time, so that doesn’t mean I’ll stall if there’s a new discovery, but I do want to have a tangible end in sight.)

(My previous posts on Starcross are here.)

I’ve made enough incremental progress for a report. I was hoping to have everything on the “main floor” wrapped up, but alas, one puzzle remains elusive.

From the first British paperback cover of Larry Niven’s Ringworld, illustrated by Eddie Jones. Weirdly, it looks like there’s a painting landscape drawn on the inside, instead of the general-above view map the structure should have. The teleportation disks in Starcross come specifically from The Ringworld Engineers, although they aren’t portable in the book.

The most straightforward thing I did was finally get the red rod. The problem with testing every verb on everything is that there are exact conditions that still might not be replicated by the test.

Nesting Cage
The force projectors here aren’t working, but the cage is nonetheless inhabited by many creatures who resemble crosses between a rat and an ant. They are multi-legged with chitinous shells and pincers around their mouths, but they have long ratlike tails and sparse tufts of hair. Some of them are armed with tiny spears and walk precariously on their hind legs. In one corner is a very large mud and stick nest. The nest is constructed of all sorts of odds and ends, including a red rod. The rod is embedded in the mud near one of the entrances of the nest.

>throw black rod at nest
The black rod doesn’t damage the nest very much, and in fact a rat-ant quickly incorporates it into the nest.

Reviewing the text, I realized this implied something heftier might do the job.

>throw gun at nest
The nest smashes into fragments and the rat-ants stop dead in their tracks! They frantically evacuate the nest and immediately begin constructing a new nest at the opposite end of the cage. Rat-ant babies are being carried across the cage, and warriors watch you suspiciously.

Useful for everything but shooting at someone! But I finally got to grab the red rod, and use it to test out what it’s like to set the life support system to methane.

Repair Room
This room is taken up by two large pieces of machinery. The leftmost has a symbol depicting the emission of rays beside a yellow slot. The other machine bears a symbol in three parts: the first two parts, in black, are a solid block and a fluid level. The third, in red, is a series of parallel wavy lines. Beside it are three diagrams; under each one is a red slot. The first diagram shows four single dots equally spaced around a six-dot cluster. The second shows two eight-dot clusters in close proximity. The third has three single dots equally spaced around a seven-dot cluster. The only exit is up some stairs.
There is a metal and ceramic square here.

>put red rod in first red slot
The red rod disappears into the slot. You hear a subdued hum of machinery coming to life.

Just as a reminder, the dot patterns I had theorized were atomic numbers, and indeed that turned out to be right.

Carbon 1, Hydrogen 4 or CH⁴ = methane

Oxygen 2 or O² = dioxygen

Nitrogen 1, Hydrogen 3 or NH³ = ammonia

Enough waiting and you get

The air here has become quite pungent, smelling vaguely of charcoal.

followed by

The air here has become quite hard to breathe, permeated with the smell of coal gas.

The air here has become almost unbreathable, and heavy with the smell of coal gas.

and death with a hard cut off, just like letting the life support run out of time before.

The red rod in the second slot (like you’re supposed to do responsibly, getting oxygen) is sufficient to keep the game going on with no more time limit. I do think the “feel” of the game would be significantly different for someone who solved this puzzle early; for one thing, they wouldn’t get the still-mysterious death messages about how this solar system was going to be marked. There also wouldn’t be as much of a feeling of dread and danger, since most of the other deaths you have to go out of your way to see.

Drive Bubble Entrance
You are floating (clinging?) outside the drive bubble, a crystalline half-sphere covering the aft end of the artifact’s axis of rotation. Small knobs like handholds lead up the surface of the bubble, away from the end of the cylinder. The drive bubble is transparent and through it you can see the controls for the main engines of the artifact, which must be aft of here. The only way in is a hatch which is closed. Beside the hatch is a silver slot.

>jump
Gravity is very light here and you practically zoom into the air. Unfortunately gravity is not entirely non-existent, so eventually you begin to fall, faster and faster, in a lovely curve produced by the rotation of the artifact. You make a gorgeous but fatal swan dive into the surface.

**** You have died ****

The closest I could find with a real chemistry paper containing the same diagram, via ResearchGate.

I made a hard run then at trying to figure out the electronic mouse, since I could take my time following it around (with the literal verb FOLLOW). I tried marking up my map, especially paying attention then the mouse disappeared into the wall, and trying to figure out why it would sometimes go into a room and sometimes avoid it. (In general, it seems to “sense” garbage so, for example, it will avoid the laboratory unless you’ve put something on the ground.)

Yellow Hall
The room is lit by an emergency lighting system.
There is a maintenance mouse here, cheerfully scouring the area for garbage. It has already collected a blue disk, and a safety line.
The mouse disappears into a heretofore unnoticed hole in the wall, which closes and becomes nearly invisible.

I decided to try — just in case I maybe had made a typo before — to try out giving the mouse the blue teleportation disk again (keep in mind I was also thinking they were only usable once and I needed them for the altar; I was trying everything). Just like before, after the mouse disappeared, the blue disk did not work. However, if you wait a long time — and upon subsequent testing this might be a very long time, like 40 turns — it will finally work, and you can teleport to a new area.

>stand on red disk
There is a loud click as you step on the disk, and then a moment of disorientation.

Garage
This is the garage for Maintenance Mice. There are several stalls in which non-functional mice are rusting away. Other stalls are empty. There is a chute into which trash could be dumped, and a large bin nearby. A maintenance-mouse-sized door is in the forward wall.
There is a thin blue disk the size of a manhole cover here.
There is a maintenance mouse here.
There is a trash bin full of junk of all sorts here. Someone appears to have been dumping things for years (decades? centuries?) and never cleaning them out.
Among the trash near the top of the bin you see:
A safety line
The mouse rolls up to the trash bin and dumps some stuff into it.
The mouse leaves as unobtrusively as it arrived.

Oho! I was able to retrieve my disk, dig around the bin and find a green rod, and escape through the north wall (which leads you in that room with the mysterious south wall, so that’s two mysteries in one go).

My structural intuition was that the violet rod still gets stolen via teleport, so I tested out the disks again after the Garage incident and … they worked! But why? It turns out the teleportation happens as many times as you like, as long as you “reset” the disk positions afterwards. This opened the possibility that the disks also get applied to the obnoxious lab-globe puzzle. Alas, that’s the one puzzle I’ve been hacking at with no luck.

Laboratory
This is a glaringly lit room filled with strange devices, most completely incomprehensible. For example, a huge projector of some sort points menacingly at a silvery globe floating in midair in the center of the room. The silvery globe is the size of an orange. Imbedded in the silver globe is a blue crystal rod. Beneath the projector is a dial with four positions.
The silver sphere contains:
A blue rod

Some fun observations:

1. Typing CLIMB GLOBE just says “Bizarre!” but you can try to ENTER GLOBE gets the message:

Climbing it gives you a strange feeling, so you get back down.

2. You can fry the blue rod with the ray gun, or fry the silver sphere. If you fry the latter, everything goes away briefly (and the blue rod is destroyed permanently) but the sphere is re-formed via the matter projector.

The blast washes over the globe, which grows brighter and brighter as it overloads, then with a sinister shiver, it disappears! The blue rod is destroyed by the blast! Moments later, the projector builds up enough energy to restore the globe, and it reappears.

3. BLOCK BEAM is understood as a command, but doing so only gets the response:

Trying to destroy the beam of energy isn’t notably helpful.

4. As noted earlier, the mouse can be coaxed into the room so it might possibly give an assist, but I haven’t been able to trap it in the globe or get it to try to yank out the blue rod. (Yes, longshots, but so was hoping I could just teleport to the disk the mouse had just by waiting 50 turns.)

5. The most obvious behavior to play with is still the fact you can put things under the globe and on top of the globe. It feels like this has to be pertinent, especially because in my (admittedly short) tests I couldn’t find any object other than the globe that let you refer to the space UNDER it and put things. But what is the use? The blue rod only appears on switching the size of the globe to 1, so that has to be the last step, which potentially causes things to fall from above, or from the bottom of the bigger globe to the floor; there might be something on the floor when this happens. I tried having the teleport on the floor so that the thing from above lands on it and teleports, but no dice (additionally, why would that help?)

>turn dial to 1
The globe flickers out for an instant and then reappears, shrunken. The silvery globe is the size of an orange. Imbedded in the silver globe is a blue crystal rod.
When the sphere shrinks, the ray gun falls to the new surface and then slides to the floor.

I’m starting to get the feeling this isn’t totally self-contained and I need an item from elsewhere, but where? The game hid its crystal rod pretty cunningly so I might be missing one or more hidden puzzles which reveal rod and/or helpful items. Even if I play like Green Lantern and try to imagine any helpful item at all, I can’t think of what would extract the blue rod.

It seems like there needs to be some way of manipulating the physical properties of the sphere — with heat or cold, say — and this can then be combined with the size changing to make the small version of the globe go pop. It has resisted all my attempts, and I did do the “try every verb” maneuver on it. It just isn’t normal matter!

>get globe
The globe won’t budge no matter how hard you try.

>touch globe
The globe feels neither hot nor cold. The globe doesn’t move no matter how hard you press.

Weirdly, even while stuck I am finding new things (even if new ways to die) so I don’t feel like I’m reaching a content limit yet. However, I just might try peeking at two (2) of the Invisiclues if I hit, let’s say, one more hour with nothing to show for it. Given the Invisiclues are already cunningly arranged by the original company I don’t need hints in the comments. (However, I would like to hear from either person who said they were playing: are you any farther? Feel free to answer in saying you have X rods.)

Via eBay.

Garage
This is the garage for Maintenance Mice. There are several stalls in which non-functional mice are rusting away. Other stalls are empty. There is a chute into which trash could be dumped, and a large bin nearby. A maintenance-mouse-sized door is in the forward wall.
There is a trash bin full of junk of all sorts here. Someone appears to have been dumping things for years (decades? centuries?) and never cleaning them out.

>examine chute
The chute seems bottomless and warm air rises from it.

>enter chute
The chute leads straight to the input hopper of a fusion reactor which gets some of its power from trash. It’s now getting some of its power from you.

**** You have died ****

Powell's is rightly famed as a destination for book lovers, and I finally made my pilgrimage last weekend. The perils of air travel limited the inevitable splurge -- I had to fit my haul into a single backpack -- but I wound up with some nifty volumes. Including this surprise:

The world is awash with choice-based gamebooks, each with its own clever paraphrase of "choose your own you-know-what". A book based on the old Oregon Trail idea isn't a surprise.

No, the surprise is that bit about "tabbed pages". Tabbed?

Yep! This isn't a "turn to page 8" gamebook. It's a pipe-and-tab gamebook, which is a very uncommon format. Meanwhile is the first and, I thought, the only example. Here's a second book that does it!

Let's back up a bit, though.

The Oregon Trail (1971) is one of the earliest narrative text games. Heck, one of the earliest computer games. Jimmy Maher and Aaron Reed have ably documented its history.

...Yeah, you got distracted reading those posts. (I sure did!) But you're back now.

The Oregon Trail is an evergreen concept. Various ports and remakes appeared through the 80s and 90s. In 2008, a studio called Gameloft got the license from the publisher that held it. (HarperCollins seems to have scooped the "Oregon Trail" trademark in 1992. Or maybe it was Houghton Mifflin at that point? I haven't dug into the murky web of book industry oligopolization.)

Gameloft released their version for a variety of mobile platforms. These days it's on Steam and other stores and consoles. I haven't played it, but it seems like a straightforward modernization of the original sim-game concept. More gameplay, more narrative, more historical detail, sweet graphics. Fine.

Around 2018, some bright spark got the idea of doing CYOA books as a spin-off. The first four of these form a sequence, taking you from Missouri to Oregon in four chapters. They must have sold pretty well because the publisher did four more after that.

These eight are not tabbed gamebooks. They're regular old "turn to page N" style, plain text with small illustrations. (The illustrations have a cheerfully 8-bit pixel style. Way more pixelated than the computer game, I was amused to note.)

The books themselves don't credit an author; they just say "Copyright 2018 by HMH IP Company" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). But the current publisher page credits "Jesse Wiley". Wiley doesn't seem to have any internet presence beyond the series. Might be a person, a pen name, or a syndicate alias like "Carolyn Keene". More info welcome!

Then, aha, in 2020, a new volume appears! Pick Your Own Path on The Oregon Trail. Same branding, same attribution. (Except the publisher is HarperCollins now.) But this one is printed in full color -- with panels, pipes, and tabs.

Note that this is not a graphic novel like Meanwhile. The panels are plain text. The pages are illustrated with the same pixel-clip-art as the earlier books, albeit colorized; but it's not sequential art. But, by the same token, there's much less text per page than a "normal" book. The textual Oregon Trail gamebooks have rich narrative scenes, with named characters and everything. In this one, the text is trimmed down to a couple of tight sentences per panel.

Have I gotten across how peculiar this is? Tabbed books are not easy to do! They are expensive to print because of the die-cutting. The paper needs to be very heavy coated stock to prevent the tabs from tearing. It's color printing. Okay, probably the color printing is free once you've committed to the heavy stock, but still -- expensive.

Also, the layout is a pain in the ass. I would not, offhand, know how to solve the problem of turning a state diagram into a die-cuttable stack of tabs. Jason Shiga's note on Meanwhile says:

...the problem proved to be NP-complete. With the use of a V-opt heuristic algorithm running for 12 hours on an SGI machine, the solution was finally cracked in spring of 2000. It was another six months before layouts were finished, again with the aid of homebrew computer algorithms.

Of course a circa-2000 SGI workstation isn't much by modern standards. And Meanwhile is a far more complex book than Oregon Trail. (Oregon Trail has 26 pages, 76 panels, and 10 tab rows. Meanwhile has 37 pages, 710 panels, and 11 tab rows.)

Still, it's a bunch of work, and it's not obvious that the result is more fun than a standard CYOA gamebook. I mean, I'm super excited, but I'm not the target audience! Your typical game-playing kid might not even think about the difference in format, except to say "Huh, no names."

So what's the book like? I should talk about the book. It's rather simple, as gamebooks go.

As you see, there's two big branches. (The "leave in March or May?" choice above.) Each branch is your basic gauntlet pattern. Do everything right, you live. Do anything wrong, you die. Yes, you can die of dysentery, not to mention cholera, typhoid, hypothermia, and bear.

In total there are 25 failures and three victory states. I'm not sure why the cover says "more than 50 possibilities!" but those numbers are never very meaningful. I suppose you could count the number of distinct paths that lead to victory. I see just eight, and they don't vary much beyond the three endpoints.

There's exactly one "walking dead" node, where you're certain to die but you don't know it yet. Everywhere else, if you make a bad choice, you turn the page and read your death scene. That very first choice -- "are you ready to start?" sure sets the tone.

Or... does it? It conveys that every mistake is immediately fatal. But it also conveys that the author is out to get you. "Ha ha, rattlesnake!" It's not exactly a logical consequence. Maybe it should have said, "You stay home, which is safe but boring. Your journey ends here never starts."

The chart has a couple of small loops, and these don't make much narrative sense either. Making the same mistake over and over is silly, of course. But also the loops include time travel! You can leave Chimney Rock on May 2, run out of food, and double back to Chimney Rock, losing "four weeks of travel" -- but you return to the same May 2 panel you started at. The other loop has a similar date failure. (The designers missed the obvious opportunity to kick you over to the other branch, which has later dates!)

As for the story... well, the book is not a searing indictment of colonialism. There is no historical context. It doesn't even mention why you're going to Oregon! On the up side, the book avoids stigmatizing the Native Americans that appear. Given the extreme brevity of the text, it hardly counts as a nuanced portrayal, but at least it mentions real First People nations and it doesn't make them bad guys. In fact this book has very few bad guys. Aside from one bandit ambush, you will generally die of stupidity or natural causes. Stupidity and natural causes, I should say.

(I believe the earlier textual CYOA books in this series have more historical depth. You meet and travel with Native American characters -- named characters! -- so there must be some context written in. I don't know how much, though.)

The book tries to stick to a realistic portrayal of good decisions and bad decisions. (Do not cheap out on repairs. Do not run away from the bear. Etc.) Inevitably, though, there are a lot of "left or right? whoops not left" decision points. I already mentioned the initial choice. For another example, both branches have a choice of the form "take Barlow Road or raft down the Columbia River?" The wrong answer kills you, but the two versions of the choice have different wrong answers.

(I suppose it makes sense that the correct answer depends on the season? That is, the date when you arrive. But the text doesn't have enough info to make this a solvable puzzle.)

(These two Barlow/Columbia choice panels are on the same page, by the way. I'm sure this is a nod to Meanwhile's brilliant narrative use of side-eye.)

(Yes, the Barlow Road was named for Sam Barlow. The mighty Oregon Trail pioneer, that is.)

Are there any other tab-format gamebooks out there? How did this one come to be? Who decided it was a format worth imitating? Who is Jesse Wiley? I'm desperately curious to know!

Yes, I asked Jason Shiga. He wasn't aware of this book either.

If I learn anything, I'll attach it here.