Renga in Blue

With today’s game, due to unique circumstances, I’m going to pull out a review first. Specifically, one from the November/December 1983 issue of Softline. Quoting directly: There are adventures, and there are adventures, and then there are adventures. And after them, there’s this. It’s Blood Quest. It’s new. It’s now. It’s happening. It rages. It melts. It burns. It’s free verse. It’s beyond description. It’s the last word in graphic adventuring. This game has everything, and consequently it’s…

I am extremely sorry that I shall not be able to use the music of Thamos, but this piece … is now among the rejected works which are no longer performed. For the sake of the music alone it might possibly be given again, but that is not likely. Certainly it is a pity! — Mozart writing to his father Leopold in 1783, nine years after the first performance of Thamos, King of Egypt I’ve seen the end of the game. I wouldn’t say I “finished” exactly as you’ll see in a moment. My previous posts on…

(Read part 1 on Happy Bushman here.) It turns out I was stuck on what was the only hard part; there are pieces where you can lose, but for the most part it’s cases where it is clear what you did wrong and you just need to back up and try again. Original PC-88 version, from Yahoo! Auctions. Before getting into the gameplay, a quick correction: I was taking the Romanization of the author’s name from Mobygames because I couldn’t find it elsewhere, but I realized the author’s name is printed (small…

Recently I played Genma Taisen, published by Pony Canyon in Japan in March 1983 to coincide with the accompanying film. It was an official conversion of an animated film to a game; the “first” from Japan, maybe, although there were Space Battleship Yamato games (like this one and this one) and I don’t know if any were “official”. In the same month, Pony Canyon released another game, Happy Bushman. It was based on the live-action film The Gods Must Be Crazy, from South African filmmaker Jamie…

Most soap operas take a while to work their way up to murder, but EastEnders kicks off with it from the very first scene, airing February 1985 on BBC One. A door gets kicked in; the characters Arthur Fowler, Ali Osman and Den Watts find the “cantankerous old man” Reg (who had been missing a few days) nearly dead. It is revealed later another character attacked him trying to steal his old war medals. (Reg dies. Conversation reveals Reg was too much of a “nasty old drunk” for people to care.) I…

I’ve finished the game; I was nearly at the end. My previous posts are needed for context. From the Microbee Software Preservation Project. I had left off on an apparent combination lock with four symbols, where you had to enter an “input” as a string of numbers. I had tried every permutation 1234, 2341, 4231, etc. with no luck. I decided after enough further struggle that I must be missing an item, so I re-checked every location and item in case some of the ones that were previously red…

(Continued from my last post.) Eye of Min, as I previously mentioned, was part of a trilogy, the second and third games being The Sabre of Sultar and The Temple of Azragor respectively. They were originally sold separately. Clipping an excerpt from a 1983 catalog: An adventure program featuring a graphic map that is updated as progress. in your search of the eye. When you have solved this excellent mystery, the next in the series is waiting, it is called “SABRE”. However, they soon also started…

In the 1960s, Qantas wanted to improve their flight reservation system. At the time, reservation clerks would get tickertapes from travel agents and enter flights manually; every single sales office needed to be contacted whenever a flight was full. Cancelling involved, again, manually calling every office. To make the company run smoother, they obtained three IBM S/360s (each with 64K of memory) and spent 18 months with IBM creating a new system. IBM S/360 being unloaded from a plane in 1966,…

I owned an Acorn Electron as a kid. It wasn’t the greatest games machine in the playground, but it did have the best game of all-time, Braben and Bell’s Elite, and one of the finest adventure games of all time, Trevor Hall’s Twin Kingdom Valley. For a boy with a fertile imagination, and an obsession with the Fighting Fantasy books, Twin Kingdom Valley whisked me through the screen, and into a fantasy world of babbling brooks, Forests, Orcs, Trolls, Goblins, Dragons, Kings and treasure! — Mark…

(Continued from my previous posts.) Some of the C64 screens have animated clouds. Last time I left off on a narrow fissure leading to Watersmeet, and a cave nearby that’s a maze. Also, just for the record, I had a brass key (from the very start) and a bronze key (from the witch where I traded the crystal ball). There was one gold door I was unable to unlock; we’ll get back to that today. Regarding Watersmeet, I knew something special was going on because there’s some text about it in the intro…

(Continued from my previous posts.) I have the first two underground sections (the one from the locked grate, and the one from the cave at the trail) mostly mapped out and connected, so now seems like a good time to pause. First entrance to the underground. Second entrance to the underground. It makes the geography a little clearer to start with the trail entrance, although in my playthrough I started with the grate and only connected it up later. At the cave entrance there’s a metal door to…

(Continued from my previous post, read that post first before this one.) As is usual for one of these massive games of this era, the best place to start is outside. I’ll be showing it off in three sectors, the first being the environs around the starting cabin (the one that has the key / jug / lamp and is the place where the treasures go). I originally thought perhaps this was going to be on a grid and I could do something more minimal, but no: this is a traditional Adventure map with twists…

It’s not your world. You arrive there and you’re a person, a creature, just like all the others. You see something shiny and think maybe you could go get it, so off you wander. You’re not controlling the game – you’re part of it. — Trevor Hall, interviewed in 2006 With this, we reach one of the most well-remembered games of 1983. Your Computer, December 1983 issue. It is often mentioned in the same context as The Hobbit, and this includes advertising from the time (“EAT YOUR HEART OUT BILBO!”)…

(Continued from my previous post about what is likely the first adventure game written in Sweden on a home computer.) I may not have squeezed out every single piece of working game from The Temple, but I’ve squeezed out most of it. Once past the initial issue, the game’s crashes don’t come back until later, but they come back spectacularly. The only Janic bag I’ve found multiple pictures of, from Tradera. They were the company that later picked up Commodore products and ended up sending their…

The last time this blog visited Sweden was with Stuga a full 15 years ago; one day, I will go back to that game and toss in the history of Swedish mainframes and academic computing alongside. A 1963 photo of the BESK, via Stelios Kessanidis on Facebook. The BEST (1950) and follow-up BASK (1953) were the earliest Swedish computers. However, we’ve got a complicated story with enough threads as-is. The threads will eventually unite in the late 70s. Let’s start in Italy– I graduated in 1953,…

(Continued from my previous post.) First, a resolution of the technical mystery with the caps-swap, courtesy of Andrea Pachetti in the comments (who has a blog dedicated to the history of Italian videogames, I liked this post on patents). By Louis Mittelman, Jr. Via the Smithsonian, Usage Conditions Apply. As I theorized, this was ported from a Commodore PET; Andrea found it was specifically a PET 2001 (the first model) with a 32K memory extension added. (The main smoking gun was a “POKE…

In 1980, Commodore got their first factory in Germany (in Braunschweig). The CEO Jack Tramiel came to give a speech and was warned “don’t tell them you’re Jewish”. He handled it in typical Tramiel fashion: So what did I do? I made a speech to them and told them all I was Jewish and that I was a survivor of the concentration camps. And then I said that I wanted everyone who was an SS officer in my office in the next two days. Over twenty of them came in and about six walked out, saying they will…

(Continued from my part 1, read that part first.) Before tangling into the gameplay, one bit of bookkeeping and one bit of meta-discussion. From Akiba PC Hotline. For the bookkeeping, one thing I didn’t linger on is: what should I be calling this game? On the side of the box, on the front of the tape, and on two of the title screens, the game is just 幻魔大戦 but on the front of the box, and on the third title screen, a subtitle gets added, using English text. 幻魔大戦: Harmagedon Even the colon is…

This is one of the most infamous computer games from Japan ever made. You can mostly blame the 1967 film The Graduate. I’ll explain along the way– From the first issue of Genma Taisen, the original manga. Genma Taisen, the manga, was first serialized in Weekly Shōnen Magazine starting in 1967, with writing by Kazumasa Hirai and art by Shotaro Ishinomori. By then both men had established careers, with Hirai writing the 8 Man series (1963 – 1966) and Ishinomori launching Cyborg 009 in 1964; both…

People are going to buy these things and then after six weeks or so they’re going to put them up on a shelf in their closet and ignore them … we saw that there was a need for something that helped people to both socialize with other people and get practical life use out of these really significant investments. — Stacy Goff, president and co-founder of Atari Computer Enthusiasts Before getting to our author today, I need to revisit one of the prior games from this blog, Max’s Adventure. Max’s…

Dr. Bongo’s plan is to destroy the World, with only hours before his devastating missiles are launched you locate his position. Your mission is to stop him and be the World’s No. 1 hero. — From Sinclair User, March 1983 Custom Software is another company from the UK that picked such a generic name it’s like they wanted to get lost in history (although to be fair, “Dr. Bongo’s Safari Park” is a pretty distinctive name and doesn’t show up much in periodical searches either). The main gimmick…

As a child I was obsessed with making stuff, it started with cardboard boxes and moved on to wood by the age of 5. By 10 I was constantly visiting rubbish dumps to find broken electrical stuff I could use to build what ever my imagination could imagine. Space ships, cars, satellite dishes to search for aliens – Of course all of this failed. — Martin Webb, writing in a 2020 forum post Tenterden, in Kent. For all the games we’ve seen so far by teenagers, even when commercialization has happened,…

I’ve finished the game; this is continued from my previous post. Portion of the ad from Softside’s January 1983 issue announcing that Adventures of the Month are now being moved to the disk/cassette version of the magazine. Just to get it out of the way first, we’ve got headhunters again, something I’ve written about before. Since this is set in India and vaguely Indiana Jones-shaped I checked in case it was making a reference, but Temple of Doom came out in 1984. Perhaps Indiana Jones was…

It’s been a while since we’ve played Peter Kirsch, despite this being his 16th game for this blog. (Most recently: The Dalton Gang, Alaskan Adventure, The Curse of the Pharoah). This is the 20th and last game for the SoftSide Adventure of the Month (he didn’t write all of them, but he edited all of them and wrote the majority). He kept going after this with the SoftSide Adventure Series (10 more games!); it was published on their “SoftSide Selections” which has more than just adventure games.…

It was remembered as a “joke” computer, with its 22 by 23 character screen and 3.5Kb of RAM. Revisionists forgot that at the time there was nothing else, and that within the confines of that 3.5Kb of RAM (sometimes more) we made magic happen. Brendan Jones (quoted above) we’ve seen before with three VIC-20 games from 1982, the most memorable being Fatman: Crime and Vice which invokes gritty American ultracrime stories despite being written by a teen-aged Australian. He was friends with Nigel…

(Continued from my previous posts on Catacombs, and in particular my last post which described how the 1981 PET version of the game was recently rescued.) The disk copies we have are for the “4040” edition of the game. This is referring to a disk drive pair by Commodore; image via the Centre for Computing History. While the predecessors (2040 and 3040) were for the US and Europe respectively, this one seems to have gone international; it gets mentioned in an Italian book, for instance.…

(Continued from my previous posts on Catacombs, which you probably should read before this one if you want the full background.) Last weekend, I received a message from Marcel Ingram Lansing that one of the most sought-after Commodore PET games had been rescued. Specifically, Colin Haynes had copies of both Catacombs and Goblin Towers by Brian Cotton in Commodore PET disk format. They’re part of a series of five adventures from the author published by Supersoft starting in early 1981. Goblin…

Back already! (Continued from my previous posts on Thissala.) From a 1981 brochure for the Data General Dasher terminal. Well. Rob pointed out I still missed a chunk of content, but I still would have made it an addendum or a comment on my last post, except then I found a puzzle that both of us had missed, and here I am. Many of the lingering puzzles could be “this isn’t coded yet” territory, but the nature of the puzzle I found is such that it feels highly likely there’s a way through. Let’s…

This is my last post on Thissala for now, although given the authors never finished it, and there seems to be content I haven’t been able to access, I can’t promise it is the last word. My previous posts on this game are needed for context. Via S. Howlett-West Books. Prior to officially being To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first book of the Riverworld series was published as two novellas; this magazine has the second. Let me first address something I mentioned in my post last time: what…

(Continued from my previous posts.) I’ve finally finished filling in the map of the desert, and found absolutely no items whatsoever. It’s all just rooms and more rooms. If there are any puzzles, they’re of the “hidden” variety. This presents an opportunity to do something I’ve done only marginally on this blog: analyze the prose. Via eBay. Before I get that, let’s lay out the rest of the geography. I mentioned a rusty key after a rock slide; heading farther northwest leads to a view by a cabin…