Renga in Blue

(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…

(Continued from my previous posts.) One thing to keep in mind with mainframe adventure games is they were often experienced by players of that period in a state of “under construction”. This started directly with Crowther who left a literal “under construction” sign in the lower parts of his cave, where one of the exits simply crashes the game. This was kept to an extent by Woods (who left “under construction” in at Witt’s End) but Woods also had one release that included his own “under…

(Continued from my previous posts.) Last time I left off on getting immediately killed by a pirate when entering a niche at the train station. Predictably, you can also get killed by waiting for the train in the track while not going west into the niche. It is now 13:5 There is a rumbling sound and a distant whistle from a VS+EL RR train. WAIT It is now 13:10 You have just been run over by a VS+EL RR train. There are no other exits. I ran through my item list (rope, pendant, charm, keys, can…

(Continued from my previous posts.) While I have explored the cave some and will share my results, I have not gotten that much farther; I’m intentionally saving part of the game for a later post, because I want to focus on the parser, world model, and trying to work around the game’s bugs. Before getting into all those things (and the cave itself), one brief bit of business from the town that I had trouble mapping. Aula in the comments pointed out an alternate map shape, and once I realized…

(Continued from my last post.) As is tradition with one of these gigantic cave-delving based games — and there is cave-delving, even though it wasn’t clear at first — let’s spend some time outside first. To recap from last time, the game starts with you in a parking lot with little direction. Nearby is a dowel rod, a charm with triremes, two disks that allegedly allow teleportation (when magically charged), and a $10 bill. Going west from the road with the bill (and the two to the north) gets…

Public attention, as well as the attention of groups such as this, has been focused on the design and application of large, expensive “super computers.” Our national preoccupation with size and power makes this fact understandable. However, the minicomputer, which I define as a stored program computer selling for under twenty-five thousand dollars, is deserving of much more serious attention than it has heretofore been given. — Robert L. Hooper, from a paper presented at the 1968 Fall Joint…

This is a temporary post for anyone attending my talk on the 1st year of Japanese adventure games. This links to my discussion of each one I have been able to write about in depth. For those not attending, there will be a YouTube upload eventually! (Although for my regular readers, there won’t be anything new! But maybe you’d like to hear me talk anyway.) Omotesando Adventure Mystery House Mystery House II Diamond Adventure Takara Building Part 1 Cosmo Cross The Phantom Ship / Yuureisen The…

I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context. Cover from an early Apple release, via Mobygames. To continue directly with the most immediately clear solve: the way the barrel works is as a teleporter. It’s not a new location at all, but rather is the dark place between the dungeon and the magician’s room. You can go east or west to get out; the reference to finding a nearby fire to light the candlestick is to the fire in the magician’s room I had already used before. The…

(Continued from my previous posts about the game.) Progress, but not quite as much as I’d like. Still, I think I’m one or two posts away from the end. My main target for today. The most immediate thing I solved — roughly five minutes after making my last post — came from one last re-read of the fairy looking for their glasses. I realized that it might not be a tiara or hat on the fairy’s head (as my brain was originally interpreting), but rather the glasses themselves (especially since the game…

(Continued from my previous posts.) Before getting into the puzzle solving, let’s tour the last part of the map, where “there’s less hustle & bustle”. This is just past the main town, to the south. Just west of the room above are the stockade (with the scene I discussed last time) and the jousting. Just like with town, the various rooms have random encounters. It isn’t nearly as bad as it could be, and I’m guessing they’re programmed in a way that forces a rotation rather than hoping the random…

(Continued from my previous post.) I’ve got most of the map laid out, and things are open enough that I’m not really “stuck” but I wanted to report in anyway. Story from the later version of The Coveted Mirror, via the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. To clear one thing up right away, regarding the mirror pieces: you don’t pick up the ones you find. You instead just see them and remember their shape, and trying to pick one up mentions a “protection spell” (I’ve only found one of them…

We’ve featured companies here before (like Adventure International and Sierra On-Line) that started their main development in games, with a few extra utilities being sold on the side. When Mark Pelczarski formed Penguin Software, their initial core product was (rather than a game) their Graphical Magician, which held them steady through their early years. However, they eventually became prominent for their adventure games: Transylvania, Crimson Crown, The Coveted Mirror, The Quest, and their…