Missed Classic: Castle Adventure - Won! (With Final Rating)

By Michael

I’ve kept my blog-related New Year’s resolution! I stopped tinkering with my own blog long enough to finish the game in this final post. And the game kept its resolution as well. Castle Adventure is still hunkering along at 320x300 pixels.

When we last visited the castle, I had done some research in the library.

It would have been so easy to post another Buffy picture, but I’ll be impressed if anyone knows the TV show this is from.

We learned that, to open the gate, we need to wave the scepter. Which means, of course, we need to find a scepter. Details, details.

Missed Classic: Castle Adventure - Scenes From an Italian Restaurant Located Inside Castle Highclere

By Michael

Now that we’ve celebrated the holidays and again have an empty wine flask, I welcome you back to our visit to the unnamed castle. Welcome back to our visit to the unnamed castle. This is the reverse of a good murder mystery, because we know whodunnit. That would be me, with the sword, in the Castle Gardens, the Throne Room, and the Knights’ Hall.

I wonder if a candlestick, revolver, lead pipe, or a rope will be of use in this game?

I chose to go up. At the northernmost end of the first floor, there’s a staircase that goes up. It brings me to an identical looking “cooridor”.

Missed Classic: Castle Adventure - B.J. Blazkowicz Goes Looking for Loot in Several Wrong Places

By Michael

In today’s review, we are playing a game where we direct a character who is locked in a castle, looks for loot and secrets, and picks up weapons he finds along the way to kill horrible creatures, in hopes of escaping.

This reminds me of a screensaver...

When last we left our intrepid, unnamed hero, he was killed by an ugly ogre. So, perhaps it’s time to start again.

Missed Classic 116: Castle Adventure - Introduction (1984)

Written by Michael


Many radio call-in shows had an oft-repeated, somewhat cliched line: "Hi! I'm a long-time listener, first-time caller." I suppose that describes me. I've been reading and commenting on the blog for a handful of years, and finally got around to writing my story and threatening planning to write a missed classic review about a memorable childhood game. The game I'll be talking about is somewhat special to me, because it was my first game of any form I played on a computer that I know of. I hadn't even played Lemonade Stand at school yet, it would be another year before they installed a row of Apple IIe systems in the elementary school library.

Around 1985, when I was about 7, my grandfather showed me this new toy he had. In the family room of his house, he had set up his new IBM Model 5160 computer (known as the PC/XT), complete with an amber monochrome screen and a daisy-wheel printer. It had the latest in cyber-security: that round key that would lock the keyboard. And along with some software programmed "borrowed" from the engineering firm he worked at, he also had some shareware and freeware programs, obtained from mail-order shareware vendors like PC-SIG.

The keyboard and printer were in a constant battle, over which one could make enough noise to drive my grandmother crazy.

Missed Classic 98: Adventure Alpha (1984)

Written by Joe Pranevich

In 1984, Dr. William H. Kraus was a rare breed: one part game designer, one part Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics Education. Up to this point, the games he had designed were simple, one-trick teaching tools for students in K-5. That was related in part to his academic bent: unlike most designers, he was concerned about quantifying and documenting the improvements his students saw while playing educational games. As he was sitting down to write what would be the first of three adventure games to break that mold, he made a prediction:

“In the not too distant future, it is likely that at least one microcomputer will be found in most elementary school classrooms and that teachers will wonder how they ever got along without them.” - “The Computer as a Learning Center.” Computers in Mathematics Education: 1984 Yearbook, edited by the National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics. 

Kraus never became a famous game designer. Perhaps his games were too stuffy and academic. Perhaps his evidence-based approach to teaching fun didn’t quite translate for enough students. Or perhaps, he just enjoyed doing the research that would benefit future teachers and educational game designers. Whatever the reason, his short design history has left us with only three adventure games: 1984’s Adventure Alpha and The Islands of Beta, and 1985’s The Lantern of D’Gamma. I looked at the second of these games five years ago, but now that archivists have discovered the missing original, I wanted to revisit these happy memories of my childhood again. 

You may have been expecting a Space Quest V post this week. Unfortunately, due to a computer emergency (and the discovery that I cannot write a blog post without the use of the letter “R”), my laptop has been shipped away for repairs. My write-up of Adventure Alpha has been sitting in the “draft” bin since the start of the COVID epidemic. With a borrowed computer and browser-based emulation, I was able to put in the time to finish the write-up. I hope you enjoy this diversion from our regularly scheduled content.

Missed Classic 78: Crash Dive! (1984)

Written by Joe Pranevich

For the era that we study, Brian Moriarty is one of the giants. He brought us three of Infocom’s classics, starting with Wishbringer, and jumped over to LucasArts to create Loom, one of my favorite adventure games of all time. Before we move on to Trinity (1986) and start the story of Infocom-under-Activision, I’d like to reverse course and fill in the final blank from his early career. In the early 1980s, Moriarty worked as a writer and eventual technical editor for Analog Computing magazine, celebrating the Atari personal computers that he loved. In that role, he wrote his first game, a tepid Adventure in the Fifth Dimension (1983) that failed to foreshadow the fantastic designer he would become. The following year, he penned Crash Dive!, his final Atari game before joining Infocom. Does that game show his potential? That’s what I would like to find out.

Inspiration can strike from just about anywhere, but Crash Dive! has perhaps one of the more unusual origin stories that I have ever heard. It starts with a failure: in 1982, Analog’s Jon Bell and Tom Hudson wanted to make a submarine action game. Bell and his team even toured two submarines (the Nimitz and Dace) for inspiration and historical accuracy. Cover art was commissioned, the game was announced, and even the back-of-box copy was written… but it evaporated into thin air. Despite the time and expense, it was never released. That would be the end of the Crash Dive! story, if it wasn’t for its “inspirational” cover art and a very special issue of Analog Computing.

Zork Marathon: A Rush to Uniformity - 1984 Books & Wrap-up

Written by Joe Pranevich

Sixteen games! It’s been another year both in real-time and in Infocom-time as we have reached the end of 1984 in our misnamed “Zork Marathon”. I’m still having a ton of fun, but as I mentioned in my last post, we need a bit of a breather and catch-up before I want to start on Wishbringer. This year marked two more events in the history of Zork that I cannot pass up without mention: the completion of the Zork series of gamebooks by Steve Meretzky, and the expanded manuals and Zork material provided when Infocom transitioned into the “gray box” format for all of their games. We’ll kick off the 1985 coverage next time with Cornerstone, Infocom’s disastrous move towards the business computing market.

Before we begin, I have written a bonus post covering Suspect, the final game in the Sergeant Duffy mystery series. Ilmari already did an excellent official review of the game, but I couldn’t pass up playing it before moving on. It’s a great game and a good end to the year for Infocom and it is worth your time to (re-)read either of our reviews. I also have a strange kind of “Request for Assistance”. For the last four years, I have played a "classic" holiday-themed adventure game for our Christmas bonus post. There is only one more 1980s Christmas adventure that I know of left to play: A Christmas Adventure (1983) by Bitcards. This is a true rarity: a customizable game that you could give to your Apple II-owning loved ones as an electric holiday card. Unfortunately, the only copy I can find anywhere is 150 UKP (around $200). That’s a bit steep, but I’d like to see if we can collaborate to purchase and donate it to the Internet Archive. As an experiment, I have set up a GoFundMe page as a fundraiser and already coordinated with the good folk at the Internet Archive to import this game if we purchase it. (In fact, it will be shipped straight to them.) I’ll get to play it, but so will anyone else that wants to. Please take a look and donate if you would like to see me play this game this Christmas and for it to be saved by the Internet Archive. I hope no one is offended that I am asking for help; I just really want to play this game for posterity (and Christmas fun).

Missed Classic: Hitchhiker’s Guide - Won! And Final Rating

Written by Joe Pranevich

I did it! With your help, I conquered The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! This has been my fifteenth Infocom adventure and certainly one of the tougher ones, but thankfully Voltgloss and some Invisiclues were around to put me back on track. I leave this game feeling fairly satisfied, especially as I had made it quite near the end before I needed help. You’ll be reading all about that in just a moment.

For this week’s jaunt, I recommend that you get into the mood by a rendition of “Marvin, I Love You”, one of my favorite Hitchhiker’s-related novelty songs. Since this will likely be my last Hitchhiker’s post (unless I do a special one on the canceled sequel down the line), I couldn’t end this without making you listen to it at least once. I’ll have more chances for Douglas Adams love as we later get to Bureaucracy, and (perhaps someday) Starship Titanic. I discovered this tune through Dr. Demento as I doubt the original album was released in the US. The female vocalist on this track is Kimi Wong-O'Brien, better known as the then-wife of Richard O’Brien, the creator of Rocky Horror. There are more than a handful of Hitchhiker’s Guide-inspired songs released over the years. I’d love it if we got a good playlist of them in the comments!

Don’t Panic! It’s time to finally bring this adventure game to a close.

Missed Classic: Hitchhiker’s Guide - Arthur Who? (Request for Assistance)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Let’s mix our time travel metaphors!

If you’ve ever seen Doctor Who, you know that the adventure of the Doctor and his companions are fairly random. They travel from world to world, from time to time, solving problems and having adventures. They also spend a great deal of time running. But during the period that Douglas Adams was a writer and script editor, this was taken to the extreme with the installation of the “Randomizer”. This device mostly prevented the Doctor from deciding where the TARDIS would go next, ensuring that neither he nor the evil Black Guardian (from whom he was fleeing) would know where he was going. Functionally, the show was exactly the same as before, but now there was some technobabble reason why they didn’t know where they were going rather than just the normal not knowing where they were going. Eventually, they dropped the premise and forgot that the Black Guardian was supposed to be chasing them anyway. That’s Doctor Who in a nutshell.

I have to wonder whether Douglas Adams was inspired by the Randomizer when he and Steve Meretzky were working on this segment of the Hitchhiker’s Guide game. That all we have: random mini-adventures in random order. I’m not sure how this is supposed to wrap up. It’s still fun, but they traded the linearity of the earlier part of the game with random side stories. It’s easier to narrate than explain, so read on! I should also mention that at the end, I have no idea what to do next. Suggestions are appreciated.

Missed Classic: Hitchhiker’s Guide - Improbable Mission

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back! Last week, I successfully defeated the Vogons, retrieved the elusive babel fish, and managed to secure an atomic vector plotter before being jettisoned out of an airlock. Not bad for a Thursday! This week, I will be picking up the thread just after passing out for lack of oxygen and very improbably being picked up by a passing spaceship: the Heart of Gold. Thus far, the Hitchhiker’s Guide game has been a lot of fun, if a bit linear. Contrary to my initial fears, Adams and Meretzky have managed to make the game funny without being inscrutable; there is a logic to the puzzles that makes them solvable and gives you a sense of pride for doing so.

I mentioned last week that I am stuck and I remain so, although I have some new things to try. I have decided to pause my own playing for another week or so until the writing catches up. I hope that my re-playing the events will inspire me to find the thing I missed. I think I realized something that I missed even while typing out this post, so I look forward to experimenting. Onward to the adventure!

Missed Classic: Hitchhiker’s Guide - I Got the Babelfish!

Written by Joe Pranevich

What is the most famous puzzle in adventure game history? Is it defeating the snake in Colossal Cave? Sneaking in the back of the white house in Zork? How about something from King’s Quest or Maniac Mansion? In 1984, one of the most famous puzzles (at least according to the marketing department at Infocom) was the babel fish from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The puzzle was so famous that successful players purchased a now-prized t-shirt advertising that fact: “I got the babel fish.” If I had lived in 1984 and played this game, I would definitely have bought the shirt. Why? Because, this week I got the babel fish. I confess that this puzzle probably isn’t that famous considering that I do not remember it from my original playthrough of this game more than twenty years ago, but it was still fun. I’ve received t-shirts for dumber reasons.

Before we begin today, I recommend setting the mood in with “Journey of the Sorcerer”, the theme song to the original series. In a burst of cosmic similarity, I’m going to cover in this post roughly the same ground as the first episode of the radio and television series. I doubt I’ll be able to keep that up as the game will diverge from the source material, but it’s as good as any place to begin.

Missed Classic 57: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Infocom may have been the masters of text adventures, but they aspired to more. They wanted to be “interactive fiction”, to have the recognition that gaming could be an art form on the same level of a good book. To this end, they pursued authors, most notably up to this point Mike Berlyn (Suspended, Infidel, and Cutthroats) and Jim Lawrence (Seastalker). Even Steve Meretzky, Infocom’s jack-of-all-trades was now a published author. But could they have scored a greater prize in 1984 than Douglas Adams, already admired as one of the all-time greats (and all time weirdest) writers of witty and absurd adventures? Mr. Adams had written and performed with Monty Python. He had produced some of the greatest episodes of Doctor Who to date. He had found seemingly overnight success with his Hitchhiker’s Guide series on radio, albums, television, and books. Now he was coming to work with Infocom to adapt his most famous work to gaming. It would be a tremendous challenge, but if they succeeded it could change the face of Infocom and gaming forever… or at least until someone decided to bet the farm on business productivity software.

This week, we’ll tell his story and start the game that he produced. Can Mr. Adams’s style of humor translate to a good game? Is it even possible to make a good game based on a comedy? I am very eager to find out.

Missed Classic: Cutthroats - Won! Twice! And Final Rating

Written by Joe Pranevich

And it was such a nice dream, too...

Last week on Cutthroats, I lost. I successfully teamed up with my fellow treasure hunters, identified the location of the sunken cruise liner, solved a few underwater puzzles, and made it back to the surface with a priceless (and surprisingly dry) stamp collection. That sounds like the end, but then I was murdered in my sleep. Someone in our crew is a traitor, but who could it be? The Weasel? Pete the Rat? Johnny Red? This isn’t the most trustworthy crew and just about anyone could have done it.

At the beginning of last week’s session, I felt that the game was pedestrian. Now that I’ve found Berlyn’s “unexpected” twist, I am not so sure. I’ll have more thoughts about this once I unravel the mystery, but for now I am more annoyed than anything else. Let’s jump back in the game and discover the killer. Who could it be?

Missed Classic: Cutthroats - Lost!?

Written by Joe Pranevich

Our target: the Leviathan.

Welcome back! Last week in Cutthroats, the game began with my friend handing me a map to sunken treasure just moments before he was murdered. The following day, wholesome undersea explorers with names like “The Weasel” and “Pete the Rat” approached me to help them search for a treasure that “they” knew about, coincidentally one of the treasures that only I know the location for thanks to my new map. Even better, I have to pay not only a share of the boat, but also buy all of the provisions for the journey. I feel used! As I ended last time, I sat in the outfitters looking glumly at the cashier. I have a price list and some cash, but absolutely no idea what I will need to make my adventure a success. I suspect that picking incorrectly will mean a dead end and potentially hours of backtracking.

Thus far, I am surprised by how “normal” this game seems. Other than the suggestion in the manual that there are multiple shipwrecks, it has played very vanilla. We have neither the “asshole protagonist” of Infidel, nor the interface-bending antics of Suspended. This seems like a pretty normal game, albeit one set in the real world rather than a science-fiction or fantasy setting. The game is slow to get started, but we’ll see if that impression holds this week.

Missed Classic 53: Cutthroats - Introduction (1984)

Written by Joe Pranevich

In 1984, Infocom had a fantastic idea: let’s make two nautical-themed adventures in a row! More to the point, Infocom was working hard to keep each of their key developers working on a game to release this year: Steve Meretzky on Sorcerer and Hitchhiker’s Guide, Stu Galley on Seastalker, Mike Berlyn on Cutthroats, and Dave Lebling on Suspect. (Marc Blank even produced one: the Tutorial Game that I looked at in my last bonus post.) The nautical comparison isn’t quite fair: while Mr. Galley had produced a rolicking sci-fi adventure in a submarine, Mr. Berlyn was aiming for a modern-day tale of treasure hunting and piracy on the high seas. Still, it seems odd to have two superficially similar games in a row.

For this game, Mike Berlyn picked up an accomplice: Jerry Wolper. Mr. Wolper was an Infocom programmer who would work on the technical aspects of the production while Mr. Berlyn worked on the story. Berlyn had already proven himself more than capable of handling the technical side, but this freed him up to be more of a creative presence than before and was well-aligned with other creator/programmer pairings the company was experimenting with. Seastalker had been built the same way, and Hitchhiker’s Guide will follow the same model in just a few months. Will this change help Berlyn to write the best possible game? Possibly, although it could also suffer from having a less experienced programmer at the helm. I guess I’ll have to play to find out.

Missed Classic 52: Infocom’s Tutorial Game (1984)

Written by Joe Pranevich

You might say that a guy who is trying to play every Infocom game in release order, plus read all of the tie-in books, is a bit of a completionist. If you then added that he was trying to do all this in a mad rush because he wants to be done before it’s time to review Return to Zork when we get to 1993, it’s probably best that I don’t know your opinion. If you asked my wife, she’s tell you that I like to do things in the correct order. I always try to read books in the order they were published, regardless of what the author says. I’ll probably never let my son watch the Star Wars prequels before the original films. The shared experience is important to me and my playing these games in order, I have a hope of understanding how the original players felt when these games came out, even if the average Infocom-purchaser wouldn’t have bought all of the games.

That leads me to this surprise. I had thought that Cutthroats was the next released game, and I’ve started playing it already, but while I was wrapping up the research I learned that I had been mistaken: there was one tiny Infocom release between Seastalker and Cutthroats. Around the summer of 1984, Infocom released two special advertising packages. The first of these, the so-called “Zork I demo” was a disk sent to computer stores. The intention, at least according to text in the demo itself, was that a customer in these fine establishments could sit at a computer terminal and play a few minutes of an Infocom game, become inspired, and leave with a handful. But while Zork I is a lot of fun, it wasn’t quite the perfect game to get players hooked. It didn’t hold players’ hands at all or even explain how you play interactive fiction. To remedy this, Infocom developed the Tutorial Game, a miniature adventure that would introduce the key concepts in a fun and lighthearted way.

Missed Classic: Seastalker - Won! And Final Rating

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome to the Aquadome! Last week, I started into Seastalker and discovered that my father’s company's underwater base is under attack by a sea monster. I was able to finish work on my experimental sub, deal with two acts of sabotage, and navigate a busy and obstacle-filled harbor to finally arrive at the Aquadome. This game is fun so far, half adventure and half mystery, as we have to both save the base and uncover the saboteur. I have a theory who that is, but we’ll see what happens as we arrive at the base itself.

This week starts with a happy reunion as I dock my sub at the base’s docking tank, and emerge into a reception area. The whole station crew is gathered to meet us! Is one of them the saboteur?

Missed Classic 51: Seastalker - Introduction (1984)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Now, where was I? Oh yes, before I was distracted by the amazing Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes (plus a Christmas side trip), I had just completed Sorcerer, the first Infocom game of 1984. That game remains one of my favorites so far and has moved Steve Meretzky into my short list of awesome game designers. Three months later, Infocom followed it up with Seastalker, our first “junior” adventure. One of the key trends with Infocom as they entered into 1984 was a desire to connect traditional fiction writers with their new “interactive fiction” medium. We have already seen two games by Mike Berlyn, a science fiction author, in 1983, but this year will go even farther: three of their five games will be written by an established non-interactive author.

In order to ensure that their first adventure for a younger audience was successful, Infocom sought out Jim Lawrence, a 30-year veteran of middle-grade fiction, and paired him with Stu Galley. Mr. Galley had already proven that he could take another’s ideas and make them blossom when he wrote The Witness, this would be his chance to do so with an author that didn’t understand the medium. You probably have never heard of Mr. Lawrence, but in just the few weeks that I have been researching him, I have become a tremendous fan.

Missed Classic: Erik the Viking - Won! (With Final Rating)

By Ilmari

Where should we sail today?

Missed Classic: Erik the Viking - Sailing the Seas

By Ilmari

Before returning to North Sea, let’s take a look at the Pacific Ocean