Missed Classic: Deathmaze 5000 - WON! and Final Rating

By Will Moczarski

Adventurer's Journal #3: I finally found a secret passage that got me out of my previous conundrum – I got to kill the monster eventually and even found a sword. When I thought that I was in for the home-run the monster's mother came out of the woodwork and taught me otherwise. I also did away with this beast, though, and poisoned a vampire bat on my way out only to be killed no less than four times in the most painful ways imaginable. My guardian angel (or rather guardian demon) kept on resurrecting me, however, and I finally got out of this mess. If there's one thing I've learned it's to cherish the safety of escape rooms...

The third day in the maze starts with a facepalm moment. While examining the perfect square I accidentally press the up button and reappear on the other side. Is this “puzzle” nothing more than an unconventional door? On the other side, I discover the usual essentials: a torch and food, as well as a ball of blue wool. Will there be a vicious cat to accompany the vicious dog from level 2? I have to drop some items, too, so I want to put everything that seems like a treasure – the ring, the ball, the paint brush – in the same square and head out to re-explore level four. Unfortunately, dropping more than one item in the same location results in the hallway being “too crowded”. I'll have to pick a whole corridor, accordingly. The next minutes are spent experimenting with all the items. I finally find out that I can play the flute for the snake and it rises out of the box. Moving towards it results in it biting me and me dying once more, though – not exactly breaking new ground here. Reading the usual message about the game again I suddenly know how to cross the pit in level 2 and get the magic staff! Maybe that is the item I am missing? I restore back and fart my way across the pit, thus avoiding the second vicious dog. Still, the staff doesn't have any effect on my remaining puzzles – not the wildest success I could have come up with in my dreams.

In-game graphics for the snake!

Missed Classic: Deathmaze 5000 - Telephone for Van Gogh

By Will Moczarski

Adventurer's Journal #2: This maze really gets to me. I have been stuck in the strange trap for quite a while before getting my throat ripped out by a vicious dog, starving to death and getting mauled by a foul-smelling monster. Someone or something continues to resurrect me, though, and I have to live through all of these horrors again and again until I find my way through – at least I'm making progress...

Interestingly, the biblical passage that the Byrds borrowed for their hit “Turn, Turn, Turn” is from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, a number too similar to 317.2 to ignore. In Ecclesiastes 3, the 17th word is an „a“, and this „a“ is at the beginning of the second part. Furthermore, the second half of Ecclesiastes 3:7 (thus including 1-7.1 but excluding 1-7.2) is “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak”. This line is apparently not featured in the lyrics to the song by the Byrds – it's left out. And...in Latin Jehovah begins with an “I”. In short, all of this got me nowhere – my cabbalistic approach was doomed to fail. Instead I put my tail between my legs and took a hint from the in-game hint system which told me to “invert and telephone”. What? The hint is just another puzzle? I appear to have been right by inverting the calculator but how do I use “2.LIE” on a telephone? At least this didn't take me too long but I was astonished just how cruel the game really was. In 1980, the letters L, I and E would have been on the same buttons as the numbers 5, 4 and 3 on a telephone. For example: If you wanted to call the LucasArts helpline from their adventures, it would be advertised as “1800-STAR WARS”, translating into “1800-7827 9277”. 5-4-3-2 was so clearly a sequence that I didn't believe in coincidence and indeed turning right five times, left four times and right three times set me free from my conundrum and I was able to leave with the calculator in hand. What a cruel, cruel puzzle! If there is anybody here who was able to solve this without the in-game hint system, please let me know in the comments – I'd be most interested in your train of thought.

Missed Classic: Deathmaze 5000 - Conference of the Byrds

By Will Moczarski

Adventurer's Journal #1: So I entered the five story building with the ominous name Deathmaze 5000 although everybody had warned me about it. I figured that escape rooms are for pansies and I'd need more of a challenge to get my righteous adrenaline fix. The maze was really something, though – I was perpetually beheaded by some invisible guillotine, found a lot of treasures but nothing edible so far and finally got stuck in a devious trap that seemed to be quoting either the Bible or the Byrds – not really sure which. I'm already longing for the safety of a conventional escape room although naturally I'd never admit that. Here goes nothing!

[From TRS-80.org: excerpt from a Med Systems catalog]

In-game manual and contact data for unbecoming insults...right?

Missed Classic 59: Deathmaze 5000 (1980) - Introduction

Written by Will Moczarski

One of the creepiest gaming experiences of my childhood was called Asylum, a downright crazy text adventure with graphics scaring the hell out of me back then. As I never actually managed to complete the game it has kind of stuck with me over the years and hung over my head like an unfinished memory. To finally come to terms with it, I've decided to blog through the adventure games developed and published by Med Systems Software of which Asylum (confusingly aka Asylum II) is the last.

The rather unknown company was founded around the beginning of the 1980s and first released a series of simple maze adventure games called Rat's Revenge, Deathmaze 5000 and Labyrinth for the TRS-80. They cannot be found anywhere on MobyGames and the early history of Med Systems is generally in the dark but sometimes retro gaming calls for a little bit of digital archaeology, right?