Transcript
Speaker: Welcome everybody to quest quest the adventure game podcast. It's me, Jess. Uh, you might know me as decaf Jedi on Twitch and YouTube, and you may have guessed by now. i am here solo. I'm flying solo.
Speaker: Uh, strap in, put your tray tables in upright position. It's me all by my lonesome, my usual co-host Ben. Ben is off on a solo quest this week, leaving the podcast completely in my hands.
Speaker: So, you know, sometimes it's just like that. They can't all be winners, but you're stuck with me. ah Ben is actually on a pretty exciting solo quest this week. you Some of you may know he recently streamed the Access point-and-click adventure game from 1992, Amazon Guardians of Eden.
Speaker: And, you know, he was so taken with the game. He actually just up and bought a ticket to South America, flew down there. he has been kayaking down the Amazon River for the past week.
Speaker: I'm sure he's gotten into all kinds of exciting trouble as he's as he's gone on this side quest, if you will. ah But he'll be back next week. Don't worry. We'll be back to usual programming. and But this week, ah you're with me, and and we're on a little little solo quest ourselves.
Speaker: And I've got a what I hope will be a ah fun topic in mind, reminiscing about about some games I played as a kid that I vaguely remember.
Speaker: ah So that's what's in store. But first, I mean, I have to ask myself the question, what have I been playing? Yeah. And I don't have the official why have I been playing music handy. So I'm going just add in post ah some nice background music here. You're probably hearing it right now for all I know. Maybe you are. Maybe I couldn't figure out how to drop that in here.
Speaker: And maybe it's just complete silence in the background. Either way, what have I been playing lately? Um... I have gotten way into a new toy that I bought recently. I recently bought one of those little handheld retro gaming consoles.
Speaker: I got an Ambernic RGXX35H, which definitely sounds like a ready for market commercial product. with a catchy name like that.
Speaker: But essentially it's a little horizontal ah Game Boy-ish doodad capable of emulating games all the way up to around the Dreamcast and the PlayStation 1. So it has a pretty good range of of games that it can emulate.
Speaker: And I have been going back and playing everything from old NES games to arcade titles to everything in between. It'll even run ScumVM. So if you get ahold one of these suckers, you can finally ah play all your favorite ScumVM games on the go. and Now, sadly, I don't think you could play a s Escape from Monkey Island. That, of course, isn't a Scum game.
Speaker: But someday we'll have a handheld version of Escape from Monkey Island. Don't worry. some Someone out there will hack that onto a device. But for me, I've gotten kind of obsessed with this thing. It's not my new favorite toy. I've been playing with it nonstop. And what I've really been enjoying ah more than anything, I've been getting into a lot sports games.
Speaker: I find that with but with consoles, i really tend to gravitate toward sports games. Like I've been playing a whole lot of NBA Jam Tournament Edition. Get in there, give me the Phoenix Suns. I'll start raining down threes with Thunder Dan Marley.
Speaker: I'll get the round mound of rebound Charles Barkley Duncan on everyone's head. it's It's a good time. I'm really enjoying that one. I've been playing a lot Tecmo Super Bowl for the Super NES. That's an old favorite.
Speaker: I've been obsessed with Tecmo Bowl since its inception. I go back and play it several times a year already, having a little handheld version of it where I can just load up a season mode, get in there with the Dallas Cowboys, you know get some rushing yards with Emmett Smith.
Speaker: Give you those Troy Aikman to Michael Irvin completions, you know, get the big TDs, rack up those stats. I like to get back yeah my players as the league leader in every category I can. Well, let me some take my Super Bowl. But what I've been really enjoying more than anything.
Speaker: is an old favorite, another Super Nintendo game. I call it the Super Nintendo. You know, i know a lot of people call it the Super NES. I know there are freakazoids out there that are call it the sneeze and SNES and things like that.
Speaker: I still call it Super Nintendo. I feel like as a child of the of the early 90s, which is to say I was born in the late 70s, that Super Nintendo is the is the way that me and all my friends talked about at the time. But SNES, whatever.
Speaker: do the date that The details are inconsequential, but I've been playing a lot of Super Baseball 2020, like a whole lot of Super Baseball 2020. This is a 1991 game by SNK. Some of y'all may know this one. It's sort of their follow-up to the Baseball Stars series. Baseball Stars, fantastic game on the Neo Geo. It was later on other platforms as well. It was an arcade title like most the Neo Geo stuff.
Speaker: But you know Baseball Stars, right? And Super Baseball follows up on that. It even carries over the Ninja Black Sox, which was one of the teams in the original Baseball Stars. I still think that's an amazing team name the Ninja Black Sox. There really needs to be a minor league team somewhere that adopts the Ninja Black Sox as their official mascot. But um the the Super Baseball 2020 game set in the far future of 2020 adds robots.
Speaker: ads robots And this, it turns out, is all that baseball ever needed. It turns out that baseball with a mixture of human players, cyborg humanoid players, and then flat out robots on like tank treads, some combination of those in a nine player lineup is all a game has ever needed.
Speaker: i you have robots and players that you can upgrade uh through with all kinds like you know better pitching arms and and super bats and stuff like that uh so you can do all that kind of thing occasionally the robots explode that's exciting there should be more exploding in baseball right now if you go watch a baseball game even a minor league game the odds of seeing anyone explode are really not much higher than they are anywhere else uh and in fact maybe lower than a lot of places but in baseball super baseball 2020 you get to see some baseball explosions and there's nothing wrong ah with that. It even has a nice season mode tacked on there. So you can play a little tournament against all your other plays. also has some different rules like there the foul zone for the ah for the stadium is is much smaller. There are a few other little things. You earn money when you make plays. So if you make a big
Speaker: like jumping diving catch in the outfield or something you'll earn a little bit extra cash and you can buy those upgrades with the cash so it's almost like ah a short-term kind of rg rgp uh rpg uh mechanic that's uh that's built into the game but i love me some Super Baseball 2020, and that's what I've been playing this week. I've been wearing out the battery on this this new little toy, and I have a feeling for the next next several episodes, you can expect to hear more about what sorts of weird retro handheld games I've been playing with this new toy because it's kind of consuming a lot of my imagination right now. So that is is what I've been playing.
Speaker: Now, Ben, we're here right now but And we asked him what he was playing. He would tell us about some kind of like roguelike bullet hell game that he found on steam that I've never heard of. And this would be the part of the podcast where I just kind of listen politely and wait for my turn to speak and like jump in with a joke or something like that.
Speaker: But without Ben here to tell us about some obscure game that he's playing, I guess we just move on here in a world of solo quests to our topic for the day. Uh, I want to talk about a five and a quarter inch floppy disk specifically.
Speaker: a five and a quarter inch floppy disk that I owned as a child. and This is very much just a personal reminiscence. I don't know if anyone out there is has necessarily encountered this same floppy disk. and I've actually looked online quite a bit and had trouble finding this, but let me tell you about the specific floppy disk that I'm thinking of.
Speaker: I'm 99% sure the floppy disk in question, based on my research, came from a company called Key Punch Software. ah They were a publisher in based in Minnesota.
Speaker: ah They're kind of billed online as one of the early shareware publishers. I think probably a better way to describe them is they were a publisher who took a bunch of games they found online ah for free and just sold copies of them on floppy disk. I don't know if shareware is is quite what it's called. It's like community sourced and sold for profit. But I'm pretty sure this is a KeyPunch software disk.
Speaker: And a lot of what KeyPunch software put out were compilations of short text-based games. um And I found several of these games I'm going to talk about today. um in other KeyPunch software compilations, but never quite this combination.
Speaker: But this five and a quarter inch floppy disk that I want to talk about today is one of the first... I guess compilations of games that I ever played on my first computer way back when, in like 1986, 1987, when my parents bought me my, uh, my Tandy 1000 EX and I was suddenly a ah PC gamer.
Speaker: Somehow I acquired. this disc, it was a nice gold label on ah on ah on a floppy disc. And this disc contained four games, four games that as simple as they were, all text-based, all very basic sorts of games.
Speaker: These really captured my imagination in a way that all four of them have stuck with me to this day. And in that sense, that you know, i think that alongside early games I played like King's Quest, uh, two, that was the the first adventure game I ever played or arcade games like, uh, David Crane's Ghostbusters game. That was one of the first games that ever played.
Speaker: Uh, pinball construction set, Bard's Tale, uh, EA's, uh, Seven Cities of Gold, uh, Along with these, this little disc with some with some text games that really caught me in. A couple of these are adventure games. A couple of them aren't. But i want to talk about all four because this is a strange five and a quarter inch floppy that's still stuck in my mind all these years later.
Speaker: So what games were on this floppy disc? ah There were four of them. ah And I want to talk about each of them. ah I'll go ahead outline them though.
Speaker: ah D and d star Trek, vampire castle and alien are going to be the four games on this. Those last two vampire castle and alien are text adventures.
Speaker: ah D and D as you might guess is a RPG and star Trek is a tactical space combat simulator. I'm going to say, but i want to talk about all of these. Because, man, for this to be, like, again, a rinky-dink compilation of what may have been software that this company just stole and and published, allegedly, in case KeyPunch software still exists. Like, I'm going look this up on Moby Games and find out that, like, in 1989, KeyPunch software, ah you know, renamed itself Activision or something, and they're going to sue me for saying this. ah But...
Speaker: um These four games, yeah, all of them ah really caught my imagination against a lot of graphic-based titles that I was playing otherwise. And I want to start with D&D. I suspect if there's one of these that y'all might have played, if anyone out there listening may have played before, there's a good chance D&D or the Star Trek game will be the one you've played. And by the way, if you're out there listening and do you have memories of any of these games or any other weird early games that you encountered that you don't even know how they ended up in your possession, in your floppy disk box, ah feel free to email us at questquestpodcast at gmail.com or leave leave some comments. You can leave them on our Spotify or you can leave them over on our YouTube where we post post all of our episodes. But the first of these games, D&D.
Speaker: As you can guess, D&D, and literally the way this is usually rendered, the title is simply the letters D, N as in Nancy, and D. So that's Dungeons.
Speaker: D is in Dungeons, N as in Nancy, and then D as in Dragons. D&D. ah This was a game that, as far as I can tell, Starts out as a mainframe game. It was like a lot of early text games.
Speaker: It comes out, it looks like around 1977, based on my research. ah So it is a game that is relatively early in Dungeons & Dragons history.
Speaker: As far as I know, this is the first attempt to adapt Dungeons & Dragons into any kind of video game. It's created by, who i see online, a Purdue student by the name of Daniel Lawrence.
Speaker: Uh, this was, yeah, I think it dates back 1977 and like all the games I'm going to talk about here, uh, the version I played, the DOS version that I played, uh, was written in basic.
Speaker: Uh, so in that sense, it is literally and figuratively pretty basic game. All four of these were, uh, were basic titles. Uh, and, uh, you know, at the time, as I was playing these early games, I mean, again, I'm,
Speaker: you know, nine years old, 10 years old. I didn't really understand how any of this sort of stuff worked. I just knew there was a batch file on this disc. And if I type D and D I was transported to the forgotten realms. I was taken to, uh, taken into this game and, uh, I have to tell you, I was captivated by as a kid,
Speaker: Already by the age of nine or 10, I was obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons. I watched the cartoon obsessively, ah which was really a weird cartoon. I tried to play Dungeons and Dragons. Like, I mean, that's kind of the story of my life, though, is trying to play Dungeons and Dragons and failing, not be able to get other people interested, not be able to get a party together.
Speaker: But the first time I played it was real life Dungeons and Dragons was at my cousin Jeff's house. And he put together just like a little one-shot adventure. I remember he had miniatures and like a castle model that we used for it, which was very exciting.
Speaker: Really captured my imagination. had been obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons already at this point my life. So when I load up this D&D game, what I really loved about it was it felt close enough to me to be Dungeons and Dragons adventure.
Speaker: Basically, it is a very plain text dungeon crawler. it If I had to compare it to something, like if you've ever gone back and played like the text version of Rogue, the the game that helped inspire the whole roguelike genre, um it's a lot like that. ah So you're seeing like a simple ASCII-based dungeon.
Speaker: You're seeing your character move around it. You can choose, I believe, to be a fighter, a magician, or a cleric. Maybe if ah if I'm recalling correctly here, um in the version I played, i think you had four dungeons that you could choose from, ah each that had its own little set of goals.
Speaker: And then, you know, you could do kind of the Dungeons and Dragons thing that you'd expect. You you go around, you... explore this dungeon, you battle monsters, you find treasure.
Speaker: It has a very basic, uh, version of D and D mechanics with hit points. Uh, it's all very rudimentary, but, uh, pretty pioneering for the era. It's trying to be at some level, a fairly so sophisticated RPG considering,
Speaker: that it was made in basic. Again, you know, basic is a programming language. This real limitations. But getting in there and exploring these dungeons and oftentimes dying very quickly because, I mean, we're talking about like nineteen seventy s D&D rules. So you're rolling in there with all of like six hit points.
Speaker: yeah All it takes is a goblin getting a couple of lucky rolls and you're toast, baby. That's game over. But I love this. And especially the idea there are different dungeons to choose from with different difficulty levels.
Speaker: Being able to explore these, yeah I never really mapped it. it's the It's a game that practically demands mapping. But very rarely do I map. I'll talk about a rare exception to that later this episode.
Speaker: But I never bothered mapping these things. So lot it became like a memorization thing. Can I remember how to how to get through these? And yeah, for a game that is basically, you know, a bunch of ASCII dungeon walls and sort of non-astery, like yeah an asterisk as your character and things like that.
Speaker: It really captured my imagination. Just that ability to play something that kind of felt like D&D was amazing to me. Now, granted, there were more sophisticated games out there by 1986, 1987 that could have afforded me a much more sophisticated D&D-esque role-playing experience. I mean, I didn't know anything about Ultima at the time. I imagine if I'd gotten a hold of an Ultima game back then, i would have loved it.
Speaker: But you know what? I didn't have Ultima. I had D&D. I had a batch file that ran D&D, and that was all I needed. I wouldn't play an Ultima game until I eventually played Ultima 4. That's Quest of the Avatar, right?
Speaker: Right. I played Ultima 4 eventually on NES, and that was that was pretty good. But yeah, for me, D&D was one of my first opportunities to play any kind of PC role-playing game. And man, did I sink hours into that thing. For what's a relatively simple game, i really I really poured a lot of my attention into it.
Speaker: That's D&D. The next game on this disc I want to talk about is Star Trek. And I believe in some circles, this one would be known also as Super Star Trek. I think it got some upgrades and tweaks along the way.
Speaker: But this is another game with with quite a history behind it I believe it dates back to 1971 from what I can read online. It was originally again published for mainframes, ported into basic ah by the early 1970s.
Speaker: I believe it got a release in 1974 under the Super Star Trek title ah as as a you know basic game. And this one, as you might expect, ah follows the adventures of our old pals in Starfleet, specifically the crew of the USS Enterprise. That's going to be ah the 1701. No stinking A, B, C, or D or anything like that attached to it.
Speaker: It's an old Constitution-class vessel on a five-year mission. To seek out strange new life, all that sort of stuff. We know. ah Star Trek, Super Star Trek, 1974.
Speaker: ah By the time I get a hold of it again, it's it's over 10 years later. But once again, what we have here is just a text-based game. What you're looking at in this game is ah grid of like an eight by eight grid.
Speaker: And it's sort of a star map. And right in the center of it, you have the letter E with a couple of brackets around it. And that's the enterprise. ah And you have 64 quadrants that you can explore in the game. I believe each of these is an eight by eight grid.
Speaker: So it's it's as big as actual outer space. They did their research on this and it turns out that that is actually the size of space. ah What do you do in the game? This is more of like a strategic starship simulator where you're going to be moving around these grids, traveling from quadrant to quadrant. You have to manage your energy. you know how those dilithium crystals are. You can't burn out your dilithium crystals.
Speaker: Or you're just dead in the water out there. What am I going to Spend 70 years at Impulse trying to get to the nearest star base? I don't think so. ah You've got to manage your shield, your phasers. You've got to keep stocked up on torpedoes.
Speaker: That means you're going to constantly be docking at star bases to refuel and rearm yourself. Along the way, you're going to encounter Klingon ships and and do battle with them. You have to like figure out how to use this grid-based system to target your torpedoes, ah give them coordinates, actually, to to hit their targets.
Speaker: Um, this to me was fascinating again, in the same way that D and D was the first RPG game that ever played. This is probably the first. Strategic game that ever got my hands on. Uh, I mean, it is definitely not arcadey.
Speaker: This is one that's all about managing resources. It's all about managing your movement. It's all about a very tactical kind of combat, given the limitations of, again, a text based eight by eight grid.
Speaker: ah And you're on a mission. I think there's like a time limit that you have to meet to maybe take out so many Klingons or explore so many new things, all that sort of stuff.
Speaker: But This, again, as you can imagine, I was, ah this will shock you after hearing that I was a D&D nerd at the age of nine or 10, but oh man, Star Trek from the time i was, i was a small child. i was obsessed with Star Trek. My dad was a Star Trek fan. My dad watched Star Trek when aired on NBC back during its original run.
Speaker: And when when I was a kid, he introduced me to Star Trek at a pretty young age. I think probably the first Star Trek thing I ever encountered was Wrath of Khan. You probably saw that on cable, if I had take a guess. All I remember was really being traumatized when they put the little mind control slug in Chekhov's ear.
Speaker: And then being really disappointed how sad Chekhov was when he had to betray the crew. I really felt bad. for pavel in uh in that moment but i was a star trek fan i got obsessed uh you i mentioned i watched the dnd cartoon if you thought that was weird really the first star trek series i got into was star trek the animated series when they would show reruns of that on nickelodeon on saturday mornings And for the longest time, that was like my version of Star Trek, which if you've seen that version of Star Trek, it's kind of a weird version of Star Trek to get into.
Speaker: But I was primed for a Star Trek game like this in much the same way that like the D&D game tapped into my imagination. This did the same thing. Like it was easy to get lost and really feel like.
Speaker: even just reading this text and seeing this little e icon move around in this text-based grid. It felt like commanding my own starship using only text commands. The strategy felt deep at the time. I suspect now if I went back and played this one, I haven't gone back and played this one. I want to note, I haven't gone back and played this one or D&D because i kind of don't want to spoil my memories of them. I got to kind of love the way I remember them so much. I don't want to go back and be like, oh, you know, actually, this was kind of ah basic thing.
Speaker: Literally, again, figuratively, this was a very rudimentary game that, you know, isn't this deep strategic simulator. I remember these this coordinate based torpedo aiming wasn't as thrilling as I remember it. It was kind of tedious.
Speaker: I'd prefer the make believe version of this game that continues to exist in my mind. And yeah, as a kid, just desperate for Star Trek content.
Speaker: mean, you have to remember Star Trek The Next Generation hadn't even come out yet. ah you know ah We were like months away probably when I was playing this game ah from from Star Trek's second coming. ah But I...
Speaker: Absolutely loved just flying around the galaxy. This is the kind game that as a kid, I didn't even need to play it to win or play it to accomplish anything. For me, it was sufficient just to be out there doing my thing and just telling Sulu to put it in warp four and making sure it was Scotty that the dilithium crystals hadn't been all drained.
Speaker: Just... a wonderful experience as a kid. But again, neither of these two are text adventures. These are respectively, you know, again, ah ah an RPG and a ah tactical space starship simulator.
Speaker: The last two games on this compilation, this key punch software disc of four games. The last two are actually proper text adventures.
Speaker: The first of these text adventures I want to talk about is called Vampire Castle. I was able to track down who actually designed this one online. This one seems a little more obscure. It's from around 1980. It started popping up, I guess, on BBSs and then eventually getting sold in compilations like this.
Speaker: But Vampire Castle is ah relatively simple text adventure where you are in ah vampire's castle and your job is to find him and eventually slay him, as one does. i mean, that's what vampires are for in video games. I mean, the gusto with which...
Speaker: King Graham slayed Dracula in King's Quest 2. I mean, that's what we should all try to emulate. And I mean, especially if you've played the Apple to GS version of King's Quest 2, where Dracula gets up as like, blah, blah, blah, and, you know out to suck your blood with those digital sound effects. That's scary. Now, there are no digital sound effects to be found here. Vampire Castle...
Speaker: is very much just a ah text parser, a bad text parser. This is no Infocom game. But we are in the world now of adventure gaming. And up to this point, you know, again...
Speaker: I'm relatively new to PC gaming. My exposure to adventure games, the first time I booted up Vampire Castle, the first time I loaded Vampire.bat, which is a pretty funny batch file name now that think about it. Oh my goodness.
Speaker: All these years later, I'm only now appreciating that there was a file I launched called Vampire.bat. Oh, that's a good batch file name. Oh, that's really good. this is This is why we podcast. Sometimes we podcast...
Speaker: to unlock these sorts of secrets uh just wait until eventually we cover space quest one on this podcast and unlock the secret of ulentz flats uh that's coming eventually but yeah vampire dot bat uh up until this point the adventure game that i had played was probably based just king's quest 2 i think that was the game that got with my computer it was not only exposure to the genre and and think maybe the only text adventure I'd ever seen before this, I have vague memories of being at a sleepover at my friend Sean's house as a kid.
Speaker: And he had ah computer there. i think it was a Commodore 64. And I'm almost certain he loaded up Zork on it. And we played it for like 10 or 15 minutes and then got distracted and went to swim in his pool. Sean had an above ground pool.
Speaker: And A pool was far more exciting to me than text adventure at that age. So Zork was was quickly ah forgotten. And pretty soon I'm i'm floating around in that above ground pool, just maxing relaxing, you kicking it all cool ah the way I like to do.
Speaker: ah So Vampire Castle is really one of the first text adventure games ah that I ever played. and I think the thing that really leaps out at me when I think back on Vampire Castle, I have actually gone back and replayed this one ah recently. spent little bit of time with Vampire Castle to to reminisce.
Speaker: And what really leapt out at me is sort of the eerie minimalism. And I don't know if this is intentional or just what's created by the nature of of the game's relatively simple interface.
Speaker: The descriptions are very sparse. the The room descriptions are minimal. Like a lot of early text adventures back then, especially one, you know, written in something like basic code, uh, the parser was, uh, was not great at parsing. The parser wasn't parsing very often.
Speaker: Uh, it could understand pretty easily like a ah go West, uh, you know, go East open door, But much more complicated than that. And it really started to falter. ah So this is a simple game, simple descriptions, simple commands.
Speaker: But the whole time, there's this sense that... You may be you know possibly being stalked by a vampire.
Speaker: ah As you are stalking, this could be a, does the hunted become the hunter? i guess that's the other way around. ah That's good. If you're the hunter hunted and you become the hunter, that's good.
Speaker: It's being the hunter has become the hunted. That's a bad thing. And that's more of the situation that it helped build. um There's lots of exploration. This is a castle that has...
Speaker: you know, hidden passages behind bookcases. And, oh, man, I was a kid. Give me a hidden passage behind a bookcase. And that piece of media is golden for me. That's all I needed as a kid to be. And, you know, if I'm being completely honest with myself, still, when I see a hidden passage behind a bookcase,
Speaker: I'm pretty happy that I don't know if you ever outgrow that really, but this had 10 passages behind bookcase. The only thing better is a hidden cave behind a waterfall. Am I right? um I learned the word parapet ah from this game. Back story. Parapet. It's also a game that as you explore, like a lot of text adventures from this era, i'd going in all the way back to adventure and Zork, like the end games like that.
Speaker: ah Colossal cave. ah Oftentimes there's a little bit of punishment that comes with exploration, lots of traps that if you take a lot wrong turn, a lot of it's sort of learned by trial and error.
Speaker: um But eventually, yeah, this is a game that... I think for me, that exploration element of it was was very exciting. And you know while today, as as an older gentleman, I'm loathe to use my imagination, as a child, ah I don't even think for me, I was just like,
Speaker: I don't think I realized that making this a text adventure probably was it not a choice at the time. You think for me, it' like, oh, this is just a different way adventure games are rather than, yeah, this is probably one guy doing this in his spare time.
Speaker: This isn't a big budget commercial project that can afford all 16 colors of the rainbow. <unk>s It's going to have to settle for black and white text. ah being able to like i mean i spent a lot of this game kind of scared that somebody's going jump out and get me then again know that was king's quest too i i also spent a lot time afraid ah you know hagatha or an enchanter or you know a little a thieving dwarf would jump out and get me as well but uh yeah this one's funny you know one of the things i really remember about it like
Speaker: Again, there are secret passages, there are hidden secrets all through this castle. ah When you walk into the library area of this game, one of the things always stuck with me was it gives you the sparse room descriptions like, oh you're in the library, books lie in all the walls, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: ah There's a there's a a great axe in the corner. ah But it mentions, like a lot of text adventures do, you know ah exits are north, east, and west.
Speaker: It, as you go into the library in this game, uh, notes, not all exits are obvious. which again, as a kid, that's the sort of thing that just like really captured my imagination. This notion that it's like, well, there are obvious exits to the North and West, but not all exits are obvious, prompting you to start digging around and see if you can figure out how to trigger this, uh, this secret, uh, this secret passage, this hidden exit. And that with, again, that sort of sense of, I guess, eerie minimalism, this, you know, there's,
Speaker: enough sparse description here to really make it feel like you're alone in a castle the parser isn't your friend the parser isn't bringing a lot of personality this it's all on you and will you find this uh this vampire before this vampire finds you that's sort of the the driving force behind vampire castle and going back and replaying it more recently you know it's um it it's a minimalist game. You know, I think that it is a game that is pretty modest in its ambition, but competent enough. I mean, again, there's still some some fun little puzzles to solve and some fun little deaths to encounter. So in that sense, yeah, Vampire Castle is one that, so going back to play it today, didn't completely spoil my experience from youth.
Speaker: Which brings us to the last game in this game. compilation that maybe be key punch software did. Who knows? It doesn't matter where this disc came from. I don't even remember like opening it from a box. It wasn't pirated. A lot of my software as a kid somehow came to me pre-pirated by friends and relatives and things like that.
Speaker: This was a legitimate, you you can't just get a gold label and slap it on a disc. Those things aren't cheap. ah But wherever this thing came from, the last game on this compilation, and maybe the one that I find today most interesting is another text adventure, ah called alien, uh, released in 1982.
Speaker: eighty two And i found this one, ah interesting enough, uh, that actually went back and replayed it, uh, still ah found it amusing and fascinating in the same way as I did as a kid and still really enjoyed my playthrough, even though once again, it's a rudimentary parse or rudimentary game.
Speaker: It's got a little bit of, uh, it's got a little bit of pepper. It's got a little bit of mustard that maybe vampire castle didn't. And actually, um I decided i would, uh,
Speaker: i record my playthrough of this one you can check that out it's going to go live on my youtube channel decaf jedi uh the same day this episode comes out so if you want to check that out be sure to go over to my youtube and you can watch a playthrough uh of this game alien from 1982 and eighty two and What I love about this one, another text adventure, as you can probably guess from the title.
Speaker: This one is a science fiction adventure. Now, no way is this tied to the Alien film franchise. You'd think in 1982, maybe this is going to be, you know, some sort of unauthorized text adaptation where yeah has Ripley's hiding from a xenomorph, all that sort of stuff.
Speaker: Not in any way connected with, uh, with the alien franchise, but, It does have some similarities with another franchise that care about quite a bit. So I want to talk about this ah and why i think this game is kind of fascinating here in the year 2025. What is the setup?
Speaker: ah what is the setup So you are a passenger on a space luxury liner, uh, called the Adonis. And due to some unspecified reasons, uh, the Adonis, uh, suffers a, uh, a catastrophic explosion in deep space.
Speaker: And you are the lone survivor of This space tragedy. ah You escape in an escape pod. You crash onto a hostile alien planet.
Speaker: And your job is to find other humans. You know that there's some sort of research station that used to exist on this planet. Your goal is to find other humans, to find a ship, to escape and get to safety.
Speaker: and From there, it's a simple two-word parser. It is a game very sparse in terms of puzzles. In fact, um you really only need directional commands for most of this game. It's literally just go east, go west, go south, go north.
Speaker: Uh, at one point you tap, get blaster at another point, you look at a computer screen, but basically other than that, it's just a walking simulator.
Speaker: Uh, there are no real puzzles to solve. Um, So that's kind of unique, I think, uh, for a game like this, it's, uh, it, it dispenses with puzzles almost entirely.
Speaker: Um, what's also kind of neat about this as you're exploring is this is a game where where mapping is imperative. As a kid, this is the rare game that I actually drew a map for. Now, you know, again, Quest Quest's official stance on mapping adventure games, Ben and I simply won't do it.
Speaker: ah We both wish we could. We both wish we were, you know, meticulous mappers and that we could save those maps and it would be like a fun little memento ah of the games that we've played, but that's not who either of us is.
Speaker: Instead, we muddle through these games. Alien, as a kid, I cared enough about this to make a map. Because basically, what you end up with is almost like a Dragon's Lair kind of experience. If you know what I mean by Dragon's Lair experience.
Speaker: This is very much a game that if you step a little bit off the golden path, if it's not instant death, it's going to be a death pretty quickly. Like right away, it starts with a situation. You're on the planet's surface.
Speaker: You're trying to find this research station that's nearby. And as you start the game, it gives you the description of your location and it notes the weather looks fine.
Speaker: And with every few moves and every few parser commands, look at stuff, interact with stuff, things like that. Slowly that weather forecast gets worse.
Speaker: Eventually the game starts saying things like, you know, the weather seems to be taking a bit of a turn. And the line that I remembered very vividly is as the weather continues to sort of deteriorate.
Speaker: Eventually the parser will start saying, looks like a storm's a Bruin, which I don't know why the like very colloquial phrase looks like a storm's a Bruin really caught me. But also think it's indicative of why this game for me has a little bit more juice than vampire castle.
Speaker: It has a little bit more personality. The parser, is, is, is playing with the player a little bit. So it looks like a storm's a-brewin'.
Speaker: And the longer that you're out here in this early initial part of the game, if you make too many moves, ah you're kind of in Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy territory, your house gets bulldozed.
Speaker: Here you simply die in a storm if you don't find shelter relatively quickly. So what that means is you have to explore, learn what's a dead end, learn what moves you forward,
Speaker: And eventually find that golden path. ah So mapping becomes imperative. You need to make sure that you get into a nearby cave system in as few moves as possible while grabbing a blaster from a skeleton you find along the way.
Speaker: ah So that's a lot of of how this game works. It's, know, you step off that path, you get eaten by something. You fall your death. Things are are pretty bad. it's It's a world where death is around every corner.
Speaker: And honestly, i think what I find most fascinating about this is these death scenes are usually... very thoroughly described and a lot of times they're pretty gruesome like it's talking about you being ingested by all manner of flora and fauna it uh it revels in gross descriptions of the way that you die on this ah alien planet uh and it usually ends the death of
Speaker: notes, the death now death note, usually ends these death messages with some sort of like chuckle, chuckle, you're dead, buddy, is what the the parser says.
Speaker: And what I find fascinating about this is, first of all, this is a lot of personality for a parser for a relatively low-budget kind of game for 1982 But reminds me,
Speaker: but it reminds me A lot. Of the space quest series. Everything about this game. Reminds me a lot.
Speaker: Of the space quest series. And I would love to know. You know.
Speaker: The two guys from Andromeda. Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe. haven't talked a lot about their inspirations for, uh, for space quest through the years. I know that, um, I know that Scott at least played a number of info com games. Um, I've never heard him necessarily suggest that planet fall or station fall, uh, the two games that, you know, are, are space adventures starring ah sanitation engineer themselves, whether those influenced the creation of the space quest series dollar, the character of Roger Wilco.
Speaker: I would really love to know if either of them ever happened to come across this game. I mean, i guess exploding spaceship escape pod crash on a hostile planet isn't commercial. completely original concept, right? I mean, at some level, that's not not terribly far off from, you know, how Star Wars kicks off. That's, yeah, mean, I won't say that alone. The fact that the Adonis luxury liner explodes an alien and you crash land on a planet versus the Arcata exploding in Space Quest 1, the Sarian encounter, and landing on the planet of Corona.
Speaker: um I don't know if that's a... you unique enough concept to suggest that's an inspiration. Honestly, though, it's the tone of this game and this sort of way it handles death. The idea that death is around every corner, that death is usually like comically over the top and gruesome, and that the narrator, the parser of this game makes fun of you for dying.
Speaker: If anything, that to me is what reminds me more of space quest than anything. I would love to pick the brains of the two guys from Andromeda and see if either of them ever came across this one. Uh, I wouldn't say space quest is ripping this off necessarily, but they seem like they're being cut from a little bit of the same cloth. And to me, that's fascinating before I had a chance to play space quest.
Speaker: I'd played this alien game and, uh, you know, space quest one, and then especially space quest two, I think share this really snarky narration in, in a beautiful way, ah that, uh, yeah, I think that in that sense, they have something in common, uh, with alien.
Speaker: and This is a game that if you're on the golden path, if you know which way to go, if you're looking at a walkthrough, ah you know, this is a game that's easily finished in like 10 or 15 minutes.
Speaker: In fact, I think my playthrough that I posted up on YouTube is like... 12 or 13 minutes and I showed off a few of the deaths and started over fresh a few times and things like that.
Speaker: It's incredibly short. I mean, even by text adventure standards, this is mini game. It's a, it's a diversion. Again, there are no puzzles in it. It is strictly a, can you figure out which way to go in order to survive and get off this planet?
Speaker: ah Solving puzzles isn't part of the equation, but this is a game that fascinated me as a kid. And it's one that I had trouble tracking down a few years ago because I couldn't even remember for sure what it was called.
Speaker: I look back now, is of course, it was Alien. I launched it with a batch file called Alien. ah But Eventually, I was able to track this down back when you could search things on Google. You remember that? Like when you go to google.com and you would like try to find 1980s text adventure with a string of text in it, like looks like a storm's a-brewin', and Google might serve you up a bunch of pages that give you the answer to that question.
Speaker: That sort service doesn't really exist anymore on the internet. So thankfully, I tracked this one down before Google became what it is now. The internet became what it is here in the year 2025, because I've really enjoyed going back and revisiting this one. It's, uh, it's one that, uh, I think is worth giving a look to if there's, um, know, probably there's anything in this collection that I think stands up today.
Speaker: I think some of the, the roguelike elements of the D and D game. Even though it isn't it isn't procedurally generated, but it it's reminiscent enough of the individual ah the original Rogue that I think there's some fun there.
Speaker: Or the the charm of the Star Trek premise. But Alien's a game that's deeply fascinating to me. I suggest checking it out and seeing what you think. It has an oppressive atmosphere, a good bit of humor, and some fun descriptions. This is a game that's much...
Speaker: ah I would argue better written than say vampire castle was. I mean, it's no infocom game, uh, from a narrative or a technological standpoint, but yeah, aliens got, got little bit juice. It's got a little bit of that, uh, got a bit of that alien juice in it.
Speaker: Uh, this one is worth checking out. But with all that having been said, I mean, what has this episode been? This has been me reminiscing about a disc, the origins of which I'm unsure of still,
Speaker: A compilation of four simple text-based games, a compilation that can't even find record of existing online in this exact form anywhere, because honestly, who's writing this stuff down?
Speaker: But man, as a kid, like in terms of capturing my imagination, These were games that in four completely different ways managed to do that. You know, it's the, it's the exploration of the D and d game. It's the strategy and resource management of star Trek. It's the sort of, guess, suspense filled exploration of vampire castle.
Speaker: And then this snarky, you know, humorous, sometimes over the top. gross alien game that really all four of these has stuck with me like i'm guessing my parents probably paid like 10 or 15 for this collection and i wouldn't doubt that didn't easily put you know 40 or 50 hours total into this if not more who knows i may have played that star trek game 40 or 50 hours but's Just because I liked it. It's fun flying around the quadrant and shooting at Klingons and stuff. I mean, this is before were any of those treaties ah yeah that that would make that sort of thing difficult. You just go around shoot at Klingons back then.
Speaker: That's how it was back in 1986, 1987. We didn't have a wharf yet. We didn't know what that meant. um But this is just a set of games that, again,
Speaker: I remember so vividly here, know, decades down the road and with Ben out of town, mean, don't think I'd ever have an excuse to talk about any of these on my own, or rather Ben, we're actually here. So taking this opportunity while I'm on my own to maybe share some of these with you and, uh, hopefully hear from you about some weird, obscure games that you played as a kid that you still remember that maybe nobody else seems to, if there are any of those out there.
Speaker: you know Let us know. Let us know in the comments on Spotify or on YouTube. ah Let us know by email. We're questquestpodcast at gmail.com. um And I want to thank everybody for listening. This is the first of the solo quests that I've done.
Speaker: ah Frankly, i can't wait until Ben's back because I've talked way too much. And I've been forced to laugh at my own jokes even more so than usual during this episode. And I'm sure nobody wanted to hear that.
Speaker: But I do want to thank everyone for listening. We'll be back to regularly scheduled programming soon. ah In the meantime, ah this is where I start to lay it on ah pretty thick.
Speaker: This is where I tell you, thanks for listening. Thanks for being out there. ah we're We're happy to have all of our quest questers out there in radio land tuning into these episodes.
Speaker: If you wouldn't mind, i go to iTunes, go to Spotify, go to wherever you listen this podcast. ah Leave us a review. Give us a good rating. This makes a difference. It helps people find us. It puts us higher up in search results, all those sorts of things. We appreciate that support. ah Give us feedback. Let us know what topics you want to hear about. Again, questquestpodcast at gmail.com. Tell a friend.
Speaker: about quest quest uh if that friend tells a friend and they tell a friend pretty soon we'll have over a million listeners and ben and i can both retire and then we might be able to put out two episodes a week who knows but for now i'm going to sign off thank you for being here for this solo quest and be sure to tune in next week when we
Speaker: It makes this look so easy. How does Ben do this every week? Next week, we'll be talking about the shocking truth of why every adventure game protagonist can fit a ladder in their pocket. Thank you for listening. Quest Quest out.
