Zarf Updates

Back when I was a kid, after I solved an Infocom game, I'd print out a transcript of a "perfect" playthrough. And, as it happened, I kept this box of printouts through all the moves and decades since.

The box sits right now on my shelf of Preserved Stuff, in between the box of "How to Play IF" postcards and the stack of hand-scribbled adventure game maps from the 90s.

It's a nice memento but very nearly useless. I'm not about to scan in all those pages, and you wouldn't learn much from reading them. Not even about my play style -- as I said, these are optimized, after-the-fact transcripts.

However, a question came up on Jason Dyer's blog about the exact version of Suspended that I played. And I said hey! I could look at the transcript and tell you!

...Actually, I can't. Suspended doesn't print out the release and serial info when you start a transcript. Oh well.

But since I was in there, I snapshotted the start of every transcript. Here they are.

(Okidata dot-matrix printer, in case you were wondering. Might have been the μ82a model? Or μ92, according to the post from ten years ago. Trust that guy, he's got a better memory.)

Some of the printouts are pretty hard to read -- not because the ink has faded, but because we ran our printer ribbons into the ground back then. I've heavily cranked the contrast in these shots.

Zork 1

The very first! Actually, this wasn't the Zork I first played. We had the original "barbarian Zork" package published by Personal Software. I remember it was a 13-sector floppy -- I had to boot from Apple's special BOOT13 disk to convince my disk drive to load the game. (Anybody know what release that would have been?) (EDIT-ADD: Release 5, thank you.)

I don't recall pirating a later release to avoid this boot-y dance, but I'm sure that's what I did.

Zork 2

This, in contrast, is the original Zork 2 that we bought. It doesn't show the version when you SCRIPT, which puts it at r19 or earlier. Probably much earlier.

The first line is the OK. from the SCRIPT command. Note the 80N before that -- the interpreter is sending some kind of control code to the print driver. Probably putting it in 80-column mode. To no avail, since the interpreter will be sending 40-column lines.

Starcross

I see I didn't even start this transcript at the beginning. You wake up in the Living Quarters, get up, and move to the Bridge.

Deadline

I remembered to type VERSION this time. Release 18 is the earliest version which has been preserved. It's probably the first version that shipped.

Enchanter

They've now invented the idea of the transcript banner. This text appears when you type SCRIPT.

You can't see this, but I did a RESTART immediately after the SCRIPT command. I was trying to capture the dramatic "It must be the warlock Krill" intro text. Sadly, the interpreter wouldn't do it; the restart cut off the transcript.

Suspended

As I said, Suspended lacked the serial number as well. The ARR command is a shortcut for ALL ROBOTS, REPORT.

Planetfall

I seem to have skipped the beginning here, and started the transcript at the library computer. To record all of this important Resida history for later reference, I guess.

Wow, that phonetic dialect is just as annoying today as it was in 1983.

Subtle note: Planetfall kept the heading "INTURLAJIK GAAMZ" even in the grey-box edition, after Infocom had rebranded their "Interlogic games" into "interactive fiction".

Infidel

Witness

Again, probably the release version.

Sorcerer

We got an Apple //e to replace the ][+! Or possibly this switch occured when we got an 80-column card? I don't remember exactly. Lower-case was a revelation.

Seastalker

The heading "___ AND THE ULTRAMARINE BIOCEPTOR" is customized; the game starts with a "type your name" prompt. I typed "F D Emolpho". Emolpho will later return as one of the compu-loa of System's Twilight.

As it happened, I also owned a well-read copy of Tom Swift and His Jetmarine, to which Seastalker owes an obvious debt.

Spellbreaker

Spellbreaker must have gone through a lot of test cycles, because release 63 seems to have been the first version.

Trinity

My longest transcript printout.

Lurking Horror

Serial number 000000? Yes, I pirated this one. I don't remember if my friend manually erased the serial number, or if that was some kind of piracy-detection feature in the interpreter. It's certainly release 203, serial 870506, though.

I still have the photocopy they made me of the manual. The last page is defaced by a hideous smear of ichor which has bled through the page! Or grease. Probably grease. We wondered whether that was a bit of deliberate environmental storytelling (not that the term existed at the time). But no, scanned versions of the manual (see here) don't have the smear. Just a packaging defect.

Thus we have it. You can see I didn't do every game. After a while the prospect of replaying from scratch felt like work.

I was hoping I'd discover a hitherto unknown serial number. Nope! Although it would likely have been the earliest games, and those were the ones that didn't record a serial number.

Wouldn't have mattered anyhow; the floppies that I played from are long since gone. As are most of the packages. I have a few of the folios still.