The flip-top box is sturdy white corrugated cardboard and it’s clear Apple didn’t skimp on materials prices for their first high-level language released for the ///.  The color product label is folded over two sides of the box and glued in place.  Printing, logo placement and general design and art layout are similar to the packaging of Apple /// COBOL, which was released in 1982.  Reflecting Steve Jobs’s taste in quality and design, the art used on the manual covers and throughout the packaging was licensed from collections at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands and from Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco.  Apple would do this again with artwork for the Apple /// COBOL packaging.

Also, note the subtle “professional” touches added here: the deep blue behind gray pinstripes, like an expensive executive suit.  This was business software for a business computer, after all!

Opening the box, we find the Packing List; the Apple User Input Report, which was intended to allow customers to provide feedback, make suggestions or report bugs; and the Software License Agreement, an early ancestor to today’s voluminous End User License Agreements.  The latter was a three-copy carbonless form you were supposed to sign (press firmly!).  You got to keep the white copy, while the yellow copy was to be given to your dealer, with the orange copy to be sent off to Cupertino.

Somehow, I doubt these were read any more carefully than today’s click-through EULAs…

Up next is a baggie containing the diskette folders.  As far as I can tell, this unique design was used exclusively with Apple III software.  I don’t recall ever seeing Apple II diskettes shipped like this, though I could be wrong.  The pinstripe pattern appears again here, reminding the user that she is using business software, not some silly game.

Beneath the four floppy diskettes, we come to the manuals.  A unique piece of art, no doubt hand-picked by Jobs himself, adorns every cover and each is individually wrapped and resting on top of their respective Errata pamphlets.  Perhaps as a testimony to the rushed nature of the development of Apple /// Pascal, every manual has one of these pamphlets, and they’re all extensive, the largest accompanying the Programmer’s Manuals, and Introduction, Filer and Editor Manual and each weighing in at a hefty eleven pages of corrections.

It’s clear that Pascal, like nearly every software package for the ///, was so late that Apple preferred to ship the Errata right in the box, rather than incur further costs and delays by editing and reprinting all the manuals.

The whole package is a bulky 9.75” x 6.5” x 3.25” and weighs 4.5 lbs.

Three of the four manuals – the two Programmer’s Manuals and the Introduction, Filer and Editor Manual have already been scanned and are available in all the usual places, but the Program Preparation manual and the Errata pamphlets are currently MIA.  I’m not one to knock other people’s work but I think it’s safe to say the existing scans, while serviceable, hardly qualify as archival so I’ve added these to the queue along with the ones that were skipped the first time around.  I hope to have everything up at Apple2scans.net within a month or so.

My aim is to finish this one this week, and I’ve set a goal for myself to cover a game a week going forward from here.  I find I do better when I set little goals like this for myself, so I expect to make a new post every Wednesday, with gameplay taking place mostly over the weekends.

Stay tuned…

There are already graphics and productivity packages and even a few games for the Apple III.  Maybe something with sound?  A simple music player to take advantage of the III’s improved audio capabilities might be fun.  Whatever I decide to do, I need to get started.  Time is growing short…

The second thing that hit me was that, while the forest can be a bit confusing, it’s not really necessary to map out every corner of the lush environment at this point.  Many places exist simply to give the writer an opportunity tell the player a well-written story, another thing I had little patience for at 12.  The puzzles would come and when they did, they were fun and challenging.  ”Boring” is simply wrong.  As I continued to explore and took the time to really enjoy it, I allowed my expectations to adjust to the experience and my initial frustration faded away.  There are a couple of important places in the forest that I would need to come back to later on, but finding them again was simple enough.  The real meat of the game came for me once I entered the boarded up old house.

Everything about Zork I kept me wanting to keep playing, even when other minor annoyances such as real life encroached on my play time.  I allowed my curiosity to draw me in and was richly rewarded for the experience.  Mapping out Zork I can be a tricky thing if you’re not prepared for the fact that following a path from point A to point B doesn’t guarantee a return trip by following the same steps.  Many paths are one way and while I’m trying to keep this project as authentic as possible (playing on a real IIe, for example), I’m happy I decided to rely on Trizbort to handle my mapping needs.  I’d have gone through several tablets of graph paper by now, otherwise.

Once I got into the house, the game really began, quickly providing me with some basic tools I’d need to get killing trolls, collecting treasure and avoid being eaten by a grue along the way.  Armed with my trusty glowing sword and brass lantern, I sallied forth into the Great Underground Empire.

(Part II tonight)…

Or something.

For further reading and general interactive fiction enlightenment, visit the blog Renga in Blue, where high school math teacher Jason Dyer writes about all things text adventure-ish and is currently doing the same thing I am, only on a much larger scale.  Instead of just Infocom, Jason is blogging his way through *every* IF title ever produced.  Whew!  It’s quite a project, but he’s doing a heck of a job so far.  I’d be envious of the progress he’s already made, but that just sounds exhausting.

And now, on with the show.

This product announcement for ZORK, which ran in the September 1980 edition of The Mini-Tasker, the DECUS RT-11 SIG Newsletter, was Infocom’s very first advertisement.

My motivation for doing this is simple.  Over the years, I’ve owned a copy of nearly every Infocom game, but I’ve only finished two or three of them.  Sometimes, I just lost interest in the title, or got distracted by another game and never returned to it.  But mostly, I just gave up after encountering a particularly vexing puzzle or maze that I couldn’t be bothered to solve.  With a resurgence of my personal interest in interactive fiction spurred on largely by Jason Scott’s excellent GET LAMP documentary, I’ve decided that it’s time to once again slay the proverbial dragon, or at least try to avoid being eaten by a Grue.

I expect this to be somewhat different than what Cage encountered as he played his way through Sosaria, Britannia and the other lands of Richard Garriott’s imagination.  Infocom’s games are more numerous, but offer shorter gameplay per title.  Additionally, most are standalone games or short series written by different authors, rather than a continuation of a plot and storylines that arc over the entire run of games and guided by one person’s vision.

For actual play, I’ll be using the Apple IIe on the desk next to me.  I have most of the original disks I bought way back when with my hard-earned lunch money and allowance; in the cases where I can’t find a disk, or the floppy has gone bad I’ll probably rely on ADTPro and disk images.  I can’t really imagine a scenario where I’d have to go with an emulator over the real thing to play.  I might switch over to Virtual ][ or AppleWin to take the occasional screenshot.

And finally (yes, I know I’m rambling), I’m not planning on using any of the ready-made walkthroughs that are easily available on the Intarwebs.  I’ll be sticking to my collection of Infocom Invisiclues and my copies of the first two volumes of Kim Schuette’s excellent “Book of Adventure Games” series.  Desk space is at a premium in my cramped, dirty little office and my pencil-drawn mapping skills are atrocious, so I’ll by doing all my maps in the excellent Trizbort program.

Up next: ZORK I. Stay tuned…

Happy holidays, everyone!  Yes, that’s me and yes, I wrote the AppleSoft BASIC program that rendered the “Merry Christmas” on the screen.  The white sleeve on the left edge of the card belongs to the blouse my sister was wearing.  I decided to protect her privacy (and maybe a bit of her dignity) and cropped her out of the scan.

I find it amusing that, in a similar fashion to the image from the previous contest, the Apple IIc used by the kids to control the ship throughout the movie was never visibly plugged in to a power source.  In the scenes shot in the basement of Wolfgang’s house, that makes sense – wires and outlets tend to be tucked away until the plot calls for them.  But this IIc was magical.  It even worked outdoors, sitting on a rock with no electrical outlet in sight.

At one point, Wolfgang pulls a 9-volt battery from a compartment in the monitor and explains that this is how everything is powered, which might make sense except that a single 9-volt cell obviously doesn’t provide enough energy to run an Apple IIc and even if it did, nothing is plugged into the IIc’s power input, as mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Ah, movie logic.

As an interesting aside, Explorers marked the first major roles for two of its young stars, Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix.  It also featured an unrecognizable Robert Picardo in an early role.  Several, actually.

Anyway, on with the show.

The winner of the 6502Lane Tuesday Trivia Contest, and box of Apple-branded 3.5” floppy disks is…

Joseph Bailey!

Congratulations, Joseph.  I’ll be sending you an email shortly.  To everyone else who participated, thanks for playing along.  This was fun and I’ll probably do it again shortly.

It’s a box of 3.5” 800K Apple-branded floppy disks, still sealed.  As I said, nothing major but hopefully not complete crap, either.  Perfect for use with your Apple IIGS, or for sitting on the shelf, collecting dust.