The story of SVHA Adventure, and how it was saved after over 40 years of obscurity.
This is the first of two articles that tell the story of the earliest adventure games developed in Norway, and how we managed to rescue them. These are games that until now have been almost completely forgotten, and the few details we’ve had have been vague and in fact largely wrong.
The first game is known as SVHA Adventure, and is an expanded version of the original Colossal Cave Adventure. SVHA Adventure was developed for minicomputers from Norsk Data at NTH in Trondheim, in 1979. The other game is called Ringen, and is an original adventure taking place in the Mines of Moria known from Lord of the Rings. Ringen was originally developed at UiT in Tromsø a couple of years later, but its story continued for several years outside the University.
Until now, neither of these games have been available online. So it is with great pleasure that we are not only able to present the story behind these forgotten games, but also working copies you can experience for yourself.
When Don Woods’ completion and expansion of Willie Crowther’s original 1975-1976 Fortran IV version of Adventure/Colossal Cave began spreading like wildfire in 1977 across university campuses and other institutions which hosted the DEC PDP-10 mainframes that it was written on, one of the first things that happened was that numerous students, faculty members and employees who had become enamoured with the game began to convert it to run on the multitude of other mainframe and minicomputer systems that were in use at the time.
A digital Big Bang
While some creators were soon inspired to write their own original text adventures in these early days of the medium (most notably Zork/Dungeon), the novelty, addictiveness and relative ubiquity of Woods’ 350 point version meant that most of the energy generated by this digital Big Bang event went into what might be called a «conversion culture», which persisted at these types of institutions well into the 1980s, even as the genre was rapidly adapted to the increasingly affordable and widespread home microcomputer market.
Initially, the goal of these conversions was simply to get Adventure up and running on whatever system happened to be at hand, but before long, much like it was to Woods himself, the idea of adding to and «enhancing» the original became irresistible to many. Some of these versions featured only minor additions or changes: perhaps a handful of new rooms and an additional treasure or two, probably done just for personal amusement or to help learn new programming skills. But others took the task more seriously, and created much larger and more complex expansions of the game, some of which have lived on and served as the basis for further iterations which continue to appear today.
One of the earliest of these conversions was done by Kent Blackett of DEC in 1977, which was in turn converted to the PDP-11/70 by Bob Supnik in 1978. These early conversions didn’t attempt to add anything new to the game, but did help to facilitate its rapid spread. Supnik’s in particular started making its way around, and several conversions of Adventure with distinct added content were based on its code, a fact which I’ll return to shortly.
One of the curious aspects of this initial Adventure tidal wave is that, for various reasons, it was almost entirely limited to the Anglophone world. It spread quickly to Canada and the UK but didn’t seem to make it to continental Europe. The main exceptions to this were the Nordic countries, where perhaps partly due to a combination of early adoption of advanced computer systems in universities and other institutions and widespread English language proficiency in an era when that wasn’t yet as common as it is today in most of Europe, a similar «hacker» culture emerged, particularly amongst university computer science students.
The first Nordic adventures
The first instance of Adventure inspiring a mainframe or minicomputer game in the region is 1978’s Stuga, from Sweden. The very interesting background story of that title is well known and I won’t repeat it here, but I will add that its PC port was translated to Norwegian (as «Hytten») in 1986 and distributed by a small company in Trondheim called Translata. This version is now lost.
In Denmark, a 1978 Four-Phase Systems IV/90 multi-player port of the standard Don Woods version of Adventure, renamed Quest for unknown reasons, was recently found at Philips. Around 1980-1981, an untitled adventure (unfortunately lost) was written in APL on an IBM mainframe in Aarhus by Peter Ole Frederiksen, who went on to create the PC game Kaptajn Kaper i Kattegat several years later, which is quite famous in Denmark.
In 1983 a former co-worker of Frederiksen’s at IBM in the 1960s, Sven Baumgartner-Taarup, translated the original Don Woods version into Danish in PL/I at SDC under the title of Hulen i Kæmpeskoven. Despite some talk a few years ago that it may have been rediscovered, I was able to confirm firsthand with SDC employee Hans Michael Munkstrøm that the magnetic tape it had been stored on was wiped years ago, and it’s now lost.
Finally, in Finland there was the very large and interesting (but unfinished) Tolkien-based DECSYSTEM-20 mainframe adventure Lord, written by Helsinki University of Technology student Olli J. Paavola in 1981-1982. Long thought to be lost, it was thankfully recovered a number of years ago and is currently on display at the Finnish Museum of Games in Tampere.
Game development at NTH
The scene being set, we now turn to Norway. Specifically, the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH), Norway’s leading technological university before it merged into NTNU in 1996. Around 1978, the aforementioned Bob Supnik port of Adventure made its way to NTH, and caught the attention of a young computer science student named Svein Hansen. He was part of a group of computer science and engineering students there who were interested in gaming, which included Dag Svanæs, who remembers their group of friends, and Svein in particular:
«I was part of a nerdy group that spent a lot of time around the Norsk Data machines at NTH during the period 1979-82. I remember Svein as a guy who brought role-playing game miniatures into room 242 in the central building, where we spent a lot of time.»
As he mentions, much of the activity these students were involved with at the time centered around the Norsk Data ND-10 minicomputer that was at the facility. Norsk Data was a major Norwegian success story at the time, with their powerful and fast minicomputers being used in various technical fields around the world. The students did much of their work (and play) on this system, even forming a «Hobby Group» around it, which another member at the time, Bernt Marius Johnsen describes this way:
«A community was formed around a Nord-10 that Norsk Data gave to the «hackers» at NTH. It had the production number 54, and since Studio 54 was the hottest disco in New York at the time, we started a kind of «hacker club» that we called Studio-54. Studio-54 was eventually continued under the name Programvareverkstedet (The Software Workshop), which still exists today.
The community consisted of people from the computer science program and people from electrical engineering (mostly cybernetics), and there was a lot of overlap between Orakelet (a tutoring service for students), Studio-54, and those who worked as student assistants for the Basic Course in Computing.»
Aside from Svein, Dag and Bernt, other members of Studio-54 included Nils-Morten Nilssen, Ketil Albertsen, Roy Lyseng, Ragnar Z. Holm, Steinar Haug, Jan Kommissar, Frode Hernes, Bjørn Steine, Fridtjof Iversen and Jon E. Strømme.
Adventure for the ND-10
So it was only natural (returning to the theme of a «conversion culture») that Svein, the Adventure-addicted gamer, decided to convert Adventure to their beloved ND-10 in 1979, writing it in the system-specific Nord Fortran 77 language. Some ambiguities exist here, as while the surviving version is in English, there was also a Norwegian language version, which was mentioned both by Bernt and in a comment found in the game’s code:
«This game is currently only available in an English version. We have a more limited version in Norwegian, but this can only run on machines with 48 bit floating point. So we chose to release the English version.»
I originally took this to mean that the Norwegian version came first, as it seems it wouldn’t run on Norsk Data’s newer systems by the time this comment was written around 1982 or 1983, but that’s not how Bernt Marius remembers it:
«I believe the Norwegian version was made after the English one, and the code was specifically tailored to ND’s Fortran compiler, and therefore couldn’t run on anything else. I remember a case where someone tried to port it to Vax/VMS, without success.»
The game got expanded
In any case, Svein’s conversion soon ensnared the rest of the Studio-54 hackers into Adventure’s web, and inevitably he and other members of the group succumbed to the irresistible urge to start changing and expanding the game themselves. Aside from Svein himself and Nils-Morten Nilssen, Bernt remembers that the main contributors to these enhancements were possibly Ragnar Z. Holm and Steinar Haug.
Dag Svanæs was also inspired to try writing his own adventures, but in a very unusual way, as he describes:
«I remember playing around with making some small text-based adventure games in Prolog around 1980, mostly to test out the possibilities of logic programming, probably inspired by Svein’s adventure game.»
Although these games seem to be lost now, Bernt also remembered them, remarking:
«Incidentally, the Prolog interpreter that Dag used for his game experiments was the one I had implemented for my diploma thesis. Also on Nord-10/100 machines.»
Bernt also provided this amusing anecdote from his time in the club:
«I didn’t contribute any code to Adventure, but I did set a record for how quickly you could get through the entire game with a full score (something under 15 minutes, IIRC). I also made a map of the entire cave on an A0 sheet of paper. On one occasion (I don’t remember exactly what it was), I was honored with a trophy (a plastic drinking glass placed on my head with a grade glued on top) and was named ‘Cartographer and Master of Adventure’.»
Eventually, the game even played a part in one of the more serious technical applications that the ND systems were known for, as Bernt recalls:
«Roy Lyseng and some others created a program for static analysis of Fortran programs, FORTVER, which was used, among other things, to find errors in Sesam-80 (a relatively large program used to calculate drilling platforms in the North Sea). They used the Adventure program to test FORTVER.»
It would seem that the adventure gaming scene at NTH continued on for a time, even after most of the Studio-54 group had graduated and moved on, as a ND system conversion of Dungeon (aka Zork) was also created by an anonymous student there in late 1984.
Playing SVHA Adventure
As for the game itself, it can be described as one of the larger and more interesting expansions of Adventure, despite some technical issues in the surviving version. There are almost 70 new rooms (all «real» locations, rather than generically described mazes), close to 20 new items and treasures, and a number of original puzzles, not all easy to solve.
There are several direct Tolkien references (something I’ll get into extensively in the next part of this article), and some specifically «Norse» content, including a famous Viking riddle, some mysterious runes, and appearances from both the Oskorei and Dovregubben (The Mountain King) himself. Amusingly, there are also sections adapted straight from a Greg Hassett (one of the pioneering adolescent adventure game authors of the early home computer scene) article that appeared in a contemporary (July, 1980) issue of Creative Computing.
But perhaps most interestingly, from a design standpoint, are all the new game mechanics that are introduced here. The pesky dwarves that prowl the caves can now steal your treasure and deposit it elsewhere, and dangerous Orcs have been introduced, who can appear in the same room with the dwarves, even getting into fights and killing each other off. There’s an unusual new mode of transportation, not one but two container items to help drag your overloaded inventory around without having to drop things all over the cave, and other new elements as well.
Much of this is fairly unusual for an Adventure expansion, and going back to the Creative Computing article, makes me wonder if Svein or some of the other Studio-54 crew may have picked up a few ideas from the nascent US-based home computer adventure scene that they’d been reading about in their imported magazines. There are also a few elements that, while probably coincidental, make it seem possible they may have had access to one or two of the other expanded versions of Adventure that were floating around at the time.
Another interesting change is the scoring system, which despite all the additional content only goes up to 360 points. Other Adventure variants of this size tend to max out at 500 points or more, but this version reduces the points you traditionally get for collecting treasures, solving puzzles, etc., which may be the only time that’s been done, as far as I’m aware.
Preserving the game
Unfortunately, as mentioned above, there are some technical issues to deal with. We were able to get the very rare 8 inch disk that contains the game running on Ronny Hansen’s ND emulator, but it turned out to be quite damaged. While the game could be started, it would dump you straight into the middle of the cave with no light source, with attempts at entering commands returning only strings of garbage characters. There were too many disk errors, and frustratingly it seemed like we were out of luck.
Fortunately, Torfinn Ingolfsen, another ND systems expert who has possession of the disk itself, was able to re-dump it for us and we were finally able to get it into a (mostly) working state. There were still a few instances of garbled or misplaced text that had to be worked around, but ultimately this too was resolved by finding a previously unknown backup disk in a large archive of Norsk Data programs.
However, the main problem is that a couple of programming bugs seem to have slipped through in this later disk release of the game, which received very limited distribution by Norsk Data themselves in early 1984 as «SVHA Adventure», along with several other early Norwegian games, including some created by Studio-54. These bugs prevent you from escaping with two of the new treasures, which means that you can’t trigger the traditional endgame after depositing everything back at the famous well house.
A larger issue is that a save game feature was never implemented, meaning that each time you die (and you will die many, many times), you have to start all over from the beginning again. I’ve played through many different versions of Adventure countless times, but this caused the detailed bug report and full mapping and analysis I needed to do for this project to take over a month to complete. It was still quite enjoyable to discover all of the new content in this version of the game, but unless you’re an experienced Adventure player, it may become very frustrating.
Some of these issues could easily be fixed if we had the original Fortran source code, but Svein Hansen, the only person who’s likely to still have it (and possibly even the lost Norwegian version of the game) has proved difficult to track down. I believe he may have ended up at a company called Metric AS/CompuMetric in Oslo a couple of years after he graduated from NTH, but from there the trail goes cold. If anyone has information on his current whereabouts, please get in touch.
Acknowledgments:
Special thanks to the following people, who kindly shared their time, memories and expertise with me, and without whom the preservation of these games and writing of this article would have been impossible:
SVHA Adventure – Ronny Hansen and Torfinn Ingolfsen (NDWiki), Bernt Marius Johnsen, Alf Inge Wang and Dag Svanæs (NTNU), Hans Michael Munkstrøm (SDC), Mike Arnautov
Ringen – Halvor Nilsen, Per Arne Engstad, and Pål-Kristian Engstad, John Markus Bjørndalen, Erlend Johannessen, Steinar Trædal-Henden, Tore-Brox Larsen and Kai-Even Nilssen (UiT), Niklas Nyland (Finnish Museum of Games, Vapriikki)
Article edited for publishing by Joachim Froholt.
Try SVHA Adventure yourself
If you would like to play SVHA Adventure, you can use Ronny Hansen’s ND100X WASM Emulator.
- Select boot-device = SMD
- Press Initialize and then Start
- Wait 1-2 minutes. It will look like nothing is happening. At some point, the text «PAGES FOR SWAPPING» will show up along with some information.
- Make sure the emulator window is active, and press the Escape key on your keyboard.
- Log in as «games», with no password.
- Enter «svh» to start the game. Wait while it loads. You can’t do anything until it asks if you want instructions (despite the cursor blinking).
- Once you’re done playing, enter «quit» and «log out».
Alternatively, you can download a pre-packaged version here. Run Retrocore.exe. The steps from then are the same as from step 3 above.
Note: Erasing text is done with CTRL-A. However, you can change the terminal type in order to use the more common backspace key for this. Do this using the command «SET-TERMINAL-TYPE» to change the type to 6 or 79. Abbreviated versions: «set-t-t,,6» or «set-t-t,,79». Future versions of the emulator might include a script to automate this.