For years, Ringen was considered lost and not much was known about it. Here’s the full story of the game, and how it was saved.
This is the second 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.
- It is a good idea (but not neccessary) to read part 1 before proceeding
Just after Svein Hansen and most of the the Studio-54 group at NTH in Trondheim were finishing up their studies and dispersing, another young computer science student and his group of friends were bitten by the Crowther & Woods Adventure bug, this time at UiT, the University of Tromsø. His name was Halvor Nilsen, and as the new school year opened in September, 1983, he began to implement the ideas he had been developing for his own original adventure game, Ringen, aka Krigen om ringen («The War of the Ring»).
Although it was still relatively uncommon at the time to write text adventures in a language other than English, he decided from the beginning that the game should be in Norwegian, in order to increase its accessibility to his friends and fellow students. The tools he had at hand to realize his vision were the CDC Cyber-18 minicomputer that had been installed in UiT’s computer science department, which was hooked up to a number of (most likely DEC model) terminals, and the Pascal programming language, which was the one most common on the platform.
Inspired by Tolkien
As the game’s title would indicate, Nilsen’s biggest inspiration, aside from Adventure itself, was the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. «Krigen om ringen» was the title of the first Norwegian translation of Lord of the Rings by Nils Werenskiold, published from 1973-1975. It was widely criticized for being inaccurate, as well as for its stodgy Riksmål-based prose (a somewhat old-fashioned and conservative descendant of written Dano-Norwegian), and was mostly forgotten after Torstein Bugge Høverstad’s acclaimed translation, «Ringenes herre», was published shortly after the game was released. Still, it served as an introduction to Tolkien’s world for quite a few Norwegians at the time, including a young Halvor Nilsen, who went on to read the books in their original English versions several times as his fandom grew.
But just as important as these fundamental influences was the desire to put all of his long hours of study to use in creating something real and tangible, showing the progress he had made as a programmer. As Halvor himself says:
«I wrote this while I was studying computer science in Tromsø. It was mostly to test what I had learned during my studies on a «proper» project, partly because I was interested in both Tolkien and computer games.»
Describing the structure of the program itself, he states:
«The mechanics of the game are in the source code, while the descriptions of the rooms and the structure were built up recursively by reading a text file. In addition to the descriptions, it also contained codes for which objects were in the room, as well as which paths led out of the room so that a pointer to the next room could be created. This was quite memory-intensive, so at one point I had to insert a break in the game where the old dynamic structure was discarded and a new one read in from a file.
Looking at some of the printouts of the Pascal code, I must say with shame that it doesn’t look very elegant and modern, but it worked. I can partly blame the fact that there were no modern editing tools, and that everything was written in a text editor where indentation had to be added manually, and the font was only in CAPS.»
An instant hit
The work which had started in September was finished by December, immediately becoming a hit in the UiT computer science department. After observing his friends and other students playing the game, he decided that a few tweaks needed to be made. Without changing any of the game’s content itself, he added a new section of code to handle memory issues and implemented a couple of other functions, including one that was ubiquitous in mainframe and minicomputer adventures at the time, aimed at addressing the concerns of the annoyed department administrators at the facilities which hosted them, who generally cast a disapproving eye at all of this frivolous game playing taking up the valuable time students were allotted on these powerful, expensive systems in lieu of the «serious» work they were intended for. This led to the creation of Ringen II, released at the beginning of January, 1984, which would be the final revision of the original game. Halvor recalls:
«The environment it ran in was on a minicomputer, and we students were sitting in terminal rooms at dumb terminals. It was possible to give a command to see what kinds of programs everyone else were in. At one point, playing Ringen was quite popular among several people, and I think that was when I added the MESSAGE function. Then I could see not only that they were playing Ringen, but how far they had come. I also think that some at the department were irritated that people were spending time on this, so that in Ringen 2 I added a time limit on when you were allowed to play.»
As he describes, playing Ringen had become something of a social event in the department, and this included two of his good friends at the time, who had been his classmates for years in Tromsø prior to entering UiT. One of them, Morten Holm, may have taken the Ringen code and used it as the basis for his own unusual experiment with the adventure game format. As Halvor remembers it:
«I think it was a slightly surreal game where you walk around a street in a modern city and experience different things. I think I played it once myself, but I don’t think it was very extensive.»
His other friend, Erlend Johannessen, was inspired by Ringen (which he also remembers playing from home over a 300 baud modem) to try and convert one of his favourite books at the time, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the gamebook which had just launched their groundbreaking Fighting Fantasy series, into a text adventure. In his own words:
«This sort of book was a perfect fit for computer games of this kind. Unfortunately, this work was never completed. I think it was mainly a matter of time, and a far too large number of text descriptions that had to be typed in by hand (actually an entire book’s worth).»
Two brothers discover the game
After graduation, the friends went their separate ways, and Ringen was mostly forgotten. Halvor himself went on to an impressive career in technology and the military intelligence sector. These normal life events and the relentless passage of time would normally have condemned a game like this to be lost forever, but fate had other plans for Ringen, as it entered into a strange sort of afterlife, thanks to a clever pair of teenage brothers who themselves were just getting their first taste of Adventure.
Pål-Kristian and Per Arne Engstad were 15 and 14 years old respectively in 1984 and were students at Grønnåsen secondary school, located just minutes from the UiT campus in Tromsø. They had received a Commodore 64 from their parents the previous Christmas, and like many kids at the time had become fascinated by these new machines and what they could be capable of. They quickly taught themselves BASIC programming and were particularly interested in games, as you might expect. Norway was just starting to develop the beginnings of a small local gaming industry, but at this early stage was still mostly reliant upon import titles for systems like the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, which were primarily spread through copying and trading with friends.
Elder brother Pål-Kristian was the first to catch wind of a new game causing a stir among some of the students at nearby UiT, and decided to investigate for himself.
«Getting into the University computer room was pretty easy. I just asked, and they gave me a username. Everything was fine as long as I behaved, was quiet, and let the students have their space if they needed it.»
Soon Per Arne joined in, but he remembers their method of entry being a little more devious:
«What I remember is that we sneaked into the University of Tromsø, in what is now the computer science building. There were no locked doors at that time. Down in the basement there was a computer room with various terminals. I don’t remember how we got the login info, but it was probably Pål who had some acquaintances (or that the security was very poor). I have a memory that there were green screens, so I assume they were VT100 or VT220 terminals. I remember that it could be quite unstable, and it was annoying because then I had to start over from the beginning again. But mostly I remember that I was afraid that we would be thrown out… Fortunately, the fascination with this wonderful new world was greater than the fear. It lit a spark in me in relation to programming.»
From minicomputer to microcomputer
Before long, the two of them began to wonder if they might somehow be able to get this large game running on a powerful minicomputer to operate on their comparatively humble Commodore 64 at home. They managed to get a full printout of the Pascal code (possibly from one of the students at UiT), and set to work converting it into Commodore BASIC. This was no easy task, according to Per Arne:
«Lack of space with just over 38K available on the C64 was a big problem, and we were quite young at the time. But we managed it. Pål-Kristian was clearly the brains of the outfit in planning out the conversion, because we had to make it in a completely different way in BASIC than the Pascal version, which used pointers and recursion. I contributed further to the programming once it all became clear.»
They worked on the conversion for over a year, finally managing to squeeze the entire game (with a number of changes) onto a single C64 disk by the end of 1985. Soon, a number of their friends were clamouring for their own copies, so it began spreading around the neighbourhood.
The game’s size and relatively verbose Norwegian text made this Commodore 64 conversion an impressive achievement, especially considering the embryonic state which the local game industry still found itself in. A small handfull of Norwegian text adventures had begun to appear for various home computers starting in 1984, but they were mostly amateur efforts or translations of English language originals, and were all quite simple and limited compared to Ringen. This led me to wonder if the idea of trying to have it professionally published was ever considered. Per Arne explains:
«The question of publishing the game professionally is a multi-faceted one. I was fifteen in the fall of 1985, and my brother was 16. At that time, the internet didn’t exist. There were no real game companies in Norway, I think. Who should we have turned to? In addition, it was never, at least as I remember it, the intention that we would make money from this. In any case, I was driven by the fact that it was incredibly exciting, both with the programming itself and also that it was possible to make games in a fairy tale world. We could have contacted Halvor to get something together, but we never did…»
Nevertheless, in 1986 the brothers purchased an IBM-compatible PC, and decided to do a further conversion of Ringen to MS-DOS in QBasic. This constituted the final version of the game as a text adventure, with the extra memory allowing the addition of several new bells and whistles, such as a save and load function, a high score board, in-game hints and a few extra vocabulary synonyms in order to make it a bit more user-friendly. This was all completed by 1987, but the final chapters of Ringen’s unusual story still remained to be written.
New life in VikingMUD
By 1989, the traditional text adventure was, with some exceptions, in the twilight of its original lifespan. Pål Kristian had at this point developed an interest in MUDs, the text-based ancestors of the modern MMORPG. In neighbouring Sweden, Lars Pensjö had just developed and released Genesis, the first «LP» mud, which made it much easier than before for users to add new and expanded content to the game.
This inspired Pål-Kristian to convert certain sections of Ringen’s original map into the Moria area of the LOTR-themed zones featured in Genesis, translating the corresponding room descriptions into English (some of which can amusingly still be seen scribbled in the margins of the original Pascal code printout), adding in some new outdoor areas around the periphery (Ringen itself took place almost entirely within the subterranean mines and caverns), and removing all but a handful of the adventure game-specific elements (treasures, puzzles, encounters, a distinct endgame, etc.) while adding in new MUD-appropriate content, such as multi-player quests and combat.
This proved to be quite popular, and while Genesis still exists today, the content of the game has changed greatly over the years, erasing most traces of Ringen’s original influence. However, in early 1991, just two years after Genesis had first appeared, a new game was launched, VikingMUD. The Ringen-based Moria content of Genesis was immediately implemented there as well, and is still accessible today in a largely unchanged form.
Pål-Kristian continued to be involved in these MUDs for a few more years, while Per Arne left to attend the University of Manchester (UMIST) in England, before they eventually moved on to their professional careers. Per Arne returned to Norway and started a successful career in IT, while Pål-Kristian also drew on these early experiences and entered into the growing games industry, first at the fledgling Funcom in Oslo in 1994, before moving on to California and an impressive career, mainly in graphics, with SquareSoft, Naughy Dog and Sony, working on a number of famous series such as Final Fantasy, Jak and Daxter, Uncharted and The Last of Us, and eventually ending up at Apple.
The details were lost to time
As the years passed by and the brothers moved on with their lives, the exact details of Ringen’s complicated origin story were mostly lost, becoming obscured in a sort of apocryphal fog. The only sources of information left were an entry on an aging adventure game database and one or two old Usenet posts, where half-remembered second or third hand information had turned the original author into simply «Hansen» rather than Halvor Nilsen, the original development platform into a nonsensical «CNC» instead of a CDC, and inexplicably pushed its release date all the way back to 1979.
Despite an attempt to analyse what may or may not have been a part of the original game (which included some impressively accurate guesses) in what had been converted to VikingMUD on Jason Dyer’s excellent Renga in Blue/All the Adventures site in 2019, no further information ever emerged, and the game itself remained thoroughly lost, with little hope of being recovered. Such was the dire state of affairs for Ringen when I finally decided to try to get to the bottom of things several months ago, as an outgrowth of my research into Svein Hansen’s NTH adventure.
For the sake of brevity in an already very long article, I won’t go into the entire saga of the game’s eventual location and preservation here, but some description of this sequence of events is necessary in order to understand the exact nature of what we currently do and don’t have available.
After contacting UiT (where almost no memory of Ringen’s existence remained), I received help from several people there, which led me to Per Arne’s contact information. After a brief search, he was able to dig up three old disks, one containing the C64 version, and two the MS-DOS. Shortly afterwards he found a printout of the BASIC source code, although it was missing all of the room descriptions.
The pieces fall into place
At this point, the details of the original game (author, year, system, etc.) were still forgotten, but a breakthrough occurred when Per Arne made a last ditch attempt and raided his parent’s loft, turning up the printout of the original Pascal code they had slipped out of the UiT computer room with all those years ago.
This finally brought to light much of the missing information we needed, and enabled me to track down Halvor to help fill in the blanks of the game’s true origins. A problem remained though, as once again the code printout was missing room descriptions, in this case around 75 of the nearly 120 in total. At this point we were able to analyse and compare the code in detail, but the recovery of the game itself was going to come down to the disks, which hadn’t been touched in nearly 40 years.
John Markus Bjørndalen at UiT had recently been working to preserve some other old disks there and had the right equipment at hand, so the disks were handed over to him. The C64 version proved too damaged to be recovered, despite his best efforts, but much to everyone’s great relief, one of the PC disks was still in good enough shape, and with a little tweaking he soon had it up and running flawlessly on Dosbox. This was fortuitous, as it’s surely the best and most playable version of the game, while still staying quite faithful to the original.
The C64 version was identical in game content, but missing the new quality of life features. However, we’d still like to have it preserved if possible, so if any of the Engstads’ old friends from Tromsø are reading this and still have copies of the C64 Ringen disks that were passed around decades ago, please get in touch.
Returning to the question of the original Pascal version, we would very much like it to be restored as well, but as you’ll see below, there are just enough differences to make this very difficult without having the rest of the room descriptions. Halvor unfortunately had lost most of the material related to Ringen as he moved around over the years, although there’s still a chance he may be able to recover something, and the search continues.
Adventures in the Mines of Moria
Ringen is a moderately sized (by mainframe/minicomputer standards) adventure that combines the traditional treasure hunt element of Colossal Cave and its descendants with a more distinct quest/escape narrative (get the ring back and make it out through the other side of Moria) derived from its Tolkien source material. In some ways, it’s quite streamlined and user friendly for the time. There are no mazes (which is very unusual for that era), and with a few exceptions the usual «guess the verb» parser frustrations for item manipulation and puzzle solving have been eliminated by simply relying on «BRUK» («use») in most cases. Useful inventory items (aside from the «one ring» itself) such as protective armour or a container item to increase carrying capacity work passively, simply by being in inventory. There are a number of in-game hints (in the conversion), and most of the clues in the game’s text serve to point you in the right direction.
On the other hand, softlocks abound, the original game had no save feature (although that’s not an issue now) and there are a number of randomized or timed elements to deal with, including encounters and the placement of certain items.
Regarding encounters, many of the familiar LOTR faces put in an appearance, including an anachronistic Thorin from The Hobbit, whose portrayal here is quite different from what you might expect, and who serves an unusual role in lieu of a certain common adventure game mechanic. Another thing you may notice is that even when some enemies are obviously supposed to be orcs, they’re always referred to as trolls (e.g. «Uruk-Troll»), which when combined with a riddle-posing «trollkjerring» (a folkloric witch or ogress) who’s essential to your progress through the game, lends a particularly Norwegian touch. Like an edition of LOTR with a few Theodor Kittelsen illustrations pasted in. I suspect that Tolkien himself, with his deep appreciation for Norse folklore and mythology, might have enjoyed this.
As previously mentioned, the differences between Nilsen’s original and the Engstads’ conversion are relatively minor, but enough to make them distinct. There are numerous small differences in the text, a few changes to the map, the way certain events are handled, etc. One specific thing worth pointing out is a section involving a necessary mode of transportation, where the conversion changes the items involved, probably in order to make it seem more logical, but which in turn introduces a comical anachronism.
However, the most notable difference is in the game’s brief outdoors opening section. The conversion’s is short and to the point, presenting a strictly timed chase scenario, while the original’s is more detailed and atmospheric, featuring a day/night dynamic, a scene-setting description of the Nazgul, and a memorable monster encounter. This is one of the only instances where the conversion seems a bit cut down in comparison, but it was most likely a necessary sacrifice considering the much stricter memory constraints they were working under.
Ringen in relation to other early Tolkien games
Returning to The Hobbit, even though Melbourne House’s famous graphic adventure had just begun to be imported to Norway by various small distributors at the time Nilsen was creating Ringen, the two games bear almost no resemblance to each other, and when asked Halvor explicitly stated that he had never played it at the time, and didn’t yet own a home computer. His only computer gaming experiences at that point had been with Colossal Cave and a few other mainframe/minicomputer titles.
Getting too deeply into the history of early Tolkien-based games is beyond the scope of this article, but since Ringen has always played an almost mythical role in that history, I thought it would be interesting to touch on two other games from that time that show some remarkable similarities to Nilsen’s work.
The first is Olli J. Paavola’s Lord, as I described briefly in Part 1 of this article. It’s a very large and verbose adventure, but is incomplete, with many of its planned locations never implemented before Paavola moved on to other projects and graduated. What was completed essentially takes you through the events of the Hobbit and right up to when Frodo’s party were about to enter Moria, so it (rather uncannily) almost serves as a prequel of sorts to Ringen.
There are of course many differences as well (Lord is full of large mazes, whereas Ringen has none, for instance) but the similarities are striking, both in the time, methods and intent of their creations, the communities that surrounded them, as well as how they were long thought lost before improbably being brought back from the dead.
Niklas Nyland of the Finnish Museum of Games, which helped to preserve the game and now have it on display, has written an extensive research paper on Lord entitled «From fantasy classic to vernacular videogame: LORD as a participatory adaptation of Tolkien’s legendarium», an early version of which he was kind enough to share with me. It will soon be published as part of the Marbacher Schriften series, and I highly recommend it if you’d like to delve deeper into this subject.
The other game worth mentioning here is The Mines of Moria, by Eric A. Seiden, the second in a series of four LOTR adventure games he created and released circa 1979-1981 for the TRS-80 while he was still a teenager in Miami, Florida. While each individual game is of course comparatively limited due to the nature of the platform, as a whole the series is a fairly faithful and ambitious adaptation of the entire LOTR opus, from beginning to end. The Mines of Moria itself covers essentially the same quest/escape aspect as Ringen, without the latter’s inclusion of an extended Crowther & Woods-inspired treasure hunt, and shows some remarkable similarities in that context. Presently, I would consider these titles to be the first true Tolkien-based games, but unfortunately they remain extremely obscure and as of yet have not received the attention that they probably deserve.
Finally, to bring things full circle, I should mention that both SVHA Adventure and Ringen feature forms of a Palantir-based «viewing» system, although what each shows is quite different.
If I had been able to look into a Palantir myself a few months ago and seen that the effort to finally locate, preserve and tell the strange but true story of this unique piece of Norwegian gaming history would actually be successful, I would never have believed it. Yet, here we are. Despite several near-death experiences and decades spent in both physical and online limbo, Ringen, much like the magical artifact it was named after, has proved surprisingly hard to get rid of.
Acknowledgements:
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)
This article was edited for publishing by Joachim Froholt.
Download and play Ringen
Here’s the MS-DOS version of Ringen for download.
Use DOSBox or equivalent to play. Run SETUP.BAT first, and then RINGEN.EXE. Choose a date in 1988.
Translations:
Translations of Norwegian text found in the photos.
1.
«A NAZGUL DARKENS THE SUN! SUDDENLY IT’S AS IF THE BLOOD FREEZES TO ICE IN YOUR VEINS! A DREADFUL SHRIEK FROM HIGH ABOVE PARALYZES YOU WITH HORROR. HIGH, HIGH ABOVE FLIES A BLACK SHAPE, A WINGED HORSE WITH AN EERIE RIDER. IT’S A NAZGUL, A RINGWRAITH!
LONG AGO THERE WERE NINE KINGS OF MEN WHO POSSESSED THE NINE RINGS, SEVEN DWARVEN KINGS WHO BORE THE SEVEN RINGS, AND THE ELVES WHO HAD THE THREE. THE NINE CAME UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE EVIL ONE, AND THE NINE KINGS BECAME THE EVIL SAURON’S FAITHFUL GENERALS. DEAD CREATURES DRIVEN ONWARDS BY EVIL, THEY NOW SEEK THE RING WHICH WAS LOST!
THE NAZGUL DISAPPEARS OVER THE MOUNTAINS TO THE EAST.»
2.
«SLOWLY THE MOUNTAIN PARTS BEFORE YOU, AND A LARGE GATE SLIDES OPEN. INSIDE YOU CAN SEE A DARK STAIRCASE. SUDDENLY EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING AT ONCE. A PALE GREEN TENTACLE WHIPS OUT OF THE WATER AND TRIES TO GRAB YOU! YOU BACK INTO THE GATE, AND THE LAKE BOILS AS TWENTY OTHER SLIMY ARMS GROPE THEIR WAY TOWARDS YOU. WITH GREAT FORCE THEY GRAB THE GATE AND SLAM IT SHUT. YOU ARE TRAPPED INSIDE THE MOUNTAIN!»
3.
«THE PROGRAM IS AN «ADVENTURE» GAME WHERE THE PLAYER’S ACTIONS ARE DECISIVE TO THE OUTCOME. OTHERWISE SEE THE GAME RULES.
THE GAME TAKES PLACE IN A SYSTEM OF CAVES. REPRESENTED BY RECORDS WHICH CONTAIN, AMONGST OTHER THINGS, DESCRIPTIONS. AND POINTERS TO NEIGHBOURING CAVES. THE STRUCTURE IS CREATED BY LOADING FROM THE FILE «LRINGEN», DECLARED AS A TEXT FILE. THIS PROVIDES A DYNAMIC DATA STRUCTURE WHERE THE PLAYER MOVES BY & UPDATES POINTERS.
RINGEN I = DEVELOPED 08.09.83-01.12.83
RINGEN II = VERSION 1. 01.02.84″
4.
«Welcome to The War of the Ring
Freely based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘The Lord Of The Rings’
The program was developed for the C64 1985/86/87 by Per Erne and Pål-Kristian Engstad
For those who have not read his books, we highly recommend ‘The Lord Of The Rings’. As an introduction, ‘The Hobbit’ by the same author can be read. Those who have read these books will have advantages in getting through the game.»
5.
«On your journey you will meet many different kinds of creatures, beings and animals.
Some of them you have already met. The hobbits are your closest friends, and you can trust in them through thick and thin. They are quite small, no more than two or three feet, half the height of humans, they enjoy food and drink, and are generally cheerful and happy.
In your party there was also a dwarf and an elf. The dwarves are generally suspicious and difficult to make contact with. They are about the same size as the hobbits, but are heavier and more powerful. They have a special love for treasure and riches, trust in rough stone and hard rock, live and dig under the mountains, and are strong as trolls and tough as oxen when it comes down to it!
The elves are very shy and nowadays only a few have seen them, but they are said to be very beautiful and gracious, even though they can seem a little mournful and sad.»
6.
«Towards you comes a tall, stout figure dressed in white elven clothes. It’s your dear companion Legolas who’s finally here to help! He embraces you in a friendly hug, and says softly:
I will try to help you out of here, but first I will try to find our mutual friend Gandalf. In the meantime, you must try to help yourself as best you can. I have fortunately found your beloved sword, Sting. Take your glittering weapon, then you’ll have something to defend yourself with! We’ll soon meet again!»
With long, powerful strides, Legolas walks away once more and is gone.»