We travel back to 1980 again as I work to systematically play the rest of the text adventures from that year. Space Traveller is the fourth adventure game written by Roger M. Wilcox. It was originally written for the TRS-80 in 1980 and Mr. Wilcox managed to recover the program from cassette tape in 2013. He rewrote the program as a WPF .NET application as part of his “remember my past” endeavor. The program requires that you have installed either the full .NET 4.0 framework or the .NET 4.0 Client Profile.
Space Traveller has a science fiction setting but at it’s core it is a “collect the treasures & deposit them” theme which ran rampant in the early era of interactive fiction. You are on Planet Q and you have the ability to travel to both Planet Earth and Planet X and explore them.
One of the trickier puzzles from Space Traveller involves finding a small hat in a hat shop on Planet Earth. The small hat appears innocuous at first glance and when you check there is nothing inside of it or special about it. However in a write up Roger M. Wilcox mentioned that he drew inspiration from Scott Adams; Ghost Town and a tiny bit from Strange Odyssey. His comments really stuck with me as I was playing the game and so when I found a small hat in a hat shop my alarm bells started to go off.
In Scott Adams’ Ghost Town one of the trickier puzzles involved the parser and a 10 gallon white hat you had been wearing for much of the game. Secretly tucked into the rim of the hat had been an extremely important note or clue which was necessary to read in order to move forward in the game. So I was relatively sure that there was more to this hat than met the eye. I tried a number of things to no avail but when I finally tried; SHAKE HAT a 6 foot shovel fell out. Seriously. Once I had the shovel and was able to dig in numerous locations the game moved right along.
There are five treasures that you need to find in the game and then deposit them back in the “score room” aboard your transport vessel. Many of the puzzles involved digging for them. Were it not for the Wilcox’s comments about being inspired by Ghost Town I am sure I would have gotten good and stuck in the game. There were not really more than 15 locations in Space Traveller and the game probably only took me 30 minutes to solve. Remember that Space Traveller was not a commercial game but among a private collection of games meant for friends and family that was finally made public in 2013.
Next up on the docket is Nuclear Sub, another Roger M. Wilcox game and my personal favorite from his collection to date.
As ever, great write-up!
Are you sure that you’re remembering Ghost Town accurately? It’s been over a decade since I played it, but my recollection is that the hat contained a small key. Adams hinted that there was something to the hat as when the player wore it, they were told that the hat felt strange. It’s a minor puzzle that I’ve always regarded as plausible and reasonably fair.
The shovel was to be found in the general goods store (the location which was also used for storing treasures).
I should have worded things a bit more appropriately. In the game Space Traveller; when you type in; SHAKE HAT; a 6 foot shovel falls out which you can then use. I hadn’t meant that a shovel fell out of the hat in Ghost Town. I apologize for any confusion and thank you for dropping by and posting
No need to apologise – I’m sorry that I misread the paragraph!