Game #91: Mystery Mansion

Mystery Mansion was written by Gregory Hassett in 1980 for the TRS-80. It is an interactive text adventure written in machine language with a split screen format much like you’re used to seeing in the Scott Adam’s Adventure series. It is not to be confused with Bill Wolpert’s Mystery Mansion which was programmed for a mainframe.

Greg Hassett was 12 years old and in high school when he wrote his first program. He would go on to publish 10 different games and form his own publishing company to distribute these games. He was a programming wunderkind and was completing games as often as Scott Adams during that era. I would love to know what happened to Greg Hassett. He was obviously incredibly talented at such a young age and virtually fell off the face of the earth. If anyone has an inkling as to what he went on to do I would love to hear from you.

With the completion of Mystery Mansion I have now played all ten of Greg Hassett’s offerings. The list below is a chronological list according to publication date. The first three games in the list below were published in 1978, games 4-6 were published in 1979 and the remaining games were published in 1980.

1. Journey to the Center of the Earth
2. House of Seven Gables
3. King Tut’s Tomb
4. Sorcerer’s Castle Adventure
5. Journey To Atlantis
6. Enchanted Island
7. Mystery Mansion
8. World’s Edge
9. Curse of the Sasquatch
10. Devil’s Palace

It is relatively easy to find these games and play them except for Mystery Mansion. I had an incredibly hard time finding it and was pointed in the right direction by Jason Dyer of Renga in Blue fame. (If you are not familiar with the Renga in Blue website I urge you to check it out) Greg Hassett released his games into public domain and thus I was able to obtain Mystery Mansion from Ira Goldklan’g TRS-80.com site. I also wanted to thank Jason who helped me with a TRS-80 emulator and he was more than patient with my questions.

If I had to rank Greg Hassett’s games in order of enjoyment I would rearrange the list in the following manner. Remember that the enjoyment of any game is subjective not objective. There is bias and personal opinion that is involved and thus everyone’s idea of enjoyment is going to be different; but here it is.

1. Mystery Mansion
2. World’s Edge
3. Curse of the Sasquatch
4. Enchanted Island
5. House of Seven Gables
6. Devil’s Palace
7. King Tut’s Tomb
8. Sorcerer’s Castle Adventure
9. Journey to Atlantis
10. Journey to the Center of the Earth

It was clear that Greg Hassett was improving in his craft as you can see his later releases found their way to the top of my list. Devil’s Palace is arguably the largest and most difficult of all his games and there are parts of it that are absolutely great but the illogic of the puzzles and breaking of my fair play rules earned it a lower spot on my list. In my top three selections, gone are the treasure hunts and they are replaced with interesting plots and twists. Curse of the Sasquatch plays out like a Scooby Doo adventure and Mystery Mansion provides a great twist at the end as well. I am curious to hear how other readers would rank the Greg Hassett games.

Why does Mystery Mansion, the last Greg Hassett game I’ve played through, make the top of my list?

I honestly can’t quite attribute it to any one thing. I liked the plot which isn’t completely revealed until later in the game. I liked interconnectivity of the puzzles with the map and how they all flowed together so smoothly. World’s Edge would improve upon this even further with the puzzles providing color to the narrative and helping to drive the story. The puzzles in the game were not much different than previous puzzles found in Hassett’s earlier games however I appreciated them more because they frequently opened up further areas of the map to explore. The puzzles and the map were more related to one another in this way more so than in any of his other games.

I liked how the solving of a puzzle would continuously open up new sections of the map. There was a compact flow and cohesiveness to the entire thing. One of the more difficult puzzles involved finding a phaser and deciding how to use it. I believe this particular puzzle is paying homage to Scott Adams’ Strange Odyssey. This same puzzle device involving a phaser had me stumped for some time when Scott Adams first introduced it.

The phaser puzzle would ultimately lead to probably the toughest puzzle in the entire game. This puzzle can be solved by referring to a keypad and substituting the letters for a number. This phone number will then be needed later to finish the game.

The ending was pretty unique and offers a bit of a twist much like Curse of the Sasquatch did with it’s own ending. This helped propel both of these games to top spots on my list.

I did encounter a situation in Mystery Mansion where I was about a third of the way into the game and realized that I needed an object I had left behind in a different area. It was now impossible to go back to that area so I had to restart the game and begin again. I really enjoyed where Greg Hassett took his games in 1980. The puzzles remained largely the same however his game maps were more concise and we started to see how the puzzles added color to the narrative. We also started to get a glimpse of what he would do with a larger game that allowed saves in his Devil’s Palace. There were parts of that game that were brilliant but the inconsistency of the magic system and puzzles ruined it a bit for me. I would have liked to have seen more from him and I’m sure we’d continue to see him hone his craft. Remember these games were created by a young man between the ages of 12 and 14. Incredible. I certainly appreciated the chance to play these pieces of gaming history and I am thankful I was able to find a copy of Mystery Mansion. It was the hardest of them all to find and it ended up making the top of my list. This is why, as I mentioned in my previous blog post, the work of archivists and historians to preserve these older games is so incredibly important. It does not go unappreciated.

I am looking forward to hearing how you would rank the Greg Hassett games or any memories you have of playing them. If anyone has any information on where Greg Hassett is now I would also be very interested in hearing about that as well.