Sierra On-Line's first translation
Remember Issue #1
Welcome to the first issue of this newsletter! And thank you so much for signing up! I have the jitters, but this should be a good one 😀
This month, we're going to talk about Mystery House in French - a topic many of you probably don't know much about! And I'll try to keep it this way: new perspectives on subjects you already know, investigations and new information, and technical experiments and reports. The goal is to avoid rehashing the same stories that you'll find on other websites, magazines, or books. A high bar to clear, but I'm pretty confident I can meet that standard, at least for a few months 😉
So, if you like this newsletter, please spread the word! I know this is a pretty niche subject, but there is interest out there. Tell anyone who's interested in old adventure games, retro systems, the history of video games, etc.! Thanks in advance for helping me promote this little project 😀
My news
You probably all already know about it, but I released Tristam Island, a retro text adventure in the mold of Infocom's, released on 36 different platforms! Using the Z-Machine's portability, I was able to simultaneously release it on platforms such as the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, TI-99/4a, Amiga, Atari 8-bit and ST, and even the GameBoy and the Dreamcast! You'll get lots of technical details in future issues of this newsletter; if there's something in particular that interests you, reply to this email, so I know what kind of topics I should write about!
The game has been well-reviewed, earning a 5-star review from someone who's played all the classics, so you know it's the real deal 😀 There hasn't been too many other reviews yet, but it's the kind of meaty game that'll take a few days or weeks to complete; I hope more reviews will come, and this will help with word of mouth. If you haven't bought it yet, grab your copy today!
News in retro adventures
This section will (hopefully) feature latest news in the retro text adventure scene! Please send me a message if you think I forgot something 😉
- PunyInform 1.8 is out! This is a great Inform 6 library: it packs basically all the power of the standard library in half the size, and it's fast on retro systems! This is the one I use, so of course I'll recommend it to you 😉
- Adventuron is organizing a Christmas Jam, that runs for another 10 days. If you'd like to make your own graphical adventure on that theme, or play some, be sure to follow that!
- DAADReady, Uto's package to create graphical adventures for 8-bit systems using DAAD, is out with version 0.2. This is one tool I can't wait to sink my teeth into; you can write a game in English, Spanish, Portuguese and German, and generate the images for 11 different platforms - and more once Uto will have found a command-line tool to create Amiga and Atari ST images. A really promising package!
- Sad news to close this roundup: Sean Ellis, creator of Graphical Adventure Creator (and STAC, its Atari ST counterpart), has passed away recently. Here is a great interview of him from a few years ago, by John Aycock.
Article of the month
This month's exclusive article is a piece of the history of retro text adventures in France. I will tell you everything I could find about the first translation of Mystery House by Sierra (or rather, On-Line Systems). It was very interesting to do this kind of digging around, and unearth treasures in 1980s computing magazines!
Thanks!
Be sure to let me know what you thought of this first issue of >Remember! I hope to hear from you soon. See you January 10th for the next issue!
Issue #1 : Sierra’s first translation
I recently had the pleasure of doing some research on the (pre-)history of French text adventures. It is an area that’s not been explored very much; in collaboration with Alexis Blanchet, who recently wrote with Guillaume Montagnon a very well- researched book on French video games, I decided to explore the 1979-1983 period. One of the finds I was the most excited about was the discovery of Sierra’s official French translations of their early games, which had been forgotten and were unknown even from specialists.
I am not going to tell you what Sierra was, and who Roberta and Ken Williams were. I would like to note, however, that two books on the history of Sierra Entertainment recently came out: “The Sierra Adventure” by Shawn Mills, and “Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings” by Ken Williams. Reviews seem to indicate that those books actually largely complement each other, so unfortunately, you’ll have to buy both :) If you’d like to read more on the early days of Sierra, Jimmy Maher’s blog is very informative and has a number of very well-researched articles on the subject. Read for instance both articles on Mystery House:
https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/mystery-house-part-1/
https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/mystery-house-part-2/
Mystery House VF
The very first game we’re going to talk about in this newsletter is On-Line Systems’s first game, “Mystery House”, which single-handedly invented the genre of the graphical text adventure. This was Roberta Williams’ first game, which started her rather long and celebrated career as a creator of adventure games. “Mystery House” was created, as the story goes, on the Williams’ kitchen table, and published in 1980 for the Apple II.
In 2019, Jason Dyer was continuing his project on his blog Renga in Blue :
https://bluerenga.blog/all-the-adventures/
His goal is to play every single text adventure in chronological order – and, additionally, attempt to find out as much as possible on these games. (If you don’t know his blog, go check it out, it is amazing – and thanks to his work finding and cataloguing text adventures, some long-lost games are found again; for instance, it was his blog that prompted the recovery of Wander, the first known attempt at text worlds and adventures, from 1976.)
This time, he found and rescued (thanks to the Wayback Machine) a very rare game, which is the first text adventure in French – which will be the subject of a future article (I have lots of things to tell you about this one too!). In his article and in the discussion that followed on the French forums (ifction.free.fr/taverne), he mentioned having read something strange: apparently, there was a French translation of Mystery House. Nobody on our forum had heard about this; Laine Nooney, one of the world’s specialists of Sierra On-Line, wrote an article on her blog on Sierra’s (or, rather, On-Line Systems’s) second-ever ad, published in the summer of 1980, and expresses astonishment at the fact that a French version of Mystery House is mentioned:
http://www.lainenooney.com/blog/sierra-ad-2
I myself had never heard of it!
And then, one of our members, “Yoruk”, finds the disk image of “Mystery House VF” - the “VF” standing for “version française”. You can find it here:
https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/images/non-english/french/misc/On-Line%20Systems%20-%20Mystery%20House%20%28in%20French%29%20cracked.dsk
It seems to have been put on Asimov, a prominent FTP repository for all things Apple II, in 2018, quietly. We then speculate: since the name of the file says “(cracked)”, is it an official version? The title screen mentions “Malibu Microcomputing – Tom Nalevanko”: is it hacker’s name, or the translator’s name?
Malibu Microcomputing?
Jason Dyer was able to answer this one: it would seem like the name of the translator. In fact, Mailbu Microcomputing was a real software house at the time. Just take a look at page 3 of this magazine from Novermber 1980:
http://www.introni.it/pdf/Micro_30_1980.pdf
And Jason even sent a magazine that has a catalog (page 52) that mentions “Malibu Microcomputing; contact: T. Nalevanko” , which is exactly the name that appears on the screen:
https://archive.org/details/micro-6502-journal-35/page/n53/mode/2up
Note that the ad mentioned above says that the Malibu Microcomputing software is available in Europe, at SIVEA, in Paris. SIVEA was a very large computer shop in Paris at the time; they took ads in French magazines from 1979 to the mid-80s, and had several locations in Paris and throughout France. They will pop up again soon.
However, we should exercise more caution: digital archeology, as championed by John Aycock, must be rigorous and not go too fast in its deductions. How do we know this is an official version? That it’s the one mentioned by Sierra in their ad? For starters, it would seem odd that a software house that takes ad in magazines and works with distributors everywhere else would run the risk of translating and distributing an unofficial translation of On-Line Systems’ game. Furthermore, a recent video game archeology article by Aycock and Biitner (both from my alma mater the University of Calgary) also talks about the French translation (page 11 of the article):
https://journals.equinoxpub.com/JCA/article/view/36745/pdf
By inspecting the code of the French version, the authors conclude that Nalevanko likely had access to the source code when translating the game. And, well, there’s also the fact that Ken Williams himself told me, in a reply to one of my emails, that he remembers doing business with Tom Nalevanko for this translation – though he can’t remember many details.
“Les micros ne manquent pas de fantaisie”
The next question we can ask ourselves is whether this translation was distributed in francophone countries. And the answer is yes! Let’s start with France: around this time, in France, there were essentially two magazines dedicated to computers: “Micro-Systèmes” (more geared towards professional users) and “L’Ordinateur Individuel” (for hobbyists). Lucky for me, both magazines have been digitized (most issues, at least) by volunteers over the years, at this amazing website (a must-see if you’re looking for old French computing magazines):
https://abandonware-magazines.org/
By perusing every single issue of “L’Ordinateur Individuel”, a time-consuming task that nevertheless game me a lot of insights and scoops, I was able to find some information on the distribution of “Mystery House VF” in France – in fact, it appears in numerous ads over the years! The first time I could find it was in an ad by SIVEA (remember these guys?) in the december 1980 issue:
http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/L%20Ordinateur%20Individuel/ordinateurindividuel_numero0023/Ordinateur%20Individuel%20023%20-%20Page%20109%20%281980-12%201981-01%29.jpg
(This is six months after On-Line Systens released the original game in the United States, which quite frankly seems like a miracle to me for the time.) The game is sold 250 FF (remember “francs francais” before the euro?), which wasn’t too expensive for the time, as most games ranged from 150FF to 400FF. On the same listing, “Hi- Res Adventure 2” sells for 220FF, as does “Adventure Microsoft”.
We then keep seeing the game pop up in ads for a few years: SIVEA sells it for 290FF in December 1981, and also in the summer of 1982; in November, they even add a little blurb, saying “An adventure in hi-res, very much like “And then there were none” by Agatha Christie; find the murderer before it kills you! Adventure in french, 305 FF”. That’s the last time I could find the game in SIVEA’s ads, but other resellers seem to have it: JCD says they have the French version at the end of 1982, while others like SIDEG or STA just say “Mystery House”. We know for a fact that the English version was also sold in France at that time: Jean-Louis Le Breton, who I need to tell you about one day, remembers buying the English version in May or June 1983 with his first Apple II.
The fact that SIVEA sells the game, and that Malibu Microcomputing had a working relationship, leads us to think this was Nalevanko’s version that was sold. We have, however, a stronger proof of that, which was brough to my attention by Alexis Blanchet. At the time, there was a magazine about games – board games, chess, go, checkers, mathematical games, etc. - that was popular in France named Jeux et Strategies – and they were starting to take notice of these new-fangled computer games. They started to talk more about these, starting with an article titled “Les micros ne manquent pas de fantaisie” (“Micro[computer]s aren’t lacking in whimsy”, roughly) by Pierre Berloquin, in issue number 9. In that article, they talk about video games they were impressed with, including the French translation of Mystery House. And guess what: there are screenshots, including a screenshot of the title screen, and it clearly shows “Malibu Microcomputing – Tom Nalevanko”! This is about as solid of a proof as we can expect from such an undertaking. Here is a scan of the article:
Let me also mention briefly other francophone countries. There is proof (in the Ordinateur Individuel ads, once again) that a shop in Brussels, Belgium was selling this translation as well around 1982. As for Quebec, there is actually a Summer 1982 catalog from one of Quebec’s first software houses, Computerre, that mentions “Maison Mystère”, with the “Mystery House” cover:
https://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/products/france/computerre/computerre_catalogue_ete1982.pdf
(Note that Quebec laws prohibit English names, at least for works in French, which is probably why “Mystery House VF” wasn’t the title in that catalogue.)
What about the game itself?
You’ve probably all played Mystery House, and know what to expect: classic wireframe graphics with colors that bleed a little bit, sudden deaths in the purest Roberta Williams style... One can wonder about the quality of the translation; and, well, I don’t think that French was Tom Nalevanko’s first language. Even though the text is understandable, there are very odd phrasings that sound wrong to a native speaker. In fact, I was able to find two different reviews of this translation by professors of French, who were trying to see if this game was a good way for students to learn French. (The question “Can IF help with learning a language?” is apparently as old as translations of IF, and unfortunately there hasn’t been much progress on that question for 40 years...) Their answer was a resounding no: sure, the game is fun and might motivate students to learn more French, but the translation is of rather poor quality, and the game accepts misspelled words (a limitation of the parser, which only looks at the first few letters of the word). And – gasp! - there is no way to type accents! An entertaining read, and one that confirms what my impressions were on the level of French on display here.
In any case, if you want to experience that translation (to see how rusty your French is), there is an interesting quirk: the parser still accepts the commands in English, as if that had never been disabled, or as if Nalevanko forgot to disable it. You can thus play the game by reading the descriptions, and typing the commands in English! If anyone gives that a go, be sure to let me know!
