Jason Dyer

Epic Hero #1, Ocean Hunt (1982/1983) In the April 1984 edition of Imagine magazine, intended mostly for tabletop gaming, Mike Costello (editor of Wargame News and Warmachine) started a column devoted to home computer gaming. Many read…

in which All the Adventures returns to England with Epic Hero #1: Ocean Hunt

containing a bloodthirsty merchant

an extremely bad pun leading to an existential crisis

a brief history of the Colour Genie

and a mostly unknown yet prolific author, Marc Leduc

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Cosmo Cross: The Thing’s Hollow—It Goes on Forever— (Continued from my previous posts.) I was missing one reasonably simple (but still hard to find) action in order to escape with the Bluestone; I did try the next part of the game but it didn’…

My conclusion to the grand cinematic experiment for PC-88 from XTAL SOFT in Japan, Cosmo Cross. I get past the adventure section and reach a mysterious planet full of monoliths, and a cutscene which aspires for an era far past its time.

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“To fight a troll”: notes on the combat mechanics of Zork 1.

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Cosmo Cross: Don’t Look Behind You (Continued from my previous post.) I’ve made progress on but haven’t yet finished the ADV part of Cosmo Cross; while I suspect the section is short, I made it through enough content to …

Cosmo Cross, the bizarre sim/adventure hybrid, continues

involving major issues with guess-the-noun

and one looming warning

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/07/c...

feel free to drop thoughts in the comments! I've still been poking at PRISM every few days because it feels like there's still more there I'm missing, even if jumping to the final solution is impossible because of broken puzzle reasons

Cosmo Cross (1982) The company for today’s game, confusingly, goes by X’TAL SOFT, XTAL SOFT, or CRYSTAL SOFT depending on what document you are looking at. At least the title of the game is straightforwar…

All the Adventures dips back to 1982 for a space sim-adventure game hybrid from Japan. I give the history of how a music company switched to games and the workings behind the space-combat section:

bluerenga.blog/2026/02/06/c...

University Adventure (1983) Today sees the return of the tapemag T&D Subscription Software, which we last saw with the game Killer Mansion. The tapemag was started in 1982 by Tom Dykema to distribute Tandy Color Computer …

Today on All the Adventures:

an '83-vintage My Univesity/College game, including excessive drinking and zealous resident assistants

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Time to kick off a (year-long) commemoration of one of THE OLDEST video games known to history! 🎊

It’s “Bouncing Ball” — a candidate for the first-ever video game — celebrating its (75th) Diamond Anniversary this year!

🧵👇

House Adventure (1983) House Adventure first appeared in the “tape magazine” Chromasette, the January 1983 issue. We’ve seen Chromasette before with games like Williamsburg Adventure that were republish…

Next on All the Adventures, one of the buggiest published games I've ever come across, from the tapemag Chromasette

staggeringly, breathtakingly broken as published

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PRISM: The Atari Version (Continued from my previous posts.) Curses, foiled again! The review that mentions PRISM (Creative Computing, May 1983) only lists the game for Apple II, and PRISM barely got any mentions later, so…

Alas: I needed to do at least one more post on PRISM (the real life treasure hunt from 1982), as there's a version I didn't know about for Atari computers. The images are different enough to cause some of the potential clues to radically change.

bluerenga.blog/2026/01/28/p...

PRISM: The Clinging (Continued from my previous posts.) This is my last post on PRISM for now; just like with Alkemstone, if something comes up worth posting about I may return. Some things to get out of the way first…

Here's my last post on PRISM (for now), the Apple II game with clues to find real-life treasure. I work out how the game is likely hinting how to find a burial spot and I find an unexpected clue in the game's background sounds.

bluerenga.blog/2026/01/27/p...

PRISM: How to Hide Something So Almost Nobody Finds It (Continued from my previous posts on PRISM.) Nobody is easy. Almost nobody, that’s the tricky part. On the night of August 7th, 1979, I set off with Bamber Gascoigne, who was chosen to witnes…

The study of PRISM continues, as I go back over some history of Masquerade (which the game was heavily inspired by) and try to get at the central question of: how do you specify the exact location of three different buried treasures with 1982 technology?

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alkemstone – Renga in Blue Posts about alkemstone written by Jason Dyer

I'm not doing any PRISM updates today, but if you haven't seen it yet, you can read my coverage of Alkemstone, another buried object with information buried in an Apple II game (this time a proper game! ... kind of).

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PRISM: Unspeakable Forms (Continued from my previous posts.) First off, to share from the comments– Morpheus Kitami: The colored letters have different kinds of colors. Maybe instead of one word per page, it’s one se…

The grand conclusion of the PRISM story, including some riddles like

NOT A ROCK / NEVER HOT / NOT FRUIT / NEVER LOCKED

plus

IN AT 7 / OUT AT FOUR / FORWARD 8 / AND SLIGHTLY MORE

which lead to real buried treasure.

Solving continues in the comments!

bluerenga.blog/2026/01/22/p...

PRISM: Colorless as a Tear (Continued from my last post.) From a review by Brian Murphy (Creative Computing, May 1983) he writes that: I was unable to wrest any hints from ISM. Are the keys more than one hundred miles apart?…

Part 2 of my series on the (never solved) real-life treasure hunt PRISM, on a "Storydisk" from 1982 for Apple II.

We try to solve the game in the comments!

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I had this one hanging in my classroom for many years

PRISM (1982) PRISM is an ISM Storydisk which tells the wonderous tale of the theft of the three ancient Keys of Color, and the adventures of the young boy who must seek them in the monstrous kingdom of Yolsva, …

In 1982, a company out of New York made three golden keys and buried them. They put clues in an interactive book in the format of an Apple II program called PRISM.

The treasure has never been located, so today, All the Adventures embarks on solving the mystery.

bluerenga.blog/2026/01/21/p...

The Colonel’s House: Interview with the Author (Continued from a post from a year ago. You should probably read that post before this one.) While I occasionally reach a videogame in the All the Adventures project which is famous enough to have …

I played The Colonel's House, a VIC-20 adventure game, about a year ago. The author contacted me not long ago and I did an interview, so I am able to give the history of how the game was made for the first time.

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original post here: bluerenga.blog/2025/03/10/t...

Sword of Raschkil: Supermoon Logic I’ve finished the game; this continues directly from my previous post. I received warning on the puzzle I was stuck on from gschmidl that: “I have no idea how you’re supposed to f…

the ending of Sword of Raschkil, which features a puzzle so inexplicable, so baffling, I have to coin a new word

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adventure-751 – Renga in Blue Posts about adventure-751 written by Jason Dyer

BTW, I did finish writing about the whole game (6 posts) if you want to read it

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Sword of Raschkil (1981 / 1983) Written in 1981, not published until 1983. Take your pick. I didn’t have this one on any of my lists but El Explorador de RPG recently pointed it out; since it was not preserved otherwise, gs…

A new quest emergence on All the Adventures, including a short history of H & E Computronics (as well as how they somehow sold the first known commercial "adult" game).

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@jfroholt.bsky.social ‘s latest excellent article covering one of “Knights of Aberdeen” library tapes for the MZ-80A is now available !

Haunted House: Pray Hard with a Vengeance I’ve finished the game (prior posts here). It turned out I had one bottleneck (the wolf) which opened up the rest of the game, and “puzzles” I was spending time on (like the ghost…

in which I complete Lucas's Haunted House, figure out how to carry a 10 foot statue, and explore the historical web of plagiarism and semi-plagiarism surrounding the work

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Effect and Cause

Haunted House: Pray Harder (Continued from my previous post.) Just to recap from last time, here was the state of my map, with special rooms marked. I also had access to a candle, a box of matches, a bottle of spirits, some …

in which I continue Haunted House by Steve Lucas (one of the most prolific text adventure authors of the 80s) and published by Silverlind (via a former ICL employee)

and find out that monsters don't like crisps very much

and I need to work on my praying technique

bluerenga.blog/2026/01/14/h...

Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 was literally impossible to beat, you couldn't get one of the puzzle pieces

there was no patch, you just couldn't beat the game and had to accept it

The _demo_ is really good. It’s like 5-10 minutes but the atmosphere is terrific and it’s like a horror short story

Never tried the rest of the game

Haunted House (Lucas, 1983) Writing an adventure game is very similar to writing a novel. Everybody can write a few unrelated sentences, but the novelist’s skill comes from stringing sentences together in such a way as to cre…

in which I tell the story of how a company called Silverlind got formed due to the shenanigans of the mighty International Computers Limited (a combination of 9 distinct companies) and one of the three adventure games that they published

bluerenga.blog/2026/01/12/h...

Has swimming pool pinball ever been a thing?

Adventure 751: Into the Sunset I’ve never spelunked, although I’ve been in a number of caves around the country as a tourist. Like Carlsbad Caverns, Lava River Cave here in Oregon, Cave of the Winds in Colorado and others I can’…

the grand conclusion to my six-part series on Adventure 751, the long-lost game that was available on CompuServe most of its lifetime and only unearthed recently

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