John R. Olsen Jr.

                      by Jean Childs

"You lie in a silk lined coffin. You can hear the sound of a
hammer as it pounds nails into the heavy lid, sealing you inside
this black chamber of death. There is no light. Your hands explore
the smooth silk lining of the walls of your prison, but find
nothing. The hammering stops. You feel a swaying motion as your
coffin is lowered into a six foot deep grave." - from 'Rings for
Bony Fingers' by John Olsen.

John R. Olsen Jr. is 45, single, and lives in Newberg, Oregon, USA
where he teaches middle school maths and computers. He has also
taught computing to adults, so I asked him which was easier to
teach - children or adults. He told me that both present their own
special set of difficulties and rewards. Children have an
enthusiasm and natural grasp of technology. Adults can communicate
more effectively and have a better grasp of consequences.

John has had over 100 magazine articles and software programs
published, owns ten computers, and has written a book on
Visionary, the Interactive Programming Language. His first
computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1, which now rests in his
closet. He has five Commodore 64s. One is used at school to record
class grades. Another runs his bulletin board system, and has been
running non-stop twenty-four hours a day for nine years. The third
one was used for personal use and a fourth one used as a backup
for the other three. Both the last two have gone to join the
TRS-80 in the closet. The fifth Commodore is a portable SX-64
which John used to take to computer club meetings but, he says,
the Commodore 64 is an 'old' computer and that one also sits
mostly unused now. He also has an Apple which he used at school,
but that is also being phased out. At home he uses an Amiga 1000
for developing software, doing IBM emulation and graphics etc.,
and an Amiga 500 which he mostly used for digitizing audio. His
newest 'baby' is a Macintosh LC 475 which he has had since last
November and is currently his computer 'of choice'. He hates the
idea of parting with any of his computers but does admit to now
having a storage problem.

Visionary, the Interactive Programming Language, was released for
the Amiga computers in 1991 by Oxxi Inc. in California, USA.
John's book "The Visionary Programmer's Handbook" was released
simultaneously as an aid for those learning the new language. It
included a disk, containing a sample game he had written, and
detailed explanations of how each line of code made the game work.
The game was a graphic point-and-click interpretation of one of
his 'beginner' adventures from the old Commodore 64 days, called
"I Was A Cannibal For the FBI". As I wanted to know all about
John's adventure writing history, he very kindly sent me a copy of
the introduction to his book which I found very interesting. I
have his permission to reproduce that introduction for SynTax, so
over to you John.

"I first played a computer adventure in 1979, less than a year
after I had purchased my first computer. It was 'AdventureLand' by
Scott Adams; a true classic. It was my first experience with an
adventure game, and it was wondrous!

Looking back at it now, I can see its warts. It took over eight
minutes to load from a cassette, and it completely filled the
entire 16K memory of my TRS-80. The parser was primitive; only two
words were allowed, "get key", "chop tree", "kill dragon".  Input
was strictly limited to verb and noun. There were no graphics. The
display was split with the room description at the top of the
screen, and all other input and output shown on the lower portion
of the screen. The messages were short and frequently cryptic. And
there weren't a lot of rooms or plot by today's standards. But I
was entranced.

The plot, for those of you who never had the pleasure of enjoying
this adventure, involved gathering thirteen treasures in a
fantastic land of dragons, forests, and caverns. There was a wild
assortment of objects in the land that defied logic. Paul Bunyan's
blue ox Babe, jeweled crowns, Aladdin's lamp, and the magic mirror
from Snow White were just a few of the things found in
AdventureLand. You could visit volcanic chasms, blue lakes, and
smelly swamps. If you took a wrong turn, you could even find
yourself lost in a computer memory chip. When playing this
adventure, you frequently had to give logic a vacation, and just
go with the situation.

A year later, when I first tried my hand at writing my own
adventure, I began to appreciate the immense task that Scott Adams
had accomplished. Into a mere 16K of memory, he had squeezed the
adventure interpreter and the data necessary for an entire
adventure game. The interpreter had to contain all the routines
for loading and saving games in progress, the parser for dealing
with the player's input, the screen routines for the split-screen
window, as well as the logic for moving to different rooms,
getting, dropping, and using the variety of different objects. The
data had to contain all the programming steps, the messages, the
location descriptions, and the vocabulary list.

Scott Adams went on to produce a total of thirteen adventures,
with titles such as 'The Count', 'Ghost Town', 'Golden Voyage',
'Mission Impossible', 'Mystery Fun House', 'Pirate Adventure',
'Pyramid Of Doom', 'Savage Island', 'Strange Odyssey', and 'Voodoo
Castle'. They were later converted for use on Apple and Atari
computers. And a few were finally made available on the Commodore
64. But none are available today for the Amiga. And perhaps it is
just as well. They were products of an earlier and more innocent
age. They would not stand up well in their original text-only
state, with their limited vocabulary and shorter storylines.

Still, I remember with pleasure the arrival of each new adventure.
Usually the playing of a new game was a group process. A bunch of
about five of us would get together for a long evening of
adventuring. With one person doing the typing, and the others all
yelling out suggestions, we would play until the wee hours of the
morning. Usually we would get stuck every hour or so. Then we
would sit around and toss around a variety of more and more
outlandish suggestions. Sometimes, by sheer luck or accident, we
would strike the lucky combination and solve one of the puzzles.

I loved adventures. I loved playing them. But my mind kept toying
with plots for my own adventures. These adventure stories were
frequently inspired by the juvenile radio programs of the 1940s
like 'Jack Armstrong', 'Fu Manchu', and 'I Love A Mystery'. I was
yet to be born when these programs aired over the radio, but I had
heard audio tapes of them. The fantastic stories were perfectly
suited to computerized adventures. Then too there were the
Saturday afternoon serials at the movie theater. Although they
also played before I was born, I had watched 16mm film prints of
some of them. Twelve and fifteen chapter serials like 'Captain
Marvel' and 'Daredevils Of The Red Circle' were a perfect
inspiration for the type of computer adventures that I had in
mind.

I decided that I was going to write an adventure game. But I had
no idea of how to go about it. There were no adventure authoring
languages like Visionary at that time. My only choice was to write
in the BASIC language. And that meant that I had to write
everything: the parser, the input routines, the output routines,
as well as the movement and other logic. But I had a pretty good
knowledge of BASIC and so undaunted I began writing my first
adventure during my Christmas vacation of 1980.  The plot of my
inaugural adventure was taken from the old horror movies. Its
working title was 'Frankenstein Adventure'. The plot had you (the
player) discovering you were the long lost relative of Dr.
Frankenstein. As his only heir, you had inherited his mansion.
When you arrived, you found a letter from him telling you that he
wanted you to complete his creature and bring it to life.  The
story was set in and around the old mansion. There was the
obligatory graveyard and crypt. And of course, there was the
windmill out in the center of the foggy old bog.

The plot twists in this first adventure are as effective today as
they were ten years ago. You had to place a heart and liver in the
creature. To do this required a visit to the cemetery, where you
removed the organs from a corpse, but a hungry wolf barred your
way as you attempted to leave the cemetery, and your only recourse
was to give up the liver. The wolf snatched it up and ran off.
This left you with a creature in the cellar laboratory without a
liver. But at a later time, the wolf appeared again, and this time
you were able to kill it. You discovered that it was a werewolf,
and in death it reassumed its human form. It was from this second
human copse that you obtained the liver you needed.

Another plot twist was the ending of the adventure. Throughout the
entire story, you were under the impression that your goal was to
complete the creature and bring it to life. You spent a great deal
of time finding the various tools, instruments, and organs in
order to complete the creature. Yet when you finally connected the
electrodes and threw the electrical switch, the creature came to
life in a shower of sparks and started toward you with murderous
intent. It was at this point that you discovered your adventure
was not over. Your final goal was to destroy the creature and save
your own life. The way in which this task was accomplished was
taken directly out of one of the Frankenstein movies. You lured
him into the swamp, as seen in the climax of 'The House Of
Frankenstein'.

The adventure was completed and debugged during my two week
Christmas break in 1980. It was my intent to submit it for
publication, and sell it. But first I gave a copy to a friend to
play. He loved it. But he did ask, "Why can you keep killing the
wolf?" Sure enough, he had found a bug. I had the wolf appearing
when the player visited the far corner of the cemetery. But I
forgot to stop creating the wolf after you had killed it. Hence,
the wolf kept reappearing and reappearing. It was a lesson well
learned:- always have someone else play your game after you are
finished writing it. Because no matter how sure you are that all
the bugs have been eliminated, someone else is sure to find one
that you missed!

I submitted my first adventure to Cload, a cassette based magazine
for the TRS-80. They had previously bought some of my other games
(non-adventure games), and they snapped up Frankenstein Adventure.
Several months later, it appeared in one of their issues. My first
adventure! Within a matter of days I started getting letters.
Everyone loved it. I got letters from all over. I even got letters
from other countries. Some were in foreign languages that I
couldn't read, but had to have interpreted. Some people would ask
for help. Others would simply write expressing their appreciation
for the thrilling experience. And although the volume of letters
dwindled, I still received letters for many years after that, as
copies of my program continued to be circulated.

I was captivated. Writing adventures was more fun than playing
them! I immediately started plotting other adventure stories.
First there was one based on the jungle settings of the Tarzan
novels, entitled 'The Elephant's Graveyard Adventure'. Then
followed a sequel using a few of the same locations, 'King
Solomon's Mines Adventure'. Both were published by Cload magazine
in 1981. Others followed. The 'Lost City' adventure was so big, it
had to be done in two parts. (Keep in mind, these all were written
in BASIC in a maximum of 16K memory.) 'Arabian Nights' adventure
took place in Baghdad. 'Shipwrecked' took place on a desert
island. All of these were published by Cload magazine, or Softside
magazine. Softside was a printed magazine and a companion disk.
For a time, adventure games were so popular that Softside offered
an 'Adventure Of The Month Club'.  Several of my adventures saw
their first publication as an Adventure Of The Month Club
offering.

I continued writing several new adventures each year on the TRS-80
through the early 1980s until the TRS-80 stopped production and
the demand for software tapered down to a trickle. The Commodore
64 was the new kid on the block, and so I upgraded my computer to
a Commodore 64. I spent some months converting the first of my
adventures over to the C-64. The BASIC languages used by Commodore
and Tandy were similar but had substantial differences. I prepared
to convert the rest of my adventures to run on the C-64, but
before the task was completed, a wonderful thing happened. An
adventure authoring system was released for the Commodore 64.

In early 1984, AdventureWriter was released. It was an adventure
authoring system that allowed anyone to write adventures with no
programming knowledge. Not only that, but they were in machine
language not BASIC. All messages were encoded so that even
examining the disk sectors wouldn't reveal any clues. The parser
was still somewhat limited, but with proper programming you could
parse more complicated sentences. For example, you could say: "put
the envelope in the mailbox", something you could never do with
Scott Adams adventures, or with my BASIC ones. But best of all,
the adventures could be much larger and still run with the
instantaneous speed of machine language. No more pauses after the
player typed his input. The adventures now reacted immediately.

It should be pointed out that AdventureWriter actually originated
in England. It was written in 1983 by Graeme Yeandle and released
by Gilsoft under the name The Quill. It was released under the
name AdventureWriter in the U.S. by CodeWriter Corp. who also
released Apple, IBM, and Atari conversions of it under the same
name. One of the nice things about that was that once an adventure
was written using AdventureWriter (alias The Quill), it was
relatively simple to convert it to run on an Apple, IBM or Atari.
From a marketing standpoint, this was a big plus. For a small
investment in time, the same adventure could be sold on four times
as many computers. And that translated into larger royalties.

It was at that point that I tossed out all further plans to
convert my adventures to the Commodore 64 in BASIC. I started
using AdventureWriter immediately to convert my old BASIC
adventures over to the C-64. The program was a joy to use. It
allowed me to create a program much more sophisticated than I was
previously able to write. My first conversion was the two part
Lost City Adventure. Since AdventureWriter allowed so much bigger
adventures, both parts were combined into one giant adventure and
was given the title 'Revenge Of The Moon Goddess'.

I re-wrote my original Elephant's Graveyard Adventure and its
sequel King Solomon's Mines Adventure, combining them into another
giant adventure under the title of 'Perils Of Darkest Africa'.
Then I set down to write my first original story on
AdventureWriter. I took my inspiration from an old radio mystery
in which the dead apparently came to life and walked at night.  My
story took place in a Louisiana cemetery on the edge of a bayou.
The result of several months' work was 'Night Of The Walking
Dead'.  It was to become one of my most critically acclaimed
works. One critic wrote that he actually felt chills run down his
spine when he was playing the game late at night.  He even went so
far as to write that it compared with Stephen King's novels. (I
was flattered, but realized he was exaggerating).

All three adventures were published by CodeWriter Corp., the
company that also published AdventureWriter, in a package called
'The Thriller Series'. The software package was released in time
for the Christmas rush 1984, and could be found in the software
section of all the major toy stores. Because of demand for a
sequel, I converted some of my old stories from the TRS-80 days.
By the following summer a second package was released, called
'Thriller ll'. It contained 'Shipwrecked', 'Son Of Ali Baba', and
'Frankenstein's Legacy'. The latter was my very first adventure,
upgraded and expanded and now available on the Commodore 64.

There were more adventures and other publishers in my future. My
next adventure was born from a desire to write an adventure that
was so big, that it would tax the limits of AdventureWriter.  From
this inspiration came 'Three Hours To Live'. It had 254 rooms, the
maximum that AdventureWriter allowed. The completed adventure was
so big that I could not convert it to the Apple computers, since
the Apple has a lower memory limit on AdventureWriter than does
the C-64.

And the adventures kept coming and coming. A few were written
especially for use in my computer classes. Most were written with
commercial possibilities in mind. There was 'Eye Of The Inca', a
treasure hunt inside an ancient Central American temple. 'The Sea
Phantom' was a ghost story that took place on the stormy New
England coast. 'Merlin's Gold' had you searching through Camelot
looking for the Wizard's gold. 'The Magic Forest' was a prequel to
Merlin's Gold.  In it, you released Merlin from a magic spell. And
then there were the two 'sampler' adventures entitled 'I Was A
Cannibal For The FBI' and 'The Secrets Of Funland'. These were
smaller adventures meant to be a sample of what an adventure is.
The puzzles and plots of both were rather simple as adventures go.

I bought my Amiga in 1986, but had to wait until 1990 to write my
first adventure on it. Until that time there was no adventure
authoring language available on the Amiga. At least, not that I
found suitable. Oh, there were glimmers of hope. In 1986
AmigaVenture was released, but it was a BASIC adventure framework
rather than an adventure language. In 1987 two similar programs,
ADL and ADVSYS were released. Both were adventure authoring
languages, but were complicated and didn't allow for anything more
than pure text. Each was originally written for the IBM and ported
over to the Amiga. And none of the above were released
commercially. They were either public domain or shareware. In
1988, Sunrize Industries advertised the first commercial adventure
creation program called 'Adventure Workshop'. I got to try it out,
when the company contacted me to do the beta testing for the
program. It offered sound and graphics capabilities, as well as a
language that was easy to understand and use. But unfortunately,
the program was never released commercially. That meant if I
wanted to write adventures on the Amiga, I would have had to use
one of the above systems that I found lacking, or do it myself in
BASIC. I toyed with the idea, but then along came T.A.C.L., The
Adventure Construction Language. This was the early precursor and
baby brother to Visionary.

I first saw T.A.C.L. advertised in December of 1989. The following
morning I was on the phone ordering it. I was told the program
wasn't quite ready. The manual hadn't come back from the printers
yet. But I put in my order anyway. It arrived during my Christmas
break, and I spent most of my free time getting acquainted with
the language. During the first three months of 1990, I wrote three

brand new adventures. The three adventures were all horror
stories, and made up the 'Nightmares From The Crypt' trilogy. The
first was 'Rings For Bony Fingers'. In it, you had to find the ten
rings and replace them on the fingers of a skeleton. In
'Ghostriders Of El Diablo', the second in the trilogy, you lifted
an Indian curse from the old ghost town of El Diablo. The third
and final adventure was entitled 'Dr. Death's House Of Horrors'.
It was set in a large Victorian mansion that housed a wax museum.
All three adventures were tied together by a central theme. In
each, you were asleep having a nightmare. Each nightmare was
different, but in each you had to find the way to awake before you
died in your sleep.

In the summer of 1990 I heard the first whisperings of a new
adventure language called 'Visionary'. It was to have its roots in
T.A.C.L., but was to be much more extensive with full graphic and
sound capabilities. I was called upon to beta test the software
before its release, and found it be a superb language.  It is the
language I use today, and is the reason for this book.

There are many more adventures brewing in my imagination. As
computers evolve and become more sophisticated, so will my
adventures. Years from now, I have no idea what computer I will be
using. But one thing I do know: I will be writing adventures on
it."














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