SwordQuest Earthworld logic

[+Atari_Warlord]

Well this certainly hurts my head and scratches my curiosity at the same time.  I did find a wiki page that listed 15 "planets" which maybe corresponds to the items.  Not sure if it will help, but here they are.

 

"Planets" = Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Chiron
 

 

[zzip]

1 hour ago, Ecernosoft said:

THATS IT????????

*questions life*

Yeah it was only 12 rooms, one for each sign of the zodiac.   The question was what items you'd put in each room.

[MrTrust]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

It was also being sold to kids most who didn't yet have advanced maths, or knowledge of numerology or astrology (beyond basic horoscopes)

 

Well, they had libraries and encyclopedias.  It's possible the answer is based on some diagram from a book that works have been popular then.  There is something like this planetary rulership chart, for example:

 

 

 

Perhaps this provides some clue.  There may be commonalities between the rooms that are ruled by the same planet.  Pisces and Sagittarius are both ruled by Jupiter and only have one item associated with them. Maybe that's significant.  These are the 7 celestial bodies visible to the naked eye, but if you include the outer planets, there are 11, and 11 clues.  Perhaps each clue is associated with a different planet.

 

I'm not sure the solution will require any advanced mathematics, although some geometry might be involved.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Sounds like Atari did get 8 correct entries.   I wonder if they found the real solution, brute forced it or disassembled the code?

 

Like I said, to win the contest, you didn't need to beat the game (i.e. reveal all 11 clues and get the big sword).  You only needed to find all the hidden words within the panels of the comic, which any kid who read Highlights magazine could do, figure out that the correct keywords were on prime numbered pages as is hinted on the first page of the comic.

 

You really don't need to find more than the first clue in the game to figure that out, and you're guaranteed to do that.  Yes, we know people figured out the right keywords from looking at the comic, but we don't know if any of them ever actually found all the clues within the game.

 

1 hour ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Or just got plain lucky.

 

Like I said, 65k+ possible combinations of items in each room. You've got to find the right one in 0-9 different rooms simultaneously, and you have to do that 11 times in order.  The odds of anyone doing that by brute force, trial and error, or luck, are astronomical.  If you programmed a bot to do it, it would probably take months to run out.

 

1 hour ago, x=usr(1536) said:

I'm reasonably convinced at this point that the puzzle aspect is in some way flawed.  It may be possible to arrive at the correct answer, but not necessarily as it was intended to be solved.

 

It's certainly flawed in that you're misled from the beginning.  The comic has all the hidden keywords to win the contest, but does not have the right answers to get the game to reveal the clues.  Too many items and rooms do not appear in the comic at all.

 

If there is a non-arbitrary solution, it will likely combine some knowledge of astrology, mythology, astronomy, and numerology.  The problem from a player standpoint is you have no clue where to begin looking.  At least with the solution revealed, it might be possible to retroactively explain the logic behind it.

 

1 hour ago, x=usr(1536) said:

It would be interesting to see the method(s) by which the people who submitted the correct answers arrived at them.  That may make it possible to determine whether or not there is an error in the puzzle.

 

The only interview I've seen that touches on this question, the guy confirmed he only found a handful of in-game clues.  The rest he found just by scanning the comic, and he took a lucky guess on which ones to include in his submission.  He says that later one of the entrants provided a solution, possibly by BBS or Usenet.

 

If that's true, that might be the source of the solution we have now.  The question is did the legitimately figure it out, or did Atari leak it to him somehow?

 

What puzzles me is that, with all the ballyhoo about the series over the years, nobody who's been in a position to look at internal documents or interview guys like Frye and Hitchens seems to have asked the question of what their thought process was laying this all out.  Not that I can find, at least.

[zzip]

10 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

I'm not sure the solution will require any advanced mathematics, although some geometry might be involved.

 

Well maybe not math, but the fact that nobody can explain how to derive the solution 40 years later even with the internet at our fingertips means we kids didn't stand a chance back then 

 

I quickly got the feeling it was hopeless and kind of depressed at my inability to solve it.  The only real mystery was why we bought FireWorld after the EarthWorld debacle.   I think that was my brother's doing

 

[+Atari_Warlord]

Ran across an old interview on Digitalpress from someone that wrote the manuals and said that the game was not solvable and a worse punishment than prison.  Is everyone that worked on this passed away now?

[MrTrust]

37 minutes ago, Atari_Warlord said:

Ran across an old interview on Digitalpress from someone that wrote the manuals and said that the game was not solvable and a worse punishment than prison.  Is everyone that worked on this passed away now?

 

This would seem like a slam dunk except instruction manuals for many old console games, particularly later 2600 ones, were notoriously suspect.  Also, he only wrote the Waterworld manual.  Quoting from that interview:

 

Quote

"In terms of getting a "synopsis" to work from, I do not recall a single instance where a programmer gave me a "synopsis" of how his game was played. That was not how we worked at Atari. Essentially, when work was meted out at our staff meetings, we were given a game cartridge, and we were told to go play with it and figure out what it was all about."

 

Having a designer or programmer write a manual for a game is a bad idea, but having some guy who just played it a lot seems like an even worse idea.  In any case, this is not dispositive that he claims this.  He might be saying it has no rational schema because he knows it doesn't, or because he couldn't figure one out.  On the other hand (my clarifications in blue):

 

Quote

 

Joel (Oberman, project manager on the SQ series) even acknowledged the inherent unplayability of the game to me, which was probably why he was in such a panic mode... 

 

Since it was Joel's responsibility to see that the contest (this was the final tie-breaking round for all the contestants who sent in the correct secret message) came off OK, he had a solution all worked out, he said, as he handed me a specially burned EPROM cartridge. He had instructed Dan Hitchens, the programmer, to reprogram the game so that the game play would be exactly the same, but that the solutions would be different. Then, he gave me a sheet of paper on which Dan had scribbled the solutions showing which objects needed to be put into which rooms in order for players to move onto to the next level.

 

Joel wanted me to merely transcribe Dan's notes into a nicely formatted answer grid that we would hand out to the contestants and turn them loose.

 

I refused.

 

 

According to him, the project manager admits the game is broken, and they have to have a race to finish this reprogrammed version of the game where the item/room groupings are different, and he asks the guy working on the Waterworld manual to simply transcribe the answer sheet than Dan Hitchens (programmer on the game) had written out.  Apparently, they just wanted to give the contestants the answers and see who played through it the fastest.  Battaglia (WW manual writer) refuses, and writes out actual astrology-based hints that the contestants managed to solve within the 90s minutes.

 

The guy is really high on the cleverness of these hints, and he really, really hates EW, so maybe that's coloring his view a bit.  Also, if you're just going to hand the answers to the players, why not just photocopy the original notes?  Why bother pulling someone off another project to transcribe it?

 

If that really were true, it does strongly suggest that they intended the original game to be solved by brute force.  If that's true, then what the hell?  You don't need more than basic high school math to calculate that that is friggin' impossible.  Why would they do that?  What were they thinking?

 

[Ecernosoft]

Has anyone ever beat this crazy game? 

[Supergun]

6 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Or just got plain lucky.

 

I'm reasonably convinced at this point that the puzzle aspect is in some way flawed.  It may be possible to arrive at the correct answer, but not necessarily as it was intended to be solved.

 

It would be interesting to see the method(s) by which the people who submitted the correct answers arrived at them.  That may make it possible to determine whether or not there is an error in the puzzle.

But wouldn’t the programmer be the best source to ask if the game was solvable? (with the aid of the comic book clues and/or without)

[+x=usr(1536)]

39 minutes ago, Supergun said:

But wouldn’t the programmer be the best source to ask if the game was solvable? (with the aid of the comic book clues and/or without)

Maybe.  I agree with your train of thought, but, off the top of my head, can see two potential caveats with that approach:

• The programmer may not have been aware of (or responsible for) the flaws, particularly if multiple people had their hands in the project and/or his involvement ended early.
• He may just flat-out not remember (or misremember), which is understandable given how long it's been.

None of this means that I'm in opposition to the idea, and think that there's definitely merit in following it up.  My expectations are tempered, but that does leave room to exceed them

[+x=usr(1536)]

4 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Like I said, 65k+ possible combinations of items in each room. You've got to find the right one in 0-9 different rooms simultaneously, and you have to do that 11 times in order.  The odds of anyone doing that by brute force, trial and error, or luck, are astronomical.  If you programmed a bot to do it, it would probably take months to run out.

Absolutely, and I am by no means discounting or disregarding the mathematical practicalities.  However, if those practicalities are predicated on the puzzle itself being implemented correctly from the start, they may not apply if the implementation is flawed.  Enigma was considered secure until someone reused a one-time pad; MD5 was considered a secure hash until collisions were found.  Granted, these are by no means one-to-one equivalents to the puzzle we're looking at, but they do illustrate that implementation flaws weaken the overall structure.

4 hours ago, MrTrust said:

If there is a non-arbitrary solution, it will likely combine some knowledge of astrology, mythology, astronomy, and numerology.  The problem from a player standpoint is you have no clue where to begin looking.  At least with the solution revealed, it might be possible to retroactively explain the logic behind it.

Agreed, and this is essentially what I was getting at when I mentioned working backwards from the answer.  Problem is, if this thing is flawed, is it possible to fully work backwards from the one correct answer?  My expectation in this case would be no if the puzzle is flawed, and yes if it isn't.

 

In a way, we're not so much waiting to find out the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything as we are trying to figure out how Deep Thought came to say, "42."

4 hours ago, MrTrust said:

The only interview I've seen that touches on this question, the guy confirmed he only found a handful of in-game clues.  The rest he found just by scanning the comic, and he took a lucky guess on which ones to include in his submission.  He says that later one of the entrants provided a solution, possibly by BBS or Usenet.

This is part of what leads me to suspect that the puzzle is flawed.  If there's no need to solve it in order to find the answer, then it seems as though it was never properly conceived.

4 hours ago, MrTrust said:

If that's true, that might be the source of the solution we have now.  The question is did the legitimately figure it out, or did Atari leak it to him somehow?

All of which are possibilities.  Ditto the possibility that someone at Atari realised it was unsolvable, this finding made it to the legal department, and the instruction from on high was to pick the most reasonably-explained answer and call that one correct.  Once it's pronounced to be right by Atari, it effectively becomes canon.  People might not have been as litigious in the '80s as they are now, but running a contest that nobody can win would have definitely brought unwanted legal action even then.

 

IIRC, that was, in part, what led to the cancellation of Airworld and awarding of the prizes without releasing the final chapter in the series.

4 hours ago, MrTrust said:

What puzzles me is that, with all the ballyhoo about the series over the years, nobody who's been in a position to look at internal documents or interview guys like Frye and Hitchens seems to have asked the question of what their thought process was laying this all out.  Not that I can find, at least.

Same.  I suspect that in Frye's case, so much attention has been given to his version of Pac-Man that his other titles just don't get the same level of interest.  This is also a title that has been so suitably out of the spotlight since the contest was ended that Dan Hitchens isn't even really identified with it - sure, he lists it on his resume, but it's just not a title that's a huge nostalgia draw for the most part.  With those in mind, I can understand why these might not be things that they're asked about.

4 hours ago, zzip said:

Well maybe not math, but the fact that nobody can explain how to derive the solution 40 years later even with the internet at our fingertips means we kids didn't stand a chance back then 

I understand what you're saying, but given that this was a game created without those resources available at the time, it should be solvable (or at least explainable) without having to resort to them now.  If this were an outright cipher, I'd be willing to say that throwing everything we have now at it would make perfect sense, but this was a contest.  It was meant to be solved.  If it isn't broken, that should be possible, at least logically.  Whether or not that holds true outside of logic is anyone's guess

2 hours ago, MrTrust said:

If that really were true, it does strongly suggest that they intended the original game to be solved by brute force.  If that's true, then what the hell?  You don't need more than basic high school math to calculate that that is friggin' impossible.  Why would they do that?  What were they thinking?

Exactly, and this comes back to my comment above re: not requiring modern technology to figure it out.  It's probably a safe bet that most, if not all, of the puzzle was designed with pencil and paper, then implemented in logic - at which point we're back to the question of whether or not it's flawed (which I still believe it to be).

[Supergun]

I think the entire project was overly ambitious. (for the time)

 

Back during the NES days, a friend of mine once made a comment while I was playing an extremely difficult game. He said that maybe it was literally impossible. That maybe that area was impassable and perhaps some programmers make some games unbeatable or impassable in certain areas ON PURPOSE so that they don’t have to actually finish the game and can just leave it incomplete. He said that it might save lots of time and money for development.

 

So perhaps what happened here was a little bit of both.

 

The game became so overly complex and the limitations of the technology of the time simply didn’t give enough resources to the programmer to complete their vision and so they just half assed it and left it as an unbeatable game.

 

You have to realize that 65,000 possibilities or even a million possibilities, makes no difference at all because no kid will ever be able to accomplish it. And kids playing the game for hours on end and all of their friends wanting the same challenge and buying the cartridges up makes for good sales and happy parents.

 

How many players spent millions of quarters on Street Fighter 2 trying to find the secret character Sheng Long or trying to find a hidden Mortal Kombat fatality just because of fake April fools Easter eggs in the gaming magazines?

[MrTrust]

2 hours ago, Supergun said:

But wouldn’t the programmer be the best source to ask if the game was solvable? (with the aid of the comic book clues and/or without)

 

Indeed, and I attempted to contact both Dan Hitchens and Tod Frye to ask.  Mr. Frye did get back to me.  I don't want to share our correspondence here without his permission, but according to him, no, there is no rhyme or reason to the placement of the items.

 

So... that's disappointing.  

[else]

11 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Indeed, and I attempted to contact both Dan Hitchens and Tod Frye to ask.  Mr. Frye did get back to me.  I don't want to share our correspondence here without his permission, but according to him, no, there is no rhyme or reason to the placement of the items.

 

So... that's disappointing.  

 

Maybe Atari was secretly hoping nobody would beat the game, so they wouldn't have to pay out?

[lucifershalo]

what might be cool is a hack with only the mini games and not the illogic puzzles....

[Zoyous]

2 hours ago, else said:

 

Maybe Atari was secretly hoping nobody would beat the game, so they wouldn't have to pay out?

This is my thought as I read through the valiant attempts to make sense of this mess. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that no one even knows the whereabouts of the prize(s) these days? It sounds to me like the programmer had a great idea to synergize the partnership of Atari/DC/Warner/Franklin Mint. Then someone higher up the chain had a great idea to use the opportunity to make an impossible contest in a game series that they probably knew would be impossible for the company to finish producing, and simply keep the prizes. Certainly the people who were in a position to green-light the project should have been able to see the red flags going on in the gaming industry at that time, understand that there was an imminent shakeup coming. "Oh, no one's been able to solve it yet? And the business is really in the red. Gee, I'd better keep this outrageously gaudy and valuable sword in a safe place."

[Keir]

24 minutes ago, Zoyous said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that no one even knows the whereabouts of the prize(s) these days?

We know that Rideout still has the chalice (as of 2018) and Bell had the medallion melted down for cash (he kept the little sword but apparently that was later stolen). Otherwise, it's just rumors (maybe the crown was awarded or maybe not, maybe the other prizes went to Tramiel or maybe they went back to Franklin Mint and were also recycled). 

[MrTrust]

I've still got some digging to do on this, but I think we know enough to come up with a plausible theory of what happened with this.  First, it's important to make it clear there are two puzzles: one within the comic, and one within the game cartridge.  The puzzle within the comic simply required you to find all the secret keywords hidden in the pictures like so:

 

 

There were 10 of these hidden words in the comic.  They're not particularly hard to find once you know to look for them.  In order to select the five correct ones to win the contest, you only needed to catch the reference to prime numbers on the first page, as usr did within a New York minute.  Frankly, I'm somewhat surprised they only had 8 correct submissions for the contest puzzle.  So, if they were hiding their $100,000 embezzlement scheme behind this secret code, they went to the Snidely Whiplash School of Crime.  They also established an essay contest as a backup tie-breaker round if they had too many winning entries, which would be terrible if they didn't intend anyone to win, because then they would have no choice but to choose a winner.  Also, it's just a silly way to steal money.

 

The second puzzle is in collecting specific items in the game program and placing them in specific rooms in order to reveal clues.  Get the right three items in the right three rooms, and the game displays a page and panel number telling you where to look for one of these hidden words.  If you find all the references in the game by figuring out the correct room/item combinations, you win the game and get an ending screen.  Also, you will know which panels contain hidden words.  It's not necessary to do this to win the contest, and it is not known if any of the finalists actually did.  I would be very surprised to learn that any of them did, given the odds against it that we've already discussed.

 

So, according to Frye, there was no rational schema behind how the correct item/room combinations were arranged.  This was done late in the development cycle.  My assumption is that the bulk of the game design and code, the story of the comic book, and the contest puzzle were developed concurrently, probably with minimal direct communication between the game guys and the comic guys, and when the time came to finalize the second puzzle - the one within the game cartridge - there was a communication breakdown.  I asked Frye, explicitly, there's no other way to get the game to reveal the clues short of brute force trial and error?  To which he replied that there are hints in the comic book.

 

Well, yes, there are several hints in the comic book if you want to know, say, where you will find the lamp, or how the map is laid out, or what the cloak does, etc.  Things that function within the game and the main scenario do more or less map onto the comic accurately, so in that sense, yes the comic does provide some "clues" as to how the game is played.  What it does not have, or does not seem to have, are any hints as to how to solve the second puzzle.  For instance, this is the one and only reference to Aries in the entire comic:

 

 

Now, if you are able to glean from this panel that the Aries room is supposed to receive at various points the Shoes, Water, Key, and Cloak, you're a hell of a lot more perceptive than I am.  Other rooms that are necessary to find many clues are not depicted in the comic at all, such as Libra and Scorpio.

 

What I think happened is that the team working on the comic did not get the message that the "hints" they needed to supply were not just the secret hidden words for "the puzzle" or a demonstration of how the different items work within the game.  There's one set of "clues" in the comic in the form of hidden words, and a set of "clues" or "hints" within the story letting you know that, say, the Cloak of Invisibility will help you pass Sagittarius' arrows, and there's a set of clues hidden within the game cartridge's puzzle directing you to specific panels to find the secret keywords, but there's a missing fourth set of clues needed to point players in the direction of getting the right items into the right rooms.  So, I believe you had multiple different teams from multiple different companies all working on this project, probably not directly with each other very much, and you have multiple things being referenced by words like "clue", "hint", "game", "contest" that one or more people either elided incorrectly or didn't understand in the first place, and the comic omitted crucial information.  It's likely that the comic writers and artists did not fully understand the project, given their description of what happened with the contest is way off from what we know happened; they said in an interview that Atari had buried some ornate sword somewhere and the game was supposed to reveal the location for someone to go dig it up.  

 

I'll see if Mr. Frye gets back to me with answers to my follow-up clarification questions, or if Mr. Hitchens ever adds anything, but in the absence of more information, I think this is the most plausible theory of the case.  What I'd still like to know, and am still trying to find out, is:

 

 - Where along the timeline of the game cartridge being developed was the comic finalized?

 - What, exactly, was the method by which they expected players to solve the puzzle within the game cartridge?

 - Are any of the contest finalists known to have successfully all 11 clues within the game cartridge?

 - How did we come to have the correct item/room combos available on the internet since at least 2001?  Where did it come from?

[else]

Quote

What I think happened is that the team working on the comic did not get the message that the "hints" they needed to supply were not just the secret hidden words for "the puzzle" or a demonstration of how the different items work within the game. 

 

I find this unlikely.  The more people that know the solution, the more likely it is to leak.  Ideally you'd only want one person at Atari to know.  So I don't see Atari providing all the details of the solution to an external comic team.  What I find more likely is that Tod Frye provided a blank sheet of graph paper to a manager at Atari, and told him to fill it in with the solution.  Then Tod coded it into the game.  That way only one person knows.  Just a hunch....

[+x=usr(1536)]

5 hours ago, MrTrust said:

I've still got some digging to do on this, but I think we know enough to come up with a plausible theory of what happened with this.  First, it's important to make it clear there are two puzzles: one within the comic, and one within the game cartridge.  The puzzle within the comic simply required you to find all the secret keywords hidden in the pictures like so:

FWIW, something I never made clear about my own investigations into this was that I decided to more or less ignore the comic because the words and hints were very obvious.  They weren't rejected, but given that they were essentially known quantities my belief came to be that they wouldn't do much to move the in-game puzzle forward.  And if they were going to do that, they would have done it years ago.

5 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Frankly, I'm somewhat surprised they only had 8 correct submissions for the contest puzzle.

That always surprised me as well.  Even with the contest taking place during The Crash™, it's difficult to see how they would have that few correct entries.

5 hours ago, MrTrust said:

So, if they were hiding their $100,000 embezzlement scheme behind this secret code, they went to the Snidely Whiplash School of Crime.  They also established an essay contest as a backup tie-breaker round if they had too many winning entries, which would be terrible if they didn't intend anyone to win, because then they would have no choice but to choose a winner.  Also, it's just a silly way to steal money.

Exactly.  This is a case where not attributing to malice that which can be explained by error is the best approach.

5 hours ago, MrTrust said:

My assumption is that the bulk of the game design and code, the story of the comic book, and the contest puzzle were developed concurrently, probably with minimal direct communication between the game guys and the comic guys, and when the time came to finalize the second puzzle - the one within the game cartridge - there was a communication breakdown.

Occam's razor.  This is probably the best explanation we have, barring any additional information from Frye or Hitchens.

[Rom Hunter]

17 hours ago, MrTrust said:

What I think happened is that the team working on the comic did not get the message that the "hints" they needed to supply were not just the secret hidden words for "the puzzle" or a demonstration of how the different items work within the game.  There's one set of "clues" in the comic in the form of hidden words, and a set of "clues" or "hints" within the story letting you know that, say, the Cloak of Invisibility will help you pass Sagittarius' arrows, and there's a set of clues hidden within the game cartridge's puzzle directing you to specific panels to find the secret keywords, but there's a missing fourth set of clues needed to point players in the direction of getting the right items into the right rooms.  So, I believe you had multiple different teams from multiple different companies all working on this project, probably not directly with each other very much, and you have multiple things being referenced by words like "clue", "hint", "game", "contest" that one or more people either elided incorrectly or didn't understand in the first place, and the comic omitted crucial information.  It's likely that the comic writers and artists did not fully understand the project, given their description of what happened with the contest is way off from what we know happened; they said in an interview that Atari had buried some ornate sword somewhere and the game was supposed to reveal the location for someone to go dig it up.

Tons of speculations in this topic (understandable), but I think the above is a plausible theory.

Best researched info on the SworQuest series can be found here:
https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/interviews/michael_rideout/interview_michael_rideout.html

And here:
https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/articles/swordquest_revisited/swordquest_revisited.html

Edited December 2, 2022 by Rom Hunter

[bigfriendly]

I haven't been on the AA forum in quite a while and I found this thread and I found it very interesting. I dedicated weeks to playing Earthworld trying to get through the games clues and for the longest time thought their had to be some kind of puzzle to figure out the game itself. After a while all of my friends had pretty much accepted that game was boring but I marched on. When I found the 3rd clue 25-6 it brought the game briefly back to life within my gaming circle because no one had gotten past the first two clues in the game. I would leave the system on sometimes overnight so I wouldn't have to move all of the items back to where I last stopped playing. I kept notes about different patterns I had tried with placement of the items in different rooms. To this day I feel like Atari made such a terrible mistake with the Swordquest series. The whole idea was so epic for it's time with expensive gold prizes and the idea with merging the comics with the games was so great. If those clowns would have put together a game that played like Raiders of the Lost Ark just think about how much fun that could have been. Raiders didn't have great graphics but it was a puzzle that could be figured out. It wouldn't have been to difficult to build a game like that for Earthworld but as with many other titles like Pac-Man and ET Atari was only interested in hyping things up and putting out a garbage product to make a fast profit.

Edited January 10, 2023 by bigfriendly

[Asaki]

On 11/30/2022 at 8:12 PM, MrTrust said:

Indeed, and I attempted to contact both Dan Hitchens and Tod Frye to ask.  Mr. Frye did get back to me.  I don't want to share our correspondence here without his permission, but according to him, no, there is no rhyme or reason to the placement of the items.

 

So... that's disappointing.  

That makes a lot of sense.

We never had any of the docs back in the day, so the game just seemed like a complete enigma to us...it's not very surprising to find out that that's probably all it is. Atari was probably more focused on getting contest winners, which they succeeded with, and afterwards realized they should probably make the rest of the games a little more playable.

 

Has no one ever hacked the game and/or written their own set of clues to make the game playable?

 

  

On 12/1/2022 at 4:06 PM, MrTrust said:

There were 10 of these hidden words in the comic.  They're not particularly hard to find once you know to look for them.

I'm going to have to look a lot harder, because I only found two o_O

I may have found four, but two of them are too difficult to read (if they are words) in the PDF file.

Edited January 12, 2023 by Asaki

[+batari]

I am sure the only reason Frye was picked for this project is he hadn't had enough time yet to spend all of his royalties for writing Pac-Man. From what I read that took a few years. So maybe they felt he was unlikely to care about a $25k prize.

 

That being said, I do find it a bit disturbing to hear that the contest was possibly unwinnable through normal means, if the winning entrants were merely making lucky guesses and did not find all of the clues in the game. I agree that having to do 11 tasks in order without cogent supporting clues in the manual makes this functionally impossible.

 

I am wondering if the person who figured it out and posted a solution actually dumped the game. People knew how to do that in 1982. They may have disassembled the game on an Apple II (which automatically disassembles 6502 code in its ROM monitor), and/or experimented with hacking the ROM and running it on an EPROM emulator. When there is money at stake, it seems likely to me that some knowledgeable hackers got to work and figured something out.

[Asaki]

"This is not the SwordQuest EarthWorld Playoff Contest. No. This is just a Tribute."

 

So am I just not looking hard enough, or has no one ever made a ROM hack replica of the Playoff cart? Am I the first?

 

I'm not very good at ASM, but I made some changes to Omegamatrix's disassembly of the NTSC EarthWorld, and I've played through a few times in Stella and it seems to work correctly. It's actually almost fun.

I took some inspiration from the PAL release, mostly to see how the "ending" works, but I did not copy all of the changes it made to the game.

Interestingly, the PAL's clue 5 page still shows dagger and food. Weird. But mine doesn't do that.

I just read on another page that clues 9 and 10 can be unlocked at any time...I have a feeling PAL does the same thing, so I probably won't fix it.

 

Anyway, the playoff rules/clues are included in the readme, if one does not already have them (you will need them). Like I said, my ASM is not very good, so let me know if any issues are found

 

sqewt_20230113.zip

 

On 1/12/2023 at 6:05 AM, batari said:

They may have disassembled the game on an Apple II (which automatically disassembles 6502 code in its ROM monitor), and/or experimented with hacking the ROM and running it on an EPROM emulator. When there is money at stake, it seems likely to me that some knowledgeable hackers got to work and figured something out.

It's highly probable, but all of the clues in Robert Ruiz's solution pamphlet are in a completely different order from the actual ROM. Of course, he could've scrambled them to throw everyone off the trail.

[Lord_of_Sipan]

On 12/1/2022 at 2:06 PM, MrTrust said:

It's likely that the comic writers and artists did not fully understand the project, given their description of what happened with the contest is way off from what we know happened; they said in an interview that Atari had buried some ornate sword somewhere and the game was supposed to reveal the location for someone to go dig it up.  

That would be “Hare Raiser” which was a British unsolvable 80s video game wrapped up with a fraudulent contest involving a buried golden item. Stuart Ashens has a good talk on this that is available on YouTube, can’t remember if it is though his own channel or another one. The topic is a really rabbit hole (ba-dum-tssss)
 

So this may be a case of a memory mix up, which actually sounds kind of unlikely if this was someone confusing a project they had worked on with a fraudulent scheme they were uninvolved in, or, more likely the comic people were never told any substantive details about the contest by Atari and they filled in an unrelated game related contest that was reported on in the UK press in its place.

 

Were the comics done in the UK or by British artists in the US? I can’t remember who Atari contracted for the comics.

Edited January 14, 2023 by Lord_of_Sipan