Game 378: Goodcode's Cavern (1982) and Romero/Carmack Corrections

            

Goodcode's Cavern

United States
Gebelli Software (publisher)

Released 1982 for Atari 800

Date Started: 3 September 2020

Date Ended: 3 September 2020

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty: Easy (2/5)

Final Rating: 10

Ranking at time of posting:  13/379 (3%)

     

In today's edition of "If It Were Any Good, It Wouldn't Have Taken 10 Years to Show Up on MobyGames," we have Goodcode's Cavern, also known as Dr. Goodcode's Cavern (the box cover, title screen, and manual all slightly disagree). This all-text game plays like a combination of The Devil's Dungeon (1978), with its numbered rooms and magic wand as the only piece of player inventory, and Rodney Nelsen's Dragon Fire (1981), with its randomly-generated room descriptions. Its concepts are basic enough, however, that it might have been influenced by neither.

     

The setup is that Doctor Goodcode has purchased a mansion and found the caverns beneath it inhabited by monsters. He wants you, an adventurer, to clean it out. Thus begins your exploration of a randomly-generated three-level dungeon with 80 rooms per level. Your goal is to make it to the exit with as much treasure and as many kills as possible.

             

Stepping into the first room.

        

There's no character creation process. Everyone seems to start with a strength of 86 and no assets except a magic wand with three charges. The dungeon is laid out like a node map, with each room connecting to up to four others in the four cardinal directions. You can wind your way through all 80 rooms on each level in numerical order or watch for the occasional opportunity to jump from, say, Room 40 to Room 57. That's about the only "choice" you get in the game.

  

As you enter each room, the game draws from a collection of random terms and phrases, so one might be described as a "light blue room with a wooden floor" and the next a "ruby red room with a dirt floor." A selection of atmospheric effects finalizes the description: "There is a pool of blood"; "It smells like a fire"; "It is very musty in here." Each room can have nothing, some gold pieces strewn about, or an encounter with a monster.

          

This room is pink with a thick carpet and there's moaning.

           

Monsters include snakes, orcs, alligators, tigers, vampires, wild dogs, frogs, and cave bears. Each has a randomly-selected descriptor and color, so you might get a "mean white snake" or a "gruesome russet wild dog" or a "mammoth yellow vampire." Not only that, but there's a random exclamation before the monster ("Hot tacos!"; "Jiminy Cricket!") and each monster has a random behavioral descriptor after his name; for instance, "he is starting towards you" or "he is looking hungry." Each monster also has a strength level. Your only options are to "Defend" (which seems to do nothing), "Attack," or zap the creature with your magic wand. The latter kills everything instantly, but you only have three charges to start.

              

Hot tacos indeed. Although I suspect if I saw a blue grizzly bear, I'd start blaming something else I got in Mexico.

             

Attacking pits your strength against the monster level, and behind a bunch of colorful flashes, the game calculates how much health you and the monster lose. Some battles take up to three rounds. If you win, you get whatever treasure that monster was carrying, which again is drawn from a list of random descriptions and values. You might find an "ugly iron ring" worth nothing or a "bright gold chalice" worth 11,000 gold pieces. You only have 20 treasure slots, so you often find yourself discarding cheap treasures to make room for more expensive ones. There are no other inventory items in the game.

          

Finding a "nickel headband" and then checking my status.

        

As you defeat monsters, your level goes up, and I guess maybe it improves your odds in future combats. If so, it's not really palpable. Leveling is a bit weird, because it's expressed as two numbers, like "1-40" or "2-67." I couldn't tell where the first number rolls over; I think my winning character got to "2-110." Equally mysterious is how health regenerates. Your health is represented as a percentage--the higher the more you're wounded--and sometimes it seems to drop as you move between safe areas, but other times it remains stubbornly the same.

        

The mammoth russet vampire was a little too much for me, so I zapped him with the wand. I'm glad I did, because the colossal gold knife was worth a lot of money.

        

In addition to regular monsters, demons of various colors and descriptions (e.g., "yellow cave demon"; "pink sewer demon") pop up randomly and extort gold from you under a variety of excuses, including loans, protection money, and buying tickets to the "demon's ball." They ask for relatively little gold, and you can't fight them anyway, so there's nothing to do but hit B)ribe and pay them. Their demands don't even get more expensive on lower levels. It's a very weird dynamic.

          

A demon convinces me to pay reparations.

         

The game has an odd fixation with color. Not only do you get color descriptions for the rooms, monsters, and treasure, but the main screen frequently changes color, flashes different colors when combat is happening, and sticks different colored boxes randomly on the sides of the screen. I guess the developer was just showing off the capabilities of the system. It didn't affect my experience either way; I just found it strange.

    

If you die at any point, you can quickly hit the joystick button to resurrect in the same room for a minimal cost, but it fails about half the time.

              

No, but you can resurrect me.

         

Room 80 of the first two levels is a special room where a demon will buy your treasures for cash and then sell you food, a compass, information, or an extra two "zaps" for the wand. I have no idea what food does; buying it seemed to have no effect. Ditto the compass. "Information" resulted in nonsense clues (e.g., "you will meet a tall dark stranger") whenever I tried. The extra zaps are priceless, though, and you can make more than enough money on Level 1 to ensure that you can just use your wand to blast through the next two levels, although using the wand nets you no experience.

         

Room 80 on Level 1.

        

Room 80 on Level 3 presents you with a "wizened old man" seated at an organ. The door slams shut behind you, and your wand starts to flicker. This seems like an obvious clue to Z)ap the wand, but in fact it doesn't matter what action you take; the outcome is the same: you win the game and the program recaps the amount of treasure you collected and the number and strength of monsters you killed. Presumably, you're meant to keep replaying for higher scores.

    

The winning screens.

         

This is the sort of game that I would have seen in a bargain bin at Electronics Boutique in 1984. I would have been suspicious of its $7.95 price sticker, assuming it couldn't possibly deliver much content for that price, but I would have bought it with hope anyway, taken it home, and tried my best to supplement my wanderings with my own imagination, pretending I was having fun, but feeling in some vague way that there must be more to life than this.

           

Cavern barely passes as an RPG. It has one inventory item that you can choose to use; I guess it has some statistics behind the combat; and there is that mysterious "level." It gets only a 10 on the GIMLET, with 2s in economy, interface, and gameplay and 0s and 1s in everything else. I can't find the game even mentioned in a contemporary source, let alone reviewed.

         

I have no idea what's happening here.

                  

Dr. Goodcode, whoever he was, never made another appearance (search the name without Cavern and you get nothing). The rest of the title screen is equally mysterious. If the dedicatee, "Kitty Goodcode," wasn't a James Bond girl, she also wasn't anyone else as far as I can tell. Perhaps the only notable thing is that it was published by Gebelli Software, which was a short-lived California-based enterprise from Nasir Gebelli, the famed Apple II developer who went on to work on the Final Fantasy series at Square. I'm participating in a podcast with John Romero later in September, and I know he knows Gebelli, and I suppose I could ask him to ask Gebelli to confirm who Dr. Goodcode was, but .  . . there are times that tracking down the original developers to some of these 1980s games honors them, and there are times that it doxxes them. This seems like one of the latter.

   

But since I was only able to get 1,200 words out of Goodcode's Cavern, let me use the rest of this space to explore a lesson that I recently learned about secondhand journalism. A few years ago, in writing about Dark Designs III: Retribution! (1991), I wrote the following:

            

1991 was a major transition year for Carmack and his new partner, John Romero. At the age of 20, Carmack had gotten a job two years prior at Softdisk, largely on the strength of his Dark Designs series. But he and the other developers grew to despise the sweatshop-like atmosphere of Softdisk and the monthly programming demands. He and Romero began moonlighting by selling their own games--principally the Commander Keen series--as shareware on bulletin board services. When Softdisk found out about these games, and that the pair had been using the company's computers to write them, both threats of a lawsuit and offers of a contract followed. The messy result was that Carmack and Romero left the company but agreed to continue to produce one game every 2 months for Softdisk's magazines. Thus, a couple years later, after the team had changed the gaming world forever with Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, you see them credited on the occasional diskmag title like Cyberchess and Dangerous Dave Goes Nutz!

            

I had consulted several sources to assemble that paragraph, including one that purported to have interviewed both Carmack and Romero in detail, and I was pretty confident in what I had. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when John Romero (who I didn't even know was aware of my blog) invited me to participate in a podcast interview of Stuart Smith. (We're recording in mid-September; I'll let you know when it's out.) I took the opportunity to run the paragraph by him and found out that almost everything I'd written was wrong. To wit:

          

• I was a year late; 1990 was the year most of this happened. Romero worked at Softdisk prior to Carmack and was actually the one who hired Carmack, not because of Dark Designs but because of a tennis game plus his obvious facility with programming.

• Romero and Carmack loved working at Softdisk and only left because it was the wrong sort of publisher to take advantage of the horizontal scrolling technology that the duo would use in Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.

• It was actually the president of Softdisk, Al Vekovius, who suggested that Carmack, Romero, and Tom Hall start their own company. There were no lawsuits and no threats; Carmack and Romero kept working for Softdisk for a year to avoid leaving the company in a lurch.

• The reason Carmack and Romero are credited on so many Softdisk titles stretching into the mid-1990s is that those titles used technology and code that Carmack and Romero had created. They otherwise had no involvement in games like Cyberchess and Dangerous Dave Goes Nutz!

      

All of this has been a lesson in putting too much faith in secondary sources, even when they agree and everything seems to fit together logically. I didn't get into this gig to be a journalist, and I have no formal training in journalism, but clearly my blog has veered in that direction at least occasionally, and as such, I need to adopt stricter rules for my use of sources, to make it clear when I'm speculating based on limited evidence, and to always see primary sources when they're available. I'm still working on these "rules," but they stopped me here in speculating on the identity of Dr. Goodcode even though I have a pretty good idea of who he is.

     

Sorry for the otherwise short entry, but you'll see a few more of these in September, as I have to devote more time to getting my classes going. Hopefully for the next entry, I can make some progress on The Summoning.