BRIEFs: Journey into Danger (1981), Mazies & Crazies (1982), Spy Daisakusen (1982)

 

         

Journey into Danger

United Kingdom

ICL (developer and publisher) 

Released 1981 for ZX81, 1982 for ZX Spectrum
Rejected for: No character development

     

Journey into Danger is a simple proto-RPG released as part of ICL's Super Programs 6. It has no backstory, no character creation, no character development, no attributes, no tactics, and no goal other than to earn points.

    

I just earned points.

          

The player character (an asterisk) is released into a single-screen maze with a clearly marked entrance and exit. The maze has a fixed configuration but a random distribution of treasures, traps, and monsters, all invisible until the asterisk enters their squares. The player's goal is to get to the exit with as high a score as possible, which includes treasure and slain monsters. He has to get out before the time counter, which starts at 500 moves, reaches 0. 

      

The only real choice in the game.

      

The player's only choice to make, other than the route through the maze, is whether to (F)ight or (R)un from monsters. The monsters include giant earwigs, giant spiders, giant crabs, griffins, and dragons. When the player meets a monster, the game indicates the relative odds of victory, and the player makes his choice. All fights are to the death (the character has no hit points), and fleeing carries a loss of both time and any accumulated score.

     

Traps include tea breaks (this is how you know it's a British game), rests, rock falls, narrow ledges, and pits, all of which just deduct from the "time left" meter. 

     

I didn't have to BRIEF this. I could have called it a "win."

                

It's really a simple gambling game. Any direct route to the exit probably offers about four encounters. So you need an average probability of 85% per encounter to have at least a 50% chance of making it to the exit alive if the player fights every battle. Of course, any player can make it to the exit by just fleeing every battle. In any event, there's a 100% probability that this is not an RPG.

   

****

   

    

Mazies & Crazies

United States

ICL (developer and publisher) 

Released 1982 as BASIC code for the TRS-80
Rejected for: No character development

   

Mazies & Crazies is a simple roguelite game published as type-in code in Frank Dacosta's Writing Basic Adventure Programs for the TRS-80 (1982, TAB Books). It is one of two full programs in the book; the other is called Basements and Beasties, and it mimics text adventures like (Colossal Cave) Adventure (1976).

     

Though clearly based on Rogue (1980), with perhaps a bit of Dunjonquest (1979), Mazies strips away too many elements to retain its RPG status. Instead of getting stronger throughout the game, the player starts with 9,999 points of strength and immediately starts losing them—about two per second, plus five for every square moved, and a lot more when the unnamed character meets an enemy.

       

Confronting a snake with a couple of treasures nearby.

          

The character appears as an @ and explores a 90-room dungeon with a fixed layout and room numbers, collecting treasures and helpful items such as swords, torches, and bombs. Monsters (*) include spiders, huge bees, trolls, and dragons and must be fought, shot, or evaded. The goal of the game is to find as much treasure in the dungeon as possible and return it to the first room, where you can accumulate a score.

    

I was able to check it out a bit thanks to blogger Jim Gerrie, who entered and debugged the program, then published a series of entries about it on his "Type-In Mania" blog. He speculates that the "winning condition" is to find all 16 treasures before the counter runs out. If the player does run out of strength and die, though, he can "resurrect" with all of the treasures where he left them. Gerrie had some fun with the game, altering the program a bit to fix perceived bugs and to offer a "boss" battle with a demilich. His coverage is pretty comprehensive, and since I don't really see it as an RPG anyway, we'll move on.

      

**** 

     

     

Spy Daisakusen

("Large-Scale Spy Operation"; the Japanese version of Mission: Impossible) 

Japan

Pony Canyon (developer and publisher)

Released 1982 for Japanese PCs, including the PC-88.
Rejected for: No character development

     

Japanese role-playing games have always tended (with plenty of exceptions, of course) to feature defined protagonists—in contrast to the dominant American approach, in which the player determines sex, race, class, alignment, and backstory. The Japanese approach doesn't disqualify the game as an RPG by my definitions—as long as the character improves. In modern JRPGs, he usually does. But in the early era, it was common for Japanese RPGs to include immutable attributes as part of the prescribed character.

   

That's what we have with Spy Daisakusen, which is the way the Japanese render Mission: Impossible, which of course had several iterations as a television show before the first Tom Cruise film in 1996. The player controls Jim Phelps, head of the Impossible Mission Force, as he penetrates a six-level, 60-room, randomly generated enemy base, collects intelligence, and dispatches rogue agents. His ultimate goal is to reach the "document room." 

     

Attributes alone do not make an RPG.

        

Phelps has attributes: endurance, stamina, accuracy, agility, judgment, and luck. Based on a small number of trials, endurance seems to roll in the 8-20 range, accuracy around 5-15, and everything else about 2-8. There's no opportunity to re-roll without restarting the game entirely.

    

The game begins with Phelps getting his mission on a reel-to-reel tape, which of course explodes when the message is finished. After his attributes are rolled, he selects from a list of weapons and equipment, including an assault rifle, hand grenades, a knife, sleeping gas, a time bomb, and a fire extinguisher. He then enters the six-level dungeon.

      

The tape will self-destruct in five seconds.

            

Navigation in the game is bizarre. The player gets a split-second screenshot of his current position in the hallway before a text screen takes over and asks the player to input the direction of movement on the numberpad. Did something about the PC-88 make it impossible to show the image and ask the question on the same screen?

      

I had about a second to take this screenshot. I'm heading towards an elevator, with four rooms on either side of the corridor.

            

The corridors are lined with doorways, and the player can choose to enter any of them. They might have documents or enemies or both, and after Phelps deals with anyone inside, the player can choose to destroy the room. As I learned the hard way, if the character doesn't have the right equipment to deal with whatever's in the room, the game immediately ends.

     

If the room requires combat, you get a little screen showing the enemy positions, but I think this is just cosmetic. Everything happens with menu commands, as the player chooses various options related to his equipped weapon.

      

Combat in a "radar room."

             

I'm going to be honest: if I thought this were an RPG, I'd have a hard time playing it. My normal rules don't even require me to play a game if I can't easily translate the text. But I'd rather reject a game on definitional grounds than technical ones, and I think I'm on solid footing here. 

        

This doesn't look much like Peter Graves to me. But maybe that's deliberate.

        

I searched in vain for any evidence that Spy Daisakusen was an officially licensed Mission: Impossible game. Opinions online seem to suggest that it was not. It was written by Yoshinobu Takahashi, who is better known for a game he created the following year: Genma Taisen (1983), based on an apparently-famous manga franchise. Jason Dyer has a solid history of Takahashi and his games on his "Renga in Blue" blog. My translation of the title may be a bit controversial, as I'm not in any way an expert in Japanese. Jason suggests that it should be simply translated as Mission: Impossible; other sites just give it as Spy Mission. I am relying on dictionaries that say that daisakusen means something beyond just a "mission," though—that it indicates a major operation. Some translations use "epic." Hence.

    

10/21/2026