Mission: Asteroid was the third title in the Hi-Res Adventures series of graphical adventure games, following Mystery House and Wizard and the Princess. The publisher intended it as a gentler introduction to the genre for new players and labeled it #0, placing it at the start of the series. While not as difficult as the prior two, it is perhaps a bad choice as an introductory title – I’ll get into why a little later.
Hi-Res Adventures
Hi-Res was the inaugural series from husband and wife team Ken and Roberta Williams. Roberta had fallen in love with the original Adventure and Scott Adams’s Adventure series of games and was interested in making her own. Ken bought in when he realized how much money there was to be made – particularly if one made use of the Apple II’s hi-res graphics mode.
While Roberta’s adventure ideas were fresh for the time – her Mystery House drew inspiration from Agatha Christie instead of the standard treasure hunt format – what set Hi-Res Adventures apart was Ken’s implementation of the art. A single floppy disk had little space, so rather than storing images as bitmap grids, he struck upon the idea of using lists of drawing commands to render a vector image step by step each time the screen refreshed.
This process is not without its downsides – particularly on slower machines the time it takes is not inconsiderate – but for adventure gamers in 1980, it was the series selling point. Pictures! On your computer!
Mission: Asteroid’s Narrative Design
Mission: Asteroid puts the player in the role of an astronaut tasked with destroying the eponymous danger before it collides with the earth and destroys all life. While the game’s manual provides the general gist, we’re initially not informed of this goal within the game’s text. Without preamble we find ourselves standing in front of what will turn out to be our unnamed space agency’s headquarters.
We have no context for who we are or what we’re doing until we figure out that the strange beeping we’re hearing is coming from a watch we’re wearing. We do this by running the INVENTORY command, a convention that newcomers to the genre – the game’s target market – may not be aware of.
LOOKing at the watch tells the time and we see that it has a switch that, when pressed, will play a recording directing us to the briefing room. We are also provided with a password. From here we get our briefing, laying out the premise: an asteroid is going to hit Earth in a few hours. We’re told to fly to it and blow it up, but not how to make this happen. Fortunately for us, the path to the rocket brings us across a supply room with explosives and a computer with our flight plan. Once in the rocket we can pilot our ship to the asteroid, land on it, drop the explosives in a hole, and return home.
Location-Based Storytelling
As is the norm within the genre, location is the basic story block of Mission: Asteroid. Each location is a self-contained scene with no impact on what’s going on elsewhere. The game presents its narrative to the player with a large illustrative image, a small section for text, and the objects that may inhabit the space.
The graphics – the Hi-Res Adventure selling point – is superfluous. The text provides all information the player needs in a given location. Indeed the player can toggle the graphics window off if they choose. For its part, the text presents each location through sparse prose; we seldom need to scroll more than the four lines it allows us.
Compared to its contemporaries Roberta writes with more descriptive flare than we’d see in the Adventure International games, but with far less evocative detail than in Infocom’s Zork or Zork II.
A Mechanical Hindrance to Exploration
As terse as the text descriptions are – they do little more than identify the space and point out objects and exits – responses to commands are even more so. They are often little more than an acknowledgment that the game understood what you meant. The parser is a simple one, allowing for a verb and a noun, and more rarely a preposition and a noun as a follow-up in case we need to PUT DISK INTO DRIVE. Each of these commands takes up five minutes of the time we have allotted, resulting in scant more than 80 turns to complete our mission. The successful path to victory eats up almost all of them, giving little margin for missteps or exploration.
This is where Mission: Asteroid fails as an introductory adventure. Not in the difficulty of its procedural puzzles, but in discouraging exploration, a central draw in text adventure games. Its tight time limit is atypical and unforgiving and fails to set the appropriate expectations of the genre for new players. Examining your surroundings eats up time. Backtracking eats up time. Experimenting with objects or NPCs in ways other than that necessary to progress eats up time. Even checking your watch to see how much time you have left devours five minutes.
Characters
Speaking of characters, Mission: Asteroid boasts five, though they’re more properly actors with function, devoid of characteristics. The secretary is a gatekeeper, refusing to let you pass without giving her the password. The general is an info dump, waiting to give you your briefing. The doctor is another gatekeeper, who will not let you leave without passing your pre-flight checkup. And the reporters are a trap – if you talk to them, you’re thrown in jail for divulging the details of your top-secret mission.
Presumably, the Earth is destroyed shortly after.
Legalistic lethality is present in interactions with the general as well. If you try to talk with him instead of SALUTE GENERAL (as the text suggests) he’ll have you court-martialed instead of asking you to save the planet. The Doctor, bless his soul, refuses to let you leave to stop the imminent disaster if you haven’t EXERCISEd in the workout room and TAKEn a SHOWER because, quote, “you’re out of shape and you smell bad.”
A single workout fixes that, though.
This suicidal devotion to protocol is as much characterization as the characters are provided – player as well if the doctor is being honest. Or perhaps it’s worldbuilding, presenting a thematic truth that following protocol is more important than human survival.
What we can learn 40 years later
Despite these flaws, Mission: Asteroid avoids some of the wanton cruelty towards the player other games in the series were capable of. With largely procedural puzzles, its unforgiving time limit is the only real difficulty. And if you were to lose due to getting lost in space, talking to reporters, being rude to the general, or some other folly, not to worry, because there’s no ending coded into the game. You can keep playing as if nothing happened, even following an asteroid strike.
Of course, if you do happen to stop disaster… no you didn’t. The game rolls on, and the timer counting down to the strike hasn’t been disabled in the code, either.
Would I recommend Mission: Asteroid to a beginner? No. Or to anyone else, really. Even if you have a sense of nostalgia for these old text games, there are better examples from the era, even some from this very series. Its utility exists as an example of how not to create an introduction in a game that violates the hallmarks of the genre.
Got any insights based on your memories of these early adventure games? Or thoughts from someone who has only experienced more modern titles? Drop a comment and let me know.