RAINBOW ADVENTURE - SOLUTION.
Rainbow Magazine was an American computer magazine dedicated exclusively to the TRS-80.
Impressively, it ran from 1981 until 1993.
In 1982 they ran a competition for readers to create a Text Adventure and, in the August 1982 issue,
provided the code for a generator programme to help them along. In that year’s July Issue, they
printed the code for a sample adventure called, imaginatively, ‘Rainbow Adventure’. It’s,
obviously, not a very good game, but a wonderful time capsule of the era, and it gives all those
early Text Adventure haters something to rant at: tiny vocabulary, terrible parser, no logic, et
al.
Enjoy
SOLUTION
You begin on a Kentucky Street (the mag was based in Kentucky), so: SOUTH, SOUTH, SOUTH and GET
OBJECT. EXAM OBJECT reveals it to be a key. So: NORTH, NORTH, NORTH then EAST into a Shopping
Centre. Go SOUTH to the clothes shop and EXAM MIRROR to find you are wearing a watch. NORTH, NORTH
takes you into a pawn shop where you SELL WATCH for money. SOUTH, EAST takes you into a computer
shop. There is a display case here so UNLOCK CASE and OPEN CASE reveals a cassette tape. GET TAPE
then LOAD TAPE fires up the computer, so RUN COMPUTER to read that the bus service has been
reinstated. (must be a very early internet). We’re off again, so WEST, WEST, NORTH. The bus
service was on the ball, so a bus is already waiting for you. ENTER BUS (the drivers must have been
holding out for a massive raise, because all the money you made from selling your watch is taken up
by this single bus ride). The bus has dropped you off right inside a post office with its very own
mail box, so OPEN BOX, GET RAINBOW, READ RAINBOW, and you have completed a game which, ironically,
is quite difficult due to its complete lack of verbs and parser.
