Adventure of the Week: Crash Dive! (1984)

The Internet is a deep and wonderful resource, but the technology can also spread errors and misinformation, as one source copies from another.  I mention this because this week, we're playing Brian Moriarty's Crash Dive!, a text adventure for the Atari 400/800 computers, originally published as a type-in listing in issue #18 of ANALOG magazine.  There should be no question regarding its authorship -- the title screen lists Moriarty (later of Infocom and Lucasarts fame) as the author, as does the original magazine article.  Mr. Moriarty has also laid claim to this game as his own work in published interviews.  But still, numerous online sources list this as an unreleased game by another ANALOG contributor, one Tom Hudson.

The source of the confusion is this: ANALOG Computing's commercial boxed software division had an action game in the works called Crash Dive!, and the box art for that unreleased game does indeed list Tom Hudson as the author.  Both are submarine-themed games, both are titled Crash Dive!, and both were (or were going to be) published by ANALOG in print or on disk.  But Moriarty's published game was a text adventure, while Hudson's unreleased effort was clearly an action game, based on the box copy.

Going back to primary sources is usually a good way to set the record straight:

The author's first published text adventure, Adventure in the 5th Dimension, was written in Atari BASIC; this one is completely in assembly language (encoded in printable form for its magazine type-in debut), so it fires up immediately and plays speedily.  The original magazine (link above) is well worth referencing, as it includes a photograph of several key props containing clues for the game, an interesting print approximation of the Infocom "feelies."  As a matter of fact, while this game is a two-word parser affair, it was Moriarty's last magazine effort; he would shortly move up to begin work on Wishbringer for Infocom.

Crash Dive! opens in a confined space, and it's highly unusual in that the player's goal is not necessarily to escape the doomed submarine, but to keep it from falling into enemy hands by any means necessary.  The user interface is a nifty extension of the Scott Adams "windowed" screen, divided here into several fixed windows.  The display approach handily establishes the player's carrying capacity -- beyond six items, the game tells us Your arms are full!  The layout also inadvertently imposes a visible item limit on every room, yielding Not enough room here when the junk piles up too much.  There's also a turn counter in the upper right-hand corner, handy for tracking some early "time"-limited events but not otherwise essential to play:

As always, I urge interested readers to sally forth and discover the game's secrets independently before continuing here.  My goal is to document Crash Dive! in detail for the historical record, and there will necessarily be all manner of...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

This adventure isn't particularly difficult, but it's wise to save on occasion, as we encounter quite a bit of time pressure early on, and there are several ways to die with no advance warning.  In fact, we are more than likely to fail on the very first move if we carelessly OPEN HATCH:

In what may be a Scott Adams-inspired puzzle, we have to HOLD BREATH before opening said hatch.  We can only cease respiration for so long, of course, and eventually we are forced to breathe, once again dying in the poisonous gas cloud.  There doesn't seem to be any way to do this intentionally - RELEASE BREATH, BREATHE, and DROP BREATH do nothing of note.  There is, however, a gas mask in a weapons locker -- finding that item is necessarily the first order of business.

Just to keep things interesting, there are several red herrings meant to lead us down the primrose path to plausible but unsuccessful solutions.  There's a secure door with a slot that accepts an ID card -- but the first card we are likely to find is in the crew's quarters, and turns out to be the ace of spades.  There's also a tiny screwdriver available at the start of the game, which proves too small to be useful in the obvious situation.  A key found in the radiation suit is not useful for opening the locked door.  And a dull knife from the galley is useless for dealing with the armed traitor onboard, but works pretty well as a screwdriver.

Once we have the gas mask, we may take time to LOOK PERISCOPE and learn that we can see Enemy approaching!  The sonar station's scanner indicates the same.  There's a serious time issue here, assuming we've obtained the gas mask, as within about 30 turns, Enemy captures the sub and kills you instantly!  I spent some time looking for a way to fire the torpedoes, but had no luck, and resorted to putting the submarine into dive mode.  There's a depth gauge onboard, but there aren't any subsequent complications to deal with -- the sub dives at 8 fathoms per turn, with no way to reverse course but no need to do so.  We can PUSH RED again to level out at any depth, and if we push the red button once, wander off and fail to stop our descent, the Sea Moss naturally bottoms out at 128 fathoms and the game continues after Bang! Sub hits bottom.  The periscope still shows Enemy approaching! even when we've parked our vessel on the sea floor; I don't know if this is a bug or just remarkable persistence on the part of the enemy.

An access tunnel toward the north end of the submarine (no FORE/AFT/PORT/STARBOARD maneuvering on this ship!) contains a warning sign reading, DANGER: Radiation zone!   Continue north, and A blast of radioactivity kills you instantly!, unless we are carrying the radiation suit from the equipment room.  With both the gas mask and the radiation suit, GET and WEAR are treated as equivalent, so WEAR MASK yields Already holding it.  There's no need to explicitly wear anything.

The shower stall adjacent to the crew's quarters contains shampoo and a grate fastened shut with screws.  Both of these items come into play, eventually, for dealing with the armed traitor hiding out in the fan room.  We need the shampoo, as well as the wrench and the cable cutters, to liberate the radioactive sonar unit from the sub's sonar sphere.  We need the dull knife (not the tiny screwdriver) to open the shower grate, which is larger than I had mentally pictured.  The open grate leads to a ventilation duct, from whence we can drop the deadly radioactive device on the traitor.  Oddly, just carrying the device into the fan room and dropping it at his feet does not have the desired effect, and there's no THROW verb implemented.  So we can hang around for a while, safely ensconced in our radiation suit, watching for any sign of incipient radiation poisoning on the part of the villain, but if we try to leave, the Traitor shoots you and kills you instantly!  Perhaps he has some natural immunity to poison gas and floor-level radiation; at any rate, only the ventilation duct route produces the desired effect, a Dead traitor.

One more way to die -- if we neglected to douse the sonar unit with shampoo, when we try to CUT CABLE A jolt of high voltage kills you instantly!   The shampoo also seems to help release the unit's tight and rusty bolts.

We must refer to the magazine photo for critical information on a couple of occasions -- READ MANUAL and LOOK SHAMPOO both instruct us to refer to ANALOG #18.

If we've read the article -- which I did only late in the game -- we know that our ultimate goal is to keep the Sea Moss from falling into enemy hands.  There'll be no escaping this time -- our goal is to go down with the ship.  We have three objectives -- I quote Moriarty's original article:

1. Find a way to survive in the submarine's poisoned atmosphere.


2. Get the sub under water, so that enemy ships will not be able to reach it easily. You have a limited number of moves after the game begins to accomplish this, or the Enemy will capture the sub and kill you on the spot!


3. Find a way to completely destroy the Sea Moss.

If we've examined the photo, we understand how the sub's missiles are targeted and armed.  The display in the Navigation center indicates our current X/Y position, which is randomized but should be noted, as we'll need this information to finish the game (it can be referenced at any time.)

I was confused at one point because the Crash Dive! parser uses only three characters to distinguish words.  I thought INSTALL was recognized as a verb, and spent some time trying to INSTALL UNIT and so forth, with the game telling me, Be more specific.  I finally realized it was reading the input as INSERT.  It's also odd that in this submarine game, we can't RAISE or LOWER PERISCOPE, only LOOK through it.

I had some difficulty with the locked door -- I tried sliding the playing card into the doorjamb, using various tools to pick the lock, kicking it and smashing it, all to no avail.  Finding the key in the radiation suit provided a brief but mistaken ray of sunshine.  But I was finally able to SHOOT LOCK with the traitor's pistol, gaining entrance to the Captain's quarters.

The Captain is no more, having left a suicide note and security ID behind.  With the ID in hand, we can now enter the "southern" airlock and unlock the missile arming switch with the key.  Our goal now is -- gulp -- to arm the sub's nuclear missile and target our own location.  It's handy at this point to know how the parser works, because (in my case) I had to adjust the aiming coordinates to X=80, Y=16.  There are two buttons, and I'm not sure what happens if we go beyond the intended targets; maybe the numbers wrap around.  Suffice it to say that PUSH GOLD increments X by 8, and PUSH SILVER decrements Y by 8, and you'll be somewhat relieved to know that PUS GOL and PUS SIL work just as well.

Once we've set the proper coordinates in the upper missile bay, we can return to the Missile Control Center and PUSH WHITE, earning perhaps the sparsest, bleakest victory display I've ever seen:

Victory is ours, though it's a bittersweet triumph -- no cheering throngs, no glittering treasures, nothing but a cold (okay, briefly very warm) and lonely death, 128 fathoms down.  Mission accomplished, at significant but heroic cost.

I haven't seen a published walkthrough for Crash Dive!, so mine is below the fold; I've also shared it in the CASA archive.





***** WALKTHROUGH *****




HOLD BREATH
OPEN HATCH
D
D
N
GET WRENCH
E
WEAR MASK
W
S
W
GET SHAMPOO
E
S
E
WEAR SUIT
W
U
W
PUSH RED (Sub dives)
E
N
W
GET CUTTERS
E
N
N
N
POUR SHAMPOO
CUT CABLE
GET UNIT
DROP CUTTERS
DROP WRENCH
S
S
D
E
GET KNIFE
W
W
UNSCREW GRATE
DROP KNIFE
S
DROP UNIT
N
E
S
W
GET PISTOL
E
U
N
N
SHOOT LOCK
W
SEARCH CAPTAIN
GET ID
E
S
S
E
READ DISPLAY (note the X and Y coordinates)
W
D
INSERT ID
S
EXAMINE SUIT
GET KEY
UNLOCK SWITCH
U
READ DISPLAY
PUSH GOLD (until X matches X noted earlier)
PUSH SILVER (until Y matches Y noted earlier)
D
N
PUSH WHITE (congratulations on your productive suicide!)