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Intrigue Software's interesting history


matthew180

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I stumbled across this article and found the history of Martin Webb very interesting:

 

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-10-13-the-boy-behind-the-biggest-coin-op-conversion-of-the-80s

 

This paragraph was very unexpected and surprised me:

 

" Although Martin was only 17, he was already a seasoned programmer with more than a dozen games under his belt. The majority of these were original titles for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A home computer which were mainly sold via mail order. His dad managed the business - and therefore Martin - and also produced the graphics for the games. The company, Intrigue Software, got off to a good start and built up a decent reputation in TI-99 circles. "

 

I have never heard of Intrigue Software or any of their 99/4A titles, does anyone know any of the software they produced?

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Intrigue produced games such as Quasimodo Help, Decathlon, Mania, AdventureMania, and a few others, for the TI99.

Martin Webb has actually had some input on this forum, a couple of years ago.  He also made games independently of Intrigue, he wrote a game or two for "Newday Computing", namely Alpine Quest. (A graphical text adventure).

 

Intrigue were one of the strong-sellers in the UK in the 80's for the TI.  Ciro has a few of their titles on his site and I know Vorticon has or two as well.

 

Some of their games came in nice cassette boxes such as the one shown in the picture.

PRODPIC-2393.jpg

Edited by Firefly
showing picture of intrigue cassette
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8 hours ago, matthew180 said:

I stumbled across this article and found the history of Martin Webb very interesting:

 

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-10-13-the-boy-behind-the-biggest-coin-op-conversion-of-the-80s

 

Love this byline:

 

"Martyn launched Retro Gamer magazine in 2004 and has been typecast as a lover of rubbish old games ever since."

 

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5 hours ago, JB said:

I'm just disappointed that the thread isn't titled "Intrigue Software's intriguing history"

I almost wrote that, but decided it was too cheeky. ;)

 

Those are some nice looking boxes!  It still amazes me that anyone could make a living or sell games written in BASIC, especially on the 99/4A.  It also makes me wonder how much doing these games actually prepared Martin for the Sega port?  It is quite a leap from BASIC to doing an assembly language port of a high-speed arcade game, and on a system with a different CPU and graphics (not that BASIC prepares you for assembly at all, but maybe he started dabbling in 9900 assembly?)

11 hours ago, Firefly said:

Martin Webb has actually had some input on this forum, a couple of years ago.

Oh really?  Cool.  What is/was his forum alias?

 

Has anyone played any of these?  I'm wondering what the play-ability was like, or how the adventures compared to others of the day like the Scott Adams titles, etc.?

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10 hours ago, matthew180 said:

I almost wrote that, but decided it was too cheeky. ;)

 

Those are some nice looking boxes!  It still amazes me that anyone could make a living or sell games written in BASIC, especially on the 99/4A.  It also makes me wonder how much doing these games actually prepared Martin for the Sega port?  It is quite a leap from BASIC to doing an assembly language port of a high-speed arcade game, and on a system with a different CPU and graphics (not that BASIC prepares you for assembly at all, but maybe he started dabbling in 9900 assembly?)

Oh really?  Cool.  What is/was his forum alias?

 

Has anyone played any of these?  I'm wondering what the play-ability was like, or how the adventures compared to others of the day like the Scott Adams titles, etc.?

I've played his text adventures, I think either adventuremania or mania was one of his, and I owned back in the day, Alpine Quest, that he wrote.

The parser was a strange one; you couldn't just type EAT FOOD ... it wasn't even a two-word parser, you had to type EATFOO so three letters of first word, no spaces, and three letters of last word .... I now realize why i couldn't get off the first part of Alpine Quest because that would have been the same.  

 

I can't remember his handle on here, I think it's just his name? .... I remember me telling him about my difficulties with Alpine Quest and bless him he apologized ! Seems a really nice guy.  I turned around and asked him if he'd like to write any more games for the TI now that he's discovered the hive of activity surrounding it ... it was the last time I ever heard anything from him.  Perhaps after reading that article I see why he might not want to.  I hope he keeps in touch on here anyhow.  

 

I think he learnt 6502 assembly in a certain space of time like a year, and then they dropped on with US Gold. I couldn't imagine the pressure!

 

 

Edited by Firefly
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  • 8 months later...

Hey Martin! :) i am Ciro from Italy, glad to see you here!

At this link, you can see all the stuff i collected and published on the TI99iuc's DataBase, some of the stuff still missing anyway and i think some titles will be very hard to find still :)


http://www.ti99iuc.it/web/index.php?pagina=cerca&ricerca=intrigue&cerca=Cerca

IntrigueTapes.thumb.jpg.c15ad6a19d65189528498a3f4fe4a024.jpg

 

Yes, i have some questions please ? 

I still have a pair of original Catalogs to scan and add to the DataBase, in one of these, there are listed some a pair of titles that i never seen published, for example:
image.png.9f96d84bc2bdea8773f9e17b96984330.png  image.png.4abfeca1e2c1d08d16ed0d208144ad66.png  

Have you memories about these?
because, for example, I missing the number G12 in the collected tapes and i always wondered to discover which title could be the missing one :) 

in addition, I found "Panic on the Titanic" numbered as G21 have you memories if this was the last one published, could you confirm, please ? ?

 

Edited by ti99iuc
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  • 5 weeks later...
  • 3 months later...

I am sorry this has been so long. But I do try and participate in answering questions around the web where I can. 

 

So, today I still build software. These days it is SaaS (Software as a Service) I have my own cloud system used by business's around the world. Our system is hugely complex and is used daily by thousands of customers. I am 54 in 2021 so I guess how does building cloud software compare to making tiny games on the TI 99 in basic. - Actually in some respects very similar. The key thing that the TI99 taught me from the age of 12 was solving problems and making my code compact and fast. The TI and in-fact all of the 80's home PC's were dead slow and limited in memory and power.

 

So in order to build stuff you had to always consider ways of making things appear faster and use less memory. This can be seen in games like ATLANTIS and PANIC ON THE TI-TANIC. ATLANTIS has many many screens each different (Rooms) these were made simply by drawing the sea bottom using RANDOM numbers. I soon discovered that if I use random numbers they are actually always the same, this makes it easy to draw random shapes that will always appear the same when replayed. I used this technique on PANIC and ATLANTIS - to position fish, objects and draw rooms. Normally this would be done using mapping - In 'Adventuremania', 'Mainia' and Lionel I mapped everything into dimensional arrays. This is very low level but still effective. Arrays were used to map rooms, doors, keys, objects etc. The downside is the arrays would consume lots of memory thus bottlenecking the size of the game. In other games such as Battle of the Stars - I learnt how to make lots of things move around the screen. In the early days if you had 3 objects on screen moving each, every game cycle would slow down the keyboard response.

 

On the TI this was dreadful. Later I used a technique where only one object is move each cycle this speeded up response times. Now this may all seem trivial - But, the secrets learnt here were all applied to the COIN-ON ports. For example OUTRUN uses 8x8 char graphics for the objects road side, they are moved at different cycles to speed the game play up dramatically and give the illusion of speed.

 

The step from going from BASIC to 6502 was STEEP! - It took possible a year min to make the first game and it caused a lot of trouble at home. I can recall I had a frog on a large pond plant and he would hop around - I spent ages just playing with it, learning how to scroll screens with out flicker, detect collisions and so on. When I am doing this kind of stuff it is 24 hours night and day. Even today I will literally sleep solving problems. It is a painful exhausting process of determination to succeed. 

 

Learning my basic skills on the TI with it's limitations taught me the basics of speed, compression and illusion. All of these are used today in our Business APPS. For example today a customer commented on a live screen share with 10 attendees your app runs really fast - When I here this I know this comes down to understanding that code should run fast even if today we have much faster systems. Speed is everything.

 

From that aspect building BASIC programs on a TI is much like making web pages. When a webpage loads it is identical to loading up a game on the TI - The code runs in sandbox. When we build web pages we use techniques similar to those used in OUTRUN to make the pages load very fast, hiding the bloat in the background.

 

I find it incredible that at the age of 54 I still spend 20 hour days 7 days weeks sat in front of 4 screens building code. As a child I was obsessed with making stuff, it started with cardboard boxes and moved on to wood by the age of 5. By 10 I was constantly visiting rubbish dumps to find broken electrical stuff I could use to build what ever my imagination could imagine. Space ships, cars, satellite dishes to search for aliens - Of course all of this failed. 

 

Discovering the Zx80 changed my life - finally I could make what I imagined in small 8x8 pixels - and to this day that is what I do. I love building stuff, I love ideas and challenges and have an endless passion and energy to make it work no matter how enormous the task is.

 

I guess I am an inventor?

 

Thank you for playing these games and showing interest in the history that made them. For some reason seeing the coloured tape cover of SANTA and the GOBLINS brings back the most Nostalgia - I think that time was very difficult at home when I made this game and as a child (14 or 15?) I guess i had dreams of making $$$ and solving family money issues.

 

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  • 11 months later...

Hi all, just to set the record straight (since it was mentioned) but Martin didn't write Alpine Quest for Newday Computing.  That was me!  I didn't make any money from it but I remember the guy from Newday (Harry, sorry forget his last name) gave me Tunnels of Doom as a down payment, so fair enough.

 

It was ages ago, but if memory serves, Alpine Quest was set in a ski resort and you needed to switch between two characters to complete the game.  I think maybe to get past the hotel receptionist CHECK IN might have worked as a command.  I dunno, it was too long ago.

 

I'd love to get my hands on the BASIC code though if anyone still has it.

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8 hours ago, RatintheKitchen said:

Will never give up hope I can find it some day......

Hello 

 

I had Alpine Quest for my TI back in the days ... it was me who struggled with reception (and my friend Daz!) 

Maybe one day it might come up on Ebay , one of us would buy it, convert it to digital file and put it on here.  Thats my hope anyhow :)

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12 hours ago, Retrospect said:

Hello 

 

I had Alpine Quest for my TI back in the days ... it was me who struggled with reception (and my friend Daz!) 

Maybe one day it might come up on Ebay , one of us would buy it, convert it to digital file and put it on here.  Thats my hope anyhow :)

Wow, there is stuff that this community dos not have... Surprising!

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1 hour ago, oddemann said:

Wow, there is stuff that this community dos not have... Surprising!

There's quite a lot of UK software still to be found.  We're finding stuff from Apex now, that's good, and Intrigue.  Now we need Newday Computing for their Alpine Quest and a couple of other little companies for their games.

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  • 11 months later...

Hello. Sorry for responding to an old thread, but I am presently playing and writing about "Santa and the Goblins" for the TI99/4A by Intrigue Software. I'm one of the editors for "The Adventurer's Guild" (advgamer.blogspot.com) and we cover a Christmas-themed adventure every year. (To see what I do, you can see last year's post on "Paranoia", as Christmas UNIX game from 1987: https://advgamer.blogspot.com/2021/12/missed-classic-103-paranoia-1987.html.) 

 

In my review, I'd like to discuss Intrigue Software and the pair of Dennis and Martin Webb. I know that Martin posted here two years ago. Does anyone have any contact information for him? Is there any chance that he is subscribed to this thread and might notice this post? The Webb family is quite interesting, and you didn't even get into the techno-sourcery of Thomas Webb/Tom London. If anyone can provide any contact details or anything else you might remember about Intrigue and its two key members, I'd appreciate it. (I know of Martin's work on "Outrun" and similar, plus what is in the summary above, but not much more. They are not well documented on Mobygames and I'm not even sure if Dennis was also a programmer or if he left that to his son.) 

 

On a second note: has anyone beaten "Santa and the Goblins" 40 years ago or so and still remember anything about it? I have mapped the house, found all of the items, and made my way to the dragon's lair with Elvin... but what to do next confounds me. The BASIC source code is available so I should be able to work it out, but it's uncommented spaghetti code with complex and subtle uses of DATA/READ statements that are outside my comprehension. If anyone can tell me how to get past so I can complete my review, I'd be grateful. I can review based on what I have, but I think I'm close... if I get past the dragon, I expect the kids' rooms are on the other side and then I can drop the presents off and win. I think.

 

Thank you for any help!

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On 11/27/2022 at 2:15 PM, JoePranevich said:

 

On a second note: has anyone beaten "Santa and the Goblins" 40 years ago or so and still remember anything about it? I have mapped the house, found all of the items, and made my way to the dragon's lair with Elvin... but what to do next confounds me. The BASIC source code is available so I should be able to work it out, but it's uncommented spaghetti code with complex and subtle uses of DATA/READ statements that are outside my comprehension. If anyone can tell me how to get past so I can complete my review, I'd be grateful. I can review based on what I have, but I think I'm close... if I get past the dragon, I expect the kids' rooms are on the other side and then I can drop the presents off and win. I think.

 

Thank you for any help!

 

17500 DATA magic lamp,wand,lamp oil,bag of goblin stoppers,,,,matches,,mysterious map
17510 DATA,,,,stairs,,,,,,,,,stairs,pies,boys gift,girls gift,goblin

27100 DATA say,loo,sea,eat,inv,cli,rea
27200 DATA tak,dro,rub,str,fil,wav,gra,giv

I wonder if rub goes with lamp, str(ike) goes with matches, wav(e) goes with wand, fil(l) goes with lamp oil, cli(mb) goes with stairs

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You are right on with the verbs, but you solved one that I didn't: "strike". I could not work out what the "str" word could be.

 

Unfortunately, even with that I am still stuck. I'm stuck in the Dragon's Lair, any moves that I try to make to leave and the dragon blasts flame as me and I cannot proceed. If I rub the lamp in that room, Elvin appears... but then he doesn't do anything. There are "say" words in the code that we can say to Elvin and maybe one of them triggers something, but they are particularly inscrutable. ("say elvin hallo" uses an uncommon-in-the-US spelling of "hello", "say elvin lamp for" tells you what the lamp is for but I only know that from reading the code and not because anyone could guess that syntax...

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