From: Michael Holtzman <Michael.Holtzman@openlink.com>
To: "arthur.j.odwyer@gmail.com" <arthur.j.odwyer@gmail.com>
CC: Jesse Silverman <Jesse.Silverman@openlink.com>
Subject: Lost Game - CastleQuest
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2016 16:21:46 +0000
Message-ID: <BY2PR0201MB07755D6F45986A420967262CEF160@BY2PR0201MB0775.namprd02.prod.outlook.com>

Hi Arthur,
 
A friend of mine referred me to you ‘lost game’ page (http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/in-search-of-LONG0751/readme.html).
 
I am one of the original authors of CastleQuest, which I wrote with a
roommate while we were students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).
The game is usually attributed to Bob Maples, as he ported and published
it at The Source, Genie, and CompuServe.
 
I wrote CastleQuest with my roommate, Mark Kershenblatt, at RPI in the
late 70’s, where it was available on the school’s timesharing system. In
fact, we jointly hold a copyright for CastleQuest as a text-based adventure
game software program. My roommate dropped out of school – probably because
he spent more time working on the game than he did on studying. On
graduation I bequeathed the game to the RPI chapter of the ACM, who kept
it running on the school’s computer system.
 
Sometime later, Bob Maples visited the school and saw the game. At the time
he worked at The Source. He contacted us and offered to port the game to
The Source’s timesharing system and split the royalties with us. Later he
did the same at Genie and CompuServe. Apparently he never divulged the fact
that he was not actually the author of the game, only the ‘publisher’.
 
I’m not aware of any existing source code for CastleQuest (I had a box of
punch cards – seriously -  with the source code, but that was disposed of
long ago). Should the code for CastleQuest be recovered, I have no issue
treating it as open source under a GPL license.
 
Regards,
Mike Holtzman

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In-Reply-To: <BY2PR0201MB07755D6F45986A420967262CEF160@BY2PR0201MB0775.namprd02.prod.outlook.com>
References: <BY2PR0201MB07755D6F45986A420967262CEF160@BY2PR0201MB0775.namprd02.prod.outlook.com>
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2016 16:24:21 -0700
Message-ID: <CADvuK0LqwcQOJd5kg4jqqkZuEw-zn7EWC7tRZ8=AHpBNETsmhA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Lost Game - CastleQuest
From: "Arthur O'Dwyer" <arthur.j.odwyer@gmail.com>
To: Michael Holtzman <Michael.Holtzman@openlink.com>
Cc: Jesse Silverman <Jesse.Silverman@openlink.com>

Mike,

That's amazing!  I'm also super thrilled that my making that web page actually
resulted in "progress" — it's lovely to know that one's not just writing into
the void. :)

I don't suppose you still have any contact information for Mark Kershenblatt?
It's a long shot of course, but maybe he kept a copy of CastleQuest somewhere,
or knows where one might be found.

Also, when you say "we jointly hold a copyright", do you mean literally as
in it's on file with the Library of Congress?  If so, I know that you — as
an original copyright holder — could personally file an application to view
the original copy (a.k.a. the "deposit").
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ06.pdf
To the best of your recollection, would that be possible? and if it would,
how could I persuade you to try it?

Thanks both for replying and for authoring a piece of my childhood,
–Arthur

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In-Reply-To: <CADvuK0LqwcQOJd5kg4jqqkZuEw-zn7EWC7tRZ8=AHpBNETsmhA@mail.gmail.com>
References: <BY2PR0201MB07755D6F45986A420967262CEF160@BY2PR0201MB0775.namprd02.prod.outlook.com>
	<CADvuK0LqwcQOJd5kg4jqqkZuEw-zn7EWC7tRZ8=AHpBNETsmhA@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2016 13:33:05 -0700
Message-ID: <CADvuK0+U4m=NxEtaxPoLxzXqUk_ZeKsiR=Q4ojwnAmQHL2tu8g@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Lost Game - CastleQuest
From: "Arthur O'Dwyer" <arthur.j.odwyer@gmail.com>
To: Michael Holtzman <Michael.Holtzman@openlink.com>

Hi again,

I realized just yesterday that in my first email, I forgot to ask some of
the most basic questions!  I'm so used to digging into variants of
"Adventure" where the following questions' answers are already roughly
known.  Would you mind answering some questions?

- What computer language was CastleQuest originally written in?
- For which system and/or hardware?
- Can you pin down its "release" at RPI to a specific year?
- Were you undergrads or graduate students? In what major/field?
- Did it have any major influences?  By the time I came across CastleQuest
on GEnie in the mid-1990s, I assumed it was just another (particularly
addictive) application of the Adventure Game Toolkit or imitation of
Infocom; but if it dates to the late '70s... well... that's not that long
after "Adventure" itself (1975); "HAUNT" (1979); or "Zork" (commercially
released in 1980).
- Anything else interesting about its development?
- Do you think it was known to anyone outside of RPI before Bob Maples came
along?

And one random historical question:

- "Compute!" magazine ran an unrelated game called "Castle Quest" in their
July 1983 issue, and then ran errata in October 1983 and January 1984
indicating that they didn't mean to step on your and Kershenblatt's
trademark. As far as you recall, was this because you two and/or Maples
sent them a complaint, or did they just decide to do a trademark search on
their own?

The RPI chapter of the ACM seems to have disbanded circa 1995; I've emailed
the RPI chapter of ACM-W in case they might still have any dusty tapes
anywhere.  I'm not really expecting a response, though.

Thanks much,
Arthur

==========================================================================

From: Michael Holtzman <Michael.Holtzman@openlink.com>
To: Arthur O'Dwyer <arthur.j.odwyer@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Lost Game - CastleQuest
Thread-Topic: Lost Game - CastleQuest
Thread-Index: AdH6MBDQbGlBpg7ATE2lPXQtBwZtrgAQL+WAASfEYIAACG1Zeg==
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2016 00:34:22 +0000
Message-ID: <F749CA69-CEBB-4221-96F7-69454EADA358@openlink.com>
References: <BY2PR0201MB07755D6F45986A420967262CEF160@BY2PR0201MB0775.namprd02.prod.outlook.com>
 <CADvuK0LqwcQOJd5kg4jqqkZuEw-zn7EWC7tRZ8=AHpBNETsmhA@mail.gmail.com>,<CADvuK0+U4m=NxEtaxPoLxzXqUk_ZeKsiR=Q4ojwnAmQHL2tu8g@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CADvuK0+U4m=NxEtaxPoLxzXqUk_ZeKsiR=Q4ojwnAmQHL2tu8g@mail.gmail.com>

All good questions. 

- Written in FORTRAN (what else?)

- Written on an IBM mainframe (3033, I believe) running MTS - Michigan
Terminal System - operating system. 

- I think 1979, I was Comp Sci '80 and Mark was Undecided '82

- The original Adventure was the inspiration. I must have played that
100's of times. 

- I worked part time as an operator in a remote computer lab, mostly
ripping green bar off the printer and putting it on racks. I started
writing it in my spare time at work. One day I showed it to Mark and
he was hooked. 

- There was a back door that enabled super-user mode. Being an RPI
student myself, I knew that people would dump the binary and look for
the password. So I put in a honeypot that looked like the PW but using
it would lock out the user.  The actual password was the day of the week. 

- A lot of students played it, so it's known to some number of alumni.
Though not enough to be a cult. 

Bonus question: we read about the "other" CQ and sent them a cease and
desist letter on a fake legal letterhead. Guess it got their attention. 

Oh yeah ... We do have a US copyright, but IIRC it's on the output (text)
and not the source. I will try that link and see. Also, I haven't been
in touch with Mark for years but I recently sent him a LinkedIn request. 

Regards,
-- Mike

==========================================================================

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	<CADvuK0LqwcQOJd5kg4jqqkZuEw-zn7EWC7tRZ8=AHpBNETsmhA@mail.gmail.com>
	<CADvuK0+U4m=NxEtaxPoLxzXqUk_ZeKsiR=Q4ojwnAmQHL2tu8g@mail.gmail.com>
	<F749CA69-CEBB-4221-96F7-69454EADA358@openlink.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 01:08:40 -0700
Message-ID: <CADvuK0LhujsiiEX415k_7j9js1HCLSgyjmHosinPrXe475b3MQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Lost Game - CastleQuest
From: "Arthur O'Dwyer" <arthur.j.odwyer@gmail.com>
To: Michael Holtzman <Michael.Holtzman@openlink.com>

Hello again Mike,

Might I have your permission to post and/or summarize these emails somewhere
under http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/in-search-of-LONG0751/ ?  This is some
pretty great primary-source material. :)


On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Michael Holtzman <Michael.Holtzman@openlink.com> wrote:
> All good questions. 
>
> - Written in FORTRAN (what else?) [...] 
> - The original Adventure was the inspiration. I must have played that 100's of times.

Me too. :)  The next most obvious question is, was the structure of the
CastleQuest source code derived from Adventure?  I don't know if you've
ever seen the Adventure source code, but it's really nifty and has a lot
of idiosyncratic ideas:
- almost all geography, messages, and item data stored in a separate (and
lightly encrypted) data file
- a "travel table" mapping out the geography
- a division of the verb space into "motions" (like NORTH), "actions" (like
TAKE), and "messages" (like HELP)
- object position is stored redundantly: each object has a PLACE field, and
each room has a linked list of objects that are there
- each object has a PROP field that indexes into a table of descriptions
for that object
- objects can be invisible (like the moss), or appear in two rooms
simultaneously via a "phony" clone (like the rough stone steps)

Did CastleQuest borrow some of those implementation details, or was the
programming entirely from scratch? (False dichotomy there, of course. :))

Conversely, did anyone ever make any other games with the CastleQuest "engine"?

And when Bob Maples took it to The Source, is my intuition correct that
that was probably a pretty easy port of your Fortran code? I mean he wouldn't
have needed to recode it in a different language or anything, right?

 
> Bonus question: we read about the "other" CQ and sent them a cease and
> desist letter on a fake legal letterhead. Guess it got their attention.

Ha!
 
> Oh yeah ... We do have a US copyright, but IIRC it's on the output (text)
> and not the source. I will try that link and see. Also, I haven't been in
> touch with Mark for years but I recently sent him a LinkedIn request. 

FYI, I found the Copyright Office record!  I can't tell whether it might be
a printout of code or just a transcript of some game text.  The copyright
number is TXu000091366.
The instructions to request a copy of the deposit are still at
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ06.pdf.  I'd be willing to PayPal you
a bounty of $100-plus-expenses if you actually get a response out of the
Copyright Office. :)


I wrote:
> The RPI chapter of the ACM seems to have disbanded circa 1995;
> I've emailed the RPI chapter of ACM-W in case they might still have any
> dusty tapes anywhere.  I'm not really expecting a response, though.

Indeed, no response from anyone at RPI yet.

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