The Six Most Infamous Puzzles In Adventure Game History
1. Getting the Babel Fish into Your Ear
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1984
Probably the most well-known puzzle of any on the list, the babel fish puzzle is renowned for walking the fine line between fun frustration (or "funstration"), and pure seething evil. Displaced Earthling Arthur Dent has been zapped aboard a hostile alien ship. In order to understand alien languages, he has to put a babel fish in his ear. In the book on which the game is based, Arthur's friend Ford just hands him the fish. But in the game, a few more steps are required.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, co-authored by Douglas Adams, puts the fish in a vending machine and gives the player a limited number of turns to acquire it before the game becomes unwinnable. From the Everything2 entry on the puzzle:
After the player presses the button, the fish is vended, but with such force that it flies across the room and into a hole. The sequence of events for the novice player goes as follows:
Above the hole is a hook, from which the player eventually decides to hang his dressing gown; this causes the vended Babel Fish to hit the gown and drop to the floor…
… where it falls down a drain ('press button and catch fish' is not a valid input). The player may then decide to block the drain with his handy towel, which causes the fish to hit the gown, drop to the floor, and land on the towel…
… where it is cleaned away by a cleaning robot that dashes into the room, and dashes out again via a small panel. At this point the player realises that the game is toying with him or her. Undefeated, he or she may choose to block the panel with Ford Prefect's satchel*, at which point the Babel Fish flies into the gown, drops to the floor, the robot picks it up, runs into the satchel, and throws the fish in the air…
… where it is cleaned away by another cleaning robot, one tasked with maintaining the upper half of the room. It is this additional puzzle that caused players the most anguish, as the solution is not at all obvious – it involves placing some junk mail on Ford Prefect's satchel, which, when sent flying through the air, occupies the second cleaning robot enough for the Babel Fish to arc gracefully into the player's ear.
The game's publisher, Infocom, actually sold T-Shirts for people who managed to solve the puzzle:
It's a small sadness that, thanks to the Internet, a phenomenon like this couldn't really happen again.
2. Guessing the Gnome's Gname
King's Quest, 1984
1984 was apparently a good year for infuriating adventure game puzzles. In the original King's Quest outing, Sir Graham meets a gnome who challenges him to guess his name. The obvious answer is "Rumplestiltskin", since most of the game's characters and story elements are cribbed straight from Grimms' Fairy Tales. But no – that's not the answer. Written on a piece of paper in the witch's house (the witch from Hansel and Gretel, whose person, house, and note have nothing whatsoever to do with the gnome), are the words "sometimes it's wise to think backwards."
That's what you get for NOT MAKING ANY SENSE.
Connecting the gnote to the gnome requires more than a small a leap of faith, to say nothing of logic. But no matter: many intrepid adventurers made that leap, strode boldly up to the gnome, and guessed "nikstlitselpmuR", which is "Rumplestiltskin" spelled backwards. But "no", the parser responds – "that's not the correct answer".
A million things go through your mind at this point. Does the game have it wrong? Did the creators of King's Quest forget that oft-unpronounced "t" in "Rumplestiltskin"? Or did you get the verb wrong? You try "ANSWER NIKSTLITSELPMUR" and "SAY NIKSTLITSELPMUR" and "TRY NIKSTLITSELPMUR". Or maybe you were wrong the whole time? Maybe the note has nothing to do with it? And if that's the case, then what's the answer??
This had better be good, old man.
"What is the gnome's name?" was, by far, the most-asked question of the Sierra Customer Service Hotline. That's because the solution to the puzzle is unfair and infuriating. Here it is. You're supposed to write the alphabet forwards and backwards:
ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
For each letter in RUMPLESTILTSKIN, you need to find the corresponding letter in the backwards alphabet. So R maps onto I, U maps onto F, and so on. The gnome's name – obviously – is IFNKOVHGROGHPRM.
Guessing the gnome's name is a great example of how unfair, unpleasant and unforgiving puzzle design could be in the early days of adventure games. It's very telling that in future releases of King's Quest, NIKSTLITSELPMUR was accepted as a valid answer. Back in the day, the biggest difference between the approach of Sierra designers like King's Quest's Roberta Williams and designers at the rival Lucasfilm/LucasArts shop is that the Lucas designers seemed to want the player to actually succeed!
3. Microwaving the Hamster
Maniac Mansion, 1987
In the original Maniac Mansion, you could steal Weird Ed Edison's pet hamster and, as either Razor or Syd, put the little critter in the microwave and make it pop. If you hand the resulting goop back to Ed, realization of what it is slowly dawns on him, and your character spends the rest of the game as a tombstone in the backyard.
What did i just say about LucasArts designers wanting you to succeed … ?
When the game was ported to the NES, LucasArts endured a rigorous censorship process that is fascinatingly chronicled by Douglas Crockford in The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System. While the word "pissed" and the Michaelangelo statue had to go, the hamster-in-the-microwave schtick stayed … that is, until the wrong person at Nintendo caught wind of it. The puzzle was excised from the European version, and all future pressings of the cart.
4. Drinking with Boos
Return to Zork, 1993
Before Internet memes made arrow-in-the-knee jokes ubiquitous, another memorable line from a video game lodged itself in the minds of gamers like a Rick Astley tune. This puzzle involves getting Boos to repeatedly pour you a drink, dumping it in the plant, and waiting until he's soused enough to steal his keys. Each time Boos pours, he asks "Want some rye? COURSE ya do!" It's Boos's exuberant Silliwood performance and the puzzle's repetition that makes the moment stand out.
Here's the rest of Boos's toast, which i thought was a Zorkism, but have now discovered that it's an old Rabbie Burns drinking song:
Here's tae us
Wha's like us
Damn few,
And they're a' deid
Mair's the pity!
5. Reading the Creation Account
The Neverhood, 1996
Mair's the pity that for its amazing visuals, The Neverhood wasn't a better adventure game. One of its most maddening puzzles wasn't really a puzzle at all. Early in the game, Klaymen discovers The Chronicles of Neverhood, a Biblical-ish account of the creation of the game's clay universe. Comprising eight books, the Chronicles sprawl out across 38 separate screens in the game. Most dutiful adventure game players brought up on Infocom's "feelies" were convinced that the Chronicles must contain important information about how to solve certain puzzles in the games, and read each and every section of the wall.
Well, gosh – THIS is gonna be fun.
The horrible truth is that the Chronicles exist only to flesh out the game's backstory, and have nothing whatsoever to do with any in-game puzzles. The player is merely supposed to walk to the far end of the 38 screens to pick up an object, and then hoof it back to the beginning of the hallway.
6. Creating Fake ID
Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, 1999
Much has been written about the death of graphic adventure games, but one of the most influential articles on the subject is Who Killed Adventure Games? by Old Man Murray, who details an idiotic puzzle in the third Gabriel Knight adventure that has the player assembling a fake ID of a man with a moustache in order to impersonate a man who doesn't have a moustache.
Hmm … i'm clearly gonna need some double-sided tape, and a cat.
Concludes Murray:
Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.
USE mouse ON comments section
What are the most interesting, shocking, funstrating or memorable puzzles from your adventures?
This entry was posted in Blog and tagged Video Games on March 2, 2012 by Ryan Henson Creighton.
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11 thoughts on "The Six Most Infamous Puzzles In Adventure Game History"
Mitchell Smallman March 2, 2012 at 10:45 am
This…this is exactly the list I would have made for this subject.
Ryan Henson Creighton Post author March 2, 2012 at 3:43 pm
It's great to have validation from a fellow scholar.
Casey March 2, 2012 at 11:38 pm
aaaaargh. SAY NIKSTLITSELPMUR. I must have typed that 1000 times.
Robin Spark October 12, 2012 at 5:39 am
A rediculously hard puzzle was in Space Quest 2, where, to get through the swamp, you had to type word for word "take a deep breath". It was the first adventure game I ever played. That one puzzle took me a month! I'm glad I persevered though.
Jim Candy September 9, 2015 at 11:22 am
You are so right about that puzzle. "Take a deep breath??" Come on! I bought the hint book, and it wasn't even necessarily clear in the hint book. I tried slowing down the speed and could swim all the way to the edge of the screen before running out of breath. Not to mention, I had already tried other variations of "hold breath"
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Mica January 3, 2016 at 7:31 pm
Thank you, Old Man Murray! I loved Gabriel Knight, and was super excited to play the 3rd game, until I hit that puzzle. I got more and more frustrated, until I was forced to look up the walkthrough, at which point, I took the cd out of my computer, screamed at it, and then burned it in my fireplace
Roger Durrant January 26, 2016 at 10:09 am
For me the six most difficult puzzles in IF that I have encounteres over the years would be:-
1) The mechanical monkey puzzle in Jon Ingold's Mulldoon Legacy. How you are you suposed to work out the connection between Monkey, Key and Sign to access the games Room is beyond me.
2) The museum guard in a packing case inside the female magician's trailer from the otherwise excellent Heroine's Mantle. The sequence of instructions to the imprisoned guard to help him avoid the knife would not work in real life.
3) The ningy coin in Acheton. This has been documented elsewhere, but it seems impossible to me to know if the holes are above or behind the coin. Moving it makes the game unwinnable.
4) The opening inside the antique shop in Philosopher's Quest. There is no clue that you have to throw one of the objects out of the door and without doing so, the game also cannot be won.
5) In Dungeon Adventure you keep bumping into things that you can't see. So how are you supposed to know that they're mushrooms?
6) In Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina, it is necessary to have knowledge of base 5 and base 7 hexedecimal, binary and octal code, just to get in. Wow, those security men sure are intelligent.
Ryan Henson Creighton Post author March 31, 2017 at 12:12 pm
i haven't played (or even heard of) any of these! Thanks for sharing.
A Little White Shell Named Jim Morrison March 7, 2018 at 2:17 pm
And don't forget the Goat.
Ianthe Mugglestone July 5, 2018 at 10:58 pm
The rubber ducky puzzle in The Longest Journey, circa year 2000! I'm copy pasting the solution from an internet walkthrough below for y'alls entertainment. I'm replaying this game this year, and I was able to complete this wacky puzzle FROM MEMORY from my original playthrough 15 years previously. Good grief!
~In your room, open the WINDOW and look out. Use the BREAD on the floating RUBBER DUCK.
When the bird lands on the grill, it loosens the clothesline and the rubber duck floats away.
Click the CHAIN to haul up the CLOTHESLINE, then take it. Go back outside the Fringe and pick up the now DEFLATED RUBBER DUCK that is stuck in the canal. Then go to the Subway Station. To the far left, something glitters. Look at it and you'll see that it is a KEY. In the inventory, combine the CLAMPS and the CLOTHESLINE. Then click on the RUBBER DUCK and and blow up the deflated duck. Combine it with the CLAMPS-CLOTHESLINE into a new item. Immediately use the combined items on the KEY down on the track.~