Back in the early days of adventure games, there was a hard divide between people who liked text-only adventures — today typically referred to as “interactive fiction”, though if we’re getting technical about it, there are some differences between interactive fiction and text adventures — and those who appreciated games with graphics.
There was a sort of unspoken (well, actually, sometimes spoken) assumption that text-only games were more “grown-up” and for more “intelligent” people, because they specifically required the use of your imagination, just like a good book. And there’s some merit to that argument.
But there were some interesting experiments going on concerning exactly what to do with the graphical capabilities of early ’80s home computers. And Gruds in Space from Sirius Software is a great example.
Gruds in Space was first released in 1983 for Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64 and Apple II, and was the work of Chuck Somerville (he who would go on to make Chip’s Challenge, among other things) and Joseph Dudar (who appears to have only ever made this game). The “Gruds” of the title were actually a mascot character for Sirius Software, who published the game, but they play a relatively minor role in the game as a whole.
Instead, the game casts you in the role of an interplanetary freelancer who receives an urgent communication from a military vessel that has become stranded without fuel on Pluto. You are presented with the mission of retrieving some “heliotropanite” from Saturn and delivering it to the stranded vessel so they can rejoin the fight against the evil Baranok forces.
You are given the option of refusing, since you’re an independent starfarer rather than a member of the military, but are promised one million dollars for successful completion of your mission. One would think one million dollars would likely be a drop in the ocean for someone in possession of their own starship, but you accept nonetheless.
What then follows is an early example of a graphic adventure. Not a text adventure with illustrations; an actual graphic adventure. By that I mean that the game keeps text descriptions to a relative minimum — indeed, the sentence “YOU SEE NOTHING SPECIAL” comes up with infuriating regularity — and instead presents things to you as if they are happening before your eyes through a first-person view.
And you know what? It works. There are very few points in Gruds in Space where you feel like having everything in the scene spelled out for you in text would make things easier, and in the few instances where certain things might not be immediately obvious, the game does make a point of highlighting them with a brief bit of text. While you’re still interacting with the game by typing two-word commands — we’re not quite in the land of point-and-click just yet — it’s quite impressive how intuitive the game manages to feel despite its simplistic presentation.
Gruds in Space eschews many of the nasty tricks that pure text adventures liked to play on their players back in the early days. There are no “mazes”, there are no situations where leaving an area from the south does not cause you to enter the next from the north, and there’s very little fumbling with the parser, as simplistic as it is; most commands have a few synonyms, and things like prepositions or a “target” for a particular action are rarely required — for example, since you generally only encounter one character at a time, there’s no need to type “GIVE COIN TO BUTLER”; just “GIVE COIN” will suffice, because the butler is the only one present. Simple and intuitive — but it doesn’t stop the game from having some puzzles to figure out.
That said, there’s only really one sequence in Gruds in Space that feels like a “puzzle” in the traditional sense; the rest of the things you end up doing feel like an organic extension of you exploring the environment. There are a couple of actions you need to take in order to complete the game which might not be immediately obvious — although somehow I figured them out when I first played this as a young child — and at least one instance where something completely illogical appears to happen, but for the most part, working your way through Gruds in Space is a pleasure.
Of course, the downside to this is that the whole thing can be done and dusted in under an hour if you have the slightest bit of experience solving this kind of thing. Combine that with how the parser’s vocabulary is fairly limited and the in-game text is relatively minimal, and it’s unfortunately not hard to see why some of the more “hardcore” adventure game fans from back in the day turned their nose up at this in favour of what they believed to be more “mature” fare.
But that’s not to say no adventure game fans liked Gruds in Space. In fact, Page 6’s resident adventure game expert Garry Francis was rather taken with the game, regarding it as a “collectors’ item which deserves to be a classic” and noted that it is “an excellent game in every respect” which “had not suffered in the transition from the Apple [II], unlike quite a few other games on the market.”
Francis particularly highlighted the one major puzzle I alluded to earlier, which involves navigating an alien ship by inserting coloured orbs into sockets and then remembering to take them with you before you pass through the doors you opened. Francis said it was “a beauty… the sort of puzzle you’d expect to find in Infocom’s Zork or Enchanter trilogies”.
I personally found this section to be a little bit frustrating, despite it probably being the part of the game that required the most thought; it felt kind of like it was there because “adventure games are supposed to have puzzles”, whereas the rest of Gruds in Space had unfolded as a fairly intuitive, self-explanatory sequence of actions up until that point.
I think my biggest bugbear with this section is that there were numerous sequences where if you went through the wrong door, you’d end up locked in a room with no choice but to reload a previous save… assuming you’d remembered to make one. And from the outside of each room, there was no way of knowing this before entering, so it really was a bit of a case of trial and error. Given that Gruds in Space requires a separate game save disk (and comes on two sides of a floppy disk in the first place) this sequence ended up involving a fair amount of annoying disk-swapping, with no option to use multiple drives.
It wasn’t so obtuse as to feel absolutely impossible, however. Indeed, once you’d successfully steered clear of the “dead ends” and gone in the initial few doors in the right order (and perhaps locked yourself in a couple more rooms by forgetting to take the orbs with you along the way) the whole thing unfolded in a fairly straightforward manner. It made me think, but it didn’t make me annoyed at the leaps of logic I was expected to make; it made sense.
And that really sums up a lot of Gruds in Space: it makes sense, intuitively. The natural-feeling first-person viewpoint means that you can navigate around the world just by looking at it, rather than needing to make a map. Interacting with things is never a matter of stumbling through the parser’s capabilities until you chance upon the correct combination of verb and noun. Even the more obtuse moments make internal sense if you pay careful attention to the few things the game does spell out to you in text.
So while it won’t last you very long — and I’d urge you to try and solve it without using a walkthrough, as it’s pretty straightforward, particularly by genre standards in the early ’80s — it’s definitely a worthwhile journey that I very much enjoyed taking. I absolutely loved just wandering around the game world when I played Gruds in Space as a kid, and finally making the time to beat it properly as a 42-year old adult feels like I’ve finally paid this game the respect it deserves.
Well, perhaps if we’d ever actually bought a copy… instead, the version I played back in the day was one of the myriad copied games our family acquired from the local “computer club” back in the day. No wonder Sirius Software apparently bit the dust by 1984. Sorry about that, folks; a lot of us didn’t really know any better at the time!
Anyway, if you get the opportunity to try Gruds in Space on any of the aforementioned platforms, I highly recommend spending an evening exploring it and seeing how far you can get. It’s a pleasure to play such a different take on the adventure game for the early ’80s period — and fascinating to consider it in the context of how the graphic adventure gradually came to dominate the genre in later years.
So thanks very much, Chuck and Joseph; it may have taken me a while to beat your game, but I finally did it. And while I can no longer buy a copy in a way that will allow me to directly show my appreciation to your hard work, at least I can talk about the game in the hope a few more people might come to recognise it.
And, on that note, TYPE 66-43-44. GO WINDOW
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