I’ve been stalled out on a couple of attempts at IF projects recently, which I attribute primarily to chronic sleep deprivation brought on by parenting a toddler who wakes consistently at 4am. So I’m going back to something which was a success before: a Let’s Play thread!
Like many nerds, I’m a sucker for a time travel story. First Things First by J. Robinson Wheeler is often cited as the ur-example of a time-travel-themed parser game, but I’ve never played it. Let’s fix that!
Feel free to join in in the thread to observe, commentate, speculate, dissemble or otherwise kibbitz. If you don’t know the solution to a puzzle, but you have an idea, please suggest it! (This also includes “I played this game a few years ago and I don’t remember exactly but I think you might have to do something with the laser and the disco ball.”) But if you do for-sure know the solution to a puzzle (including if you looked it up), please don’t post it unless I ask, even in spoiler tags.
Part 1 - Orientation
You’ve just arrived at home from your nightly visit to the science and invention section of the local public library, where you spend each night dreaming your dreamy dreams of one day inventing a time travel machine. Tonight, for some reason, you’re especially fatigued, and can’t wait to get inside and go right to bed. Seems like a good plan, but somehow you have a premonition it’s not going to be that easy…
Okay, our objective is to go home and go to bed? Doesn’t sound too complicated, but we have seen plenty of great oaks grow from little acorns in the parser game objective space: finding a map in your attic, for instance. Anyway, we’re not burying the lede with the theme, if our character is obsessed with time travel to the point of spending every night reading about it in the public library …
First Things First - A Text Adventure Game by J. Robinson Wheeler
Developed with TADS: The Text Adventure Development System.Release Version 3.0 20061221
Copyright 2001, 2006 by J. Robinson Wheeler. All Rights Reserved.
Published by JRW Digital Media.
Type ABOUT, CREDITS, and HELP for general information.Front of house
This is the front of your house. A couple of stones lying about make up your half-hearted attempt at landscaping. Your driveway is to the northeast. A small path leads northwest and southwest. The front door stands invitingly to the west.You see a doormat here.
A fairly unassuming opening so far; let’s see what we’re working with:
>X ME
You have never been one to care about your appearance. You’re wearing comfortable clothes, the same as always.>I
You are carrying:
a library book>X BOOK
Tonight, like every night, you brought home a book on time-travel theories. This one talks about the paradoxes involved in changing the future from the past, or some such.
Changing the future surely shouldn’t be the problematic part of time travel, right? Everything we do changes the future! Unless this means changing the relative-future-which-is-actually-the-past, e.g. going back to your grandparents’ lifetimes and changing their future so that your parents aren’t born (in what was originally your past).
If this is going to be a time travel game, we may need to start inventing some new tenses.
>READ BOOK
There are two main theories about the potential for time travel. The first is that time is linear and immutable. Even if one were able to travel back and forth, there would be no way to alter the course of events. This does not rule out free will; rather, it is stipulated that free action is accounted for – the time traveller’s comings and goings have, in a sense, already taken place. You could not go back in time and prevent your own birth, for circumstances would intervene to make this action impossible.
This take on free will always feels like a cop-out to me: “oh, you have free will, it’s just that the universe knows what you’re going to use your free will to choose and has already accounted for it, so no changing your mind.”
The second theory is that the timeline branches when a time traveller moves back and forth. A traveller from the future may disrupt the possibility of returning to the same world he or she left behind. Some say that time is an infinitely branching tree, with each moment containing a universe of all probable or possible choices, and the time traveller slips around from one to the next, with free will being a crucial factor in the consequent events.
On the other hand, the “trousers of time” theory is narratively kind of unsatisfying because any time you jump timelines, you leave the old one behind forever, including everyone you know. So if you want to use time travel to fix a problem for your family and friends, all you can actually do is create a new timeline in which that problem doesn’t exist, and then stick around and enjoy your new and improved situation with parallel-universe clones of all the people you left behind and can never return to.
A third theory has been recently posited, and is the core of this particular book. It delves into the possibility of a merger between the two theories (previously determined to be mutually exclusive). This theory is expanded upon under the heading of paradoxes.
I guess that last sentence is inviting us to … ?
>READ ABOUT PARADOXES
(in the library book)
This book centers on a new kind of paradox. It posits a theory in which the two main theories of time travel (previously determined to be mutually exclusive) are merged, allowing both for a universe in which time travel cannot change the course of events; and yet at the same time depicts a branching time stream where a time traveller may redirect events to change the future.This new paradox goes something as follows: A time traveller from the future travels back to the past. The mere act of traveling backwards disrupts the future course of events from that moment, making it impossible for the traveller to return to his or her own time and find it to be as he or she left it. However, through further manipulation of objects and events, the time traveller will be able to alter the time stream such that the future he or she left will be restored.
I’ve only been playing this game for five minutes and my head already hurts.
Once the future is restored, the time traveller will have discovered that all of these events – including the initial time trip which disrupted the time stream – needed to happen, or else the time traveller would never have existed in the world he or she initially came from, and thus would not have been able to make the trip in the first place. The existence of the future he or she came from was contingent on the very disruption and manipulation of the time stream that nearly caused their future never to have existed at all!
Okay, so I think that what this is getting at is that we can end up with a closed-loop kind of deal where it turns out everything that we did was already predetermined and all of the stuff we did in the past neatly explains what we saw in the present, but we have free will because we’re not required to close the loop and can decide to stick around in the alternate time stream instead?
Hopefully this will all become clearer later when we actually get to do some time travelling. Is there anything else in the book?
>READ ABOUT FREE WILL
(in the library book)
Depending on which theory one subscribes to (either of the two main theories, or the third), free will is either absolutely necessary or absolutely forbidden.>READ ABOUT TIME STREAM
I don’t see any time stream here.
I can’t think of anything else to look up right now, so let’s look around:
>X DOORMAT
It’s a bulky rectangular mat made out of thatched brown fibers. It reads, “Welcome.”>LOOK UNDER IT
There’s nothing under the doormat. It would be a good place to put your spare house key, if only you knew where it was.
Uh oh. That last clause has me worried.
>X DOOR
It’s solid wood, a real beauty, with the best lock money can buy. You always considered it to be nicely inviting. Until now.
Yeah, we’re definitely in trouble.
>OPEN IT
It’s locked. Drat the luck, you’ve forgotten your house key tonight. There must be a spare around here somewhere.
Well, we already looked under the doormat, so let’s see what else is around here.
>NE
Driveway
This is your front driveway, which leads west to the north side of your house. A small path leads southwest to the front door. To the east is the road into town.You see a little car here.
>X CAR
It’s your baby-blue Mazda. You decided some time ago that you would take a personal step to helping the environment by walking everywhere, and you haven’t driven it since. The little car is closed.
I approve of this in principle, and also covertly support the author in keeping the scope of the game manageable by disallowing driving off to any random location that takes our fancy. Although owning a car is expensive, so if we’re really determined not to use it any more, we should probably have sold it.
Anyway, I don’t suppose we left a spare housekey in the car by any chance?
>LOOK IN IT
Why not climb in and look around?>GET IN IT
You’ll have to open the car first.>OPEN CAR
It’s locked.>UNLOCK CAR
What do you want to unlock it with?>I
You are carrying:
a library book
Drat. Since a set of car keys has failed to materialise in our inventory since we last looked, we’ll have to leave the car for now.
>E
Sidewalk
The concrete sidewalk that leads away from your house is starting to show the wear and tear of the hot summers and cool winters. The sections are uneven and tufts of grass poke up through the cracks. The sidewalk wanders east alongside the road away from your house and toward the nearby shopping village. Your driveway is back to the west.You see a mailbox here.
I’m assuming that at some point the game is going to tell us “no, you can’t go wandering off into the night” and keep us confined to the immediate vicinity of the house, so let’s see if this is actually the edge of the map.
>E
Bend in path
As you approach the local nub of suburban civilization, you again are reminded that community expansion has a price. A small shrubbery here serves, apparently, as an excuse for people to litter, as it is full of bits of trash. The footpath bends here from west to north, leading into the shopping village.
Okay, no, there’s more to explore here.
>X SHRUBBERY
It’s a full, healthy, dense little bush.>SEARCH IT
You find a sewer grating!
Note to self: better make sure to search all the scenery henceforth.
>OPEN GRATING
It’s too heavy to open.>LOOK IN IT
Sitting in the muck about a foot and a half down is a five-dollar bill.>TAKE BILL
You can’t reach the five-dollar bill through the grating.
What a classic puzzle! Hopefully we can find some string and some sort of hook to make a makeshift fishing rod?
Since we didn’t take any time to check out the previous location, let’s take a look now.
>W
Sidewalk
The concrete sidewalk that leads away from your house is starting to show the wear and tear of the hot summers and cool winters. The sections are uneven and tufts of grass poke up through the cracks. The sidewalk wanders east alongside the road away from your house and toward the nearby shopping village. Your driveway is back to the west.You see a mailbox here.
Odds on the mailbox containing a leaflet?
>X MAILBOX
The mailbox is closed.>OPEN IT
Opened.>LOOK IN IT
There’s nothing in the mailbox.
Ah, not this time! I can’t see any particular purpose to the mailbox for now, then, but maybe we can go back in time and mail-order something and it’ll turn up here in the present?
>W
Driveway
This is your front driveway, which leads west to the north side of your house. A small path leads southwest to the front door. To the east is the road into town.You see a little car here.
>W
North of house
The north side of your house is dominated by your garage door. The garage door is closed. A scaled stone wall runs up the side of the house. The driveway extends east, and a small path leads southeast to the front of the house and southwest to the back.>X GARAGE DOOR
It’s closed.
It’s only while editing this commentary that I realised I didn’t actually try opening the garage door. Let’s make a mental note to try that next time!
>X STONE WALL
The wall tapers in a stairstep fashion as it climbs up to and beyond the edge of the roof.
I can’t quite picture what this wall looks like, but I think there’s a reasonable chance we can …
>CLIMB IT
You climb gingerly up the stone wall.North roof
This is the north end of the roof. Shingle tiles, already looking the worse for wear, make for slippery traction. A gutter trap, clogged with leaves, runs along the length of the west side of the house. The roof itself continues south. The stone wall, which turns out to be the outside of your chimney, leads back down.[ Your score just went up by 4 points. You can toggle these notifications at any time by typing ‘notify.’ ]
>X GUTTER
It’s clogged full of leaves.>TAKE LEAVES
You pull a few stray leaves from the gutter and toss them aside.
Encountering a mailbox earlier in the game leaves me compelled to try:
>COUNT LEAVES
There isn’t much point to that.>SEARCH LEAVES
You find an old tennis ball, which you take.
Gotta keep searching! At least so far, all the things we’ve found something in by searching have been things which could reasonably contain something hidden from a casual glance. I think where the use of SEARCH really gets its bad press is games where you can EXAMINE a table and be given a description of the woodwork, etc. but it’s not unless you type SEARCH TABLE that you discover there’s a priceless diamond and a smoking revolver lying on top.
>S
South roof
The shingles are in even worse shape on this end of the house, which makes you very nervous as the ground is a long way down from the peak here, at least 30 feet. The gutter trap is to the west and continues up to the north end of the house. You can see the top opening of the drainpipe in the clogged leaves. The only exit is north.A squirrel is here.
The squirrel is rather squat and feral, but it regards you with an almost intelligent interest.
>X DRAINPIPE
It runs from here down to a spout at the back of the house.The squirrel gazes into the distance, daydreaming about something.
>SEARCH IT
You feel nothing but muck and wet leaves in the drainpipe.The squirrel dashes from one spot to another, then twitches its jaws.
>X SQUIRREL
Definitely male, all right. He’s got a tuft of white hair on his head that almost gives him an Einstein-like appearance. In his little paws is a big, juicy acorn.The squirrel nibbles at his tail.
>X ACORN
Ripe for planting.
Since this is a time-travel game, I would pretty much bet money that we need to get this acorn from the squirrel and plant it somewhere in order to take advantage of there being a tree there in a later time period.
The squirrel lazes about in a state of squirrel contentment.
>TAKE ACORN
The squirrel is carrying the big juicy acorn and won’t let you have it.The squirrel shakes his little head. It doesn’t mean anything significant.
I don’t get the impression that there’s anywhere else we can go up here, but let’s check:
>E
You will fall off the roof if you go in that direction.The squirrel gazes into the distance, daydreaming about something.
>N
North roof
This is the north end of the roof. Shingle tiles, already looking the worse for wear, make for slippery traction. A gutter trap, clogged with leaves, runs along the length of the west side of the house. The roof itself continues south. The stone wall, which turns out to be the outside of your chimney, leads back down.>D
You climb gingerly down the stone wall.North of house
The north side of your house is dominated by your garage door. The garage door is closed. A scaled stone wall runs up the side of the house. The driveway extends east, and a small path leads southeast to the front of the house and southwest to the back.
We haven’t been behind the house yet, so let’s look there.
>SW
Behind house
The back of your house is pretty non-descript, except for some really nice trees that make up for the lack of landscaping in the front. The spout of your drainpipe comes down here from the roof. A gravel path extends northeast and southeast.>X TREES
I see nothing special about the nice trees.>CLIMB THEM
nice trees: The nice trees are not suitable for climbing.>X SPOUT
I see nothing special about the drainpipe.
The drainpipe sounds like it could be a mechanism for getting things down from the roof (drop them in at the top and then take them out down here), but I’m not sure why we’d need such a thing since we can apparently climb up and down at will.
>SE
South of house
You always thought this would be a nice place to plant a tree, but a bare spot reminds you of your lack of foresight. The ground slopes down slightly here, and the wall of the house looms an extra story high because of it. There is a tiny window high in the wall, about 30 feet up. A little path made by you on your many daily walks leads southwest into the woods. You can walk around your house to the northwest and northeast.
If we weren’t already convinced, that first sentence couldn’t be much less subtle about the fact that we’re going to need to plant a tree here (either now, or in the past). Incidentally, the puzzle solution that I’m hypothesising here (get a seed from a squirrel, plant it in the past to grow a tree which you can use to climb in the present in order to get inside a house) appears in almost exactly the same form in Finding Martin, released four years after First Things First.
>X BARE SPOT
The bare spot reminds you that you always wished you’d planted a tree here. Standing in the spot, your attention drifts to the equally bare wall on this side of the house.>X WALL
You always thought that the wall on this side of the house would make a great place to hide a secret door. Again, you are reminded of your lack of foresight. If there were a door here, you could get in that way.
So rather than going back in time to plant a tree, we could also go back in time to install a secret door?
I’m still uncertain about whether we should actually be expecting to get inside the house any time soon. It seems like the game is presenting that as our immediate, short-term objective, but this could also be a Bureau of Strange Happenings-type affair where answering the phone that starts ringing in the very first scene is actually the end of the game.
>SEARCH WALL
You find nothing of interest.>X WINDOW
The little window is probably the one that leads into your attic. It’s hard to judge from here, but it looks like you could just fit through it. Getting all the way up to it is going to be the real problem.
Okay, plenty of things here to worry about later, but not much it seems like we can do right now.
>NE
Front of house
This is the front of your house. A couple of stones lying about make up your half-hearted attempt at landscaping. Your driveway is to the northeast. A small path leads northwest and southwest. The front door stands invitingly to the west.You see a doormat here.
We probably should have tried this earlier too:
>KNOCK ON DOOR
You knock on the front door. There is no response.
I guess either we live alone (not too implausible for someone who apparently spends every evening at the library) or everyone else is out?
This has brought us back to the front of the house, so let’s check out the little path we saw on the way around.
>SW
South of house
You always thought this would be a nice place to plant a tree, but a bare spot reminds you of your lack of foresight. The ground slopes down slightly here, and the wall of the house looms an extra story high because of it. There is a tiny window high in the wall, about 30 feet up. A little path made by you on your many daily walks leads southwest into the woods. You can walk around your house to the northwest and northeast.>SW
Path in the woods
This little spot is one of your favorite places to sit and think. A well-trod path winds through a natural grove of cedar and live oak trees. A large rock juts up out of the ground right in your way, so the path does an abrupt curve around it. The path leads northeast to your house, and a clearing is visible to the southwest.>X ROCK
The rock is a five foot grey boulder, almost egg-shaped, a single piece of heavy, textured granite. Polished smooth over time, a wedge shape sheared from the top ages ago provides a comfortable place to sit.
Not sure if there’s anything in particular to do here?
>SW
Clearing
The woods part in a marvelous natural clearing here. Moonlight streams prettily through the canopy of leaves above. The ground is hard and flat and clean. Your footpath leaves the clearing to the northeast, heading back to the house.There is a warmth to the air you don’t recognize.
That final line suggests that there’s something important about the air here, but air doesn’t generally afford a lot of options for interacting with it. What can we do here?
>FEEL AIR
The air feels slightly warmer than usual.>X MOONLIGHT
The moon is gibbous and waning, but bright on this cloudless night.>SMELL AIR
You smell nothing unusual.>TASTE AIR
That isn’t something you need to taste.>X AIR
You see nothing unusual.>TAKE AIR
It’s fixed in place.
That’s the first not-quite-appropriate default response we’ve seen slip through so far; this game has been doing a pretty solid job for the most part. But I’m out of ideas for the air; the room description also mentions the ground, so can we do anything with that?
>X GROUND
It lies beneath you.>DIG
What do you want to dig in?>GROUND
What do you want to dig in it with?
Not looking promising.
>BOOK
The ground is too hard for digging here.
The fact that the response is that the ground is too hard, rather than objecting to the clearly-inappropriate choice of digging tool, suggests that this is probably the wrong direction to be taking.
By this point we’ve explored all of the areas around the house, so the only remaining bit of the map to check out is what we find when we head further down the road. We start by returning to:
Bend in path
As you approach the local nub of suburban civilization, you again are reminded that community expansion has a price. A small shrubbery here serves, apparently, as an excuse for people to litter, as it is full of bits of trash. The footpath bends here from west to north, leading into the shopping village.You see a sewer grating here.
>N
In the village
This little shopping village is attractively decorated with colored signs pointing you to this merchant and that. To the west is the bank, and to the east is the public library. Because it is late, the only thing open is the sandwich shop, which is to the north. The road leading back home is south.
This seems to highlight pretty clearly that there’s only one way to go from here, but let’s check:
>E
You’ll have to open the public library first.>OPEN LIBRARY
It’s locked.>W
You’ll have to open the bank first.>OPEN BANK
It’s locked.
Sandwich shop it is then!
>N
In the sandwich shop
The room is painted a gaudy yellow color. On closer inspection, it is merely spattered with mustard stains. That’s the kind of shop this is, I guess – heavily frequented because it’s the only one nearby. There’s a counter, a menu, a big advertisement, and a row of tables and chairs. The door is to the south.Fred, the sandwich guy, is standing at the counter.
Fred says, “Hey there. How can I help you?”
Fred is cleaning some utensils.
There must have been a lot of mustard spilled in this shop if it’s possible to mistake the mustard stains for the actual decor. I guess Fred’s sandwiches must be highly spatter-prone.
>X COUNTER
Flat. Long. Counter-shaped.Fred is cleaning some utensils.
>X MENU
The menu lists two items: a hot meatball sandwich, and a cold cut combo sandwich. Both are 5 dollars with tax.Fred is cleaning some utensils.
>X ADVERTISEMENT
The advertisement is a big photo of the cold cut sandwich, with a big star-shaped balloon that contains the phrase: “BUY THE SPECIAL! Now only 99 cents!”
Wow, good job we checked before spending a whole five dollars on the cold cut sandwich! Not that we have any money. We saw a five-dollar bill stuck in a drain, which would buy us one hot sandwich or a spectacular five specials, but only if we can fish it out, which we can’t.
Fred is cleaning some utensils.
>X TABLES
There’s nothing on the tables.Fred whistles a half-remembered melody.
>X CHAIRS
There’s nothing on the chairs.Fred dries his hands with a paper towel.
>ASK FRED ABOUT SPECIAL
Fred says, “It’s a good deal. On special.”>X FRED
Fred, the sandwich guy, always smiles at you even though you must have bought a thousand sandwiches from him. He’s got a pudgy frame, dark eyebrows, and a tiny mustache, but there is always a happy twinkle behind his eyes.Fred dices some vegetables.
So, there’s nothing obvious to do in the sandwich shop either, at least until we get hold of the money. At which point we can buy a sandwich, but it’s not clear how that might help us either. And we’ll have to choose which one to buy, which leads me to wondering whether we can lock ourselves out of victory by buying the wrong one. My default assumption for a game from 2001 is that unwinnable states are possible, so I’ll be keeping multiple save files. But this leads me, in a roundabout way, to realise that we were so keen to start exploring that we never checked any of the meta-information when we first started. So let’s round out this first installment by rectifying that.
>ABOUT
First Things First was the first game I started writing in TADS, way back in 1996. My brother had just purchased TADS, then available only as shareware. We both sat down to write a quick game to test it out. A couple of days later, he had finished his one-room demo. I had already built about twenty rooms and had invented the basic plot and one or two puzzles. Five years later, Version 1.0 was finally released. Now it’s a further five years later, and the release of Version 3.0 can almost be seen as a 10th anniversary edition. Given the central premise of the game, fixing bugs today that I put into the code fully ten years ago was an interesting experience. Life imitating art, and so on.Interactive Fiction has evolved since I first started, and so have I. This adventure presents both my naive 1996-era and my matured 2006-era imaginings, as well as the progessive steps in between.
This game is free, but if you would like to make a shareware donation in support of it, please visit jrwdm » First Things First and use one of the PayPal links to do so. Feel free to send me email at ftf@jrwdigitalmedia.com.
Thank you for playing First Things First. I hope you enjoy it.
>CREDITS
This game has been a long haul, with many people deserving of thanks along the way. First, I must thank my brother Diek Wheeler, for getting me started with TADS five years ago. He’s been waiting that long to see the game I said would take me a couple of weeks to finish.For betatesting, I extend many hearty thanks to Admiral Jota for getting me moving again after a long hiatus. His diligence and stubbornness (especially about NPC interaction) have made the final product more complete (and more interesting) than it would have been. Special thanks to Doug Jones and Vincent Lynch, for their betatesting dedication and their sharp eyes for missing details.
Other people who provided testing and feedback at various points: Jonathan Blask, Tyson Boucher, Tony Delgado, Iain Merrick, and Lenny Pitts. Last but not least, thanks to Geoff Bailey, Vincent Laviano, Peter Nepstad, and the rest of the “Iron-Men” Betatest gang. For Version 2.0: Jason Dyer, Paul Godfrey, Dr. D.J. Picton, Christopher Tate, and Andrew Walters. Version 3.0: D.J. Picton, Steven Tucker.
Honorable mention for general help and problem-solving goes to Neil K. Guy, Gunther Schmidl, Dan Schmidt, Dan Shiovitz, John McCall, and Michael J. Roberts.
About half of those names are the regular ifMUD crew I remember from around the time this game was released. Most of the rest I recognise from the rec.*.int-fiction newsgroups.
>HELP
First Things First is a large-scale text adventure game in the classic style. There are no treasures to collect or monsters to outwit, but you will have to overcome a lot of obstacles as you make your way through the story. You will come across a number of objects, some of which will be obviously helpful, others which may or not be, and still others which are no help at all. Figuring out what you need will be a matter of exploration and trial and error.There are no included hints to help you along, although the game is populated by various characters who might be able to nudge you along if you ask them about various items in your possession or obstacles you are butting against. There will be times when you definitely know more about a topic than the person you’re talking to, and you can impart this information by telling them about it. Like the character you will portray in the story, however, you will mostly be on your own.
Further note: we should remember to ask people about stuff. In particular, this suggests that we should ASK or TELL people about objects in our inventory.
Remember to examine everything, and make liberal use of your ability to search. When in doubt, revisit places; sometimes, you will find something new in a place you thought you had already scoured.
It is possible to lose or destroy items that you will need later on, so before you do anything irrevocable, remember to save your game. Don’t be reckless, and the game will try to play fair.
Well, there we go; I’ll definitely be keeping those backup saves.
Use the FULLSCORE (FULL) command to keep track of how far along you are in the story. The EXITS (XITS) command will remind you of which directions are open to you.
Good luck, and thank you for playing First Things First.
So, our initial exploration seems complete; I don’t think I missed any places we could go (although since the help text mentions the EXITS command, I’ll have a check back around the map using that to make sure I didn’t overlook anything). It looks like we ought to be trying to find the spare key, although there are clearly a couple of more elaborate puzzles (the unplanted tree and the secret door) which also suggest that they’ll be needed to get inside the house, so I guess we’ll figure out how all of that fits together in the end. Suggestions for what to try next welcome, though!
