I first heard of TassTimes in Tonetown when I received my first issue of Questbusters, an absolutely essential 1980s newsletter with reviews and walkthroughs of adventure games. That's how we rolled before the internet. I did not pick up the game for my Commodore 64 until the early 1990s, during my sweeps of bargain bins, and while I played a few sessions, I did not get very far.
Nonetheless, it has been on my radar ever since, and a Google search revealed that the game was free to play on the Internet Archive, a vast, free repository of all things, ever. The sheer amount of software that is there not to just play directly but to download is staggering. Having its existence revealed to me was a watershed moment in my thinking in that, to play games across all platforms throughout the history of gaming, I no longer needed to necessarily acquire ancient hardware to do so.
This time, I played Tass Times in Tonetown using the Apple IIGS version, which featured one of the earliest mouse-based interfaces in my memory. As a standard text adventure with graphics, players can as usual just type commands like GO WEST or USE KEY, but the screen to the right of the area display contains a few common commands that one can use a mouse to click on and select. The icons for those are garishly large but forgivable as that was an emerging interface style at the time.
This being a classic text adventure, it required an extensive map to be made as the game was explored, and I went to town. The very act of exploring a map like this is enough to reveal all the aspects of the map and items in play, which brought me to approximately 80% completion by my own reckoning. From there, it was a matter of learning more about how the items I found work toward a solution.
Immediately upon entering the world of Tonetown, the player is at risk of death by not being "tass" enough. After doing what is needed to avoid that death, I thought there would be more aspects of the game that would task me with proving my tass-ness, but they never emerged. Part of the problem with playing old games is that sometimes, the modern expectations of gameplay creep in and one anticipates gameplay elements that had not been really developed yet.
Nonetheless, the world is fun to explore and the characters and situations are quirky and unique. The puzzles are not that hard, and as I mentioned, simply exploring the map will put most of the pieces in place. A lot of trial and error is required, but luckily for an older game, the player can save anywhere and there are plenty of save slots to encourage exploration.
In the 1980s, as the text only adventure evolved into first the same thing with a picture, then to more user friendly interfaces later in the decade, the themes of these games became more eclectic and varied, cumulating in such masterpieces as Lucasgames' Maniac Mansion. Tass Times in Tonetown is a fun little trip into just how wacky and offbeat these games could get. I'm glad I took the time in 2020 to finally swing back and finish the game, as well as map it out as I explored.
As for my map, I hope to take the time at some point to add it to this blog as a part of a map section, that will contain not just the new maps I make as I go, but scans of classic ones I drew back in the day. So, watch out for that. And be sure to visit and contribute if you can to the glorious effort that is the Internet Archive.
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