AlphaMan

Lineage

AlphaMan shares no code with any other roguelike. Jeff Olson wrote it from scratch in QuickBASIC, and its readme names its inspiration: two TSR tabletop games by James Ward, Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World, whose “unwitting inspiration” the author acknowledges. The FAQ places the look “in the spirit of Rogue or NetHack”: coloured text-mode graphics, permanent death, unidentified items.

It was shareware, spread over FTP (ftp.win.tue.nl) and Usenet's rec.games.roguelike.misc in 1995, and had no children. Its source was released under the MIT licence and preserved by superjamie; this port is built from it. See the family tree, where it sits among the games only inspired by Rogue.

Credits

Screenshots

Trivia

• The villain is the Grinch, and you must not kill him: “with his dying gasp he'll trigger the release of the nerve toxin”. Throw a can of Roast Beast at him instead, and his heart grows three sizes. (spoilers, section 6)
• Five castles hold what you need: a map from the Munsters, Buzz Aldrin's space suit, Elvis' blue suede shoes, Donald Trump's presidential ID card and Gilligan's serum. (FAQ)
• Why Elvis and Gilligan? The cast was chosen “to poke fun at the more banal aspects of Americana”, writes Olson in the FAQ. (FAQ)
• The spoilers file went only to the 50 to 100 people who registered the $15 shareware; it was first published with the source in the 2020s. (superjamie/alphaman-src)
• Naming your character “Jeffrey Olson” starts you with all stats at 18, a long sword, chainmail and good mutations, an inside joke that keeps the author on top of every high score list. (superjamie/alphaman-src)
• The map generator was too slow on an 8088 without a maths co-processor, so Olson replaced the floating-point random numbers with integer bit-shifts, with help from a classmate who had written assembly books. (superjamie/alphaman-src)
• RogueBasin lists it as one of the few roguelikes where the player needs to eat and sleep, and where the total time to finish the game is limited. (RogueBasin)
• The FAQ from August 1995 announces a “SuperVGA game in the same genre” as the next project. It never appeared. (FAQ)

What's unique

• Science fiction, not swords and sorcery. Berries replace potions, tech devices replace wands and scrolls: a Fusion Rifle, a Slinky, a Veg-O-Matic, a Kevorkian Machine. You must figure a device out before you can use it.
• Two random mutations, one physical (Quills, Tentacles, Laser Generation…) and one mental (Cryogenics, Hypnosis, Life Leech…), used with p and m, most on a cooldown of rounds.
• An outdoor world. The main map is a valley; each square opens into a local region. Castles and lairs are the dungeons, and since 1.1 the game remembers their levels.
• A clock. Game time runs in hours and days, you tire and must sleep (Z), and finishing fast earns an experience bonus at the end.
• Six stats including Radiation Resistance and Mental Resistance, and radiation zones on the map.
• Three difficulties: normal, somewhat easy, easy, with separate Halls of the Dead.

Code dive

• Language: Microsoft QuickBASIC 4.5, eight modules A1.BAS–A8.BAS (about 14,600 lines) linked with a C helper library ALPCLIB.C (about 900 lines, Microsoft QuickC 2.5) for the screen, the dice and the map generator. All integer maths: DEFINT A-Z.
• Environment: MS-DOS, 640K, 80×25 colour text mode written straight into video memory at segment B800, with eight video pages for the map, the menus and the help. To fit on one 3.5" floppy, every message lives in binary string files (alphaman.1….6) addressed by offset and length.
• Data: creatures are records in a 50-byte file (ALPHA.CRE), castle layouts in ALPHA.CAS, item tables in ALPHA.GDY. Saves are NAME.ALF plus a .sav and the remembered castle levels.
• This port: the same QuickBASIC, merged into one source and built natively with QB64-PE, and for the browser compiled by FreeBASIC (its QuickBASIC dialect) to C and then by Emscripten to WebAssembly, with a small DOS text-mode console written for it. Source: memmaker/alphaman.

Stats

Counts from ALPHA.DEC (nphysmut, nmentmut, ncreat…, nberry, nssd…) and ITEMLIST.

Manual

The game shipped with a readme rather than a manual: README.TXT (stats, mutations, items, keys, the shareware terms). Two more texts by the author, both published with the source: the FAQ (release history, all mutations, the quest) and the Spoilers, once reserved for registered users (every berry, device and creature, and the six castles). In the game, ? opens the help.

Getting started

1. Open the game, type a name, pick a difficulty (2 is the easy one). The first run asks you to name the “wimpy monster”; any name and letter will do.
2. Read your two mutations on the right. Use them with p (physical) and m (mental).
3. Move with the arrow keys or the numeric keypad (diagonals: Home, End, PgUp, PgDn). Walk onto items to pick them up, into creatures to attack. x explores on its own.
4. Press Enter for the menu of all commands, i for your possessions, e to eat, f to figure out a device, u to use one.
5. Find a castle or a lair entrance and press < on it. Sleep (Z) when tired, S saves. The full key list is in the in-game guide.

Help

The author's spoilers file is the walkthrough: section 6 tells you castle by castle what to fetch and how. Rules of thumb from it and the FAQ:

• Visit the five castles in any order; the tape recorders' suggestions are not binding. A character with Heightened Vision can skip the Munsters.
• Drop your belongings before fighting Gilligan (he breaks things), and don't kill the Grinch: throw the Roast Beast.
• Wait until “very hungry” before eating. Throw the exploding and blinding berries; eat the rest when you are safe.
• Tech items don't work on the Grinch's level, so hoard berries on the way: invisibility, fright, speed, a Detox.
• More: RogueBasin on Alphaman, and the 1995 threads on rec.games.roguelike.misc.

Cheats

• The author's name. Call your character Jeffrey Olson and start with 18 in every stat and good gear (see Trivia).
• Save editors. The source repository ships ITEMS.EXE and MUTAT.EXE, DOS tools that add devices and berries or change the stats and mutations in a saved game. Not part of the web build.
• No wizard mode in the game itself; the debug snippets in ALPHA.DBG are commented out.
• Save scumming works in the browser: Export save before a castle, Import save if it goes wrong.