Some secrets truly stand the test of time.
There’s plenty of nostalgia around Apogee Software, the shareware publishers of classic platformers and action-adventures like Biomenace, Rise of the Triad, Wacky Wheels and Wolfenstein 3D. Most of those games have been well and truly beaten by the internet, but one of Apogee’s first creations still has some mysteries left.
Supernova was a text adventure released by Apogee in 1987, two years after the company’s founding. It was a text adventure co-written by Scott Miller and Terry Nagy, starring a miner in a remote part of space. Apogee was still releasing games as oldschool shareware titles back then — send us some money to “register” the game, in other words. But after discovering that most people played the game without paying to register, the company developed the episodic shareware model which Apogee would become famous for.
Supernova is a fairly rudimentary text adventure, lacking the visual stylings of something like Shogun or the better writing and design in games like Zork. The official instructions, which you can still read through the freeware file on the 3D Realms site, lists all the verbs and adverbs that you need to know to perform any action. “COMMANDS or VERBS – shows a two screen list of possible commands,” the readme says.
So maybe it’s not surprising that the game still has a secret ending, 32 years after it was released. The official Apogee Software account mentioned that the shortcut, which allows players to skip from the beginning of the game to the end Far Cry-style (but almost two decades before Far Cry did it), had gone unsolved.
SuperNova was developed 32 years ago by Apogee Software (Productions) 😉 and still no one has ever discovered the super secret short cut to the end of the game from the beginning of the game. Forget the aardwolf secret, if you really want to make your mark solve this secret!
— Apogee Software (@ApogeeSoftware) June 26, 2019
The hint has to do with a “Special Cheat” that’s mentioned in the fan-written walkthrough. The walkthrough mentions a way to bypass a good chunk of the gameplay — so I won’t mention it here, but you can Google it if you want — but the actual secret ending is related to that pathway. Fans have worked out half of the solution already, so it’s only a matter of time before Supanova‘s final puzzle is unravelled.
Question is: what other secrets lie in the Apogee vault? (Please say Biomenace has a few. I’d love to replay that game.)
Update: So Apogee has confirmed that the final ending has been solved by Leland Kirk on Twitter. If you want to find the solution for yourself, head no further, but otherwise, this is what the mystery was.
The first part was a shortcut at the beginning of the game that wasn’t a spoiler as such. You buy a beer at the start of Supernova, drink the beer, leave the bar, and continue heading west — 41 times! — until you discover something unusual:
That shortcut gets you directly to the ice planet and spaceship, where a robot basically scans (cleans?) you and then allows you to put on a spaceship suit. From there it’s a matter of resolving a reactor regulator room puzzle, which Apogee says Kirk was the first to do:
Guess I’ll get back to work!
Does the ending they’re referring to happen to be different than the reactor regulator room puzzle one?— Leland Kirk (@AskLelandKirk) July 2, 2019
You can read the rest of the walkthrough here. The game’s also playable in a browser here, if you’re keen.
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