It’s been a long time since we talked about a video game, and it’s been a really long time since we talked about one of those classic point-and-click games from the nineties. 1 Harvester is a horror game from 1996, which combines standard point-and-click scenes with the full-motion video segments that were all the rage in the early nineties. It’s supposedly quite violent and it’s supposedly quite bad, but I didn’t bother to find out. I just looked at the chess scene.
The concept of the game is that a teenager wakes up in a place he doesn’t know and gets in the web of a strange sect, the machinations of which bring him in highly dangerous situations — but it’s all fine, because they also bring him opposite a chess master.
The chess master offers the player a choice: either fight him to death or solve his chess problem: “Mate me and you may pass” is his offer. 2 Obviously, the player happily agrees to see the chess problem: 3
As you see, the chess master doesn’t know how chess works and he has set up the board wrongly. Apart from that, the problems makes a surprising amount of sense. It’s very easy, but there is indeed a single way for white to mate black; not just in three moves but in any amount of moves.
A completely valid and economic mate in three is such a baffling rarity on this blog that I immediately assumed the game’s developers took a problem from some collection, but maybe they didn’t, The database I use for searching chess problems has quite a few that have this exact material, but not this one. Does any of my readers perhaps know the origin of this puzzle? Was it really original? Should a new mate-in-three be added to the above database with first publication in Harvester, the video game?
Realism: 4/5 What should I give here? I can’t really see this position arising in a game, but it is very realistic as a problem.
Probable winner: White may pass.4
1. [Even though the end goal isn’t clear, you could argue that the whole worldwide web is also a point-and-click game from the nineties.] ↩
2. [I guess he’s lonely.] ↩
3. [They also agree happily to see the diagram editor.] ↩
4. [Possibly over a graveyard.] ↩