Nine cases playable, all lint clean, all verified end-to-end.
A records-modernisation project puts sixty-seven years of paper through a
scanner, and Frank Drebin Jr becomes the first person ever to read one of his
grandfather's reports. Page nine of the Meridian Street file sets out the
survey, the recommendation, the transfer and both signatures, in the same flat
careful voice as everything else. He put it all in. He put all of it in. Page
ten is the property schedule, because there was never going to be an
explanation — to the man who typed it there was nothing there to explain.
The palette drifts backwards through the case: room 0 is Act III cold blue, the
basement is nearly all grey, the last rooms are 1958 monochrome, and every 1958
prop is generated mono so it reads as lit by a different decade — the owl trick
from Case Ten extended across a whole case. Ninety-one-year-old Stanley
Kowalczyk, the rookie from Act Zero, is the only warm-coloured thing in it,
because he is the last living link and he has had his commendation on a wall for
sixty-seven years, next to a note telling a night clerk to be at his sister's.
Under the third floorboard at 1114 Delaware: nineteen tins, 1939 to 1958, every
one full, not one ever opened, with an inventory on top in a flat careful hand
headed PROPERTY — NOT YET SUBMITTED. He never spent any of it. It was never for
anything.
Jr does the only thing a Drebin can do with a true fact. Eleven pages, every
sentence true, submitted at 3:14 in the morning — and the portal thanks him and
asks him to rate his experience with the records modernisation portal today. He
rates it honestly, because he is constitutionally incapable of anything else,
and leaves a four-hundred-word comment, and nobody reads it. The cycle is the
punchline and the punchline is the tragedy.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eight cases playable, all lint clean, all verified end-to-end.
John asked what 1950s bumbling criminals Drebin Sr could look good against.
Clouseau is the wrong shape twice — 1963, and a bumbling detective rather than a
criminal. The right seam is the Ealing comedies: The Ladykillers (1955) and The
Lavender Hill Mob (1951). Done as archetype parody, never character import,
which is exactly what ZAZ did to M Squad — take the form, not the people — and
which lets the gang be tuned to make Sr's twist land.
Five lodgers calling themselves a barbershop quartet, and in eleven weeks nobody
in that house has raised the arithmetic. A mastermind who is nought for eleven
and blames personnel every time. Muscle brought for the violence who offers you
an aniseed ball. A driver who cannot drive and came with the goggles. A
safecracker who is the best in the state and has been deaf since 1943, and has
been asking about that since August. An inside man who works at a different
company on a different street and has raised it four times.
The twist: they tunnel eleven feet through Victorian brick for eleven weeks to
reach a vault Frank Drebin Sr emptied five weeks earlier — legitimately, on his
own written recommendation, signing the transfer manifest at both ends. Arrested
inside an empty room. The paper calls it the finest detective work in the city
in twenty years and every word of it is true. This is why he has never been
caught: the visible criminals are loud and his own crimes are silent.
The case is actually cracked by a seventy-nine-year-old landlady who took a bus
to the police station to complain about the noise, and she never learns it.
New lint rule, from a real 10-point loss here: two DIFFERENT objects awarding
points for setting the same flag — points fire on the false->true flip, so
whichever runs second silently pays nothing and max_score goes unreachable. Same
object paying via `use` or its own dialogue is fine; those are alternatives.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
John corrected the family tree and the correction is better than what I had.
Leslie Nielsen's character is plain Frank Drebin; the 2025 film makes Neeson
"Jr", which retroactively makes Nielsen the father without ever calling him Sr.
So Frank Drebin Sr is now a THIRD Drebin one generation further back — 1958,
entirely ours, no canon to violate. Terminology corrected across all three docs.
The twist, per John's "maybe he is really a criminal": he is the most prolific
criminal in the city's history, he is also a decorated homicide detective, and
he has never once lied about any of it. Not corruption — corruption requires
noticing. He is a Drebin: totally literal, totally sincere. He robs the payroll,
then investigates it diligently and files an immaculate report stating what he
did, because the form asks what happened and he answers the form. Nobody has
ever caught him because nobody reads the reports. Best clearance rate in the
division.
The mechanic: the score is the cover-up. Played completely straight, no jokes in
the system text — every scoring action is correct procedure that destroys the
evidence against him. Lifting a latent removes it from the metal. Section 9
requires the spoiled card be incinerated, witnessed. The typed report supersedes
the rookie's notes and the Captain signs it unread. You reach 100/100 in room
three; the final room is worth nothing, because you have already been paid in
full for the cover-up.
He is also the Gremlin — the chickens on the Captain's desk come from the coop
he built in 1951, and in seven years nobody has said the word out loud, so it
has never occurred to him that anybody wondered.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Act I, monochrome. Five rooms, 100 points, verified at 100/100 with four
verified deaths.
Built out of John's Police Quest material. PQ1's famous 8-bit integer underflow
is not an easter egg here, it is the central puzzle: Frank signs for a $40
operational float clipped to a note reading DO NOT EXCEED YOUR FLOAT, the back
room costs $2,500, and exceeding the float by one dollar wraps the department
ledger's eight-bit field to 255 — the terminal appends the cents column and
authorises $2,550.00. He keeps drinking to 132 because it will not do to stop
suddenly. Accounts raise it in March; it goes to a hearing.
PQ1's Gremlin runs through the whole case and is never resolved: chickens on the
Captain's desk, on Al's shoulder, on the murdered guest star, and one in the
winning freeze-frame. Nobody has said the word "chicken" out loud in eleven
years. No file was ever opened.
Then the stage: six memorised jokes, in order, and every "improvise" option is
fatal — plus a full glass on a stool three feet from the microphone, which is
how Danny Cavanaugh died and which you must not touch.
Linter gained the rule that actually caused this session's bug: MRPGI's
obj_matches is a BIDIRECTIONAL substring test over name AND synonyms, and
match_obj takes the first hit in array order, so an earlier object can make a
later one unreachable by its own name. `talk barman` was addressing `clubbar`.
It found two more: `sideboard` swallowing `cardtable`, and `bouncer` swallowing
`bunkerdoor` — the last of which shipped broken in Case Ten. All six cases lint
clean and all six still win.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Case Eight — The Smell of Fear (1991). Act II, full colour. Five rooms, 100
points, verified at 100/100 with two verified deaths.
The puzzle is identification: Meinheimer has an eidetic memory, so the double
cannot be caught out on a fact — he can be caught out on a manner. Ask him two
questions and he answers "about four hundred", "roughly", "give or take", and a
man who remembers everything never says roughly. The catch is gated on having
heard the approximations, so the player has to earn it. Accusing him without
that is a death. Also in: the Blue Note, the SWAT tank through the wall into the
zoo (which arms the lion that kills Hapsburg two rooms later), the mariachi
infiltration, and a nuclear device disarmed by tripping over its power cable.
tools/lint.py: three of the four bugs that cost real time here were the same
class, and I walked into sets_flag-on-a-takeable twice — once in Case Ten, then
again in Case Eight after documenting it. So the rules are a linter now, not a
paragraph. It caught two live instances of that trap (case-08 blueprint,
case-10 wig) and a scoring mismatch on the first run. All five cases lint clean
and all five still win.
play.sh is now a case picker: bare invocation lists the cases and asks, or pass
a number.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Act I, monochrome. Five rooms, 100 points, verified end-to-end at 100/100 on
the first pass, plus three verified Sierra deaths.
Frank goes under as fight manager "Frank Deacon" to break a fight-fixing racket.
The procedure gag from the bible finally has teeth: Form 22-B, the four-page
application for an authorised cover identity, is filed in Act 1 by a clerk in
Sacramento who never learns anything about it — and that form is the only thing
standing between Frank and a very short career. At the promoter's licence check
the "I'm licensed" reply is gated on having filed it; skip the form and the
single visible option is the fatal one. Bureaucracy as the thing that saves you
is the exact inversion the campaign is built on.
Act I cases now share a sprite set: 18 PNGs copied from case-01, 14 new ones
generated. tools/sprites.py skips keys beginning with "_" so sprites.json can
carry a note about which sprites are shared.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Act III, cold-palette EGA. Six rooms, 100 points, verified end-to-end
headlessly at 100/100 with the win firing.
The homage John asked for is a register, not a costume. Nielsen played Drebin Sr
oblivious — the joke was he never noticed. Neeson plays Jr sincere: he notices
everything and means all of it, so his text is written straight and often
genuinely moving, and the comedy is what it turns out to be about. He gives a
Taken speech about his particular set of skills, chief among them paperwork. He
takes four armed robbers in eleven seconds dressed as a schoolgirl with his back
to the actual crime. Cane gets the same sincerity back at him from the wrong
face.
The three-era payoff pays off: the owl sprite is generated monochrome and placed
in a full-colour room, so Frank Drebin Sr is visibly lit by a different decade
than everything around him. The palette rule from DESIGN §2 doing the emotional
work at the climax.
Planned cases 10 and 11 merged into one folder — same film, same cast, no
duplicated sprite set, and the owl payoff lands in the same case as its setup.
Third authoring trap documented: sets_flag fires on use, never on take (points
does both). A takeable item silently failed to set its flag and the gate it fed
never opened; gate on `needs`, which checks inventory, instead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Act II, full colour EGA. Six rooms, 100 points, verified end-to-end headlessly
at 100/100 with the win firing, plus two authored Sierra deaths.
The mechanic: Drebin is fired, so he has no power to search anyone — but a home
plate umpire can crouch beside a professional athlete, take his bat off him and
inspect his equipment, and nobody in a stadium of sixty thousand thinks twice.
So every frisk needs an umpire-legitimate pretext, in order: brush the plate,
inspect the mitt, check the bat for pine tar, then Number 44. Announcing
yourself as police is right there, and correct, and fatal.
Matching inversion at the reception: tackling a head of state is correct
procedure, it ends your career, and being fired is the only way to progress.
Two authoring traps found and documented for future cases:
- Object names must not be prefixes of each other — 'ludwigdesk' shadowed
'ludwig' in the loose parser match, so 'talk ludwig' addressed the furniture.
- Flag-gated edge exits need walkable floor into the trigger zone (y<=21 for
north); the upper deck sat behind a painted Wall band and was unreachable on
foot. Walk every exit to verify — goto_room hides this.
tools/sprites.py now retries farm 429/401 with backoff (that status is the
guest concurrency cap, not auth) and honours MB_POOL.
LoRA finding recorded in DESIGN.md §9: the farm's style LoRAs are FLUX.1-dev
architecture and are a silent no-op on the only ungated model, and the pixel
look comes from the nearest-neighbour downscale anyway, not the model.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A Sierra-style adventure in the Police Squad!/Naked Gun universe, on MRPGI —
which reimplements AGI, the engine Sierra shipped Police Quest on.
The premise: Police Quest's pedantic procedure x Police Squad!'s farce. The
game grades you on correct procedure with a straight face, and the reward for
perfect procedure is catastrophe anyway. Per John, the famous Police Quest II
bugs are shipped deliberately as canon gags.
- RESEARCH.md — all six Police Squad! episodes, all four films (incl. Neeson's
Frank Drebin Jr, 2025), the recurring cast, and the ZAZ comedy grammar.
- DESIGN.md — the joke engine, the two Drebins across three eras (Drebin Sr's
1982 cases render in a monochrome EGA subset for the 1950s M Squad look),
an eleven-case campaign, and the PQ2 glitch-to-feature table.
- cases/case-01-substantial-gift — playable. Five rooms, 100 points, full win
path verified headlessly at 95/100 plus four authored Sierra deaths.
Procedure gates, dusting for latents, and Miranda rights in the correct
order are all pure JSON; no engine features were invented for it.
- tools/sprites.py — all 24 sprites generated locally on MODELBEAST
(flux_local -> bg_remove_local -> trim/downscale), reproducible by seed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
