"Put bag in bottle"

In Leisure Suit Larry 2, an oversight in the game's vocab makes it so that mere "put bag in bottle" doesn't work... supposedly. From the Leisure Suit Larry Collection's readme:

When you reach the top of the volcano at the end of the game, be sure to include the word "the" in your commands, such as "put THE bag in THE bottle" or "drop THE bottle in THE crevice." A subtle bug slipped into Larry 2 just before it shipped. This eliminates it.

Is there any truth to this? Let's find out.

The most common version of the game (the one included in collections) is 1.200 (January 11, 1989). It's not the absolute newest version (the Amiga port is), but that's a subject for another post.

"The" is just an article, so I think the parser just ignores it. None of the said specs in rm82:handleEvent use it.
"Put" is an imperative verb.
"Bag" is both a noun and an imperative verb.
"Airsick" is a qualifying adjective, but it only appears as an optional said spec for the inventory object, never in rm82.
"Bottle" and "Rejuvenator" are both acceptable nouns.

To find out once and for all, I teleported to room 82 (which automatically gives you the needed items if debugging), and input "put bag in bottle"...
"This area is not conducive to bombing. Try again somewhere else."
I typed "drop bottle in crevice", "put bottle in bag"... same result!
So I got closer to the crevice, then did everything needed to open the elevator doors using only the shortest "verb/noun" commands. All with no parser-related issues.
So we know that the game recognizes all of these possible commands. There appears to be no bug here.

So my first theory is that the bug WAS in the game initially, but was fixed in later releases. To conclusively find out, I tried this whole process with the earliest released version, 1.000.011.

The said specs are exactly the same as in the newer version; even "bag" is both a noun and imperative verb.
Starting the game, teleporting to room 82, trying the parser...
And guess what? It works without error.

The final conclusion here is that, if there was a bug, it was fixed BEFORE shipping, and Al Lowe (or whoever wrote the collection's readme) didn't know this. So thankfully, this myth is busted.
 
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