Most soap operas take a while to work their way up to murder, but EastEnders kicks off with it from the very first scene, airing February 1985 on BBC One.
A door gets kicked in; the characters Arthur Fowler, Ali Osman and Den Watts find the “cantankerous old man” Reg (who had been missing a few days) nearly dead. It is revealed later another character attacked him trying to steal his old war medals. (Reg dies. Conversation reveals Reg was too much of a “nasty old drunk” for people to care.)
I would say “this sets a tone that would continue its whole run” but it’s a still-running soap with over 7400 episodes (as of this writing) so I can’t declare anything constant, but it did get a reputation as being gritty and topical. It was designed by Julia Smith and Tony Holland (previously of the police procedural Z-Cars) with the intent of being a “younger” competitor to ITV’s Coronation Street (first launched 1960). It was squarely designed as working-class and diverse.
By the mid-80s all sorts of British TV was getting adapted into games, like The Young Ones and Minder. In 1986, multiple companies were interested in EastEnders. The contract was won by the Welsh company Macsen.
It is having to work very closely with EastEnders — seen by nearly 20 million people each week — to get the correct amounts of excitement and authenticity. The best-loved soap in Britain has an almost religious effect on many fans and a poor game simply won’t be accepted, it seems.
The co-owners, Moelwen Gywndaff and Edryd Gywndaff, explained that they were “co-operating very closely with the BBC” and that “all the life is there, and if you get away from that, then you are getting away from the essence of EastEnders.”
Out by the end of 1986. Cover via Mobygames. The “PART I – THE ARCADE GAME” suggests they intended an adventure game for part II. I could see an EastEnders version of Urban Upstart working out.
I’m not clear what the original intent was with “close co-operation” — this was printed in the September version of Bang Weekly before work started — but it didn’t land that way. The production was rushed. The actual creation was done by the trio of Anthony Roberts, Paul Towers, Derek Laws under the label of Towers Software; Anthony Roberts himself explains:
I was part of a 2 main programming team that brought this Wonderful game to the Spectrum (and C64, although that one never made it to production!). We were holed up in a Welsh Hotel for 3 weeks prior to Christmas, after being commisioned by Macsen to produce this game from scratch. I have no idea where the music came from, it was given to us as a module we just called into as required. Macsen did indeed go bust, just as the game was released, and we never received a penny for our efforts!
For what its worth, if you could see past the awful graphics, (and lack of joystick control!!!), as a strategy game it was oddly captivating.
The music that was handed off was by Julie Dunn (who was called David Dunn at the time). She made other well-regarded music from the day; the game I recognized just browsing her work was Finders Keepers.
If you didn’t see the warning signs yet: EastEnders the video game is widely considered very bad, being a cryptic assortment of mini-games with barely any connection to the show. The video I’m linking below is titled Possibly the Worst Game Ever.
So how did Macsen get the contract for a highly-regarded show in the first place? The Bang article claims that “its track record of previous licenses” are what counted: games based on the TV game shows Blockbusters, Bullseye, Countdown, and Treasure Hunt.
The C64 ports of Blockbusters (and the “Gold Run” spinoff) are both by today’s author, Huw Ford. It is unclear if he was ever engaged to work on EastEnders (maybe he was going to do the never-made C64 port before everything imploded?). Given he worked on a 1985 game show conversion with a different company he had probably parted ways with them already, which may have been for the best: by the middle of 1987 Macsen was sunk with a debt of 350,000 pounds.
Prior to his game show work he launched his own label in 1983, HFS Software; he was 21 years old.
Confusingly, the name of the company shifted (with the same address) to WordLight and to Omen, not in any particular sequence; the Dragon 32 cover of Land of Tezrel uses both company names simultaneously.
Via World of Dragon.
Land of Tezrel landed on C64, VIC-20, Dragon, and BBC Micro, with the C64/VIC-20 versions by Ford only, the Dragon port by Anthony Mansell, and the BBC port by Gavin Cradle. Neither of the people porting have any other credits, although it is possible Mansell worked directly for Dragon Data; as Ford explains, while he was creating his games he “only lived a few miles away” from the factory (in Wales) and he was able to talk to the developers.
I went with the VIC-20 version I have (a later OMEN branded one) just because it felt like the original platform. Through discoveries I made later this turned out to be clearly the case; additionally, even though I have the (earlier-published) HFS version for C64 and the (later-published) OMEN version for VIC-20, I can say the VIC-20 version just slapped on a new title screen and really represents the earlier version of the game. I’ll get into that later.
The early ad called this “AN UNUSUAL ADVENTURE” and while it doesn’t seem like it right away — your goal is to gallivant around a standard fantasy world, find the Magic Ring of VORDA, and escape — I pretty quickly caught on to what the author meant. The entire game is outdoors on a 10 by 10 grid (just a touch larger than HOBBIT) but also has the player’s original position and most object positions randomized. The actual function of the objects stays consistent but the random elements are enough to toss this into adventure-roguelike territory. The closest comparison I can think of is Dungeon from Andrew Colin’s Introduction to BASIC; while there are major enough differences it could be coincidental, it’s possible Ford was referring to the guide while making this game. The other comparable game is Conquest of Memory Alpha with its own grid structure and randomness (a less likely crossover since that was a TRS-80 game).
The above screen comes from one of my starts. The start location is random with the exception of starting on the south side of the map (there’s a river dividing the north and south portions).
Stars mark important spots. It is indeed “dessert” and not “desert”.
We’ve seen a similar region division idea elsewhere (like with Reality Ends; one thing that helps this game along is occasionally describing when there’s an adjacent region, giving specific places more flavor.
Items (spread at random) include a sword, an “oracle box”, and a wand. One room has a path across the river which suggests you need to get a cape from a dragon to pass by. I never did find the cape.
The reason I didn’t find the cape was the wandering enemies that you can find. The dwarf (seen above) simply tries to swipe objects; I was holding a sword, I tried KILL DWARF, and it worked. I no longer had to worry about the dwarf swiping things.
At least the game clarifies it’s an EVIL dwarf, unlike the one in Twin Kingdom Valley which seemed to be peaceful that I left alone.
In addition to the dwarf, there’s a MONSTER and a DRAGON that show up. In both cases they will magic you away to another place unless you either type RUN (a command you can get by typing HELP during the scene) or by killing them. Unfortunately, at this stage in the game I wasn’t sure how to kill them; despite KILL DWARF working, when I tried it on either enemy the game didn’t understand my command, so I had to suffer getting teleported instead.
However: the teleporting isn’t bad! The teleport can land you anywhere on the map, including on the north side, so even though I didn’t find the cape to get over the river, I didn’t need it because I could just jump over by teleport instead. Before exploring that side, two other elements on the south side to note.
The first is a canyon (lower left corner) where at the end there seem to consistently be some KEYS. I say “seem to” because the randomness seems a little glitchy in this game.
Sometimes (but not on every game) a wizard would block the way in the canyon. The wizard asks if you have a fish to give. If you say NO (without a fish) he simply refuses you to pass; if you say YES (with no fish) he gets angry and teleports you away. On my winning run I didn’t see the wizard so I didn’t need to deal with the fish, but it’s simply a red fish (not a red herring) randomly placed elsewhere on the map the wizard wants.
The wizard showed up in most of my attempts, so I’m not sure why he was sometimes absent.
There’s additionally, in the mountains, a room with a waterfall. Saying the word VORDA teleports you there. (Usually: I did have the word refuse to work sometimes, and just like the wizard not showing up, I’m not clear why.)
We’ll return here later.
With that taken care of, let’s teleport to the north side of the map.
I had the sword. The I DON,T UNDERSTAND was a result of me trying to KILL MONSTER.
There’s a “ruined castle” on the east side with a LITTLE OLD MAN. The game says if you give the man some food he will give you a hint where the ring (the main quest for the game) is.
The food was nearby; he just says it’s in the Snow Queen’s Castle, which is not terribly helpful because after mapping things out that’s clearly the only other important thing where something might be hiding.
There are two sets of keys you need to open the gate. One is at the end of the canyon (I think always) and the other is randomly placed. With both you can OPEN GATE. This is near the end of the game but I was getting sent away by the GUARDIAN OF THE GATE. KILL GUARDIAN was not doing any good.
After numerous frustrating attempts (including bring the wand over and trying to make that work) I checked the walkthrough, only to find out that it was for the C64 version and has a significantly different series of events, and it tells you to KILL GUARDIAN here (the exact thing that wasn’t working). I asked gschmidl for some help and he extracted a text file with the source code.
932 ifmid$(in$,u,3)=”use”ormid$(in$,u,4)=”kill”ormid$(in$,u,4)=”figh”then950
933 ifmid$(in$,u,3)=”run”then995
934 ifmid$(in$,u,3)=”hel”thenprint”{clr}if you are unarmed{down} ‘run'{down}”:u=256:nextu:goto930
935 nextu
936 print”{clr}{down}i don,t understand”
937 print”{down}and the”:printo9$(cq):print”has cast his spell.”:goto987
950 foru=1tolen(in$)
951 ifmid$(in$,u,4)=”wand”andwa=1andys>msthen22100
952 ifmid$(in$,u,4)=”wand”andwa=1andys<msthen22000
953 ifmid$(in$,u,5)="sword"then22200
I’m not quite sure why KILL DWARF worked, but after studying things over I realized the game wanted either USE SWORD or KILL SWORD. This isn’t a guaranteed win but at least the game now understood me.
With the RNG going my way, the guardian died and I was able to claim the ring.
Not quite the end, though! The game now wants you to find a wardrobe and escape (I assume this is Narnia-adjacent). Trying out VORDA which warps back to the waterfall reveals the wardrobe right away. OPEN WARDROBE reveals one last monster fight and then victory.
Regarding the C64 version, the sword is no longer out in the open: you have to jump into a cave to find it. The dragon also is no longer in a random place, and you need to SMASH a STALAGMITE to reach the lair if you want to claim the cape (still optional because of teleportation, though). Also oddly, the north side of the map now has a bit more structure to it; the second pair of keys are now consistently placed at a dead end, and the Snow Queen Castle becomes actual rooms rather than something you interact with indirectly while outside.
The author’s original vision seemed to match more closely with Colin’s Dungeon (pure RNG item placement, only three items can be held in inventory at a time, lots of random teleports) but with some changes to reduce the pure-slot-machine aspect in the initial VIC-20 version, and even more changes after to create the C64 version. The improvements did help, even though this is just an “afternoon game” (or at least it would be, had I not had the parser trouble with USE SWORD). I also thought the “region” system worked in the tight restrictions the author had in terms of content; the description of adjacent regions plus a few extra rooms were enough to keep the landscape from being flavorless.
This is a “street lamp” in the dark forest on the north side. In the VIC-20 version you can RUB LAMP and get a message about nothing happening; the C64 version has a joke about a genie coming out and falling over dead.
Due to the heavy randomization, this game also enters the rare pantheon of “early text adventures that reflected later careers”; Huw Ford eventually went on from writing game show conversions to work on gambling machine software, and the CEO of his most recent company calls him a “Jedi coder” who “knows every computer language” in an interview.
I’ve finished the game; I was nearly at the end. My previous posts are needed for context.
From the Microbee Software Preservation Project.
I had left off on an apparent combination lock with four symbols, where you had to enter an “input” as a string of numbers. I had tried every permutation 1234, 2341, 4231, etc. with no luck.
I decided after enough further struggle that I must be missing an item, so I re-checked every location and item in case some of the ones that were previously red herrings were not (the locked chest at the rope, a shield on a wall, the swamp that kills you, a random broken dagger, etc.) One of those items turned out to be the key, but I wasn’t able to reach a solution by thinking from that direction.
What I did next was flip from thinking about nouns to thinking about verbs. This is something that I’ve written about long ago with mainframe Zork, although in that case I was thinking of simply finding which verbs work (which eventually changed into my “common verbs” chart). I didn’t need a chart in this game because it provides all the verbs from the start.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to see what the verbs do! Sometimes they have a very specific failure response. I took a random tree near the castle and tried each verb in sequence; I was told after LEVER TREE that I needed the pick to do that (the broken pick from the start)!
With the pick in hand tying LEVER TREE gets a “nothing happens” response, but that means — especially given the custom-coding to check if you have the pick — that it must work elsewhere! I went through every item in the game again trying LEVER THING, finally hitting upon LEVER SHIELD.
I see what’s going on now with it — you’re trying to yank the shield off the wall — but that’s never the language I would normally use, and while I’m fairly sure I’ve seen LEVER as a verb somewhere else it’s rather rare.
The niche has a scroll which gives the combination I was seeking. There are repeats, which indicates a brute force method with just the digits 1 through 4 would have worked (but that would have been painful, and of course it’s better to solve the author-intended way).
4411 from the scroll.
There was nothing deep and/or significant here in the general content, and barring the two obscure secrets (the cauldron and the shield) there was nothing elaborate as far as puzzles go, but the art gave a pleasant buzz to the experience and easy is better than too hard (and despite that, this ended up going to three posts). There’s still two more games from the same author which we’ll eventually get to so hopefully Chris Norman will show up one day to explain the process.
The mini-map really is novel: we’ve seen a few but very few, and none that have a visualization quite like we’ve seen here. Morpheus Kitami suggested that some games of the 90s may have been influenced by this series, although the Microbee itself was obscure enough it’d have to be a circuitous route if that’s the case. Still, an idea come up with independently and not repeated can be just as interesting as one that influenced the industry. The game does get a mention in a 1984 Swedish magazine; for reasons I’ll save for another time the Microbee did manage to make inroads in Sweden.
Interestingly enough, the review complains about how the game applies a room and description after every command, and this can be irritating when using a modem. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I’m guessing for remote use the top part of the screen is sent after all commands (because sometimes that’s the only thing that changes). The Microbee developed strong network capabilities early (see Owen Hill’s background in telecom) but I don’t know the exact configuration.
Coming up: I’ve got a few things cooking, and I’m not sure what the order will be (there may even be another game tossed in the middle). One of them laterally involves a famous British TV show, one of them involves a Japanese conversion of a movie (produced jointly by companies in South Africa and Botswana), and one of them involves an Apple II game by two unexpected authors.
Eye of Min, as I previously mentioned, was part of a trilogy, the second and third games being The Sabre of Sultar and The Temple of Azragor respectively. They were originally sold separately. Clipping an excerpt from a 1983 catalog:
An adventure program featuring a graphic map that is updated as progress. in your search of the eye. When you have solved this excellent mystery, the next in the series is waiting, it is called “SABRE”.
Because of this, I can give you the “cover art” for Eye of Min, scan from the Microbee Software Preservation Project, which I find fascinating, font like a old-school zine:
Or maybe fliers for an unlicensed heavy metal concert.
I’m not done, but what I’m stuck on is potentially a “self-contained” puzzle so I don’t want to start prodding at the walkthrough (or the source code in BASIC) yet. I suspect I am very close to the end otherwise.
So last time I was stuck with a wand I couldn’t use (the solution will come up naturally later), a cave that only had 8 trees and nothing else, a well that I couldn’t enter without dying. Oh, and there were bandits, but that part was easy.
Just needed to actually hit them with a sword rather than a random item.
Nothing else seemed promising except the potential for something hidden. I had already tried PUSH and PULL on the bookcases but I went ahead and tried it on everything. Finally, I hit paydirt on the last item I hadn’t tested yet:
To be fair, I was thinking of the cauldron as a “utility” item to maybe mix a potion or two later (it still could apply for that later, but it’s now less likely). Heading north into the newly-found secret passage required lighting a candle or torch. This passage leads to a locked door. Trying to UNLOCK DOOR prompted me with what item. The “broken pick” at the start I figured was a red herring so I tried out the wand, and somehow that worked.
Not sure what I’m doing to invoke the magic. Or maybe it isn’t magic at all, and just applying the fact it’s a big metal stick.
Further in was a room with a locked chest and a rope; neither the wand nor the broken pick works this time on the chest. (There is a FIX command, but it seems to do nothing with the pick, so unless there’s a tool somewhere to allow repair I believe the pick is a red herring.)
At least I was able to get the rope. I assume the chest gets unlocked later.
I took the rope over to the well and did TIE ROPE; the game didn’t understand that. It wants TIE WELL.
This turns out to be a “knowledge puzzle”. One of the norms of these games that it helps to know is “will you find random things in certain places that are clues to puzzles”; an escape room game from the Flash era of course will, but at this time period it wasn’t common, and especially not common for the code to be “indirect” (example: as opposed to the code just written on a paper, you see five circles followed by three circles somewhere, meaning a lock gets opened by 53).
If you PUSH KNOB the game will prompt you with which one. Most of the knobs will kill you.
However, based on the fact the dead-end cave with no items had 8 trees, the answer to the puzzle here is 8. Pressing that knob specifically will open the next passage. I admit I solved this by brute force and only worked out what it was meaning after the fact. (Escape room logic has been done before in this era, but it isn’t common!) I also found out after the fact that the number of trees in the cave changes (randomization of a detail like that tends to be another clue that something is used for a knowledge puzzle).
Inside is what I assume is yet another knowledge puzzle.
If you examine the panel there are plates, and you can push the plates. It asks you to push them as a sequence.
Which order. e.g.2143.
Entering the wrong code is death.
The room fills with poisonous gas.
I had a couple theories having to do with smallest-to-largest or largest-to-smallest but I ended up (via save states) brute-forcing all 24 permutations of 1234. None of them worked. It turns out any number sequence is possible, so it might be you need 2123 or the like. I’ve combed over the rest of the game and haven’t seen anything resembling a clue (or at least, one I can share with you) but I figure I’d toss one this out here to you, the readers, before I break down and check spoilers. (If someone does check spoilers, all I really want to know is if this is a self-contained puzzle, or if I’m missing a physical clue I’m supposed to read elsewhere like the trees in the cave.)
In the 1960s, Qantas wanted to improve their flight reservation system. At the time, reservation clerks would get tickertapes from travel agents and enter flights manually; every single sales office needed to be contacted whenever a flight was full. Cancelling involved, again, manually calling every office.
To make the company run smoother, they obtained three IBM S/360s (each with 64K of memory) and spent 18 months with IBM creating a new system.
IBM S/360 being unloaded from a plane in 1966, from IBM Australia.
By the end of the decade the IBM systems were interlinked with Honeywell H632s, which weren’t even out when the reservation system was first being developed. Source.
The information on reservations still needed to be sent by wire; this meant engaging the PMG (Postmaster-General’s Department), which was responsible at the time for both postal and telegraph duties. The project manager for the Qantas job was Owen Hill (electrical engineering graduate in the ’60s, he was a “cadet” which means PMG paid for his degree while he worked three weeks a year for them). Tapes were sent at an approximate rate of 75 baud. The “end transmission” text was NNNN which was a problem in Australia due to the presence of Shannon Airport (SNN). While the system made everything run smoother it required constant nurturing, and Hill remembers being “down in Melbourne every two weeks” handling issues.
He found the situation frustrating enough that as soon as his contract was up he left for a job with IBM, and from there hopped to creating his own company: Applied Technology. He had discovered the magic of buying electronics in bulk and made his own mail-order business selling individual parts and especially kits.
Applied Technology didn’t stay pure mail order; they had a shop in Hornsby (just northwest of Sydney). A group of enthusiasts started to cluster there, one of them being David Griffiths. Griffiths had designed his own video card, the ETI 340, with plans printed in Electronics Today International starting in their April 1978 issue. It had a resolution of 64 characters across by 16 down (same as a TRS-80). It slotted into an S-100 bus meaning it could be used with an Altair or other S-100 compatible computer.
From the front cover of the issue.
The hobbyist Stephen Dennis tried to embark on the challenge of building the machine, but even after soldering it together it wasn’t working; he called the magazine to get a hold of the designer (Griffiths) and the two collaborated to turn the plans into a more general kit. It started to be sold (in the kit form) by Applied Technology. The store in Hornsby became a tight-knit cluster of enthusiasts.
[Matthew] Starr, who was just finishing high school, had become a regular visitor to Applied Technology’s nearby retail hobby shop. He’d already built his own David Griffiths system and even helped fix customer problems while visiting the store.
Matthew Starr (see above) and Owen Hill co-designed (along with some other Applied Technology regulars) a computer based around the already-created video card. It was codenamed “Granny Smith”. Hill and Starr went down to the offices of the publication Your Computer to do a pitch around Christmas 1981. Hill wanted to put a 32-page brochure in the magazine which essentially counted as a manual for the kit, with the last page giving ordering instructions. The editors agreed but thought the system needed a better name; on the drive home Starr suggested the Bee, which Hill improved to the Microbee.
You can read the insert/ad that printed shortly after here. The brochure promised that users could “build the most powerful state of the art kit computer complete for $399.00”. (That’s worth about $1,785 Australian dollars today.) It’s heavy on technical details including schematics.
Technically, the Microbee is similar to a TRS-80 (not only the 64 by 16, but a Z80 processor) although it had more expandability (something the company emphasized in early advertising) and the character graphics are programmable enough to allow for arbitrary graphics. While dK’tronics had to make a custom graphics rom as a piece of hardware for new character graphics on the ZX-81, the Microbee has the character-modification feature built-in.
The upshot is a system whose graphics float between pixel-based and character-based and have a feel unlike anything I’ve seen before. To give a general idea, here’s Halloween Harry from 1985; this was later the basis for the much more famous Apogee game:
So: high-res relatively speaking, but also divided into tiles to enough an extent there’s a “Game and Watch” feel even though animations are quite possible? You’ll also see this distinctive look in the adventure game I’m about to get to shortly.
The kit sales took off and Applied Technologies soon after started selling pre-made computers; where they really hit their stride was winning (along with Apple) the New South Wales education contract in April 1982, so they became one of the embedded “education computers” of Australia. (Apple was the expensive option, Microbee was the cheaper option.) I have the video cued where Hill talks about how the shop was so busy customers starting stepping behind the counter to help:
They eventually peaked at 11% of the market in Australia and with presence in more than 3000 schools. Most of the software for the system was Australia-developed (despite some sales elsewhere, most notably Sweden).
Microbee had its own software branch, Honeysoft. Outside authors sent in products and received royalties; one of their products from 1983 was a trilogy of adventure games by C. W. Norman. I thinkthe name is Chris W. Norman but I haven’t unearthed anything else about the author yet; since I’m just doing the first game for now (and this is only part 1 of ?) there’s still plenty of time for information to come up, or even the author to find himself while Googling.
In high-res mode the ratio of pixels wide vs. pixels tall is 1:2. This makes for a much wider look than the TRS-80 despite the character counts matching.
Eye of Min is a “single target” treasure hunt where you’re just looking for one treasure, the “priceless gem” in the title that is protected by “deadly traps and hideous monsters”. The game helpfully gives a complete verb list:
There’s a graphical window consistently drawn in the lower right corner of the screen; it’s top down somewhat like Ultima. I think the programmable-character style essentially encourages this, and if you flip back to the brochure excerpt you’ll even see the same standing figure used in both the sample and this game.
The figure moves around as you move around the map, and is actually quite lovely for an automap from this era. We’ve seen a few like with Time Adventure but they tend to be fairly abstract.
Here’s a map drawn by myself to compare:
The action starts outside and is a little deadlier than it might initially seem. From the pond with the bench, going east into the swamp immediately kills you via quicksand; north is a dark cave where going in without light kills you; west is a well with no rope where going down kills you.
Heading back to the start (with the curious broken pick, no idea if that’s just scenery) and going northeast is the ruined castle, and a switch of map scene:
It’s less deadly than the outside. The ground floor has a broken dagger, not-broken sword and scabbard, candle (on a dining room table) and pen (on a writing desk). The inventory limit is tight enough that you can’t just take them all.
Also, there’s a door you need to open to reveal the northern part of the map.
Off the side of the entry hall there’s also a guard room (shovel, torch) and a tower with a tinderbox. You can use the tinderbox to light either the candle or the torch and safely go into the cave.
The cave is seemingly a dead end. I have not been able to find a noun that the game lets you use to refer to the “8 living trees” and it really might just be scenery (the game is consistently using CAPS for when there’s an object you can do things with).
The only other piece of progress I made is with the shovel back at the guard tower; I did DIG while at the pond and the game asked me where, so I said BENCH.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to use the wand! The verb list has no “WAVE” verb or anything else typical; I ran through the entire list without luck. Perhaps it merely needs to be held at the right place, or there’s a magic word involved.
The game did warn about enemies, and after enough fiddling around with the wand, two bandits appeared blocking the way to the castle.
Unfortunately, due to the inventory limit (and me prioritizing the shovel) I hadn’t brought the sword from the castle along, so my attempts to beat the bandits over the head with a wand failed.
I suspect I’m just missing something basic that will break things open, but for now I’m stuck.
Testing the game isn’t as rapid as I’d like because the emulator I’m using (MAME) starts eating inputs if I try to speed the computer up. There is a walkthrough so I’m not looking for “spoilers” but I will take suggestions from anyone who hasn’t played the game. I sense this won’t be long and this will be part 1 of 2 (it’s just BASIC, and if nothing else, the graphics take up space) but I’ve been fooled before.
Enormous thanks to Sebastian Boell who (along with Graeme Philipson) interviewed Owen Hill and Owen Hill himself who gave permission to use the interview. Thanks also to Ewan Wordsworth, current owner of Microbee (he was formerly an employee and has a modern website).
I owned an Acorn Electron as a kid. It wasn’t the greatest games machine in the playground, but it did have the best game of all-time, Braben and Bell’s Elite, and one of the finest adventure games of all time, Trevor Hall’s Twin Kingdom Valley.
For a boy with a fertile imagination, and an obsession with the Fighting Fantasy books, Twin Kingdom Valley whisked me through the screen, and into a fantasy world of babbling brooks, Forests, Orcs, Trolls, Goblins, Dragons, Kings and treasure!
I’ve finished (as much as a game like this can be “finished”) so final spoilers ahoy; you should read my previous posts about the game before this one.
Mattias in the comments mentioned that some objects have images attached. Most don’t; LOOK BRASS KEY (or nearly any other item) gets the response “seems ordinary” and I had tried that enough times I assumed that there was no point to looking at items further (the intro text also doesn’t say anything about this as a feature). However, it turns out there are a few exceptions, like the diamond above (found at the start of the cave next to Watersmeet) or the picture in the cabin.
The picture ends up being a hint, because if you look at the wooden rod (back at the forest king area), you’ll notice a relation.
This turns out to be not needed to beat the game (and in fact I ignored it almost completely after using it) but that’s also true of the bridge in Crowther/Woods. You can WAVE WAND while at the fissure to get into the desert from the south, without passing through secret doors.
Since the secret doors are in close proximity to Watersmeet (and part of my gameplay involved going back there to heal up in between trips) it was better to use those anyway.
Incidentally, the desert has two “sand lurkers” (no idea what they look like, humanoid or not) and when I found them one was carrying a bag of silver…
…so I used a mace I found lying around to chip away at their health until they died. This is more complicated than I’m making it sound because unarmed enemies will run away when you whack at them, and out in an open desert I found it easy to lose track of them. I accidentally fell into the moat of the castle a few times while searching (which causes serious damage). Additionally, the one holding the bag of silver dropped it in the process (and it got scooped up by a castle guard) so I ended up getting no treasure at all from the process (until I later killed the castle guard).
While dealing with this came later in my sequence, it’s easier to explain now what happened with the princess: I took the guess she might be related to the Forest King (since the two kings hate each other as part of the narrative). There’s also the meta-element that the Forest King doesn’t have a character that can be killed while the Desert King does, indicating to me the Desert King is the violent one and the Forest King is the peaceful one. The one thing I hadn’t tried is bribing the guard when getting tossed into the dungeon.
I decided to not worry about max score and leave the dwarf in peace. He’s still got his One Ring to pine over. I’m sure nothing bad will come of it.
With the amulet being worn, you can then free the princess (who is just past the gold-key door, so all you need to do is basically take the amulet into the basement).
The silver key you get can then unlock the door at the bones; the bribe you handed over is right in the room. Given the circumstances, I think the intent is not that you’re stealing the gift back, but rather the Forest King is thankful enough about his daughter being returned that you’re welcome to take it back.
The diamond works too. According to Morpheus Kitami’s playthrough the bag of silver from the desert does not work so there’s some value threshold to the bribe.
With this all done, it was time to raid the castle and kill guards. As far as I can tell all you really need is a sword (which an elf happened to be carrying around, I did ASK ELF FOR SWORD and he handed it over); if there’s “experience points” muddling the experience it’s too small an aspect to notice.
Don’t attack if they’re clustered like this.
As long as you fight one-on-one (and go back to Watersmeet to heal) the guards are pretty easy.
The Desert King is pretty straightforward as well, as long as you get him alone. On this run for some reason he was up near the storage room and cellar.
The combat incidentally brought out the feeling Trevor Hall mentioned about why there needs to be extra rooms: when physical placement of the guards (and juking them so they aren’t clumped together) becomes an issue, “ordinary” rooms take on new meaning. This is very similar to the treatment of rooms on MUDs that I’ve written about before. For a time I found this section of game to be nearly indistinguishable from playing a regular MUD (except it being single player, of course).
One more encounter, with the last castle guard hanging out near the dragon.
One other fun aspect is the giant. I mentioned last time arming him with an axe; he’s still effective but described the whole time as an “ill giant”. If you go back to Watersmeet and he follows, he’ll swim and heal himself! (This happened after I had already killed the dragon; I’ll explain why that’s important in a moment.)
With all that done, I still had a few things to mop up. One of them was a witch in a tower who had a gold staff and a dagger; I was able to kill the witch normally and get the staff. According to my check of the walkthrough later, it was supposed to be a lot harder; the gold staff allegedly prevents damage, and you need to hand over a dagger which will cause the wielder to harm themselves in order to defeat the witch.
I found the moment so ordinary (see above) that I didn’t have a screenshot and had to reload a save state just now just to return to the fight. Maybe the gold staff only applies in the C64 or Spectrum versions? Or maybe the witch normally doesn’t have a knife? Did a guard wander in and suffer an unfortunate death, but in the process of grabbing the knife from the guard, the witch no longer had protection? Barring the BBC Micro version being different, this demonstrates how much chaos and variety the game has by relying on characters to be the “obstacles”; a hard-coded puzzle could have forced the player to reckon with the gold staff.
Another thing to mop up was the locked silver door in the Desert castle, and this one was fun to find. There’s a wooden staff locked behind the door, and this is another one of the rare cases where you get a visual:
Waving the staff did nothing (WAVE is only for the wooden rod) but the skull was suggestive that it was a weapon.
The staff is a one-hit-kill weapon. It’s pretty fragile (breaks after roughly two uses) but fortunately there’s really only one use that’s important: the dragon.
(Morpheus on his playthrough did not use the staff, but rather had healed the giant and went all weapons blazing with giant-buddy. I found the flames to be too dangerous to pull this off but there’s a lot of randomness involved; the best I could do before dying was get the dragon “weak”.)
With the master key I was able to get into the last remaining locked door, and as predicted, it had the Desert King’s chest. The chest is very heavy and you can’t be holding anything else at the same time (including the lamp!) I ended up toting it through darkness in the maze over to the rock fall and reached the final room.
Once you’ve proven yourself with the chest, you don’t need to carry it to enter this place, so there’s the slightly odd circumstance of spotting the secret of life, turning around and leaving to deposit the chest at home, and then returning for the secret of life. I think I’m satisfied enough to say I’m done with the game.
The gold river, incidentally, was supposed to be the seed for the sequel:
Near the end, you find a river of gold. You have to wonder where it would go? And that’s where the next game would take you. But how could you travel the river? What boat could withstand molten gold?
I had started on a dynamic landscape tool such that forests, deserts, etc would be different in each game restart, but never wrote any game code. No story line was written, but you would be able to travel the river of gold to a vast land. No more pathetic 17 locations. I recall some ideas like “A wooden boat would burn in a river of molten gold”, so the game had to be started well. Some part of the original game would lead you back to that river.
Unfortunately, Bug Byte collapsed while owing lots of royalties (the same circumstances that caused Matthew Smith to jump ship with Manic Miner) so the sequel never happened.
Now that I’ve seen enough context, I’m going to quote Hall at length from this interview where he discusses how the characters work. He explains how other games only had characters “appear to come and go” without the ability to give chase, and then goes into technical details:
Location database: up to 256 locations possible, each with a description, and list of exits (a direction code byte [including locks]+ 1 byte target location). One byte “image number” per location. Locations also have a zone.
Object database: object with weight, value, throw damage, hit damage, fragility and location.
Creature database: Creatures with location and inventory of objects, friend/foe flag, permitted zones and health. One of the creatures is “You”.
Graphics database: 256 objects, (including sub-objects), drawn on a 16×16 grid. Giving about 80-100 location images, using about 200 objects in the BBC version, almost all 256 objects used in expanded C64 version.
So: Your question on NPCs.
They could inspect the tables (except pictures, no need for that).
They have a decision tree including some random numbers, but basically:
Can I pick up a weapon?
Can I fight?
Should I flee?
Should I wander (in my zone)?
All their fight chances were similar to yours, except “You” always got the first blow.
Note that even if you chose to run away, the other blows still came.
The game had a combat exception rule that running if your last action was to fight, let you run away.
All in all, the rules were probably less than 1/2 K of code!
This 1/2 K code of code is what causes the game to be memorable, and for quotes like the top of this post (calling it “one of the finest adventure games of all time”). Just like The Hobbit, people did necessarily play to “win”; the experience could vary just based on where the NPCs roamed to. The game has a genuine air of replayability that many other authors of this time failed at; I’d say because of the lack of plot/minimalism it is even more replayable than The Hobbit.
Another curious moment: there’s a locked brass door in the dungeon area where the room has nothing in it, but I tried locking the door anyway and an elf and a troll appeared from nowhere. I was able to easily kill the troll because it didn’t have any weapons.
I say all this because I’m still on board with the outside perspective of Morpheus Kitami, and others who were less impressed: “I have mixed feelings, the game was fun, but it’s hard to call it a good adventure game.” It was very easy to have objects that you needed snagged by NPCs and roaming around, which is both a demerit and a feature. I had tried to store some items (including the flint stone) in the “secret door” section but didn’t realize elves could get in there; I hadn’t lit my lamp yet so ended up typing ASK ELF FOR STONE in the dark section as I wandered around until I eventually found where it went. The fact that this encounter could even happen in the first place was both absurd but also stunning, and the feel of a world where “anything can happen” is what gave it such prominence to those who formed core memories around it.
What Trevor Hall would do on a desert island, from The Classic Adventurer.
Coming up: our first encounter with the Microbee, a computer developed in Australia.
Last time I left off on a narrow fissure leading to Watersmeet, and a cave nearby that’s a maze. Also, just for the record, I had a brass key (from the very start) and a bronze key (from the witch where I traded the crystal ball). There was one gold door I was unable to unlock; we’ll get back to that today.
Regarding Watersmeet, I knew something special was going on because there’s some text about it in the intro of the BBC Micro version:
It is believed that the lake itself has some mystical properties which, some say, are derived from the many potions of witches and so forth, which have been split into the rivers and streams throughout the ages.
It is also said that a wise man may look upon the secret of life, which lies nearby.
I tried filling a jug and getting the same “refreshing” message I did with beer, so I was puzzled for a bit.
I pulled out the verb list and realized it had “swim”, so I tested it and found that swimming in the water healed wounds. There’s something else special going on, but I didn’t realize it until later.
The C64 graphic conveys a little more clearly this is a place you’d want to swim.
Analogous to Adventure having one “all different” maze and one “all alike” maze, this one required dropping objects to map things out. Fortunately, it’s relatively small; if you knew there was nothing else hidden you could find the two things inside without much effort (the paths tend to lead to them, rather than away from them).
The first thing is a “holdall”, a duffle bag for those Americans out there. It increases your inventory limit, but is a bit fussy to operate. In order to get any items in, you have to FILL HOLDALL, and then the game prompts each of your inventory items one at a time.
Also, make sure you don’t put a lit lamp in!
You can PUT THING IN HOLDALL to get something in just fine, but the only way I was able to get items was via EMPTY HOLDALL which dumped all of them at once.
For the second thing to find, you might notice from the holdall room four of the exits lead to Maze (4), and from there all of them eventually lead to a rock fall.
The upshot, in a maze-narrative sense, is that Hall wants the rock fall encounter right away, as opposed to making it a secret that may not be found for a while. A player normally wouldn’t have to do any mapping at all (except from their perspective they don’t know they’ve exhausted the maze).
At the rock fall you are informed you need to find the chest of the desert king if you want to pass.
From here I was stuck for a while; without the next revelation, I’m not sure if any more progress is even possible (although this author does like putting multiple entrances and exits to things, so I can’t say for sure until I’ve finished the game).
Back at Watersmeet, if you DRINK WATER straight from the source without filling a jug first, you’ll get a special ability: seeing secret doors.
This is a curious moment insofar as many players would not realize there is an issue here at all; someone who drinks straight from the water first would not know (nor would it be likely they’d test) that the water loses its magical potency once in the jug.
Unfortunately, with me getting the ability so late, it means I have to check everywhere I’ve been on the map. I’ve checked most places; back at the room-of-bones in the witch maze there’s a secret locked silver door to the west; as I have yet to find a silver key I do not know what is behind it.
The important secret door anyway is back at the cave I was just in, right at the entrance before the maze starts: there is a small hidden complex to the east: bedroom, kitchen, sitting room. Inside the kitchen is a gold key.
Conveniently, there’s a second secret door that leads right to the hall from last time that ended at a locked gold door. This goes to a dungeon which will eventually lead up to the domain of the Desert King, so the Forest King and Desert King areas are directly connected (you don’t have to go outside to travel between them).
Right away there’s two dungeon doors that take a bronze key (the kind I got from the witch); opening the first one frees a princess.
UNLOCK DOOR WITH BRONZE KEY
It is now open.
A princess flees. She doesn’t recognise you.
This happens so incidentally that it circles back to the author’s own mission statement about how you are not the main character of a story, but rather just the inhabitant of a world. It is possible the princess will come up later (I haven’t gotten back over the map yet to see where she ended up) but at least this particular moment felt like an anti-story of sorts (not in a derogatory sense, just in a “games can have different goals from each other” sense).
A second dungeon door had an “ill giant”. The giant was friendly so I tried handing over my axe; guards are on the floor above and it proceeded to wallop some of them off-stage.
The graphic that gets used for all the “dungeon breakout” rooms.
To see the aforementioned guards, just go up a trapdoor to a new section.
Remember, I don’t mark any of the wandering enemy locations because I don’t know where their “home base” is.
Once again (while mapping things out) I am mostly able to ignore the NPCs; I did get whacked once hard enough to die but I had a save close enough I didn’t lose any progress. For the most part the rooms are just scenery so information is progress.
There’s one “guard room” as shown here with a “uniform”, but the uniform seems to have no effect on the guards. “Wear” isn’t a recognized verb.
There’s a storage room and cellar that would normally be pure scenery except there’s beer in the cellar. The game does have a thirst timer and you will die if you don’t drink anything.
Just passing through and going up another floor leads to the main complex of the Desert King.
The ground floor has a study (scenery), dining hall (scenery), kitchen (scenery), and workshop (not scenery, there’s a cauldron of oil). My guess is in addition to a thirst-timer the game has a lamp-timer, but you can refill the lamp with oil from this cauldron.
The cauldron is depicted in the room, unlike most items, but it also is so heavy you can’t pick it up (even with all items dropped, the game says “you can’t carry any more”.)
Going back to the main stairs, and going up to the upper floors…
…it looks like from the map, other than locked doors, it’s still pretty much obstacle-free. It’s a little denser in guards, and you can find the Desert King himself wandering around, with a gold crown and a sword.
One of the doors is silver (like the one in the crypt) and one is given no metal-color at all, but I think that’s because to open it I need the master key. This is where the dragon from the cover art shows up.
Well, sort of shows up — again, no characters displayed in the graphics. I’ve been able to get the Desert King to follow me, so I’m wondering if somehow I could have him get inadvertently fried by the dragonfire.
There’s one more tower that has a witch with a “gold staff”. I have not tried tangling with her yet. You can also leave the castle out the front drawbridge but it just leads to the desert on the north side of the chasm; I haven’t tried searching thoroughly but it doesn’t look like there’s anything to find other than more scenery.
To recap my obstacles:
1. two silver-locked doors
2. one “no description” locked door that presumably needs the master key from the dragon
3. the witch and the king in the Desert castle
I assume the chest is behind one of the locked doors, so I’m not counting it as an obstacle. Looking back at previous content, we could also count the dwarf holding onto a diamond ring; I haven’t found anything to trade for it yet. I did manage to simply kill the dwarf, and this was a very sad encounter where it just kept running away as I chipped away at its health.
The heaviest moment of “you are just like the random enemy NPCs” in the game.
I haven’t tried my secret-door vision absolutely everywhere (secret entrance in the mountains, maybe?) and there’s the eternal issue of me simply missing an exit, but I think I’m hovering close to the end and I really need to enact a strategy to handle the NPCs rather than just run away from everything.
In general, other than the moment with the water, there haven’t been “puzzles” in a regular sense; knowing that a gold key should be taken to a gold door is closer to what I’ve termed a natural action, and the NPCs clearly have enough randomness and multiple approaches that they feel more like obstacles (akin to a CRPG) rather than puzzles.
I have the first two underground sections (the one from the locked grate, and the one from the cave at the trail) mostly mapped out and connected, so now seems like a good time to pause.
First entrance to the underground.
Second entrance to the underground.
It makes the geography a little clearer to start with the trail entrance, although in my playthrough I started with the grate and only connected it up later.
At the cave entrance there’s a metal door to the east (which is unlocked) and a passage to the west. Go west twice and you’ll end up in the Hall of the Forest King and tossed in a dungeon. I have yet to experiment with this section. (It sounds like they need a bribe; maybe this whole section is forced and it’s possible to retrieve the bribe, but it’s just as easily possible with this sort of game that you can avoid this encounter altogether.)
Prior to making it to the Forest King you can swerve down into a long hall and eventually reach a dead end with a gold door. The doors are helpfully color coded with keys (you’ll need a gold key for a gold door) but I don’t have the appropriate key yet.
Heading back to the cave entrance, and going through the open door, there’s a small section of rooms containing a “short wooden rod”, a “short dagger”, and a “crystal ball”. You might remember the crystal ball from last time; this is the area that links directly with the grate. Near the dagger is a locked bronze door (again color-coded, I’ll bring back the key later).
Also in this area is the part that took the most significant chunk of my time, an exit to a maze. The maze does not have graphics and swaps things to text-only mode.
The text-only mode is partly due to mazes being awkward to show graphics of, but also as a hint, as this is simply an “all different” style maze from Crowther/Woods. This starts in a “turny twisty little maze of passages” and different rooms have different names.
The different names can be used to make a map, but I admit I always find these kinds of mazes a headache. I went with old-fashioned object dropping. Fortunately, the different wandering NPCs don’t seem to want to brave the maze, so it doesn’t have a character like the Thief from Zork I picking things up. Unfortunately, your inventory capacity is too low to map all the rooms, but I remained stubborn and started moving objects to get rooms like “ROD 3” and “BALL 2” as I was mapping things out. Generally, the paths converge on a central area with a witch (if you move at random, you’re likely to eventually reach the witch).
The witch has no visuals attached (none of the NPCs do, but even the maze itself has no visual) so it’s just straightforward text. If you hang out for longer than one turn the witch starts to throw spells, and eventually you’ll die.
I took multiple tries at fighting (using the dagger) and had no luck; it’s possible I was causing damage via HIT WITCH WITH DAGGER but the game wasn’t giving any feedback.
Still, the witch didn’t start immediately attacking: maybe the witch is “neutral”? I had a crystal ball I wasn’t able to use for anything yet, so I tried GIVE BALL.
I still need to experiment with the moods of the NPCs and how far you can push them. There was an elf running around outdoors with an axe (the one the troll normally liked to hold) and I did ASK ELF FOR AXE and the elf just handed it over. I don’t know if “trade value” is a thing and if a series of swaps are possible; maybe the game can be won entirely by “diplomatic victory” rather than getting in standard RPG fights.
With the bronze key claimed, I went to escape the maze (I already had the exit mapped) and unlocked the bronze door. Unfortunately, the troll was waiting for me and gave me a heavy wallop. I fled through the bronze door, then locked the door behind me.
This gave some breathing space, but unfortunately led to a dead end: a stair going to a room with a diamond ring, some gold, and a dwarf. I haven’t tried contesting the dwarf over the treasure yet, but there’s no aggression so I suspect some more trade-swaps might be in order.
One last thing to mention with the witch maze: a side passage, leading to a room with bones:
The room has a shaft leading up to the Hall of the Forest King but it just results in you getting tossed in the dungeon again. I’m not sure if the shaft has a “reason” in a puzzle-solving sense or if it’s just meant to build more environment.
One last wrinkle, because I was trying to be completionist about my map: I already had everything mopped up when I tested one more exit leading back from the skulls to the maze. I didn’t know which room it was going to, but the all-different style of room name still applied, so I wrote down just this room description, then did a quick run through my already-made map to see what location it corresponded to.
I tried moving on to the third underground but it’s another maze. It makes reference to a Desert King, but I already burned my mapping energy on the first maze, so I’ll save that for next time.
(Continued from my previous post, read that post first before this one.)
As is usual for one of these massive games of this era, the best place to start is outside. I’ll be showing it off in three sectors, the first being the environs around the starting cabin (the one that has the key / jug / lamp and is the place where the treasures go).
I originally thought perhaps this was going to be on a grid and I could do something more minimal, but no: this is a traditional Adventure map with twists and turns along with one-way paths. It does make creating the map feel less like “lawnmowing” and for certain swerves of landscape (like the mountains) breaking out from a grid makes some sense.
Description: The picture is your view west. You are wandering through high mountains, paths lead west, north west, south.
I ended up switching my mode fairly quickly to “picture first time, but not on second visit” since the game lets you just hit TAB to see the picture at any time, but also because the “first time” aspect is handy for mapping. If I arrive at a room that does not give a picture, I know I’ve already visited it, meaning I didn’t need to do any “breadcrumbs” like I was mapping out a maze; I especially found this helpful in a couple aspects where the map re-united in a way I wasn’t expecting. For example, the quarry to the west of the start — one of the first places you should visit for reasons I’ll get into later — has a flint stone. There’s two exits elsewhere on the map that land back on the quarry (one-way), and without the “no picture” clue I would have thought it was a different quarry.
That’s incidentally not saying the exits are south and east, but rather there’s just one exit “southeast”. There’s another unmentioned exit to the east which goes back the same way. Unfortunately despite the system constantly letting you know what you can find in different directions, enough directions are unmentioned I have to test all of them.
If from the start instead of heading west to the quarry but take the road east instead, it leads to The Sword Inn. The inn is drawn farther away and then closer (applying the system I discussed last time which draws “objects” rather than scenes and can change the size).
This is important not only in the technical application of Trevor Hall’s system, but also in his philosophical approach on how to treat space. Especially with modern text adventures having a road of multiple “rooms” can be considered fluff and is best cut; despite the wandering creatures (which I’ll get to) there’s a fair amount of empty space on the Twin Kingdom map. From one of his interviews:
It’s boring if you only have 20 places to visit. If you don’t have some ‘dead’ locations with nothing happening, you go from one nasty disaster to another, which is too intense. You need padding, to get lost before you find something.
He’s likely thinking of Scott Adams (who was tight by necessity); we recently had a Marc Leduc game make terrific use of tiny space so this is more of a general standpoint than an absolute rule. However, it does fit in with his goal of creating an “environment” rather than just a story (that in a graphical sense feels vaguely like walking around a modern open world game).
The inside of the Inn has a “keeper” and some “beer”. You can fill your jug with the beer (it “refreshes” you if you drink it).
This led me directly to wonder what kind of character interaction was possible: could I have a conversation? The game helpfully gives a complete verb list from the start:
help option inventory score draw picture view look quit end drink swim wave wait ask empty pour fill give off on light unlock open close shut lock get take drop throw cut hit
The only commands on there that are “social” are give and ask (I guess “wave” could be here that’s for a “wave wand” kind of command). I was able to give my key to the keeper, then ask for it back. Maybe it’s useful to have an NPC hang on to things for you? (Not the keeper, since you can just stash things in the cabin, but there might be a section later where this comes up.) No way to ask about rumors or the like.
Speaking of NPCs, wandering around the aboveground I’ve found at least two elves, one gorilla, and one troll. The gorilla and troll are both pains; they will sometimes follow you and whack you with whatever weapon they have at hand. (The gorilla specifically will “throw” its items while the troll will “hit” you.) I’ve just been trying to map things out but occasionally I suffered a death in the middle of testing exits or whatnot.
NPCs can fight each other; here the troll has whacked an elf. You might also notice the troll carrying a flint stone; that’s the flint stone (the only one in the game) nabbed from the quarry, so assuming you’re in this circumstance you need to extract it from the troll in order to use it, and given the flint is used to light the lamp, it becomes important fairly quickly. I find it easier to just nab the flint first and avoid the problem.
The map I started this post with includes one of the three ways underground: just west and north of the starting room.
It’s the most elaborate room in terms of the graphics trying to depict the grand span of the environment.
You are in a clearing. North is a forest path. East is a forest path. South you can see a road. Down is a locked brass grate through which you can see a narrow passage.
While I haven’t placed any of the moving characters on my map (due to the fact I don’t know for certain their home bases) I’m pretty sure after enough attempts the gorilla always starts here with a wooden club. It’s possible to ignore it, unlock the gate, and run on by. I’ll show the first two rooms of the underground but I’m staying with the outdoors otherwise.
There’s a crystal ball here, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet.
Moving north…
…there’s not much new to see. (Unless I’m missing a secret, of course.) It’s just meant to be a pleasant forest environment, although rather oddly there are two one-way exits leading over to the mountains.
Notice how the game consistently tells you what the direction the view is in, and this direction changes based on the room (and not some kind of relative-direction setup based on where the player came from). This is pretty rare but it showed up in The Palms.
To the far north there’s a “Top of Waterfall” and going north farther has you dive into a crocodile pool, which you immediately are forced out of by the game.
This is a canyon where you can go west and see the spring farther in the distance (again, using the “object” paradigm rather than completely pre-cooked “scenes”).
Going even further you can find a cave (the second underground entrance). A very brief look at the cave (which I’ll save for a later post):
The cave in context (on the northeast side of the map):
Most of these rooms are just connective tissue; the sloping trail which enters the cave connects back up to the forest, and the forest lets you go south to eventually reach the quarry (that’s the one-way passages I mentioned earlier), west to a “cliff top” (which lets you quickly loop back to the first map) and a fissure.
You are on the south edge of a deep fissure. North you can see down a dangerous fall.
Despite the game saying “you are dying” if you go north, you can actually survive the fall, landing in a narrow canyon! Going west in the canyon leads to a narrow fissure with Watersmeet at the end, and a cave (the third underground entrance) right beforehand.
Just a brief look at the cave in the fissure.
Going east just lands back in the canyon with the crocodile pool, so that’s everything (probably) on the outside. I admit I haven’t tested every single direction in every room (the room exits it gives usually are right) and of course one of the underground sections may pop back outdoors again (like to the north side of the canyon, I imagine). I also don’t know if the three undergrounds I’ve found merge together or if all three are separate.
There’s still a lot to explore with the NPCs; I haven’t tried fighting back yet (they’re pretty possessive of the weapons, and I’ve been focused on mapping anyway). I do know you can arm the “allied” NPCs and have them fight as well, so even if all the game is tracking is how good your weapon is, there could be some interesting strategies involved.
It’s not your world. You arrive there and you’re a person, a creature, just like all the others. You see something shiny and think maybe you could go get it, so off you wander. You’re not controlling the game – you’re part of it.
It is often mentioned in the same context as The Hobbit, and this includes advertising from the time (“EAT YOUR HEART OUT BILBO!”) The setting is a “mythical place where two kings reside” who “hate each other”; you are an “adventurous, bounty hunting, greedy human” and your goal is to “finish the game with as much wealth as possible”. This is a standard treasure hunt, in other words, but it has illustrations for all the rooms, and it has dynamic NPCs (the latter point being why it gets compared to The Hobbit).
The author, Trevor Hall, has an unfortunate namespace clash with a more famous musician, but fortunately he’s done multiple interviews (1, 2, 3, 4) so I’m able to give some history.
P. M. Skinner is Pete Skinner, a friend of Trevor’s.
Trevor Hall studied Computer Science in Manchester, getting a taste of arcade games at the student union and obtaining his first computer, the text-only Acorn Atom. By 1982 he started publishing with Bug-Byte.
I think I did what many others wanting to publish did (and presumably still do):
1: Find a game publisher who already exists, and has some titles available, and adverts in mags etc.
2: Send the game for evaluation.
I think Bug-Byte was the first I tried, and they offered a good royalty rate. I don’t know where the company got its start up cash, but there were 3 main players who handled (or mishandled) all that. They had some advantages, like a good artist, a very good deal on rent in a new unoccupied building, their own tape duplication machines. They built a good name from the Spectrum Manic miner series, BBC micro stuff from me and others, and some C64, but lost the Manic Miner programmer to another company. That was probably a bad turning point for them.
In this case he did not simply send games to be independently evaluated (like Simon Wadsworth where his second game Time Warden fell down a black hole and he switched to making games for Artic): he had demo games impressive enough to be a regular contract worker for Bug-Byte. The company has featured here enough times (including the Manic Miner kerfuffle) I won’t recap their history other than to say they were one of the most prominent software houses soliciting games from anyone.
Bug-Byte was getting 20 or 30 games submitted some days and most of them were useless and went straight in the bin but some were excellent.
— Chris Cannon, who selected games for publishing at Bug-Byte, via Acorn: A World in Pixels
Hall has four games credited for 1982, and two more for 1983 prior to Twin Kingdom Valley, all for BBC Micro: City Defence, Galaxy Wars, Space Invaders, Dogfight, Sea Lord, and Oblivion. Space Invaders is worth a screen as Trevor credits working on the game as how he learned assembly language.
The single-pixel bullets mean the barriers last a bit longer than regular Space Invaders.
Hall’s first experiences with adventure games were his friends playing Crowther/Woods which appeared on “big computers” at the university:
I never got very far in Adventure. There was some version of some system at the university, which we found fun to play, but, time on those systems was limited, and we had to study sometimes.
He remembers one of his friends commenting on the characters “standing still” with the same puzzle to solve whenever a character is encountered. He saw some home computer games with the same issue:
The troll was always standing by the bridge. It made no sense! So I thought, why not make every creature in the game, including oneself, pretty much the same. Make everyone able to walk around, pick things up and fight. Let them interact.
In other words, he wanted a game where you are not the protagonist of a story, but rather part of a world.
He and some friends drew maps (using “little green pieces of paper he’d swiped from the computer science lab”) and worked out how connections to other places could be described in a “few bytes”. He describes the parser as “easy” (“tokenize the text, and recognize a verb and an object”) but had more trouble with the graphics. He wanted 3D but found it to be too slow, so he used scaled pictures instead with flood fill. The general idea was to have scenes not thought of as being single pictures (like Sierra) but compositions of objects; he modified the code so “program wouldn’t attempt to draw underneath something that was already there.”
Road outside wooden cabin at the start of the game. The game states outright “the picture is your view north”.
The trees from the scene above are both the same object image, drawn at different scaling levels. Sierra’s Time Zone and Melbourne House’s The Hobbit would have both trees drawn as individual graphics. Rather than a “picture book” model, Hall aimed to make an “environment” akin to modern 3D worlds. Note that Hall’s “priority drawing” system glitches a little bit with one of the flowers; it gets drawn in whole but then some of the tree lands on top, while most of the tree is drawn “behind” the flower even though it appears on the screen after the flower. When Hall talks about Pete Skinner drawing “many of the objects” he really means objects, not entire scenes.
His world-representation paradigm (thinking of the world as “3D space” even though it isn’t) applies not just to graphics but to text. Graphics are reused where you see things from farther away or closer, but the rooms are designed such that things seen from afar can be included in the textual description. Despite the BBC Micro being relatively plentiful on space this sort of maneuver was needed in order to include all 175 rooms he was aiming for.
Hall talks more about his NPC design in his interviews but let’s come back to that when we have some more context, and get into the game itself. From the start there is again the eternal question: which version? The original is BBC Micro; there’s also the Electron, Spectrum, and C64, and I know at least the C64 has more rooms than the BBC Micro version does (so revisions happened, like The Hobbit). Still, comparing all the graphics, the BBC Micro version looks the most “intended”; the graphics appear designed for a screen with a particular color scheme and resolution.
C64 version. Notice how the flowers look a little mangled. There’s an animated hopping bunny, though!
The game helpfully gives six options for how text and graphics work:
1 Draw picture if room unvisited, give long description
2 Draw picture if room unvisited, give short description
3 Draw picture always, give long description
4 Draw picture always, give short description
5 Don’t draw picture, give long description
6 Don’t draw picture, give short description
For the moment I’ve set things to always show pictures and long descriptions, but let me show long vs. short in the starting rooms.
You are on a road.
North you can see a wooden cabin.
North east is a forest path.
East you can see a road.
West you can see a road.
South is a wooden fence through which you can see forest.
?N
You are inside a wooden cabin
South you can see a road.
There is an empty stone jug here.
There is a brass key here.
There is an unlit oil lamp here.
The “short” version cuts out all the direction descriptions: just “You are on a road” and “You are inside a wooden cabin” without mentioning what is east/north/etc.
The cabin is where the treasures go.
The map is not only large but immediately open, so I’ll save giving the lay of the land next time, but one quick visit to another place:
The gorilla is an enemy you can fight that can also follow and randomly thwap you with the club it is holding. The enemies can pick up weapons that happen to by lying around; again, this feels strongly like MUD behavior. An elf was nearby and later the gorilla had nothing and the elf had the club; it appears the elf simply stole the club.
A gorilla is here with nothing.
An elf is here with the following
A wooden club
Allegedly the puzzles aren’t elaborate (at least compared to The Hobbit) so this really does give a different feel than a standard adventure game. I’ll report back in next time if that holds up.
I may not have squeezed out every single piece of working game from The Temple, but I’ve squeezed out most of it. Once past the initial issue, the game’s crashes don’t come back until later, but they come back spectacularly.
The only Janic bag I’ve found multiple pictures of, from Tradera. They were the company that later picked up Commodore products and ended up sending their PET computers to Datatronic when they went bankrupt.
Exterior of Janken Minidata, where the PET computers eventually ended up. Source.
I switched to just using v1 (although anyone adventurous enough to edit the game might want to look at the early version of the game as well). After fixing the “burn” issue (where I changed “go” into “goto”) and I made sure to use directions with abbreviations (“n” instead of “go north”) I was off and running again. It took a while before another hard crash. I still am not clear if this was “left unfinished” or just undone by the bugs (caused by bad transfer issues, perhaps?).
To recap the action, we start in a cell with a bed that has a pillow and matches, and nothing else useful. If you hang out long enough in the toilet room someone arrives to deposit an item.
Me messing around with random directions in case leaving room directions out is one of the game’s issues.
Regarding the “kn” typo above, I assume the intent is the word “in”. In PETSCII the binary for “k” is 01001011 and the binary for “i” is 01001001, exactly one bit difference; of course it could be a perfectly ordinary human-made typo, but this sort of thing does make me suspicious. (See “Scgtt Adams” from The Golden Voyage, clearly a one-bit error.) The game also uses KNVENTORY rather than INVENTORY.
Going back to the main cell, there’s a bowl with food, and inside the food is a saw-blade. It looks like we have a friend on the inside, on our mission, which is to (????). (Really, I still don’t know. There’s dragons later and a diamond but the game just being a treasure raid doesn’t mesh with something else you’ll see later. Maybe it’s a mixed quest where we have multiple goals.)
You can then cut the door with the saw (“That was a hard work”) and get farther inside.
The first of three maps.
There’s a “gray corridor” with a locked door we can take care of in a moment; going upstairs to the kitchen, you can find a knife in a cupboard (which will get used much later).
There’s also a warning about “watchers” in the room to the east which you fortunately don’t need to heed too closely.
They’ll only wake up if you PRESS BUTTON which sets off an alarm.
The keys can be used to both the window and the downstairs door. It’s better to unlock the window first because once you unlock the downstairs door (another cell) you’ll lose the keys going in.
You’ll lose the keys even if you drop them off elsewhere first and aren’t holding them, so this counts as a bug, but maybe it’s a bug in a “plot continuity” sense; you need the wire to get out of prison, and there’s more keys outside the prison, so this is a clean way to avoid referring to two sets of keys. Just: it’s a softlock if you lose them too early.
So far, the items: matches, pillows, wire, knife, explosives. Heading outside the window, there’s a fire-escape going up, another locked door, and an exit to the west. There’s another locked door (which you need those keys for!) although the door is jammed from the other side so you can’t go through anyway.
To the west in the prison yard there’s a parked car, but you can’t do anything with it yet, so it’s time to go up the fire-escape and use the wire as a rope.
Can you climb a wire in real life? It happened in Ferret as well.
This is not an intensely guarded prison, but I’m guessing our Man on the Inside might have helped with that.
The landing spot has some driftwood and a boat at a sea. If you try to swim in the sea, you die; if you try to go via boat, you die.
It is faintly possible this is not just intended as a death-trap; while this is a “biome journey” of sorts like Wizard and the Princess nothing is one-way. In fact, it seems to be useful to maybe go back into the prison.
The reason you can’t unlock and go through the front door of the prison is the stone as seen above. I would think the explosives would take care of that problem but I never got them to work. If you do this, when you get the car-keys later (which you’ll see shortly) I think you can possibly drive the entire car out and do things with it.
Moving on from the unexploded rock, heading north there’s a ferry. Get on and you can find a radio, the car-keys (told you) a book, and a button. Pressing the button causes the ferry to move to a new destination. You can re-press the button to go back.
Voilà, the third map:
Straight off the bat you can find a pistol (if you try to KILL anything before finding the pistol the game says you need one). Then there’s a bit of branching, including:
▸ a desert with an note, a torch, and a cactus; the note says the nose can be very useful.
▸ relatedly, on a “narrow ledge” you can find a pamphlet mentioning you can TURN the nose in all directions
▸ a “high wall” with some scratchings; reading them reveals the word DIRAM, although I tried to use it and crashed the game
▸ a “liane” in a swamp which baffled me for a while; I realized after a bug I’ll show off later that it was referring to liana vines but for a while I thought it was a person and tried to talk to them
▸ with the liane you can tie it to a pillar at a collapsed bridge and retrieve some ratsbane
The use of the word reminds me of Citadel Adventure using the word “embrassures”. Sure, it’s technically a word in English (spelled wrong) but it’s extremely rare compared to all the other English words; this is the sort of move someone who learned English as a second or third language would make. I would guess the Swedish equivalent (lian) is more common? Mooware on Bluesky pointed out that liane is vine in German (spelled that way) so maybe Stefan Modin was just mixing languages generally.
Now, for that bug that led me to realize it was a vine in the first place: if you go north from where you find the pamphlet, you’ll end up in a dark place.
I was able to goto 7 and keep the game going, but without light. I tried “go hole” and usually died…
…but one time I successfully made it, coming across a treasure with dragons and a chest.
The buggy room has a letter you can read and find the word LOUZI; trying SAY LOUZI teleports you to a new area.
The new area includes a pit with rattlesnakes and a shovel. I have tried digging many places with the shovel although I admit I have not tried digging all the places with the shovel (that is, taking it all the way back to the prison yard etc.) I feel like I’ve hit the “broken threshold” enough that I can’t distinguish between a puzzle and a bug, so this seems like a good spot to close things up for now. If I ever get confirmation the game is fixed to the point of being completable (maybe not all the bugs) I’ll take another swing.
For now, we’re headed back to England, as coming up: Twin Kingdom Valley.
