Full Pimania cassette inlay, from World of Dragon.
If you study the image above and turn your head sideways, you’ll notice the game Pimania includes
FREE APPALLING HYPNOTIC DISCO THEME MUSIC !
The game was on cassette like most of the games in the UK market, so audio and code could be stored via the same medium. The entire back side is taken by an erratic piece of music.
I can make no conclusion even after playing the game a significant amount of time. I think it may have more to do with the contest, which I am theoretically not planning on approaching.
The “theoretically” part is because there are aspects of the game related to winning the adventure (or “getting to the end” at least) and aspects related to the contest, but it is not clear which is which. So discarding some information as “external” may reduce the complexity.
For example, last time I had encounter with a scared Pi-man.
Valium is not the only thing that you can trade. For example, you can hand over a CUDDLY TOY and get back PSALM 33. I assume from the Bible, there is no other description.
16 There is no king saved by the multitude of an host: a mighty man is not delivered by much strength.
17 An horse is a vain thing for safety: neither shall he deliver any by his great strength.
18 Behold, the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear him, upon them that hope in his mercy;
19 To deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine.
I combed over the text a bit to see if it had any game relevant clues, and I don’t think so; if it gets used for something I suspect it goes to the contest.
Next to the “scared Pi-Man” room, Pi-man can also appear in a “bored” permutation. He’s willing to trade items just like the “scared” Pi-Man is.
This screenshot was taken after I had already accured some loot. To be specific, whilst wandering the map with no trading involved I found
BAKED BEANS, CUDDLY TOY, RUBBER DUCK, PORK PIE, TV DINNER, SAXOPHONE, CAN OF WORMS, HULA HOOP, POGO STICK, VALIUM
The POGO STICK, HULA HOOP, and SAXOPHONE can all go to the “bored” Pi-Man to obtain a SUNDAIL, MEGAPHONE, and OXYGEN respectively. Most trades have the message “THANKS A LOT (yourname) SEEN ONE OF THESE BEFORE?” followed by the item you are getting, although the saxophone has a special message:
The fact Pi-man is holding a sax in most of his pictures suggests this is one of the more important trades. With “scared” Pi-Man the VALIUM, CUDDLY TOY, PORK PIE, and a DUCK get a BLACKBOARD, PSALM 33, COMPASS, and a CALENDAR respectively.
None of these traded-for items can be dropped. That is, DROP OXYGEN gets the message
You can’t do that around here!
There is an inventory limit of five, which means (since there are seven items to trade for that I’ve found so far) it is technically impossible to get all of them at once.
Now, you’re not totally stuck once you get five “traded items”. One room in particular (adjacent to the “scared” pi-man in the other direction from “bored”)…
At this neck of the woods trails point out 5 and 3.
…has Pi-man sometimes swipe objects back from you, one at a time. If it triggers seems to be entirely at random, but you can use this to “take back” a trade. I had my blackboard get swiped and the valium re-appeared again in a different room location on the map (so I could trade back for it if needed).
You can also, oddly enough, trade the duck to the bored rather than the scared Pi-man. He will take both your duck and another item from your inventory, which can also trim down your trading list.
This all seems to be more or less just musical chairs leading to no plot in particular. I can try to USE SUNDIAL and get no response (followed by the screen clearing and the room description repeating) but otherwise I consistently get (say for the CALENDAR):
SORRY!
YOU CAN’T USE A CALENDAR
AROUND HERE
Rather at random — maybe literally at random, but I might have hit a silent trigger — I managed to find one secret exit. Back in the room with the “Pi-man swipes stuff” behavior, one of my visits mentioned a new way out:
It is the only time I have seen this exit. I tried repeating going in the room many times before and after without this result.
The path is linear; going 10 moves forward most of the way, with 4 (pointing the opposite way on the clock/sundial) going back.
At the end of the line is the Cavern of Ivory, and the ULTIMATE GATE OF PI.
I strong suspect this location is the end of the game. However, I’m not sure how to “sacrifice” any objects. I can drop the anything from the “initial object stash” to no effect; I haven’t been able to USE anything at the gate. However, I still haven’t tested a great many items (see my lack of ability to have the secret exit re-appear).
I’m not sure where to go from here other than to randomly trudge around some more and hope something useful happens. I do have the suspicion there might be more iterations of Pi-man.
Mel Croucher as depicted in Sinclair User, April 1985.
I found the opening somewhat engrossing (albeit surreal) but this has degenerated into a “cope with the weird system” game. Any promise of social satire has pretty much evaporated. Highly cryptic hints are one thing, but this game seems designed to require testing everything everywhere and hoping something falls out. I admit I am close to the “stop trying to solve it myself and look for a walkthrough” threshold here. Especially with random (?) elements it doesn’t seem worth it to trudge in circles for another few hours with nothing to show for it. I’ll give things another good hour before I start cracking a look.
Renga in Blue 
I like the music. As soon as I heard the opening, I thought, ‘That’s Da Da Da’ (song by a German band, Trio). I then checked Da Da Da to confirm the sound. The song’s 1981-1982 and this game’s 1982, so it’s possible the Pimania folk recorded over a bit of Da Da Da, but it’s also possible they just had the same Casio keyboard and used the same rhythm element.
The tape info claims a Casio VC-1. This is probably a typo (as far as I can tell there is no such thing) and they mean a Casio VL-1, which is what Trio used.
I’ve been mildly curious about this game ever since the first (and only!) time I heard about it in 1983, in an overview of adventures on the ZX Spectrum in a Swedish in a Swedish computer magazine. It didn’t go into much details, though. In fact, the description boiled down to (roughly translated) “Here, the freaked-out fantasy reigns supreme. You don’t know where you are, why you are there, or how to proceed. It took me quite a while to even get the game started. But after that, it’s a never-ending journey among rubber ducks and pork pies.”
The other games mentioned in the article were Inca Curse, The Hobbit, Black Crystal, Trader, Maziacs, Smugglers Cove, Velnor’s Lair, and Demon Knight. The author admitted the pickings were slim (in fact, the only one he had been able to find in Sweden was Inca Curse), and that some of them weren’t actually adventure games. But I guess a few of them might show up here sooner or later, and I look forward to that too!
Maziacs is action-adventure, Black Crystal seems to be as well.
Inca Curse I’ve played already.
Hobbit is coming in 1982. The rest of those are coming in 1983.
I’ve got a lead on some Swedish ABC 80 games that are mostly undocumented from earlier, but finding copies is hard.
You can find a lot of ABC80 / ABC800 software, including a few adventures, archived at https://www.abc80.net/archive/luxor/sw/ABC-klubben/
I haven’t looked much at the ABC800 stuff, but I did replay the ABC80 stuff recently.
I took a closer look at what adventure games are contained in the archive I mentioned:
[ABC80] Uppsjö (Erik Åström, 1983) – The first adventure game I ever played, so I have fond memories of it.
[ABC80] Jakten på den försvunna Z80:n (Erik Åström, 1984) – The second adventure game I ever played. This is version 1.1. Apparently there was a version 1.0 dated April 26, but that one may be lost.
[ABC80] Time (1984) – “Idea from Your Computer. Translated, modified and extended by Sten Axtelius.” I haven’t played this one, and I don’t know what the original was.
[ABC80] Adventur (Peter Åhlén, 1985) – Billed as the “by far largest game of its kind for the ABC80”. At 102 rooms that’s probaby true, but there’s a lot of filler.
[ABC80] Kock (Peter Åhlén, 1986) – A much smaller (28 rooms) and more focused game. I read somewhere that he was planning a floppy version with more text, but I don’t know if that ever materialized.
Somewhat frustratingly, I don’t think any of these games support saving and loading.
With one minor exception, I haven’t played any of the ABC800 ones:
[ABC800] Atlantis (1983) – “Based on a mini adventure listed in Your Computer September 1983 by John Ransley. Swedish adaptation by B. Mårtensson”.
[ABC800] Devil’s Dungeon 1984) – “By C Williams Engel, modified by T Alm”. Apparently more of an RPG, and the original game was from 1978.
[ABC800] Adventur (Peter Åhlén, 1985) – Presumably the same as the ABC80 version?
[ABC800] Anchion2 (anonymous, 1985) – Modeled on Uppsjö, but in a different setting.
[ABC800] Jakten efter St Petersburg-ikonen (1984) – “Translated and converted to ABC800M by Bertil Mårtensson … Translated from The St Peresburg Ikon, Your Computer 1984, by John Ransley.”
[ABC800] Inka-statyettens Hemlighet (Petter Stahre, 1985)
[ABC800] Star Wars (Daniel Deimert, 1987) – This one is in English. Appears to be an adaptation of part of the first movie. I tried it briefly, but got frustrated with the random deaths.
I think that’s it. While looking through some old print-outs, I did stumble over an ABC80 port of Roger Chaffee’s “Quest”, but you’ve already reviewed that one and I don’t think it had any noticeable differences from the original.
There are some much earlier ones than that are in that archive (that’s what I was I meant by hard to find) but I really appreciate the rundown of these!
Oh? I always assumed that Uppsjö was the first original one on the ABC80, but there were games – even non-commercial ones – that never appeared in the “ABC-Klubben” archives. (And some that did appear seem to have been slightly mistranscribed or updated from the magazine they were published in.) And there were other computer clubs that I know much less about.
Sorry, I don’t have any leads on those. There is a Facebook group about ABC80, but I think they’re the ones running the archive I linked to. There is some other software there as disk images (that I don’t know how to read), but I don’t think there are any adventure games there either.
The game does basically resolve around mastering how to deal with the Piman in order to get the correct combination of gifts… I think that most of the enjoyment for people at the time was discovering the clues to the external competition… which can be found in all sorts of places… even the game map itself. As a standalone adventure, I think the consensus is that it is really isn’t that enjoyable. It passed me by back in the day and, despite being a ZX Spectrum text adventure player, it’s not one I’ve felt the need to spend much time with.
I’ve finished (or “finished” kind of) and yeah, the actual game part is rubbish. I’ll get into both that and the contest part.