Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

The old Gothic church, so the locals say, used to have a veritable labyrinth of passages beneath it, but the whereabouts of the entrance to the passages has long since been forgotten. The church itself has fallen into disuse for a variety of reasons, the main one being the sinister aura that surrounds one of the large tombs in the church graveyard. The church’s treasures have long since disappeared without a trace.

An ancient local legend, all but forgotten now, tells of a vast underground land inhabited by weird monsters guarding wonderful treasures. Could there be any connection between this legend and the lost treasures? By the way, if you do find any treasure, take it back to the church, and lay it on the altar – after all, it doesn’t belong to you!

CATACOMBS is a large and complex adventure which is definitely not for beginners. Many of the puzzles to be solved are unusual, with ingenious solutions, and will stretch your imagination to its limits.

Supersoft December 1979 catalog cover, as uploaded by the co-founder of Supersoft to Wikipedia.

This is a game I vacillated on if I was even going to play it or not (or at least, play it anytime soon).

Back in the halcyon days of January 2020, when I was generating my 1981 list of games, one of the prominent “lost game” companies was Supersoft. We’ve seen them before with Hitch Hiker’s Guide and the saga involving a lawsuit.

They were not the only adventure game Supersoft published that year, and a Personal Computing Ad from November 1981 lists

Hitch-Hiker’s Guide £16
Goblin Towers £14
Cracks of Doom £14
Catacombs £27
Weird Wood £25
Cornucopia £35

Three of these are by Brian Cotton, and all are lost in their 1981 form (Commodore PET). Goblin Towers exists in a later 1984 form for C64. Brian Cotton eventually (through 1981-1982) had a series of five games (Catacombs, Witch Hunt, Cornucopia, Forestland, Goblin Towers) where I had them sorted as either 1984 games or “lost”.

Based on the earliest advertising anyone has been able to track (“anyone” mainly being Gareth Pitchford) Catacombs was the first of the games and started being advertised March 1981. The timing here — that is, the exact month of March 1981 — has an enormous amount of significance, as our Quest for the First Britventure in 1981 mostly stopped at The Golden Baton and a May 1981 ad. Our quest would have ended there had it not been blown away by the existence of A. Knight’s Galactic Hitchhiker from 1980. But Galactic Hitchhiker was a one-person-game sold by a one-person-company, that is, not sold by a real “professional” distributor like Molimerx or Supersoft.

By having an ad date of March 1981, Catacombs is the first original “professional distributed” British adventure game.

And… we don’t have the original anymore, nor the early C64 version (which, based on the Cotton games we do have, probably just involved copying the source code from the PET verbatim). There was yet another version made as part of a “Classics Revisited” set from 1986/1987, for a wide variety of platforms…

…but at least for Catacombs, those versions were all lost too in 2020. I had Catacombs sorted in my “I guess we’ll never see what it’s like” folder, marked with grim digital red. There I thought it would remain, until in 2022 a collector stepped forward and uploaded the entire Classic Revisited set to oldgames.ru (in DOS format). Suddenly, as of September of last year, it became possible to play all of them.

This stuck me with a dilemma; Catacombs is extremely important in British adventure game history. We can say British adventures on personal computer started with Galactic Hitchhiker but British adventure games as an industry started with Catacombs. But is it worth it to play a “remix” which I knew to be different?

Eh, whatever. I’ll be getting to playing this in the 2030s sometime anyway, might as well check it out early.

Some quick history on Supersoft before starting the journey–

Via Commodore Computing International, March 1985.

Pearl Wellard (left) and Peter Calver (right) were accountants in 1978 who both worked at the same company. The company obtained a computer (a PET, the “proper business computer” of the Trinity) and the pair was the ones who ended up setting up the system. After that they got hooked enough to start writing and selling their own PET software under the name Supersoft.

There wasn’t software for the PET in those days. There were only about 1000 PETs in the country.

The pair ended up giving their jobs up after 18 months to work at Supersoft full-time.

Our turnover in the first year was £2000 — in the second year it increased to £100,000.

There’s not a great deal of info on the duo’s early years otherwise (Peter has done interviews, but mainly because of their purchase of Audiogenic in the mid-80s. Who cares about that old PET software, right?) I did want to share a bizarre excerpt I found from a freeform “gossip column” in the January 1981 issue of Personal Computer World, that is, from two months before Catacombs got published:

Supersoft’s Peter Calver has a PET name for partner Pearl Wellard. Pearl has threatened the Editor with all sorts of dire horrors if he reveals that it’s Pearl*****. (A prize for the first correct entry.)

I think we’ve had enough preface, but I should add one other thing: based on the thread at CASA, one puzzle has a bug that makes it unsolvable and one puzzle is currently unsolved. This is a hunt-the-treasure game where you are supposed to gather everything together, type SCORE, and pat yourself on the back for a job well done, so there’s no “ending text” anyway (people have extracted the text to confirm). I think the max score is ~240 out of 250? It is difficult to check without spoilers.

For my first session I decided to explore freeform, without even making a map, just to see what I was up against. Poking in the church I quickly found the altar where the treasures were destined to go (at least according to the ad copy in the catalog).

I found a notice board which felt Zork-ish.

Trying to wander away from the church, all I found was a maze.

Avast, casual exploration foiled! … I guess I’ll whip out the maps and start taking in things seriously next time, and share what some of the puzzles are like.

(In the meantime, could someone let me know what the actual theoretical high score is, given the bug?)