The publisher sold this one as “Adventure”, so I’ll hope you forgive me going with the alternate title on the intro screen, which the author (Simon Wadsworth) has stated was always the real name of the game anyway.
From The Retro Cavern.
Bug-Byte was founded in 1980 by Tony Baden and Tony Milner while they were students and neighbors at Oxford. Tony had bought a ZX-80 and the duo — after playing around with the machine — realized that software selection was scant.
They formed their own company (using Tony Milner’s address from Coventry as the business mail, since a student residence didn’t seem professional) where “at first we pretended we were bigger than we were”, making a peak of 150 pounds in weekly sales by the end of the year.
They tried spending for a full page ad in March 1981 for ZX-80 software; that same month is when the ZX-81 launched.
We had doubled our advertising and halved our sales.
After graduating Oxford the duo went full time into business, finding an office in Liverpool and cranking out ZX-81 software (“I wrote eight in one day once”) eventually growing to the point of having sold 500,000 cassettes by August 1982.
Tony Baden. Picture (and the information just given) from Your Computer, August 1982.
They later became famous as the publisher of the adventure Twin Kingdom Valley, which we’ll hit in 1983, and the platformer Manic Miner, which we won’t be reaching at all (although Data Driven Gamer gave it a play-through you can read, or you can watch the video below).
For today’s game, we’re firmly still in the summer of 1982. The author, the 16-year old Simon Wadsworth, describes how “my school friends and I spent countless hours battling the creations of Scott Adams, Brian Howarth, Level 9 and Artic Computing” and decided to write his own, using ZX81 BASIC (with some machine code). Note how there’s been enough time for the early British games to be influential, it isn’t just original Adventure and Scott Adams.
I have no idea what made me submit it to Bug-Byte for publication, but I’ve always been glad that I did. This was the first step in my career as a software developer. It was written while studying for my GCSE O-Levels. When the Head of Year got to hear about it she contacted the local newspaper; so I achieved my fifteen minutes of fame.
I located the newspaper page in question (thanks to Detchibe from Discord) which mentions he earned 200 pounds:
I wasn’t expecting much. When they accepted it, I could hardly believe it.
Simon sent in a second game to Bug Byte which never got published (for unclear reasons) followed by two for Artic, so we’ll be visiting him again, but for now, let’s check out his first effort.
This was incidentally a giant pain to emulate. EightyOne, the typical recommended emulator for ZX81, has been acting very slow for me (pushing a button for a menu taking 2 minutes+ to respond). JtyOne, the online emulator at zx81stuff, had input problems, I presume because of the ZX80 machine code (at least that site makes the BASIC source code easy to read). I went through some even more obscure emulators like no$zx and ZEsarUX which had the same input error, and finally had luck with reverting to an old version of EightyOne (version 0.52) which you can find here.
The “collect pieces of the magic gizmo scepter and assemble them” plot gives vibes of Howarth and the Arrow of Death (remember he was an inspiration!)
The opening just has a handful of generic-forest-adventure rooms (lake, meadow, forest, mud path, …) but a wildly unusual number of items just lying around. To get to the pond above I needed to JUMP over a fence, and the fence itself had a wire. There’s a boat you can enter that just has an axe and a diamond you can grab, there’s a “mud ball” that turns out to be a crystal ball if you just “clean” it (LOOK CRYSTAL: “I SEE A GOBLET AND A FURNACE”), and there’s an acorn up a tree.
Without doing much other than kick down a gate I had 8 items and I was stuck on a “doorway”.
You don’t pick up the bag of dirt: you start the game with it. I can just imagine some emperor sending you on your journey and reminding you “don’t forget your dirt!”
The “doorbell” is strange in the description since this is a “first three letters only” style parser, so it first seems like the game only lets you refer to the door, not the doorbell. The trick is to use the noun BELL, but alas, that doesn’t translate to progress:
PRESS BELL
BUZZ…
IM ELECTROCUTED
THE GAME IS OVER
So I find myself stuck, yet again, on some teenager’s simple BASIC game stuck on what seems like a very simple obstacle. I did go through my verb list…
…but despite the large item list to play with I’m out of ideas. Suggestions welcome! (Please no plumb-the-BASIC-source spoilers yet, though, at the moment I only want to hear if you haven’t looked anything up.)
Renga in Blue 
Tried emptying the dirt out or searching through it? Using something else (mud ball) to ring the bell? Look inside the boot? Axe the door? Swim in the “dry” pond? Just throwing out things to see if something sticks or triggers you to think of something else.
Does LOOK CRYSTAL show the same thing when used at each map location? Or different “image” when repeated in the same location?
LOOK BOOT reveals nothing but I did work out (via staring at the verb list) that SHAKE works and gets a key for the door
I’ll test the crystal in other places but where I tried it I only saw the goblet
I was also going to suggest choosing violence and chopping the door with the axe.
the game is weirdly against violence, even against yourself
new section has
a demon — doesn’t react to anything, can’t kill, doesn’t kill you
a giant spider — doesn’t react to anything, can’t kill, doesn’t kill you
a deep pit — which will kill you if you jump in, so I guess demons are puppy dogs
In a more wordplay-oriented text adventure you migh try using your dirt to “ground” the electric buzzer, but I sure hope that isn’t the case here.
I don’t suppose a dreadful pun like EARTH BELL with the mud would work? SMEAR or APPLY the mud or earth? TURN or PULL BELL? Can you knock on the door or throw an object at the buzzer? Can you insert the wire into the door anywhere? Surely not a generic magic word?
I’ll try that too
even though I’m “past the door” (see my new post) I’m stuck enough I have a suspicion the doorbell is usable somehow
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