Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

One of the earliest homegrown computers for the British market was the Nascom 1. (This is the same computer Level 9 got their start on.) Alan Butcher had obtained one in ’78, and at his company (British Telecom) there were enough other people interested in the same computer that he was able to start a computer club.

From the Centre for Computing History.

This club soon expanded past British Telecom employees to the general public. An early member who joined was Bob Simpson, who we’ve mentioned here before: he was the founder of Micro Power. Micro Power had some early Nascom games but they were essentially focused on Acorn computers like the Electron and the BBC Micro. They published Seek, the game that was essentially stateless and all action happened in the connections between rooms, and a game they just called Adventure, which had a princess who didn’t want to be saved and an out-there “meta-narrator” mechanic.

They were started out as half-computer-store half-publisher, with Micro Power’s growth as a major software company happening organically.

As the place became a hub for people, they would bring along programs they’d written and Bob would say, ‘I will sell that for you.’

— Chris Payne, Marketing Assistant for Micro Power

Alan Butcher (who eventually became the software manager) notes that people in the publishing side spent time in the store:

Having the retail outlet helped a great deal in keeping in touch with customers; the shop would be packed with enthusiasts only too willing to give feedback.

Part of the Nascom club I mentioned also had David Elliott as a member (described as a “young kid” by Chris Payne), which is how he got connected with Bob Simpson and Micro Power. David Elliot is the author of today’s game, Eldorado Gold.

Computing Today, May 1982.

David Elliot has been interviewed but he doesn’t mention his text adventure game (originally for Nascom, see above) at all. He calls his first game Alien Destroyers, even though it almost certainly was Eldorado Gold. (That Nascom ad was from May; the first ad for Alien Destroyers was in September, and the ad includes a BBC Micro version of Eldorado Gold.) So: why did he neglect to mention it? Was it because the book all this is coming from (Acorn: A World in Pixels) was specifically oriented towards the Acorn products anyway? I don’t think so based on his phrasing:

Alien Destroyers was my first game, and not the best implementation, but a learning experience. Funnily enough, it being one of the first Micro Power games, meant it was on the back cover of magazines tor several months. It was quite nice for me, but I expect a bit boring for the readers and a push to get new games written.

Quite possibly it is because: Eldorado Gold is heavily derived from an earlier game, Lost Dutchman’s Gold from 1979.

From the cover for Lost Dutchman’s Gold.

I don’t mean “derived” like we recently saw with ADV.CAVES where the exact same source code had a new company name dropped on top, but clearly the author was using the original source code and map as a reference and tweaking it to make his own game.

From the Centre for Computing History.

The meta-structure of both games is identical. You start at your shack/hut, with a mule nearby. At hand is a map, a lamp, a gun, and carrot(s). You can wander into the desert and follow the map to a secret canyon, make your way to a mine, dig holes in the mine to get some treasure, and take a ladder that goes directly from the mine to the starting residence, obtaining victory.

The original game was simple but managed to have some charm due to, first of all, the main narrator being THE GHOST OF BACKPACK SAM who takes on a old-time-Western accent for even basic parser messages.

GOOD LUCK AND I HOPE YOU DON’T END UP A GHOST LIKE ME.

The mule also can be befriended with the carrots and the saddlebags it carries around can increase the size of your inventory. The canyon includes an encounter with Indians that can result in a gun battle although the best route is to steer clear because it will eventually kill you; the gun that the game starts you with is in fact a red herring. (This is similar to how Time Zone had a number of scenes with angry indigenous people where the right play is to avoid them.)

The source code was distributed past its TRS-80 origins — it was one of the games on the ADV.CAVE disk of Apple II games, and had a printing in The Captain 80 Book of Basic Adventures. Speaking of computers popular in the UK, there’s ports for the Atom, BBC Micro, C64, and Nascom; there’s even a version for Microbee (a computer essentially exclusive to Australia).

So it makes sense David Elliot got a hold of the source code; what he did maybe could be thought of as a parody.

You start in your hut with a chart showing a path to a mine, and a gun. Outside is the mule, as in the other game, although the mule only is carrying around a shovel, not saddlebags. Just to the west of the mule is a carrot.

I’ll speak more of the mule in a moment. The ghost town in the original game just has a saloon where you’re meant to find keys that are used to open up the mines. In this version, there’s a bank with some bank notes you can try to take, but then you get tossed in a jail. It’s just a trap — you’re supposed to steer clear. The only thing you really need is some more cartridges for the gun. Given the fact the gun was a useless red herring in the original game, this gives a hint that things are going to roll down differently.

Hey, it worked in Deathmaze 5000.

Going in the desert and following the map/chart is identical; there are no Spanish coins in the cave, just a jar of oil (which can be used to revive the lamp if it runs low, but you don’t need to). If you go into the Indian encampment rather than a shootout there’s just nobody there.

I wonder if anyone was disappointed by the ad copy and cover image.

There’s no keys in town, so entering the mine is not handled the same way as before.

And now is where I reveal the big change I alluded to. You use the gun, twice.

First, the mule just eats your carrot if you try to feed it and never gets close, so instead of the mule being a helper who follows you around, you’re supposed to SHOOT MULE.

Since there’s no keys, you also use the gun (with the extra cartridges from town) to blast the door.

The mine is essentially identical: you can grab some gold, diamonds, and silver, two of them requiring the shovel to DIG.

There’s a ladder you can use that will take you up a secret passage back to the starting location. Then you need to go back to the hotel in the ghost town (as the instructions say) and type SCORE to win.

It almost seems like this was meant to be a parody game; that is, the young author started with the source code and mucked about with it as a learning exercise, especially noting how useless the gun was. He decided to make the gun be an integral part of the game and simplify the mule mechanic by just making it a poor victim.

OK, it isn’t that much a mystery the game didn’t come up in an interview. At least its existence is interesting as a historical snapshot.

Perhaps you’d like to play the author’s game Swoop instead. It feels halfway between the gameplay of Galaxian and Demon Attack. Patterns of birds that swoop down are trickier than either of those two games and birds will aim for collision more often, giving a different flavor to the gameplay loop.