Does my hon. Friend agree that pornography is a drug, and a very dangerous drug at that, as it rots the mind and can persuade individuals to commit great violence and cruelty against innocent people?
— Comment during debate in Parliament at the House of Commons, 28 March 1985
The 1987 ZX Spectrum game Soft & Cuddly was infamous for gauche horror imagery and being distributed with a barf bag. The advertising leaned into this; an insert poster distributed with the October 1987 edition of Crash boldy declared the game
THE FIRST COMPUTER NASTY
One of the tabloids — The Star — ran with it, quoting Mrs. Mary Whitehouse of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association as saying “It is the product of a sick society.”
The British obsession with deviant media really kicked off in the 80s with the introduction of video stores, and the fact that videos were not covered under the rating system and so could be released uncensored. This led to a moral panic about “video nasties” (a term introduced in 1982) that included horror films being accused of spawning particular murders; the Video Recordings Act 1984 eventually led to a set of 72 videos being outright banned in the UK. These were not all recent videos and included, for example, the 1963 movie Blood Feast.
An Egyptian caterer kills various women in suburban Miami to use their body parts to revive a dormant Egyptian goddess while an inept police detective tries to track him down.
The raw paranoia that such media produced is vaguely reminiscent of the Satanic Panic in the United States.
The trailer above includes such tabloid headlines as
Scarred for life: Experts links street riots and child abuse to diet of filth fed to our young
and
Cruel movies fan hacks 4 to death
However, despite Soft & Cuddly cozying up to the title in order to trump up sales, the first game called a “digital nasty” in the tabloids came rather earlier, in 1982, in the form of an innocuous text adventure published by Artic Computing, Ship of Doom.
…
Ship of Doom was the second game from Charles Cecil (he was now 19), and the third in the series from Artic, hence Adventure C. (Previously: Planet of Death, Inca Curse.) Again it had ports to ZX80 and ZX81, with a port that followed for the ZX Spectrum. (The latter is what I played.)
Via World of Spectrum.
Richard Turner, one of the founders of Artic, worked together with Cecil so I am calling him a co-author.
He and I had quite good imaginations so we came up with some nice stories. We also had a love of puzzles and we liked stuff that you had to figure out. That was of more interest to us at the time than arcade games — which I wasn’t that good at anyway.
This game represents a turning point in their catalog, as Richard had talked with a Whsmith manager about selling the tapes, and discussion turned to business in general. The manager explained Richard’s company needed to be Vat-registered and also that “the artwork [was] rubbish and we needed something a lot better.” The cover above is the last of the “complete minimalism” covers in the Artic catalog of 8 adventures, and re-prints additionally added new art. Sales (according to Richard) went drastically up.
Via World of Spectrum.
As the text on the packaging (in either version) informs us, our spaceship has been scooped up by an Alien Cruiser looking to enslave humanoids and we have been stuck by a tractor beam (as told to us by Fred, our pet android). Our goal is to disable the tractor beam and escape. It’s not exactly Star Wars because there’s no stormtroopers to greet us; in fact, the entire opening area of the vessel is empty of aliens or even deathtraps. This seems to be the “apathy alien” style like how the Star Trek crew boards a Borg vessel but the hostiles don’t bother to acknowledge the crew’s presence until they become a threat.
In the typical fridge-logic sense it is puzzling, but honestly, I kind of like it. Alien stuff should be alien and it makes the experience feel stranger.
Room descriptions are minimal; the opening setup is here to provide us objects and devices to fiddle with.
A “shady room” has a dark corner, but fortunately nearby there are some infrared glasses. If you wear them, leave, and come back, you’ll find a SQUARE MICROBATTERY.
This is still the same system based on the Ken Reed Practical Computing article from 1980, so feedback can sometimes be minimal and getting a repeat of a room description can be fiddly.
Other than those objects and the hook from an earlier screenshot I’ve racked up a laser gun, a coin, a silver rod with a square slot, and a torch (British, so flashlight). I feel like the battery ought to go in the torch or some such but OPEN TORCH gives me
I CANT
with the Ken Reed standard message showing again and LIGHT TORCH just says I CANT DO THAT YET.
As far as obstacles go, there’s a body in a block of ice (can’t move or even shoot it with the ray gun)…
…a key under a glass cover (you can shoot it with the ray gun but the whole thing vaporizes and you softlock the game)…
…and a computer room with a red light and a key hole. I presume the key goes in the hole.
I’ve gotten a whole lot of I CANT from the various things I’ve tried. I don’t feel like anything is broken, really, and I’m guessing I’m missing a simple interaction. Inca Curse (game B) wasn’t terribly hard but Planet of Death (game A, without Cecil) was so this is really a coin flip on what level of pain I’m in for.
I did go ahead and make my verb list, which I’ll provide now.
I’ll wait on finishing my historical story about Artic’s encounter with the British tabloids, as I haven’t reached the room that caused the controversy yet. Cliffhanger!
(And no spoilers yet, please.)
Renga in Blue 
I vaguely remember playing this one years back on a Spectrum emulator, when I decided to play through all the Artic games chronologically. I recall that the only one that really gave me trouble was Ground Zero, and that my favorite by far was The Golden Apple. As for this title, I doubt it will bother you too much, given your hardened adventurer skills. In fact, it looks like you have one of the more annoying points covered on your verb list already…
Useless bonus trivia ™: Blood Feast was also the name of a particularly “nasty” sounding thrash/death metal band who were kind of the big local heroes in the northern NJ late 80s/early 90s metal scene I was part of as a teenager. Luckily, video nasties and Satanic panics didn’t really affect us. Gen X Jersey was very much a “free range” species. See “Clerks” for more info.
surely the square battery goes in the rod’s square slot.
This was right. I had of course tried PUT first, which turned out to just drop the item, and then INSERT, which totally seems like the normal verb, but you need to PUSH it.
This is the case, and is the main stumping block for most players, as the adventure is very easy otherwise. So much so that this game became infamous for this, even overriding the controversial bit you have mentioned. We weren’t in the habit of pre-populating a verb list back then.
the actual bad part was I was referring it to a SCREWDRIVER (that is, after all, the noun, SONIC is the adjective)
but no, SONIC is what it wants
I only figured this out after DROP SCREWDRIVER and it told me I CANT
I had already tried all the verbs with the thing, twice, argh
lf you type SONIC SCREWDRIVER in full with the appropriate verb, will it accept that? I remember that this part didn’t seem to trip me up for long like it seems to do with most players, but I’m trying to remember exactly why that was the case…
works ok with that
but that’s because it really is a two-word parser and it read that as POINT SONIC
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