This is the second game of Brian Cotton, after Catacombs (1981). Maybe.
I say maybe, because this game is quite a bit simpler; while we’ve had authors write a “beginner game” after their initial stab (see: Pirate Adventure, Mission: Asteroid) this feels simple in a learning-how-to-make-games way. That is, while Catacombs was published first, Goblin Towers may have been written first. While I’m not done yet, unless there’s a major turn of events this will be finished in two posts rather than four.
TO RECAP the story so far: Supersoft, a company founded by Pearl Wellard and Peter Calver in 1978, published one of the first professionally distributed text adventures in the UK, Catacombs; maybe the first. (Since writing that article more missing 1980 games have come up. Some might be vaporware — that is, they may have never truly existed — and the ads for them make them all look like amateur-garage companies, meaning the “professional” moniker still gives Catacombs some distinction. Of course, “professional” is a loose word to be using for the UK market in 1981, so there’s some hand-waving here.)
Goblin Towers was published after Catacombs, still in 1981. The original version was for Commodore PET, which we don’t have, but a C64 follow-up came after which we do have. This is unlike the situation with Catacombs, where no copies of earlier variants are available and we only have the 1986 “Classic Quests” re-issue, which likely added content and text.
The 1983 copy shown above (cover via Lemon 64) has a fair chance of being similar to or even identical to the PET version of the game. This is the version I’m playing, although I also compared a little with the Classic Quests version. To simplify my narrative, I’ll save talking about changes in the re-write for when I’m done with the original.
The premise is that there’s a castle with rumored treasure, and we need to go fetch it all and bring it back to the starting building, getting points for each treasure placed.
Unlike most the games of this sort, I don’t think the most direct inspiration is Crowther/Woods Adventure, or even Scott Adams Adventureland. I think the author was inspired from Zork.
Now, this is a much spicier assertion than it seems because this was written in the UK. Infocom was not common in the country, and in the land of expensive disk drives it was never terribly popular through the 80s. However, in addition to the newspaper giving the same vibe as the leaflet from Zork, and the lunch, there’s combat with a goblin you’ll see shortly which resembles the fight with the troll. There’s not that many forward ramifications — they’re all still pulling from the same original source, after all — but even when looking at the US market, there haven’t been many people inspired by Infocom yet. I’m guessing Cotton’s exposure was to mainframe Zork, not commercial Zork; this game likely was written in 1980 when I don’t think any commercial copies of Infocom had made it over the pond yet.
Another point of resemblance: Crowther/Woods Adventure kicks things off with a grating, and Zork has an early grating but changes it so it must be unlocked from the other side. The same thing happens here; there’s a grating, but even with a key (found later) you can’t open it. The game says it must be unlocked from the other side.
The starting way to enter is instead at a large inviting castle:
Quite early on is a side passage with a goblin combat (which, again, feels a lot like the Zork troll fight).
I died a fair number of times and I thought perhaps I was meant to come back later with a special object or at least more “experience points” helping, but I gave it one more go after eating the packed lunch and was victorious. I guess our hero was just a bit peckish. It’s hard to murder on an empty stomach.
Past the goblin are some stairs going up and down, with two relatively straightforward puzzles associated with both directions.
On the down side, there’s an iron key (I haven’t used it yet) followed by a cell with an emerald (treasure) and a loose block. You’re simply supposed to push the block. This opens a passage to a diamond, and a route to go outside (you’re not trapped, this is just an alternate route out, like Zork).
On the up side, there’s a locked chest, and a room with a message: “Cassim forgot about it but Ali Baba didn’t.” This indicates that to open the chest you need to say the words OPEN SESAME. (Cassim is Ali Baba’s brother who tries to steal the treasure, who forgets the literal words OPEN SESAME to get out of the cave.)
Reversing back to the goblin fight, and heading east instead, first there’s a crystal wand (haven’t used yet, but it does count as a treasure) followed by a straightforward maze, the kind of maze where going east from A to B usually means you can reverse your steps by going west.
With just a few exceptions.
The maze has a pearl necklace (treasure) and leads to a ledge which has a “hook”. I have been unable to get the hook to do anything. It feels like the sort of place where a rope would go, but I haven’t seen a rope and the verb TIE doesn’t work.
To recap: Out of the treasures, I’ve found an emerald, sapphire, diamond, and pearl necklace. I’ve found a key which hasn’t gone to any locks yet, a wand where waving it everywhere does nothing, and a hook I have had no luck with. Unless I’m missing a map exit (not implausible) I’ve otherwise explored all the accessible areas. The high score is 160 with score coming in chunks of 5 so we’re not talking an excessively long game, but it is possible Mr. Cotton has ramped things up later.
Renga in Blue 
I’m not sure if this is an additional sign of Zork lineage, but in the 1986 version if you move in the dark “something nasty has found you” rather than your falling into a bottomless pit or something like that. Grumble.
I’m suspicious of that little room in the loft above the cottage! Waving the wand doesn’t work there either though.
Oh, and Goblin Towers has
>VERBOSE
Maximum verbosity.
which I think means it’s definitely influenced by Zork. That wasn’t in a few different Adventure versions I just tried on the Archive and it is in Zork.
the VERBOSE is an ’86 feature, not ’83
also the loft isn’t in the ’83 version either
Ah. The ’83 version didn’t seem to run on the archive (maybe I just didn’t wait long enough to load) so I switched over.
I wonder why they added the loft if, presumably, it doesn’t do anything?
What makes it even more weird is there seems to be almost no other changes in terms of room layout otherwise! I was hoping for some extra hint on the cliff hook but alas.
The game does seem amenable to verb-testing; it seems like TURN and PULL are both accepted (PULL maybe at the block that takes PUSH) and HANG isn’t. CUT is but trying to cut brambles got me nowhere. JUMP in the loft gets “Wheee!”, don’t know if it has an effect anywhere else. This is all in the ’86 version of course.
I’m suspicious that the rumble sound for “OPEN SESAME” might also have had an effect somewhere else on the map but I couldn’t find one. As my first post suggests I was running into lamp life problems.
I was trying “cut walls” in the room where the goblin seemed to be hacking, but got “I don’t see any walls here” or somesuch. “Walls” are I guess only implemented as a noun in the room where you have to READ WALLS to get the message about Cassim and Ali Baba. I had some parser trouble with that exact message.
far east of the maze has an extra exit where you can go “up”
finished the game
the main obnoxious thing is that there are a couple spots where it takes an indirect noun but it is clearly bespoke-coded (that is, a verb the game doesn’t understand normally is understood if you type the exact right phrase in a certain spot)
also, KILL GOBLIN is different from KILL GOBLIN WITH SWORD uuuuuugh
The obvious Zork influence here is quite intriguing, so I did a little research and turned up some interesting info, which leads me to believe that the author was more likely to have encountered Personal Software’s commercial Apple II version of “Barbarian” Zork I at a very early date than to have played the mainframe original, which seemed to be almost totally unknown in the UK at that time:
https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1980-11/page/146/mode/1up?view=theater
These PromGlow Ltd. ads continued in the coming months, and were soon joined by other Apple II importers carrying it.
Now, the really interesting thing here is that this actually seems to be the very first magazine ad for commercial Zork, predating Personal Software’s own full-color ads in the US computer press by a month or two, perhaps more if you take into account the delays entailed in importing. This seems to run contrary to many of the assertions and assumptions made here, for instance:
https://medium.com/@paulalbertpf/zork-and-the-case-of-the-mixed-up-barbarians-6a46ed0ef3ce
I won’t go on yet another of my patented “everyone gets release dates wrong” bloviations here, but the continual prioritization of developer interviews and anecdotes over in-depth period textual research remains a major problem in the “field” of game history research…
Anyway, you’ll also recall the whole thing about BASUG and the early UK Apple II scene that I commented on in the Spelunker entry, so it does seem feasible that he may have encountered it from early adopters/importers like that and then decided he wanted to try recreating something like it on his PET. Nothing definitive here, of course, but it does strike me as more likely than the mainframe angle, for various reasons.
I mean, the “fortunate” thing on adventure games is how little oral documentation we have on anything!
The import Zork is pretty intriguing. This sort of thing can always happen informally, too.
Posting this separately, but it came up during my Zork/Goblin Tower research. I turned up this type-in that seems to have evaded detection until now:
https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputing198012/page/n57/mode/1up?view=theater
Its an “adventure rogue-like” as you’ve coined it. The funny thing is that the fighter/wizard/thief setup immediately reminded me of the first Hero’s Quest, and after poking around a bit it seems like there was originally supposed to be a whole “goblin dungeon” area in that game which ended up getting cut. I wonder if the Coles happened upon this little type-in in their earlier days…?
There’s an article by the same author in the July 1980 issue of Byte (about his (?) game “Castle”), https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/articles/byte80_nicholson.html
Anyone wanting to type-in Goblin may want to check out the reader submitted corrections in the March 1981 issue.
Mr Nicholson seems to go on to have a long and impressive career in IT. https://robertnicholson.info/
Good catch there. I thought his name sounded familiar, so I was surprised when I couldn’t find it on CASA. I must have vaguely remembered it from seeing that Castle article at some point. If you read those two articles together, it would almost seem like Goblin was a reaction to his own complaints about more sophisticated adventures like Castle being a bit too slow and complicated, so perhaps that’s why he never published it?
After further searching, there was another “correction to the correction” letter published about Goblin in the June, 1981 issue of Personal Computing. Nicholson himself had a few other general programming articles published in both Personal Computing and Byte, circa 1978-1983, and then seems to have started a company called Sydis, who were involved in business systems and computer voice recognition.
Looks like my first post on Zork/Goblin Towers got eaten by the spam filter due to multiple links. Hopefully you can fish it out…
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The progression of Brian Cotton’s Supersoft games is somewhat erratic in terms of difficulty and structure. I think as a rule of thumb if an author created several games they usually became progressively more complex and difficult. With these games however, I would say that Forestland (1983) is much easier than Catacombs (1981) and Cornucopia (1982). In fact Forestland is one of the very few games that I have completed in one day, whereas Cornucopia is horrendously difficult but plays rather more like Enchanter with its list of spells. Witch Hunt (1985) is much more like Goblin Towers and Forestland but is considerably more difficult and has some very devious puzzles.
Is it me or does the goblin in the Supersoft picture from the Lemon 64 site look like Edward G. Robinson?