No matter how small an Adventure you write, it will take far, far more time and effort than you thought it would.
— Peter Killworth from How to Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron
Double surprise!
You may be wondering why I am ending my 1982 sequence with what I am marking as a 1983 game. As of this writing, Mobygames, CASA Solution Archive, and IFDB all list the game as 1982. Unlike Critical Mass where I could find a physical copy with the date, there’s no rationale I can find to even get the year by mistake. Acorn User in their May 1983 issue states outright that
Acornsoft are due to release seven new packs this month — three on chemistry, a programming package called Microtext, Draughts and Reversi, Starship Command (see reviews) and another adventure — Countdown to Doom.
Ads start to appear in the second half of the year, so I am fairly certain I have already ended my 1982 sequence and am starting 1983 (however, I’m still happy to hear evidence to the contrary).
To backtrack to the history: this is another game by Peter Killworth. We haven’t seen him for a long time, not since Brand X / Philosopher’s Quest, but technically he’s been busy, because 1982 was the year he took Brand X (which he wrote for the Cambridge system with Acheton, Hezarin, Avon etc.) and turned it into a commercial product for Acornsoft.
Back in 1979, he had taken the language used for Acheton and made a small puzzle involving a cliff:
I had a problem which revolved around using a pivot to get up a cliff. Put weight on one end, and the other goes up — but you have to be careful to get the weight right. I programmed it on the mainframe, and left it for a friend to have a look at. When I came back next morning, I was deluged with messages from people I’d never heard of, all telling me where I’d gone wrong in the program.
With the launch of the BBC Micro, Acornsoft started looking towards Cambridge University for software, with the offer of a BBC Micro to takers; a friend of Kilworth’s had a program accepted so Killworth decided to convert Brand X (which is how it became the originally-abbreviated Philosopher’s Quest).
Converting from a mainframe to a home computer means — like Infocom by necessity, and Level 9 by choice — he needed to include a text-compression algorithm in order to fit everything he needed.
I have an unofficial competition running with Pete Austin of Level 9 and various other people on text compression. We’ve got it to about fifty per cent.
Throughout 1983 — which we’re now kicking off — he wrote Castle of Riddles and Countdown to Doom as original games for the BBC Micro, and also converted Partington’s Hamil. Eventually, with all the Topologika editions that happened in the late 80s, he wrote an expanded version. Unlike Philosopher’s Quest which essentially restored the mainframe content, the new content was written specifically for Topologika. A third edition appeared in 2000 when Killworth announced conversions of his three “Doom trilogy” games for z-code (that is, the type of file Infocom used that can be run with software like Frotz, Nitfol, etc.)
Killworth in 1984.
This game is fairly special to me in that not only have I beaten the game before (in the year 2000 incarnation) it represents what I might call the first difficult adventure game I’ve ever beaten without hints. (Infocom? Always relied on the Infoclues somewhere. This makes my memory of how to solve the puzzles foggier, which is why I barely remembered Zork III’s content at all when I played through. I had beaten Lucasarts games without hints but none of them were “difficult” in the same way as a game by a Cambridge oceanographer who moonlights with adventure games.) Part of the reason I had waited until the end of “1982” to play this is I figured some extra passage of time might help with forgetting how things work. I still have the walkthrough I had to write to beat the game in the end, though.
What I haven’t beaten (or played before) is the older, shorter version, and after much waffling that’s the version I’m going with. This is partly to juke my memory of the game even further, but also because this is a case (unlike the other Cambridge games) where the extra content was truly a late-80s addition.
As implied earlier, this ended up being the first of a “Doom trilogy”, a set of games on the planet Doomawangara. The first game is a relatively traditional solo-character treasure hunt, the second involves timing out a series of events akin to a mystery like Suspect but it’s a planet-adventure instead, and the third game involves a group with multiple characters.
Our ship crash lands and we need to look for six “components”. In addition to the components there are six “treasures” which seem to be optional (I don’t remember them being optional before) although like any proper adventure we’re going to try to get them all. (It’s not an “innovation” exactly as even Acheton let you get away without having all the treasures, and on my Hezarin playthrough I skipped two, but it is interesting that the game is formally set-up to let you bypass all the treasures.)
There’s a hard time of what seems to be 220 turns; this is why I needed a walkthrough last time I beat the game, because while it isn’t a ludicrously tight time limit (like Madventure, which required solving puzzles in different ways to optimize) it also isn’t one that you can hit by natural exploration.
You start trapped in the ship you crashed in as the exit door is jammed; there’s fortunately an explosive that can help as long as you LIGHT EXPLOSIVE followed by THROW EXPLOSIVE (and clear some space). Unfortunately, just trying to open the door from that kills you, as a reminder this is still a game from the Cambridge family of authors.
Using PUSH DOOR instead gets out, and leads to many directions to explore. We’ll search around the planet next time.
(I’m still doing a “concluding 1982” post like I did with 1981, but I’m going to finish this game first. Since I’m updating my recommendation lists, feel feel to speculate what might land on them; the four categories are Games everyone should play, For adventure enthusiasts, Things I personally enjoyed quite a bit that didn’t make the above list, and Some bonus games for historians.)
Renga in Blue 
This is most likely where the erroneous release date originates from:
https://www.mobygames.com/game/3997/countdown-to-doom/cover/group-69263/cover-186497/
Typical old-timey database stuff, where they would always go by physical media/packaging or title screens, rather than doing any research.
Moby’s data is woefully incomplete especially on older stuff. Metadata for old IF is extremely hard to come by (beyond just getting a list of anything that was released, and then weeding out everything that isn’t actually IF and somehow adding what is but isn’t on Moby).
I’ve said this before, but I think the main problem with the old databases (both general and system-specific) is that they largely pre-date the online availability of the thousands and thousands of period text sources we have to work with now, and the mass of new or more accurate information that hobbyist researchers/digital archeology dorks like ourselves turn up on a regular basis is largely too recondite to overcome the general inertia that exists, for many reasons, in the digital “old world”. Unfortunately, the upshot of this is that we’re swimming in a sea of bad release dates, missing platforms, lost or undocumented games, etc. But that’s also what makes it a fun area of research, as there’s still a lot of virgin territory to explore.
BTW, as long as you’re here, I’ll just mention quickly that I’ll be posting an update on the Roberts 665 adventure (that you are largely responsible for discovering!) soon, based on research that Arthur O’Dwyer and myself have been doing on it, as well as a couple of big mainframe adventure discoveries that I’ve been working on in the meantime. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that a playable game might even be coming soon from at least one of them…
That’s great, Rob. By the way, if anyone here is interested in the IF pack we’re putting together, you’re cordially invited to the eXo Discord where all the work happens: https://discord.com/invite/37FYaUZ
Or wait for the release, which I’ll advertise here if I may, and then flood me with corrections until I cry.
Just to note, as a longtime Mobygames contributor, that anyone is welcome to file corrections there if you have a convincing source to overwrite any inaccurate information you may find there. Obviously it has issues, but they’re as easy to address as they are to grouse about.
I guess the 1982 date comes off the copyright on both the tape and the original packaging but the experts at the BBC Micro games site have it listed as 1983.
Missed seeing the physical printed one
in some cases like this I’m fairly sure it’s just a matter of publishing dates slipping, but this one’s real strange because Castle of Riddles came before this game so it might be genuinely a flat-out typo
but maybe he started Doom first, but for whatever reason switched priorities?
It’s on both the cassette and the box, so it would seem to be a deliberate choice of 1982 for the copyright. Perhaps that was when an initial version of the game was completed. Castle of Riddles also had a copyright of 1982 on the box and the cassette but is listed as 1983 on CASA (as there’s evidence of a date of release in 02/1983) so I’ve got no issue with amending the date there for Countdown to be 1983 too.
Perhaps the order or priority of work was switched because of the way Castle of Riddles was linked to the competition Acornsoft ran with Your Computer in early 1983? [The February 15th 1983 release date of Riddles is linked to that competition]
Yes, I could see having both games in an advanced state but wanting to prioritize the contest while the vibe from Masquerade / Pimania was still hot.
As you probably all know, this game was never implemented on the Phoenix system, but written directly for the BBC micro (which is a pity as Peter missed out on all the feedback that the Phoenix users normally generated). I still have a complimentary copy of the 1987 Topologika version (running off a floppy disc) – I authored some other games they published.
Do you happen to remember exactly which version(s) of Crowther/Woods Adventure you had available on the Phoenix system? Just the original 350 point version, or can you recall any of the alternate/extended versions showing up on the machine over the years? Did any of you (or anyone else at Cambridge) ever attempt your own extensions of the game that you can recall, or was the focus solely on writing original adventures from scratch right from the get go? Also, do you remember any other non-Crowther/Woods or Dungeon/Zork adventures ever showing up on the system outside of what you and your colleagues had written yourselves?
Sorry for asking so many questions, but I’ve only ever seen generic descriptions like “The Phoenix system also had Advent and Zork” with no real details, and I’m kind of curious about what else might be lurking in the system’s archives.
As far as I remember (45 years later!) there were 2 versions of the C/W Adventure, implemented by Mike Oakley of the Computing Service (later immortalized as the mummy Yelka Oekim in Acheton, although the spelling was changed for the commercial version). I think the 2nd larger version came very soon after the 1st.
Zork was never implemented on the Phoenix system, nor any other adventures written outside Cambridge University, as far as I know. The first adventure to appear on Phoenix after the C/W adventure was Acheton, for which David Seal and Jon Thackray had devised their own programming language; this language was used for later adventures such as the Killworth/Mestel Brand X, which was the ancestor of Philosopher’s Quest.
Very sorry to be peppering you with questions like this, but I’ve sort of been specializing in researching and trying to preserve these Crowther/Woods variants recently. Do you happen to remember any details about the second, longer version? Like any particular puzzles or treasures that you remember being in it that weren’t in the original, or what the maximum score was? I know these might seem like silly questions after all these years, but those minor details that people remember later are one of the main ways to categorize and track these things down, and determine if something might have been a unique local variant.
Sorry, I don’t remember any details like that. And unfortunately, I’m not in contact with anyone who would be likely to know.
Didn’t Peter also port mainframe Quondam to the BBC? That is of course the only version of that game that now survives, similar to Jon Thackray’s porting of the now vanished mainframe Hezarin to DOS.
The latter is the only game of the Phoenix games in their many different guises (mainframe, Topologika, Acornsoft etc.) and platforms that actually has game crashing bugs (several of them when you type verbs intransitively as I recall.) Given the sheer size of the game, however this is never reprehensible. The only other bug (aside from the very occasional misspelling) in any of these classics as far as I know is a bug involving freezing items in Parc which I passed on to Adam Atkinson some time ago.
The Doom trilogy are all first rate games and Peter’s programming skills/puzzle ideas are very much to the fore.
If you poke around that article I quoted, it was written right when Quondam was in progress so he talks about it a little (gets published in 1984).
Seems like the game should’ve been called Countdown on Doom.
For the “everyone should play” list, aside from Infocom and Topologika games, I’m going to call El Diablero, Temple of Disrondu, and Dungeon Adventure at least. (Those last two are by future big-shots so it’s not that much of a stretch, but playing/reading these, there’s a reason they were future bigshots.)
(I mean bigshots in the adventure world, not Marc Benioff.)
Wait wrong blog, Benioff was responsible for some obscure cRPGs with a dodgy company. IIRC one of the City Adventure kids went on to become a hedge fund centimillionaire but is there some famous future billionaire who showed up here? Not counting Naomi Millgrom.
I still need to do Gordon Letwin’s version of Adventure for Heathkit sometime, that’d be our future billionaire
and of course we just had Melbourne House with Naomi Besen, who is one of the richest people in Australia
I’m also going to bet on El Diablero for “modern players should try this”; from your writeup, it sounds like it would even hold up solidly in a modern competition.