Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Many of the British product samples remained at the company. We tested as hard as we could but didn’t dare sell any hardware that was obvious crap. The British were more relaxed about that kind of thing than the Danes.

— Rolf Ask Clausen, of the company ZX-Data

In late 1980, the Danish journalist Svend Garbarsch made a fateful call to Clive Sinclair, regarding a ZX80 he had seen in a British magazine.

By that time, Denmark certainly had a tradition of computing in general dating back to Regnecentralen (funded directly via Marshall Plan money for reconstructing Europe after WWII) with the companies Christian Rovsing and Danish Data Electronics later big contenders. None really tried to enter the consumer space. Regnecentralen modified a Data General Nova mini-computer to be the RC 7000 in 1970…

Via the Science Museum at Aarhus. Compare with a Data General Nova.

…and then transformed it into the RC 3600 as a business/school computer. Christian Rovsing also focused on mini-computers; the latecomer DDE made their first computer in 1975 for “data collection, process control and monitoring”.

An ID-7000, the first computer from Danish Data Electronics.

Arguably the most interesting early stab at Danish home computing was the ICL Comet. (ICL we’ve seen before: essentially Britain’s counterpart to IBM, with the I in the name meaning International.) As their computers generally used CP-M as their operating system we won’t have any Comet-specific software in this Project’s future; the important point is that it still tended to be targeted at the higher end / hobbyist audience, along with various computer kits like the Nascom. Even the Commodore PET was considered more of an expensive business machine.

What all this means is when Svend Garbarsch made his call from Denmark to England, a “cheap” computer for the masses in Denmark had yet to be introduced. Somehow in the process of the conversation with Clive Sinclair, the salesman-CEO talked the journalist into forming a distribution outlet for ZX80s: hence the founding of ZX-Data. According to his nephew Rolf Ask Clausen, the first test computer came at Christmas 1980 through the post office, and he had to “explain to the customs officers what the ZX80 machine was, and thus how it should be cleared through customs.”

In their first ad, the Sinclair ZX80 was dubbed “Folkedatamaten” — “The People’s Computer” — and orders started streaming in. According to his nephew Rolf Ask Clausen who was there from the beginning, he “worked day and night” trying to keep up. After a month they had to increase their warehouse space and hire more people.

July 1981 in the magazine NY Elektronik.

Note this is after the ZX81 already launched elsewhere! One might suspect leftover product being handed off, especially given the failure rate sometimes went to 10%. ZX-Data did switch to shipping out ZX-81s by November 1981; the ZX Spectrum (where the failure rate finally calmed down) filtered down to Denmark by 1983.

Cover of a March 1982 newsletter from ZX-Data.

Now, I need to back up the story a little. Today’s game, while written by a Dane in Copenhagen, was first published (as far as we know) in February 1981, which is before the ZX-Data launch. To explain, let’s go back to a pivotal moment in 1980–

The Australian Tim Hartnell had floating through multiple jobs, including news reader for a TV station, before landing in London as a journalist working for the Australasian Express; his writing was of the “nerdier” inclination and included a mathematics column.

Photo by Robert Young.

The photo above was taken in April 1980 outside Madame Tussaud’s. Tim was puzzling over the ZX80 which had launched two months before. He had obtained a book on BASIC programming that he is shown reading here, specifically having trouble with the chapter about For/Next loops. According to Young:

It was while he was reading this chapter that Tim realised that if he was having difficulty understanding this programming stuff, then other people probably were too. This photo virtually shows the instant that Interface Publications was born.

He swerved his journalist career towards computers, writing one of the very early books for ZX80, Making the Most of Your ZX80.

This particular book was put out by Computer Publications (later well-known for the magazine Sinclair User) but Hartnell went on to form his own publisher, Interface (co-founded with Robert Young); he also launched a ZX-80 club which quickly got “thousands” of members.

The club’s February 1981 issue of their publication advertised (for the first time) a 16K SUPERGAME.

Citadel on the bottom. Labyrinth is from Hartnell’s ZX80 book and is even more marginal as an adventure game, but I’ll still visit it sometime.

Ole Noerregaard of Copenhagen was a regular contributor starting in 1980, so he somehow got a hold of a ZX80 anyway despite them not having an official distributor in Denmark. (There’s always either talking past or smuggling through customs!) With the caveat that this is only a quasi-adventure game, it’s the first of its type we know of from Denmark. It was written in English. (My next game, which involves a completely different story, will get into the first one written in Danish.)

The game did have some “professional distribution” but the word “professional” earns those quote marks.

If you think that’s bad, look at the inside:

The publisher is not Lion. The publisher is the exceedingly obscure CDS Micro Systems. Lion is the one who made the tape, and CDS flipped it over and slapped CITADEL on it and called it good. CDS does have a few other games (all ZX80) and two of them (Andromeda and Timestar) are sort-of adventure games (with Wumpus-style navigation) but they don’t seem to have any connection with Ole Noerregaard so we’ll pitch studying them for some future time.

To summarize:

a.) Tim Hartnell launched a club and publication in the UK after discovering the ZX80 as a journalist.

b.) Denmark in general didn’t get any kind of distribution until a different journalist (Svend Garbarsch) called Clive Sinclair and got talked into founding ZX-DATA, which started distributing mid-1981.

c.) Prior to that, it was still possible through other means to cart hardware between countries, and Ole Noerregaard not only expanded his computer to 16K but was an enthusiastic contributor to Hartnell’s publication Interface, getting a SUPERGAME published starting early 1981 with some extra distribution by the dodgy CDS Micro.

Commentor Rob (who clued me in on the game’s existence) sent a less-damaged picture of a later issue of Interface with a blurb.

16K SUPERGAME: Make the most of your new, expanded memory with CITADEL. In the remote land of Destaphnya; shrouded in mist at the peak of Mt. Nganra, stand the CITADEL. For a thousand years, men have sought to find the secret hidden in the citadel, to possess its power. All have been repelled by the Dark Agents of Protection. Will you succeed where the others have failed? Can you storm the CITADEL? If you have a 16K RAM pack, you need CITADEL.

The game’s lore involves the titular Citadel “existing in many dimensions”; your job is to get as much treasure as possible.

You can carry four objects at a time, and bring them back to the start in order to “place” them in your home dimension, getting points. You are given three items at the start (none of which are explicitly treasure, but any item in the game gets points when stored as a treasure). The instructions give a goal of 1200 points. Commands are all single-letter.

(As an aside, regarding the ZX80, I think it’s notable we haven’t seen attempts at parser games, Planet of Death aside. It isn’t like the expanded version is really that much different from the ZX81 in a BASIC-code sense, but rather, the screen-blinks-at-every-keypress when typing long commands gets very grating. The issue is mitigated with single letter commands. If you need to see what a parser game looks like on ZX80, this link will take you to a playable version of Planet of Death.)

Room descriptions in the citadel are randomly generated, and not in a consistent positional way. That is, the room description changes every turn, even if you stop and “look” while hanging out. While some descriptions are genuinely vivid the overall effect is to make them be ignored; there is no “exploration pleasure” in finding a vivid new scene.

Both this and the previous room are the exact same room, the second screen obtained but using Look.

The map is randomly generated each time, making a 7 by 7 map. I have one of them fully rendered here, where monster encounters are marked with a danger symbol.

Notably, the map is not just a single path, but has some merging, meaning that you could technically avoid monster encounters if you knew where they were ahead of time. Alas, with no save game feature, it’s a matter of spinning the dial at random.

There’s no running away: each encounter requires you ATTACK with your choice of inventory item (like POLE ARM) and as far as I’ve been able to find by squinting at the source code the choice of weapon does not matter: it’s random if you have anything good happen or not.

Usually combats end by the enemy running away, either delivering a blow (as shown above) or having a draw with no damage given (a good result). You have a LIFEFORCE that starts at 400 and goes down by 100 on a good hit.

The one (1) time that I managed to kill a monster was on a skeleton. One of the “weapons” was a silver cross so you might think that might give an advantage in undead-combat but no: this was with a pole arm, and there seems to be no effect to the choice of weapon.

I did eventually scrounge out by luck what I think is essentially a max score. However, the game never acknowledges such and still claims there’s more treasure in the Citadel (there wasn’t).

This hence doesn’t rise to the level of an adventure — no real exploration, object choice doesn’t matter — but it isn’t an RPG either, as there are no stats other than the overall life force going down. So it’s in that weird in-between space that happened in early games where it isn’t a recognizable genre at all. Clearly the author put a lot of effort into the map generator and had some legitimately colorful room descriptions to match, but simply rose to the level of a “slot machine game” and stopped there. This was still worth playing as it will make an interesting comparison with the other ZX80 “quasi-adventure” specimens out there; for now, we’re going to switch to Danish, and look at their first “real” adventure.

The enormous chess board is my favorite of the random descriptions.

POSTNOTE: There’s a version of Citadel called Catacombs of Morglim that was tweaked by Trevor Sharples of the ZX80 club. It was published as actual source code in the pages of the Interface, but with the map generator taken out. A follow-up article by Sharples mentions methods of tweaking the source code; weirdly, the follow-up talks about having it generate a new cave each time, putting a generator back in. And no point during either article is Citadel mentioned as the original. This still seems to be in the hacker-code-sharing mode where “ownership” was very loose. Or maybe Catacombs of Morglim was the first version (only distributed “person to person” so to speak) and Citadel was the enhanced version? Citadel started being published first, but that doesn’t mean it was written first.