(Continued from my previous posts on Catacombs, which you probably should read before this one if you want the full background.)
Last weekend, I received a message from Marcel Ingram Lansing that one of the most sought-after Commodore PET games had been rescued.
Specifically, Colin Haynes had copies of both Catacombs and Goblin Towers by Brian Cotton in Commodore PET disk format. They’re part of a series of five adventures from the author published by Supersoft starting in early 1981. Goblin Towers we already had in something close to the original form, but Catacombs we’ve only had as a broken DOS port from five years later which is impossible to beat.
Catacombs is one of the earliest commercial British text adventures, and given how many they eventually came out of the country, it’s not exaggerating to say a landmark has now been preserved.
LONG ASIDE: The first ad for Catacombs was from February 1981. Based on Gareth Pitchford’s research, we know of four (or maybe three) adventure games from earlier that were sold “commercially” (to at least some extent) of British origin.
1. Just one month earlier the magazine Computing Today had a classified ad for Dungeons of Death on the Commodore PET; the description makes it unclear if it’s an RPG, quasi-RPG, quasi-adventure, or adventure.
“Amusing, spifferoony game tape for 16K PET”. Source. Remember, for newsstand magazines the actual month is roughly one off from the one printed.
2. There’s an ad in Personal Computer World November 1980 for a mysterious game called Toxopholy by the equally mysterious Spider Software out of Croydon, Surrey. It was written for Apple II, which was not a common computer in England. (Not unknown either, to be clear!)
Given another ad from Spider Software elsewhere which includes games like Wizard and the Princess, they clearly were more of a “publisher” of Apple II software, although the Toxopholy ad is so early that game may still have originated with them.
From Windfall July 1982, an Apple magazine from the UK. Notice that Toxopholy is no longer advertised.
3. We know more about Galactic Hitchhiker for the UK101 than the other games, because I’ve played it and written about it here already. It is remarkable for having the “computer avatar” have its own voice and attitude, and is story-driven in a way rare for 1980. It was first advertised a month before Toxopholy.
4. There was an early adventure game by none other than Games Workshop, the company most known for Warhammer 40K and with 2025 revenue of £565 million. The earliest ad anyone has been able to find for their adventure appeared in a July 1980 issue of Practical Computing (so out by June) which puts it as the earliest commercial release of an original text adventure from Britain we know of.
Our own version of this classic computer moderated fantasy adventure game in which you explore an underground dungeon populated by snakes, trolls and menacing little goblins which constantly bar your way. As you explore, you give the computer commands such as – get gold, open lock, drop bottle, kill goblin etc. – and tell it which way you proceed. The computer responds with your revised situation and awaits your further instructions.
White Dwarf Issue 22 (Dec. 1980/Jan. 1981) mentions Games Day ’80 with pictures; Adventure was being shown off on a Commodore PET.
None of this undercuts Catacombs in importance. None of the games just mentioned had wide distribution; Steve Jackson describes sales of the PET games as a “disaster” (the biggest seller, a Star Wars game, sold 60 copies), and Dungeons of Death appearing once in a classified means it might have sold in the single digits. While the Cotton games didn’t quite have the reach of, say, Planet of Death, they still had a second printing by Supersoft, and generally got into the UK gaming consciousness; the only places on the Internet you can find Toxopholy mentioned as even existing are my page and Gareth’s.
Returning back to the recent rescue: the disks for Goblin Tower were easy to copy, but Catacombs was a tricky case because the disk seemed to be corrupted. There’s a long account here (along with downloads!) of what happened, but to shorten the story, Brian Cotton used text files for each individual room, and wanted to make sure the player couldn’t read them.
DirMaster is able to list the file correctly, but trying to take the directory on a real Commodore PET just produces corruption. What’s happening is the extra ” character followed by the @C which is sufficient to garble the text (when looked at with a PET) into junk. Furthermore, Cotton didn’t want people realizing the trick through the game’s BASIC source code. From Marcel’s video:
Look closely at line 2, which has a string of colons like this: “::::::::::::::::::::”. If run alone, that’s just a string of non-commands, but prior to that line there’s the SYS 15602 line. What that does is call a different spot in memory which overwrites the next line of BASIC source code while that code is running.
The spot filled with colons has been transformed into Z$=”0:”+CHR$(34)+CHR$(0)+CHR$(3). This provides a string that the game then uses to read the name of any text file representing a room, putting those characters at the start. Then, immediately after Z$ is assigned, the game covers its tracks by calling SYS15449, which rewrites the line of code that was just called back into a string of colons.
The web page includes the original version (which does run emulated) and also the “cracked” version with everything changed into plain-text. The issue for preservation is that it took a little more than a simple file-copy to preserve the disk (check the link for details). For us from here, though, we can focus on the game itself!
The game is genuinely close to its large Classic Quests iteration, although there’s one immediate change you can see from the start.
The result of READ BOARD.
The game has ASCII art! There’s files marked “pic1” through “pic11” (or to be more exact, funky characters followed by pic1 through pic11) and each one is an image that has a mere text description in the DOS version.
Your job is to explore the church that you start at and the catacombs beneath and retrieve all the treasures.
At least at the start, the game is very similar to the Classic Quests version, with room descriptions at least matching. However, inside the church, the book in the Classic Quests version uses text…
While the page is quite legible the content seems not to make much sense, however I can make out something about entering Heaven with the aid of certain holy writings.
…but uses ASCII art here. There’s no hint indicated like in the DOS version.
The map outside seems to be a slightly different maze than before (I probably will not map it out, but I’m always morbidly curious when a game undergoes slight changes). The keys are hidden under a lectern in the church just like before, and they unlock a tomb in the same way.
Inside is a coffin with a sword and lamp. The lamp lights with LIGHT LAMP but does not turn off with DOUSE LAMP (as the Classic Quests version) but rather OFF LAMP.
Just to the east is the vampire staked with the cloak, and the cloak has ASCII art. I haven’t tried messing with the vampire yet; in the current DOS version, you get a container for holy water from the church, then throw it at the vampire to kill it so you can safely take the stake, but the stake is used for absolutely nothing. It may not have the same behavior in the original!
Down is an OBOLUS coin as before, but again, some slight bit of art.
Just adjacent is the river with Chiron; I remember having to intentionally give a coin over in the DOS version (which is wrong to do! the coin is a treasure and you can cross the river a different way). Here, if you wait a turn at Styx, you will automatically cross.
One last difference I’ve noticed is that something that was previously broken definitely is here: the hooded rider. This was a rider that was supposed to appear randomly, but examining it would cause death.
You have looked upon the Dark Angel. This is the angel of death: to be more specific, your death. It has cost you your life to look upon it.
This game doesn’t let you examine! I’m not sure if I’m supposed to do something different here. It’s curious if it was added just for the DOS port.
Just as a reminder, other than this scene (which should result in some manure) I had a non-working flamethrower, no way of getting by a spider web (probably uses the flamethrower), a zombie and purple sphere with no clear use, and no way of pulling a “plug” in the water. On the last one, quoting Alex Dijkstra:
You need to remove this to get to Neptune’s bedroom and the Elysian field without paying Charon.
That is, previously the coin was getting used anyway because the alternate method wasn’t working! More investigation (and probably a finish) next time.
Renga in Blue 
I have new research/information related to some of the topics covered here that will be presented as part of an article soon-ish.
One interesting thing that was revealed by the preservation of these disks is that Catacombs seems to have been released slightly later than the initial ads would suggest. There’s an internal code date of 3/29/81, which would indicate that the game probably didn’t start being sold until at least April of that year. Jumping the gun with this sort of advertising isn’t that surprising, as Supersoft sold heavily through direct catalog marketing, like a number of other early UK software houses (CDS, for example), so saying something was available while it was still finishing up development and listing it with a price as currently available kind of fell under the “now taking orders” umbrella and wasn’t considered illegitimate, even though people would start grumbling after a while if the delays became too lengthy.