To explain today’s game we need to go back to 1982 and a company from the London area, Rabbit Software, which I’ve written about before. To recap: they were a mail order company that spun off from a computer shop early in 1982, quite quickly filling their catalog with solicited content. They had some drama trying to distribute the games of Bruce Robinson culminating in Alan Savage (one of the founders) dumping 4000 faulty tapes on a street, and even more drama in 1984 when Alan Savage died. The other co-founder, Heather Lamont, “vowed” the company would continue but it ended up being liquidated the same year, bought by Virgin Software.
Box art and gameplay screen of a Rabbit Software game, via Mobygames.
Early in the lifespan of that company, one of the sales managers, Mike Barton, had obtained a VIC-20, and
… his interest in games software soon grew as did his frustration with the products on the market at that time and his disillusion with his employers.
This led to his leaving the company, planning to launch his own (Romik Software) at the Personal Computer World Show in September, along with friend (and business expert) Gerry Rose and a programmer, Steve Clark.
From June 1982 Personal Computer World.
The trio spent several weeks preparing by creating some programs to sell along with literature and packaging. They decided — unlike many UK companies stepping into the field — to go directly to having a dealership network at stores as opposed to using mail-order.
Source. Brind was an “assistant” described as “busy putting inlays into cassette boxes and packing the boxes into cardboard cases.”
Barton emphasized an “honest” approach to software, which extended to drawing the pictures on tapes based on actual graphics in the game rather than having an artist do a more fanciful rendition.
A “real action shot” from The Centre for Computing History. Compare with the Pakacuda shot at the top of this post.
For their adventure games, which came out starting somewhere in the last half of 1983 (compare this ad with this ad) there was a little more difficulty in selling an all-text screen; the cover still makes very clear that the buyer is looking at an artist’s rendition.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. Note this is for expanded VIC but still only 8K, so half a TRS-80.
Before getting into the game itself, I should mention that other than setting a firm price of 9.99 pounds on all products and insisting that they be written in machine code, the company emphasized having tapes that work.
Romik insists on no more than a 0.01 per cent failure rate from the tape duplicating company it uses: “with the state of the country at the moment, if you demand something, you’ll get it”. The key to good quality reproduction, Mike says, is to produce a good master tape in the first place; the master for their programs is made at the tape manufacturers’, under strictly controlled conditions.
I emphasize this because it sounds like Barton had familiarity with the disaster of the Robinson tapes, and hence had familiarity with that author’s adventure style. This is written in machine code rather than BASIC but at least cribs off those games (like Jack and the Beanstalk) in a conceptual way. (Incidentally, the “honest approach” led to an acrimonious split between the lead founders where Gerry Rose went off to form his own company only a year later, but we’ll save all that for another time.)
There are three authors listed: Simon Clark, Richard Sleep, and Chris Whitehouse. The only one who has a second credit is Richard Sleep, who has another VIC-20 adventure to his name (Animal Magic, 1984); otherwise none of three have made their mark elsewhere I can find.
The rock has some writing that says a poison and its cure are opposites.
The map is extremely tiny, in a way that we’ve only really seen with Robinson games.
The golden apples are visible right away, if you go east with a “tall apple tree”, “GOLDEN APPLES”, and a “large dog” (as depicted on the cover). The first order of business is getting some herbs in the glade to the west, which cause “madness”.
This just makes all the text display backwards; to cure this, go to a forest to the south (which has an axe you can nab along the way)), then climb a tree.
Now heading north, there is a field where a man is putting sowing “salt” and needs to be cured; the herb works in reverse and cures him:
With the staff, you can move the rock at the start, revealing a trapdoor. You cannot go through the trapdoor or open it (it is unclear why) but with the axe from the forest you can CHOP DOOR.
Going in the hole left behind gets the response that you need to wait until the next adventure (which might give a hint which Romik game is next in sequence, at the moment I don’t know).
With the hint from ENDYMION it is now possible to get the apples, although one more caveat: you need to get rid of the dog first. Since the dog does not have madness, giving the herb induces madness:
SAY ZEUS and then SHAKE TREE win the game.
I’m not sure how I would have felt had I spent 10 pounds. It was certainly “polished”. There are lengthy instructions where almost none of them even apply. This was genuinely tight for a “tiny game” in a modern sense — I could see giving it a positive review without caveats — but was so short I likely would have felt like I’d get more my money’s worth with a couple budget titles instead. On the other hand, this gives promise that the other Romik titles we have for 1983 (Fool’s Gold, Quest for the Ancient Tome of Aliard, Sword of Hrakel, Tombs of Xeiops) won’t be as dodgy as their VIC-20 origins might suggest.
Coming up: Finally, Apple II. No more hints other than I have a theme going.
Renga in Blue 