One thing I’ve been puzzling at is how Pimania got viral. Mel Croucher’s April 1985 interview in Sinclair User rather elliptically mentions sales of 100,000 (same as Elite, which is about as big a seller as the UK market could have produced). I’m skeptical of this number but it was still “a lot”.
It hit the right moment to carry another wave of contest mania, yes; rather than just burying the Golden Sundial it went on a rotating exhibition (the way to win, remember, is to find the right place, day, and time to show up). But still, I think there was a lot more marketing push than the underground-comic feel to the art might indicate.
It was advertised fairly regularly in Your Sinclair, but Automata also ended up with an unusual arrangement with Popular Computing Weekly starting somewhere in mid-1983. I’ll let Mel Croucher take over (in the book Pibolar Disorder by Mel Croucher and Robin Evans, published 2018):
After a while, a magazine called Popular Computing Weekly surrendered to our idiocy, and made a deal with us. They would give us the back page of their magazine to do what we liked with, in exchange for us entertaining the masses and increasing their circulation.
Quoting Mel Croucher again, this time from Deus Ex Machina: The Best Game You Never Played in Your Life:
Looking back, I don’t know if I invented transmedia in video games or not, but when I conjured up the computerised quest PiMania in 1981, I saw no reason not to break out of the confines of the computer monitor. It was released in 1982 as a video game, a rock album, a comic strip, a t-shirt, a magazine, a social network, and a real-world treasure hunt for a gold and diamond prize, all of which needed the other elements for maximum participation. The central character (usually Christian Penfold dressed as the PiMan) also made live appearances and TV recordings. The game went to Number One in the UK, Germany, Spain and several other territories we didn’t even know about, thanks to a new phenomenon called “software piracy”. At one point we had thousands of self-styled PiManiacs searching for the prize in the real world, and I trickle-fed them clues via the game content, the weekly comic strips and subsequent music albums. The prize was eventually won in 1985, and in 2010 a commemorative PiMania album was released on fashionably retro vinyl, complete with a PiMan mask, so I guess the little bastard is still selling, and I want to bring him back to life when Deus Ex Machina 2 is done and dusted. But that’s another story.
Regarding a T-shirt, there’s also a pitch for merchandise within Pimania itself, but I’ll get to that. I wouldn’t go all the way cynical and say the entire enterprise was unhinged capitalism, but there was at least some level of opportunism.
I say all this because by most metrics the game is pretty dire.
Continuing directly from last time, I had found a Scared Pi-Man and Bored Pi-Man and managed to trade some items. I theorized about at least one other form, and I found it as Hungry Pi-Man.
Hungry Pi-Man’s needs are fairly obvious, and he trades just like the other two:
CAN OF WORMS → DEAF AID
BAKED BEANS → HANGLIDER
TV DINNER → TELESCOPE
A pork pie is just like the duck with bored Pi-Man; it will cause him to steal something.
While I didn’t work out the pattern until fairly late, to simplify the narrative I’ll explain now: the rubber duck + bored Pi-Man and pork pie + hungry Pi-Man combinations are still important. Holding them in inventory is what summons the respective Pi-Man. The scared one doesn’t seem to be fussy, but the other two simply won’t show unless you have the right item, which is part of why it took me so long to find the Hungry variant (I just didn’t have the luck of wandering around with pork pie in hand, I dropped it in an object stash fairly quickly).
Because it also ends up being important, let me give a simplified map of the three forms of Pi-Man (there ends up being only three) as well as the “secret exit” to the ULTIMATE GATE OF PI.
This excludes all “side passages”.
The “secret or swipe” is what I’m calling the room where sometimes a green door appears, and sometimes the Pi-Man appears to steal one of your items (one that’s been traded for, like, the DEAF AID, but it won’t steal the CAN OF WORMS).
The gimmick turns out to be that if you don’t have a stealable item, nothing happens; if you do, then either it gets stolen or the green door gets open. So you have to risk item theft in order to get in the door.
Furthermore, this isn’t a 50-50 chance. In some cases it is more like 75-25 odds tilted in favor of your item getting stolen (if you have more than one traded-for item it will just steal one, but stealing an item still means no open door). In some cases it is, maybe, 100-0.
From this next part I am essentially reliant on the pamphlet “The Answer” that was released after the contest was finished. In order to win the game you need to bring seven specific items into the ULTIMATE GATE and drop them. Remember you normally aren’t allowed to drop them, so it is clear when dropping an item as a “sacrifice” works that it means something special.
The seven items are THE COMPASS, THE CALENDAR, PSALM 33, THE TELESCOPE, THE DEAF AID, THE BLACKBOARD, THE HANGLIDER. Any other traded-for items (like OXYGEN) the game won’t let you drop at all.
I never managed to get all seven items in.
This screen was my nemesis. I kept seeing it over and over again rather than having the gate open. The Answer claims that “The more useful the gift, the less likely it was that the Door would be revealed.”; in other words, a fairly nifty object like The Telescope (which gives you a picture of what the target location for the contest looks like) is allegedly much harder to get past the Swiper.
I say “allegedly” because I never got the telescope through, not after many, many, attempts. The randomness is pure hell. In addition, you need to get all seven items through in a fairly specific order.
Remember how the pork pie summons Hungry Pi-Man and the duck summons Bored Pi-Man? (Not something mentioned in The Answer, by the way.) The seven items you need are all from Hungry and Scared. You need to trade away the duck as part of the sequence (you get a CALENDAR from Scared); it means, assuming you stash the Calendar safely, you never see Bored again.
This isn’t terrible in that even though one of Bored’s items technically gives a clue (a MEGAPHONE, I’ll talk about it later) the megaphone doesn’t count for the seven items at the gate. So Bored Pi-Man is technically optional.
On the other hand, you need the pork pie to summon Hungry, so you have to wait on giving the pork pie to Scared until you’ve got all of Hungry dealt with.
That all still is just a matter of sequencing carefully, but the ending upshot is having one (or a few) items that need offloading at the Gate and the Swiper Pi-Man just refuses to let you through. I tried many different permutations. I did get close once — I would have made it to the Gate with six items, but I got stymed by an in-game ad.
You see, typing 10 to go into the green door only sometimes works. Sometimes it gives you an ad. The hard-fought after, sometimes-10-minutes-to-appear green door. I wish I was joking.
After hitting the ad-door the room’s randomness “resets” and you can have something get stolen rather than have the real door appear. I basically got stuck with my cargo and after many different approaches I concluded there was no way to get through.
People talk about the game being obtuse, but really, in a way, once the initial obstacles (opening key and movement) are resolved it is almost trivial; the trades are all very simple puzzles. The appearance conditions of the Pi-Man are arbitrary to work out, and breaking through the Swiper door is especially arbitrary. It is a game near-impossible (impossible?) to beat not because of obscurity but because of randomness.
So I apologize: no official ending.
Now the whole thing is in BASIC so we can still read the ending. After depositing the seven artifacts you are asked for one final key, which is 22. (22/7 being an approximation of pi, and 22/7 being the day the contest is asking for.)
AT LAST, BY ACCIDENT OR DESIGN YOU HAVE RETURNED THROUGH THE ULTIMATE GATE OF PI. REMEMBER WHERE YOU HAVE BEEN AND WHAT YOU HAVE SEEN…. REMEMBER TOO THOSE GIFTS THAT UNLOCKED THE GATE. DISTIL THIS KNOWLEDGE AND MEET ME AT NOON ON THE CORRECT DATE AND PLACE REVEALED. I’LL BE WAITING THERE FOR YOU EVERY YEAR, BEARING THE GOLDEN SUNDIAL OF PI
Ugh. The other aspect about all this is that I was able to speed up my emulator. Normally there’s a long wait between commands, but at least I could zip around the map, but it still got irritating trying to get the TELESCOPE through to the gate for the 6th time. I tried save state abuse and that didn’t help either.
Why didn’t any of the reviews point this out? Did nobody really finish the game?
In truth, even the winners, Sue Cooper and Lizi Newman (teachers from Yorkshire), really didn’t. They noticed, if you draw the directions “properly” that they make a horse. The correct place to go was a chalk outline of a horse at Hindover Hill.
Not normally addicted to computer games, they have been playing Pimania since early 1983 on a Spectrum. When I asked Sue for an estimate of the number of keyboard hours they had put in, she replied: “Very little, we knew it had to be a horse fairly early on, so most of our time was spent in researching where!”
They then looked for prominent horses. The star constellation in particular (see the opening animation reference to “shooting into space”) is a Pegasus. They hit two “wrong” horses on the July 22 dates in 1983 and 1984. In 1985:
The clue that pointed them to the correct geographical location was the fact that Pegasus is near the Seven Sisters of the Plough. Their search, after a misleading pointer to Cambridgeshire in the Field Guide, finally put them on to the Seven Sisters cliffs between Seaford Head and Over.
However, they were not convinced that they had the right spot until they made a pre-visit the day before. They saw the large compass mounted on a pillar, close to the car park entrance at this beauty spot. They also noticed the inscription of Psalm 33 on a metal plate set in stone (and adjacent to Psalm 34 in the game) nearby. But it wasn’t until they saw the view down into the Cuckmere Valley, where the river meanders to its outlet at Cuckmere Heaven, that they became convinced that this was indeed the view shown in the Pimania graphic when looking through the telescope.
Here is the river as illustrated in The Answer:
I wish I could give a screenshot, but I was never able to get the Telescope up to the Observatory, where it gets used.
Nor did I get the deaf aid through, which has the Pi-Man listening to the notes CAGG. This is meant to be Ca, or Calcium, referencing the chalk outline of the horse; the GG is supposed to reference “baby talk for a horse”. This latter bit makes no sense to me, is this some kind of British thing?
Also, I never bothered with the megaphone — too exhausted — but if you take it to the Echo Chamber next to the Observatory you can use it to get
I WILL BLESS THE LORD AT ALL TIMES; HIS PRAISE SHALL CONTINUALLY BE IN MY MOUTH!!!
I am honestly sheepishly impressed with the contest part. The GG part is the only thing in the explanation that made me confused; everything seems genuinely workable (not that it stopped legions of Pi-Man fans visiting Stonehenge hoping that was the right place). While we’ve had map spelling things before, the geometrical angle of the clock makes it particularly slick (as well as the rooms corresponding to the parts of a horse). I do have one last piece of history to baffle over, though:
According to various sources, including in Pibolar Disorder, the intent for the final position was for the Finder to be at the horse’s arse. The teachers were instead at the horse’s head but Croucher gave the prize anyway.
…Mel didn’t have the heart to tell them the exact location of the treasure was in the horse’s arse, and he got Robin to change the official answer book accordingly.
But … why? What possible clue is there to the arse rather than the head? The ultimate gate of pi is at the head, the megaphone signals the head. (Even if you consider the megaphone a “negative clue” — as it doesn’t go to the ultimate gate — that doesn’t signal the arse.)
The answer book of course smoothly explains why the head works. There is nothing that contradicts it. Is the whole thing maybe a waggish joke Croucher was playing on future historians? (It makes a terrific conclusion to Jimmy Maher’s chronicle.) I don’t know, but if anyone has a theory as to what was intended there, I’d love to hear it.
Full Pimania cassette inlay, from World of Dragon.
If you study the image above and turn your head sideways, you’ll notice the game Pimania includes
FREE APPALLING HYPNOTIC DISCO THEME MUSIC !
The game was on cassette like most of the games in the UK market, so audio and code could be stored via the same medium. The entire back side is taken by an erratic piece of music.
I can make no conclusion even after playing the game a significant amount of time. I think it may have more to do with the contest, which I am theoretically not planning on approaching.
The “theoretically” part is because there are aspects of the game related to winning the adventure (or “getting to the end” at least) and aspects related to the contest, but it is not clear which is which. So discarding some information as “external” may reduce the complexity.
For example, last time I had encounter with a scared Pi-man.
Valium is not the only thing that you can trade. For example, you can hand over a CUDDLY TOY and get back PSALM 33. I assume from the Bible, there is no other description.
16 There is no king saved by the multitude of an host: a mighty man is not delivered by much strength.
17 An horse is a vain thing for safety: neither shall he deliver any by his great strength.
18 Behold, the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear him, upon them that hope in his mercy;
19 To deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine.
I combed over the text a bit to see if it had any game relevant clues, and I don’t think so; if it gets used for something I suspect it goes to the contest.
Next to the “scared Pi-Man” room, Pi-man can also appear in a “bored” permutation. He’s willing to trade items just like the “scared” Pi-Man is.
This screenshot was taken after I had already accured some loot. To be specific, whilst wandering the map with no trading involved I found
BAKED BEANS, CUDDLY TOY, RUBBER DUCK, PORK PIE, TV DINNER, SAXOPHONE, CAN OF WORMS, HULA HOOP, POGO STICK, VALIUM
The POGO STICK, HULA HOOP, and SAXOPHONE can all go to the “bored” Pi-Man to obtain a SUNDAIL, MEGAPHONE, and OXYGEN respectively. Most trades have the message “THANKS A LOT (yourname) SEEN ONE OF THESE BEFORE?” followed by the item you are getting, although the saxophone has a special message:
The fact Pi-man is holding a sax in most of his pictures suggests this is one of the more important trades. With “scared” Pi-Man the VALIUM, CUDDLY TOY, PORK PIE, and a DUCK get a BLACKBOARD, PSALM 33, COMPASS, and a CALENDAR respectively.
None of these traded-for items can be dropped. That is, DROP OXYGEN gets the message
You can’t do that around here!
There is an inventory limit of five, which means (since there are seven items to trade for that I’ve found so far) it is technically impossible to get all of them at once.
Now, you’re not totally stuck once you get five “traded items”. One room in particular (adjacent to the “scared” pi-man in the other direction from “bored”)…
At this neck of the woods trails point out 5 and 3.
…has Pi-man sometimes swipe objects back from you, one at a time. If it triggers seems to be entirely at random, but you can use this to “take back” a trade. I had my blackboard get swiped and the valium re-appeared again in a different room location on the map (so I could trade back for it if needed).
You can also, oddly enough, trade the duck to the bored rather than the scared Pi-man. He will take both your duck and another item from your inventory, which can also trim down your trading list.
This all seems to be more or less just musical chairs leading to no plot in particular. I can try to USE SUNDIAL and get no response (followed by the screen clearing and the room description repeating) but otherwise I consistently get (say for the CALENDAR):
SORRY!
YOU CAN’T USE A CALENDAR
AROUND HERE
Rather at random — maybe literally at random, but I might have hit a silent trigger — I managed to find one secret exit. Back in the room with the “Pi-man swipes stuff” behavior, one of my visits mentioned a new way out:
It is the only time I have seen this exit. I tried repeating going in the room many times before and after without this result.
The path is linear; going 10 moves forward most of the way, with 4 (pointing the opposite way on the clock/sundial) going back.
At the end of the line is the Cavern of Ivory, and the ULTIMATE GATE OF PI.
I strong suspect this location is the end of the game. However, I’m not sure how to “sacrifice” any objects. I can drop the anything from the “initial object stash” to no effect; I haven’t been able to USE anything at the gate. However, I still haven’t tested a great many items (see my lack of ability to have the secret exit re-appear).
I’m not sure where to go from here other than to randomly trudge around some more and hope something useful happens. I do have the suspicion there might be more iterations of Pi-man.
Mel Croucher as depicted in Sinclair User, April 1985.
I found the opening somewhat engrossing (albeit surreal) but this has degenerated into a “cope with the weird system” game. Any promise of social satire has pretty much evaporated. Highly cryptic hints are one thing, but this game seems designed to require testing everything everywhere and hoping something falls out. I admit I am close to the “stop trying to solve it myself and look for a walkthrough” threshold here. Especially with random (?) elements it doesn’t seem worth it to trudge in circles for another few hours with nothing to show for it. I’ll give things another good hour before I start cracking a look.
WELCOME SEEKER, YOU STAND BEFORE THE GATE OF PI. YOUR QUEST IS TO LOCATE THE GOLDEN SUNDIAL HIDDEN IN TIME AND SPACE BY THE CORRECT INTERPRETATION OF THE TRUTH THAT LIES WITHIN THIS PROGRAM.
ON THE APPOINTED DAY, ONE AMOUNG YOU WILL BE REWARDED WITH THIS CELEBRATED ORIGINAL TREASURE. IT IS CRAFTED FROM GOLD, DIAMOND AND THE RAREST OF THE EARTH’S RICHES.
Recently, we — and I do mean we, it was most decidedly a team effort between myself and my readers — played through the “contest game” Krakit. There was a rolling prize of “10,000 pounds or more” and it fairly intentionally seemed targeted at the same market that went wild over Masquerade (a contest that ran from late 1979 to early 1982).
Krakit was not that replacement. It was too annoying and too hard, with 12 questions that needed perfect answers, some which required essentially getting lucky, and no buried-treasure component.
Alkemstone from the year before wasn’t that either, being a US-market only game for the Apple II (the US did sell some Masquerade copies but never caught the fever the same way it did in the UK).
Pimania is the closest candidate to a game claiming the title as a Masquerade successor. It originated from and was focused in the UK, and the central mystery involved a Golden Sundial, very much aligned with the Golden Hare.
From World of Dragon.
Mel Croucher and Christian Penfold were the duo behind Automata Cartography, founded in 1977 to make tourist brochures and later audio guides. In 1981 Croucher had bought a ZX81 computer and branched out (using the same Automata Cartography label) into surreal mini-game packs designed for the default 1K model.
Now, before I show some, I think “default 1K model” needs some expansion. We are talking enormously tiny games. The VIC-20 3583 bytes found in Jack and the Beanstalk seem luxurious even in comparison. We’re talking, essentially, little poems as code. Cassettes packed with 1K-sized programs filled stores (alongside tapes for ZX81s with expanded memory) for about a year.
Complete source for a 1K game from Sinclair User, Issue 1, April 1982.
Nearly all the 1K output from other companies was, at best, generic. Despite all that, Automata Cartography produced tapes attempting to be art, in the Dadaist school; or at least tapes that would raise enough of a fuss to get attention.
Ad from May 1982 Sinclar User.
Vasectomy involves a “short sighted drunken surgeon”. In Hitler, you put a whoopee cushion under the Führer’s chair. In Reagan, you have to stop Ronald Reagan’s grey hair from showing so he doesn’t start nuclear Armageddon.
Their next act is what concerns us today, namely their debut on the ZX Spectrum, the adventure game Pimania (with ports to ZX81, BBC Micro, and Dragon 32). Pimania features their company’s bizarro mascot, as shown here in center on a later vinyl release of Mel Croucher:
From Merchbar, Pi-Man with more arms than normal.
I would say the success of the game was inexplicable (especially once I get into the content) but I said, this was oriented as a contest game. Clues to a Golden Sundial valued at £6,000 were put in the game, and it was a real artifact designed by a legit high-end jeweler named Barbara Tipple, whose webpage claims she is “only female jeweler in Britain to ever have received 3 De Beers Diamonds International Awards”; she had already won one of them by the time Pimania came out.
Sinclair User, January 1983.
The clues in the adventure game gave an exact time and place to appear to claim the prize (rather than a location to dig), and unlike Krakit which folded with no winner (and almost certainly no way for there to be a winner), the Pimania prize was honestly and genuinely claimed in 1985. Of course, that’s three years after the game came out, so it still was rather hard to work out, and I’ve heard the adventure game portion is cryptic at the same level as Quondam or one of the other legendary brain-breakers.
I’m … not so certain yet. For one thing, the parser and especially the world modeling system is relatively light; I don’t think the programming (by Penfold) has the sophisticated capability of interlocking complex daemons which require exact timing. (I’m avoiding spoilers, of course, but if nothing else I should point out the source is in BASIC.) I think, rather, this game is cryptic, and might have a couple absurd leaps of typing required. One kicks the game off, and it was a rather fortunate choice (as you’ll see in a moment) that I went with the BBC Micro port.
I went with BBC Micro mainly because BeebEm is a fairly robust emulator.
The screen above shows “pi” taking off into space, and then the prompt where you type a word. Just typing PI works.
Before explaining what happens next, I should mention the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum have a very different solution to this puzzle. Take a look at a ZX81 keyboard:
There is a key actually marked PI, or at least, you can shift the function to a mode which types a π symbol. This is the keypress required to start the game in either Spectrum version. Ouch. This is a game that was a genuine hit in the UK marketplace and has a modern Steam release. At least the Steam description spoils how to solve that puzzle.
This is followed by an animated dancing PiMan:
I’m put most in the mind of the Apple II game The Prisoner, maybe of a more absurdist variety. Directly from here you get dropped into the adventure, and I thought for a bit (maybe like The Prisoner again) the command line was a ruse of sorts, and we were supposed to do something different entirely.
The background is a garish pink. I have saved your eyes by switching the monitor to black and white mode. You’re welcome.
Specifically, it seemed like I could type regular text adventure commands, but almost nothing worked. I spent roughly 30 minutes on this screen. A condensed transcript of some of the more interesting responses:
> GO UP
THAT DIRECTION IS USELESS HERE. TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT YOUR FACE!
> HELP
Sorry my friend, but you have to help yourself around here!
> LOOK UP
You’ll need to use a telescope to see!
> USE TELESCOPE
YOU HAVEN’T GOT A TELESCOPE WITH YOU!
> TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT MY FACE
You’ll need to use a telescope to see!
The last prompt suggested this is a “keyword parser”, looking for words in the line rather than expecting nouns and verbs and so forth lined up in a particular order. Many other commands led to “Please will you rephrase that!”
TURN FACE, CHANGE TIME, GO CLOCKWISE, EXAMINE FACE, JUMP, SET TIME, SHOUT, YELL, SAY HELLO, GET TELESCOPE, GAZE AT SUN, 3:00, MAKE TELESCOPE, GO SUN, WAIT, PI, FIND TELESCOPE, UNLOCK ARENA, BE HAPPY
The 3:00 was fairly close. I had quite quickly decided this was all sundial-themed and I needed a time, but I needed to enter the command in the right way. 3 from 12 could be … 9? Just the digit 9?
Ah-ha! And I soon realized the general gimmick of the game’s movement — to use numbers from 1 through 12, as opposed to any kind of compass direction. If you go 3 to go one direction, you go 9 to turn the opposite way — essentially flipping sides of a standard clock. Here is my map of the game so far.
Room descriptions are minimal and sometimes serve purely to clue what directions are possible. Given the directions are not always given, I ended up testing every number from 1 through 12 in every single room. This could have been tedious, because the game’s response to a command is not instant; there’s a little animation of passing through a “pi gate” after a successful or unsuccessful command. I ended up using save states whenever I was told
NO RIGHT OF WAY AT 1
or whatever number it is, so I could jump straight to testing out 2. Some more room descriptions to give the idea:
Just laying around there are lots of items: BAKED BEANS, CUDDLY TOY, RUBBER DUCK, PORK PIE, TV DINNER, SAXOPHONE, CAN OF WORMS, HULA HOOP, POGO STICK, VALIUM. Only Valium has the funny description on pick-up, as shown above. You can’t carry them all at once, alas. I’ve only encountered one puzzle while mapping, where Pi-Man himself was feeling scared.
Some Valium works, as this is the 1980s.
And from here I have gotten no farther. I suspect I need to re-check all the rooms post-Valium and the Pi-Man will have moved elsewhere. If not, then there’s some obscure item interaction in one of the rooms. Some of them do have a little description (a PRIVATE cul-de-sac has the game flash at you and warn you to get out, for instance) so the world isn’t entirely barren.
Renga in Blue 
