1982 Simon Wadsworth
Platform: ZX81
Simon Wadsworth had previously published a text adventure called The Scepter through Bug-Byte Software, which he’d written as a fifth-year student as an O-level project. However, he was about to unleash a new text adventure called Time Warden and had these recollections on his old archived web page:
“This was my second full adventure. I submitted it to Bug-Byte, as I had done with The Scepter, but it was never published. It was written using the same source code structure. I’d forgotten all about this game until sorting through a pile of old cassette tapes looking for my copy of The Scepter.
In this adventure you play the Time Warden. While you have been away on vacation and the Key of Time has been lost on the planet Syrius 5. You have 250 turns to recover the key before the end of the Universe.”
This rare ZX81 game was flagged up to us thanks to contributor Michael Hart, who learned about the game over at the Renga In Blue blog, where you can see screenshots and discussion about the gameplay.
Thankfully Simon also added a download and archived the game many moons ago, so we have added that here.
The story is inspired at least in part by Doctor Who. Michael also found this snippet from Simon that talks about his earlier game’s publication.
With thanks to Michael Hart for highlighting and all his research gathering to make this page possible.
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