A surprise finding thanks to the guys at Genesis Project (in particular Hedning, Six and Whisper), which is a very obscure text adventure game that was written in 1984 for Martin-Art.
Previously the game was only known to exist for MS-DOS, but was ported from the C64, which was released originally around 1984-1985 (the copy protection was dated 1985 according to Hedning/GP). The C64 version was found in 2022 on a set of American disks from New York.
The PC version however was released later around 1987, and then again in 1989. The MS-DOS version was sold as shareware, but the C64 disk was copy protected – suggesting it was sold and not given away in the same way.
We were not 100% certain that the C64 version was properly released, but contributor Gareth Pitchford located an advert for the game that confirmed it was being sold and found many adverts in the US press at the time. We’ve added two to the gallery.
Basically, the game was released as “New” via a company called Ultrabyte, who were doing the advertising. Earliest spot is July 1985 in the likes of Compute!’s Gazette, RUN and Ahoy! From research by Gareth Pitchford, Ultrabyte was ran by a Carl Allan Kukkonen.
Within the downloads, you can find also a map, full documentation and a solution to the game. This is a great finding overall, and yet another C64 game preserved thanks to Genesis Project.
So, a game that was released in limited numbers, not unreleased but finally preserved!
A huge thank you to Gareth Pitchford for all of his additional research into finding out the release details for us to add to the page, which has saved us a lot of research work.
Contributions: Hedning, Six, Whisper, Gareth Pitchford
I play this game on the C64 as a kid in the late 80s. I remember running to ask my grandpa about some of the latin words. Aurum Sub Est if I remember correctly. The clock striking and finding gold bars hidden here and there, and falling off the second floor into the rose bushes and pretty much dying.
I never solved the game, but had a pretty good map of the mansion in my head.
Great game. Appreciate whoever made it happen again! Our little minds filled in the graphics in C64 days, and we were just as happy, if not happier than kids today.