THE 'ORRIBLE 'OUSE OF TERRIBLE OLD TAT - Odin, Thor and Mary?

Welcome once more dear fiends to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Or rather welcome back to Asgard and the world of Valhalla! Published in 1983 for the ZX Spectrum and ported to the Commodore 64 in 1985, Valhalla was, as we have previously discussed, a ground-breaking and ambitious game. It was worlds away from the legions of Jet Set Willy clones which were clogging up game shelves back then. But was the game itself any good? 

It certainly sounded like it was going to be amazing - hanging out in a world of Norse gods and monsters, undertaking epic quests, and generally being allowed to do what the hell you liked. Well, provided you could get the bugger to load that is - for the first drawback to Valhalla was a long loading time, which greatly increased the chances of it crashing.  However, once you had listened to the five  or so minutes of electronic screeching - surely a formative influence on a generation of kids who would grow up to invent acid house, techno and jungle a decade or so later - the first thing to strike you is the scale of the world. 

The game plays out in three distinct realms from old Norse cosmology, Asgard (the world of the gods), Midgard (the land of humans) and Hell (realm of the dead). Traditionally in Norse legends there were nine worlds, with additional realms for giants, elves, dwarves and so forth, but here three worlds work well enough. And just like in the old sagas, brave heroes could physically travel between the worlds. Now in the game, these worlds of possibly exciting adventures comprised of some 81 different screens, each one a separate location - as can be seen here on the map of Valhalla. Now travel between the locations was accomplished in the usual text adventure fashion i.e. typing into "go north", "go south-east" etcetera. And there were some short-cuts available too - some screens/locations had hidden "ringways" - magic portals that teleported you to another location if you possessed a magic ring. 

But there were two downsides to all of this. Firstly you really needed to make some kind of map if you wanted to avoid becoming hopelessly confused and lost. But more importantly, travelling to another location meant the game had to draw another scene. Now the Movisoft engine did so by drawing in layers - first the background, then the midground, foreground, buildings, people and any items there. Hence travelling was a bit on the slow side as it tended to take about half a minute or so to render everything. Now playing Valhalla now, this kind of thing makes the game very slow and tedious indeed, however in fairness back in the day people didn't expect things to happen super quickly quite as much, and this kind of waiting for the computer to render a new screen wasn't exactly uncommon in the early adventure games. Plus it's easy to forget now how impressive the graphics were back then, for it was only a couple of years earlier than game graphics had consisted of basic shapes such as rectangles and squares moving about. And of course there was a novelty value to watching the computer draw in each scene layer by layer too.

Now as for doing the quests, while the instructions which came with the game were good,  it took so long to travel anywhere or get anything done, many players soon got distracted and started just having fights for the hell it and generally running amuck. Which is arguably closer to how real Vikings might have behaved... Well, that was my excuse anyway. But anyhow, historical accuracy aside, the game itself had a certain sense of mischief to it anyway. To begin with you could spend many happy hours egging on various gods and monsters to fight each other, but Valhalla had some mischief of its own up its sleeve too.

Firstly as the program had a limit on how many items could be in any one location. There could only ever be eight items in one place, whether on the ground, in a chest, or in a cupboard.  And if this limit was exceeded, the game had a novel and amusing solution. For the very second a ninth item was dropped, a character cheekily named Klepto appeared and stole one!

Which item got pilfered by Klepto was entirely random, and hence it was very possible he could take one of the much sought magic items you'd been questing for if you weren't careful. Of course, should this calamity befall you, you may very well ended up typing in "Klepto is a little shit" into the game... Although in fairness, given the freedom offered by Valhalla, and bearing in mind the general character of kids, if you were playing this back in the day, you'd no doubt already been typing in every rude word you could think of. 

However this would reveal another of Valhalla's little jokes. For swearing elicited the cryptic response - "Mary is not amused".  And a small figure would march on the screen and come and give your character a slap! Now if you are thinking "hang on, I don't remember a Mary in Norse mythology!" you'd be quite right. For this character was named after a very familiar and often hated figure in 1980s Britain - the self-appointed moral guardian Mary Whitehouse. 

For many years Mrs Whitehouse campaigned relentlessly and fearlessly against swearing, sex and violence in our media, and as a result was seen by many as being more terrible than all the monsters and demons of Valhalla, mainly of course by kids who were mad keen to see all that swearing, sex and violence. Ironically, many of us only learned about the existence of some erotic TV series or violent movie in the first place thanks to Mrs Whitehouse protesting about it. Naturally when playing Valhalla, it was great fun to just bait Mary, albeit in a pixelated form. And of course, a new unintended subgame emerged - and that was trying to discover exactly how many and which swear words the game's text parser recognised! 

Now of course, it would have been child's play to have the game's text parser not to recognise any swearing at all, but a generation of kids are very glad that they did. After all, anyone who played The Hobbit really wanted to the game to recognise the command "Tell Thorin to shut the fuck up about gold". Quite clearly, the programming team behind Valhalla had played more than a few adventures and what's more understood the mindset of their target audience. Hence Mary was a fun way to allow you to swear within the game, but, and this is the clever bit, in such a way so that boring grown-ups, who had a massive downer on computer games anyway, couldn't kick off about it. Now that's real genius! 

THE 'ORRIBLE 'OUSE OF TERRIBLE OLD TAT - Valhalla I Am Loading!

Hello dear fiends! Welcome once again to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Now then, last time we were adventuring in the long lost lands of home micro gaming, searching for treasure, slaying dragons and wishing Thorin would stop singing about ruddy gold all the time. As we discussed at some length, the home micro version of The Hobbit back in 1982 was something of a milestone in computer gaming, and a newly formed company called Legend was very keen to pick up where Bilbo and Gandalf had left off...  

Now Legend, a spin-off company from business software outfit Microl, were not a fly-by-night (or should that be type-by-night) games publisher. Unlike dozen of other software houses that sprang up around the same time - for there wuz gold in tham thar gamin' hills - Legend didn't release hundreds of titles which very often looked suspiciously similar to other hit games. Rather they released a handful of high quality titles, with their first offering Valhalla setting the bar rather high. 

Written for the ZX Spectrum, and later ported to the Commodore 64, Valhalla was a game that came in a big box that screamed "QUALITY PRODUCT", and with a price tag to match - a very very expensive for the time £14.95. Although it was re-released a few years later as a classic title, in more modest packaging and at the pocket money friendly price of £2.99.  Valhalla was created by Richard Edwards, Graham Asher, Charles Goodwin, James Learmont and Andrew Owen, and was mostly written in the common language to home micro's BASIC, with the game engine being dubbed "Movisoft", which sounded very futuristic and interactive. In fact it's a very early example of a game having a named software engine.

And very impressive it was too. Like The Hobbit there was a vast world to explore, a large cast of characters to interact with and you played the game by typing instructions into the game. The downside of this ambition was that the game notoriously took bloody ages to load - well over 5 minutes to load - which a long time even in the era of the home micro when loading a game took several minutes. As one reviewer of the day quipped "I only just had enough time to load Valhalla - let alone review it". And as with many of the larger home micro games, a longer loading time meant increased chances of the game glitching and not loading properly. I know of several folks who never got the darn thing to do anything but display the loading screen. Which admittedly was rather nice, showing a digitised version of the famous 7th century Anglo-saxon helmet found at Sutton Hoo, but not exactly as thrilling as hanging out and fighting with Norse gods and giants. 

So then, provided you got the game to load properly, what did Valhalla offer the player? Well, the goal of the game was to collect six magic objects - Ofnir (a key), Drapnir (a ring), Skornir (a shield), Skalir (a sword), Felstrong (an axe) and Grimnir (a helmet). These magical treasures could only be collected in order, hence to get Drapnir you had to have Ofnir first and so forth. And while the items were in particular locations, if you died, any you had would be taken from you and hidden in a random location somewhere in the game world. On the upside however, dying was not a big deal in a world of gods and monsters, for if you were slain, you found yourself in Hell. However in accordance with the old legends and sagas, the land of the dead as just one of nine worlds in the old Norse cosmology, and hence just as you could travel from the world of men (Midgard) to the realms of the gods (Asgard), if you had died, the adventure wasn't over, you could just walk out of the Hell and continue your quest.

Valhalla also had some rather clever features too. Those of you have know your Dungeons & Dragons (whether as a tabletop game, or one of the many computer RPGs that use its rulesets) will be familiar with the concept of a player's character having an alignment - that is to say, a defined trait which maps out their philosophy and morals, whether good or evil, an upholder of law or a devotee of chaos. Now in Valhalla, your character doesn't have the usual RPG style character sheet with stats and traits, but very cleverly the game does take note of how you behave in the game world. When you begin your character is neutral - that is to say he is classed by the game as neither good nor evil. However as play progresses, your actions are noted by the game engine and other characters in the world of Valhalla will react accordingly. Hence if you are helpful and friendly to characters on the side of good such as Thor or Odin, all characters on the light side of the Force as it were will be inclined to be more helpful to you in your quest. Likewise being chummy with the likes of Loki will earn you favour with the forces of darkness. A very cool bit of programming I'm sure you will agree, and very ahead of its time. 

However Valhalla has an even bigger claim to fame, for it was one of the very first true open world games. Now The Hobbit is often hailed as being a pioneer of open world gaming as you could head off anywhere into Middle Earth, but at the end of the day if you wanted to get anywhere at all in the game you still had to follow a linear plot that mirrored the journey and adventures in the original book. Now normally in RPG games, the world waits for you to do something and then reacts, but things were not like that in Valhalla. Here the world of the game carried on regardless of what you were doing, characters would go about their business without waiting to react to you - they would travel between the world, eat, drink, and fight as they pleased. In fact, once the game started it would essentially play itself. Obviously that's not to say it would make choices for you and you could sit back and watch the game do the quests for you. But on the other hand, events in the game weren't tied in the slightest to you doing the quests, and indeed if you just wanted to explore, hang out with the gods or get into fights - i.e. generally doing what the hell you liked - you could.

Now all of this was obviously very impressive... But technical cleverness doth not a great game make. After all, there have been many titles down the years that boasted of having revolutionary concepts, ground-breaking coding and super new spanky graphics, but in terms of actual playability have sucked harder than a Hoover on overdrive! Next week, we are dusting off the old Spectrum, praying the rubber keyboard hasn't perished, and will be playing Valhalla! 

THE 'ORRIBLE 'OUSE OF TERRIBLE OLD TAT - Shut up Thorin!

Welcome once again dear fiends to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! This time we are continuing our explorations of the weird world of the home micro and taking a look that some games that are truly legendary. Or at least was released by a company called Legend...  

Now at the dawn of the home micro age, there was a common perception that these small and affordable computers, that didn't require a massive room filled with spinning tape wheels and an evil genius with a beard who would program it to run amuck and try and take over the world, would mainly be used for serious purposes. Such as science, education and business. And naturally as soon as the public began snapping up the likes of the Sinclair ZX81, many saw a glimmer on the technological horizon of vast empires built on writing software. And this was no mirage - indeed there was a new frontier opening based on computer publishing... 

But the gleaming city which was built on software didn't turn out to be based on accounting programs. Nor was it built on rock and roll as predicted by Starship. For despite the efforts of pioneers and gadget gurus to educate the public on the power and potential of the mighty micro, what actually happened was that people bought them and then completely failed to get to grips with them. However, the nation's kids very quickly mastered how to load a game, and very soon the software sections in shops were expanding to contain a tidal wave of games. 

Now in these early days, one of the companies formed to create and sell business software was an outfit called Microl. However at some point in 1982, Microl very cannily realised that the big money was in games, and set up a spin-off outfit solely to create gaming titles. Headed up by John and Jan Peel, this new gaming software company was called Legend. Now although there were a host of fly-by-night companies that popped up and foisted a legion of shoddy games upon us all, Legend was no quick cash-in venture and the Peels were interested and excited by the possibilities of the emerging games scene. Quite correctly, they realised that computer games weren't just a passing fad, and that the power of the home micro allowed for gaming to evolve way beyond the arcade titles of the past and become a whole new media in themselves. And from the start they were aiming for quality. In an interview with Your Spectrum magazine (see here) , the Peels claimed "We are looking for TV quality images coupled with the interactive potential of a home computer". 

Now one of the most impressive games in the early days of home micros was The Hobbit created by Beam Software in 1982. In many ways, this computer game version of JRR Tolkien's classic wasn't exactly breaking new ground - it was basically a text adventure, a style of computer game which had been around since the mid 1970s. However these earlier text games had been mainly played on computers in labs and universities, and the general public still generally thought of computer games as things like Pong, Space Invaders or Pac Man. However The Hobbit really grabbed the public's attention - to begin with it came with a copy of the original book (see! computers were educational!) and as well as the usual typing in of phrases such as "Ask Gandalf to open the door" and "Ask Thorin to stop singing about gold", The Hobbit came with pictures. Yes, they were primitive and took ages to load but they were based on famous illustrations and really brought the game to life. 

And to the vast majority of people who were just discovering the joys of computers, The Hobbit was a massive leap forward in game-play from running about overeating or crashing spaceships. Instead of repeating the same actions or doing the same tasks over and over again, except slightly quicker on each level, in The Hobbit you could go where you liked and do what you liked. Well, provided the program could understand the command you typed in. The text parser in The Hobbit was good, but it never understood the more frequent types of commands typed in by kids determined to mispend their youth, as seen below...

Now obviously to get anywhere in the game you had to replicate the plot line of the original book, and in fact you could complete the adventure in under ten minutes if you knew what you were doing (as can be seen in walkthrough videos like this one).  However there was nothing to stop you heading off in any direction you liked, and causing mayhem in Middle Earth. And this kind of freedom in a computer game was nothing short of astounding back in the day. In fact, the lure of just wandering anywhere you liked was so great, most players never found some of the notorious bugs in some versions of the game which actually made the proper adventure unfinishable! 

Now the Peels rightly recognised that The Hobbit was a real milestone in the development of computer gaming, not just in the technical sophistication of the game engine but also in the impact it had made on the public's perception of what games could be. They realised that games that let players create their own adventures, tell their own stories had the potential to be as addictive as soap operas, and thus Legend's first venture was intended to pick up where The Hobbit left off. Very astutely for their first game, they chose as their subject matter some of the very same source materials that had inspired Tolkien's famous tales, Norse mythology. And the game that resulted was Valhalla! 

Next time - we voyage to the realms of Asgard, journey to Hell, and insult assorted Norse divinites!  

The 'Orribe 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat - A Bull and Cow Story...

Welcome dear fiends once again to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Step this way folks as once again we sort through assorted dusty boxes of eclectic ephemera, But no, not that one! Never that one! You'd never guess what's lurking in there! Although to be fair, with a few clues you might... Particularly if you mis-spent your youth messing about with any incarnations of tonight's item! For our exhibit today is an enigmatic game requiring a logical mind and sharp powers of deduction, and what's more, one that has long been wrapped up in a few little mysteries of its own! But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back the beginning... 

Now at some point in the 19th century, and no one is exactly sure when, a little game for a couple of players emerged. It was intriguing, challenging and perhaps best of all, as it required just a few scraps of paper and a pencil, it could be played on the sly, at work, in lessons, or in church. We don't know who invented it, and like many such games that have spread through oral culture, it has gone under various names down the years. However these days, it is best known as Bulls and Cows. And it is played like this... 

The first player devises a sequence of four numbers - for example, 4321 - and writes it down where the brave soul that is to be their opponent cannot see it. Player Two then places a guess as to what that number is. Of course, the odds of randomly guessing the sequence correctly first time are millions to one, and therefore Player One will then give some hints - a correct number in the right place in the sequence is a "Bull", while a number that is in the sequence but in the wrong place is a "Cow". Hence to return to our example sequence, 4321, if Player Two had guessed it was 6123, they would be informed that had gotten one Bull and two Cows in that guess. Then armed with this information, Player Two may hazard another, hopefully more informed, guess. And thus by a series of logical deductions, and it has to be said a little luck, the sequence could be discovered. Usually the game is played in an agreed number of rounds, with each player taking turns to set a sequence, and whoever works out the sequences with the overall least number of guesses wins. 

There are several variants, most notable one that sees the game being played with a theoretically simpler to guess  three digit sequence, and a version that replaces a number code with a word. Quite why it is called Bulls and Cows, nobody knows. But I would guess that possibly the name comes from correctly guessing the right number in the right place was termed a hitting a bullseye in the early days of the game. And while we are on a speculative tip, it is also possible that Bulls And Cows inspired another well-known game that could be played on the quiet with pen and paper, Battleships. As they employ quite similar mechanics, one may well have led to the creation of the other, or perhaps both share some earlier guessing game as an ancestor.

As well as being a rather fun little game to while away some spare moments, Bulls and Cows also fascinated mathematicians. For example, it has been calculated that any number can be deduced in a mere seven moves. And given its popularity with folks who love mucking about with numbers, it is perhaps not surprising that Bulls and Cows formed the basis of one of the very first computer games. For way back in 1968, back when computers where huge beasts that took up entire rooms, all bulky cabinets, spinning wheels of tape, and a tendency to want to take over the world if SF shows of the period are to be believed*, a chap named Frank King coded a version that could be played on the mainframe at Cambridge University. A couple of years later in 1970, inspired by King's program, one JM Grochow created a version at MIT. These new computerised incarnations of Bulls and Cows were named simple "Moo". 

Now one of the players of Moo at Cambridge was a fellow called Dr John Billingsley who in the early '70s just happened to have a consultancy with a plastics firm, Invicta. And around the same time, an Israeli postmaster named Mordecai Meirowitz had been inspired by Bulls and Cows to create a board game version of the old favourite that replaced numbers with coloured pegs. Meirowitz had shopped his creation around various toy firms but with no success. I'm guessing that games manufacturers couldn't see the point of making a version of the game with folks could play themselves with just a pencil and scraps of paper.

But as it happened at this particular moment Invicta were looking for to break into the toy market. Their big rivals, Auto Plastics had just gone under after being taken over by the Nestene Consciousness**, and Invicta were looking for a game to be produced that required a lot plastic molded pieces. Having encountered Moo at Cambridge, and having played at an old skool pen and paper version with his children, Dr Billingsley recognised the potential of Meirowitz's game, and thus the boardgame now known the world over as Mastermind was born! 

Making its debut in 1971, Mastermind was an instant success and in the early years of the 1970s pretty much conquered the world. And indeed, it is still going strong today, with new generations discovering the delights of code-breaking and plastic pegs in their spare time. However there have long been questions around Mastermind that not even the best codebreakers have been able to answers... And next time, we shall have a crack to finally answering these enigmatic questions! 

* Probably best not to, to be honest
** At least according to leaked files from U.N.I.T.

THE 'ORRIBLE 'OUSE OF TERRIBLE OLD TAT #20 -

Well dear fiends, welcome back to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible of Tat! Now then yesterday was the ancient festival of Lammas, a time of celebrating the harvest, the life of the fields, and kinds of other pagan and folksy rites and rituals. And hence it's the perfect time of the year to remember that time when cornflakes went all Wicker Man on us. Yes, that packet you can see above is an actual real thing, although you would be forgiven for mistaking it for an obscure prog rock LP cover.  But yes, it was a genuine cornflakes box that was once stacked high on the shelves of the British supermarket, Sainsbury's in the mid 70s! 

So how did this most evocative cereal box come into being? Well, back in the early days of Sainsbury's, in the '60s went supermarkets were a new thing, it was decided that it was somewhat wasteful to spend tons of money on advertising and promotions, with the company's ethos being very much that good food should sell itself. And hence for their own brand range of products, they did employ a fancy marketing agency and instead, designed all their own labels in-house. The Our Label range as it was known was supervised and designed by a clever chap called Peter Dixon, who would stay with the supermarket until 1989. The design ethic was simple, but eye-catching colous, as we can see here in this wrapper - 

How despite being minimal, the Our Label did carve out a distinctive look of its own, often with a futuristic minimalist aesthetic. And their packaging canon is now highly hailed as a treasure trove of iconic designs. For example, this design for dried veg would not be out of place on a '60s Penguin paperback or as the cover of a LP of moog music. 

And indeed, the first incarnations of the Sainsbury's cornflakes boxes followed this almost op art approach, giving us cereal packaging that is either a design classic or a load of balls depending on your view. 

Howee it would seem that as the Swinging Sixties metamorphosed into the As Yet Possessing No Agreed Upon Alliterative Adjective Seventies, the Our Label evolved as well. While their designs retained the same broad no-nonsense but eye-catching approach, a more pictorial approach saw the coming of the much celebrated John Barleycorn inspired design for the above cornflakes box. As far as I can tell it was a complete coincidence, but the box does rather recall the promotional imagery for the great grandfather of folk horror The Wicker Man (1973)... 

Likewise, there is more than a passing resemblance with the cover of a celebrated psych-folk LP of the times, Bright Phoebus (1972) by Lal & Mike Waterson too. Perhaps Thunderclap Newton was right, and there was just something in the air...

Anyhow despite all the oft-cracked jokes about breakfast cereals with free human sacrifices, and shouldn't that be Summerisle's Cornflakes, surprising the pagan iconography of this particular box isn't most scary design in the Our Label archive. For while their cornflakes box may owe something to  The Wicker Man, these pet food labels appear to have been inspired by Zoltan Hound of Dracula!