The Horror of Homebrew!



Sometime in 1984, my brother and I discovered something wonderful - The Quill! We had 'acquired' a copy from a friend of a friend's friend's mother's brother's uncle's dog and had no idea how to use it because there weren't any instructions. Then I accidentally discovered a glitch - it was possible to load some early Quill adventures directly into the utility from the 'final' game - you didn't need the original data file. By pulling apart an early 16/48 adventure (A Spell of Christmas Ice - apologies to the author!) I was able to learn the basics of adventure creation without actually investing money. Hey, I was a kid - gimme a break.

What follows is a tale of woe, misery and truly terrible games! Although in later years my adventures for Spectraxx would approach 'passable', these early efforts were... bad. Real bad. So obviously you'd never want to play them.

Ah, what the hell. Here are some of them. To save them from oblivion, you understand. Not because they're actually any good. No. Click the pictures to actually download the games as TZX files. If you're a masochist.


School

Get Trousers...


This was our first ever attempt. And it shows. Get up and dressed for school is the (rather lame) premise. It's small, it's easy - it's based on our old house. You play me, and 'Mark' is my brother. Try to 'wake' him if you need putting out of your misery. Getting around is a nightmare 'cos I hadn't figured out that you might actually quite like to know where the exits were in a particular room. I guess you'll have to make a map! Why I chose black text on red background I have no idea... sorry if it ruins your eyes. I've managed to recover the original Quill datafile for this one too, so it's tagged onto the end of the TZX just for fun.



School II

Bottom! Ha ha ha!


As if the original wasn't bad enough, School was rapidly followed up with this imaginitively titled sequel. This one's not quite so bad - white text on blue background is nice, there are marked exits and the play area is much bigger. Still no real 'puzzles', though - just collecting stuff. And I still hadn't figured out lower case letters or spaces after full stops, so it's pretty difficult to read. But... this one includes an 'instructions' page when you load it up! Impressive, eh? The Quill datafile is again tagged on the end for the morbidly curious.



V - The Final Battle

Spectacular loading screen ahoy!More CAPS!


1984's big telly event was shoulder-pad-heavy sci-fi mini-series - V. Everyone loved it (yeah, yeah - I know) and I loved it so much I made an adventure based on it. This is the most complex adventure yet (not saying much, I know) and featured a loading screen, of all things! Again, no real puzzles just lots of collecting, mazes and instant deaths - a map is a must here. And it's still all in glorious CAPS-LOCK-O-VISION, although I had figured out that white text was better against a red background by now. No Quill datafile for this one unfortunately, but I suspect it was also done with an early Quill so chances are you can just load the main game up into the editor like I did...



The Ones That Got Away


Yes, there were more! Sadly(?) these are the only ones I've managed to rediscover in my trawl through several hundred tapes. Buried somewhere in the pile of cheap C90s could well be the following 'gems' and some other stuff that no doubt I've completely forgotten about:

Everyday Adventure

I saw the title in a book somewhere and thought it was great. I never actually played the game, but named my first effort after it. You were Bert the 'Bovver Boy' and must make you way to the dole office before it shuts. Cue lots of inappropriate (and probably not very funny) jokes and terrible puzzles. This was the most complex effort yet, but was also the last 'mini-adventure' to make it off the drawing board before... bigger and better things!

Attack of the Mutant Bumpries

Our first 'mega' advenure. Full length, with a complex map and storyline. And no doubt all in CAPS-LOCK with no real puzzles. It's been a while since I played it, so I can't remember for sure. This was the one I hoped to propel us to the 'big time' - I approached Atlantis Software about publishing it. Luckily for them they said 'no'.

Revenge of the Mutant Bumpries

Undeterred, off we went to produce a sequel. Bigger, better and possibly even including lower-case letters... I can't remember at all. Haven't seen this one in ages, so I'm not hopeful that there's still a copy in existence.

Psycho

The flurry (sort of) of unofficial telly-related games continued with an adventure based on the Hitchcock classic. Actually I think it was based on Psycho 2 which I'd just seen on the telly. Sadly this seems to be gone too, although this fabulous loading screen (which was probably drawn by my brother, Mark) remains!

Argh! I'm scared!