Missed Classic 126 & 127: A Double Dose of “A Special Christmas Adventure” (1986 & 1987)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Merry Christmas! Another year has come and gone, but we’re still playing games here at “The Adventurer’s Guild”. I hope that you and your family are enjoying the holiday, taking some time off, and perhaps playing a classic adventure game or two. While I am off battling Christmas Tree Monsters in Beyond Zork (as of this writing, I still don’t know how to defeat them), it is our tradition to play and discuss a truly holiday themed adventure game for Christmas. This year, I am breaking that tradition by playing not one but TWO Christmas-themed text adventures for the ZX Spectrum. They happen to share the same name, but we’ll cross that holiday-themed bridge when we come to it. 

I don’t want to set expectations too high, but this is how my holiday posts tend to work:

1. I find an obscure Christmas-related title, often that few have ever heard of, and play it. 
2. Using my decade of contacts and detective skills, I track down the original authors. They are amazed and mystified that anyone cares about their old game and are glad to discuss it with me. 
3. I compose a half-decent story about that adventure game.
4. Somehow, despite being a title that you never heard of or cared about before, you enjoy the story and stick with us for another year of adventuring! (Also, Santa has personally threatened to cancel the blog if I ever stop doing this. Seriously.)

This year didn’t quite go to plan. Not only because I’m looking at two games at once, but also because I haven’t been able to track down the author or even be sure who they are. We do have some fun history and detective work… and possibly even a murder. I’m generally not a fan of murder, especially over the holidays. 

Onward then to A Special Christmas Adventure! Both of them. 

The Spectrum was cute, I’ll give it that!

Let’s start from the beginning: the ZX Spectrum was a marvel of British computer engineering. Developed in Cambridge, UK (rather than the more technology-focused Cambridge, Massachusetts) by Sir Clive Sinclair and his company, it was one of the breakout stars of the computing world in the early 1980s. Priced at only £125 (roughly £550 today, or $700), but featuring a color screen, an 8-bit Z80A processor, a tape drive, and up to 48K of RAM, it was an ideal entry-level computer for the British and European markets, with less success in the US. It sold more than three times as many units as the similarly-British BBC Micro, although the latter system became dominant in the British educational market. Its popularity also helped to keep competitors like the Commodore 64 and Apple II from gaining the traction that they would see in the United States. Britain was the home of the Spectrum and, for a time at least, it was the dominant home computing platform in the region. 

The Spectrum’s dominance in the UK led to some differences in early computing culture between the US and UK. Text adventures were popular there, of course, and helped thanks to being the launch platform of “The Quill”, perhaps the most writer-accessible text adventure platform on the market in the early 1980s. It was also easy to pirate and many of the low-cost text adventures produced in the period may not have been fully up to compliance on their licensing. We looked at “The Quill” briefly when I covered A Spell of Christmas Ice a few years ago, but at least 600 commercially released text adventures were created in “The Quill” alone– thank goodness we aren’t one of those blogs that have to play every game! Disk or tape magazines (“diskmags”) were popular in the UK and they had their homegrown ones: 16/48 Magazine, Spectrum Adventurer, and more. Finally, for us adventure enthusiasts, the rise of “contest games” was almost an exclusively UK-based phenomenon. These were text adventures designed to be so difficult that the first to complete them would be awarded with a prize! In an era today where games are designed to be winnable, I imagine that these would feel a bit alien to us. 

William Young and his three companies operated out of one of these terrace houses.

An ad for the SA.E.C. in Spectrum Adventurer.

And that all brings us to our story for today: William Young and our pair of Christmas adventures for the ZX Spectrum. While researching this story, I have read several of his surviving editorials as well as the letters and articles that he elected to feature in his publication. If I get one impression of him at all, it is this: he was one of us. He seemed to love adventure games and did everything he could to boost text adventures in the UK. He operated a hint service, he volunteered to playtest and advise amateur game designers, and he operated what can best be described as a lending library for completed games. It’s difficult to say what impact, if any, he had on the text adventure field, but he was devoted to that craft. I just regret that I haven’t been able to locate him to discuss this further.

What I have been able to learn about William Young could probably fit on the back of a napkin. In the mid-1980s, he was living in Carluke, a Scottish town of around 13,000 people within commuting distance of Edinburgh. While he certainly loved adventure games, there is no direct evidence that he wrote any himself. (More on that in a bit.) And around 1986, he founded three separate but connected projects to share his love of Spectrum gaming and presumably to make some money:

• First, the “Spectrum Adventure Exchange Club”, started either in 1985 or 1986, was essentially a lending library for the growing number of text adventures being written for the ZX Spectrum. “Finished an adventure? Don’t let it gather dust on a shelf - exchange it for another one.” The Club was later expanded to include a “free map service” for “14 popular titles” as well as offering a tip line. 

Surprisingly reasonable international postage.

• Second, the Spectrum Adventure tape magazine. Beginning in approximately June 1986, the magazine provided hints, reviews, and a free game in every issue to the Spectrum community. Issues were priced at £2 each, or about £7.23 today ($9.50) and were published 11 times per year, with the December/January issue covering both months. Many of the included games were serialized as episodes or chapters in a longer story, something which I haven’t seen before. “Doctor Goo”, a parody of the British sci-fi show, Doctor Who, was a frequent protagonist in these serialized games.

• Finally, a company called “Global Games” that published games, including those developed through the Spectrum Adventure Exchange Club. As best I can tell, this is separate from a different UK company, also called “Global Games”, which published ZX Spectrum action titles– but some resources today conflate the two. Young’s “Global Games” appears to have started around 1988 to publish both S.A.E.C.-related titles as well as other adventure authors; some titles that were previously credited to S.A.E.C. switch to being distributed by Global Games after 1988.

Looking at this now, it is sometimes difficult to see where Spectrum Adventurer and the “Spectrum Adventure Exchange Club” began and ended. Many of the games developed for the former were credited as being written by the “S.A.E.C.” Additionally, the Club supported several contest games which were distributed either through the magazine or Global Games. These included Castle Thade (1986), Castle Thade Revisited (1987), and Virus (1988). The value of these contests seemed to rise over time: the winner of Castle Thade received a computer monitor, while the winner of Virus received an entire new ZX Spectrum +3 computer!

Credits changed between issues, though William Young was always the editor.

What we do know is that as December 1986 approached, William Young was interested in doing something special for Christmas. He was between adventures: his November’s issue included the final chapter for Space Odyssey, while the next one was planned to be the first chapter of a Doctor Goo adventure. (Incidentally, Space Odyssey sounds amazing, but most of the game has been lost. It’s a sci-fi story where you are a falsely-convicted murderer who wakes up from suspended animation on a penal ship that has been struck by a meteor. In the previous five chapters, you somehow escaped from the ship, regained your lost memories, and found a time machine. The final part involves traveling back in time to the murder to either solve it or put things right.) With a bit of time to fill and it being the holidays, William Young either commissioned or wrote the first A Special Christmas Adventure, as well as a special graphical holiday message that would load during the issue. (You can see the animated message at the top of this post.) 

Over the following months, Young continued to improve his tape magazine with a new layout and logo. When Christmas 1987 rolled around, he had just finished his final serialized chapter of Doctor Goo and had a blank spot in the calendar. Reusing the special Christmas logo from the previous year (not even bothering to fix the glaring typo!), he crafted or commissioned a second Christmas adventure for the issue. 

Congrats, David! I hope it was a good Christmas present.

Unfortunately, working out what happened next has been an extra challenge, in large part due to the fragmentary nature of the rediscovered material. To date, only Spectrum Adventurer issues 7 through 24 have been found, spanning 1986-1988. It is unclear if #24 (June 1988) is the final issue or just the final one rediscovered; it contains the usual preview of the next issue and no indication suggesting that the end was near. While enthusiasts have retained and shared the TZX images for the Spectrum tapes, I have been able to find none of the original physical tapes, jackets, or labels that might have additional clues. If there was a Christmas issue in 1988, it has now been lost. 

By August of 1989, Spectrum Adventurer and the Spectrum Adventure Exchange Club were closing. William Young’s announcement (that I found summarized in an issue of Your Sinclair magazine, not directly) suggested that he no longer had time to keep up the club. This lines up with his increasing work on Global Games and it’s reasonable to assume that he wound down the previous entities to focus on the new one. Within a short time, games previously distributed by S.A.E.C. were now listed as Global Games, including a compilation of his Doctor Goo chapters from the magazine. Unfortunately, the fate of William Young and his new company is not clear after this point. Despite publishing at least four games in 1989, Global Games seems to fade away with the decline of the ZX Spectrum. The last advertisement that I have been able to find for them is from June 1992. 

Global Games sometimes (always?) used very nondescript cover art.

After all that, who wrote A Special Christmas Adventure and its sequel? That question is more difficult than it might first appear. Like every S.A.E.C. game, it is solely attributed to the club. A few retrogaming databases credit Mr. Young– and that is a reasonable guess– but he is never directly credited on any games. Ever. The first several issues of Spectrum Adventurer include advice for writing, marketing, and playtesting games, all written by Young, but it is unclear if he is speaking as a designer of games himself or as someone who reviews games for distribution. (The first six of those editorials are missing and he may have been clearer about his experience in one of the now-lost ones.) That said, all of his distributed games either credit an author directly or S.A.E.C. As William is the only employee that I am aware of at S.A.E.C, it’s tempting and perhaps reasonable to assume that he wrote the “S.A.E.C.” games himself, but I cannot prove it. 

The only other obvious candidate is a woman named June Rowe from Launceston in Cornwall. If we assume that the issue credits include the designers of the included free games, then she is the only person other than William to be credited in both Christmas issues. She is a writer and game reviewer, and she transitioned to being the letters editor at the Adventure Probe fanzine after Spectrum Adventurer was closed. Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate her either. 

As for Mr. Young, all of my attempts to locate him have come up empty. I had three leads:

• William Young (1900-2007) was the least likely candidate, but he’s also who shows up first and most often in search results. He was a radio operator for the Royal Flying Corps from Carluke during World War I (!!) and was living in Borneo during World War II where he was captured by the Japanese and taken as a prisoner of war. He would have been 86 in 1986 and while it is not impossible that he could have run a gaming company, he happened to be living in Australia at the time. Certainly an amazing life, but not the one I was looking for.
  
  
• A second William Young (born c. 1935) was a Hoover repairman who founded an appliance repair company in Carluke that still bears his name today. He would have been in his 50s in 1986 and could have had a side business doing computer games, but the current owners of his company have been kind enough to let me know that it wasn’t him.
  
  
• A third William Young (1954-2011) would have been 32 in 1986, a prime time in his life to run a games distribution company. Unfortunately, I have been able to learn nothing about him except that in 2011, he was killed in Carluke during an argument over a damaged sofa. 

The only thing I can conclude is that “William Young” is a common name, even in a town as small as Carluke. I am disappointed that I could not track him down. So many of the mysteries that I came across could have been resolved with a handful of emailed questions! We’ll have to put all of that aside because it’s (finally) time to play the games.

No credit for “The Quill” though it is likely a Quill-created game.

I had to look up what “given his P45 meant” – unemployment.

Playing The Game: 1986 Edition

Poor Santa is in a bit of a predicament. A wicked gnome has stolen the magic key to the Children’s Presents Room. Unless Santa can find the key before Christmas eve, all the children in the world will be more than a little upset at not receiving any presents. 

   Santa would be sacked, given his P45 and banished from Fairyland if he is unable to recover the key.

   Santa’s future employment and the happiness of millions of children depend on you!

We start the game in Santa’s Grotto and I’m already searching Google because I have no idea what a “P45” means: it’s a tax form that you receive from your employer when you are terminated from your job. The plot of this game seems simple enough. All we have to do is explore, find the magic key, and save Christmas. How many times have we saved Christmas already? It seems like every year Santa is getting into some trouble, you’d think he’d be more practiced by now.

Right away, the game is annoying me by its mixed use of second and third person. We are Santa, but we can also see (at least in this scene) Santa reading a letter. I take the hint and read the letter from the Wicked Gnome myself.

There is an important clue in this letter that I missed.

Dear Santa

I have your key and you’re not getting it back! I can’t wait to see the disappointment on the children’s faces on Christmas morning when they find out that there are no presents for them.

Ha Ha Ha

The Wicked Gnome

The so-called “Wicked Gnome” seems like such an anti-Christmas sort of person! Why would someone want to deprive children on Christmas? He must be wicked indeed.

Finding the Gnome’s Castle is a little easier than I expected: no sooner do we walk out Santa’s front door at the North Pole (or… Fairyland?) than we run into the castle and the surprisingly tall hedge surrounding it on all sides. There is no obvious way in.

I head back inside and explore Santa’s home first. There are some elves in another room, deeply worried that we won’t pull this off in time. Out a side door, I discover Santa’s “garden”. As this is a British game, I immediately assume that this is just his “yard”, but it seems that he is also really gardening there. I pick up a spade left on the ground. Nothing else in the house appears important, except for a locked door in the reindeer’s stable and another leading to the Children’s Presents Room.

But, now what? There’s not that much to do in the game and only a few rooms to explore. The obvious goal is that I need to somehow get past the giant hedge, but there’s no clear way to do that. 

The spade offers me the best clue, but even that isn’t much:

> Examine spade

Useful for digging.

> Dig hole

Santa can’t do that.

Digging a path under the bush doesn’t work. I resort to digging everywhere to see what happens and eventually stumble on the most obvious answer: if we dig in the garden, we discover a bean that Santa apparently planted but didn’t sprout. How that will help us if it didn’t sprout before, I have no idea. Attempting to eat the bean gives us the clue that we shouldn’t do that because we “want to go up in the world” and I immediately think of Jack and the Beanstalk. We can use it to go over the giant hedge?

My completed map of the game, thirteen rooms.

Well, no. I get stuck at this point for a surprisingly long time, exploring everywhere until I consult a walkthrough and realize that I missed two things:

• I had to more carefully “examine” everything in the room descriptions. In Santa’s workshop, examining a pile of discarded wood would have revealed a torch (flashlight), a doll, and a tin hat. None of those things help me with my immediate problem however.
  
  
• Getting past the bush requires us to have seen the address of the gnome on the letter as “underbush” and then type the command “under bush”. Frankly, that’s bad parsing even with a clue, especially since it’s not a very good clue.

When we arrive at the other side of the bushes, we find that the gnome’s castle is actually a well-defended tower. Now, it is time for some Jack and the Beanstalk, except that after planting the bean, I need to water it. I fill the tin hat with water from a nearby spring (did I mention there was a spring?) and the bean magically sprouts. I climb the tower and come face to face with the Wicked Gnome.

How do you defeat a Wicked Gnome? With love, of course! It’s Christmas so I give him a doll (a pleasant gender role reversal for 1986) and he’s so thrilled that he hands over my key. I race back to the workshop and unlock the Children’s Present Room. I win!

Congratulations! The elves are hurrying to load the sleighs with presents. You have saved the children from being very sad on Christmas morning, and Santa still has his job.

Time Played: 1 hr 15 min

It took me a lot of trial and error when I was stuck.

No time to rest, I have to do it over again!

A different (but similar) plot.

Playing The Game: 1987 Sequel

There is no time for self-congratulations because I boot up the second Christmas adventure and discover that Santa continues to have difficulty keeping track of his keys. The game doesn’t bill itself as a sequel to the previous holiday special, although it shares a lot in common with that effort. 

It is almost midnight on Christmas Eve and Santa Claus has packed his sleigh with toys. All he has to do now is feed his reindeer to give them strength to face the rigors of their journey. 

Alas! The key to the hay store has gone missing. You must help Santa to find the key.

The happiness of children around the world depends on you. Good luck.

While we start in Santa’s Grotto again, the layout is different. While last time, we were in Fairyland, this time we are in Santa’s more traditional North Pole home with an impassable snow waste just outside his front door. In a couple of moments, I explore the house and discover the hungry reindeer. This time, I don’t even need to explore carefully to find both a metal helmet and a toy flute hidden among the workroom scraps. 

Out in the wastes, I discover:

• A seer living in a cave. She’s magical, but sad that she lost something. Perhaps I will help her to find what she lost.
  
  
• A block of ice that is too cold for me to manipulate.
  
  
• A tower (much like the gnome’s tower) but with no obvious way to open the door.

The final map of the game. Only eleven rooms.

Solving this is no problem for a seasoned adventurer like myself and this second game has fewer tricky parser bits. We are able to open a magical door in the tower by using the flute. Doing so allows an animal that has been trapped inside to run out. I then check the seer and discover that she had been missing her cat, but that it has now returned! She is so happy that she gives me some salt. I use the salt on the cold block of ice and it melts, leaving a pool of unfrozen water in the icy desert.

At this point, I die. Unlike the previous game, there is a strict time limit (70 turns) and as soon as you pass that, it’s midnight and we can no longer deliver all of the presents. I start over from scratch and do it all quicker.

Back in the tower, I locate a magician who has stolen our key, doing occult stuff next to a roaring fire. He doesn’t want a doll, not that I have one to give him, nor will he return the key. The solution rhymes with the previous game also: we can fill the metal helmet with the melted water from the block, then use it to douse the fire in the magician’s room. The resulting steam allows us to sneak up and grab the key. I race back to the reindeer room and open the hay door. I win!

Congratulations! You have opened the door to the hay store. The hungry reindeer rush in and have a feast. Before long they are ready to deliver their load of toys and all the children will have a merry Christmas.

Time Played: 25 min

"a warm animal smell"

Final Rating

The only thing better than reviewing one Christmas game is reviewing two! Our Christmas games are rated on the “suspiciously similar” EGGNOG rating system, but they are ultimately rated against an idealized version of a Monkey Island game from the mid-1990s. As such, text adventures don’t tend to score well and tiny holiday text adventures that were distributed for free even less so. 

Before jumping in however, I want to spend a moment to consider the way that these games “rhyme”:

• Both games start in “Santa’s Grotto” and have a small house at the North Pole (or… er… Fairyland?) for us to explore. The layouts are completely different, but the thrust is the same.
  
  
• Both games involve locating a missing key, but notably not the same key: Santa loses the keys to the presents in the first game and the key to the hayloft in the second.
  
  
• Both games feature filling a metal hat / helmet with water that we find along the way to solve a puzzle. In the first game, it’s for watering the bean, while the second game uses it to douse the fire.
  
  
• Both games end by entering a tower and “defeating” the villain. 

My guess is that the author did at least a smidgeon of code reuse. Both games appear to be Quill-based, but only the second has the required statement to that effect. There is no “oh no, not again” from any of the elves to indicate that both games are in-universe to each other, but with very limited text anyway, why would there be? These are just two holiday nibbles that they certainly didn’t expect to have a lasting impact, least of all being reviewed thirty-seven years later.

Advice from the master?

Enigmas and Solution-Findability - Neither game had great puzzles. The 1986 edition suffered from the terrible “under bush” command and had overall a more challenging parser. The 1987 edition added the time limit and was more polished overall, though still featured only 1-2 total “puzzles”. My score: 1 for 1986 and 2 for 1987. 

Game UI and Items - Two text adventures written under the Quill, so we were mostly limited to two-word interactions. The first game did worse here overall thanks to fewer synonyms and the “under bush” puzzle which I feel the need to bring up again, but it was still functional. My score: 1 for 1986 and 2 for 1987.

Gameworld and Story - The story for each game is simple and pretty traditional: something has happened to prevent Christmas from going off without a hitch and we have to deal with it. Both have very small areas to explore so there isn’t a ton of “setting” to examine:

• In the first game, our setting is “Fairyland” and not the North Pole which is new for me when it comes to Christmas games. Maybe Santa has a separate house there? Even so, I love the detail that the “Wicked Gnome” who hides away at the top of a tower guarded by an impenetrable hedge just wanted love (and a doll). Some more text would have made this work better, but it’s a fun idea at the core.
  
  
• In the second game, we are more traditionally at the North Pole. The tiny side detail with the woman and her lost cat is lovely, but the villain is boring and not actually defeated.

Given the pros and cons, I’m going to score each one with a two, albeit for different reasons. My score: 2. 

No graphics, but Spectrum Adventurer switched from basic text to this logo in 1987.

Noises and Pretty Pixels - I cheated just a little bit because the Christmas tree image with the star that leads off this post is the introductory screen of the month’s tapemag and not the game in specific. (They used the same special image for both Christmas 1986 and 1987.) That leaves the game with no graphics to speak of at all, though the second game includes colored text. My score: 0. 

Overworld and Environs - This category is often the most difficult to explain, but I always think of it as “atmosphere”. The example that I have used in the past is that a well-designed house gives you points in “Setting”, but if it’s scary or moody or makes you feel something, that is “Atmosphere”. To that end, we don’t get enough text to really add to the atmosphere and overall it feels a bit empty. We have elves complaining that we’re taking too long in the second game plus the joy of making the Wicked Gnome a little less wicked through the power of Christmas in the first. Both games score about the same. My score: 2. 

Gregariousness and Thespianism - Our final category relates to the way that we interact with the characters in the game and the quality of the writing. Here, the writing is minimal and there are essentially no NPCs. The first game gets some points for the Wicked Gnome’s love of dolls, but the second does not. My score: 2 for 1986, 1 for 1987. 

Let’s add up the scores:

• A Special Christmas Adventure (1986) received (1+1+2+0+2+2)/.6 = 13 points!
• A Special Christmas Adventure (1987) received (2+2+2+0+2+1)/.6 = 15 points!

I don’t see any reason to add or remove bonus points, so let’s just go with those.

Obviously, those are not high scores, but for less than two hours of gameplay (and hours and hours of research), they aren’t bad! And since they scored as well as Adventure in the 5th Dimension, William Young or whomever wrote this can feel pride in scoring the same as a game developed by the legendary Brian Moriarty! 

From here, I am signing off until the new year. I have some Christmas Tree monsters to beat, plus a few real ones (and relatives) that I have to see. I hope you all have a great and festive season, whichever solstice-related holidays that you happen to celebrate. If you have any fond memories of Spectrum gaming or of any holiday-relating gaming, I hope you share with us below. Warm memories are always appreciated in the cold season! (At least for us northern hemisphere folks.) 

If you are still in the mood for more Christmas games, please check out some of our previous holiday adventures:

• Merry Christmas from Melbourne House (1984)
• A Spell of Christmas Ice (1984)
• Crisis at Christmas (1986)
• Elves ‘87 (aka Elf’s Christmas Adventure) (1987)
• Humbug (1990)
• The Christmas Adventure (1983)
• Sanity Clause (1991)
• Paranoia (1987) 
• Santa and the Goblins (1983)

From all of your friends here at “The Adventurers Guild”, we wish you a joyous and healthy holiday season.

Christmas decorations in Carluke, Scotland, 2019.