Missed Classic - Twin Kingdom Valley - WON! and Final Rating

Written by Morpheus Kitami

Me and the boys about to fire up a text adventure

Last time, I had explored half of the map in my noble quest to rob everyone and everything I could of their treasure. It wasn't going well, primarily because everyone else was on a distasteful quest to kill me and take everything not nailed down. Those monsters, those evil, evil gorillas, elves and trolls. I must use my wits to prevent them from stopping me.

This is one psychotic gorilla

Last time, I did not quite save at the proper time, and now somehow the small dagger is not where it once was. I have no idea where it went. It just disappeared. This seems to be a sign that things have gotten mixed around since last time. I encounter a gorilla south of the path to the north, and he's got two clubs and an axe. How the hell did he even get that? Anyway, I can't kill him, the axe is just too powerful.

I feel like someone was trying to cheat me

I decide to just ignore him and head to that cave. It doesn't actually connect the two parts of the map, it's just a small sideplace. You know, a surprising number of descriptions you could give underground passages sound rather strange out of context. Not that there's much here, just another dagger and some locked doors. This better not be one long chain of keys.

Missed Classic 107 - Twin Kingdom Valley (1983) - Introduction

Written by Morpheus Kitami

There's a sort of empty space in the history of adventure games between 1982 and 1985. At least I feel that way. The '70s had the mainframe games, followed by Scott Adams and Infocom. Then Sierra came along and did graphical text adventures, and before King's Quest we have a handful of literary adaptations and text adventures with pictures. There's not really much discussion of this time period, even among people who like text adventures. Things sort of disappeared into the ether outside of Infocom. Let's see some of them.

Twin Kingdom Valley was not my first choice, but my first choice has about 1000 pages of backstory I feel I should read first. Twin Kingdom Valley is a fantasy text adventure, one I keep getting confused as Twin Valley Kingdom and now I'm not sure which way is up. The back does not describe much, just that its a fantasy game with 175 rooms. Its one of two games Trevor Hall developed and the only adventure. While he is mentioned as having made a few other games, only an obscure text strategy game seems to be credited to him on online databases.

Morpheus desperately trying to play The Hobbit, 2007, colorized

Twin Kingdom Valley's claim to fame is active NPCs, these having their own, hopefully complex personalities and move around. This gives me flashbacks to The Hobbit, where NPCs moved around while you slowly tried to figure out what to do. For me, that meant dying to the trolls before they would go on to killing and eating Gandalf, Gimli, the rest of the dwarves, Morgoth, Saruman, the Silmarils, uh, Cirith Ungol, Angband and the rest of the universe. So, let's hope it isn't one of those adventure games.