From The Archives: Digital Fantasia
Brian Howarth is in Blackpool, writing text adventures for the TRS-80. New 8-bit computers are arriving. What should he do? >CREATE COMPANY. Brian creates a company called Digital Fantasia. What now? >INTERVIEW BRIAN
Brian Howarth reveals how buying a TRS-80 led to forming his own company
In the shadow of the almost Soviet-style Norbreck Castle Hotel, a pebble’s throw from the Blackpool seafront and its trundling trams, there was once a small but flourishing mecca of computing run by a programmer wellknown to anyone with a love of text adventures.
It sold a range of software titles, books and other goodies. But the items Brian Howarth enjoyed selling the most was a series of games called the Mysterious Adventures – not least because he had written them himself, to critical acclaim.
It was 1983 and Brian had become enamoured with computers. Having left grammar school in Blackpool in 1969 with a handful of O-levels he begun a career as a telephone engineer, he ended up buying a TRS-80 from Radio Shack in 1981 before a friend introduced him to games written by Scott Adams, the first person known to create text adventures for personal computers. “I enjoyed playing those games and I became motivated to come up with something myself,” Brian says, explaining how he liked the ‘split screen’ format, where the descriptions would be displayed in the top portion of the screen, and the player and computer responses would take up the lower half.
“Prior to me first encountering a Scott
Adams adventure, I had only really experienced Microsoft’s Colossal Caves adventure, and Adventure on the Atari 2600. I enjoyed the genre enormously but seeing a Scott Adams adventure running on a TRS-80 convinced me that it would be a do-able thing on a microcomputer that I had a passion for.” It was at that point he tried his hand at producing his own games using BASIC, starting with a title called The Golden Baton.
It was a relatively small adventure, with an equally minuscule inventory, tasking players with regaining an important artefact. The puzzles were also sufficiently difficult, leaving gamers a little stumped at times. But, having struggled to do a decent job in BASIC, Brian decided to start over. “There was an issue of what I felt would fit into the available RAM, which, on the base TRS-80, was a mere 12 kilobytes,” he explains. “My attempts in BASIC were quickly consuming RAM and so I chose to bite the bullet and learn assembly language. The resultant size of the machine code convinced me that it would be the only way.”
To learn assembly, Brian bought a book and stayed up into the small hours on many a night in a bid to learn it. Once completed, he looked around for a publisher and found, to his delight, that a programmer called AJ Harding who ran the software company, Molimerx, liked it. He wanted Brian to create a series of games called the Mysterious Adventures (“The name wasn’t an earth-shattering inspirational event – just two words depicting my hopes for the series,” Brian says). Brian left his job and soon got on with producing The Time Machine and Arrow Of Death.
That purchase of a TRS-80 suddenly felt like a life-changing move. “I was pretty obsessed with all aspects of having a microcomputer,” he says. “Before getting the TRS-80, I’d had no programming training hence all the tools that I acquired, that were needed for coding on that system, seemed just what they needed to be. I spent many hours collecting and playing software and tinkering with utilities. It seemed like heaven.”
Working with Molimerx was also good for him. “It helped me nurture the self-discipline to not procrastinate too much when somebody was pressuring me to get titles completed on a deadline,” Brian explains. But once the first three Mysterious Adventures had been developed, his work spun into a new direction. Although he was also producing prescription-labelling software at the time for a local chemist, he answered a notice placed in a computer magazine by Mike Woodroffe of Adventuresoft for a coder who could port Scott Adams’ games to UK computers such as the Spectrum, BBC Micro and Oric and he jumped at the chance.
This altered the way he developed his games. “An acquaintance questioned why I was laboriously producing each title as a single chunk of code and data, instead of having an interpreter into which I could ‘plug in’ the data part of the adventure,” Brian explains. “He told me of an editing system he had gotten hold of and he sent me the user instructions for it. To this day, I have no evidence that these instructions were those that Scott Adams created or used, but it served to illustrate to me that I could make life easier for myself if I could reconfigure my codebase so that it would accommodate a database. It took a lot of work, but I managed to conform my code to use a database which was essentially the adventure text (the locations, descriptions, responses, messages and so on) along with the response algorithms.”
Brian was on a roll, but then, in 1983, he made a sudden decision to go it alone. Molimerx was not interested in marketing the Mysterious Adventures for any machines other than the TRS-80 and the IBM PC. “So I – seeing the approach of an army of new 8-bit computers such as the BBC Micro, the Sinclair Spectrum, the Atari 800/400, the Oric Atmos and more – decided that my newly-adopted interpreter/database method of creating titles was just the ticket for broadening the market potential. I formed Digital Fantasia for that purpose.”
Setting up a company was a bold move that would see him publishing his own games for the very first time. The shop in Blackpool formed part of the plan. “My sister-in-law was the main staff member in attendance but, in the spirit of being a family business, various family members did shifts attending to customers,” he says. Brian’s job was to port his games and produce new ones.
“I had already written the Interpreter Engine in 6502 code for the Atari 800/400, so it was a natural growth into what was a very nice
BBC Micro engine which was also 6502,” he continues. “It seemed to me that that market might yield good sales figures for the growing number of titles in the Mysterious Adventures series.” He was able to focus on porting a host of games including Arrow Of Death Part Two which he wrote in 1982 using his new database driven program, and Escape From Pulsar 7 which he produced with an author called Wherner Barnes, “a dude who was around the same age as me who I knew from a group of my drinking buddies that went fell-walking in the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales”. Escape From Pulsar 7 was set in space and it involved an escaped creature eating the crew of the spaceship and forcing you to make an escape. But if that sounded rather clichéd, another game, Circus, had a more creative plot involving the player’s car running out of petrol close by a deserted circus jam-packed with dark secrets. As always, the game involved picking up and using of items, together with the need for lots of mapping, but Brian says Circus was his favourite.
Working with friends helped to keep the stories fresh, he adds. “When I was making the games, I had some help from a couple of buddies who came up with storylines for several of the series – their only brief was to conjure up adventures that didn’t cover ground that had already been covered. They did a good job and I was proud to include their stories as titles in the series. As for me, I just worked on developing interesting varied settings, and endeavoured to incorporate challenging and rewarding puzzles and solutions.”
He teamed up with Wherner Barnes again for The Feasibility Experiment which became the Mysterious Adventure number seven. It had more than 50 rooms spread across different environments and time periods. The plot involved recovering treasures as an ‘Ultimate Warrior’ and it was dubbed by Edge magazine (perhaps infamously given it’s quoted across the internet), “as a glorious stream-of-consciousness ramble” in December 2003.
He then worked with Cliff J Ogden on The Wizard Of Akyrz which was set in a royal palace. “Cliff was an older guy who was a member of a TRS-80 user group that I had joined,” Brian says. “Despite him being a bit of an old crotchety piratey sort of character, I grew to get on quite well with him since he lived close by.” Brian also got to work on expanding the usual two-word parser used by Scott Adams by allowing complete sentences.
This was a result of Brian expanding the game engine and it was used in Perseus & Andromeda (number nine in the series). It was a retreading of the Perseus mythology story and, as well as saving Andromeda from the sea monster Ceto, it needed players to arm themselves with a sword and a shield – plus, a pair of sandals of course.
Around the middle of 1983, Digital Fantasia ran into a little bit of bother when Brian read a snippet in Home Computing Weekly about a new software subsidiary being set up by Computer house. It was to be called Fantasia, which Brian remarked in a subsequent issue was “pretty similar”, and he was worried it could affect his business.
At that time (June 1983), he was planning to release the whole Mysterious Adventures series for the 48K Spectrum, having already ported it to the BBC Micro. He was looking forward to taking advantage of the extra memory which is why games on the Spectrum incorporated scene-setting graphics. “Graphics were becoming desirable and the TRS-80 could not really have supported them,” he says.
Two more adventures were then released – number 10, based on And There Were None, and Waxworks (number 11), written with Cliff J Ogden (a wacky story that involved looking for clues into order to find and identify waxwork statues of famous people). Released on a host of computers including the C64, Commodore Plus/4. ZX Spectrum, Acorn Electron, BBC Micro, Dragon 32/64 and Oric-1/atmos, the versions either had descriptive prose or relied on graphical representations. Those that had visuals were shifting in greater numbers, however, and trouble was just around the corner.
“Thanks to my lack of experience in budget management, we got into heavy debt caused by optimistically winning large orders for units, spending way too much on packaging printing, producing, followed by not being paid by wholesalers,” Brian says. “The company had no choice but to declare bankruptcy.”
Just prior to that, Brian had struck a deal with Channel 8 Software to publish the C64, Dragon 32 and Atari 400/800 versions of his games but the closure of Digital Fantasia effectively marked the end of a fun yet short independent journey for Brian, who went back to work for Adventure Soft and created games based on Gremlins, Robin of Sherwood and Super Gran (“these household names probably contributed to bringing interactive fiction to a wider audience,” Brian says).
But then Digital Fantasia had served its purpose in allowing Brian to port games from the TRS-80 and put his adventures in front of a wider audience and so he has no regrets. His games continued to sell thanks to Channel 8 and his reputation had been secured. He is also pleased that the Mysterious Adventures are still remembered today. “They were good days of technology advances,” he says. “I also enjoyed writing the software.”
We got into heavy debt caused by optimistically winning large orders for units Brian Howarth