EMBARKING ON A CRAZY ADVENTURE
THE STORY BEHIND AMSTRAD ACTION’S REGULAR COLUMNISTS
Adventure games were a key component of AA from the beginning when the genre was covered by Steve Cooke who wrote under the pseudonym ‘The Pilgrim’.
The columns would be a mix of news, reviews and tips – or ‘clue sniffing’ – and they were so popular that, when Steve moved on to edit ACE magazine, he had to be replaced.
Stuart Whyte stepped into his shoes, writing the column as ‘The Balrog’. He’d been named the Pilgrim Adventurer of the Year 1989 in issue 45 and was felt to be an ideal replacement, despite being just 18 years old. “I’d actually written my first column as The Pilgrim in issue 49 but Steve wasn’t too happy so I had to come up with a new pseudonym. I was a massive fan of Lord Of The Rings and The Pilgrim has mentioned having a pet Balrog. I liked the idea of the pet eating the master and taking over his job”.
He wanted to keep his own identify secret, “in part because my telephone number had appeared multiple times in the ‘Lords And Ladies Of Adventure’ section and I didn’t want to have more people phoning me up”. Stuart would write his columns at home on the Amstrad CPC word processor Protext, and post a three-inch disk with his work to the office. “People really responded to the idea of a Balrog reviewing adventures and would write to me with this in mind – I had people offering their kid sisters for me to eat, people asking me what my favourite part of the dungeon was and so on. I think a particular highlight was when I did the ‘Draw The Balrog’ competition – the readers excelled themselves for this!”
When the Graphic Adventure Creator was given away on the covertape, there was a miniature boom in games, and a competition was set up with the winner, Who’s Afraid Of The Balrog?, ending up on a future cassette. Stuart Whyte ended up writing for 44 issues of Amstrad Action but left as the output from companies such as Level 9, Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls dwindled. Stuart had also become a PC gamer so the column was handed to stalwart adventurer Debby Howard. “I was super happy that the column was going to someone who had the passion,” says Stuart.