This site is dedicated to Mountain Valley and Softgold adventure games for the C64. All of these games were producted in the early and mid 1980's. Finding out release dates for these games is nigh on impossible except for one or two of the Softgold games that have the date in the banner, but none of the Mountain Valley games records the release date in them, and all the source code looks "stock", its all identicle so its hard to try and find a chronological order to any of them.
All these games are two word "Verb Noun" adventure games and every location has its own graphic picture. Now, when I talk graphics I'm talking about the famous Commodore 64 character set which had some of the best "ascii" graphic symbols for doing "ascii" artwork of any computer ever, and ofcourse it was not "ansi" (ie, Ansi standard defined chars 0-127).
Generally these games are much like the very famous Scott Adams games, they are all small games, of usually 15-20 locations for Mountain Valley games, sometimes less, and for some of the Softgold games its usually 20-30 locations. The do have some overall design to them and are not just a bunch of ill-fitting rooms slapped together. Puzzles are usually simple, sometimes logical and sometimes not ^_^.
One characteristic that all the games share is an odd behaviour that if you are looking in a chest, you have to look more than once, as looking only once will not find ALL the objects in the chest, but only one object, so you have to keep "LOOK"ing until it respons with finding nothing.
When running these games on the emulators, some of them require the ability to "fastload" and not all emulators have this, also some emulators get the colours wrong (PC64 is one).
I would recommend you use CCS64, but that emulator (shareware version) will not let you write to disk so you can't SAVE your game progress.
Whilst being a little slow, VICE and Frodo have the ability to handle fastloaders and they let you write to disk. The choice is up to you.
I first came into contact with these games in the middle of the 1980's when I found a copy of King Solomon's Mine (Mountain Valley version), previously I had been indoctrinated into Interactive Fiction via Magnetic Scrolls, Scott Adams, The Hobbit and some Infocom stuff. I cant really say what was special about King Solomon's Mine, it was a step backward compared to Zork and The Pawn in terms of parser, game size, etc but none the less, it hooked me.
Once I had finished King Solomons Mine I scrounged high and low and managed to find a copy of Bastow Manor which I got through a long time summer vacation friend at the beach caravan park where I went. I remeber waiting the whole summer holidays to play this and when I did get the chance it was bugged and unfinishable. I was in total despair when I accidently found a copy of Mystery Island.
Hey, this is similar to King Solomon's Mine! Must be by the same people. It didnt take long and this was completed too.
Commodore 64 emulators were not very capable in the early years but C64s and PC64 were getting very good and the bug bit and I was off looking for some old adventure games again, unfortunately people don't seem to like keeping these little poor excuses for IF. None of the archives had any of them that I knew off so I gave up. A few years after that I got in touch with someone via usenet, Andrew Williams, who remember the games as fondly I and whats more.. He had some!! And from there, the ball started rolling!
I don't have all of the Mountain Valley games nor the Softgold games. I am trying to make this archive as complete as possible, so if you have any of the games not listed, or listed but marked as not found, PLEASE send them to me! Any other correspondance welcome too, hints, walkthroughs, praise, etc.