From Mike Meineck, author of Klartz and the Dark Forces and more. September 16th, 2009. 

I bought a ZX81 in 1981 and became hooked on playing with it, but at the time there was very little 
software available to buy so I taught myself to programme in BASIC. My first effort 
was a text adventure called The Crystal Maze. As you know things were moving fast in those days, and 
I soon switched to the Dragon 32 then to the Commodore 64. I did Crystal Chalice and Treasure 
Tombe. Then I wrote Klartz and the Dark Forces (the name Klartz was a joke - Ronnie Barker in the 
TV sitcom Porridge used to refer to being in trouble as being in the clarts) A company called The 
Dragon Dungeon offered to publish the games and also a couple of children's adventures but soon after 
they came out the PC started to take over, with slick graphic adventures, and so text games died out. 

Klartz was a time travel game with each time zone being a different adventure with the object of 
collecting a treasure. One zone was in the time of Jesus, one on an alien planet and so on. An awful lot 
of thought had to go in to compressing the programme to fit it into the tiny memories we had in those 
days. What else can I tell you? Those were the days