From Steve Hodgson, co-author of ARV
June 2nd, 2016

I’d been interested in text adventure games for some time before ARV, being an only child I did 
spend quite a bit of time with my Acorn Electron and, subsequently, BBC Master and my own 
imagination!  Prior to ARV I had written a few adventure games, although they were mainly proofs-
of-concept or for my own enjoyment – I remember one set in a secret laboratory called “Comrade 
USSR” that featured mutant rats…

Simon, Tim and I all met at school in Matlock and were nerdy mates.  We were all born in 1976/7, 
so when ARV was released in 1992 we would’ve been 15 or 16, which probably explains why some 
of the game and its (alleged) humour is a bit juvenile!

ARV was originally called “Swag”, however Simon, Tim and I realised there was already a BBC 
game with that name, so we changed it.  ARV supposedly stands for “Armed Robbery with 
Violence”, I remember this being Simon’s idea so I’ll blame him for a rubbish name!  I can’t 
remember who came up with the original premise for the game, although I think it’s a valid one that 
we could’ve executed much better!

The game was originally written on BBC Bs and Masters, in BBC BASIC.  We used the game 
listing in Usbourne Books’ “Write Your Own Adventure Programs for Your Microcomputer” as the 
template for the game, including:
game initialisation
reading the game data into arrays
 a basic parser
calling the various subroutines (using GOSUBs, those were the days!) for each verb that the game 
understood, including direction commands (e.g. NORTH, GET, OPEN, EXAMINE).

A PDF of the book is here : 
https://wos.meulie.net/pub/sinclair/books/w/WriteYourOwnAdventureProgramsForYourMicrocomp
uter.pdf

On top of the BASIC program we also had some in-game screens, particularly a finishing screen 
which was grabbed using Tim’s TV-to-computer digitiser, if I recall correctly it was “borrowed” 
from the TV programme “Busman’s Holiday”.  We even had some very basic encryption in the 
game, involving a machine-code loader which loaded the BASIC game into memory, decrypted it 
and ran it.  There was also a finishing message displayed, I think we had the rather grand idea that 
we could host a competition for people who had finished the game to send us the message and 
potentially win a prize!  Superior Software used to do this a lot, we probably “borrowed” that idea 
from them.  Of course the finishing message was also encrypted, we POKEd the room number of 
the finishing location in some assembler code and the code then decrypted the message (using XOR 
encryption).  If anyone has a copy of the game and has been unable to finish it but is desperate to 
read the message, the room number you need is 25 (which – SPOILER ALERT! - corresponds to 
the Departure Lounge at Heathrow Airport).  Unfortunately I think the closing date for the 
competition has long passed!

Using our school’s ECONET system we then transferred the game from BBCs to Acorn 
Archimedes (which we had all upgraded to) – thanks to Hannah Cooper for her help with that.  On 
the Archimedes we further developed the game, even including some sound samples - for example 
if you found the stereo in the game and used the command “PLAY STEREO” you would hear a 
short snippet of “Paradise City” by Guns n Roses.  Like I said, it was the early 90s and we were 
teenagers… and obviously not that bothered about copyright!

When I started at Leeds University in 1994 I met Paul Wheatley, who at that time wrote the Public 
Domain column in Acorn User.  Paul was kind enough to mention the game in his column and give 
us a couple of quotes which we incorporated into the loading screens of the Archimedes version. 
 We had decided to sell copies for five pounds each via mail order, which was the early ethos of 
homebrew games back then.  Tim was in charge of handling sales and distribution, I don’t think we 
sold more than 10 copies though!

There were some vague ideas of writing ARV2, but by then we were all at university and had more 
interesting things to do.  Simon was looking for a version of ARV for his own showreel recently 
(he’s now an Artist/Designer for games) and the Archimedes public domain version can be found on 
disk 126 from the APDL Public Domain library (http://www.apdl.org.uk/apdlpd/library/g.htm).

Since then I’ve maintained my own interest in text adventures, particularly the retro ones but 
haven’t written any recently, the last one was another 3-room proof of concept written in Excel 
VBA!

Regards,

Steve Hodgson