Castlemaze Adventure

Duckworth Home Computing , TPUG 1982

Aka:: Castle Maze Adventure
Language:: English
Authors:: Steven C. Darnold
Systems:: BASIC
Platforms:: Amstrad CPC , Atari 400/800, BBC/Electron , C64/128 , Dragon 32/64 , Oric/Atmos, PET, Sharp MZ , Spectrum, VIC20
Genres:: Treasure hunt, Type-in
Related:: Exploring Adventures [1: Castlemaze Adventure, 2: Tunnelmaze Adventure, 3: Underground Adventure]
Maze Adventures [1: Castlemaze Adventure, 2: Tunnelmaze Adventure, 3: Valleymaze Adventure]
Entered by:: Alastair, dave, Paul Ingerson, Strident
Added:: 10-05-2010
Edited:: 25-08-2022

Synopsis

Plot

You are in a forest. Your mission is to explore your surroundings and collect any valuables you find. Your journey will take you to an old castle, full of twisting and turning corridors, horrible sorcerers, and mysterious spiders. Will you unravel all the secrets of the castle, collect all the treasure, and escape alive?

Notes

This game originally started life as Steven C. Darnold's enhanced and reworked port of Greg Hassett's 1978 game Sorcerer's Castle. Darnold originally produced this game for Commodore PET (at least as early as 1982). In 1983 he ported the game to the C64, compiling the BASIC with the DTL compiler. A brief history of the game can be found in Peter Archer's article Adventure Games: A Personal Journey from TPUG Magazine, June/July 1985; see here.

Castlemaze Adventure was distributed through user groups, such as TPUG.

The listing for this game may also be found in the 1983 book series Exploring Adventures on the (name of a computer platform) by Peter Gerrard (there is one book per computer platform). As with the other two Exploring Adventures adventures, the main purpose of this game is to illustrate how to program your own adventure games in BASIC. Anyone who did not want to type in the games could instead buy the three games on a single cassette. Peter Gerrard appears to have used Steven Darnold's PET listings as the basis for the various ports of the game, as he credits Steven Darnold for the original listing in the book.

The game was later "reskinned" with an "African" theme, as Jungle Bunny and/or African Adventure.

The version of Castlemaze Adventure for the Sharp MZ-80K appears to be an unofficial port that can be found on software archives.

There is an unofficial/uncredited Dutch version of the original game; called Cederick.

Steven C. Darnold's original version of this game formed part of his Castlemaze / Tunnelmaze / Valleymaze Adventure series.