Excellent Dave, straight from the horse's mouth! I'm pleased my post on it drew your attention.colyerdave4 wrote:Hi
My name’s Dave Colyer and Jasper Taylor and I devised this game, Dark Side of the Moon, back in 1985. I’m quite surprised there’s still some life in the game we made back in 1985-86!
Jasper aged 14 at the time, was staying at my wife and my house in Gloucester, while his home was being sold and he had a Sinclair QL bought for him. We started playing a couple of Text Adventures from Talent, namely ‘Skull’ and ‘West’, which we both enjoyed and I got hooked on these games and went so far as to spend £399 on a Sinclair QL.
After we’d solved these two games, we decided to try and make our own, as Jasper was pretty hot on programming and I remember he used to take over the computer lessons at his school, as he knew more than the teacher.
I remember, one night, we’d been working till 5.00 a.m in the morning, when a French student, who was lodging with us, popped his head round the study door to say ‘Goodnight’, at the same time as pulling out the plug of our extension wires connected to our PC’s and we lost about 5 hours of work!
However, it took us about 2 years to finish the game, among other things and decided to go the whole hog.
We took a trip to a trip to a factory in Telford to get the microdrives manufactured and were taken out for a nice meal, after we’d made an order of approx. 2000 cartridges, plus packaging. Then we found an artist to do the covers for us, over a coffee in a Travel Lodge in Gloucester.
When we had the items ready for sale, we invested about £900 on a back page of the QL magazine, for one issue and later attended an exhibition in London, where we sold about 4 copies!
We’d quite enjoyed the process of making and testing the game and while not copying the two already on sale, we adopted the kind of puzzles, maze and scenarios to try and add a few more features, such as having several friendly characters who moved about the game on their own, while being able to carry various objects for us. The setting was on the Moon, so all the characters had to wear helmets etc and travelled about in a moon buggy, before gaining entry to the captured moonbase and overpowering aliens etc.
The maze was in the shape of the letters ’QL’ , but it wasn’t necessary to go by the map, as long as you had patience to visit every part of the maze to find a tube of golden greasepaint-to be used as a disguise later on.
We had some fun adding a bit of humour, with an annoying fly randomly turning up, in the confines of the space ship, plus a gun that fired arrows across the screen.
I admit the game may have been a bit difficult, but we tried to keep it logical and possible to solve, from one Phase to another, plus give value for money. As far as I know, no-one has completed the game, although I used to get regular letters from a doctor in New York, asking for hints, when he got stuck.
We never made enough to cover all our work and expenses and Jasper gave up computing, after the discouraging experience, maybe a great loss to the computer fraternity!
Regards Dave Colyer (retired!)
I doubt to this day that anyone has ever completed it. Plus I don't think people have the mindset/patience for text adventures these days! Perhaps after all these years you could write a walk-through, if you can remember (the level passwords are easy to 'hack' and find out these days). Nice insight on the cartridge manufacturing - so they also supplied the plastic boxes, interesting. I think it may have done better if it'd come to market quicker, but that's how it was, you can't change that now. Hat off to you for sticking at it and producing something. The box/artwork/manual are all very well done and the idea was a good one.
What happened to all the rest of the 2000 packs, paperwork etc? Do you have anything left over from that time? And do you have contact at all with Jasper? As he was only 14 at the time he probably isn't retired yet. Come in and say hello Jasper!
