Orange River Rock. Some of Woods's additions, such as the bear, were
sympathetic but others, such as the vending machine for fresh lamp
batteries, clashed against the original. But their strange collaboration
is somehow consistent. Stretching a point, you could say that there
is a Crowther and a Woods in every designer, the one intent on recreating
an experienced world, the other with a really neat puzzle which ought
to fit somewhere.

By 1977 tapes of ‘Advent’ were being
circulated widely, by the Digital user group DECUS, amongst others,
taking over lunchtimes and weekends wherever they went. The idea spread,
and diffused, as it surprised members of the general public who were
shown it by friends. In Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer prize-winning book
The Soul of a New Machine (1981), a journalist's-eye-view of
the building of a new model of company-sized computer,‘Advent’
appears as an addiction, but more: while the engineers use the program
as a convenient endurance-test, for Kidder it is a cypher for an absorbing
inner world and, perhaps, an emerging personality. Another fascinated
visitor, the television
producer Patrick Dowling, created The Adventure
Game (BBC1 and BBC2, May 1980 to February 1986): by a curious
coincidence, his first choice as puzzle-deviser and scriptwriter was
Douglas Adams, then at the BBC but as it turned out unavailable. Adams
will reappear later. In the Game, Earth-people were tested by
the alien Argonds by being made to explore rooms stocked with items and
quite difficult puzzles in hope of finding drognas (the currency of
Arg), payment of which might placate His Highness the Rangdo, who had
adopted the body of an aspidistra plant with a tendency to shake and
roar when irritable. (And there