(seventeen
highly variable games from different sources); in Britain, Level 9
(twenty games 1981–91, founded by the brothers Pete, Mike and
Nick Austin) and later Magnetic Scrolls (seven games 1984–90, founded
by Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon, 1984). In practice their markets –
geographical and by computer ownership – overlapped little so
that competition came not from each other, but from different genres
of game.

Right through the “golden age of text adventures”,
around two-thirds of the perhaps 1,000 adventure games published mixed
graphics with text, usually in the form of a picture accompanying each
room description. Sierra, still a major player in the games industry
today for its long-running King's Quest series, began this trend
as early as 1980 with ‘Mystery House’ (Roberta Williams).
Sales were so good that board game companies (Avalon Hill, Games Workshop)
dabbled in the market, and spin-offssupposedly too evocative
and too cerebral, as was implied by the photograph of a brain. It
would be truer to say that Infocom's graphics were instead in the highly
crafted and colourful booklet built into each game's box lid, which
often contained clues (partly as an anti-piracy measure). Inspired
perhaps by the success of Kit Wright's book of paintings Masquerade,
which encoded the location of a buried golden hare, Acornsoft offered
a prize for the first correct solution of ‘Castle of Riddles’
(Peter Killworth, 1984) which – it was laid on pretty thick
– was so fiendish that the prize would take quite some winning.
A similar prize for ‘Eureka’ (Ian Livingstone, Domark, 1984)
offered a whopping £25,000. Another strategy was to extol the sophistication
of a parser, and how very far it soared above the mulish ignorance of
a shoddy