Text adventure from Kayde who went into administration at the 26th August 1983. Did Spectrum releases, tried to do C64 and Vic 20 ones, which never seemed to surface (or did they? – see below).
The game in the advert (Two adverts were submitted by Peter Weighill) was described as follows:
“Death stalks the swamp at every turh. Nowhere is safe and you’re on your own. You survive on your wits alone with nobody to help you. You’ll gasp with relief when you come to the end of the struggle against some of the most dangerous monsters ever programmed. You can be a wizard, thinker, barbarian, warrior of cleric. But you’ve got to be good. No silly problems to hinder your progress. It’s just you against the Swamp!”
We don’t know how far the game got exactly, but do you know any more?
Well, in September 2021, contributor and archivist John Christian Lønningdal confirmed that he had found and purchased a Vic 20 title by Kayde called The Valley. The cover art though is identical to The Swamp, and even the description is practically the same. We’ve added a photo of the Vic 20 release thanks to John.
It seems that at some point, The Swamp was renamed to The Valley and did see limited release. The C64 edition is still at large though – or is it?
Tucked away within Gamebase 64 is a title with the very same name, The Valley, but released by Argus Press Software. Thanks to John, it has been confirmed that it is the game that Kayde released. In the World of Spectrum, both the APS and Kayde versions are present – and they are identical, apart from the APS version has been tidied up a bit.
The dates seem off though – 1982 for the APS release seems too early, as Kayde was 1983. Our guess is that APS released it in 1984, after buying assets from Kayde when they closed down.
An interesting twist was when John also found that APS released the game on their Victape Computing magazine in late 1983 for the Vic 20, but under the name of Wraithquest. Certainly makes the story for this game rather more interesting and more of a rabbit hole potentially :-)
How different is the APS edition then on the C64 to the original Kayde version? We doubt much will have changed apart from credits, and APS may have added a splash of colour to the graphics. Therefore finding a copy of the Kayde version is still historically important. The search therefore goes on.
Contributions: Peter Weighill, John Christian Lønningdal
