Thanks to contributor Chris Hester, who flagged up an old piece that he wrote possibly for his magazine Adventure Coder. Valley Of The Source was to be the follow-up to Twin Kingdom Valley and was due for release around March 1985.
It was suggested that the game will involve the player in a search for the source of the River of Gold. From that suggestion, the game had been delayed to November 1985. The title was apparently to include half a million locations, each with four full-screen graphic views, animated sword-fights, interactive characters and a host of other astounding features.
Trevor Hall was reportedly working on the game, but everything went dead with nothing more surfacing about the game. He later told Mark Hardisty in Classic Adventurer (issue 1) that the project was shelved when Bug-Byte collapsed, owing Trevor “oodles” of royalty payments.
Thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni, we learn that in the July 1989 issue of “Adventure Coder” – it features Valley of the Source at page 20 trying to find out what was of the game and its 500.000 promised locations where the player should find the source of the River of Gold from the first TKV.
Each location would have four views in full screen size à la Lords of Midnight along with animated sword fights. It also says the game would have been released at the end of 1985 and solely for the C128 in light of its many demanding features.
But with the game worked on for a good period of time, could something substantial still exist that could be saved and shown?
Contributions: Chris Hester, Mark Hardisty, Fabrizio Bartoloni, Archive.org
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Feature from Adventure Coder magazine:
Whatever Happened To..?
Each month, I’ll be taking a look at programs that companies left on the shelf—adventures that failed to appear, utilities that were never completed. If you have any suggestions for this part of the magazine, why not write in and let me know? Maybe there’s a program you’ve been anticipating for a long time that seems to have been forgotten about.
Valley of the Source
To start with, remember a classic adventure that had many BBC owners raving over the graphics? Yes, that’s right. A BBC adventure with graphics! A seemingly rare beast, and for once, BBC owners weren’t forced to watch their Commodore and Spectrum-owning friends enjoying games with graphics that, when converted to the memory-tight Beeb, always came out text-only. The game? Twin Kingdom Valley from Bug Byte!
The graphics employed a unique compacting routine that took up about 8K, yet was able to give hundreds of large and colorful scenes to all the locations. The trick lay in using a set of base graphics, such as a chair and a table, and repeating these throughout the game, but in differing sizes and combinations. If you’ve seen The Illustrator, it’s very much like the way you can move and scale an object, all from one initial drawing.
Well, wasn’t TKV a good game? What could be better than to release a follow-up?
Occupied Pictures
Since TKV was released on the BBC, it subsequently became available on the Spectrum and Commodore 64 too. Owners of the latter machine were in for a treat (and probably other computers too) when in early 1985, plans were revealed for a follow-up to TKV to be called Valley of the Source. The man responsible was Trevor Hall, who claimed the game would feature half a million locations! Wow!!! The player would have to search through these (what, all of them?) in order to find the source of the River of Gold from TKV. Amazingly, each location would have four views in full-screen size, like Lords of Midnight. There would also be animated sword fights possible between the many interactive characters. Sounds a bit like Defender of the Crown, but don’t forget, this was 1985!
The game was set for release at the end of that year, but only on the Commodore 128 due to the many astounding features programmed in.
What Happened?
It is now four years since the game should have been released. I feel cheated when such incredible claims are leaked about a forthcoming game which then fails to appear. Where is it? I want my Valley of the Source! Imagine all those 500,000 locations to explore—months and months of adventuring to enjoy! Each location graphically depicted! Surely a winning program with so many stunning features?
But that’s just it. There must have been too many features for the good of the game. Imagine if you were writing an adventure on the Commodore 128. You’d barely have enough room for all the locations, which would have to be compressed of course, let alone pictures of them—never mind a game as well! Now take a hundred locations and you could do a game in 32K. Half a million would take more like a super-computer! But memory’s no problem if you have access to a disk drive. You simply store as many parts of your game as you like onto as many disks as you need!
Infocom games aren’t limited by the internal memory of the computers they run on. The text is stored on disk, waiting to be called up whenever necessary, hence the abundance of text in an Infocom adventure. Now, had it been Infocom instead of Bug Byte attempting Valley of the Source, I reckon we’d have seen the game in the shops as scheduled in 1985. I also have no doubt that a lot of people would have bought it on the strength of Twin Kingdom Valley.
Update history
24/09/24 – Added extracted article from Adventure Coder (see scans + articles) thanks to Fabrizio and Archive.org
July 1989 issue of “Adventure Coder” features Valley of the Source at page 20 trying to find out what was of the game and its 500.000 promised locations where the player should find the source of the River of Gold from the first TKV, each location would have four views in full screen size à la Lords of Midnight along with animated sword fights. It also says the game would have been released at the end of 1985 and solely for the C128 in light of its many demanding features.
Source: https://ia802203.us.archive.org/6/items/AdventureCoderMagazine01/adventure_coder_01.pdf
Thank you Fabrizio – updated the text, added the article scan and also extracted out the article as text too.