This is a fantasy adventure game I designed and wrote for the Apple II in 1984-85.

I began writing the game in my last year of high school and finished it up during my first year of college. A friend from high school, Kevin Christiansen, helped out by building the graphics routines for the Apple II version.  At Sierra On-Line’s request, I ported the game to the Commodore 64 — which was only possible since it shared the same processor family — but required redoing all the graphics routines.

The whole thing was written in 6502 assembly instructions and hand-linked(!)… yeah, crazy.  It was large enough that I couldn’t fit all the code plus the current map and data in memory at once (even with a 64K requirement) so I had to fashion a system of loadable segments with known jump points — yeah, no dynamic linker available.

Here’s my original solutions guide to the game.  And here’s a complete game walkthru/story that someone wrote and published through The Electronic Gamer.

an advertisement:            a close-up of the back of the box: 

and some marketing materials: