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This is the first of two articles that tell the story of the earliest adventure games developed in Norway, and how we managed to rescue them. These are games that until now have been almost completely forgotten, and the few details we’ve had have been vague and in fact largely wrong.

The first game is known as SVHA Adventure, and is an expanded version of the original Colossal Cave Adventure. SVHA Adventure was developed for minicomputers from Norsk Data at NTH in Trondheim, in 1979. The other game is called Ringen, and is an original adventure taking place in the Mines of Moria known from Lord of the Rings. Ringen was originally developed at UiT in Tromsø a couple of years later, but its story continued for several years outside the University.

Until now, neither of these games have been available online. So it is with great pleasure that we are not only able to present the story behind these forgotten games, but also working copies you can experience for yourself.

I kinda forgot about that part! :D

We talked with the designer behind games such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

American game designer Steve Meretzky startet his career at Infocom, where he created some of the great adventure classics of the eighties. For instance, it was he who got the task of making the official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game together with author Douglas Adams, a game that became a massive bestseller and is still remembered for its great jokes and devilish puzzles.

Michael Haire worked on classics such as Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Civilization and Alpha Centauri.

Michael Haire got into the games industry as early as 1981, doing cover artwork for a number of games for the 8-bit computer TRS-80. He quickly started making ingame art as well, and started working for legendary games publisher/developer MicroProse in the mid eighties. Here, he worked on a number of games that are now considered classics, including Sid Meier’s Pirates! and Sid Meier’s Civilization. We had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Haire about his experience as an artist in the games industry.