Twin Kingdom Valley is a graphic adventure game, set in a fantasy valley with two rival kingdoms, headed by a Forest King and a Desert King. It doesn’t have a whole lot in common with the arcade action of Hunchback, but one thing they share is that their first home computer release was on the BBC Micro. This was one of the things which helped Twin Kingdom Valley to stand out and contributed to its early success, because the BBC Micro was not heavy on graphic adventures. Melbourne House released a BBC version of The Hobbit, but only at about the same time, and it had just text and no pictures. Granny’s Garden had elements of graphic adventure, but was very much its own weird thing. So for many of those who had taken up Acorn’s public-service-broadcasting-supported micro, Twin Kingdom Valley was their first chance at solving text adventure mysteries with supporting images.

Working out which version of Twin Kingdom Valley was the first to reach UK #1 is a bit of its own mystery. Home Computing Weekly’s ASP non-arcade chart in the 10-16 April 1984 edition has the ZX Spectrum version at number one, just ahead of The Hobbit itself, with the Commodore 64 version of Twin Kingdom Valley at #3. In Computer & Video Games’s combined chart in May 1984, it similarly has the game’s formats listed as Spectrum, C64, Electron and BBC. There is a problem with this, which is all the reviews in Spectrum-focused magazines towards the of 1984 celebrating that the game had finally made it to the Spectrum (at which point that version did hit #1 too). That and all the early 1984 adverts which don’t list the Spectrum among its formats, plus the charts from both magazines in the middle of the year which don’t include a Spectrum version either. 

  • Twin Kingdom Valley (Bug-Byte, 1983, BBC Micro)
  • Twin Kingdom Valley (Bug-Byte, 1984, Commodore 64)
  • Twin Kingdom Valley (Bug-Byte, 1984, ZX Spectrum)

I have concluded ASP listing the Spectrum as first #1 version must have been a mistake, probably based on the assumption somewhere along the line that all bestselling games were for the Spectrum. In early 1984 it was an assumption that was usually pretty safe. I have made the leap to deciding that the first #1 version was the BBC one, buoyed up by advertising across the computer press for the release of the Commodore 64 version, which started behind the BBC one then took over. That may or may not be correct. I have tried all three versions. Different computer formats had to this point often been separate, closed-off kingdoms that just happened to share a valley. Like Twin Kingdom Valley, though, more and more games were making the journeys between them. The future for microcomputer games was multi-format. 

Trevor Hall, who wrote Twin Kingdom Valley, very much lived in the BBC’s kingdom at the time. He grew up in York, did a computer science degree at Manchester University, where he both got into arcade games and got his first computer, the BBC Micro’s predecessor the Acorn Atom. Hall sent Liverpool software house Bug-Byte a demo of his work and was invited to join. He then set to work on a quite prolific output for the BBC Micro across 1982, programming a variety of arcade-style games. These ranged from straight copies of other games (Space Invaders) to originals (Sea Lord’s half-obscured underwater shootout). After that, he decided to make something a bit different and more ambitious.

  • Space Invaders (Bug-Byte, 1982, BBC Micro)
  • Sea Lord (Bug-Byte, 1982, BBC Micro)

The inspiration for Twin Kingdom Valley, as Trevor Hall has told it, is that he played Colossal Cave Adventure and then saw its home computer successors and found them really boring because of their static nature. He had an idea to improve them, though. “Why not make every creature in the game, including oneself, pretty much the same. Make everyone able to walk around, pick things up and fight. Let them interact.” This sounds very similar to Veronika Megler describing how she came to her big idea for The Hobbit, which came out around a year before Twin Kingdom Valley. Given the nature of the separate BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum kingdoms of the time, it’s just about plausible that Hall came to the inspiration separately. Either way, some of Bug-Byte’s adverts for Twin Kingdom Valley carried the message “Eat your heart out Bilbo!”.

That unpredictable interactivity plays out in similar ways too, although Twin Kingdom Valley scales up the combat elements successfully while, as with Valhalla, missing The Hobbit’s deft characterisation. The bigger leap forward, closer to justifying the adverts’ claim of “the dawn of a new era in graphic adventures” is in the graphics. Twin Kingdom Valley, unlike The Hobbit, was conceived with graphics in mind from the beginning. It has a lot more of them, extending to every one of its many rooms (175 of them). Trevor Hall planned out what each room would look like on little cards and paid his friend Pete M. Skinner a flat fee to draw better versions of them. Then he programmed “a very clever crafting system” which had ingenious ways to display those sights on the computer quickly and using as little memory as possible.

Part of that system was working out how to repeat and scale up and down the same shapes. Using that scaling, he was also able to draw the same elements of a scene at different distances. When you walk along a road towards an inn, you can see it gradually getting bigger. At each screen the game tells you which compass direction you are looking towards, and sometimes the results really do feel like different angles on the same place. The art remains pretty crude, and yet it adds a great deal, justifying Hall’s conviction that it was important to have space to explore. “You need padding, to get lost before you find something”.

Even with Hall’s innovations, the focus on graphics left reduced memory for the text, which had to be rather terse as a result. The BBC Micro newsletter Beebug bemoaned the game’s “limited lack-lustre text which does little for the imagination”. Still, the combination of straightforward logic puzzles with a touch of dramatic flair (drinking magic lake water to reveal hidden doors) and figuring out its unpredictable combat went down well. Micro Adventurer said in a review of the BBC version that “this adventure is sure to become a classic”. They proved correct. There was no later revision and backlash like that Valhalla got once people saw beyond its surface wizardry.

Positive reviews extended to the later Spectrum version, at a time when a year was a long time in the progression of games. Crash’s preview expressed scepticism over its familiar claims: “almost every game released these days is accompanied by flurries of technical wizardry. rather like the how-it-was-done cinema brochures for a Spielberg movie”. The actual review, though, highlighted the game’s craftsmanship and “many superb qualities” before recommending it to any adventurer. Home Computing Weekly likewise called it “a good game for the adventure fanatic with some advanced features”.

In October 1984, the Spectrum version of Twin Kingdom Valley was the last primarily text-based adventure game to reach the UK #1 spot of a multi-format chart in the ‘80s (it replaced a different one which I will be writing about soon). The genre wouldn’t hit such a peak of mainstream popularity again until the ‘90s, after graphical and text aspects had been more thoroughly integrated. It went on gaining many more good and successful games in the meantime, although Trevor Hall would not be responsible for any of them. He had an idea for a sequel with a procedurally generated landscape, even more of a new adventure each time, but he didn’t get to make it. Bug-Byte collapsed in 1985, owing him significant royalties, and he went off to work in analytical chemistry instead. Twin Kingdom Valley stands alone as a monument to this particular vision, a magical and verdant place just across the valley from The Hobbit.

  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade), week ending 31 March 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade), week ending 07 April 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade), week ending 21 April 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade), week ending 28 April 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade), week ending 05 May 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade), week ending 13 October 1984, Home Computing Weekly

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