Quest, 1983 Doug Urquhart 

You are in a small log cabin in the mountains. There is a door to the north 
and a trapdoor in the floor. Looking upwards into the cobwebbed gloom, you 
perceive an air-conditioning duct. Hanging crookedly above the fireplace is a 
picture of Whistler’s mother, with the following inscription underneath: ‘If 
death strikes and all is lost - 1 shall put you straight’. 

If you recognise the above, then you’ve come in contact with some of ICL’s 
other software, the games! 

Inspired by Adventure, Keith Sheppard and I decided to produce an ICL 
adventure game, not restricted to the mainframe environment and easily ported 
to new environments in the future. I won’t bore you with the architectural 
details but it would appear we were fairly successful, since the game is still alive 
and well, having survived System 10, System 25, DRS 20, CPM, DOS and now 
Windows. It took shape over about three years during which we were joined 
by Jerry McCarthy and finally Quest was released to the waiting world in 1983. 

It’s hard to describe the impact of the game (no graphics, no sound effects, 
no windows), just textual descriptions of what was going on and a heavy 
reliance on human imagination to fill in the blanks. Within a very short time it 
spread throughout the world. Even now, I occasionally come across it on 
customer sites in places like Tulsa or Oklahoma City. 

Quest is, as they say, functionally rich. We packed over two hundred places 
into our small part of Cyberspace and peopled them with dragons, elves, 
insurance salesmen and some of our colleagues. One particularly hated manager 
was placed, name anagrammatized to avoid legal action, in a rubber goods shop 




down a sleazy alley near the railway line. He’s still there, if you care to look. 

As PCs became available, Quest moved onto them but soon found itself 
surrounded by a gang of newcomers: games which exploited the graphics 
facilities of the new environment and games produced by people who were 
actually paid to do so! It was an unequal contest. Quest still lives, but in a 
manner akin to those beautifully polished steam engines maintained by 
preservation societies, good for a gentle run on bank holiday weekends, but not 
really suitable for everyday use.