The Valley

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My implementation (from 1982) of Computing Today’s “The Valley” adventure game. As a teenager, I was obviously too lazy to type the instructions into the code, but they are pretty simple.

You start the game by chosing an adventurer type and giving them a name. You’re then presented with a map of the valley:

The Valley – the opening map

Although the MZ-80K doesn’t have a numeric keypad, my code uses the numeric keys for navigation as per the original listing:

The Valley – the most important commands!

Explore the marshes first – and pick up the empty amulet in the temple of Y’Nagioth.

Inside the marshes, signified by the two dashes – – on the valley map. The temple of Y’Nagioth is in the centre of the lake.
The stars are either treasure, worthless bauables … or the empty amulet!

Once you’ve found the amulet, your next stop is the forest to populate it with jewels. And finally (I think – my memory is a bit hazy) – you need to head for the ‘spade’ symbol to finish your quest.

It takes forever to play a game – so you can save your progress to tape as you go along. However, you have to find your way back to the start of the path to do that … often easier said than done because of all the monsters out to stop you from completing your quest.

There’s still a long way to go before Tim the Warrior is victorious … maybe the final star is the empty amulet I seek?

You can learn more about how The Valley came into being in this 2009 article published by The Register.

If you’d like to run some of the programs I’ve archived on your own MZ-80K or emulator, you can find them in my Sharp MZ-80K github repository.