Quo Vadis — A Mystery in 6 Parts (3)
Part 3 — Finding Steve
This is part 3 of a 6 part series about a mystery, a puzzle, a game, and a lost treasure. Previous Posts can be found here: part 1, part 2
It turns out that a lot of people are named Steve Chapman. I’m usually adept at finding contact information for people, but with Mr. Chapman there were so many people of about the same age and with the same name, that weeding out the right person became its own quest.
I won’t bore you with all the dead ends, but there were many. Ultimately I found that a Steve Chapman had made a video game called Ad Astra. An insanely large, meticulously detailed space adventure game with a Latin title? Surely this was my Steve. Ad Astra was an independent game and the site hadn’t been updated in a while, but I managed to track down the programmer who setup the game’s website and he gave me his last known contact info for his programming collaborator.
And so I managed to get in touch with the right Steve! Now I just needed to talk to him about the game, the contest and see if anyone had solved his puzzle! This would not be my solution — just another set of clues. Still, I think Steve’s story is quite interesting and I really enjoyed talking with him. He gave me much more context about his work as a game developer and what it was like to be a young programmer in England of the 1980s.
Steve Chapman in 1984
As a fan of vintage computers, I wrestled with how to present the material from my conversation because I know not everyone loves old computers like I do — but I think there’s something important in capturing some of the cultural history of this time considering how it has evolved into such a pervasive part of the modern world. Steve was at the right age at the right time to find himself able to get computers with the power to create amazing entertainment — if one could understand the mechanics well enough to hammer out all the functions.
A modern game programmer has a huge array of powerful tools that sit between them and the machine language needed to create the artificial worlds and rules of their art. Languages like C++, Java, Python — these are all higher level languages with more human-understandable syntax than what the actual hardware of your computer requires. An interpreter sits between this code and the actual computer instructions. A computer operating system also intermediates some of the work of keeping the game from crashing the whole computing environment, and handling resource management like calls to hardware so that — in theory — your game’s errors won’t leak out and destroy the rest of your multitasking computing environment.
But this was the age of the early micro-computer and there was no operating system. A multi-function system board might have graphics and sound capabilities, but you had to know how to address them yourself and how to call the sound routines and graphic routines to manage your game. You could program in a higher-level language like BASIC, but its performance was inadequate for most video games and it put overhead into the program by making the computer interpret the BASIC code into machine code. With current systems, this would not even be noticeable lag, but back then those slow-downs mattered. To really get speed and performance out of these things, the magic lay in machine code.
Steve had honed his skills on even earlier kit-computers like the Ohio Scientific Superboard II and the ORIC, which was a 6502-based computer. The Commodore 64 used a MOS 6510, which is a modified version of the 6502 — so Steve would be very familiar with its layout and capabilities. When he was shopping around his games for the ORIC, one of the people at the software vendors he visited suggested he make games for the C64, and so he bought one and that’s what he did.
Selling games back then involved taking your tapes to shops and making deals with them to distribute. There were a few shops popping up in the early 1980s for this and Steve had visited two of these which ended up becoming publishing houses. One was called Northern Games and it became Ocean, and the other was SoftTech. Steve had made many knock-offs of popular arcade games — versions of Defender, Space Invaders, Galaxian… but already there was something of a culture of trying to outdo the other programmers developing. A car game called Siren City had more than 25 scrolling screens which was quite a feat for the time.
Steve explained that Siren City was using character based graphics which meant that 25 screens would equate to around 25K of RAM, which didn’t leave much room to program features into the game. Even bigger games came along, but they sacrificed detail to get scope. A map might consist of nothing but a load of repeating cactuses, which hardly qualified as a detailed gaming experience.
So Steve set out to blow everyone else away by creating a game with 1000 screens (“a nice round number,” as he told me) that would scroll seamlessly. At first, he was planning it as a racing game. He worked on a variety of tricks to manage to fit all of that map into the confines of the C64’s working environment. By using tile flipping and color changes he was able to re-use a variety of tiles to fit the entire 1000 screens into a smoothly scrolling experience — all loaded from a single cassette into memory at once.
A small rendering of the complete Quo Vadis game map.
See the insane full version here.
At some point during development he changed it from a racing game into a knight’s quest, but the programming feat remained the same. The tricks he used of recycling graphics would be used later in classic games like Super Mario Brothers. It’s a good trick to effectively use limited space for a varied experience.
But I was curious about the puzzle, so our conversation switched to how the contest was born.
When Steve took the Initial version of Quo Vadis down to SoftTech he said there was a group discussion about putting in some kind of competition because at the time there was a lot of interest in the book Masquerade. This was the first confirmation that I had that the similarities in the contest was no coincidence. Then Steve told me what I needed to know most — who’d written the puzzles.
“Tim Langdell, he concocted the Riddles,” Steve said. “I still don’t know what any of them mean. In fact, I can’t remember any of them at all. I don’t know if anybody ever solved it.”
So I would have to find Tim Langdell to get to the bottom of this mystery. But I continued with my questions for Steve. Was the prize real? Was there really a scepter?
“It exists,” Steve told me. He said Tim used to take it around to shows and such. He thinks he may have seen it at the offices as well.
I had one more question. Did Steve make any money at doing this game programming?
“Yeah, I did. I made a reasonable amount of money from writing games. It got me through University.”
From University, Steve moved into computer networking devices and has earned a few patents. When I found him he was writing hardware graphics drivers. He also continued a little bit of game development with Ad Astra. We talked about that a bit and commiserated on the vagaries of writing code for Windows with its ever changing versions. I’m sure he’s changed over the decades, but somewhere he’s still the same old Steve who wanted to make a 1000 screen video game. When it came time to design the space environment of Ad Astra, he incorporated the real galactic database of the European Space Agency.
“The Star systems are in the correct positions. If you go to the solar system you can see that the constellation is there because all the background stars are drawn as they would appear in that star system. … They’re all in the correct positions.”
Of course they are.
If you’d like to go explore the universe that Steve built, his game Ad Astra is available for download. It hasn’t been updated since 2010, but he and his collaborators certainly put a lot of work into it.
In the next segment, we get to meet the man who created the puzzle that has haunted me for more than three decades, Dr. Tim Langdell.