Christian Cawley is a writer and editor who covers consumer electronics, IT, and entertainment media. He has written for publications such as Computer Weekly, Linux Format, MakeUseOf.com, and Tech Radar.
He also produces podcasts, has a cigar box guitar, and of course, loves retro gaming.
Confession time: I’m intrigued by Doctor Who games. The LEGO Dimensions Doctor Who level pack aside, the series has been a litany of misfires and lack of awareness of what players want from a game based on a time travelling alien buster.
(I’ve written about this at length in a Doctor Who games fanzine, and also spent time trying to understand why the developers of these Dr Who games fail to get it right.)
Over the years, around 20 Doctor Who games have been released (depending on how you consider the VR games to be part of the list or not). Meanwhile, countless unofficial titles that we know of have been added to that list. It is fair to say that unofficial games are largely superior to the BBC licensed titles. And that’s without going into fan mods for DOOM or Fallout, or web-based games from the BBC and licensees.
Doctor Who game… or the Time Warden?
So, it was pretty interesting to stumble across the news of Time Warden. GamesThatWerent has featured a look at the ZX81 game, written by Simon Wadsworth in 1982. The game was his second, following success with The Scepter, a homework project for which he was paid £200 by Bug-Byte (publishers of Manic Miner).
This was my second full adventure. I submitted it to Bug-Byte, as I had done with The Scepter, but it was never published. It was written using the same source code structure. I’d forgotten all about this game until sorting through a pile of old cassette tapes looking for my copy of The Scepter.
In this adventure you play the Time Warden. While you have been away on vacation and the Key of Time has been lost on the planet Syrius 5. You have 250 turns to recover the key before the end of the Universe.
Interestingly, the Key of Time is an poorly disguised reference to the Key to Time, a narrative device that featured in Doctor Who‘s 1978 run, has popped up on audio productions and other non-TV media.
You can download a copy of this text adventure from GamesThatWerent. Meanwhile, there is an in-depth appraisal of the title on the Renga in Blue blog.
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Christian Cawley is a writer and editor who covers consumer electronics, IT, and entertainment media. He has written for publications such as Computer Weekly, Linux Format, MakeUseOf.com, and Tech Radar.
He also produces podcasts, has a cigar box guitar, and of course, loves retro gaming.
