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GHOST TOWN
Virgin Games / £5.95
A Wild West text-based adventure game set in a deserted American town after the California Gold Rush. You get line maps of streets and buildings, and the whole thing is written in Basic - there's no machine code in them thar hills, pardner!
Ieuan Ghost Town has an acceptable response time to entries, but there's no variation - so once you've solved it, well, that's it. There's only minimal use of sound. 5/10
Gerralt The game is set in a fairly small town, so it doesn't take you long to find out what's going on there. The blue and cyan colours are nice - even contrasting well on a monochrome TV. 6/10
Brian A fairly standard adventure game, but with a reasonably large vocabulary. 5/10

Ieuan Davis, Gerralt Jones, Brian Pedlar

Ghost Town was a text adventure, with some line drawn graphics, set in a wild west town during the gold rush.

It was written entirely in BASIC by John while he was still at high school, and sold to the newly formed Virgin Games (for a princely £500) to be part of their first batch of releases.

One of Virgin's big ideas at the time was to treat video game programmers like 'rock stars', promoting them with a photograph and profile on the cassette inlay. It didn't catch on!

Looking back its hard to believe that John didn't let me get involved in the making of this game. He had an artist brother but still insisted on doing all the graphics himself! Although I suppose I was just an annoying 13 year old younger brother at the time rather than a video game artist.

I think he thought that it would be cheating if anybody else helped him make the game; he even did the music (such as it was) himself.