VALHALLA (COMPUTER GAME)

'''Valhalla''' was a ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 adventure game published in 1983 by Legend.

Contents

History

Gameplay

Cultural references

External links

Notes

History

The publishing house Legend was also known as Microl/Legend, and earlier as simply Microl. Legend's chairman and founder was John Peel. The developers were Richard Edwards, Graham Asher, Charles Goodwin and Andrew Owen. The name Movisoft was used for the game engine. There was in fact no separate engine and Movisoft was merely a branding concept.

Gameplay

''Valhalla'' is mostly text-based with some graphics showing the location and the characters there. It was set mainly in Asgard and Midgard, though when your character died you would reappear in Hell (Niflheim under another name) and be able to walk out.
Within its limits, the text parser would understand multi-part sentences, so long as they were written using the words it understood, which (unlike in many other games) were helpfully listed in the manual.
The aim was to collect six mythical objects, for which you needed the help of other characters, who were taken from Norse mythology and would wander around randomly. To help with this, your character had an alignment (between ''good'' and ''evil'') that would change depending on which other characters you helped. Thus, the more you helped good characters, the more other good characters would help you.
Typing in a swear word would generate the message "Mary is not amused..." and a dwarf^[1] would dash onto the screen to punch the player. Mary could be found in El Vinos but killing her achieved little as she would return within a minute.
The game engine had a limit of eight objects that could be left in any one location, whether on the ground, in a chest, or in a cupboard. If the player dropped an object when the limit had been reached, a character called Klepto appeared to "Steal" the item, removing it from the game.

Cultural references

The cover of the game as well as the loading screen featured a drawing of a ceremonial helmet from the 7th century found in an Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, UK.
The second quest object (a ring) was called 'Drapnir', a reference to Odin's ring Draupnir.

External links

★ Review from ''Sinclair User'' issue 23, February 1984; at Sinclair User Magazine Online

★

Notes

1. ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games-info/v/Valhalla.txt — the list of characters and their types is quite a long way down